Winner of the 2025 Barry Spacks Poetry Prize,Color Advisory Board is Michele Santamaría’s first book of poetry. Available directly from Gunpowder Press, Bookshop.org, and elsewhere.
“Color Advisory Board ruthlessly interrogates mythmaking with vivid precision. The myths of classic cinema, the myths of family history, the myths of femininity, the myths of beauty, the myths of whiteness—all are fair game for explosion in Santamaría’s poems: “when have we let lies / stop us from coloring the world as we like?” I love how she reaches back into that primal fantasy world of Old Hollywood and exposes how these Technicolor illusions still shape the stories we tell about ourselves. How often do we dab a little extra lipstick on the truth, adjust the lighting to make our pasts more palpable? Michele Santamaría knows, and isn’t afraid to go in for the close-up: “To what degree / Are you alive / Because someone / Decided to be / Selfish, not just run / But throw somebody else / Down from the walls / While screaming / Not me, not me, not me.”
—Nicky Beer, author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes
