Dear Friends,

Jessica Q. Stark's Savage Pageant is now available for pre-order!!! Normally $18, we're offering it for $15 thru January 13!!! Books ship January 14.

Savage Pageant recounts the history of the defunct zoo, Jungleland, which housed Hollywood's show animals up until its closure in 1969. In it, Stark explores the concept of US American spectacle and its historic ties to celebrity culture, the maternal body, racist taxonomies, the mistreatment of animals, and ecological violence. With a hybrid, documentary poetics, Savage Pageant reveals how we attempt to narrate and control geographical space and how ghosts (remainders, the sketch, unfinished stories) collapse the tidy corners of our collective, accumulative histories.

Savage Pageant $15 (pre-order deal!!!)

Jessica Stark's Savage Pageant is a map, an "undulation," a "fold," something lightly sketched then traced on "something blackened, worn-out, and organized." Stark's brilliant move in this powerful new work is to problematize the paper itself: the surfaces that receive the many marks that a poet, an inhabitant, an animal, an archivist or an audience-member might make. What a brilliant writer. What a lovely and strange book. - Bhanu Kapil

Part poetry book, part collection of private, personal, and public histories, part summons, part rune, this book takes you headfirst into the other world where all you can do is swim past your own hurt and traumas into the sunshine hole of the unreal. It's a book we must remember as we begin to forget ourselves. I'll risk it all to say that we need this book for all of time, to take with us as a guide from here until the everlasting, because, as this book says to us, "We are only here for a/ short time." - Dorothea Lasky

The body of poetry needs a new script, and Jessica Q. Stark is more than happy to oblige. At the height of her multi-tasking, birthing simultaneously son and book, she holds you captive with her carnival performance of ingenious gestures, where language and motherhood play informal games of anatomic brilliance and take you through her sanitary mayhem of pandemoniac beauty and birth. - Vi Khi Nao

Jessica Q. Stark is a mixed-race, Vietnamese poet and scholar originally from California. She received her PhD in English at Duke University, a Master’s of English from Saint Louis University, and a B.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, the latest titled Vasilisa the Wise (Ethel Zine Press, 2018). Her chapbook manuscript, The Liminal Parade, was selected by Dorothea Lasky for Heavy Feather's Double Take Poetry Prize in 2016. Her poems have appeared in HobartTupelo QuarterlyPotluckGlass Poetry Journal, and others. She writes an ongoing poetry zine called INNANET and works as an Assistant Poetry Editor for AGNI. Find her on Twitter @jezzbah.

Savage Pageant $15 (pre-order deal!!!)

If you're interested in reviewing this book, adopting it for your class, or inviting Jess to read or give an interview, please let us know and we'll be happy to help: editor@birdsllc.com

THANK YOU FOR SUPPORTING SMALL INDEPENDENT POETRY PRESSES!!!

Love,

The Editors