Lucky Charms

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A career-spanning Southern Goth infusion into the California poetic tradition of eco-social consciousness.

"Poems moving as music, first thought the first chord, playing with trust to a notion of free improvisation, rhythm guiding the tongue to an ending fade. . . . Sunnylyn's voice is on the radio, some mystic Southern station, and it sounds beautiful."—Thurston Moore, founding member of Sonic Youth

Since her arrival in San Francisco from New Orleans via the now-legendary New College Writing and Consciousness program, Sunnylyn Thibodeaux has been an integral and idiosyncratic voice in Bay Area poetry. Lucky Charms maps her creative trajectory over a 25-year period, from fugitive zines and pamphlets through full-length volumes, and concludes with a substantial selection of new and previously uncollected poems, which, as Alice Notley has written, find her seeking out "pleasure amid personal and societal dread."

Thibodeaux writes of the cosmic and spiritual from a profoundly human perspective. There are reflections on New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina, loving snapshots of motherhood, wrestlings with mortality through cancer diagnoses, grieving over losses of friends and family, all set against the struggle to stay true to the earth and to her calling as a poet. Embodying its title, Lucky Charms offers the poem as talisman, a lyric device for capturing magic and releasing it into the world, wielded masterfully by a poetic persona that partakes of the botanist, the alchemist, the astrologist, and the witch all at once.