Bøker utgitt av YesYes Books

40 WEEKS, the newest collection from Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, navigates the world through a poet-mother's sensibilities. She captures stories and lyric moments around and within the speaker's body, made more urgent by the caught voices and presence of her older child. The poems embrace the bare and grotesque nature of pregnancy and childbirth as they consider how to mother a neurodivergent child while pregnant with another, rejecting a culture that views the body with shame. The collection asks how to care for one's own body while caring for so many other bodies and how to connect the identities of mother and writer so one strengthens the other.

"Lyrical and rife with utterance, Salt Body Shimmer asks of the violence we inherit: who speaks from "the threshold throat" inside "the dark's dark"? Interior driven and intimately political, the poems in this stunning debut coax and trouble form, traversing the landscape of trauma and survival with a deft musicality of time, family, and slippery memory. At the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality, Foreman makes a song of the body--it's howl and jubilation--and invites us to confront our interior lives in the listening. Bold in its quest for knowledge and refuge, Salt Body Shimmer articulates a contemporary American experience, aware of the histories unsaid and unfaced, where women can inhabit their lives fully and freely, knowing safety is fragile and must be grabbed by whatever thread we can find."--

Poetry. Women's Studies. California Interest. "At the same time expansive and intimate, Kelly Grace Thomas's debut collection navigates issues of loss, family, and agency. BOAT BURNED invites us to witness the pains and subsequent joys of rebirth--'The boats that built me / smoke on shore.' Thomas's voice shines like a lighthouse beacon--guiding us through the difficult memories and toward the future's open waters."--Paige Lewis

"Antigua's debut collection ... is a cacophonous symphony of reality, dream, trauma, and obsession. It reaches into the corners of love and loss where survival and surrender are blurred. The poems span a traumatic early childhood, a religious adolescence, and, later, a womanhood that grapples with learning how to create an identity informed by, yet in spite of, those challenges"--Publisher marketing.

Shelley Wong's debut, As She Appears, foregrounds queer women of color in their being and becoming. Following the end of a relationship that was marked by silence, a woman crosses over and embodies the expanse of desire and self-love. Other speakers transform the natural world and themselves, using art and beauty as a means of sanctuary and subversion. With both praise and precision, Wong considers how women inhabit and remake their environment. The ecstatic joys of Pride dances and late-night Chinatown meals, conversations with Frida Kahlo, trees that "burst into glamour," and layers of memory permeate these poems as they travel through suburban California, perfumed fashion runways, to a Fire Island summer. Wong writes in the space where so many do not appear as an invitation for queer women of color to arrive in love, exactly as they are.

In this searing new volume, Lynn Melnick dives head-first through concentric waves of personal and generational trauma with her trademark fearlessness. Evincing a complex mind shaped by the late 20th century''s misplaced priorities, Refusenik interrogates misogyny and anti-Semitism across time and a shifting global landscape-from a football field in Los Angeles to a Russian shtetl to a beloved daughter''s Brooklyn bedroom. Variously unraveling and allowing for intricate tangles of anger, nostalgia and love, these agile poems furrow deeper into the terrain of Melnick''s much-celebrated earlier titles, arriving at a profound and pressured understanding of what it means to be a contemporary American.∩╗┐LYNN MELNICK is the author of the poetry collections Refusenik (2022), Landscape with Sex and Violence (2017), and If I Should Say I Have Hope (2012), all with YesYes Books, and the coeditor of Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation (Viking, 2015). I''ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton is forthcoming from University of Texas Press in 2022.

Ana Portnoy Brimmer''s debut, To Love an Island, offers the stark recognition that disaster is political and colonialism the most violent of storms. Beginning with the aftermath of Hurricane Mar├¡a and spanning the summer insurrection of 2019 and subsequent earthquakes in Puerto Rico, To Love An Island is an exploration of collective trauma, an outpour of amassed grief, a desire for unleashed mourning, a fuck-you to resilience, a brandishing of resistance. Of brazen decolonial conviction-it summons tempests, departures, strawberries, cacerolas, mangroves, guillotines, all the complexities of loving a place under imperial duress.ANA PORTNOY BRIMMER is a poet and organizer from Puerto Rico. Her debut full-length collection, To Love an Island (2021, YesYes Books with Spanish edition forthcoming from La Impresora) was originally the winner of the YesYes Books 2019 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest. Portnoy holds a BA and an MA from the University of Puerto Rico and is an alumna of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark. She is the winner of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest 2020. She is the daughter of Mexican-Jewish immigrants, resides in Puerto Rico, and lives for dance parties and revolution.

Say It Hurts grapples with queerness, love, grief, masculinity, coming of age, and coming out in the context of cultural violence rooted in misogyny and familial violence rooted in catholicism. In these poems joy and loss hold hands-at sleepovers and haircuts, at symphonies and haunted mazes, among fathers, on dating apps, during car sex, in matching tattoos, on Pinterest boards, at funerals. Lisa Summe''s stunning debut collection queers the love poem by demanding that the whole story be told-what it means to love, to grieve, and to heal by saying it out loud.