BOOKS

 
 

Cover art by Erin M Riley

 

The Weird Sister Collection
Feminist Press, February 2024

“In this stimulating anthology […] pieces balance a breezy style with intelligent interrogations of what it means to be a woman today. The result is an approachable examination of contemporary feminism.” —Publishers Weekly

The Weird Sister Collection is a reminder that feminism doesn’t live solely in academia and activism, and in fact makes its most defiant moves at the margins of orthodoxy. The book’s mix of poetics, criticism, and pop culture is an unruly and potent brew that fizzes with life as it vaporizes feminist and literary conventions.” —Andi Zeisler

“The Weird Sister Collection is a hilarious, delicious, and earnest dive into the intersection of feminism and culture. Reminiscent of not just zine-style writing but era-defining collections like To Be Real and Making Face, Making Soul, this experimental collection of writing is a must-have for anyone asking questions about identity, belonging, and the current and future state of not just feminism but all the intersectional ‘isms’ that can either hold our imaginations captive or free us.” —Samhita Mukhopadhyay

The Weird Sister Collection captures with audacious wit and unapologetic earnestness the zeitgeist of the eponymous blogging community that published at the intersection of the feminist and the literary. To read this book is to know that I am not alone in reading passionately in feminist community outside of the academy and traditional literary establishment. I am grateful for the space that Weird Sister made online and am immensely thankful now to have this collection with so many fierce writers in one place, re-creating the delightfully weird online village that continues to inspire so many.” —Susana M. Morris

“Feminist thought is alive and well in The Weird Sister Collection. Whether it drives you to start a zine or tear down a statue of a Confederate general, one thing’s for sure: after you read this book, you won’t want to just sit there and suffer anymore.” —Rax King

Weird Sister stands the test of time… the great variety of voices, topics, and approaches within this collection make it immensely appealing and important reading.” —BUST (“Lit Pick” Winter 2024)

”Instigating at the intersection of literature and popular culture, Weird Sister poked the tiger of the existing white male writing establishment.” —Ms.

”The feminist pop-culture treasure trove I didn’t know I was waiting for. […] Witchy, funny, and smart as hell.” —Girl Trouble

Reviews & Features:
BUST | Publishers Weekly | The Millions | The Conversationalist | Literary Hub | The Rumpus | Ms. | Girl Trouble | Penguin Random House News

Diary
Spuyten Duyvil Press, October 2023

“This collection is about obsessions and how we are always building them, surrendering to them, or evading them. What is really being wrestled with is love, its losses, despair, denial of that despair, learning to love one’s own body and self, and all the ways we trick ourselves into making it through the hours and days and shifts of this grinding blue world.” – Natalie Diaz

“Marisa Crawford’s DIARY is the book of this moment. All of the joys, dread, wondering, consuming, and sheer beauty of right now is encapsulated in these poems. DIARY’s utter brilliance is that you will enjoy the bountiful journey and recollections of times past, as much as you will enjoy the terror of its present. For within these poems, the sublime shows itself. Read this book and be reborn into a new sense of understanding what today means, and what poetry means as well. These generous poems quake with their truths, speak gently the mystical flowers of knowing into opening.” — Dorothea Lasky

“A dazzling collection of poems investigating dark corners of the mundane, Diary is a modern-day poetic interpretation into the everyday of being female and living in NYC while zooming into a cosmology of intimacies with incredible preciseness and lyricism. Marisa Crawford’s poetics are packed with beauty and darkness while still popping with magnificent humor. A joy to read, Diary is sassy and pretty, cataclysmic and full of life.” — Julián Delgado Lopera

“Sweet, surreal and playful, Marisa Crawford's DIARY is word candy.” — Myriam Gurba

“Diary is an ode to the raiments of the everyday, freewheeling with jobs, loves, fashions, the things that come and go – beautiful wins and beautiful mistakes. It quotes 90s rock verse like it was scripture, time-traveling through the eras as our minds do, cringe moments from middle school as vivid popups coloring the now. “And I’m like, how could you not need poetry?” And I’m like, I need this kind of poetry – sincere and slapstick, bursting with life, totally here, brooking no fear. Marisa Crawford writes the poetics of an open hand.” — Ana Božičević

Reviews & Features:
Electric Literature | Lit Hub | Largehearted Boy | The Brooklyn Rail | Girl Trouble | Write or Die | Ode & Psyche Podcast | Name Dropping | 2220 Arts + Archives

