A Is For Aegis and Sky Cracked Open the Proscenium Frame

Authors: Jacob Kahn and Caitlyn Tella

Publisher: DoubleCross Press (2022)

Two chapbooks bound together. Edition of 250.

The poems in A Is For Aegis attend to the pastoral panorama and lyric minutiae of life in the technocratic heart of empire. Engaged with a loose lineage of Bay Area pastoralism, these are poems of vantage and habitude, town and city, ownership and eviction, labor and liability, routine and pleasure, ditty and bickering.

Sky Cracked Open the Proscenium Frame explores the confluence of reality and fantasy, actor and character, from the perspective of a variety of performers—from 19th-century actress Siri Von Essen to deepfake persona Lil Miquela. The poems construct a multivalent theater to expose the causes and consequences of losing (and finding) oneself in a role.