Button Poetry – förlag

You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson is a queer, political, and feminist collection guided by self-reflection. The poems range from close examination of the deeply personal to the vastness of the world, exploring the expansiveness of the human experience from love to illness, from space to climate change, and so much more in between. One of the most celebrated poets and performers of the last two decades, Andrea Gibson's trademark honesty and vulnerability are on full display in You Better Be Lightning, welcoming and inviting readers to be just as they are.

The latest poetry collecting from the biggest name in slam poetry.

In 2013, Hilborn's poem 'OCD' went viral, and has amassed over 11 million views to date. While this collection ruminates on love, heartbreak, and mental illness, these poems are anything but saccharine. Hilborn uses the same humour and self-deprecation that propelled 'OCD' to success in order to make his unmatched vulnerability all the more powerful. Ultimately, Hilborn is a poet of the people: his work is accessible, honest, and entertaining - a revitalising entry in contemporary poetry.

Revenge Body is a poetry collection that explores anger (righteous and not), black identity, body image, loss, want, and mental health.

Neil Hilborn returns with the poignant and profound collection About Time. Balancing between devastation and perseverance, About Time shares the struggle to maintain mental health during the recent global crises. With his distinctly conversational tone and dark humor, Hilborn breaks down the cycle of mental illness - small improvements, setbacks, and the process of recovery. This collection fights against itself as the poems try to find a place for hope, love, and goodness in a lonely, terrifying world ultimately, inspiring belief in and connection to all the small joys that we can find. Fans new and old will be stunned by Hilborn's third collection. Continuing in the legacy of his previous works, About Time is hot soup for the troubled soul and absolutely cannot be missed.

Excuse Me As I Kiss The Sky is the third instalment of the Rudy Francisco poetry collection. With every book, the author utilises various tools and methods to excavate his experiences and find poetry in everyday things. Rudy believes that poetry can be found in our immediate surroundings at any given moment and poignantly includes this idea as the foundation of his work. In this book, Rudy Francisco bravely explores poetic forms such as the contrapuntal, golden shovel and the ode, while offering explanations and his approach to using the aforementioned. Excuse Me As I Kiss The Sky is meant to inspire its readers, expose them to different avenues of approaching the act of writing poetry and invites them to try it for themselves. Francisco takes the nuances of the craft that feel esoteric and breaks them down so the average person can engage and enjoy poetry in ways that feel familiar. The author uses this book to further explore subjects such as love, heartbreak, identity and healing. Rudy takes feelings, turns them into vehicles that tell stories, exhibits how multifaceted the human experience is and how connected all of us actually are. Excuse Me As I Kiss The Sky is insightful, commanding but also comforting in a myriad of ways.

If every experience lasted forever and the sands of time never interrupted our most loving moments, there would be nothing to immortalise in writing. In Sierra DeMulder's melancholic yet beautifully hopeful poetry collection, Ephemera, she writes with the wisdom of someone who has learned to love and lose. Each poem reads delicately and elegantly, just fleeting memories on the page. Split into 4 sections detailing intimate experiences from the painful deaths of family members who clung to life, to passionate love she feels for her own mortal wife, DeMulder plays a sweet song by pulling on her own well worn heart strings. While maintaining a muted emotional intensity, the poems keep their grounding in reality, never straying to supercillous territory, perhaps recognising their own ephemeral quality. DeMulder ruminates on what will come and what will fade. Despite this impermanent nature, you can feel the tender warmth DeMulder holds for her family in every line, even the moments she wishes she could forget.

Sean Patrick Mulroy's Hated for the Gods invites the reader to embrace their queer heritage with disarming tenderness, and urges them to celebrate the joy of gay sex without shame. Plaintive and joyous, sexy and ferocious - often all at once - Hated for the Gods is as much a call to action as it is a work of literature. Gorgeously rendered and skillfully constructed both to educate and inspire, Sean Patrick Mulroy's poetry weaves together stories from his coming of age in the American South of the 1990s with the broader history of gay men in America. The result is a politically radical text that will leave you shocked with all you didn't know about the history of queer people, and surprised by what you already knew but never could articulate. A world-renowned poet and award-winning scholar, Mulroy's work exists in a lineage of fearless gay literature; from Shakespeare to Siken, Genji to Ginsberg. Masterfully intricate, yet effortlessly approachable, by turns hopeful and incendiary, Hated for the Gods is a must-read for the LGBT+ community and their loved ones.

