SHIFT NOTES (paperback)

Sophie Christenberry is a poet and waitress from Brooklyn, NY. She has a BA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Earlham College. She has received support from Catapult and Brooklyn Poets. Her work has appeared in HAD, Olney Magazine, Peach Mag, and Hooligan Mag. She loves seltzer and taking the train to the beach. You can find her on Instagram @millennial_tyler_moore and Twitter @___sophieclare.

"'How honest should I be?' Sophie Christenberry asks questions that make me desperate to know, to know what she knows. Sophie’s in on secrets: she knows the inside lining of the 'industry,' she knows what the book is called, she knows the truth, but she’s not necessarily telling. These poems slip truths in the palm of a joke and then lay them out in lines for the sniffing. I snorted, I smirked, I smeared my face in my hands. And here I’ll be extremely honest: if you know what’s good, you will too." 

— Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo, author of “DUH"

"From the first line of the titular poem–I was all the way in. Devotive and prostrated with all the bliss and burden of an industry, these poems beam with what it is to be defiant and in cahoots with the world they inhabit. A simultaneous worthy indictment of Capitalist-hustle-culture and a cheeky kiki between comrades, ‘Shift Notes’ is a communion for the 21st century. An ambrosia we dip our own weary tongues into. Occupying that space at the intersection of hard work and profound intuition, Sophie Christenberry is, to be frank, unthinkably good. In this collection she gives us poems that teach us that what we make with our hands must exist within us first. Here are poems that somehow seem to exist outside of linear time and beyond vocation where service is a mask that reveals. These are poems that ooze like summer. They are sensations in and of themselves. They are 'An adulthood shook loose and prowling.' They are poems whose referential pockets spill freely and amplify the textures of the world we are blessed to endure. So chatty, so inviting, this is the Cadillac of chapbooks. Spending time in these stanzas will have you full up on dreams, yearning, and seltzer carbonation. I laughed out loud. I shook my head in disbelief. I unfurled like I was home. I was home. 'Oh/why would I rush to move through/ time’s always moving through melike a sieve.' Eat your heart out, Millennial Frank O’Haras. What Christenberry does within these lines will guide you from self to self, from seam to seam. It will make it easier to press against the mirror and love whatever presses back." 

— Angel Nafis, author of “BlackGirl Mansion”