Sometimes Cool Things Are Terrible

"Dissinger writes with a delicate balance of sadness and beauty that captures the complexities of life and love with humanity and tact. She instills in her audience these same overlapping layers of emotion, to heartrending effect. Sometimes Cool Things Are Terrible defies its own title by being very cool, but not at all terrible. It's wonderful, really. Amanda Dissinger is a master of feeling."

- CA Mullins, author of Day Drunk Blues

"Genuine and intimate, these poems are imbued with a sense of nostalgia and familiarity which makes the reader feel right at home. Dissinger's writing is transient, simultaneously conscious of what has been, but also imagining ways to take another step forward. This collection is written with a sense of honesty usually reserved for late night conversations with close friends. Sometimes Cool Things Are Terrible is an exploration of any number of possible futures and serves as an invitation into Dissinger's poetic world."

- Kevin Bertolero, author of From the Estuary to the Offing

"Amanda Dissinger is the queen of cool and her writing reflects this. I wish I could give myself this book at fifteen while I was still learning how to love and be loved. She has mastered the soft love poem that still aggressively desires to be heard and validated. Her writing perfectly explores her relationship with others and herself, especially her own body and self-perception. Amanda Dissinger is the writer you read voraciously while also tweet at for boy advice and affirmation. In this book, you will find a friend."

- Erin Taylor, author of OOOO

"Sometimes Cool Things are Terrible occupies the quiet moments of nostalgic being. Listening to air conditioners and remembering his voice. Returning to old bars as if to find a missing person. Dissinger's poetry floats between those objects we keep and the stories that give them meaning. I read these lines like looking into a mirror, wondering- "how many years will i see you? / how many years will i be?"

- Zachary Cosby, author of 21 May

"Sometimes Cool Things Are Terrible pins reality under a three-lens microscope, dissecting each section before turning the magnification up and starting the process again. Amanda Dissinger's second collection is a story of youth, waiting, mistakes, and nostalgia. SCTAT perfectly captures our brains' ability of blurring the lines between what is and what was."

- Joseph Parker Okay, author of my phone is about to die and it hope it takes me with it