Purchase Sweetbitter here.
Sweetbitter
Sundress Publications, January 2022
Nominated for the 2023 Eric Hoffer Award
Stacey Balkun’s debut full-length collection, Sweetbitter, is an examination of youth, gender, sexuality, and yearning at an atomic level. The collection reads like a fever dream as Balkun uncovers the radioactive darkness that hides beneath the earth’s surface and how it seeps into the lives of those who come near. The speaker takes us with them into the wilderness, wanting the world to be perceived differently, begging to be seen as more. From sapphic longing and poisoned baptisms to contaminated bodies and the gendered erosion of autonomy, Sweetbitter is the product of a restless coming-of-age story. In it, puberty is swimming in a toxic pond and recklessness is disguised as control. With Balkun’s hazy, dream-like storytelling, the speaker is a wild creature challenging the social confines of being human, being girl. Sweetbitter is a gripping, sometimes suspenseful, poetry collection that leaves you hungry for more.
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”
—Amie Whittemore, author of Glass Harvest and more
Press for Sweetbitter
—Radio Interview on WWNO 89.9 FM New Orleans with Susan Larson of The Reading Life available online here.
—Interview with Tiana Nobile for The Southern Review of Books available online here.
—Interview with Kel Mur on 1508 [a blog where poetry lives] available online here.
—Review of Sweetbitter by Ana Silva in Mom Egg Review available online here.
—Review of Sweetbitter by Jessica Kidd in Atticus Review available online here.
—Review of Sweetbitter by CT Salazar in RHINO POETRY available online here.
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
