Croak

Sampirisi has quickly become known to American poets and poetry readers through her work with BookThug and the Toronto New School of Writing. Among others, she has brought to Toronto influential American poets like Anselm Berrigan, Vanessa Place, Charles Bernstein, Cara Benson and Alice Notley. She is known in the American poetry community as both an amazing facilitator and interesting poet in her own right. Sampirisi was shortlisted for the 2011 K.M. Hunter Artist Award for Literature. Sampirisi recorded 25 minutes of Croak for PENN Sound last month, and it will soon appear on their website. We'll send Sampirisi to New York and Philadelphia for reading events. She has connections to the Belladonna group and Poetry Project in New York, as well as Kelly Writers' House in Philadelphia.

It ain't easy being green: Croak is a poetic negotiation between a species in crisis and its many cultural markers.Croak is a frog-and-girl opera in three parts, played out like a YouTube mashup of mid-century cartoons set to a contemporary pop song. It parades, mutilates, and reacquaints Kermit the Frog with Girl 00010111, Michigan J with Aristophanes, and biblical plagues with caged canaries in a vaudevillian play of time, culture, gender, and narrative. Combining vivisection and classical literature, empirical observation and philosophical speculation, Jenny Sampririsi's grotesque characters splash and sparkle before moving toward their inevitable narrative end. 'As invigorating and idiosyncratic a collection as this reviewer has encountered in some time. A must-read.' -- Seth Abramson, Huffington Post