Hard and Sweet as Cold Cake, by Leemore Malka

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Hard and Sweet as Cold Cake wants to feel everything. It can’t look away, don’t make me. It’s contemplative and impulsive, brazen but kind, it acts out but it just wants to sit together, in the grass, on the beach or at home. It’s trying to be graceful but it can’t shut its mouth. It wants you to know that I love you and I can’t stop thinking about you. It wants you to know I’m at peace by myself and I made the right decision. It hopes, all the time. It wonders if there’s any truth to what I’m saying, and it knows : There is.

This collection of twenty poems is inspired by musician poets such as Tom Waits, Jeff Tweedy and Hamilton Leithauser, by 20th Century dance and 19th Century painting, and forever by my hometown, New York City, as well as adventures beyond, domestic and international, on land and at sea.

Leemore Malka is a poet, actress and playwright from the Bronx, equal parts fifth generation native New Yorker and Moroccan Israeli kibbutznikit. Hard and Sweet as Cold Cake is her first book. Leemore is a graduate of NYU, an alumna of the Bats at the Flea Theater and a regular at Easy Paradise at KGB on East 4th Street and Spoken Word Paris at Cabaret Populaire in Belleville. Recent publications include Devastation Baby, Heathentide Orphans and Humankind Zine. Leemore is a French tutor, an enthusiastically decent surfer and her last name means queen. Say hi on Instagram :: @blueblackgolden