is a chapbook of twelve poems due for release in Spring 2025, published by Dancing Girl Press and Studio, an independent, feminist press in Chicago. Its central theme is the narrator’s rebuke of the notion that “poetry is a young man’s game,” an idea embedded in personal experience, as well as the traditional poetic canon.

Erica Kent packs a wallop in these poems. From the start she gives us a world where things are unsettled and contradictory: “My father never rang the bell./ Except he did.”  In a world that seems like a young man’s game, she finds the women, poets like Plath who broke—no, smashed through the ice of that man’s world. What emerges is a strong voice, capable of nuance and subtlety, able to sway with the sky and be wiped clean by the moon. She sings us into the heart of things.

–Betsy Sholl

In Erica Kent’s A Young Man’s Game, fathers sneak off while mothers lurch and flee. There’s peril throughout this collection, both immediate and potential, however Kent knows that in danger, there’s also opportunity, and she’s finely attuned to this frisson that turns good writing into excellence. Kerouac, Plath, Lowell, Giovanni – these are the stars that guide Kent forward into her own distinctive, lyrical world.

                                                                                        -Jefferson Navicky