"vampire burrito is nothing if not cinematic — aware of where the light begins and what it refracts through, a work replete with contradictions, two truths held together, bitterness tangled up in empathy, sadness tangled up in defiant joy, scoffing at the preconception of mutual exclusivity, alive in its very existence, both middle fingers to the sky."

- dan campbell, vocalist of THE WONDER YEARS

"In Matt Mitchell's Vampire Burrito, the medical and discursive apparatuses of gender weaponize both the cold sediment of history and the fiery obliteration of impending apocalypse to contain or exile disruptively sexed body-subjects. The multiple consciousnesses and social contradictions trans and intersex people navigate, however, become opportunities for play as well as fury: "I am a good mother but I am an even better infertile little spitfuck," Mitchell writes in "There's a Room Where the Light Won't Find You." The speakers of these poems erect the scaffolding of a "funhouse mirror body" and shoot T into their beautiful thighs each week to learn "who will make me more man than punchline?" These poems are dispatches from a defunct bunker, radio signals reaching into distant galaxies."

- jamie hood, author of HOW TO BE A GOOD GIRL

"the neon hollywood cowboy is back with another banger. matt mitchell's vampire burrito is a book i will return to again and again — for its tenderness & love — and again for its vividly-detailed world. these poems make me feel like i'm sipping on diet coke in some town along the west virginia-ohio border."

- josé olivarez, author of PROMISES OF GOLD 

matt mitchell is an assistant music editor for Paste, and a poet, essayist, and culture critic from Northeast Ohio. Vampire Burrito is his second book of poetry. Find him on Twitter @matt_mitchell48

Brendan Joyce's Personal Problem, a smart and smarting collection of communist poetry for our capitalist crisis. Joyce's sensibility is dreamy (but not in the twee way), droll (but not in the posh way), and thoroughly exhausted (but not in the way that gives up). The collection, with its alternatingly flat and fiery exegesis of precarity and wage work and endings and beginnings and climate catastrophe and even the economics of its own existence, transcends most of what's out there. Get it!

Natalie Shapero, author of Popular Longing


"In cigarettes, six months' rent / is a year": Brendan Joyce's thrilling poems keep time to the beat of capitalism. We're going down, but Joyce is here to bring "the wreckage in from the wreckage, / into the wreckage." If you don't read him, you will die alone, simple as that.

Michael Robbins, author of Walkman and Equipment for Living


xoxoxo

On the heels of his 2020 debut Love & Solidarity, Brendan has returned with a brand new collection of poems that circle his obsessions; money, class, work and the political economy of ecological collapse. In order to find the language for the means of economic exploitation and immiseration, Brendan focuses on its tempo, reordering our perception of time in the way capitalism imagines it; as a series of equations between commodities. 


Brendan Joyce is a poet, teacher and essayist, from Cleveland, Ohio. He has had his poetry featured in venues ranging from Poetry Daily to The Brooklyn Rail. He is the author of three books of poetry; Character Limit (2019), Love & Solidarity (2020) and Personal Problem (2023), as well as a forthcoming memoir surplus years.

“ if you are ready to know salvation

at the cost

of a most merciless truth  

because everything has a price 

my dear. ” 

Stephanie Ginese's Unto Dogs is a faithful pursuit of agency under imperial rule. With slick humor and radical honesty, she explores the violent and feminine history of a body and island seeking sovereignty from colonial powers. This collection is a searing revelation of confession, mythos, and truth.

Stephanie Ginese is a writer & wannabe comedian from South Lorain, Ohio. She is the daughter of a Puerto Rican mother & an Italian immigrant father. She currently lives in Cleveland, by the lake, with her two children. Find her at: www.sginese.com

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We Are Owed. is the debut poetry collection of Ariana Brown, exploring Black relationality in Mexican and Mexican American spaces. Through poems about the author’s childhood in Texas and a trip to Mexico as an adult, Brown interrogates the accepted origin stories of Mexican identity. We Are Owed asks the reader to develop a Black consciousness by rejecting U.S., Chicano, and Mexican nationalism and confronting anti-Black erasure and empire-building. As Brown searches for other Black kin in the same spaces through which she moves, her experiences of Blackness are placed in conversation with the histories of formerly enslaved Africans in Texas and Mexico. Esteban Dorantes, Gaspar Yanga, and the author’s Black family members and friends populate the book as a protective and guiding force, building the “we” evoked in the title and linking Brown to all other African-descended peoples living in what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery.”

Ariana Brown is a queer Black Mexican American poet from the Southside of San Antonio, TX. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Sana Sana (Game Over Books, 2020). Ariana’s work investigates queer Black personhood in Mexican American spaces, Black relationships and girlhood, loneliness, and care. She holds a B.A. in Mexican American Studies and African Diaspora Studies from UT Austin, an M.F.A.in Poetry from the University of Pittsburgh, and an M.L.S. in Library and Information Science from the University of North Texas (2022). Ariana is a 2014 national collegiate poetry slam champion and owes much of her practice to Black performance communities led by Black women poets from the South. She has been writing, performing, and teaching poetry for over ten years. Lesson plans, Spanish translations of her poems, and other resources are available on her website at arianabrown.com.