Souvenir Spoon Books
Purveyors of Quality Poetry Since 2010.
Welcome to
Souvenir Spoon Books.
Welcome to
Souvenir Spoon Books.
We're a small press publishing books of poetry we love. Click on any cover for more information about our books, our authors, and where to find copies for purchase.
We're a small press publishing books of poetry we love. Click on any cover for more information about our books, our authors, and where to find copies for purchase.
New In 2026!
Speaking In Italics
by Gregg Shapiro
The fifth book of Gregg Shapiro's remarkable Talking Heads' inspired pentagony, Speaking In Italics!
Coming Soon!
New in 2026!
Pine Barrens
by Michael Gushue
Michael Gushue's new book explores the peculiar delights of observing the particular in one's life and surroundings!
Coming Soon!
About Souvenir Spoon Books.
I started Souvenir Spoon Books in 2010 to publish poetry that caught my eye. Small or large, full or chap, the size of the volume is not as important as much as the wonder it inspires in me to want to share it with a wider audience. This seems the best reason to publish books and certainly one of the most satisfying reasons over the years.
This imprint is named after the souvenir spoons I've been collecting for many years in flea markets and thrift stores. These are little works of art that “speak” with a deep sense of place and wonder, that record history and image through enormous dedication and craftsmanship, just like the books of poetry I've sought to publish.
Enjoy and thanks for supporting good contemporary poetry!
Dan Vera
OUR CATALOG
Coming In 2026!
Speaking In Italics
Speaking In Italics, the fifth book of Gregg Shapiro's Talking Heads' inspired pentagony, is here!
“If you’re lucky enough to have heard Gregg Shapiro read his poems aloud, then you know he’s always speaking in italics: bold, clear, emphatic. This new chapbook hones the boldness and deepens the clarity. There are “moon-bright clouds,” women drinking coffee till “their lips are blue as tar.” It’s cinematic, with cameos by Joni, Marilyn, Madonna, Cinderella, too, and don’t forget those librarians of the 1970s, my favorite! “They married the library, like a nun/ married the church.” Above all, Speaking in Italics delivers on its lyric promise to probe “what if, what not, what else.”
Julie Marie Wade
“In this new chapbook, Gregg Shapiro alchemically blends quotidian and fraught experiences into a life-giving elixir. Like in "Librarians in the 1970s," where a close look reveals those "girdles, garter belts and bras that resembled / suits of armor. They married the library, like a nun / married the church." In "Situation," something darker encroaches: "Out of the snake pit, into the spider’s web. This must be / the way dinosaurs felt, feet heavy as planets ..." I am holding my breath as I climb his wonderfully warped stairs, following shimmering angles of light and shade.”
Sharon Mesmer
“Gregg Shapiro's Speaking in Italics is a lively, unflinching collection where humor and heartbreak sit side by side. Moving from Boston's North End stairwells to late-night insomnia, from love affairs to cockroach-infested apartments, these poems capture the eccentricities of queer life with wit, candor, and tenderness. Shapiro has a gift for the memorable image — a lover's "blood, black as the ink on your fingertips and lips" — that makes the ordinary shimmer with strangeness and desire. This is a book that speaks in many registers - playful, aching, sharp - but always in italics, always with emphasis.”
Aaron Smith
“Gregg Shapiro’s Speaking in Italics lights up the night with animal eyes with electrifying poems where two people find harmony in discord (“We are us”), where even the “end-of-the-world tango” is performed with defiant grace. This is a declaration of fortitude for a world where authenticity and “sanity returns for a fleeting instant.” This is a life lived without apology proving passion is the ultimate defense against the darkness.”
Ruben Quesada
Coming In 2026!
Coming In 2026!
Pine Barrens
“Michael Gushue's new book explores the peculiar delights of observing the particular in one's life and surroundings!”
Get a copy today!
Refrain In Light
“Shapiro is a cultural critic and scholar of the heart who asks “whose homeland is this anyway?” In fact, this book is full of questions — What does fire want? What does a tornado want? And Must we listen to songs from the Armageddon soundtrack? Read Refrain in Light to find out. It is only Once in a Lifetime that a poet like Gregg Shapiro comes around.”
Denise Duhamel
“Shapiro’s poems are relentless in their take down of small minds, social injustice, and the entrenched socio-economic lines that wind their way along the map from Laramie to South Beach, but they are also tender, tinged with melancholy and the want for sweetness, for redemption, for love.”
