RECORD RECORD SERIES

DONNA I LOVE YOU STEVE, by Yağmur Akyürek

Spring 2025

Open for pre-order now!

“A poet of delightful dexterity and mirth, Yağmur Akyürek is awake to the strange opulence of everyday communication. This collection takes its title from the graffiti on a town bridge, and to read it is to become intimate with a new environment. Akyürek invites you in not through description but through the particular, often surprising, associations, turns of phrase, and gestures on which language circulates.”

–Allyson Paty

”These poems are ridiculously fun. They leap before they look, they step effortlessly from fable to domestic interior, they tell you stories, and they take you on little walks around creepy towns.  Akyürek has such a light touch, and speaks in several registers at once. Enter this strange little book and don’t worry too much about where you are; you are in good hands.” 

-Matthew Rohrer

“Yağmur Akyürek's poems are a series of thought bubbles in an imageless graphic novel, captions to a set of ‘yellowing of photos like a slap in the face’, or ‘the classified files of [her] memory’, sound-bite-sized summaries so savory and delectable that you've just finished the whole bowl. In one moment, she's confiding in you that ‘The games I play with myself are questions or maybe answers / A puppeteer comes up only to me’; an instant later, she asserts that ‘Every desire has a cousin, tangential and 'blue'.’ Blending full-on har-har-humor with hit-the-solar-plexus poignancy, Akyürek is a master of the lean line, bending it pipe-cleaner style into every linguistic shape. Like a mundanely decadent voyeuristic fun fair ride, she opens windows onto odd domestic scenes, then snaps them shut just before our fingers get caught; yet when she tells us ‘You are the very act of looking’, we, the reader, know that we're what's being watched, and we revel.” 

- Arden Levine

RECORD RECORD is a series of debut chapbooks by NYC poets that consider the myriad ways our spacetime bends, warps, and frays across our shared realities. These chapbooks archive, calculate, and remix within the landscapes of cities, cosmos, and crises, offering language for motion and survival.

Series editors: Ashna Ali, Nico Bryan, Arden Levine & danilo machado

Cover design: Rodrigo Moreira

The Record Record series was made possible by the generous support of Ashna Ali, Julia Brandt, Joey De Jesus, Joel Dodge, Sarah Glidden, Jim Hayman, Karen Hildebrand, Peter Johnson, Arden Levine, danilo machado, Monica McClure, Navila Nahid, Leila Ortiz, Christine Scanlon, David Solo, Susanna Stephens, Kendra Sullivan, Morgan Võ, Candace Williams, Matthew Williams & Ariel Yelen.       

free pdf available later this year

Donations (suggested $2-10) for pdf downloads support the production of upcoming chapbooks.