Sad City by Craig Kite

Craig Kite’s poems have a winning immediacy. With surgical irony, deep heart, and astounding imagination, Kite revels what it feels like to be alive at this moment. Poems such as “Brutalism” and “Quitting” will be with us for a long time. Sad City is a superb collection.

—Peter Campion


“Delightfully biting cynicism drives these engaging, often hilarious, and always spot-on observations of our early 20th century socio-economic situation. And as is inevitable in any direct look at the capitalist catastrophe, there’s a lot of pain and sadness here, very smart pain and sadness recorded by an activist and inveterate supporter of the challenged. There’s much affection and humor mixed in with the wry, tongue-in-cheek irony, and an overall playful bounce keeps it lively. Required reading for contemporary ethical reflection.

—Cole Swenson


“The collection is at once comical and poignant, alienating and resonating, apocalyptic and ordinary—paradoxes wherein lie its beauty."

—Javeria Hasnain


Sad City by Craig Kite is a paean to the underdog protagonist-speaker and the working class New Yorker. They reside in the best city in the best country of this best world where the anchormen “all sound like… / plastic Kens and Barbies/ trying to sell me…/ the myth/ that being rich means one is smart.” I respect the resilience of the speaker, who is entrenched in the gig economy, delivering to the top of a glamorous skyscraper, only to receive no tips.. In a city that tells you to “say something” when you “see something” but to “shut the fuck up” if you “feel something,” Kite’s speaker points not to the neon nights of a city that never sleeps, but at how the “moon is a piece of tinsel/ in [his] eye..”

—Tiffany Troy, author of Dominus





Craig Kite is a poet, musician and actor from New York City with a background in journalism and human rights activism. He led field teams in Iraq 2008-2009 working to expose war crimes against indigenous Kurdish populations, and earlier in Canada to protect Algonquin territory from uranium mining. He has also worked in Chiapas, Mexico with the Zapatistas, as well as projects in New Orleans post-hurricane Katrina, and the Rocky Mountains on wildfire prevention. He was a co-founder and editor of Mad Gleam Press (2015-2020) and ran a book shop / event space in Brooklyn during that time. After surviving multiple surgeries for injuries from construction work, he currently teaches guitar and works as a doorman at a speakeasy in New York, and records music with his band Pinko, for which he is the lead guitarist and songwriter. His darkly comedic and philosophical poems are social commentaries inspired by these experiences, his struggle to navigate social systems, and surviving in the city.





Book Information:

· Paperback: 104 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-523-6

$18