SAD MAN HAPPY HOUR

With a genius that is strange, funny, and breathtakingly human, Aileen Keown Vaux’s Sad Man Happy Hour is a trip to the carnival of the soul, each poem holding something delightful, wonderfully weird, or shockingly beautiful for us as we go. How can I say that this book is so Midwestern and so Portland in a way that makes you fall in love with it? Eccentric and electric, these queer-as-hell poems sing their song like no other. Surprising as it is comforting, this debut will take your heart on a ride but share its drugs, too. So kind, so one-of-a-kind, so wonderful to hold these poems close to warm the sad heart.

Danez Smith, Pulitzer Prize Finalist

As its winsome title suggests, Sad Man Happy Hour is a collection that navigates the inevitable tragedies of living with an eye for humorous absurdities while offering finely crafted pairings of sorrow and delight. These poems are full of loves lost and loves found, grief and wonder for the passage of time, and observations that feel at once whimsical and absolutely devastating in their truths. It is a gift to experience Aileen Keown Vaux’s deep, particular attention to place and the beings they hold dear. What rings out here is a sincere heart, proclaiming: ‘I won’t apologize now for tethering myself / to Earth’s green spring, / my small wish to live…’”

Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat

Aileen Keown Vaux’s particular flavor of the sonic-ironic, devastatingly deadpan, and disarmingly revelatory is on full display in this perfectly titled collection. On “the bewildered avenue of self,” Keown Vaux’s poems teach me how to navigate my own terrifying and beautiful aliveness with generosity, humor and a nourishing dose of the surreal.”

Ellen Welcker, author of Ram Hands

Sad Man Happy Hour situates the human struggle for love and survival alongside the struggles of our animal neighbors in the bushes and along roadsides. Like the deer watching its own antler grow into its eye, like "dogs / who break the garage door / to drink antifreeze", we want what will hurt us. "I’m grateful that faith is a human glitch," writes Keown Vaux, and I'm grateful for these poems that share how we've been hiding from each other, and how to love our way back.

Callum Angus, author of A Natural History of Transition

The poems in Sad Man Happy Hour are deep down in it. In the gooey muck of aliveness where it’s hard to tell the edges of the dance floor, the movie screen, or your mother’s kitchen window from the edges of your skin, your lips, your lungs. And though Aileen Keown Vaux tells us that this boundarylessness comes at some risk, We never saw the difference / between poison and sustenance—each tasted sweet, these poems are praise songs. Paeans to language itself, Poach is such a soft word for killing, and the mess we call life—work, holding hands, semi-dystopic birthday parties, lost love, daydreams of a past life as a goldfish. The poems eek out that tender, graceful balance between the scary bits and consolation…wait…is that balance what poetry is? Yes, and, Keown Vaux tells us, it’s also the other, the beloved, Last night you welcomed me back home, / into your body, into civilization. These are poems of delight and sorrow, they are wonderful.

Sommer Browning, author of Good Actors

In their gloriously funny collection, Sad Man Happy Hour, Aileen Keown Vaux reveals a knowledge of Eastern Washington so deep you can hear the hash browns crackle in the diner miles from the nuclear power plant. From the smooth way they toggle between Rilke references and county fair slogans to their unbelievable ability to capture how falling in love feels like being birthed out of your own exoskeleton— Keown Vaux is an unforgettable poet that will rattle your heart and squeeze your hand.

T Bambrick, author of Vantage and Intimacies, Received

Aileen Keown Vaux’s SAD MAN HAPPY HOUR runs, like a machine--or a human heart!-- on cognitive dissonance: from the docupoetic State Fair poems that invite us to ride, to the touch of Prufrockian solipsism in “Moot Pointe,” a poem whose speaker wonders “Now am I old?” and declares “inside of us live nesting dolls of terror,/ each one cuter than the last.” Indeed, this is a book of allegories and fairy tales, of inside jokes turned communal, of joyful call-outs to close friends and encounters with past lovers and past selves, as the speaker wrestles an external gaze they can’t extricate from their own dysphoria and grief, “like Rilke dressed in his dead sister’s clothes.” In this collection, we yearn alongside this speaker for someone to stand next to as we reckon with any tension we might hold with our own mothers, our own bodies laden with this refuse-strewn carnival called America.

Maya Jewell Zeller, author of Raised By Ferns: A Memoir

At turns hilarious, prophetic, and heartbreaking, Sad Man Happy Hour brims with warnings,transformations, mystery, and loss. Suffering animals and mystics guide us through these poems, where Aileen Keown Vaux examines what it means to live inside the body–“a deep sea diving suit worn inside out”--on a planet teetering closer to collapse with every orbit. As Keown Vaux teaches us how “to eat again after a diet of grief” and reassures us that even when we feel despairingly alone, we–humans, creatures, trees and all–“are together in our loneliness.”

Kathryn Smith, Jake Adam York Prize winner for Self-Portrait with Cephalopod

In Aileen Keown Vaux’s haunting and hilarious collection of poems, Sad Man Happy Hour, the apocalyptic landscape of our times collides with our absurd capacity for joy. The quick way Keown Vaux’s lines move from despair to humor made me laugh in the way you do at a funeral: the laugh escapes you, and you feel like it was maybe a little wrong, but you also feel a little better. This book’s most significant gift is the compassion the speaker has for themselves, for the people they love, and for those they don’t know, like the sad men taking walks on the same trail at “happy hour” during the brutal loneliness of the pandemic. Sad Man Happy Hour includes the reader in the community these poems are building at the end of the world, when “we sit in the office / and say to each other / I’m sorry that happened to you.”

Laura Read, author of The Serious World