Sweetbitter

Sundress Publications, January 2022

Advance Praise for Sweetbitter

“Haunted landscapes and harassed bodies run and climb and swim and sing through these poems. What’s been done to this land has been done to those who live here. Secrets and lies, miscalculations and grief: such are the fruits left for the poet to reap. In Piscataway, New Jersey, according to these poems, the legacy of industrial pollution can be found in the groundwater and soil. In lines that are riddled with visual gaps, drastic line endings, and striking syntax, Stacey Balkun tells the stories of what might become of a body born of such a place. I love the formal and linguistic playfulness of these poems as much as the deadly seriousness of their content. To be human, after all, is to seek beauty and joy, to reach for love and connection, even here, on this polluted and imperiled planet. Especially here, these poems insist.”
—Camille T. Dungy, author of Trophic Cascade

“Stacey Balkun’s Sweetbitter is part bildungsroman, part eco-elegy, part myth, part fire, part ash–and completely beautiful. Though the speaker of these poems, a ‘full-grown possum girl,’ warns us she can’t rely on ‘memory / or ask my dead,’ she is our guide through this suburban landscape, poisoned by radioactivity and industrial runoff, yet flourishing with desire: the rough hunger of boys, ‘eager and aching for flame,’ and the speaker’s own search ‘to learn what sweetness was.’ This richly lyrical collection examines what it means to be queer, what it means to find one's self in alt-rock erasures, in fraying crowns of sonnets, in sapphics, partial and whole. Sweetbitter's poems are haunting and haunted, ripe for the plucking, glowing apples we aren’t made to resist. –Amie Whittemore, author of Glass Harvest”
—Amy Whittemore, author of Glass Harvest and more.

Poems from Sweetbitter Available Online

“Eulogy Ending in Red” in Talking Writing
“In the Forest” & “The Water, The Truth, The Water” at Terrain.org
“Lure at Bear Review
“No Books Would Tell Us Our Stories” in Zocalo Public Square
“Possum Sapphic” in Menacing Hedge
“Two Girls on Fire” in Iron Horse Literary Review Photo Finish Anthology
“We Could Go Alone as Long as We Were Home Before Dark” & “It Was Halloween or a Summer Day” in District Lit
“Wilderness” in Human/Kind

Jackalope-Girl Learns to Speak

dancing girl press, May 2016
Purchase here.

Praise for Jackalope-Girl

"Magical, gut-punching, familial myth braided with a powerful assertion of the self. Jackalope-Girl Learns to Speak is domestic fabulism, a branch of magical realism, at its sharpest--weaving together the heart-strings in gorgeously tight lyrics of a birthmother & the daughter she placed for adoption. The fairy tale structure asks readers to re-evaluate, to examine deeply, whatever we think we understand about family ties. Balkun's poems captivate completely."
—Jennifer Givhan

"the real wonder of the collection is the extended metaphor Balkun builds, simultaneously, about alienation, adoption, and those who feel like transplants in their own families. Highly recommended! "
—Mary McMyne

"Wow! I loved reading this. You can tell Stacey knows what she's doing, and Dancing Girl Press really got extremely lucky with this chapbook. And just because I feel like it, I'm going to do a list of reasons why."
—Tiegan Dakin, Heart, What Art Are You?

Poems from Jackalope-Girl Learns to Speak

"Tower of Babel" at Scissors & Spackle
"We Begin This Way" at Gingerbread House

Fiolet & Wing: An Anthology of Domestic Fabulist Poetry

Liminal Books, July 2019
Ed. Stacey Balkun & Catherine Moore.

“Every page of Fiolet and Wing brings some new magic: birds and blooms, fairy tales and fabulism, the border between the domestic and the wilderness, the dream and nightmare of womanhood, the home as prison and liberator. I love these fierce, vibrant, luscious poems.”
—Carmen Machado, award-winning author of Her Body & Other Parties & Guggenheim Fellow

This extraordinary collection brings together poets writing in the fabulist tradition: fable, myth, fairytale, or magic. Both an introduction to and a survey of the ways women poets reclaim the domestic sphere and define a genre, poets representing all regions of the continental U.S. and abroad spanning four continents find home here. Available in print and e-editions here.

Lost City Museum

e-edition, Bull City Press, Spring 2019

Praise for Lost City Museum

"Layered and nuanced, the poems of Lost City Museum submerge us in worlds fashioned out of our world.  We find ourselves in sea or fog, in petrified lava, in glass, in night, in an organ’s pipes of bones.  And always, always, we are submerged in language that rouses and compels.  These are deeply inhabited landscapes, precise and perceptive.  It’s such a pleasure to lose oneself in Lost City Museum that one might wish never to be found."
—Beth Ann Fennelly

"Stacey Balkun writes insatiably curious and fearless poems, like a deep-sea diver or oceanographer showing us a new world. Lost City Museum excavates underwater cities, the ocean floor, a father’s death, a marriage, and the body with boundless talent and an ocean-sized heart. Balkun crafts poems like underwater treasures brought to the surface, like museum artifacts housed in glass. “This is how to swim and still feel holy,” she instructs, and we do. You’ll feel new. The ambitious discoveries in these poems are a pure delight."
—Lee Herrick

"Stacey Balkun’s Lost City Museum navigates the depths of grief while simultaneously singing everywhere shining new love. This poet’s power is her precision—of language, of image, of the heart’s buried maps. These are poems that rise like 'prayer // turned-paper-boat cast out into the ocean.' They support 'a jetty built from an old graveyard, invented land // jutted like jawbone.' Balkun is a cartographer building her own Atlantis, and we are lucky to enter her world: for admission she’ll only charge 'a handful of pennies / and a promise to dive / after them.'"
—Jennifer Givhan

Poems from Lost City Museum

"Rift" at Tinderbox Poetry Journal
"Notes for the Church Poem" & "The Name of My Old City" at District Lit
"The City in the Distance" at Thrush Poetry Journal
"Redbird Reef" at Wherewithal

Reviews & Interviews

Review of Lost City Museum by Engram Wilkinson for RM220, December 2016