generic american household

by Liz Pino Sparks

Liz Pino Sparks

Liz Pino Sparks is a cross-genre writer, legal scholar, teacher, musician under the name Liz Capra, and a parent of five. They have made homes in: Post Soviet Russia, next to the steel mills of the Cuyahoga River, in the Sonoran Desert, and next to the Pacific Ocean. Liz is a proud grandchild of an Isleta Pueblo grandmother, a Sicilian immigrant grandmother, and generations of New Mexican Rancheros. They hold an MFA from San Diego State University, a JD from CWRU School of Law, and an LLM from CSU. 

Contact: elizabeth.v.sparks@gmail.com or @lizpinosparks on Instagram. 

praise for generic american household

Specter-infested, memory-saturated, brutal with domesticity, Liz Pino Sparks's Generic American Household is haunted as fuck. It is also a book of spells, each one complex enough to transform a cooking pot into a cauldron, trauma into incantation, envy into understanding. Witchcraft at work in verse.

– C. S. E. Cooney, author of Saint Death’s Daughter

Generic American Household is an uncompromising collection that unravels the delicate fabric of a family and then deftly reweaves it into something stronger, more complex, and dear. Set in a household's liminal spaces (porches, parked cars, root cellars, and attics) Pino Sparks’ poems are intimate snapshots of love's most tender and shadowy moments. Simultaneously heartbreaking and full of hope, they speak to the resilience of a family grappling with shattered expectations and forging new definitions of connection, ultimately celebrating the expansive nature of the human heart. 

– Allisa Cherry, Winner of the 2024 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize for An Exodus of Sparks