Scary Topiary is a small press spun-off of SATELLITE TELEPHONE magazine, that publishes a focused yet eclectic list of literary chapbooks and (soon) broadsides. The series is edited by Robert Dewhurst, and is currently published from my home in MacArthur Park, the Champs-Élysées of Los Angeles.

A (Soma)tic collaboration, ARTHUR ECHO documents a Winter 2009 day Conrad and Donovan spent listening to cellist Arthur Russell's WORLD OF ECHO on a twelve-hour loop in a five-story Philadelphia house. This chapbook appropriately inhabits the pop music tradition of the split single, as both poets tune into Russell's masterpiece to generate separate sets of notes on occult topics like angel milk & rock salt, the nutritive body, ecophenomenology, and lyric poetry. A unique tribute to Russell that conjures a reverberant portrait of close-listening and vital friendship from perceptual flux. (Review by Eric Baus at Jacket2.)

"graffiti is beautiful / an emblem of AWAKE / saying I WAS HERE / AND HOPE YOU CARE" . . . "Crisis hush listen the world is alive repeat cho / rus"

Saddle-stitched binding and silk-screened covers. Art by Sunnylee Mowery. Edition of 88. SOLD OUT.

This title is now available in a free, digital version: pdf.

Buck explores vividly atypical lyric states like armament, dispassion, sarcasm, catamenia, redundancy, and debt in this dark new suite written from post-Fordist Detroit. Exquisite and blunt poems that nimbly chart the emotional life of an administered world. (Review by Brandon Brown at Jacket2.)

"I anticipate complete and utter destruction"; "I charge an overdraft fee to each person I meet."

Read "Two Joyful Feelings".

Saddle-stitched binding and silk-screened covers. Art by Anne Muntges. Edition of 123. SOLD OUT.

NYC is rendered all brilliant, "sparkly, and sad" in this new series from Colby. FLUSHING MEADOWS takes place on the edges, F trains, & bedtime pillows of the city, where expansive feelings like longing, desire, & nostalgia are toppled daily by the equally radiant & ridiculous debris of the present.

"We take off our clothes / because we're minty fresh / and covered in honey light. // We look natural / and unfussy as we zero in on bliss."

Read "December Poem".

Saddle-stitched binding and silk-screened covers. Art by Anne Muntges. Edition of 125. SOLD OUT.

A long poem in the myriad traditions of Philippe Soupault, Charles Olson, Carson McCullers, Jacques Derrida, et al., GEORGIA is a bereaved "insomiateque"—part incantation, part invective, part lullaby. "It's a vertical work, which is what leaves us feeling falling . . . This poem keeps a swoop, a careen unsettled on the edge between the beauty of its sound and the heartbreak of what it's actually saying . . . [There's] a vertiginous desire to leap into this vibrant disaster, which is Zawacki's way of explaining how America could possibly have gotten into the position and condition it's in."—Cole Swensen

"All things that are are unlit Georgia // black like lapis in a quitted room."

Saddle-stitched binding and silk-screened covers. Art by Grace Tran. Edition of 166. This chapbook is co-published with Katalanché Press.

$10 (includes shipping).

Written from the impassive surface of the Internet and the high desert of Southern California, CRYSTAL MARYS is a field study of social-media fatigue, suburban youth, Filipino immigrancy, a denim day job in LA's garment district, and other sites of crystallized dis/enchantment. Molina traces life's "beautiful unreliable narrative logic" by the devotional images of our times—the Virgin Mary, emoji, family photos, profile pics, etc.

"I remember the world before all the likes came flooding in to destroy it / I remember when I never felt compelled to like anything."

Read "Crystal Marys."

Saddle-stitched binding and silk-screened covers. Art by Emily Pauline Fanny Dart-McLean Harris, Shola Wynne Lawson, and Feliz Lucia Molina. Edition of 129.
$12 (includes shipping).

A parable of activist youth, mellow courtship, and lost time told with Proustian pathos by our best chronicler of modern relationships and romance.

"S. remembers the kiss: elegant, minimal, musky, and sweet like her favorite dessert, pears and black coffee. And then they must have made love, but she can't remember."

Saddle-stitched binding and silk-screened covers. Art by Matt Fishbeck. Edition of 212.

$12 (includes shipping).

Summer Special: Crystal Marys and Absolute Love for $20.

Super Special: Georgia, Crystal Marys, and Absolute Love for $25 (while supplies last).