"Exploring the intricacies of gender, desire, and the divided self, Sydney Vogl is a knock-out poet, part love-sick troubadour, part Walt Whitman’s cosmic twin. No matter what she describes—a vodka-soaked sweater, a triple-hearted octopus—the world comes alive under her yearning gaze. CRYBABY! is a dazzling collection."

— Bruce Snider, author of Fruit and Paradise, Indiana

“i could have one lover in each arm and still hunger from all three of my hearts.” Thus reads, in its entirety, one of the brilliantly succinct, single-line self-portrait poems in this collection so full of arms and hungers and yes, hearts. Hearts in love, hearts questioning gender, hearts hitting rock bottom only to rediscover some secret warmth. CRYBABY! embraces emotion like sunflowers spilling from a gorgeous pocket dimension where vulnerability shines hard, sings harder. I so love these poems’ “unrotten strawberries” and “veins on… mother’s hands,” these scents and textures of delight, intimacy, heartbreak. What a sweaty supernova of aliveness, what an unabashed sob of a gift, this poetry.”

— Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

“As someone who was born and raised in Cali, I can proudly say that CALIFORNIA IS GOING TO HELL is as true and homegrown as a cruise down Highway 101. You’re in a 90s Corolla, with the windows rolled all the way down, and your favorite, most nostalgic song is blaring from the speakers. Your homies are in the backseat, too, and they’re spilling all their weekend secrets. That’s what getting in the driver’s seat of Sydney Vogl’s wildly colorful and tender debut collection is like. In one moment, you’re wandering around a SoCal suburb, pretending to chase boys; in the next, you’re dipping into an adolescent-filled and weed-tinged pool in someone’s backyard; then, you’re sneaking home, resististing the traditional notions of whatever it is your father expects you to become. These are lesbian love stories and millennial declarations, reminding us: “is there such a thing/ as memory or is there only stories/ we tell ourselves?” These pages carry truths that the speaker has told herself in order to exist. These stanzas hold the body that she has become in order to survive. These lines contain a sharp-edged language that has become her “razor blade,” in order to “pierce” her “surface.” Trust what this poet is giving us: her confessions while California burns.”

— Alan Chazaro, author of Piñata Theory & This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album

“In Sydney Vogl’s poetry chapbook CALIFORNIA IS GOING TO HELL, the author uses a confessional voice to highlight one’s self-awareness as a young person taking charge of and coming into their own queer identity. We are introduced to the poet’s journey from girl in the suburbs to blossoming adult in San Francisco. The idea of place; how it both defines and shapes us is a common theme here: familiar rooms and restaurants set the scene for new awakenings that inevitably turn toward old memories, “your body stopped belonging / on the tiled floor of your mother’s bathroom.” Vogl often employs food imagery; there are numerous mentions of sweet and savory things like tomato sauce and herbs along with mentions of salt as metaphor for a barrier both real and perceived. In “Somewhere In A Suburb,” Vogl writes, “she dug fingers into the flesh of tangerines, a dozen of them sunk in her lap seventeen & going anywhere salty…” Sydney Vogl’s debut collection is a remarkable telling; in bringing things into the light what previously only existed in the recesses of the mind: the poet as a work-in-progress; becoming who they are while learning how to navigate a new landscape of the truest self.”

— Maw Shein Win, author of Storage Unit for the Spirit House