Say Yes, Anpu, by Hugo Placer-Sanchez

Poetry, chapbook, 20 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Say Yes, Anpu is a devotional cycle of poems rooted in a contemporary reimagining of Egyptian funerary theology, centering the god Anubis not as a remote mythological symbol, but as an embodied and affective presence within the grief-soaked fabric of modern life. Set untraditionally in liminal spaces like gas stations, supermarket aisles, and empty suburban roads, the chapbook navigates a ritualized intimacy between god and mourner, collapsing sacred distance and reclaiming death as a site of tenderness and revelation. The poems are arranged with ceremonial intentionality, mirroring the movement of a funerary procession: invocation, descent, encounter, offering, aftermath. They draw from a syncretic theological lens: blending ancient Egyptian theologies of the heart and the afterlife with modern mysticism and psychopompic poetics. In doing so, the work discards the sterility of death-as-abstraction and instead reclaims grief, ritual, and divine embodiment as necessary acts of resistance and belonging. Say Yes, Anpu invites the reader not to explain or interpret divinity, but to meet it in all its trembling and unfinished qualities and in the quiet wreckage we carry. “The sense of chaos created by [Hugo’s] diction and arrangement is the same as the mood of a devotee. He probes and strikes darkness.” —Wesley Huang Hugo Placer-Sanchez is a writer and student based in St. Louis. His poetry explores mythology and modern surrealism. He is the founding editor of Kinpaurak, a literary magazine dedicated to the strange, the esoteric, and the revelatory. His writing has appeared in StreetLit Magazine, dadakuku, and other publications.