Books published by Sibling Rivalry Press, LLC

In these lush, finely wrought poems, Jim Kangas reaches back into childhood and forward to death, to show us how desire, unquenched and unquenchable, becomes the axis of our lives. Here, we are exalted and crushed by beauty--what is always lost to us and always "sprout[ing] up... perennial as wild carrot." - Benjamin S. Grossberg

Inclined to Riot, KMA Sullivan's second poetry collection, calls out and pushes against historical and interpersonal expectations which seek to contain, silence, erase the substance of a woman as anything other than mother, daughter, compliant lover. "I am cat-licked / wondering when durer's lions will consume me / or perhaps inkless today / you press in / I am embossed / your anonymous mother / your 17th century prostitute." This rejection of imposed identity and circumscribed possibility is offered in lyric, fluid, sensual images as the poet walks through art galleries across the United States and Europe responding to classical and contemporary art which attempt to tell her who she is. She does not relent: "even in fragments / mouth open, nostrils flared / I am nomad, moon goddess, carbon smear / if wings sprouted from my face / I would not fly back." Instead, she emerges inclined to riot.

"As down to earth as a donut and funnier than should be allowed- Lovers of the Deep-Fried Circle is equal parts chapbook, hug from your most supportive friend, and brunch with your favorite new Latinx poet. Baruch Porras-Hernandez is a shining light in a grim world." - Maggie Tokuda-Hall

"Baruch Porras-Hernandez, long-time luminary of the Bay Area literary and performance worlds, offers up an urgent and searing inaugural collection. The work in I Miss You, Delicate sizzles and coddles and thots and grieves its way toward Bethlehem. With deft attention to voice and narrative, to the body and its shortcomings, to geography and history, this panoply of voices from past and present is not to be missed." - sam sax

Karl Tierney was born in Westfield, Massachusetts, in 1956 and grew up in Connecticut and Louisiana. He became an Eagle Scout in 1973. Poetry fascinated him, even as a teenager. He received a Bachelor’s Degree in English from Emory University in 1980 and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas in 1983. That same year, he moved to San Francisco, where he dedicated himself to poetry. He was twice a finalist for the Walt Whitman Award, a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and a 1992 fellow at Yaddo. Though unpublished in book form during his lifetime, his poems appeared in many of the best literary magazines of the period, including the Berkeley Poetry Review, American Poetry Review, and Exquisite Corpse. He published more than 50 poems in magazines and anthologies before his death. In December of 1994 he became sick with AIDS and took his own life in October of 1995 by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge. He was 39 years old.The book that Karl Tierney didn't live to see has now been published nearly a quarter century after his tragic death. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? is a witty, biting, well-crafted time machine to another era and a reminder of the talent and promise of a generation of artists taken from us too soon by HIV/AIDS. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? is the second title in the Arkansas Queer Poet Series as published by Sibling Rivalry Press. ---“I met Karl Tierney in the 80s, when we were both in Bob Gluck’s legendary gay men’s workshop held in the back room of Small Press Traffic, in San Francisco’s Noe Valley. That workshop, like most back rooms, made for instant intimacy. Have You Seen This Man?, skillfully edited and introduced by Jim Cory, shows us the full range of Karl’s talents. Despite its mordant provenance this is a fun book, radiant with emotive power.” -  KEVIN KILLIAN-----"Reading Karl Tierney’s collection is like entering a portal into San Francisco in the 80s and 90s, a time when it was still dirty and sexy and alive, even as men across the city were dying. With sharp intimacy, Tierney’s  poems had me laughing and crying in recognition for all that we lost. And I'm deeply grateful to the editor and publisher for rescuing his work from the dustbins of history. This is vital reading." - ALYSIA ABBOTT 

In poems at once dazzling and trussed to quietude, Martin Jude Farawell's Odd Boy traverses a fretwork of silence and sonority. From the solemn pews of a Catholic childhood, the improvised dance floor at his wedding, and the mossy underbelly of late and early spring times, Farawell explores what it means to learn and unlearn his constellation of selves: boy, son, brother, husband, human, believer in the beauty of the smallest hour. Whether imagining the creation of the original family through the Biblical canon or recounting the violence of his own, Odd Boy is an atlas for the pursuit of a fierce gentleness. Farawell's poems pursue desire and its specter in landscapes large and small, perennially unafraid of their own song, unafraid to take us to the heart of it: "But now, / it is the very autumn / of autumn. / What was it? / What I wanted?"

"How does a sentence, // just like that, become prayer?" Part parable, part bestiary, part glossary of possible and impossible loves, Star Map with Action Figures, poem after poem, provides an answer. From the space between punishment and its promise, Phillips quizzes the thousand churlish faces of desire: two boys making love on a riverbank, a horse named Nightmare, the self "a needle pushed through / the stretched canvas of belief." Star Map with Action Figures counters the body's certainty with febrile syntax, challenging the mirror's ability to capture and the lover's willingness to stay. From the "forest that stands at the exact center of sorrow" to the cathedral in the speaker's mind, Star Map with Action Figures charts the severe and glittering histories of intimacy in flux. A king, a willow, a captain, the sea-all themselves, more, less, unsayable and not-become kinds of heroes, shattering the myth of "a limit to what any story could hold onto."

