Sunnylyn Thibodeaux, Lucky Charms: New and Selected Poems 2000-2025

 

LUCKY CHARMS

It is midafternoon. You are adrift
My head flutters with smiles of the dead
My heart aches. Rain let up
for a brief spell of warmth. More
to come tomorrow. Atmospheric river
sweeps in before we sent it south, where
people are drowning sorrows in drink. Drunk
as a way of living. It could be midafternoon
when the sky shifts to share, a banjo rips
A neighbor is dead. His smile keeps me
company in the process of grief. We prepare
for rain with buckets to catch the drops
from a grand hole up above. In the cloud
formations I can see his teeth and legs
He was all teeth and legs. It is midafternoon
There is a banjo. And a hole

I’ve been curious about seeing further work by San Francisco poet Sunnylyn Thibodeaux for some time, and the first book I’ve properly got my hands on is her Lucky Charms: New and Selected Poems 2000-2025 (San Francisco CA: City Lights, 2026), a title that appears as “City Lights Spotlight No. 24.” Part of what I’ve been appreciating in the City Lights Spotlight Series is two-fold: seeing selected poems by those one might think obvious candidates alongside a further list of those who have been publishing for a while, but not necessarily by publishers in the mainstream trade. For example, Thibodeaux is the author of numerous titles, but not necessarily those you might have caught through bookstore shelves: Curves & Curses (Auguste Press, 2000), Last We Spoke (Auguste Press, 2004), 20/20 Yielding (Blue Press, 2005), Room Service Calls (Lew Gallery Editions, 2008), Palm To Pine (Bootstrap Productions, 2011), 88 Haiku for Lorca (Push, 2013), As Water Sounds (Bootstrap Productions, 2014), Universal Fall Precautions (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017), Witch Like Me (The Operating System, 2020), The World Exactly (Cuneiform Press, 2020) and Broadway Azaleas (FMSBW, 2024). Her audience-to-date, most likely, a combination of those-in-the-know and regional, a consideration she most likely shares with further titles in the same series by San Francisco poets, such as Patrick James Dunagan’s City Bird and Other Poems (City Lights Books, 2024) [see my review of such here] and Evan Kennedy’s METAMORPHOSIS (City Lights Books, 2023) [see my review of such here]. The series, then, suggests itself as paying full attention to those local writers deserving of a wider and further attention. In the back of the collection, offering that the series “SHINES A LIGHT ON THE WEALTH OF INNOVATIVE AMERICAN POETRY BEING WRITTEN TODAY. WE PUBLISH ACCOMPLISHED FIGURES KNOWN IN THE POETRY COMMUNITY AS WELL AS YOUNG EMERGING POETS, USING THE CULTURAL VISIBILITY OF CITY LIGHTS TO BRING THEIR WORK TO A WIDER AUDIENCE. IN DOING SO, WE ALSO HOPE TO DRAW ATTENTION TO THOSE SMALL PRESSES PUBLISHING SUCH AUTHORS,”

LAST NIGHT’S DREAM

I had French toast
with Tim Dlugos, his hands
trembling from meds
lenses reflecting back
at me myself. It was hard
to tell, but he spoke
sensical hand-me-downs
and that’s how I knew—
like recognizing chords
in the newest band’s rip-offs
skyrockets landing on hillsides
fresh whipped cream, strawberries
black coffee. done. with errors
on the page

Thibodeaux writes first-person declarative bursts that offer the occasional abstract sheen, yet provide a foundation of concrete specifics. There are ways her narratives are composed of individual bricks of seemingly self-contained phrases and stragglers, pulling apart lines there and here, sliding up against a kind of narrative collision and accumulation. “There are fragile things in the sky / All miners are above ground,” she writes, as part of the extended “from AGAINST WHAT LIGHT,” “They sent down the Virgin Mary with food / City Hall is orange / and the moon has gone from crescent / There were seven phone calls / with no one on the line [.]” It is as though her poems are set as large canvases, and the brush strokes of her lines can move in any direction, any colour, all purposefully set within the same poem’s boundaries. And still, her poems hold the intimacy of little monologues, sharp with phrases and line breaks, precise and casual in their execution. As she writes, as part of “from UNIVERSAL FALL PRECAUTIONS”: “The gossip was of a boy / I protested. Wanting / only proof of / the misinformation. Who / defines these categories?”

 

Eve Joseph, Dismantling

 

family history

I am experiencing bouts of amnesia. Caught in the contradictions of time. One minute goes by and the whole story gets rewritten whereas years pass and the hands on the clock barely move. My grandfather took his youngest brother under the table and started to cut his throat with the blunt edge of a dinner knife. His mother had a fit and brought him a chicken. “Kill this instead,” she said, holding a glass of brandy for him in case he fainted. Forgetfulness is different than not remembering. Were it not for the feathers on the kitchen floor I wouldn’t believe a word of it.

