Winner of the 2015 Turnbuckle Chapbook Contest, selected by Sara Lippmann

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I Once Met You But You Were Dead is a hybrid chapbook of fiction and nonfiction that juxtaposes girlhood, womanhood, and cultural gender politics with war and violence. 

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Praise for I Once Met You But You Were Dead:

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"This chapbook is raw and timely and unforgettable. I love the textured layers, how the stories unfold, the jagged edges, how they push up against one another in juxtaposition and in accumulation. People ask me why I read, and my answer is for work like this: that stirs me out of my comfort zone, that upturns expectation and burrows into the deep, that grabs me by the heart and transports me, leaving me changed."

—Sara Lippmann, author of LECH

 

"These essays, flash fictions, short stories, prose poems…who cares what you call them? The writing is brilliant, realistic, violent, and full of hope and trauma. An extraordinary richness—cultural, literary, imaginative, vital—springs from the pages of SJ Sindu’s tales. Everybody should read them."

—Geoff Bouvier, author of Living Room and Glass Harmonica

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"SJ Sindu's stories don't make apologies, they fire no warning shots, and they won't slow down if you can't keep up. And you'll want to—raw and singing with hard-won grace and pain that's just as prized, SJ Sindu's characters actively negotiate the violence of masculine power and chisel away at the structures they were born into."

—CJ Hauser, author of The Crane Wife