Librería Samer Atenea
Kálamo Books
Librería Elías (Asturias)
Librería Kolima (Madrid)
Librería Proteo (Málaga)
Spend Saturday mornings with queer, disabled poet and antiwar veteran Karol Olesiak - cartoon logic is the antidote for brain rot.Saturday Morning Crusades serves up the comfort food sugar-rush of Saturday-morning cartoons and cereal-box mythology for the ancestors - war, disability, illness, and the straining body - finding the uncanny valley where innocence and corruption engage in combat. Olesiak’s own refugee experience crescendos through the post-9/11 GI Bill into co-founding an antiwar affinity group born out of Occupy Wall Street - these poems document that journey.The collection’s subtext holds an anti-imperialist sentiment. 'veterans crisis line' and 'blind collateral' linger in the aftermath of combat and the isolating language of a crisis hotline. 'aegis disavowing home' shows suspended limbs and a fight-or-flight body caught in refrains of 'trauma response,' while 'carrington event' witnesses the dissolution of the nuclear family under apocalyptic hysteria.Themes of disability and the body in crisis are explored with the same scholarship and discipline. 'the great alexander guillain-barre' channels the paralysis of Guillain-Barré syndrome through the voice of a dying Alexander of Macedonia, and 'I didn’t know that mosquitos grew so old' unspools coded anaphora coursing with current events - parading the sacred through the profane and staging a mystical crip play.Religious and mythological imagery threads like a spider’s house: 'leviathan' retells Jonah, Isaac, and the Tower of Babel from inside the belly of the whale, where we find ourselves in modern times questioning the utility of gender; 'aegis disavowing home' invokes Samuel wrestling God and the weaponization of Medusa’s head as an artifact of Greek misogyny; 'the great alexander guillain-barre' turns Alexander’s death into a meditation on demagoguery and superfluous egotism.Olesiak’s Bay Area is its own character - 'wait for the bay' surveys hyphy-era dance culture, gentrification, and migration history in a single breath - and the leviathan voice beneath it all lurks linguistically jolly even at its most resolute: idioms from five languages reassembled into haiku, emoji-laced wordplay, muppets and syndicated stand-up comedians making survival-nostalgia cameos in dada affirmation.'saturday morning crusades' first appeared in Brainrot Anthology from Fifth Wheel Press; 'online dating in a fixed system' first appeared in Soul Forte Journal; 'blind collateral' first appeared in Laurel Review: Proud to Be.For readers of contemporary and experimental poetry who want war, disability, queerness, and faith handled with dark humor and formal risk rather than solemnity.Please note: this collection includes references to PTSD, suicidal ideation, and crisis hotlines.
