Okay Cool No Smoking Love Pony

Annik Babinsk'si debut poetry collection is a tour-de-force, celebrating the unconventional through home videos, selfies, long distance travel in beat-up cars, the "wild & poor." From O'Hara-esque meditations to tightly controlled lyric lines, Okay Cool No Smoking Love Pony whoops it up in poetry land, palpable energy in every turn of phrase. When her postmodern "I" intrudes to ask, "How can I write this? / Do I have no reverence?" we readers answer, "Oh, Annik We have no idea, but we are so glad you wrote this book "

--Denise Duhamel, author of Blowout and Kaching

Okay Cool No Smoking Love Pony is a travelogue of open roads and wilderness, the loneliness of rural backwaters and the squalid company of the metropolis, the heartbreak of the actual and the terror of the imagined--poetry as wide as America the place and America the emotion. Revolting against her injustices, her loves, and her traumas, which bind her as implacably as Persephone's pomegranate seeds to the hollowness of the remembered, Adey-Babinski forges onward, writing her escape, her after-story, and ultimately her transcendence along currents of the fantastic and surreal. This book is an odyssey of hope and becoming, an argument for inhabiting and succumbing to the cambium of magic that can be found just beneath our collective mundane.

--Chloe Garcia Roberts, author of The Reveal and translator of Li Shangyin's Derangements of My Contemporaries: Miscellaneous Notes