“Graffitied Heart is the 2024 Conversation Chapbook by Ellen Bass & Kendra DeColo, newly published in February, 2024.
Graffitied Heart, by Ellen Bass and Kendra DeColo includes searing, sensuous, serious and hilarious poems in conversation—plus a conversation—about how fully embodied lives mark the heart in no-holds-barred lines.” - Editors of Slapering Hol Press
“Low Budget Movie has all the heart and character of an indie with the glitz, glitter, and feathers of a blockbuster. Through urgent directives and flexible stanzas, Mills and DeColo bankroll the pleasures and dangers of cultural desires for luxury items, for bodies, for possession above all things. Beneath the theater of American life—beyond the shimmer of the Big Screen and the smear of eggshell paint—lies a culture of violence. These poems turn our attention toward it, with sparkling, precise language and an emotional honesty that brings the heart to the throat.”
— Traci Brimhall, author of Come the Slumberless To the Land of Nod & Brynn Saito, author of Power Made Us Swoon & collaborative authors of Bright Power, Dark Peace
"I have always loved Kendra DeColo's poems, so it's no surprise that I love this new book, I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From the World. But I love it so much. DeColo somehow manages to write poems that are equal parts swagger and soft, equal parts holler and prayer. Poems that are irreverent and dead serious, playful and pained, built of precise and impeccable and raucous music. Poems wonderful and strange and luminous, as is everything when you look, when you feel, as hard, and beautifully, as DeColo does."
--Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights: Essays
"[DeColo's] work is ferocious and tender, demolishing patriarchal language and using the fragments to build riotous new worlds."--Bitch Magazine
"The brilliant Thieves in the Afterlife evokes philosopher Alain Badiou's observation that "Love is a tenacious adventure." Kendra Decolo's tenacity is shaped by the urgent honesty of "a love song played on a half-strung guitar." Her sense of adventure finds "the story of our naked life" in prisons, red light districts and the wounded embrace of loved ones and lovers. Few poets since the late Lynda Hull have displayed a lyricism so simultaneously lush and visceral. This truly extraordinary debut possesses a toughness that unmasks our vulnerability, "a tenderness that betrays our hunger."
- Terrance Hayes