I was very sick last fall! I’m less sick now and I’m thinking about pain, about being able or unable to work, how grotesque that thought is! I’m thinking about poems of wonder (awe-inspired fear/fear-inspired awe? + joyful astonishment of the unknown) that also have Tank Girl vibes which I find delightful. That kind of clout or gall, that sarcastic-cool of Daria or effortlessly confident-cool of Sailor Uranus, you know? But meets the gothic doubling of the show Interview with the Vampire. Honestly, I’m also thinking about my next Baldur’s Gate 3 Tav, maybe a Githyanki bard, disillusioned with Creche life, who only wants to sing songs, eat smores, do crafts, and play the strange human game called Magic the Gathering. All I want to do when I have the energy to desire is craft & play games! In lieu of a cohesive thought, here’s a short list! Two days ago, I hated everything. Today, I can’t seem to choose between all the books I love from Action. Last week it was 70 degrees for a day, today it’s 26/ feeling like 8 in Rochester, NY. Happy spring! Stay alive, everyone!
An incomplete list:
Hiromi Itō’s Wild Grass on the Riverbank, translated by Jeffrey Angles
This is one of my favorite books! I love an epic poem! I wish this were a book taught in high school—like instead of reading Gatsby or The Cremation of Sam McGee, let’s read Hiromi Itō! I sometimes say I don’t like narrative but that’s a lie. I like lush. I like it when narrative runs off, splashes, decomposes. I love a weird, weird plant. Wild Grass on the Riverbank is surreal and grotesque in craveable ways. It weaves its own biomythography into what it means to be a migrant. I grew up in a house where Samoan, English, and something between the two were spoken. The ways this book defamiliarizes belonging feels so real to me. I imagine this book would be neat taught beside Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of my Name or Bhanu Kapil’s Incubation: A Space for Monsters or Robin Blaser’s The Holy Forest, though I’ve been teaching it lately in my Necromancy course! Along with the spectacular ways the book undoes mastery (of narrative, languages, placelessness, bodies), it is singular in the shifting, bombastic, corrosive, wet voices and registers it channels. I feel like my thoughts on Itō’s book have left out the dark humor and delight in her poetry. Like, there are so many lol moments!
I’ve left my copy of this book on RIT’s campus, so you’ll have to buy it or check it out from a library yourself! On the Action site, there’s a video of the poems too!
Tytti Heikkinen’s The Warmth of the Taxidermied Animal, translated by Niina Pollari
This is one of the first Action books I remember reading, alongside Kim Hyesoon’s Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers and Lara Glenum’s Pop Corpse. I might have even stolen this book from BWR’s office a million years ago in Alabama! The thing I love about all three of these books are how wildly weird everyday life is and how elastic language becomes! If I ever thought about what you do and don’t put in a poem, the answer looks back at me through Heikkinen’s Fatty-XL poems. I LOVE IT when a voice is rude and the poems are saturated! That’s all lyric poetry, ever, I suppose. I say rude but might also say poignant or raw or frank. It has kind of James Tate + Chappell Roan vibes (?)! I can see this book alongside Sylvia Plath or Sophie Robinson’s Rabbit or John Keats or Byron or Grace Shuyi Liew’s Careen.
“Gonna say one thing just as soon as this vomiting stops…/ Went shopping today for cute shoes. !! Everybody is gross but me and my friends.” Isn’t that the truth?
Kim Yideum’s Cheer Up, Femme Fatale translated by Ji yoon Lee, Don Mee Choi, Johannes Göransson
I love excess or abundance! I can’t tell you how much I love this book (and Hysteria) because my love exceeds this page. Cheer Up, Femme Fatale is so Greek chorus! This is also one of my favorite books to teach because of how the reader’s gaze is weaponized and the intense polyvocal I. In a class on “villain-era” poetics, we read this book alongside Lucas Di Lima’s Tropical Sacrifice, Alice Notley’s Disobedience, Andrea Abi-Karam’s Villainy, and Justin Philip Reed’s The Malevolent Volume and so many other books that refuse in form, style, or subject. The multiple shifting speakers throughout Yideum’s work are violent, dazzling, and against healing (I’m thinking of the chapbook from Tilted Axis press of that title—Against Healing—that I can’t seem to find as I type this!). The reader is complacent in systems of violence against femme bodies and the voices throughout the book don’t hesitate to signal that complacency. If you need permission to refuse, to not be polite, Cheer Up, Femme Fatale allows it. The corrosive logic of commodity fetichism sure won’t! Cheer Up, Femme Fatale is kind of punk? It’s delightfully morbid and comedic. The poems utilize surprise in ways I always want more of. All the stuff in the poems transform and take on agency, nothing is contained in its initial shell. Everything molts! Molting is so glorious! These poems would make excellent hand-stitched patches (I don’t say that to be trite, I love a craft and I love the transformation from written page to worn artifact!).