Caridad Moro-Gronlier
“Gregg Shapiro is the supreme guide to the landscape of anxiety. He sees everywhere the looming possibility of disaster—fire, tornado, darkness, a ‘waning moon, covered by a flap of dark sky.’ Glimpsed through a car windshield, apprehension, ‘lurid and familiar,’ waits around every corner. My advice? Keep these magnificent poems close. They are the perfect talismans to ward off calamity.”
Kim Roberts
“Gregg Shapiro’s Refrain in Light opens on the wrong side of the tracks and ends in the backyard with questions about the end of the world. From train tracks to apocalypse, the poems in this illuminating and incisive volume of “unguarded intimacy” trace a journey that is geographical, personal, and political. You may be startled to see yourself reflected in this wonderful collection, a picture of the way we live now.”
John Weir
Get a copy today!
Gather Down Women
In the second expanded edition of his collection, poet Michael Gushue revisits the classical stories of women found in Aeschylus, Sophocles, Ovid and others. The modern translations and feminist reimagining of these texts reveal the mythic figures of Iphigenia, Clytemnestra, Antigone, and others, now resurrected in these poems.
Get a copy today!
Coming In 2026!
Fear Of Muses
“Shapiro’s calm and sure voice guides us exactly where we need to go: inward, towards the things that ask us to remember what an odd and beautiful, confounding and frustrating, lovely and absurd world this is.”
Brendan Walsh
“Part ode to memory, part keen-eyed deconstruction of popular culture, part homage to the amuses that lurk in every line, these irreverent, imagistic poems provoke, question and remember all that will never be forgotten.”
Caridad Moro-Gronlier
“I’m here to tell you the poems in Gregg Shapiro’s Fear of Muses are poems you’ll read aloud again and again. Fear of Muses is a collection to “be held close to [your] chest, like a good hand of cards.”
Dustin Brookshire
“This compact collection brims with life, doled out in tantalizing bites of detail. Gregg Shapiro has stories to tell—about family, about friends, about anger and merriment, about lives well-lived—and tell them he does, with his flair for the particular, in the poems that make up Fear of Muses.”
Yvonne Zipter
Get a copy today!
More Poems About Buildings And Food
“You read the title right. And the irony of it works to buoy us through this handful of poems that remind us of our mortality with strong lines like, “…he’s had enough when he fits into his own pocket” and “When I turn sideways, I disappear.” Fitting in, disappearing, hiding in own’s on grief and view of the world, Gregg Shapiro means to manage these feats in this lovely little book.”
Jericho Brown
“Gregg Shapiro’s poems know a lot about appetite—and all we do to indulge and suppress it. They also know a lot about restlessness, lust, and wanderlust—our address changes sometimes transformative (“the city where I was reborn at 21”) and sometimes not (“A new address with the same/ old face…”) In More Poems About Buildings and Food, Shapiro is yearning, vulnerable, authentically surprising. Reading these poems, I felt like I was sitting in my friend’s kitchen, dishing about everything—Shapiro writing so beautifully what needs to be said.”
Denise Duhamel
“Gregg always was my favorite interviewer, asking the more interesting, insightful and challenging questions. I was the artist, he was the journalist. I had no idea he was the magnificent poet. Tables turned. I now have the questions. More Poems About Buildings and Food has not left my bed stand. I will never think of Nancy and Sluggo the same.”
Jill Sobule
Out Of Print
Gregg Shapiro: 77
“These terrific poems—a decade of them, one for each year from 1970 to 1980— are time capsules chock-full of the amazing but ordinary stuff of Midwestern suburban childhood. But these are not nostalgic poems. Ultimately, they are poems beautifully haunted by harm and hope, longing and desire. In a chapbook that is at once funny and affecting, Gregg Shapiro proves himself the Cavafy of Chicago.”
Richard McCann
“Gregg Shapiro’s new collection evokes a working-class, Midwestern America of the 1970s, with an eye and ear that wizens through the pages, moving from wonder and awe to self-awareness. Between the lines, a narrative emerges of a father defeated by life (with echoes of Willy Loman), and a son coming into himself as a young gay man on the cusp of a new decade.”
Kathi Bergquist
“Shapiro tackles the Seventies with a poetic earnestness, self-effacing charm & a narrative that is full of edge. Ignited by the same fire of the Stonewall revolt, the years are documented with an unflinching truth and fierceness.”
