{"product_id":"modeya-maura-sappho-terpb","title":"Modeya, Maura: SAPPHO TERROR","description":"\u003cp\u003ePRROBLEM, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: April 6, 2026\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"productDescription\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMaura Modeya’s SAPPHO TERROR is a book haunted—by empire, by sleeplessness, by Sappho herself. In it, queerness becomes both the agent of terror and its object. “I want to be consumed. I want to disappear twice.” Extending the experiments of Mayer, Lonidier, and Stein, Modeya’s poems are as much about desire as they are about violence. They let us in on a secret: “Logic sometimes is so disgusting.” At once delirious and hyperalert, performance and document of a performance, SAPPHO TERROR disrupts the routines of everyday life from within. “Tending to the eros of writing something down.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA fist is something that blooms inside a lover, a hand held up in revolutionary camaraderie, and the weapon of bare-knuckle combat. In Maura Modeya’s\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eSAPPHO TERROR\u003c\/em\u003e, the poet probes, in a language that possesses an addictive deliquescence, the body as policy and the devotional as daily, where intimacy is all at once risked, tenderized, and disciplined. We begin in a space of betweenness—between street and bed, between conquest and abandon—and are then submerged into tidal pools of sleeplessness where the poet is overtaken, exquisitely, by forces beyond themselves. Sculpted into vigilant word-reliquaries, these poems exalt the femi-themme of the night while holding fast to danger. Inside this edge-space lives the chasm—the danger that lives in the distance from one edge to another—where sex, politics, and liminal states of consciousness collide, exposing how power is enforced, negotiated, and sometimes utterly undone through the body. —\u003cstrong\u003eValerie Hsiung\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eSAPPHO TERROR\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003eMaura Modeya drifts with eros between the “war intestine,” and a restless dreamscape where desire demands disorientation and the rapture of invasion teeters in tension between queer love and the horrors of militaristic and domestic terrorism. Modeya offers us a vulnerable and familiar sorrow: “Why when I want to speak of love, violence surfaces?” In communion with Sappho’s fragments—those invocations of desire intensified by their historical devastation—Modeya’s poems project that eros is to want is to risk.\u003c\/p\u003e\nLeaning into the “deathless language” of queer love, Modeya allows herself to be haunted by the unreasonable logic of eros and finds herself caught between an insomnia that threatens the poet’s coherence of self, and a sleep that risks waking to the repulsive logics adorning our daily violences.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"productDescription\"\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"productDescription\"\u003eIn striking and visceral exhaustion, this book performs the desire of possession—by a lover, by language, by loss.\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eSAPPHO TERROR\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003ebrings us into the poet’s rapture, one that is profoundly balanced between the paradoxical and perilous forces of eros. —\u003cstrong\u003eSerena Chopra\u003c\/strong\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"productDescription\"\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"productDescription\"\u003eWhat arises out of sleeplessness? In\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eSAPPHO TERROR\u003c\/em\u003e, all boundaries fall away into ritual. There is a permeability, an eros, a freedom from all structures and institutions, even from our own self. Our human guardrails fall away to a place where we forget the boots on our necks, that our money buys weapons for the state, or even that we are separate unique beings. Is it wrong to forget, or is it a healing? Perhaps both. Modeya says that in sleeplessness, “to submit means to surrender into what is wanted so badly.” In the face of terror, our letting go is a kind of purity. It tells us we can travel beyond repression, not to escape, but to reach the most natural state of our being, even before survival. It is a reminder of life. —\u003cstrong\u003eSamuel Ace\u003c\/strong\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44711330283543,"sku":"9798991148948","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/files\/1772761306-900.jpg?v=1772933963","url":"https:\/\/open-books-a-poem-emporium.myshopify.com\/products\/modeya-maura-sappho-terpb","provider":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","version":"1.0","type":"link"}