Tremendous thanks to the fine editors of Yavanika Press for publishing my fourth chapbook and to my amazing daughter Clementine for creating the cover art. You can download Almost Famous as an echapbook for free!

Praise for Almost Famous:

Trish Hopkinson is a consummate storyteller. Starting with her own precisely envisaged birth, and employing a brutal sort of honesty, Almost Famous brings family origin stories alive with vibrant and closely-observed imagery. Stepwise through years, with each poem immersed in its own moment, these narratives span the evolving viewpoint of a child, an adolescent, and finally, a grown woman, as she transports readers through "Birthday after birthday after birthday after birthday after." Hopkinson is a poet; with this book, she again proves to be a very fine poet.

--Risa Denenberg, Curator, The Poetry Cafe Online

In the poems in Almost Famous, Trish Hopkinson takes the reader on a circular journey through motherhood and what it means to be a daughter back to motherhood. Hopkinson writes with taut lyricism about the violences that can subsume a family from a daughter's birth to life's everyday stresses that explode into abuse and drug addiction. Here, in poems both stark and expansive, the speaker claws her way out of her past by reclaiming her sexuality and creating her own family.

--Avery M. Guess, author of The Truth Is

Trish Hopkinson's fourth chapbook Almost Famous brims with evocative imagery. "My memories have taste buds. ' Every moment has a different palate and lingers on my teeth," Hopkinson writes. Her poignant and personal poems draw the reader into a vividly rendered childhood. Set in a sometimes nomadic home-life where doors are "thin enough for a fist" and "the kitchen wears its linoleum like a polyester suit," uncertainty, danger, and death seem constantly close at hand. These emotionally rich poems reveal the life of a young woman coming into her own, from an unsettling birth to traumatic teen years, "fourteen flipped on its hip bearing womanhood." In Almost Famous, Hopkinson gifts us with poem after poem that boldly speaks its truth.

--Nancy Chen Long, author Wider Than Sky

Yavanika is a new digital chapbook press that "hopes to integrate multifarious genres of literature and artwork including Japanese short-forms of poetry, avant-garde, conceptual, and postmodern works of culture and art."

Chapbooks from the press are published digitally and are available as free downloadable PDFs with beautiful formatting and always gorgeous art. "Yavanika Press is affiliated with the tri-annual literary & arts journal, Sonic Boom. Using the theatre metaphor of 'the curtain' as our reference point, we aim to cast the spotlight on bold and new emerging voices, as well as veterans of the craft." You can download several examples on their web site to become familiar with the work they publish.

Both Sonic Boom and Yavanika Press are currently closed for submissions, but will reopen in 2020. You can read my past interviews with their editors here:

Yavanika Press interview

Sonic Boom interview (re-opens on Feb. 1, 2020)

Looking to get your own chapbook published? Check out these chapbook resources, including a list of no submission fee publishers:

• 20 NO FEE Chapbook Publishers and other Chapbook Listings – UPDATED!
• For information on putting together your chapbook file to print some yourself or to have them printed, click here.
• To check out my online chapbooks, click here.