OUT NOW from The Elephants Press!

Detonated Mirror is a collection of poetry and poetic prose, situated in the otherworldly desert landscape of the Southwest: a place at once feral, magical, elemental and vast, yet at the same time ubiquitously enclosed by brutal barbed wire fence. Larsen's collection is a place of aliens, the atom bomb, scorching sunlight and rough, bony terrain: a place where conspiracies, warfare, and the story of humans, animals and the earth collide in extraordinary ways. The poems explore in a visionary context the explosive and prismatic slippages on the perceived borders of self, lover, land, animal, and consciousness. Sparse, rhythmic pieces share space with prose poems that explore the narrator’s “secret body”. These, in turn, share space with horrific, disorderly, anarchistic poems that buck at the underside of lyricism and playfulness with unhinged rage and obsessions with the grotesque aspects of the body, and of its sex and sexuality. These twisting, roving poems are grounded in paradox and sublimity, and in the often magical, ultra-sensory encounters between bodies, beings, and landscape.

*Print or Ebook available at The Elephants website. Click below!

"To read THE RIOT GRRRL THING is to participate in what is, and can only be, the Riot Grrrl Thing—a condition of vivacious unlimiting. The brilliant Sara Larsen knows that thing firsthand; I can only know it imaginatively, linguistically, and in awed recognition of its exuberant, and it would seem ancient, power. Sappho did the Riot Grrrl Thing, and she was not the first, nor will Kathleen Hanna or Janis Joplin or Kathy Acker be the last. Every bad-assed magnificent spirit refusing to serve as amusement or servant does the Riot Grrrl Thing as she rambunctiously plies incessant skepticism and supplies wild altruism. Larsen's book is pissed off, playful, excessive, erudite, and free. Read it and feel the whole of it."—Lyn Hejinian

In MERRY HELL, Helen of Troy exposes the "misogynist spell" of the traditional (patriarchal) narrative that condemns her for the horrors of the Trojan War and insists "LET ME TELL YOU ALL THE TRUTH OF WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO ME".As it happened, Helen is neither abducted by nor runs off in love with Paris, but rejects Empire and leaves Sparta of her own volition. Helen's story, a heroine's journey, is interwoven with circumstances surrounding the Pétroleuse, or women incendiaries, of the 1871 Paris Commune as well as those of Occupy Oakland.

“This book begins and ends with an inventory of contemporary horrors: Abu Ghraib, Chelsea Manning, iPhones, iPads, iPods. In between these inventories is a celebration that another sort of life is possible. This life, the life that might be called revolution is polysexual, multivalent, decadent too. It names the heroes of this resistance: di Prima, Rimbaud, Wojnarowicz. And it calls them fabulous.”— Juliana Spahr

“Sara Larsen’s Starved Crew is a knot formed by churning, a ceaseless vortex that speaks in tongues. Each of Starved Crew’s brief and riveting poems begins and ends with an italicized line, suggesting interruption and circularity. Picked through with exquisite imagery, “cornered fur, spots of budded blood,” and voluptuous with narrative…” - from the Eyelet Press website

Nioques issue 22-23 is published in Paris and features new poets from the United States. This is a double and bilingual issue, coordinated by the Double Change collective. Some of my work from “The Riot Grrrl Thing” is included, in both English and French translation (translator: Olivier Brossard)

The title of this anthology is taken from a poem of mine from “The Riot Grrrl Thing”! I’m proud to have a piece about how punk influenced my relationship to poetry and aesthetics.

“In this a collection of essays, poems and visual mediums touching on the intersection of punk culture in the lives of poets. Edited by Jamie Townsend and Grant Kerber, the volume contains contributions from a collection of poets spanning generations, identities, ethnicities and backgrounds. Highlighting formative moments as well as the culture's shortcomings, this well-rounded collection takes a critical look at how deeply counter-culture can infiltrate our lives and the effects that brings about.
Jet-Tone Press will donate 100% of the proceeds from this book to West Oakland Punks With Lunch. Punks with Lunch is a guerilla not-for-profit harm reduction outreach organization providing food and other necessities to people experiencing homelessness.” -from the SPD website

A fantastic anthology capturing the spirit of experimental writing in the Bay Area, published in 2014. Featuring some of my work from this era, and an incredible array of writers who were on the scene and interacting and engaging with each other’s work at this time.

“What gathers in the pages of IT'S NIGHT IN SAN FRANCISCO BUT IT'S SUNNY IN OAKLAND is a snapshot of a poetic moment. This book is a candid flash of the ever-evolving politics, relationships, and forms that make up this particular experience of poetry, right now, in Oakland. “ - from description on SPD website