In addition to centring marginalised voices from an international and transatlantic diaspora Black Sunflowers Poetry Press are passionate about producing environmentally ethical chapbooks that express the physical book as aesthetic artefact. They’ve worked with many artists of note, including Betye Saar, and this year’s cover art is thoughtfully curated from the Japanese painter Hiroshi Tachibana. Sullivan Summer’s Performance Anxiety brings a variety of intertextual and formal approaches to a sharp rendition of contemporary American life as a transracial adoptee. Set between Italy and the US, Sarah Wetzel’s Elegies of Herons is a work of ecological attention that skilfully intertwines the macropolitical with closely observed quotidian detail. More Beautiful Than the Dead by Danny Bellinger has a finely tuned ear for music, as lyric and soundtrack to Black American history and lives; while there’s a slant and cinematic quality to Monica Wang’s enigmatic poems of childhood and familial psychologies in When Sad Ones Go Outside. Together this thematically distinct set of pamphlets and poetries combine to original and compelling effect.
About Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, a message from the publisher
Black Sunflowers is a UK based, art-oriented, small press with a focus on publishing outstanding poetry chapbooks from women and black poets from around the world.
Crowd-funded in 2020, the press is helmed by artist and poet Amanda Holiday. To date, Black Sunflowers has published twenty-three titles with four more due later this year. Our regular chapbook poets are sourced through open calls, once or twice a year and for these we use print on demand to save the planet.
Our titles include two themed ‘SMEOP’ anthologies and two Poet and Artist chapbooks containing full colour reproductions of artworks. For our covers, Black Sunflowers prioritises works by artists of colour and so far, these include Wangechi Mutu, Betye Saar, Sarah Khan, Virginia Chihota and Hiroshi Tachibana, among others.
