In honor of Women’s History Month, we put together a special package of Kaya backlist titles including Sam Chanse’s one-woman play Lydia’s Funeral Video, Lisa Chen’s poetry collection Mouth, and Sia Figiel’s debut novel, Where We Once Belonged—about thirteen-year-old Alofa Filiga as she navigates the mores and restrictions of her village, Malaefou, and comes to terms with her own womanhood and search for identity—the first book by a Samoan woman author to be published in the United States. Read more about each book below.

Order the bundle here!

Lydia’s Funeral Video by Sam Chanse

Lydia’s Funeral Video is a one woman play written and performed by Sam Chanse a playwright and performer based in New York and California. In this apocalyptic satire, devout bank clerk Lydia Clark-Lin has 28 days to terminate an unplanned pregnancy, shoot her own funeral video, and do some stand-up comedy. This publication unites the full theater script of Lydia’s Funeral Video with a new counterpoint narrative and stream of consciousness illustration that enhance this dynamic realization of a live theater experience in book form. Read more about Lydia’s Funeral Video here!

Mouth by Lisa Chen 

Mouth, Lisa Chen’s debut collection of poetry, travels from parachute girls in Millbrae to Ezequiel the murder at a border town, creating a cartography of geographic and bodily landscapes whose distances are measure by languages. Mouth is an elegiac love song to the mundane horrors of loss –  genocide, heartbreak, revolution, exile. Yet, like Diane Arbus’ photos, Chen’s poems exude a mix of humor and pleasure, highlighting beauty in the perverse,  and the perverse in the everyday. Read more about Mouth here!

Where We Once Belonged by Sia Figiel

Lively, spirited, and fiercely written, Figiel uses the traditional Samoan storytelling form of su’ifefiloi to talk back to Western anthropological studies on Samoan women and culture in Where We Once Belonged. In doing so, she weaves an honest – and sometimes brutal – coming-of-age story which combines poetry with an exhilarating combination of humor and violence. Told in a series of linked episodes which recall V.S. Naipaul and Sandra Cisneros, this powerful and highly original narrative follows thirteen-year-old Alofa Filiga as she navigates the mores and restrictions of her village, Malaefou, and comes to terms with her own womanhood and search for identity. Read more about Where We Once Belonged here!

Celebrate Women’s History month and order this bundle of dazzling stories and enchanting poems here!