Abbie Shain ’14 released a poetry chapbook entitled “Sweet Ache” on Monday night during the St. Paul Poetry Slam. The junior has been a fixture on the Macalester slam team since her first year and is currently the organization’s chair. Over the past three years, she has been writing poetry and she published the book through local printing press Button Poetry. On choosing to work with Button, she writes, “I decided to publish with Button because it’s an up-and-coming performance press that recorded me on a CD when I was just starting writing and performing my first year.”

Her work with Button extends beyond her own artistic endeavors. This semester she is interning with the press where she helps to manage its media presence, sell books and CDs on their website, and publish new books and recordings. Button Poetry is a partnership between Sam Cook, the Director of the Soap Boxing Poetry Slam in St. Paul, Michael Mlekoday, the Poetry Editor of the Indiana Review, and Dylan Garity ’12. Though the publisher is relatively small, Shain writes that seeing “all of these poems that I’d written fit together in a larger context as a book was amazing.”

Asked how she would describe the contents of the book, Shain wrote that the poems are meant to “celebrate the joy in grief” and to investigate “what it means to inherit a body after a legacy of cancer. Basically, everyone in my family has died of cancer, and this book is me dealing with that. But it’s also about joy and memory and grief and love and dead squirrels. In some ways, I’ve been writing this for my whole life.”