Book Release Announcement: Sad City by Craig Kite

There are books that arrive quietly, and then there are books that feel like they’ve been living among us all along, watching, listening, working, carrying boxes up stairwells, standing at doors late at night, absorbing the weather of the city. Sad City, the new poetry collection by Craig Kite, belongs firmly to the latter.

From its opening moments, Sad City announces itself with immediacy and nerve. These are poems written from inside the lived machinery of contemporary urban life, from the gig economy, from the working-class streets of New York, from the psychic noise of late capitalism and its promises that never quite cash out. Craig Kite’s speaker is sharp-eyed, funny, wounded, resilient, and deeply human. As Peter Campion writes, the poems carry “surgical irony, deep heart, and astounding imagination,” and their presence lingers long after the page is turned.

What makes Sad City resonate so powerfully is its refusal to sentimentalize either suffering or survival. Cole Swenson aptly describes the collection as driven by “delightfully biting cynicism,” animated by humor even as it confronts the “very smart pain and sadness” of our socio-economic moment. Kite understands that affection and irony are not opposites, they are survival strategies. The poems bounce, they bite, they grieve, and they laugh, sometimes all in the same breath.

The city of Sad City is not the postcard New York of neon dreams, but the real one: where delivery workers ride elevators to the tops of glass towers and leave empty-handed, where authority tells you to speak up but punishes you for feeling too much, where the moon can become “a piece of tinsel” lodged painfully in the eye. Tiffany Troy names the collection as a paean to the underdog and the working-class New Yorker, a book that honors resilience without romanticizing exploitation.

At the same time, Kite’s poems thrive on paradox. As Javeria Hasnain observes, Sad City is “comical and poignant, alienating and resonating, apocalyptic and ordinary.” This tension, between humor and despair, intimacy and estrangement, is where the book finds its strange beauty. The poems are socially engaged without being didactic, political without losing their lyric pulse.

Craig Kite brings to this work a life deeply entangled with systems of labor, power, and resistance. A poet, musician, and actor, Kite’s background includes journalism and human rights activism, with fieldwork in Iraq, Canada, Mexico, New Orleans, and the Rocky Mountains. He co-founded Mad Gleam Press and ran a Brooklyn bookshop and event space, experiences that sharpened his sense of community and cultural urgency. After surviving multiple surgeries due to construction work injuries, he now teaches guitar, works as a doorman at a speakeasy in New York, and records music with his band Pinko. These lived realities, of activism, physical labor, art-making, and endurance, inform Sad City at every turn.

Published by BlazeVOX [books], Sad City is a compact, potent collection that speaks directly to our moment without losing sight of the individual soul moving through it. It is a book for readers who recognize the humor embedded in exhaustion, the poetry hidden in survival, and the quiet dignity of those who keep going anyway.

Book Information
Sad City by Craig Kite
Paperback, 104 pages
Perfect-Bound
Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
ISBN: 978-1-60964-523-6
Price: $18

We are proud to welcome Sad City into the BlazeVOX catalog and to celebrate Craig Kite’s fierce, funny, and necessary voice. This is a book that knows where it stands, and invites readers to stand there too, eyes open, heart intact.

Get your copy of Sad City by Craig Kite here
https://www.blazevox.org/shop-1/p/sad-city-by-craig-kite