The latest full-length poetry collection since her remarkable Griffin Prize-winning poetry title, Quarrels (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2018) [see my review of such here] is Victoria poet Eve Joseph’s, Dismantling (Anvil Press, 2026), a book-length suite of deft, single-stanza prose poems. Her fourth published poetry collection, Dismantling is set in two untitled sections, the second of which is a suite of twenty-six numbered poems, each titled “cento.” “The shades above the city have already been drawn,” begins the first numbered “cento,” “the pockets of wind emptied. The room is quiet now, everything falling at the same rate of speed.” There’s a part of me still frustrated at how her work so quietly floats just under the radar, having only been introduced to her work at all through her third collection, and missing completely her first two—The Startled Heart (Oolichan Books, 2004) and The Secret Signature of Things (London ON: Brick Books, 2010)—although one might say what keeps her just under the radar is exactly the strength of her quietly powerful lyric. “All history is revisionist.” begins the poem “revisions,” “Dig down and there’s so and so with his version of events. A little further and you can hear the song of the last speckled cormorant and before that the ancestors of Przewalski’s horses no bigger than foxes. What’s the point of one more poem?” As part of her contribution to “short takes on the prose poem” over at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics in 2022, she wrote: “I love prose poetry. There is something about the shape of the form that encourages ranging thought at the same time it demands concise imagery. It is a loping wolf that places each paw precisely.”

Composed across firm and precise lines, set with such a delicate touch, Joseph’s poems are masterfully written, perfectly held together, even through an ongoing conversation around how easily things fall apart. This is a collection of form and attention, carefully layered and precise. As the poem “the hour before dawn” begins: “How many silences penetrate other silences? The monk with his vows. A violin at rest in its black case. Two of Adelaide Crapsey’s three: the falling snow, the mouth of one just dead. Not the dying or the death itself but the wide-open O of the moment. The breath gone from the lungs yet still in the room.” Or, as she offers to open her short “Introduction” to the collection:

Prose poetry, wrote Charles Simic, is where the impulses for prose and for poetry collide. Not a merging of form, but a collision. I am drawn to the energy of this impact and to the possibility of creating something new out of two established genres. Since 2013, following a thalamic stroke, I have not been able to write poetry in what we think of as traditional verse. Nobody really knows why. Prose poetry, with its long lines and little garden-box shape, tricks my brain into thinking I’m not doing what I most want to do.
            The poems that make up the first section of this book were written over the past six years and any flaws and imperfections are mine. The second section of the book is comprised of a series of centos – prose poems made up entirely of other poet’s lines. Derived from the Greek word for patchwork quilt the form collapses boundaries between the living and the dead and allows for unexpected alliances and conversations.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Nathan Hoks

Nathan Hoks is a poet whose books include Nests in Air, The Narrow Circle, Reveilles and Moony Days of Being. His poetry has been awarded the National Poetry Series, the Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and the Iowa Review David Hamilton Prize. He has also published translations of work by Vicente Huidobro, Henri Michaux, Tristan Tzara, and Christian Dotremont. He teaches poetry writing at the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and lives in Chicago with his family.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Publishing my first book (Reveilles) made it possible to write my next book. It made it possible to move on from the writing I was doing in my 20s. It made space, it cleared a pathway. The recent work feels of the same mold. In the immortal words of Popeye, I yam what I yam. But (hopefully) better, stronger, clarified like ghee. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

As if I had a choice! Poetry came for me in the thick of the night. Something moved my hand. I couldn’t sleep.  

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

It feels both fast and slow. I’m almost always writing poems. Most of them are pretty awful. The ones that become parts of books usually have little resemblance to their first drafts. I have many, many notebooks, digital and analog, through which the work is always shifting and evolving. 

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Sometimes a poem begins with a phrase or word that gets lodged in my head. Sometimes what happens is I start to mix and match various fragments I’ve jotted down in notebooks. I tend to write clusters of poems and then I try to figure out how they talk to each other, what kind of community they form, and revise accordingly into a book. With most of my favorite poems, I have very little recollection of how or why or wtf was going on! They all involve extended processes and other parts of myself and the cosmos that I can’t always access. 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Yes and yes. They are important and yet they are quite distinct from what poetry means to me as a form of solitary writing and reading. I cherish both modes. Readings are communal—they help me feel connected to other travelers, which in indirect but definitive ways is vital to writing poems. In a practical way they also give me a chance to try out new work and go back to the lab with findings. I think I dread them as much as I enjoy them, but the truth is I almost always say yes to them.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

How do I make language talk back? What else can a sentence do? What word combinations alter consciousness? What’s living in my basement? Who’s there? 

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

To explore the verbal imagination by challenging language and exploring the consciousnesses it makes available. To invent strange or marvelous verbal constructions. To wake us up. These tasks have obvious social and cultural value. Whether or not anyone’s listening is another question. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I am humbled whenever someone gives attention to my work!

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Start small (Richard Hugo). Gardening, not architecture (Eno and Schmidt).