Fire-its light and passion, is an apt metaphor for these rich, compelling, and deeply felt poems. It takes its form in many ways in these resonant, powerful, and completely riveting calls for justice, kindness, and attention to those parts of ourselves that illumine the dark we live in today. These are poems that activate every page, with guttural imagery and sure craft of the form. Whether limning the course of a deep love, providing a safe space to children learning poetry for the first time, shouting the proud acknowledgment of the body, or examining the ruins of terror's aftermath, Kai Coggin proposes-no, urges-that we use that inherent fire within us, to grow not only our own lives, but to illumine and help the lives of others. These are poems of protest and praise, poems of a unique and adamant voice, who shows us what we can hope for, as well as what we can truly achieve in loving one another." - Philip F. Clark, author of The Carnival of Affection

Zachary Ozma's Black Dog Drinking from an Outdoor Pool creates its own shifting, slippery, sticky language to grapple with family history, embodiment, and trauma. Black Dog is for everyone who grapples with being thrust into a story not of their own creation and trying to make something transformative from its broken parts. - Lauren Levin

"Savannah Sipple's debut is proof of a woman rising-up from the strung-out, Christ-haunted carcinogens and violences of a land stripped of its coal; up fromnine-hours on her feet followed by the extra work back home of picking gravel out of pinto beans; up from a return visit to the honey-suckle sweetness of goodchurch folks who whisper 'backslider' and 'quare.' Purging shame with every line, these poems love the Kentucky from which they rise as much as they reject theself-hatred that place instilled in a girl neither thin nor straight, and ultimately (and yes, even miraculously), emerge blatant about desire and body-proud. 'I want tobe marbled, so that if you were to slice me, you'd know what a good cut I am,' Sipple writes. Open this book to any poem to get a taste of exactly what she means."- Nickole Brown, author of Sister & Fanny Says

"In the lush and dream-like world of Jesse Rice-Evan's The Uninhabitable, the conventional narrative of the body gives way to a more porous landscape where pain becomes a stream, fur, fang, mammal, blossom, anemone and sting..." - from Muriel Leung's cover blurb

In her second poetry collection Anyone Will Tell You, Wendy Chin-Tanner explores and subverts form as an expression of the relationships between gender and identity, parent and child, self and other, humanity and the environment, and Earth and the cosmos. Distillation, fluidity, elision, and musicality are all hallmarks of this collection, which relies on the rhythm of the English language to expand the possibilities of meaning from line to line. Investigating the experience of the maternal body and its interaction with technology, Anyone Will Tell You embodies the second wave feminist edict that the personal is political.

"Robert Siek's Manhattan is a city in distress, one that resembles, at times, a zombie apocalypse: 'a herd / of walking dead crowding you, / mouths open and moaning, two step on your toes.' 'Does anyone ever get used to this?' he asks. Siek loads his poems with the nightmarish grittiness of urban life. His lines expand, stretch to the limit, until it feels like they're going to split at the seams and it's all going to spill out, a blood-and-guts mess. So full are these poems of 'everything / on the menu.' And full also of Siek's unique powers of observation, his hallucinatory free association, his twisted wit, and his refreshingly subversive sensibility."-David Trinidad"Robert Siek's poetry is murderously funny, utterly unexpected, twisted and Baudelaireishly, simultaneously, grotesque and gorgeous. Most urgently, with this uncanny new collection, Siek has opened a new space for and within queer discourse that transcends received polemics and too-familiar auto-cosmogonies. He does so by telling-beautifully, artfully-stories: monstrously observant stories about love and family, about sex and memory. And, most notably, he tells us, like and uniquely unlike Frank (and Neely for that matter) O'Hara, about the enormity of the everyday. The poet recounts stories not on message but messaging what it is to be absolutely alive in a filthy, sublime city: in New York, the legendary site of his brilliant sorcery."-Lynn Crosbie

Revelations is a captivating collection of poetry and literary translations about faith, doubt, and chaos. Ruben Quesada's poems are simultaneously wondrous and contemplative, witnessing trauma of both public and private lives that have been made and unmade at the hands of the Information Age.

"From the first, devastating poem ("i touch myself & do not leak gold"), George Abraham's poems bristle with alchemy, a narrative of love, history, family, and Palestine that pulses with longing. Juxtaposed with Leila Abdelrazaq's startlingly evocative artwork, this book is a fearless, riveting excavation of self and other." - Hala Alyan

"In Midnight in a Perfect World, Collin Kelley navigates the moody landscapes of desire, travels the dark edge of Eros in the 21st century of love, charting his passage in language sometimes brutal, sometimes lyrical, often both at once. And if that perfect world all lovers seek remains elusive, here we break the boundaries of the familiar and arrive in a place where we can breathe the twilight air and step, almost, into the dream of it, ourselves." - Cecilia Woloch, author of Tsigan"Collin Kelley is a master craftsman, reliable and unrelenting with language of emotional precision. Midnight in a Perfect World versifies life, love, and loss on two continents. This is a collection of deft, intimate stories worthy of being reread and reexamined often." - Steven Reigns, author of Inheritance"Midnight in a Perfect World is an excellently observed and written collection, taking you deeper and deeper into a world which you may never have encountered so closely or so intimately. It is an achingly emotional collection, filled with love, disappointment, betrayal, loss, and lack of and yearning for love. It does more than tear at your heart-strings … it plucks them out altogether." - Agnes Meadows, author of This One Is For You