The Southern Review of Books's "Best Southern Books of April 2021"

Punk-rock feminist poems exploring motherhood, pop culture, and resistance with a spirit of defiance, abundance, and irreverent joy

Kendra DeColo reaffirms the action of mothering as heroic, brutal, and hardcore. These poems interrogate patriarchal narratives about childbirth, postpartum healing, and motherhood through the lens of pop culture and the political zeitgeist. With references ranging from Courtney Love to Lana Del Rey to Richard Burton to Nicolas Cage, I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World revitalizes the way we look at mothering: pushing its boundaries and reclaiming one's spirit of defiance, abundance, and irreverent joy.

150+ galleys will be printed in November 2020.

Galley mailing to key reviewers, media outlets, and booksellers 4-5 months prior to publication. Additional galleys will be available upon request.

Digital galleys available by request on Edelweiss+ 3-4 months prior to publication.

Advanced review copies and press materials will be sent to a targeted list of 120-150 reviewers in February 2020. Additional ARCs available by request: contact@boaeditions.org.

National advertising: Poets & Writers, American Poets, and the Academy of American Poets newsletter.

Outreach to online media and bloggers including BuzzFeed, Bustle, Book Riot, Literary Hub, etc.

Buy-ins to relevant academic conferences, trade shows, and publications. Currently considering: American Library Association Annual Meeting, CBSD Sales and Academic catalogs, BEA, etc.

Spring book announcements submitted to Publishers Weekly.

Online/social media campaign: Extensive promotion through BOA's website, blog, e-newsletter (4.6K+ subscribers), Facebook (7.2K+ followers), Twitter (10.5K+ followers), and Instagram (3.2K+ followers) accounts.

Full-page feature in in-house catalog.

E-postcards will be sent to BOA's academic contacts, reviewer contacts, bookstore contacts, and literary bloggers.

Simultaneous ebook and print publication. Ebook ISBN will be included on all press materials, author and publisher websites, and whenever print ISBN is listed.

Simultaneous audiobook release with print and ebook editions. The audiobook will be produced by John Behrens of Nashville Audio Productions. This is BOA's first audiobook title and will be promoted widely on social media and in BOA's newsletter.

About the Author
Kendra DeColo is the author of three poetry collections: I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World (BOA Editions, 2021), My Dinner with Ron Jeremy (Third Man Books, 2016), and Thieves in the Afterlife (Saturnalia Books, 2014), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2013 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. She is a recipient of a 2019 Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and has received awards and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Millay Colony, Split this Rock, and the Tennessee Arts Commission. Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Tin House, Waxwing, Los Angeles Review, Bitch Magazine, VIDA, and elsewhere. She has taught creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Vanderbilt University. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Reviews

"I have always loved Kendra DeColo's poems, so it's no surprise that I love this new book, I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From the World. But I love it so much. DeColo somehow manages to write poems that are equal parts swagger and soft, equal parts holler and prayer. Poems that are irreverent and dead serious, playful and pained, built of precise and impeccable and raucous music. Poems wonderful and strange and luminous, as is everything when you look, when you feel, as hard, and beautifully, as DeColo does."
-Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights: Essays

"The great magic of Kendra DeColo's poems has always felt, to me, like she knows something you also know, even if you don't know that you know it. Not just a movie, but a specific moment from a movie. A commercial you might not remember. Each of her poems reveals something about how one memory can become shared. Through joy, through terror, through rage. There is a generosity that flows through this book, not just in the intimate poems about giving life and then caring for a life, but also the poems that slowly, gently circle food courts, or open with off-brand granola bars. This book and these poems are a true testament to how intimacy and generosity can take as many forms as a writer needs you to see them in."
-Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Fortune for Your Disaster

"This collection of glorious, powerful, dare I say iconic poems blew through me like strong weather. I felt electric, inspired and understood. Kendra DeColo writes about the body, motherhood and desire as sites for intense transformation, and having read them, I feel transformed."
-Michelle Tea, author of Against Memoir

"I find Kendra DeColo's poems almost unbelievably good. Shockingly good. So of the moment, so funny and yet so terrifyingly, intensely beautiful. I know most wouldn't find it at all unusual to have those things at once, so my response to them is perhaps more of a statement of my own positionality. Still, in a weird world turned upside down, poems like "I Would Like to Tell the President to Eat a Dick in a Non-Homophobic Way" and "I am thinking about the movie Con Air" feed me with their humor, whimsy, and pathos."
-Kazim Ali, author of The Oasis of Now

Awards
Winner of Best Indie Lit of New England 2012 (United States) and Adacemy of American Poets Poetry Prize 2011 (United States) and Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize 2013 (United States) and Best of Nashville: Best Poetry Collection 2014 (United States) and Best of the Net 2017 (United States) and Best of Nashville: Best Poetry Collection 2016 (United States).



Book Information
ISBN 9781950774272
Author Kendra DeColo
Format Paperback
Page Count 104
Imprint BOA Editions, Limited
Publisher BOA Editions, Limited