NEW RELEASE
X. P. Callahan, MORTAL SUGAR: POEMS IN THE KEY OF LOTERÍA
UPDATE
Friends, thank you so much for your response to Mortal Sugar.
The signed and numbered limited edition of 50 copies has sold out, but Monday Editions will issue a second printing, also signed and numbered, beginning with copy number 51.
Monday Editions announces the publication of X. P. Callahan’s new collection, Mortal Sugar: Poems in the Key of Lotería.
Rooted in conceptual poetic practice, the collection consists of fifty-four musical poems, each one limited to fifty-four syllables, each poem responding to one of the images on the fifty-four cards of traditional Mexican lotería, a game of chance that resembles bingo and, like bingo, has its origins in the Italian High Renaissance.
The collection comprises persona poems, lyric poems, epistolary poems, narrative poems, imagist poems, elegies, crackpot monologues, disingenuous confessions, agnostic prayers, sinister little vignettes, and poems that are sometimes closely autobiographical, sometimes autobiographical only in the sense of shared generational, cultural, or sociopolitical influences.
As a gesture toward the largely rhyming proverbs and other sayings printed on the lotería cards, most of the poems have an identifiable rhyme scheme, however irregular or slant. In addition to fifty-five full-color illustrations, this pocket-size little book includes a short introductory essay by the author—a Monday Editions hallmark.
This collection, sometimes deadly serious but more often playful, reshuffles the fifty-four cards of lotería into fifty-four poems of exactly fifty-four syllables. From folk archetypes to postmodern riffs, the deck turns strange and resonant: El Negrito becomes Emmett Till, an absentminded Yo-Yo Ma slips in slyly, and La Pera glows in the dark of October “to share her story / of orchard and sun.”
—, author of Tulips for Elsie and The Sweet Spot in the Chaos
X. P. Callahan balances irony, humor, and heartbreak in a book whose title references the brutal acts of the oppressor as well as the precarious sweetness of life. Invoking such diverse figures as JFK, Bette Midler, and Emmett Till to interrogate the lotería deck’s flat images, the poems peel back colonial tropes and summon a deeper truth.
—, author of Writer, interrupted, a Substack Featured Publication
Surprising, wry, and fun, these are poems that both challenge assumptions and make you laugh. Although you can read the book in one sitting, you’ll want to keep it close by for those moments when you need to be jostled awake again.
—, author of Punctuated and Gathering the Pieces of Days
X. P. Callahan, Mortal Sugar: Poems in the Key of Lotería (Monday Editions, 2025). Limited edition of 50 copies, signed and numbered. 4.25 x 7 inches, 132 pages, with 55 full-color illustrations, notes on the poems, and an introductory essay by the author. ISBN: 979-8-9926804-0-9. Publication date: August 27, 2025. Price: $26 (includes shipping within the continental US).
Congratulations, X. P. ! Mortal Sugar is a richly crafted, inspired work. Well done.
How fabulous! I’m thrilled to have my copy! Next time you publish one of your books of poetry, you might need to do a 75 book edition!