This book too is in my office on campus, check it out from the library or snag a copy for yourself!
Olivia Cronk’s Skin Horse
OMG, what’s not to love? I remember Cronk’s book as one of the first Action titles I read lol but I realize I couldn’t have read them all first. I love it when a book remakes the world around it and language turns talismanic, something sacred for sure but also something to wield—is that not the most occult? This book is a mood! I’m thinking Pretty Little Liars meets an ooze spill from TMNT meets the Syfy channel’s 2009 Alice, all rolled up in gossip & crime & mutant-y/mutiny so juicy. It’s terrifying. The kaleidoscope-mirror with which Cronk reflects and refracts humanity’s failures reminds us that anger can be transformative in the apocalypse. I’m thinking now of Cronk’s more recent book, Womonster, and the way that language controls the flow of information and what happens when it meets various genre tropes. I love the theater of it all, in all the ways to read theater. It’s fun. I played a video game called Date Everything recently (recommend!). There’s a junk drawer named Jerry, and while I couldn’t get Jerry to like me, I do really love a cluttered junk drawer. It’s everything that at some moment in time you felt was precious and wanted to keep. Is there anything more tender than that? Obviously, this book is fun alongside Aase Berg’s With Deer but also Kenji C. Liu’s Monsters I Have Been or Phillip B. Williams’ Mutiny or Ariana Reines Mercury.
I can’t find my copy of Skin Horse at all—where is it? Cronk: “This is Real. This is all in. The meat hut is closed. I can touch the weep of them all.”
One more?
Valerie Hsiung’s efg
It’s the end of the day on Wednesday so I’ll just say: maximalism or bust! I love the way the poems take up space on the page. I LOVE a long line. A long line or bust! This book makes me think of Anais Duplan’s ekphrastic work (“ekphrasis as an act of devotion”). Maybe the musicality of it? Dislocated voices, spiritual and linguistic echoes, funeral pyres, strange flora and fauna, Hsiung’s book is haunted and haunts. I LOVE an underworld! Somehow, I imagine Inanna throughout all the shifting registers in the book, moving from page to page, passing proficiency checks, rolling with advantage, shapeshifting, but rather than passing-through that final door, leaving; stays. Stays, like I did, enthralled with not only the range & register of these poems, but the wild delight of the world built. I return to Notley’s Alma, of the Dead Women; to ritual and sacrifice and ritual sacrifices. Filled with all the complex ways individual and collective memory coalesce and self-examine. Filled with empowered and revelatory moments of ritual—exorcisms, exasperations, the self as so many overlapping nesting dolls. I think I remember once going to a flea market right after Sturgis, of all things, with my dead uncle. This book reminds me of the weirdness of lived experience, that packed flea market, the sound of motorcycles and wind. If I’m thinking books in company with efg, I’m thinking Cody-Rose Clevidence’s Aux ARC Trypt Ich: Poppycock and Assphodel ; Winter; A Night of Dark Trees or Notley’s Culture of One or Brenda Iijima’s Remembering Animals or Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s Hello, The Roses or Renee Gladman’s Calamities or Kapil’s Ban En Banlieue.
My copy of efg is next to my copy of You & Me Forever on the bookshelf where I mostly keep my vintage fabric & Perler beads. Let’s practice bibliomancy: “devotion to our own devotion is awful/ and for now may it be that/ consideration of our own devotion only/ human but devotion to it would/ keep us from our wild love” (21).
Leia Penina Wilson is proudly Samoan and the author of Call the Necromancer (Action Books, 2026). Other books include: This Red Metropolis What Remains (Omnidawn Press), Splinters Are Children of Wood (University of Notre Dame Press), and i built a boat with all the towels in your closet (and will let you drown) (Red Hen Press). When not reading trashy monster romance novels, she plays Magic: The Gathering. Her favorite commander is Olivia Voldaren. Her favorite ninja turtle is Donatello. Other favorites include Sailor Moon, Baldur’s Gate 3, Dragon Age, cinnamon tea, rice pudding, and crafts.