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Please join Kelsey Street Press authors Renee Gladman and Metta Sáma for a reading on Saturday, August 28th at 5pm PST. In a time of dislocation, Renee Gladman and Metta Sáma tackle linguistic risks through form, language, and subject from one lyric utterance to the next to the next to reveal that like Gladman’s Ravicka, we too are “all dislocated and queer, strangers in a strange land—alien to others and, even, to ourselves.”


RSVP for the reading.


Metta Sáma's Swing at your own risk (Kelsey Street Press, 2019) swings from one subject to the next, from one lyric utterance to the next, concerning itself with unpacking myths of gender, race, sexuality, and violence. "Sáma's poems are visionary manifestos of the body boiled in Black Woman bloodline," Tyehimba Jess.


Metta Sáma is author of four poetry chapbooks, most recently, the year we turned dragon (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs), and two full-length poetry collections, most recently, Swing at your own risk (Kelsey Street Press). An award-winning poet, her poems, fiction, CNF, literary scholarship & book reviews have been published in various literary journals and anthologies. Sáma is the founder of Artists Against Police Brutality/Cultures of Violence, a Senior Fellow of Black Earth Institute and a member of the Advisory Board of Black Radish Books.



Renee Gladman's Kelsey Street Press books include Newcomer Can't Swim in 2007 and Juice, her first full-length book, in 2000.


Gladman is preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing and architecture. She is the author of thirteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013) and Houses of Ravicka (2017)—as well as two collections of drawings, Prose Architectures (2017) and One Long Black Sentence, a series of white ink drawings on black paper, indexed by Fred Moten (2020). Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Paris Review, Gulf Coast, Granta, Harper's, BOMB magazine, e-flux and n+1. She has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), and is a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize winner in fiction. She makes her home in New England with poet-ceremonialist Danielle Vogel.


Renee Gladman

Metta Sáma





A big thank you to Bhanu Kapil for offering Kelsey Street Press’s first Zoom Workshop—Breaking Fire: A workshop on portraiture self-love and the beautiful revenge of your as-yet-to-be written poems. Over 56 participants were virtually present including a few Zoom Bombers. The end product of the workshop was a multi-layered tryptich of text, paintings, drawings, and revenge. Here is the group textual offering shared at the workshop’s end alongside Bhanu’s swallowing of the yellow rose:



the vagus is the core and the core is us

Here the poem is a map of a map of my face

what in space, straight lines that are a variation on a chair

it was a circle that broke free first

how does spiral relate to strands

I want to speak wildflowers, I want to speak in places that bloom and rooms that offer light that exit my mouth

i had my spirits sung to me

the bird on the branch of the bridge of my nose

when i turned pink in the night

Mouth full of birds

I imagine the moon lying on its back in the night I don’t ask enough questions still the song goes up to

the gut brilliances towards the heart

face metamorphosis

a frond, an arched eyebrow, tomato cages holding up the arms, blooms break open seeds.

golden light radiating flickering

he wrong bruise from my upper arm I didn’t yet know the word biceps

three suns they rotate, the silence a chrysalide, inside the chrysalide sap sap warm sap the suns sleep

avocado green inverts into a feature of a face that cannot

let the ants teach you

one day it might become a face a poem a line a word a space a fire

passive fragments of stopping blood so dense against my being

She is taller than me. I look up to her.

The eye whipped with red and pulled by satin ribbons. Hair curled like the curve of the letter S.

Does a root system look like the inner part of a human?

From A digital eye… it appeared in the blue light, the breakdown of yes and no… nothing in-between will operate… what is moving the vision eye?

if you don’t want this scene, change it

Suppose you didn’t believe some pleasures were incorrect.

Like the woodpecker, I find a task

with every tree. Anxiety, dancing naked, that I bed with.

fragile / radical

your father stole your mother and I slept next to a spider

the forest, a mirror-sea between us

This is a red mark, that was a circle then a line and no its just your face

fire from the ditch



The Zoom workshop was a huge success minus some technical glitches, definite lessons learned. Again, thank you to all the participants for sharing in the making of such magic, the space in which to share beauty, and endurance. I am so inspired by your work. Thank you for your offerings and please keep sending us work inspired from the workshop to info@kelseyst.com.




The Press hopes to have more offerings soon. In fact, poet, activist and cultural worker Amber DiPietra has offered to host the next workshop entitled—Move/Meant: The intersection of poetics, performance art, and somatics. We are shooting for the end of July, details are forthcoming. In the meantime, I will close by sharing more of the work generated from the workshop and quoting Bhanu Kapil, “I love you, please don’t die.”




Kelsey Street would love to feature more of the work generated by Bhanu’s workshop, so please send us your work @ info@kelseyst.com.

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