Writers of all ages and levels of experience have been using Taylor Mali's Metaphor Dice for years to explore and revel in the formulaic nature of metaphors. The game gives you a collection of three different concepts or language tools that create a metaphor, and it is up to the poet to fill in the rest of the poem based on their roll. Some metaphors work and some don't. Some are immediately hilarious while others slowly reveal themselves to be astonishingly insightful. Poetry By Chance is the first collection of poems that were all prompted by different rolls of Metaphor Dice, featuring submitters from the inaugural Golden Die Contest. After reading through this collection, you can't help but see the power of metaphor in understanding the world around us. In this anthology there is no singular poetic style or voice, but rather a collection of unique voices and perspectives for each roll. With some deeply personal, and some widely universalising, one thing is clear: these poems are the brainchild of an ingenious, yet simple, writing tool.

Usman Hameedi's debut collection, Staying Right Here, is a journey in finding home. Hameedi invites readers to bear witness to vignettes of joy and hardship as he navigates finding his place in America. From an ode to Bodegas, an autobiography of his eyebrows, and elegies for lost friends, Hameedi's thematic metaphors for family, wellness, and American biases weave a literary tapestry. Reading Usman's work is like drinking a warm chai while watching the sunset in Brooklyn, or coming home to an aromatic Biryani. In his first poetry collection, Hameedi writes with an unmistakably unique voice that is not afraid of who he is. Staying Right Here is for those who have looked for themselves in the media and only seen a one-dimensional character staring back at them.

L.E. Bowman's latest collection Shapeshifter aches with the soft sorrows and hard-won joys of life. Melodic and introspective, Bowman's poems converse-struggling with grief and hopelessness while fighting for love and recovery. Shapeshifter grounds the reader in the body, ever transforming with age and experience. Reckoning with self-image, heartbreak, and motherhood, this collection emphasises the beauty in mundanity - the journey that is life. Bowman's Shapeshifter embraces the fear of an ever-changing and vulnerable existence, encouraging the reader to live in spite and because of that fear. It's a truly touching collection that can't be missed!

WASH brutally dissects black womxnhood for all its blood, beauty, sacrifice and strength. Ebony Stewart's praise and pleas for the lives of black womxn create a devotional space for healing. Stewart's third collection is uncompromising and emotionally raw. Through trauma and recovery, black girlhood comes of age in WASH, journeying through moments of self-discovery, mental illness, love and heartbreak. Stewart reckons traditional definitions of womxnhood, exploring its complications, its communities, and its queerness. With a distinct, lyrical poetic voice, WASH tells a story of queer, black womxnhood that perseveres. A collection that will bring you to tears and brighten your day, Ebony Stewart's WASH cannot be missed!

The reader can follow multiple paths that mirror the choices, experiences, and struggles one makes when reclaiming themselves in the face of sexual abuse. While being intensely personal, Wild/Hurt moves resonantly through memory and healing in a way that can speak to many survivors. Through its hardships and suffering, this collection comes to realise and love the intimate parts of itself. Ford's work encompasses a survivor's entire personhood - growing from their trauma, discovering and celebrating queerness, and living and loving with disability. Wild/Hurt is a rich, heartfelt collection that makes the reading an experience, telling a new, remarkable story with each reread.

In his anticipated second collection, Forgotten Necessities, Jared Singer wears love and loss on his skin. Through spell-bindingly immersive storytelling, Singer digs to the roots of our deepest woes and cradles our joys with utmost tenderness. Intimacy and vulnerability ache across the time and space of these poems. Forgotten Necessities holds its sadness sacredly and builds shrines to the hope that follows. Persistent reminders of the small kindnesses that make a life meaningful to the living and the dead. A brilliant follow-up to his debut, Singer's Forgotten Necessities is itself a necessity, a haunting that heals.

