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 tropes and cultural signifiers to expose the human pulse underneath. Part battle cry and part striptease, Thieves in the Afterlife targets the culture of commoditization and violence, articulat...

The Long Devotion is a collection of poems, essays, and writing prompts that celebrates motherhood and creates a space, as poet Molly Spencer has written, to “tell an unlovely truth about family life and not have to take it back.”The poets in this book represent and describe a wide range of experiences. They write about encountering the world anew through their children; intersections of parenting and race; single parenting; adoptive, foster, and step-parenting; life with ...

First printing: 2,000 copies.Kendra DeColo is a poet, pop culture critic, and comics artist whose work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Columbia Journal, Los Angeles Review, Tin House, Bitch Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of the journal Nashville Review.I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World is DeColo’s third collection of poems. Her first collection, Thieves in the After...

Punk-rock feminist poems exploring motherhood, pop culture, and resistance with a spirit of defiance, abundance, and irreverent joyKendra DeColo reaffirms the action of mothering as heroic, brutal, and hardcore. These poems interrogate patriarchal narratives about childbirth, postpartum healing, and motherhood through the lens of pop culture and the political zeitgeist. With references ranging from Courtney Love to Lana Del Rey to Richard Burton to Nicolas Cage,