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Phantasmagossip

Part of the limited print Vinyl 45 Chapbook Series

Distributed by YesYes Books

Cover & Interior Design: Alex Bruce

Author Photo: Morgan Wladowski

$14  |  32 pages  |  ISBN: 978-1-946303-07-3

Poetry  l  Perfectbound   |  March 18, 2025

 

Praise for Phantasmagossip

Like its title, Sara Mae’s Phantasmagossip is a delicious morsel of a chapbook, a short but propulsive read that sets me squarely in the glittering liminal spaces of carnivals and dreams. In all these lovely turns of language, in all these uncanny moments of whimsy and gravity, Sara Mae’s precise language guides me through the funhouses of desire, trauma, memory, and the lingering romance between past, present, and future. Sara Mae is a poet who powerfully embodies what it means to take words, phrases, images, and portmanteaus and make them sing. This is a gorgeous book, filled with the language that reminds us of poetry’s expansive power, not simply as something to be rhymed and recited, but as the sacred forge in which language is cast anew and made one’s own.” 

—Destiny O. Birdsong, Author of Negotiations and Nobody's Magic 

 

A tableaux vivant of spells and daisies, scuffed knees and sex, gender expansiveness and lamplight. A haunted, inventive feast of what hurts and of what is unruinable, of desires going silent and running rampant, each one outgrowing the last.” 

—Anni Liu, Author of Border Vista

 

Mostly we just desire, have little recourse as to what, where it should exist within us, and what to do about it. Sara Mae's Phantasmagossip reminds us of the uneven distribution between one's own wants and the awareness of those wants, that the past won't smoothly integrate with the present, that to stay in one place, near love and in pain, is a learned skill. These poems do the work of a higher nostalgia, not a yearning for the past but a hope for it to help you now.

—Nora Treatbaby, Author of Our Air

Phantasmagossip

SKU: 2501005
$14.00 Regular Price
$11.20Sale Price
Preorders expected to ship in mid March.
  • Phantasmagossip PreOrder is up at 20% off!

    Winner, YesYes Books Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest!

     

     

  • About the Book

    Phantasmagossip by Sara Mae is a packed funeral. The poems mourn shouting over one another to tell a story, squeezing hands of strangers and loved ones, picking at the many homemade mac n cheeses. The game of the Exquisite Corpse, usually played by many, is used here as a way into polyvocality, intimacy, and remembrance. Here, the poems infuse formal tradition with discomfort, adapt the shapes of literary and queer ancestors, speculate fleeting worlds of gender as the speaker sees theirs through and alongside best friends.  Phantasmagossip does not romanticize death, but instead grapples with the stakes of gendered violence and the simultaneous desire for pleasure, dissecting accusations of dangerousness levied against women, fems, genderqueer speakers. The speakers seek acceptance of their own queer desires, alongside the grief that being looked at and desired is not always the same as being seen. 

  • About the Author

    Sara Mae is a genderqueer writer raised on the Chesapeake Bay. They are the author of two chapbooks including Phantasmagossip, winner of the Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest and released from YesYes Books in 2025. Their first chapbook, Priestess of Tankinis, was published with Game Over Books. They are a 2023 Big Ears Music Festival Artist Scholar, a 2022 Tin House Summer Workshops alum, and a 2021 Sewanee Writer’s Conference Scholar. They write and release music as The Noisy. They received their MFA from UT Knoxville. Sara Mae is currently based in Philadelphia.

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