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

In my practice, poetry and translation are natural extensions of each other. I approach critical prose the way I approach house work. I like to clarify ideas like I like to have a (somewhat) orderly house; but it ain’t easy.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Like the academic calendar, my routines come and go and are often subject to arbitrary, incomprehensible, and invisible administrative processes and planetary alignments. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Tarot cards. AP News’ oddities. Walking. The Dead Kennedys. The Cure. Meditation. Yoga. Brian Eno & Michael Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Cinnamon. Pancakes. Woodburning stove. Windex. Dog hair. Chips Ahoy dipped in milk. Bergamot. Coffee (Metropolis’s light roast, Schweik’s blend).

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

All of the above. And donuts. But more in a “vibe” kinda way. Moss, for example, influences my process. I aim for airborne spores in going from draft to draft. I spend a lot of time with visual art and music. For my work, the most direct influence is always other poetry.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Some things I often come back to include: Wuthering Heights, Blake, Bataille, Ashbery, Murakami, 1000 plateaus, Koch, Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred, Kim Hyesoon, Bly’s Leaping Poetry, Tzara’s manifestos, Basho, Issa, James Tate, Notley’s The Descent of Alette, Homer, Hopkins, Keats, Lorca’s Poet in NY, Whitman, Dostoyevsky, the Tao Te Ching. 

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I would like to get my kids through college.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

The answer to both questions is televangelist. 

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Some weird combination of ego and compulsion. 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

The Brothers Karamazov. 

20 - What are you currently working on?

I have a collaborative project with the poet Joseph Bienvenu in the works. Spitball Ballet, the first of a 3 volume set called Bad Arguments for Living, is now out! I also have a manuscript called Astronomic Gargle. Like the cosmos, some days I think it’s finished. Other days it looks like total chaos.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Carrie Olivia Adams, The Book of Marys and Glaciers

 

When she comes to me, I am always alone. A woman alone is extremely herself. A woman alone leaves excess in her wake, every portion too big, in the company of others, she takes up no space, but alone, she is the space. Alone, she watches the dogs of the city, off-leash. She runs towards a foreign language. No longer surrounded by men, she is not mother, not sister, not womb. Not prayers to the fruit of. She is just a woman in blue with a tall glass of wine in a walled city, envying its pigeons. (“The Book of Marys and Glaciers”)

I’m very pleased to see the appearance of a fifth full-length poetry collection by Chicago poet, editor and publicist Carrie Olivia Adams, The Book of Marys and Glaciers (North Adams MA: Tupelo Press, 2026), a title that follows Intervening Absence (Ahsahta Press 2009) [see my review of such here], Forty-One Jane Doe’s (book and DVD, Ahsahta 2013) [see my review of such here], Operating Theater (Buffalo NY: Noctuary Press, 2015) [see my review of such here] and Be the thing of memory (Flagstaff AZ/Las Vegas NV: Tolsun Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Composed as a trio of extended sequences—“Blockchain,” “The Book of Marys and Glaciers” and “Dust Cover”—The Book of Marys and Glaciers furthers Adams’ lyric explorations through the long thought, the long sentence; stretching a thread through a subject woven and interwoven across a carefully-sustained trajectory. She writes a landscape of depiction, working medieval depictions of the Virgin Mary and of deserts, glaciers. She writes an ecopoetic traversing temporal and geographic space, seeking the bones of what remains, gets stripped away and what is willfully abandoned. She writes on what gets left behind, after all else is taken. As part “IX.” of the title sequence begins: “We’re breathing in the distance, the fires of history. Hell comes to earth and makes itself so at home some days. A pregnant Mary in the desert, throat choked with thirst and fear. Alone and never so alone. The celestial surveillance; a being bound by her own umbilical cord. What’s the difference between a tether and leash?”

Adams is very good at the extended, meditative thread, held through accumulation, one careful and considered moment followed by a further moment. “I wanted to write about Mary,” she writes, as part of the title sequence, “but then I became distracted by the glaciers. The things that glaciers do.” Blending attentions and concerns across detailed, propulsive passages, Adams’ lyric is attentive to not only thought but movement. As with other of her works, there’s a sense of the monologue, the gesture, that one might hear each of these three sequences performed in full on stage, providing a different sense of cadence. The intimacy of her lines are somehow broadened through the possibility of such a performative approach. “I keep running myself disappearance.” she writes, early in the opening sequence. “A pound and a pound. Isn’t this how to lose weight? Is regret still as heavy?”

In the cave, you know your own lies, the stars up your sleeve. A universe made from your own dust. On the floorboards, in the eaves. Even now, I make a cave with my knees. Meanwhile, I grow old in pencil shavings. The chalk of a week of eat & repeat. A season of burial, low tide, replete. My body washed up on a sheet. There was no sleep, then only sleep. Remember sadness immovable. Remember my palm a foreign thing.

                                    What said the strangers when we could not read their lips? (“Dust Cover”)

There are echoes one might compare to Philadelphia poet Pattie McCarthy’s marybones (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2013) [see my review of such here], as Adams works through her extended articulations around depictions and expectations around women, dipping into and through medieval depictions of the Virgin Mary, writing her own extended prose movements through research and lyric passage, and the prose poem sequence. As she writes to open poem “XI.” of the title sequence:

I don’t want to tell anyone all about me. Mary keeps her silences. Even if no one else does.