About the Author

KRISTINE ESSER SLENTZ is a queer writer of Maltese descent, raised in the Chicagoland area. A cult escapee and GED holder, she is the author of EXHIBIT: an amended woman, depose (FlowerSong Press, 2021, 2024) and Face-to-Faces (Thirty West Publishing House, 2026). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Saturday Evening Post, TriQuarterly, Five Points, TEDx, and elsewhere. KRISTINE is the co-founder, organizer, and host of Adverse Abstraction, a monthly experimental artist series in New York City’s East Village. She also produces and performs in Verse & Vision, a stage production currently in a micro-residency at NYC’s Dada and the IndyFringe Festival. Follow her art on Substack at Carnations & Car Crashes.

Author Photo by Corey Ewing

Reviews

“Face-to-Faces is a book of 'moth bitten kisses,' a book about separation and connection. Kristine Esser Slentz has written a remarkable hybrid collection which asks what is intimacy and where might we find it? From Feeld to a 'boyfriend list' to DMs and notes apps to QR codes, this book delights in its own form, just as it questions boundaries and old forms of love and marriage. I love this book for its clear-eyed examination of polyamory, just as I love its sheer playfulness and invention. Kristine Esser Slentz has given us a text that surprises us at every turn, a collection that is 'more of a spell than any question.’”

—NICOLE COOLEY, author of Mother Water Ash

“In Face-to-Faces, Kristine Esser Slentz blurs the line between body and machine, longing and loss, to reveal how desire and power collide in the digital age. These poems move 'deep among brain folds,' pulsing with the electric strangeness of our mediated lives:'download app / turn on song / turn on toy / record / send.' Here we are pressed against the truth of who we are and the world around us, returning to the urgent question: how do we love, even when fractured? With wit and incision, Kristine never pretends love is whole. She exposes the ache, the glitch, the silence between messages, where honesty becomes a form of intimacy, and where we are always, as one poem reminds us, 'instant / after—.' This is a document of vulnerability and survival, where poetry becomes both confession and resistance. Face-to-Faces is raw, intimate, and hauntingly human.”

—KAY POEMA, author of Diary of an Intercessor

“Face-to-Faces is a captivating archive of modern intimacy equal parts erotic ledger, grief-document and digital séance. Kristine Esser Slentz writes from the charged epicenter of desire where sexts, therapy worksheets, polyamorous kink, and domestic survival collide on the same glowing screen as she maps the messy negotiations of autonomy and attachment with a lyric precision that cuts through shame and spectacle. Face-to-Faces is a real-time record of emotional labor, of connection and disconnection. Slentz is doing something totally new and unforgettable.”

—SANDRA SIMONDS, Winner of the Reader’s Choice Award from the Academy of American Poets, Vermont Book Award in Fiction, & shortlisted for the Dzanc Fiction Prize

“'...make Me / feel I can be / on-demand...' Kristine Esser Slentz’s apt, piercing poly-dimensional collection, Face-to-Faces grants readers access to a speaker inhabiting a streamed-like quarantine. Anchored during the COVID pandemic, a period in which technology brokered relationships with others, ourselves, and gadgetry itself, eventually migrating into post-virus/viral environments, Face-to-Faces offers a kind of facsimile of daily life and love. Esser Slentz’s speaker asks, “What does an emotional [SIC] relationship look like between screens?” Filled with text and texts, QR Codes, and found written scraps, Esser Slentz employs her elegant, searing craft to immerse the reader/user in a revelatory unmasking, inviting us to consider our lives in quick response interactions. Mirrored perspective is replaced by a kind of URL existence, a site/sight with multiple landing pages, reflections and refractions. “i love being the other / woman so much / I made Myself / her in My marriage,” Esser Slentz’s speaker reveals. What is most striking is the humanity in these intimate pages: heartbreak, empathy, cayenne and brownies, lemons—despite—or perhaps because of—the new-world algorithms Face-to-Faces considers. A vital, stunning collection.”

—H.E. FISHER, author of Sterile Field

“Face-to-Faces slithers with inventive forms and hypnotic language that carry you through the highs and lows of love: virtual, blooming, encoded, public, and personal. As she turns from sensual and comforting to heart-wrenching and confessional, Kristine Esser Slentz archives her longing and invites us in — what a gift from a blazing and experimental voice that defines this poetry generation.”

—JOE NASTA, author of (friendship poems)

“Writing from depths of the pandemic, Kristine Esser Slentz’ Face-to-Faces searches unrelentingly for connection in a deeply fraught time. Navigating the messy process of making a You into a We alongside the unmaking and remaking of the I, Slentz’ lyrics shrewdly employ lines left hanging and stanzas left suspended to echo the feeling in those days of things being surreal, then unreal, then tragically, all too real. Refreshingly ambivalent towards the many mediations of the modern age, Slentz here offers wordplay, erasures, and collage first as a response to trauma but also, surprisingly, a path through it. A courageous, biting collection: peroxide on the wound.”

—BENJAMIN MORRIS, author of The Singing River

“Face-to-Faces isn’t just a collection of poems; it’s an inventive archive commemorating how we survive and flourish in the digital age. In verses brimming with winking romanticism and grit, Kristine Esser Slentz embraces the absurd without ever losing warmth, juxtaposing transcendent lyric gestures with an influencer’s linguistic flair. This multimodal book is an act of joy and a song of delight for our times.”

—SARA WALLACE, author of The Rival

“With language electric like a live wire post storm, Kristine Esser Slentz's Face-to-Faces vividly maps out stories of broken boundaries, the embodied and disembodied woundings and joys of intimacy, the heights and lows of love, along with the unparalleled enrichments that flow from cultivating our own families of choice and languages of love, so that in the end we ultimately are able to name and claim the inner culinary of our own desires.”

—JAMES DIAZ, author of Once More, Into the Light