Lucky Charms: New & Selected Poems, 2000–2025 (City Lights Spotlight) [9780872869455]

Overview

One of Publishers Weekly's Most Anticipated Poetry Books for 2026

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

" . . . you'll find notes on last night's dreams, the precise hue and texture of this morning's clouds, that day's newly blooming flowers—reports from everyday life that Thibodeaux and few others (Lorine Niedecker, James Schulyer) can word with everlasting clarity . . ."—Christopher Spaide, Literary Hub

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.