Regie Cabico
“In this collection of poems, Gregg Shapiro catalogs a poet’s stepping stones across a fast-flowing life-stream, as he navigates the disco-fueled 1970s, in a journey from adolescence to adulthood. He tiptoes, and at other times leaps with gay abandon, from stone to stone, across a stream where the waters are sometimes high and menacing, other times a gentle babbling brook. Along the way, he loses his religion and finds life, loses his innocence and finds love. And then he flies away to create his own existence as all good fairies must do.”
St. Sukie de la Croix
“A lot of rockers think they’re poets, and a few poets think they really can rock. It isn’t often that the spirit of the music and the gift of the muse combine, but they certainly do as Gregg Shapiro “opens the box marked 1971” and takes us on a hard-rocking rollercoaster ride through his formative years as both a rock fan and a poet.”
Jim Derogatis
“The appealing poems of Gregg Shapiro’s GREGG SHAPIRO: 77 leave me nostalgic, teenagery, vastly human, happily queer, and wanting more poems—right up to Gregg Shapiro: ∞. Shapiro gives us an astute and touching gift with no strings attached except guitar, nothing demanded of us, nothing expected. This little book is simply ours to keep or dismantle: scrapbook, amulet, bomb.”
Maureen Seaton
“Gregg Shapiro’s book is a gift revealed in words. A collection of poems about coming of age in the ‘70s, it movingly captures the youthful feeling that the world is coming into being just for you.”
Craig Seymour
“Gregg Shapiro’s wonderful collection of poems takes us on a young gay man’s journey through the 1970s that is beautifully written and evocative of a strangely innocent time of untarnished glitter.”
Bob Smith
“For anyone who rode around in a two door Ford LTD with a vinyl landau roof – who loved Necco Wafers – who got excited about the Bicentennial only to learn it wasn’t ALL that – who tried to stick with God but eventually gave up trying – who wrote on bathroom walls – who fooled around with boys – who finally left home – who survived the 1970s – this book is for YOU.”
Susan Werner
Out Of Print
Conrad
“Finally a poetry book that understands the romance and confusion of despair! This book will charm you with its inept protagonist and marvelous vernacular — a combination of profane and profound language, freshly squeezed.”
Barbara DeCesare
“Michael Gushue's Conrad channels Weldon Kees'’ Robinson into the 21st century where “surprise!—being dead is the new being alive!” Conrad is Conradial, but longs to be Carmenized as he “googles the night away.” These poems deftly weave the tale of a man who fears that he lacks the inner resources to respond and connect to the world and people around him. A collection that is both funny and heartbreaking as the poems operate as both myth and truth.”
Reb Livingston
“Meet Conrad, an everyman who reaches for the sublime, only to come up with boiled celery instead. Conrad, who hopes his spirit animal turns out to be a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Conrad, who journeys to the Center of the Earth only to be told, “Sorry, no room.” With kaleidoscopic vision and dry wit, poet Michael Gushue breaks Conrad’s life down into 25 pieces, running the gamut from “His Guru” to “His Mosh Pit” to “His Answering Machine.” These poems are sneaky in their simplicity and unforgettable in their poignance. Ultimately, Gushue shows us why the wise man — faced with life's banquet of banal indignities — chooses to stay hungry.”
Sandra Beasley
About Michael Gushue
Michael Gushue has been published in journals such as the Indiana Review, Gargoyle, and American Letters and Commentary. His books are Q&A For The End Of The World (in collaboration with Kim Roberts), Sympathy for the Monster, Gather Down Women: Poems and Translations, Pachinko Mouth, and Conrad; and, in collaboration with CL Bledsoe, The Judy Poems, I Never Promised You A Sea Monkey, and Palace of Depression (forthcoming). He co-ran the reading series BAWA and Poetry at the Watergate. He and CL Bledsoe run a column of very bad advice on Medium.com called "How To Even" and have published a novel on Substack, "Chip Andrews, Boy Exorcist." He lives with his wife, Susan, in the Brookland neighborhood of Washington DC.
He lives with his wife, Susan, in the Brookland neighborhood of Washington DC.
Souvenir Spoon Books By Michael Gushue
About Gregg Shapiro
Gregg Shapiro is the author of nine books including the poetry collection Refrain In Light (Souvenir Spoon Books, 2023). His poetry and fiction have been published in numerous literary magazines, anthologies, and textbooks, including The Penn Review, RFD, Gargoyle, and Limp Wrist, and the anthologies Moving Images: Poems Inspired by Film and This Is What America Looks Like. An entertainment journalist, whose interviews and reviews run in a variety of regional LGBTQ+ and mainstream publications and websites, Shapiro lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with his husband Rick and their dog Coco.
Souvenir Spoon Books By Gregg Shapiro
