Game Over Books: 2020 Titles & Projects

Game Over Books is a small Boston-based press run by nerdy artists. Our mission? Print unique books from diverse voices that push creative writing forward into the Next Level. From acceptance to publication, we give continual guidance to emerging writers as they continue to gain experience points, grow their craft, and navigate the world of publishing.

We are so excited to be a part of the 2020 Boston Book Festival and want to thank the festival staff for hosting this necessary virtual space! 

I Wish I Wasn’t Royalty: A Playable Chapbook

I Wish I Wasn’t Royalty is a poetic and artistic collaboration among four bipolar poets and a bipolar poet/illustrator resulting in a functional 52-card playing card deck. A standard card deck (ex: the classic Bicycle Poker Deck) contains four suits: hearts, clubs, spades, and diamonds. I Wish I Wasn’t Royalty follows the same format. Each of the four poets is given a suit in which their poem is written across. 

All of the cards and deck boxes will be sized like standard poker cards: 2.5″ x 3.5″.

The cards are printed in color on both sides and feature custom artwork from Catherine Weiss. The backs of the cards will all be uniform, but the faces of the cards are individually designed with an illustration and one line from a featured poet’s poem. 

Living with bipolar disorder is often full of surprising juxtapositions. Mania can cause thoughts to make unexpected connections. Depression can bring confusion and a sense of distant unreality. Every line of every poem in I Wish I Wasn’t Royalty is designed to be a stand-alone thought or image, read as part of its whole poem, or combined in unexpected ways with cards from other suits. Playing a game of cards with this deck creates opportunities for poetic fragments to offer up an ever-shifting found poem, which echoes the experience of living with extreme mood-states.

Any game you can play with a standard 52-card deck, you will be able to play with I Wish I Wasn’t Royalty. For more information, click here.

Sana Sana by Ariana Brown

“I am thankful to once again be witness to these poems that welcome and make space for the people who most need it. And for how Ariana Brown sets a lens on the world that is critical, but always caring.” —Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Fortune for Your Disaster

After ten years of performing her spoken word poetry, Ariana Brown gathers her favorite poems to return to in her chapbook Sana Sana. With a tender and critical voice, she explores Black girlhood, the possibilities of queerness, finding your people, and trying to survive capitalism. All are explored as acts of different kinds of love—for self, for lovers, for family, for community. Brown’s collection refuses singularity, insisting on the specificity of her own life and studies. As she writes toward her own healing, Brown asks readers to participate in the ceremony by serving as witnesses. Sana Sana, colita de rana, si no sana hoy, sana en la mañana.

 For more information, click here.

Cut Woman by Dena Igusti 

“Dena Igusti is a poet of undying urgency – this is a bold, heart-shattering chapbook debut.” —George Abraham, author of Birthright (Button Poetry)

In a post-colonial world shaped by what is and what will be lost, what is there left to celebrate? In Dena Igusti’s debut collection CUT WOMAN, Dena is overwhelmed by the loss of her people. The loss includes but is not limited to: the deaths of Muslims around the world due to xenophobia and Islamophobia; the deaths of Indonesians as a result of post-colonialism, state violence, environmental racism, and overall media negligence due to the world prioritizing white people over her own; the mortality of friends, lovers, and family from economic disparity and gentrification in New York City; the loss of her body that could’ve been her body if she didn’t undergo female genital mutilation. She knows that one day, her time will be up too. Rather than stay in mourning, however, She tries to turn these wakes, both current and future, into the biggest celebrations of her life. 

For more information, click here.

Big Feelings by Gigi Bella 

“we get to meet bodega cats, and Ariana Grande, her family and her loves, but most importantly we get to meet gigi: wholly human and wholly herself. this book is as tender as it is fierce, and will be opened like a gift by the hearts of so many.”  —Andrea Gibson, author of Pansy and Take Me With You

Big Feelings is a grand tour of love and loss, femininity, and the nuances inherent in the simple messiness of just being alive. Bella masterfully works within the ambiguity of feelings that do not ever truly end, of what it feels like to be a ghost within those feelings, and she guides the reader through the origin point of every haunting. She navigates the tragedies of heartbreak, the experience of brown girlhood, the loneliness ingrained within artists, and the courage it takes to get back up again even when it feels like you have already died many times before. With compassion and much needed humor, Big Feelings allows us the necessary space to be alone with one another.

For more information, click here

Heavier Than Wait by Ilyus Evander

“Yet this is a collection wrought, too, with something like hope—something, at least, like the belief that new names might grow in the old one’s place.” —Franny Choi, author of Soft Science

Heavier Than Wait is a tender guide to a queer experience in mental illness. Evander challenges the idea that apathy equals stability through her exploration of dysmorphia and dissociation in mental health. Here, the body is not just a thing of flesh, but a being filled with possibility and bound by tangibility. Using hypertext, memory, and interrogation of truth, Evander showcases the pains and hopes of healing.

For more information, click here.

The Visible Planets by Aly Pierce

“These poems circle the unknown until we recognize it as already part of us. I read them & feel smaller than I realized I was, but what a gift to find the known universe granular as it travels through Pierce’s lens, at once exploding & perfected by attention. Here, the vocabulary of particle physics, of math, of medicine, of humility, of grief, of orbit, is a limitless love language we all have in common.” —Emily O’Neill, author of a falling knife has no handle

The Visible Planets is a celebration and a eulogy of galactic proportions. Simultaneously an exploration of universal joy and the mourning of a lost sister, Aly Pierce’s The Visible Planets is a reminder of all the beauty in this fleeting life. Utilizing the cosmos and its celestial bodies, Pierce exposes the juxtaposing starlight and black holes inherent in every human. Along the way the reader will meet a colorful cast of characters including Jupiter, Neptune, Mars, and Phobos who all have their own flaws, insecurities, and desires just like any body in this universe would. The Visible Planets request the reader to love as deeply as they can while they have the time and space because eventually every star must fade no matter how bright it is.

For more information, click here.

You can find all of our titles and projects at gameoverbooks.com. If you are a bookseller, librarian, or an educator, you can contact SPD Books (johnny@spdbooks.org) for information on ordering and discounts. 

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