Kirjahaku

Death, love, and poetry-not exactly in that order. These are Sugar le Fae's concerns in Broken Lines, a retrospective of Sugar's poetry over two decades. Roughly chronological, this collection begins with a sequence of "nightstands," queer love poems, the first of which won a contest in 2005, Sugar's first publication. Over the next twenty years, Sugar has continued to publish hundreds of poems, translations, and essays in over two dozen literary publications, winning another contest in 2015 and publishing a verse memoir, The Mustard Seed (April Gloaming) in 2023. Broken Lines's second section explores ars poetica, 'the art of poetry, ' musing on a range of poetic icons and images in the Western tradition, including Eliot's "famous clairvoyante," an elegy to a lost pen, two Latin translations, and the fantastical cats of Cleopatra, Keats, and Dickinson. Section three yields to gloomier, post-Covid realities, wrestling with time and inevitability-though not without hard, surviving zircons of hope. And like a postmodern concept album, Broken Lines even includes a few B-sides at the end, deep cuts that didn't fit anywhere else.Line breaks are one of poetry's great innovations-structure makers / and breakers, able to stack meanings, subvert expectations, and glean music from plain language. The line-breaks in Broken Lines are no exception, sharp and clean, in turn humorous or heartbreaking. As a visual effect, Sugar's edges are restless but restrained, jagged but dynamic, seeking resonance. These poems hum on the page, crystalline and finely carved. Like a hem or highway, these broken lines lead somewhere.

Welcome to the Mustard Seed, your locally-sourced, gay-owned, natural foods grocer Our cashier, "Zachary," will guide you through the aisles. In Grocery, you'll find purple-haired, bisexual dread. In Supplements, overpriced herbs for every internet ailment. Produce stocks $5 apples, but the weed is cheap. (Ask the manager.) Cold-cuts and drunk sluts in the Deli. The Hot Bar costs $20 a plate, and all leftovers are thrown away by hungry employees, per management. If you drink mud, visit our Coffee Station. We also sell a variety of kombuchas and gluten-free, nonalcoholic IPAs for sober celiac's. And don't forget to check out the guys at the Juice Bar, like our oversexed owner does every time he visits unannounced. Feel free to leave your shopping cart in the parking lot.Sugar le Fae's debut collection, The Mustard Seed, is a nuanced-queer, sad, funny, biting-reflection on American consumerism and the commiseration among service workers. In its structure, this verse memoir borrows from classical song cycles or the concept albums of Tori Amos. The poems flow like scenes, a mix-tape, a dozen short films in each season. These regular cadences allow for bite-sized worldbuilding that adds up to a meal. Particular attention is paid to line-breaks-that unique poetic mechanism for stacking meanings. At its best, this collection lays language bare, makes it aware of itself, slows us down. And if nothing else, there's nothing else like it.