rebel/blonde, by Meghann Boltz, is officially out now! Grab your copy today at https://products.bottlecap.press/products/rebelblonde!

rebel/blonde is Orlando by way of Andy Warhol. Set in the Hollywood of the 50s and 60s, rebel/blonde is an exploration in the performativity of gender and an attempt to question the notion of a fixed self. rebel/blonde is death, sex, and disappointment. It is the peroxide hum of existential loneliness; that longing to be seen & loved that we carry with us from our first breath to our last. rebel/blonde is the possibility of coming up empty.

Meghann Boltz is a poet living in Buffalo, NY. She recently completed an MA in Creative Writing: Poetry at the University of East Anglia and her work has appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, Peach Mag, glitterMOB, Bad Pony, Lor, and Dream Pop. rebel/blonde is her first chapbook.

These poems are tender little punks that speak precisely to how beautiful and terrible living is. Meghann Boltz makes me feel drunk on the world, on its ordinary opulence and excesses. A stunning book!
– Sophie Robinson

The speaker in rebel/blonde is the becoming of that which can be imagined, but never apprehended, as concrete as phantasia, the passed-off shapeshifter. Assertive, helpless, powerful: a neon demon whose confessions stream like the traffic down Sunset Blvd. In rebel/blonde, Meghann Boltz has given deranged pleasure to the task of outlining that which cannot be outlined, that identity which is not one, but a crowd unto itself, deranged as une chanson of pepsi and coke, the “I” that cuts a lock of hair from their mother’s head straight out of the casket.
– Ben Fama

As in Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, rebel/blonde mixes a brew of filmstar gossip and what we used to call “gender confusion” to magical ends. Meghann Boltz plays that slash mark between “rebel” and “blonde” like a great conductor or math genius–it twitches, it divides, it clings and cleaves and fractals, bringing together a great chorus of “I want,” and diminuendo, a whisper of “I used to be desperate.” Not since I encountered the work of Kay Gabriel and Lourdes Figueroa have I been so taken by a poet new to me, nor one as ready and able to take on the stars and the planets.
– Kevin Killian

Meghann Boltz’s poems reveal with ease how the smallest puddle reflects all stars. I love this book, it sweeps me away every time I go to it.
– CA Conrad

Jessie Knoles’ new book, Once I Was Many Other Things is officially available now at https://products.bottlecap.press/products/once!

“once i was many other things” is a book about growing up, moving away, and building something new. it is about cornfields and mountains and moving somewhere you’ve never been before and evolving but also reflecting on past lives. it is about losing touch with old friends and making new friends even if these news friends are actually dogs. jessie writes poems that will lead you through loops, often off track then back on track again (if there ever was a track). at times religious, sexual, anxious, resolute, these poems will transfer you into the mind of someone just trying to figure out her relationship to the world. “once i was many other things” is change, loss, growth, and the desperate clinging on to familiar things while still moving forward, because that’s all you can do.

jessie knoles is a poet who grew up in illinois but is currently living in washington state. she is a poetry editor for hobart. you can find her online at jessieknoles.com.

Jessie Knoles writes poetry about what used to be called the Middle West: poems about bonfires and Big R parking lots and humping and cornfields and trailer bars and beer and the funerals of young people and the moon. A lot of Jessie’s poems are about the moon. Reading Jessie’s poems I started to feel an intense kinship with her – maybe it was our blood-stained underwear, our Mittelschmerz. I started to miss my youth and all the people I’d left behind in it. Jessie’s poems are little stories about the people and places we love and lose and write poems about and lose again when those poems are published. When I finished Jessie’s book I wrote on a sticky note to ask my husband for her phone number because I wanted to be friends with her. – Elizabeth Ellen, author of the poetry collection Elizabeth Ellen and the novel Person/a

jessie knoles’s debut full-length poetry collection is a daydream or a memory or a poem. read this book if you’ve ever: met someone who thinks olive garden is fancy, missed your dead pets, had a psychic experience, or slept next to your scared sibling. and if none of this applies, read it anyway, because this book is fucking beautiful. – shy watson, author of Cheap Yellow

