this is a book of poems. they call to each other, they build a world together. there’s basically just one speaker. i think i once tried to call this stuff “domestic weirdism.” i only write love poems. the earliest poems are from 2009 and last poem was written the week i turned it in in october of 2015.
it is going to be a good year
(Big Lucks Books, 2016)
You can buy it from the publisher, or maybe even your local store! please don’t buy it from amazon though.
EXCERPTS
*many of these poems appear in drastically different versions than in the book, often for personal reasons
Here’s an interview Hilary Leichter did with me about it
Here’s an interview Rita Bullwinkel did with me about it
PRAISE
"Before I read Sasha Fletcher's poems, I did not know that poems like Sasha Fletcher's could exist. And they can't, really: not without his mind, his failed affairs and Great Loves, the movies he's watched, every moment in which he has cried or held hands or slammed his fist on a kitchen table in ecstasy. This is a book about wonder. It is a book of revelation and declaration. It is so wholly unique that it has created a universe of its own, adjacent to this one, but not improbable. This universe is ruled by love. In this universe, no one is ever afraid to say or be. The speakers of these poems are refreshingly simple in their desires, earnest without being ignorant, precious without being twee. This is a universe of possibility and fantasy, of robbers and birds and certainty. What is the difference between seduction and violence, between a sunset and a sunrise, a romance and a tragedy? Sasha's a poet you want to go to the movies with. And after the movie, you want to go out with him for tacos so he can explain what intricate and beautiful and aching moments of the film that you, in your cynicism and skepticism of the purity and largeness of love, might have missed. There is something about the world that only Sasha Fletcher understands. This book contains the secret of your own capacity for loving and caring and expressing and continuing." -Morgan Parker, Author of Other People's Comfort Keeps Me up at Night
"Sasha Fletcher doesn’t convect reality as much as he does the fantasias that make reality apparent. It Is Going To Be A Good Year is stick-to-your-ribs poetry, styling an impulsive savant’s everyday oversharing and longing into textured language that glides down a promising yellow brick road towards something, rather than nothing. In an era where one may be asked, “Straight dudes, why are you still here?” Fletcher answers shrugging, because life is actually avant-garde cinema, love is real, and it is going to be a good year, whether it is or not." -Ben Fama, author of Fantasy
"Sasha Fletcher is a flashlight illuminating the crawl spaces inside you. You leave Sasha's poems emblazoned by a gentle, mocking light. You laugh on your way out of the life you once knew. You are free." -Emily Kendal Frey, author of Sorrow Arrow
"There are ghosts in this book, which means there's an afterlife. You might even be in the afterlife. You might wind up with birds stitched to your back. But even though there’s an afterlife, I’m sorry, you’re still going to need to find something to eat, and the Beloved is still going to leave you. You are going to get shot and you might shoot somebody. I love Sasha Fletcher’s voice for the fearless way it celebrates the world’s collapse—'we all kept singing/until the sky broke and the curtain dropped'—and for its endless confidence." -Josh Bell, author of No Planets Strike