Swarm Queen's Crown
2016
First Published
4.88
Average Rating
95
Number of Pages
n Swarm Queen’s Crown, Adams-Santos—author of the shortbooks Total Memory (Finishing Line, 2016), Little Fugues (Sola Books, 2011), and The Sundering, which won a chapbook fellowship from the Poetry Society of American in 2009—deals majorly with self’s inherent Otherness. We are spun, Adams-Santos says, ‘in the veiled gore / of becoming.’ This ‘becoming’ seeks to know the creaturely, the animal; and to examine the loss and estrangement of being human alongside our abiding capacity to love. The poems wield a sacerdotal power that thwarts simple rational approach; Swarm Queen’s Crown is the longbook debut of a contemporary mystic. The volume features a cover image by British artist Darren Hopes, whose periodical credits include The Telegraph, New Scientist, Killzone, and the Washington Post; Hopes’ other clients include Houghtin Mifflin, The Folio Society, and Penguin. Joanna Klink calls Adams-Santos ‘heir to Roethke.’ She ‘There is a distinct, composed wildness to her voice . . . one famished and unafraid.’ Stephanie Adams-Santos is a Guatemalan-American poet and divination artist educated at Columbia University and Stanford. Among her magazine credits are Boston Review, Guernica, Gramma, The Bacon Review, and Orion.
Avg Rating
4.88
Number of Ratings
8
5 STARS
88%
4 STARS
13%
3 STARS
0%
2 STARS
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1 STARS
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goodreads
Author
Stephanie Adams-Santos
Author · 3 books
Stephanie Adams-Santos is a Guatemalan-American writer whose work spans poetry, prose, screenwriting, and other swampy, hybrid forms. Her work is rooted in the crossroads of ritual, ancestry, and environment—with a penchant for the queer and uncanny. Stephanie's poetry books and chapbooks include Dream of Xibalba (forthcoming—winner of the 2021 Orison Prize); Swarm Queen's Crown (a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards); Total Memory; and The Sundering (winner of a New York Chapbook Fellowship from Poetry Society of America). Her short story "Night Flowers" lives in the latinx anthology Speculative Fiction for Dreamers. In the realm of television, Stephanie has written multiple episodes over several seasons of Two Sentence Horror Stories (CW/Netflix), a series featuring short tales of horror and haunting. Her work has been generously supported by fellowships and grants from Oregon Literary Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Regional Arts and Culture Council, Oregon Arts Commission, and Film Independent—where Stephanie was a 2018 Episodic Lab Fellow and 2019 Project Involve Screenwriting Fellow, as well as recipient of a 2019 Chaz Ebert Fellowship. In addition to her literary work, Stephanie is a professional Tarot reader and occasional instructor of poetry and divination, and tends to an occasional tiny, personal press called Ojo de la Selva.
