SWARM QUEEN'S CROWN

Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award

As with her award-winning shortbook A Sundering, the poems in Stephanie Adams-Santos’ Swarm Queen’s Crown wield a sacerdotal power that thwarts simple rational approach. Line by line, the speakers navigate Being’s beauty and deep perplexity—‘the veiled / gore of becoming.’ Line by line the mystery of the Crown builds. Here is the longbook debut of a contemporary mystic.

Fathom Books
7in x 8in
95 pages, hand-bound (perfect)
Publication date: November 6, 2016


PRAISE FOR SWARM QUEEN'S CROWN

"Stephanie Adams-Santos’ collection of finely-wrought, barbed, numinous lyric poems weaves from “a few warbled jags of wind” a laurel for all searchers enthralled and menaced by the beauty of a world “full of strange experience.” These are poems composed “in the tight sling of the chrysalid,” “belted to the bolt of being,” where every word sounds “lassoed to a bell.” Adams-Santos pitches her poems between chrysalis and swarm, self and world, I and thou, aware “of the secret lathe / now turning in the pulp / of our living...Swarm Queen’s Crown presents for our inspection real gardens with imaginary toads in them, the voluptuous gasp at the center of a thorny prayer."
—Dante DiStefano, Best American Poetry Blog