Sunday, May 11, 2025 3:00 PM

Location:
A Cappella Books
208 Haralson Avenue, NE
Atlanta, Georgia 30307

“A tableaux vivant of spells and daisies, scuffed knees and sex, gender expansiveness and lamplight. A haunted, inventive feast of what hurts and of what is unruinable, of desires going silent and running rampant, each one outgrowing the last.” —Anni Liu, Author of “Border Vista”

A Cappella Books is delighted to welcome poet Sara Mae for a special afternoon reading and book signing in honor of their chapbook, “Phantasmagossip.”

This event is free and open to the public; copies of the book will be available for purchase.

About the Book

"Phantasmagossip” by Sara Mae is a packed funeral. The poems mourn shouting over one another to tell a story, squeezing hands of strangers and loved ones, picking at the many homemade mac n cheeses. The game of the Exquisite Corpse, usually played by many, is used here as a way into polyvocality, intimacy, and remembrance. Here, the poems infuse formal tradition with discomfort, adapt the shapes of literary and queer ancestors, speculate fleeting worlds of gender as the speaker sees theirs through and alongside best friends. “Phantasmagossip” does not romanticize death, but instead grapples with the stakes of gendered violence and the simultaneous desire for pleasure, dissecting accusations of dangerousness levied against women, fems, genderqueer speakers. The speakers seek acceptance of their own queer desires, alongside the grief that being looked at and desired is not always the same as being seen.

About the Author

Sara Mae is a genderqueer writer raised on the Chesapeake Bay. They are the author of two chapbooks including “Phantasmagossip,” winner of the Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest and released from YesYes Books in 2025. Their first chapbook, “Priestess of Tankinis,” was published with Game Over Books. They are a 2023 Big Ears Music Festival Artist Scholar, a 2022 Tin House Summer Workshops alum, and a 2021 Sewanee Writer’s Conference Scholar. They write and release music as The Noisy. They received their MFA from UT Knoxville. Sara Mae is currently based in Philadelphia.