now available from Dzanc Books

The poems in this wonderful, gritty chapbook are full of wicked humor and a deep generosity of spirit— they forgive all our reckless foibles. The brilliant images—packed tight, one after another—create friction, throw off glorious sparks of insight and understanding. Christina Kallery doesn’t miss a thing. She finds the “tells” most of us are reluctant to acknowledge as we try to bluff our way through life as best we can. I love being in these poems among all the “dingbat romantics.” My kind of crowd, and, I’m betting, yours too.
—Jim Daniels

Christina Kallery’s poems possess an eerie bit of magic. She has the rare and uncanny ability to weave the world’s wandering souls and gritty, familiar details into a luminous tapestry, with cosmic significance. Her writing is glittering and precise, yet instantly absorbing and accessible. The overall effect is that of a ragtag hitchhiker who blows your mind with a few golden reflections, then vanishes at the next rest stop. Adult Night at Skate World includes some of the most wondrous poems I've read in years—beautifully observed, funny, and transporting. There’s so much heart here, so much empathy. By the end, we feel comforted to be among the lonesome and the lost. 
—Davy Rothbart, author of My Heart is an Idiot, editor of FOUND Magazine, and contributor to public radio’s This American Life

In this much-anticipated and brilliant debut collection, Christina Kallery’s full-hearted poems avert our gaze from the spot-lit glow into the forlorn, palpable scene way offstage where star-crossed lovers with “hearts electric” fail to connect, where a real swan falls madly for a swan boat, where all the “dingbat romantics” roller skate to oldies, and bare bruised hearts at carnivals and open mics with nothing left to lose. Kallery’s tough, tender voice riffs praise for the broken and the burnouts, for those who don’t make the list and can’t afford what’s in the trendy catalog—but unlike the “Drunk Guy” poetry she skewers, she doesn’t glorify the sad edges of American life as macho exercise or empty retro-chic adulation. Instead, she aims the crystal-bright beam of each of these hard-wrought, gorgeous poems beyond the shadows of broken marriages and alleys, past the disco lights and smoke and finds: all of us there, beautiful in spite of our loneliness, quivering, “tremulous for a little love and the sound / of a few hands clapping.” 
—Robert Fanning, author of Severance, Our Sudden Museum, American Prophet, and The Seed Thieves