Happy Pub Day to our Fall Books!

It’s official! Today we celebrate the publication of Olivia Cronk’s poetry-novel Gwenda, Rodney and Sylvia Jones’s debut poetry collection, Television Fathers. We’re delighted to introduce you to these two tours de force that balance linguistic prowess with an alchemy of image and color.

Gwenda, Rodney, is Olivia Cronk’s fourth book, and her first poetry-novel; it’s a book that Amina Cain praises as conjuring “a feeling that you are experiencing literature at its most exhilarating, wild, and imaginative register.” It summons a world “in which desire feels like a dazzling bouquet of decay”… and, according to Selah Saterstrom, “the effect is mesmerizing.

Sylvia Jones’s Television Fathers is “a stunning debut” collection of poetry, what Ashleigh Bryant Phillips calls “ a transmission for our end-of-times, a prophecy priced out of the zeitgeist—” that only Sylvia Jones can deliver. Joseph Grantham attests: “it’s a blessing to read a poet who doesn’t pander, a poet who is so completely herself.”

TELEVISION FATHERS by Sylvia Jones

Sylvia Jones’s Television Fathers creates a wholly new lens. With poems reminiscent of iconoclasts such as James Tate or Jay Wright, Jones’s voice is playful and pithy, simultaneously reimagining the past and reveling in the absurd contemporary—her gaze never straying from social inequity, nor from the personal scales of fate. A heavily saturated debut collection of unsuspecting interiority, Television Fathers is the future of modern poetry.

Sylvia Jones is a writer, editor, and prison abolitionist. Born in Staten Island and raised in Virginia, she works part-time as an adjunct lecturer in creative writing at Goucher College and George Washington University. She earned her MFA from American University in Washington D.C. and lives in Baltimore, MD. She also teaches poetry with the Goucher Prison Education Partnership.

Praise for TELEVISION FATHERS:

“The poems in Sylvia Jones’s Television Fathers read as if they were written tomorrow, but it’s a tomorrow in which everybody’s senses are keener than we can expect them to be ….” —Shane McCrae, author of The Gilded Auction Block

“The poems of Sylvia Jones offer us a dizzying array of modes and registers—there are terse and snarling epigrams, surrealist catalogues, celebrations and interrogations of pop culture, laments and elegies. She sees the manifold ironies and injustices of our doom-scrolling culture, and has the audacity to regard her poems—and the poems that she samples and loves—as a slyly subversive balm against the cant and cacophony. This makes for a stunning debut.” —David Wojahn, author of World Tree

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GWENDA, RODNEY by Olivia Cronk

Olivia Cronk’s Gwenda, Rodney is an exquisitely genre-ambiguous “poetry novel” scintillating with art, ardor, and decay. It’s a book about reading novels, ekphrasis, and the gaze, transcribed in a mode as ethereal as air filling a garment left to hang. Inspired by theater, Dario Argento’s luscious horror aesthetics, the gaudy-spectacle-art of Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films, and the feeling of reading novels like drinking endless water, Gwenda, Rodney, is an inspiration, an exhalation, a quivering ruby of obsession on display.

Olivia Cronk is the author of WOMONSTER (Tarpaulin Sky, 2020), Louise and Louise and Louise (The Lettered Streets Press, 2016), and Skin Horse (Action Books, 2012).

Praise for GWENDA, RODNEY:

“Olivia Cronk’s Gwenda, Rodney paints what it feels like to be consumed by a shadowy relationship where perceptions form a distorted reality and pull you deeper and deeper within. Everything is so slippery, from the language to the unexpected imagery—all while handholds of reality are illuminated in flashes, much like being led into a dark room, shining a flashlight quickly. But it’s only temporary before shit becomes slippery again.” —Steven Dunn, author of Potted Meat and co-author of Tannery Bay

“There is a great excitement in reading Gwenda, Rodney, like coming to Mina Loy or Silvina Ocampo or Fleur Jaeggy for the first time, a feeling that you are experiencing literature at its most exhilarating, wild, and imaginative register.” —Amina Cain, author of Indelicacy and A Horse at Night.

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