Finalist for the 2023 Button Poetry Chapbook Prize, Daniel Elias Galicia's debut collection, Still Desert sings with histories both haunting and enchanting. Artistically and linguistically dynamic, Galicia's poems weave personal and historical narratives of immigration, assimilation, and Mexican heritage. Still Desert lingers in the spaces between borders and crossings, breathing in rich, tactile environments and raw, complex emotions. With a musical rage and a sacred love, Galicia speaks to unsung lineages and the violences found before, during, and after crossing the border.

Chelsea Guevara's Cipota breathes a lineage into a song-making music of ancestral memory: dirges of heartbreak and generational trauma, anthems of rage and reclamation, ballads of love and homecoming. Guevara's voice enchants as she delves into history, ancestry, and the self-reaching for a lineage that has been battered by strife and strangled by colonialism. She moves through place and memory with deft skill and earnest humanity. Cipota examines the grief of culture lost, of a home you've been separated from, one that doesn't truly feel like yours. Cipota is a beating heart that demands to be heard. You will be rapt from start to finish.

Dive into Hollywood 'without the frills' with Gigi Bella's exploration of the rising TV and film industry in her home state of New Mexico. Bella invites the reader into her world as a chicana woman and emerging actress. With an earnest and urgent voice, Bella dissects the experiences and treatment of Hispanic people societally and in TV and film-juxtaposed with the eagerness with which the industry moves in on Hispanic communities in New Mexico. without the frills is a beautiful and poignant look at the real people who make entertainment possible-the sorrows, joys, and messy complexities of real lives. So grab your popcorn and prepare to laugh, cry, and rage with Gigi Bella's dynamic, moving collection.

Button Poetry is thrilled to re-release Rachel Camacho's critically-acclaimed debut Pink Elephant. Pink Elephant is a song of survival, gritty and honest, brutal and beautiful. Camacho's entrancing storytelling and rich language are hypnotic-refusing to let the reader look away. The collection dissects a coming-of-age within an abusive home, the recovery from that trauma, and what building a family looks like in the aftermath. Dark but edged with humour, Pink Elephant still embraces love through its troubles. If you haven't read it yet (or need an excuse to read it again), you have to pick up this newest edition!

good luck in the real world is a journey through mental health recovery. After a near-suicide attempt, Adrienne Novy was partially hospitalised. Over a year later, her mother suffers a brain bleed. Exploring suicidal ideation, hospitalisation, the burnout from working hospitality and food service, and Novy's fascination with music and pop culture, good luck in the real world explores what we cling to when we learn how to heal and what it means to fall in love with life again.

2024 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest Runner-Up and Winner of The Northern Writers' Debut Poetry Award, Carson Wolfe's Coin Laundry at Midnight is an unfolding highway through gendered violence and queer becoming. Seasoned with fresh and intricate language, Wolfe's work roams the open road in search of the self-uncovering identity in the aftermath of teen parenthood and urban poverty. A British voice wanderlust in America, this gripping chapbook challenges the male road trip narrative, going so far as to resurrect Jack Kerouac, who appears within these pages to minimise the dangers of sex work and speculate about lesbians. A painting of truck headlights and motel parking lots, Coin Laundry at Midnight questions what it means to move through a world that is continuously reinforced as unsafe for women and girls.

Having toured the world performing poetry for the last twenty-five years, navigating the blunt loneliness of life on the road and a rotating cast of unlikely antagonists, Buddy keenly unpacks topics like the intense overcompensation of his masculinity, growing up terribly queer in the south, the detriments of public shame, a toxic fear of intimacy and the devastation of a failed major relationship. Wakefield revs up for his relay race to the light with refreshing humor and insight by finding meditation as the love of his life, accepting bliss and learning to let go. While the poetry in A Choir of Honest Killers undeniably throws plenty of insightful punches, it's the through-story about moving from devastation to frequent serendipity that gives the book pace. But it's worth noting, as Wakefield writes, 'Perfect probably isn't what you think it is.'