I’m so grateful to Mary Meriam of Headmistress Press for this extraordinary design. The art is a photograph, taken by Carole Raddato, of a detail from a first-century fresco at Pompeii, which is currently held by the Naples Archaeological Museum.

Blurbs ahead:

Tartly epigrammatic, scintillatingly hyperliterate, these poems of Laforguian black wit play knowingly with the idea of constraint, disciplined in the sexiest sense of that word. Pious has an intuitive awareness of that inflection point where audacity tilts over into true authority, and her voice-rich poems speak to their times —and to all times—with an authority that cannot be denied.

—Jenna Lê

“I am the spark,” writes Samantha Pious, “that leaps and catches musty drapes.” And she may do some damage, but that damage is done well, the flames themselves are fresh and erudite, and the landscape where they pass is freed for the abundant seeds she scatters in their wake.

—R. Nemo Hill

Moving from Shakespeare to Foucault to felines, Pious’s work is a biting, precise reclamation of history, academia, and the wider world we live in. Witty, resonant, and erudite, this is a collection about grief, literature, and embodiment that stays in the memory and keeps rewarding on every following read.

—Sarah Caulfield

Sappho Is Dead will be available very soon through the Headmistress Store and Amazon.