It’s all true. The inaugural issue of Everybody Press Review is an exhibition of the community we’ve all built together through Everybody Press.
my heartbreaking jibberjabber is a moving and wild collection of poems depicting the real and the fantastic, the romantic and the violent, the celestial and the here-on-the-ground truth. Under a new identity and voice, the poet Leo Romeo Valentino (a.k.a. Daniel Vidal Soto) innovates poetry itself with a hitherto unseen juxtaposition of poetic styles, overlaying internal rhyme and metrical patterns into what seems at first like free verse poetry. The work sometimes feels like it's written by multiple poets at once, but it's all him, and you can only tell because each time it's uniquely brilliant in the same way.
In Unicorn Wasteland, Emma Alice Johnson’s protagonist, Maria rides into the story on a unicorn, dragging behind her a wooden coffin, the contents of which are not revealed to the reader, but which she guards with her life from the terrors of the hostile world around. This novella uses genre fiction elements from low-budget Western movies, fantasy novels, and science fiction monsters to tell a story about a trans woman confronting her own identity to deliver a message to her mother that she’s waited a long time to tell.
The Craft is a book-length poem composed of short, two-line stanzas, further divided into six subtitled parts and an epilogue. The poem uses the film of the same name as material to explore themes of femininity, feminism, female friendships, fear, trauma, bullying, spell-casting, doubling, and power. It is both a shameless, nostalgic love-letter to a cultural touchstone and a meditative exploration of the “teen-witch” mentality. The poet/Sarah wonders do you like/my head?
