Lucky Charms
New & Selected Poems, 20002025
Format:Paperback
Publisher:City Lights Books
Publishing:21st May '26
£12.99
This title is due to be published on 21st May, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
One of Publishers Weekly's Most Anticipated Poetry Books for 2026
A career-spanning Southern Goth infusion into the California poetic tradition of eco-social consciousness.
"Poems moving as music, first thought the first chord, playing with trust to a notion of free improvisation, rhythm guiding the tongue to an ending fade. . . . Sunnylyn's voice is on the radio, some mystic Southern station, and it sounds beautiful."—Thurston Moore, founding member of Sonic Youth
Since her arrival in San Francisco from New Orleans via the now-legendary New College Writing and Consciousness program, Sunnylyn Thibodeaux has been an integral and idiosyncratic voice in Bay Area poetry. Lucky Charms maps her creative trajectory over a 25-year period, from fugitive zines and pamphlets through full-length volumes, and concludes with a substantial selection of new and previously uncollected poems, which, as Alice Notley has written, find her seeking out "pleasure amid personal and societal dread."
Thibodeaux writes of the cosmic and spiritual from a profoundly human perspective. There are reflections on New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina, loving snapshots of motherhood, wrestlings with mortality through cancer diagnoses, grieving over losses of friends and family, all set against the struggle to stay true to the earth and to her calling as a poet. Embodying its title, Lucky Charms offers the poem as talisman, a lyric device for capturing magic and releasing it into the world, wielded masterfully by a poetic persona that partakes of the botanist, the alchemist, the astrologist, and the witch all at once.
Praise for Sunnylyn Thibodeaux's Lucky Charms:
"Sunnylyn Thibodeaux's poems are amulets against ennui. Her lines orient me in the everyday, attuning me to small wonders. Her clairvoyance within the domestic is reminiscent of Joanne Kyger, albeit under accelerating forces working through her dual hometowns of San Francisco and New Orleans. Whether watching the sky in the early morning or recording her daughter's first sentence (spoken in awe of the moon), Thibodeaux beautifully delineates the 'magic that's second nature.'"—Evan Kennedy, author of Metamorphoses
"When I read Sunnylyn Thibodeaux, I feel like myself. For many years I've felt twinned in language and intent with her work. I see weirdness and uniqueness as priorities. I see the ways that other people talk, not the way I talk. I see baptisms and a treat after, and total honesty in prosaic and scalable terms. Her elegance, her vulnerability, her magic. I haven't been this excited about a book of poems in a very long time. Lucky indeed, you devils!"—John Coletti, author of Soft Water
"A 'selected' that gives us over 20 years of poetry by Bay Area/New Orleans poet Sunnylyn Thibodeaux, whose poetics' evolution encompasses grief, motherhood, activism, and explorations of The City/Cities, revealing a split between home and heart. The accretion of this duality of place becomes a sort of imperfected Polis. As her writing life has progressed, we witness her style evolving into echoes that escape linearity yet still hold on to narrative, that branch into the abstract, while still retaining Thibodeaux's famously strong emotivity."—Carrie Hunter, author of The Flow of the Poem's Display of Itself
ISBN: 9780872869455
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
128 pages