ONCE I WAS is incredible. It’s the rush of waterfalls, American whiskey, and jet engines kicking on. It’s like the diary entries of Hera, if after she’d killed Zeus and gotten bored on Mount Olympus, she decided to ride a lightning bolt down to America to throw her own party. And yet it’ll take you off earth, above Illinois, above Washington State, so you can put your palm on the surface of your favorite cool star. This is poetry full of adrenaline, anxiety, and belief. Jessie Knoles is hands down one of the best living poets today. – Bud Smith, author of WORK

Grab your copy today!

Kate Garklavs’ new chapbook, Diffusely Yours, is officially available today!

DIFFUSELY YOURS is a love letter to place: public places and places of public defeat, sterile neon malls, night streets fecund with pigeons, dive bars, haunted kitchens. It reveres the back alleys and boxcars and diners of true discovery that now reside mostly in memory.

DIFFUSELY YOURS is Kate Garklavs’ debut chapbook. Its poems examine what the artifacts of location bring to bear on us and how we translate these gifts to the world.

Kate Garklavs lives and works in Portland, OR. Her work has appeared in Juked, apt, Leveler, Tammy, and The Airgonaut, among other places. She’s the prose editor for the Submission reading series. She tweets @ueberkatester.

In Diffusely Yours, we “uphold the glittered, misspelled letter of the law” one minute and the next finds us “in crawlspaces looking for Gunne Sax.” Narrative-driven and sharp-tongued, Garklavs’ letters are haunting and taunting: we may want to believe “in our diamond future we are richer” but Garklavs, like a good prophet, tells us what’s in store won’t be sweet or sentimental, but “dark as a blot on a heart.” -Tasha Cotter, author of Some Churches

In Diffusely Yours, Kate Garklavs transforms second-hand ordinary objects into shining beacons that remind us “artifacts outlast us all, / recasting under each new hand / that claims them.” Her poems, addressing reams of memory, eschew grand nostalgia to meditate on everyday imperfections. Garklavs’ work confronts the reality of material culture and our ephemeral existence. “I’m reimaging my personal brand,” she admits, frank about aging, capitalism’s false promises, and the desire to connect across vast distances. Love always surfaces in spite of the things that may overcrowd our lives. Garklavs beautifully reminds us that it is people who cultivate hope and joy in a difficult world. -Alyse Bensel, poet, book reviews editor, The Los Angeles Review

Kate Garklavs’ Diffusely Yours is an enthralling collection of letters to other people, saying all the things we want to say but never usually do. The lines range from darkly funny (“Normcore means never having to say you’re sorry”) to starkly poignant (“Someday we’ll take down/a wall and revel in the dust we ignored”). The landscape is ordinary, but the best kind of ordinary: the kind we exist in. The poems range from existing in shopping malls, a kitchen, high school, etc. But really, the landscape isn’t just physical, it’s love. It’s centered on keeping love, losing love, fighting for love, and all those pesky gray areas and details inbetween. Human relationships are difficult, and this collection illustrates that, from person to person, allowing the speaker to give us a glimpse into their fractured, but still whole, world. -Joanna C. Valente, author of Sexting Ghosts and Marys of the Sea

Garklavs’ letters traverse the country, plumb relationships, objects, time—as in era and moment, what is a system of measurement and also an idea, what places anywhere on a map and also says, we are here. These wildly private and equally public poems—the epistolary as much form as content—are as much intimate address to a beloved you as to the world where we live, the world where we once lived. “Remember” the poems say, and even if we don’t exactly, we do, are there. I love Diffusely Yours, its thrifting. Every single poem makes me want to write back. -Monica Berlin, English Department Chair, Knox College

Grab your copy now!