DADDY ISSUES by Sal Kang

In their electric and haunting poetry chapbook, DADDY ISSUES, Sal Kang presents a messy magnification of queerness, the violence in which femininity is birthed, and trying to find a sanctuary in sex despite it all.

Sal (they/them/theirs) is a poet, editor, and translator who currently lives and works in New Jersey. They founded Heartburn Review, a literary magazine for flammable writing, and they regularly perform poetry with Ellipses Slam Poetry, Princeton's oldest spoken word organization. They work as a prose editor for The Augment Review and as a translator and interview editor for The Hanok Review. They occasionally dump more experimental poems on their Instagram and miscellaneous thoughts on their blog. They tweet at @nini_kang.

“DADDY ISSUES is a love letter to every manic pixie who worries their desires may have blossomed steeped in blight. So what if their inception happened to be less than savory? Kang challenges. ‘no amount of therapy can unvictim you from your wants.’” —Fox Auslander, Lead Poetry Editor for Alien Magazine

“Sal Kang’s DADDY ISSUES finds refuge in the honesty of splay. Interrogating the carnal, the intimate, the obscene, there is prayer here – prayer to any divinity – as these poems trace queerness by threads both violent and tender in search of truth. The physical, connecting and reconnecting to the self, demands a necessary standoff with memory. Kang observes, ‘with my hands gone / we tangle bidirectionally, reminding each other / with every kiss— i exist i exist i exist.’” —Shannon Hearn, author of tracing circles in the dirt