BSC COVER.jpeg
 
15995050_10211581487069735_3691397513367726149_o.jpg

We Are the Baby-Sitters Club
Chicago Review Press, 2021
Co-edited with Megan Milks

“This collection of essays from smart feminist writers, philosophers, and teachers touches on everything you loved about the series and everything you couldn’t quite put into words.” — Glamour

“Each piece does a fine job of balancing tenderness with critique. . . . Sentimental but never cloying, this anthology will hit home for readers who grew up with the series." — Publishers Weekly

The book feels like a treasure trove, balancing nostalgic joy with necessary critiques of the original series — and as soon as I'm finished finding my favorite BSC pairings on AO3, I can't wait to read this collection again.” — Autostraddle

[A]n anthology that asks how Ann M. Martin's groundbreaking series shaped a generation's ideas of what feminism, friendship, racism, and more look like.” — Real Simple

“[S]tories and recollections of youth as consuming and intriguing as any of the nostalgic books and characters they critique.” — The Believer

”We Are the Baby-Sitters Club
shows us that our loves, like our identities, are always open to reappraisal, revision, and radical change.” — Bitch

At its core, it is a love letter to the BSC reader.” — Electric Literature

“Turns out there were a whole lot of us obsessed with the Baby-Sitters Club! We Are the Baby-Sitters Club is the ultimate companion guide for a generation of devout superfans.” — Lucia Aniello, Director and Executive Producer, The Baby-Sitters Club Netflix series

"This book is a reunion, a homecoming, an opportunity to connect with all the folks you grew up with but never even knew, a chance to really understand why these seven girls have stayed with us and shaped us for so many years." — Brittney Cooper

"I picked up this collection because I was obsessed with the BSC as a child. I couldn't put it down because, as an adult, I am obsessed with the complexities of gender, friendship, race, and power." — Ann Friedman

Reviews & Features:
Glamour | Real Simple | The Believer | Lit Hub | Bitch | Autostraddle | Capsule98 | The Rumpus | Publisher’s Weekly | Poets & Writers | Foreword Reviews | Lit Hub | The Rumpus

Interviews & Talks:
LA Review of Books | Electric Literature | SSR Podcast | Baby-Sitters Club Club Podcast | Your Last Meal Podcast | Stuck in Stoneybrook Podcast

 

Reversible
Switchback Books, 2017

“Reversible is bright and glitter roll-on scented, with a pitch-perfect 90s soundtrack. It’s nostalgic, dark, surprising yet warmly familiar. I mourn for the girlhood of this book.” — Morgan Parker

Reviews & Features:
Ms. | Bustle | The Rumpus | The Bind | Coldfront | Dum Dum | Civil Coping Mechanism | Entropy | KMSU | Whale Road Review | Luna Luna | Sundress | Hysteria

 
HH cover.jpg
 

The Haunted House
Switchback Books, 2010
Winner of the Gatewood Prize, selected by Denise Duhamel

“This poetry is the unholy and inevitable spawn of Emily Dickinson and Judy Blume.” — Arielle Greenberg

Reviews & Features:
Brooklyn Poets | Sink Review | Virginia Quarterly Review | The Rumpus | Noo Journal | Examiner

CHAPBOOKS

1-f6-G5A6WF3Vd-3yoM16oJA-1-184x300.jpeg

Big Brown Bag
Gazing Grain Press, 2015

”The chapbook seems to be on the verge of becoming a bag itself, a container of commodities. Reading this book, holding it in your hands, entails a continuing, tactile contact with the material life of bargains and sales, shopping and department stores. Big Brown Bag establishes an affective relationship with the mundane rhythms and spaces of capitalist consumption. Then it proposes to interrogate those rhythms and spaces, to make them the matter of poetry.” – Toby Altman, Entropy

Reviews & Features:
New Books Network | The Lit Pub | Entropy

 
tumblr_mkqmc3qQXb1sn5y7xo3_1280-300x259.jpg
 

8th Grade Hippie Chic
Immaculate Disciples, 2013

“Do the “like” of teen slang and the “like” of resemblance and the “like” of admiration and pleasure come together in the explicit words of any poem? Until recently the answer might have been “no.” But the poet Marisa Crawford has certainly done it now.” — Stephanie Burt

Reviews & Features:
American Poetry Review | Fanzine | H_NGM_N