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Poetry Chapbook - Steel Toe Books, 2024

Memory and myth. Cigarettes and summer nights. Worship songs and circle pits. don’t call us punk because we hate that traverses the backroads of America’s suburbia in the days before smartphones and AirPods at the very time of life when the aimless youth are waking up to their disillusionment at the world their parents were planting for them. These starkly direct poems speak to the human need for authentic community and escape before they drown in middle-class expectations. The characters, places, and times are pulled from a lived experience and expanded into a universal narrative around the search for something sustainable and true. Adam Oyster-Sands has written a love letter to punk and to those who wove in and out of the various shows, record shops, skate spots, and fast-food joints of his formative years. Whether you’ve spent a Saturday night in a circle pit and Sunday morning in a church pew or not, don’t call us punk because we hate that speaks to anyone who, at the exact right time, found their people in the unexpected places beyond the boundaries of a world passed to them through the stories they inherit.    

“Is this memory or myth?” Set in the sweltering, stifling suburbs of Dallas, TX in the 1990s, somewhere between nostalgia and regret, full of grace and longing, sits don’t call us punk because we hate that. Oyster-Sands takes us deep into his memories of growing up, of discovering a music scene that would change him forever, to meet the people that have come and gone in his life, and explore how the slow accrual of years can give us perspective on the unsolvable question of what it all means. 

-Scott Cannon, Picture Frame Press

don’t call us punk because we hate that is both sparsely direct and metaphoric as the poems pull you into specific people, places, and times that very well could be your own. Like the best punk bangers do, these poems make the personal universal.

-Book Blurb