hyperphantasia

New York Times — Best Poetry of 2022

Boston Globe — Best Books of 2022

Mass Book Awards — Poetry Winner 2023

Praise for Hyperphantasia

Akant conjures the ancestral surrealism, something long before the word knew itself. - CA CONRAD

There's a stubborn beauty in these pieces; the poems erupt the same moment they're read. - HALA ALYAN

Akant's haunting work captures the strangest moments at the end of the world. - SANDRA SIMONDS

This is a book made of milk, blood, cum, sap, piss, yolk, and sweat. - DIVYA VICTOR

If you have any "undealt with trauma," please do read this book. - JENNIFER TAMAYO

Sara Deniz Akant is a kind of witch, and this book forges a new genre of alchemical realism. - CHRIS KRAUS

Sara Deniz Akant’s Hyperphantasia explores the sonnet’s sonic and imaginative capabilities via infestation dreams, open tabs, and other disruptive forms of longing and (dis)belonging: the epistolary, epic, ballad, or just “some oracle shit” (history). Phanta—our AI BFF, echoing troll, or spiritual center—sweetly sings a “nekromantic soundtrack” into the reader’s ear through the “holographic non-place” of dove-robots, sleeping boyfriends, murderous grooms, and empty code. In these broken songs, “the women haunt themselves” through the quotidian trappings of daily routine: unanswered letters, dreamscapes, and ritualized obsessions. And yet, Akant’s celebratory second collection refuses to make precious bores of gender, grief, or lust. Just like the eponymous hero and prismatic villain of Phanta herself, the trash in these poems not only “sucks our hunger dry” but also “multiplies" in an attempt to reclaim the (often damning) myths that surround the culturally mixed, feminized body.

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