Sunnylyn Thibodeaux’s Lucky Charms: New and Selected Poems, 2000–2025 is fresh out from City Lights Books this spring, No. 26 in its Spotlight Series, edited by Garrett Caples. Her previous books include The World Exactly (Cuneiform, 2020),  Universal Fall Precautions (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017), As Water Sounds (Bootstrap, 2014) and Palm to Pine (Bootstrap, 2011). She is also the author of over a dozen small books, including 20/20 Yielding (Blue Press), 88 Haiku for Lorca (Push Press), Against What Light (Ypolita), Room Service Calls (Lew Gallery Editions) and What’s Going On (Bird & Beckett) and for decades now she’s coedited with Micah Ballard the output of Auguste Press and Lew Gallery Editions.

In 1999, Sunnylyn moved from Louisiana to the San Francisco Bay Area to attend New College of California, studying with poets including David Meltzer and Joanne Kyger. She once characterized herself as a New Orleans poet stranded in San Francisco, raising her daughter Lorca with her husband Micah. She continues in her San Francisco base, but splits her time between here and NOLA.

Of Sunnylyn’s work, poet Alice Notley has written, “How can there be pleasure amid personal and societal dread? How can there be such beauty when one must constantly ‘survive/ another night in this body, mind/ racing with its tickertape?’ Sunnylyn Thibodeaux’s poetry knows that this intermixture, in its idiosyncratic detail, its weather, temperament, tragedy, is the one thing there is. ‘The things we know/ know us first.’ So there’s a surprising amount of radiance and pleasure; San Francisco is real; the family is individuals; politics just there. You go on, shaky and graceful (full of grace).”

We’re pleased to present a reading from Lucky Charms at Bird & Beckett this Easter Sunday afternoon at 1pm. Please join us.

Here’s a short video of Sunnylyn reading her poem “Evangeline, How Do You Call Your Tribe,” for Mickey Shunick, at the book launch event this past Friday at City Lights in North Beach: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWp0q4eE63T/. An audio clip of the poet reading “This Must Be That Place,” for Tim Cohen, is here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/1749563/this-must-be-that-place.