Search

In Sirs & Madams, Joanna C Valente shows us that she is an adroit navigator of the human condition and knows the nooks and crannies of heartmeats and the grey and fluid nature of brainmeats. Let her take your hand. You'll be all the better for it. -Sean Doyle, author of This Must Be the Place Death and the promise of death. What more could you want in a poetry collection? Life? Why yes, that's in here too. It's swimming through every word ripping out our hearts and putting something else there that beats just as nice. I like that. Joanna Valente's first collection, Sirs & Madams, is filled with that. I often find it difficult weaving narrative and poem, but Valente does it with spectacular results. These poems echo a John Berryman "Dreamsong" mashed with Maggie Nelson's "Jane: A Murder Mystery." In other words, yes. "She says she loves men who are dead, they are the men who love the most," "Five paragraphs, one tank gasoline, loneliness greater than the sum of your parts," and "You tell her she should become a silent film star, that her eyes are singing" are just some of the dynamic lines in this book. It's in your hands, don't miss out on the promise of reading it. -Thomas Fucaloro, author of It Starts from the Belly and Blooms and Mistakes Disguised as Stars Valente's SIRS & MADAMS is rendered with stylistic and syntactical panache and courage. It is moving, mournful and musical. It is beautiful and bereft. Valente is a great writing talent who awaits wider recognition. -Seamus Scanlon, author of As Close As You'll Ever Be In Sirs & Madams, tones of birth and death compel deftly-drawn characters whose "veins are everywhere." On the surface, a tight form takes hold: Valente has real command over her structure and voice. But underneath, the nuance blooms; the poems are at once gritty, feminine, natural and morose. This book needs to tell its story and you need to listen. One gets the feeling that reading this book will set someone free. Who is it? You decide. -Lisa Marie Basile, author of APOCRYPHAL

Poetry. "She is not dead, but sleeping, Jesus says in the Gospel of Luke; like the sick girl of that verse, the speakers of Joanna Valente's sharp and urgent MARYS OF THE SEA toss and turn through a series of feverish nightmares that refract lived experiences into prophetic and wild new imaginings. Preoccupied with the consequences of mothering and not-mothering, these fifty-three poems trenchantly interrogate sexual violence and its aftermath, lingering at the site of trauma as though hanging onto the lip of an abyss. Writing becomes power, structure an act of bravery. Like an ancient civilization's first creation myths, these poems utter light out of darkness as they order a world into being."—Monica Ferrell

#SURVIVOR explores what it means to be a survivor, particularly survivors of sexual and domestic trauma, gender trauma, but really, inequalities in any form. I am also exploring what it means for a place and landscape to inhabit trauma just as bodies do, and what trauma does to the earth.

Sexting Ghosts is a collection of poems by Joanna C. Valente. 'In Sexting Ghosts, Joanna Valente invites us to join them in their haunted psychiatrist's chair for a cinematic Q&A with the ghosts and gods of the future past. These poems together form an epic flush with oblique strategies for survival. Valente's arguments sear then soften, become inquiries, persistent efforts to either understand or to cut ties with what time has shed. Ghosts and humans alike know the exhausting experience of being a human trapped in a body. Ghosts, too, are jailed in their forms.' - Jasmine Dreame Wagner, author of On a Clear Day and Rings

In Sexting Ghosts, Joanna Valente invites us to join them in their haunted psychiatrist's chair for a cinematic Q&A with the ghosts and gods of the future past. These poems together form an epic flush with oblique strategies for survival. Valente's arguments sear then soften, become inquiries, persistent efforts to either understand or to cut ties with what time has shed. Ghosts and humans alike know the exhausting experience of being a human trapped in a body.

..".these 53 poems trenchantly interrogate sexual violence and its aftermath, lingering at the site of trauma as though hanging onto the lip of an abyss. Writing becomes power, structure an act of bravery. Like an ancient civilization's first creation myths, these poems utter light out of darkness as they order a world into being." -Monica Ferrell

Praise for The Gods Are Dead by Joanna Valente: "As interest in the tarot resurges, we're reminded that its significance has stood the test of time. The Gods Are Dead is an exquisite work that breathes a contemporary light into these symbols that have been reimagined for centuries. A must-read for those interested in the occult and the arts." -Dallas Athent, author of Bushwick Nightz "These are poems of ritual and sacrifice, where ethereal meaning gets rightfully dismembered and earthy truths read. The Gods Are Dead invokes the rich symbolism of Tarot with lyrical precision, and lends a creative myth to consciousness. Joanna C. Valente writes with the kind of raw energy we all wish we could channel into life." -Lucas Hunt, author of Lives and Light on the Concrete "Joanna C. Valente's The Gods Are Dead positions anyone who opens it as both reader and journey-making querent. Those who immerse themselves in Valente's words will find a mashup of the sacred and profane, filled with longing and fear, that manages to injure as well as delight. The revered, archetypal symbols and personalities of the Tarot's Major Arcana are subverted into recognizable, conflicted characters and narratives: the unfathomable gods may be dead, but in Valente's hands these distressed identities and their stories live on." - Fox Frazier-Foley, author of Exodus in X Minor and The Hydromantic Histories

A Love Story inspects the bleakest corners of the heart, unwinding our concept of identity and being through a strange, unknown universe that we often grapple to understand and make sense of. These poems are a symphony within an unopened box. Do we choose to open it and find what's inside? Are we brave enough to go deeper to find what we ourselves contain?

An anthology of all the surreal, shadowy, sensual, and satirical lit included in FLAPPERHOUSE issues #5 - 8. Including poetry & prose about surveillance, survival, magic, many-worlds, meta-fiction, blood, braille, booze, beauty, birth, rebirth, summertime torture, feminist fairy tales, wayward placentas, fugitive robots, Hot Pockets, fashion wars, flying women, dangerous art, temporal decay, sentient playgrounds, swampy Southern Gothic, Wendigos, witches, demons, insects, P.J. Harvey, purity, parenthood, patahistorians, paraphernalia, purgatory, phosphorescent skywriting, and more.

Wendigos. Witches. Demons. Insects. P.J. Harvey. Purity. Parenthood. Patahistorians. Paraphernalia. Purgatory. Progress? Phosphorescent Skywriting: FLAPPERHOUSE #8.