Francesca Kritikos - The season of lilacs is monstrous

To great delight, we bring you another full-length poetry title, The season of lilacs is monstrous by Francesca Kritikos, now available for pre-order in both limited (26 copies with limited edition cyanotype print) and standard editions.

26 copies signed/lettered by the author. Includes unique cyanotype print by poet and photographer Juliana Ward.

The season of lilacs is monstrous is a study in contradictions: candied almonds that break teeth, lilacs that can't be milked, getting the things you want then breaking them like glass. Francesca Kritikos writes hunger and gluttony, violence and power, sex and shame with equal parts care and severity. Brutal in their precision and cutting in their spareness, these poems hold beauty and love and all that one sanctifies up to the light then finely carve back to expose a darker matter beneath. For Kritikos' speaker, there is no transformation, only transfiguration—a whittling of the self down to its most base form.

This smart, racy collection of poems from Francesca Kritikos is a portrait in severity, resignation, provocation. Francesca’s control and dominance over the line is a marvel. Like Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher, or Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, the speaker(s) in Kritikos’ The season of lilacs is monstrous follow in a lineage of women who get exactly what they don’t want. —Ben Fama, author of If I Close My Eyes, Fantasy, and Deathwish


Francesca Kritikos’ The season of lilacs is monstrous is like a hymnal written by a disaffected god; one who moves through our world in the disguise of a supplicant—particularly around unnamed men. The puppet master in the role of the “pretty puppet”. As such, Kritikos shifts between the register of the earthbound (You’re lucky / I’m not used to being free) and the omniscient (I will tell as much of the truth / as you can handle), as deftly and quickly as fruit goes from unripe to decay. Each poem enacts a search for that brief moment of ripeness. Of perfection that is not of the flesh. The search is often brutal, as Kritikos unflinchingly asks us to examine our own appetites—not just for the food we consume, but for blood, for money, for drugs, anything that helps us forget that in the end it’s all waste. It’s also exquisite. Something that once you’ve tasted you’ll never forget. —Meghann Boltz, author of True Romance


These poems come from the bruise of the fruit. —Lamb


Like “tearing a grape / off its vine,” Francesca Kritkos’ The season of lilacs is monstrous weeps a sticky lyric fluid that coats the experience of “learn[ing] to talk / at the end of privacy.” Kritkos’ disciplined, volatile poems expose the intensity and ambivalence of the flesh: skin under snow, fresh rot on a pink fingernail, “cake / cum / blood.” Herein, an unquiet imagination, and a central question, or a wish: “if fasting didn’t work / if God wasn’t right about us.” —Leah Flax Barber, author of The Mirror of Simple Souls


I have not read a book I have loved as much as The season of lilacs is monstrous in a very long time. Francesca Kritikos is the definition of an excellent writer, one who isn't afraid to explore every aspect of herself to express the moment. Kritikos is a master at being honest with herself and it shows, the poetry is raw and gorgeous. —Erin Taylor, author of Bimboland


The season of lilacs is monstrous is also available as part of our 2025 subscription.

Christine Shan Shan Hou's A Promise is shipping mid August.

Jon Leon's Uncollected Poems 2012-2021 is in stock and readily available.

September online workshops are open and enrolling.

We are now booking manuscript consultations.


With much admiration and thanks,
b l u s h

Christine Shan Shan Hou - A Promise

We are beyond thrilled to announce our next full-length poetry title, Christine Shan Shan Hou's A Promise, now available for pre-order in both limited (26 copies with limited edition Hongbao) and standard editions.

26 copies signed/lettered by the author. Includes unique one of a kind limited edition Hongbao collage with secret fortune.

Ritual ecstasy meets playroom noir, A Promise allows for the feminine in all its mythic, erotic, and grotesque forms. The speaker offers herself up as a kind of prophet and a pet and a plaything. She moves toward transcendence and then is pulled back to the body----crawling across a well-lit room, shitting the world's largest pearl, birthing half-lambs into open fields. The mythoscape created is one of flesh and feeling, touch and prayer.

“The final scene is about futility. This movie is about living life to its fullest.”

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Horny and serene, embodied and restless, Christine Shan Shan Hou's A Promise contains multitudes. These poems at times get carved apart, or folded over in impossible, reflexive yoga, or turned animal, vegetal, feral; all throughout, though, the reader can trust Hou to be a sure-handed guide of their metaphysical and physical puberties. "There is an entire fist growing / inside of you", writes Hou, and suddenly I can feel it. This book is at the brink, in all senses, and I loved it. —NIINA POLLARI


Christine Shan Shan Hou’s collection pulses with raw, unbridled desire—a visceral playground where the carnal essence of human form is etched in poetic strokes of fervor and awe. This arresting work dives into the primal raves of biology, where sinew and synapse entwine, and desire—along with its aching void—is charted and limned like a living, breathing organism. Each poem is a testament to the forces that animate us: muscle and marrow, breath and heartbeat, the electric spark of touch and the magnetic pull of connection. Christine’s artistry doesn’t just sit pretty; it grabs your senses by the collar and drags them into the unruly jungles of body and mind. Geometric precision collides with organic chaos, sparking a caffeinated tango of flesh and feeling that’s as vivid as it is visceral. A PROMISE is an excavation of what it means to be alive: to crave, to yearn, and to exist in a state of perpetual “What even is this feeling?!” Get ready to laugh, squirm, and maybe blush—a little or a lot. —VI KHI NAO


