Saturnalia Books: 28 books

Kendra DeColo’s award winning debut, Thieves in the Afterlife, explores the ambiguities of sexuality and gender, refusing to settle for easy answers or simple explanations. Whether in a strip club or a prison these poems weave together an array of personae, celebrating the profane while taking apart...

Sabrina Orah Mark follows up her critically acclaimed debut, The Babies, winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize in 2004 chosen by Jane Miller, with a second collection of prose, Tsim Tsum, centered on two characters, Walter B. and Beatrice, first introduced in The Babies. Unbeknownst to them...

Agudelo’s books have always been concerned with the relationship between worker and consumer, whether in the kitchens or in the neighborhood, but in The Bosses, his spectacular third outing, Agudelo’s sharp focus finally lands on the seen and unseen authority figures who dictate the boundaries...

In Catherine Pierce’s most peculiar second collection, we enter a world of longing and destruction, of death and rebirth, and of wonderfully odd girls—girls who read too much, who drink too much or not enough, who craft necklaces from earwigs and wring nostalgia from Spiro Agnew. These are poems...

Cortney Lamar Charleston’s debut collection looks unflinchingly at the state of race in twenty-first-century America. Today, as much as ever before, the black body is the battleground on which war is being waged in our inner cities, and Charleston bares witness with fear, anger, and glimpses of...

An unforgettable collection of funny and heartbreaking poems by a remarkable new voice in American poetry“It is unbefitting to believe in ghosts, to believe what one reads,/what one writes,” writes Natalie Shapero in her mischievous debut collection. With sharp wit and relentless questioning,...

“Correspondence,” writes Mark Doty, “is a fresh accomplishment, swift with feeling and intelligence, the work of a restless critical mind mapping its way toward a way to bear the weight of love.” Kathleen Graber’s debut book takes us on a trip through history and time, varying her subjects...

Sebastian Agudelo’s second book engages a documentary poetics to dissect an inner city neighborhood and explore the social, political, and economic tensions and affinities as well as search for the humanness of living together. The book is bracketed by an introductory section that looks to the past...

The poems in My Scarlet Ways are, most often, attempts at self-destruction by any means necessary—love, sex, language, God, and ultimately, fantasies of motherhood. With piercing passion and linguistic precision, Tanya Larkin, pursues and retreats from her reader like a poetic Mata Hari, drawing us...

Sarah Vap’s newest book is a stunning collection of beautiful and frightening poemsIn her latest collection, Arco Iris, Sarah Vap explores race, tourism, market, history, intimacy, and the vulnerability of lives beneath the stamp of longstanding powers. Whiteness is considered through the action...

In his third collection, Michael Robins unleashes the couplet to bring the pastoral past into the modern day, aligning images of grazing buffalo with those of torture and war. In the intersection between reality and imagination, with violence flowing like an river beneath us at all times, these lyric...

Playful, penetrating, and often operating by aural law, the poems in That Our Eyes Be Rigged take shape as one word quickly transforms into another via sonic slippages. These fluid transformations simultaneously reveal the worlds within a word and build correspondences between unlikely terms—highlighting...

The poems in Lullaby (with Exit Sign), explore the very nature of the elegy as rite, memorial, mechanism for healing, and raw utterance. Bar-Nadav asks, what is the shape of grief—its forms, silences, and sounds? The muscular music of her language and whip-sharp syntax join forces with startling...

At the core of Libby Burton's highly anticipated debut poetry collection, Soft Volcano, are the vivid details underpinning the relationships we hold dearly in our lives. A feminist force, highly wrought and impressionistic, surges from these intensely lyric distillations that show us what we look...