“ I like to listen to people talk.
I like to feel a poem in my body before I start to write it down.”
BIO
KAYLA SARGESON is the author of the full-length collection First Red (Main Street Rag, 2016) and the chapbooks Head on a Shelf (2022), BLAZE, and Mini Love Gun, all from Main Street Rag. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in 5 AM, Cimarron Review, and South Dakota Review. With Lisa Alexander, she co-curates the Laser Cat reading series. Sargeson lives in Pittsburgh where she teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and Carlow University and serves as Interim Director of the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops.
Kayla offers manusacript consultation packages. Payment can be made by cash, check, CashApp, and Venmo.
Please use the contact form below for more information.
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Manuscript Consultation Packages (starting May 15th):
Full length:
The Whole Shebang: $500 (line edits, comments on poems, reordering, three title suggestions)
Princess Package: $275 (line edits and comments on poems)
Baby Consultation: $175 (line edits)
Not Poetry: $190 (line edits and my general impressions)
Chapbooks:
The Whole Shebang: $250 (line edits, comments on poems, reordering, three title suggestions)
Princess Package: $175 (line edits and comments on poems)
Baby Consultation: $175 (line edits)
Not Poetry: $190 (line edits and my general impressions)
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*Madwomen** and former student of mine: 20% off (** must have taken a Madwoman class with the last three years)
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Poem Packets:
$30/packet of 5 poems
General Mentorship:
$30/hour
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POETRY
Kayla Sargeson’s Head on a Shelf needles, sizzles, and burns with a nervy intensity. These poems practice a post-punk personism that’s like a phone call from a strange and delightful alien planet. Again and again, Sargeson’s poetry holds terror, sadness, and loss at bay with a powerful and transgressive insistence on joy. These poems are hungry for life, and elevate the quirkiness of happenstance to the sublime. Reader, prepare to be permanently markered by Head on a Shelf’s vibrant indelibility. —Lee Ann Roripaugh, Author of tsunami vs. the fukushima 50
From Kayla Sargeson’s tender grit, we truly experience that poems are made of grief, and hunger, and lipstick, and violence, and frying pierogies in your underwear. BLAZE captures the primary job of the poet: to see exactly what is (no matter how terrifying), and keep looking anyway. These poems will make you braver for having read them. –Stacey Waite
“In the tattoo chair, I’m queen/ of concrete,” says Kayla Sargeson in one of her beautifully tough poems that fill BLAZE with such fire. If her poems want destruction—and they do—it is only to tear down the concrete that separate us from each other. “The night you died,” ends one of these heartbreaking elegies, “I dreamed of feathers and black pumps.” These are poems that take unflinchingly hard looks at the lives we live and the way we fail. “I’ve spent the past year memorizing your face,” one speaker says, longingly, turning the beloved into an image of power. “I finally don’t care that you don’t know mine,” the speaker rejoins, wryly, because art is a kind of love, and vice versa. These are poems of incredible longing, of incredible loss. And still they dare. They put on shimmer and shine and strut in their black pumps, in their black feather boas. These poems—about heartbreak and death, about art that “churns the bottom of our stomachs”—these poems are going to save us. –James Allen Hall
Kayla Sargeson’s Mini Love Gun pushes the boundaries of taste and acceptable speech–and then pushes further, casting light where we’d expect to find shadows, secrets, repression. The poems might shock, but only because of Sargeson’s commitment to rendering the shock of the new without evasive riddling or obfuscation. Even when the poems linger on uneasy subject matter, they do so with an ironic, ribald sense of humor, like when she imagines herself as the spawn of Ozzy Osbourne (“I love a bathead burger–extra rare”) or as the woman with the longest fingernails in the world (“I can reach that itch on your back from twenty-seven feet away”). Sargeson speaks in the voices of figures the mainstream wants little to do with, and she does this with empathy and vulnerability. At times unsettling, and wise as it is wise-cracking, Mini Love Gun reminds us that the so-called “other” we relegate to the margins is really just another version of ourselves.
–Tony Trigilio
One thinks of Coco Chanel’s ‘Premiere Rouge,’ that classic kiss of crimson red lipstick that defined the femme fatale. Kayla Sargeson’s hot punk mouth sizzles with sexual energy, reckless and vulgar and divine. These poems are hard-edged and brazenly funny, but there’s also the kind of candor and unadulterated violence that makes you feel like you’ve been down to the precinct station with a survivor giving her full statement to the detective on duty. This book is a hard-boiled thriller from start to finish, with intense passions flashing down every page.
—D A Powell
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Kayla Sargeson’s First Red, irreverent and never at half-throttle, insists that you look at yourself. The poems do not hesitate “to rip you wide open” so you can come to terms with what you hide. Through the bare skin of cities, through the grief and inevitability of the body, through the sharp cut of language, Sargeson teaches us the gorgeous hymn of our anger—its throat open and singing. —Stacey Waite
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Kayla Sargeson’s First Red may be the text that sparks the “punk poem revival.” These smart, world-wise poems are sexy and savvy, intricately crafted like the perfect tattoo. There’s sadness here, too: the burden of family and the sweet, painful longing for dead friends. The only thing this poet “ever quit was the mainstream,” and the evidence lies in each bold line. These full-bodied (full-of-body) poems sting needle-deep and ignite. —Aaron Smith
READINGS
April 9, 2022 - 2PM : Apollo Memorial Library
Pittsburgh Poets Rock the Apollo​
April 1, 2022 - 7PM : White Whale Bookstore
Head on a Shelf by Kayla Sargeson
introduced by Jan Beatty