Dear Reader, allow me a moment to tell you how much I love the book you’re holding in your hands. From the first poem I was seized by a feeling of immediate excitement: a quickening of the nerves, an electric surge through the mind, and an amplified sense of being and possibility—in other words, the unique experience that only real poetry offers. To enumerate some of the oddities and splendors that exist side by side in these poems—a giraffe from Constantinople, the Lamb of God grazing in forbidden meadows, a cult of conifers, an inn made entirely of hands, schizophrenic lily-pads—might mislead you into thinking this book is all play. But there is also serious business here. In Christine Shan Shan Hou’s wild catalogs (reminiscent of Andre Breton and Benjamin Péret and Maria Sabina), the physical world becomes correlative to the weird and splendid inner world of feeling, being, sexual desire, consciousness, and spirit. A celebration of the profoundly contradictory complex of forces that comprise the human, A Promise is essential reading for poets and lovers of poetry—and for all of us who love living in this mysterious world. —GEOFFREY NUTTER

A Promise is also available as part of our 2025 subscription. Receive copies of all 5 of our 2025 full-length titles at a discounted rate. 

2025 Full-Length Titles:

Jon Leon “Uncollected Poems 2012-2021”

Christine Shan Shan Hou “A Promise”

Courtney Bush “The Lamb With The Talking Scroll”

Francesca Kritikos “The season of lilacs is monstrous”

M. Elizabeth Scott “Her Gloves Against the Mirror”

Print copies of our Spring 2025 poetry journal are also now circulating and can be purchased in our shop.

Summer online workshops are open and enrolling.


With much admiration and thanks,

 

SPRING 2025 ISSUE

Spring 2025

 

Jon Leon - Uncollected Poems 2012-2021

We are beyond thrilled to announce our first full-length poetry title, Jon Leon’s Uncollected Poems 2012-2021, now available for pre-order in both limited (26 copies with exclusive broadside) and standard editions.

Leon’s first proper book in over a decade, Uncollected Poems brings this criminally under-circulated poet back into the mix, gathering work previously only issued in scarce rogue editions. Look for them, it’s a dead end. This is the only record of the most compelling vapor trail in contemporary poetry.

The work of a singular, fugitive mind, Leon’s poetry betrays a poetic vision few have dared to indulge.


Sacred and profane, anguished and arch, and above all else achingly chic—Jon Leon’s poetry helped to make me serious about glamour as a subject. A Frederick Seidel for the so-called indie sleaze revival.

—Philippa Snow, author of Trophy Lives

These beautiful pieces emerged from a decade wracked by the explosion of social media, the spread of right-wing populism, and a tech culture set on burying the old ways—novels, albums, movies, subcultures—a whirlwind which these poems both mourn and celebrate, in an affecting synthesis of the sacred and the profane.

—Seth Price, author of F*ck Seth Price

As an independent writer and critic Jon Leon has generated a significant body of creative and critical texts, paratexts, and poetics that form an undifferentiated genre mix within the media imagination. His literary work has appeared globally in Night Papers, Spike Art Magazine, Oyster, The Brooklyn Rail, Novembre, Art in America, Soft Targets and other magazines and journals. His books have been featured in The Quietus, Punk Planet, Vice, Frieze, Bomb, and Bidoun among others. He is the author of Uncollected Poems: 2012-2021 (blush, 2025), Nathalie (If a Leaf Falls, 2020), Sheets of Mist (Karma, 2015), The Arrivistes (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2015), The Malady of the Century (Futurepoem, 2012), Elizabeth Zoë Lindsay Drink Fanta (Content, 2011), The Hot Tub (Mal-O-Mar, 2009), Hit Wave (Kitchen Press, 2008) and Alexandra (Cosa Nostra Editions, 2008) as well as a number of privately issued titles and special editions. Public talks include presentations at Art Center College of Design, Midway Contemporary Art, The Poetry Foundation, The CUNY Graduate Center and other distinguished venues. A solo exhibition, The Coral, ran through the summer of 2013 at The Finley Gallery, Los Angeles. Leon's works are represented in numerous public collections including: The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Yale University Beinecke Library, New Haven; The British Library, London; The Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives; The Art Institute of Chicago; Qatar National Library; and The Smithsonian Institution among others. Leon is the recipient of a Philip Whalen Memorial Grant. His writing is available in German, Spanish, and Italian translations.

You can order the book here.


With much admiration and thanks,
b l u s h

 

Open Reading Period Selections

Thank you to all who submitted to our full-length manuscript open reading period. We received a dazzling amount of truly excellent manuscripts. We thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to read and consider the work of so many wonderful poets. We are thrilled to announce that we have chosen the following manuscripts for publication:

We would also like to acknowledge the following finalists whose work received additional consideration:

We appreciate your readership. Online Workshops are open and enrolling for March.

With much admiration and thanks,
b l u s h

 
 

2024 Online Journal