POET NICOLE HENARES did not name her fledgling chapbook press Magenta because it's the glittery lady's favorite color. She didn't title it in homage to Rocky Horror's vampy Transylvanian. Nope, Henares's inspiration came from the grand dames of TV reruns: The Golden Girls. Quite specifically, a philosophical musing from the mouth of Blanche: "When you're too blue to be angry, but too angry to be blue, you're magenta – somewhere in between."

"It's not very literary, but damn, I love The Golden Girls," Henares quips from her home and office in the charming Mayflower Hotel. A bit of kitschy pop culture to take the piss out of the sometimes excessively self-serious world of verse, the quote also succinctly sums up the infamous nature of the poet: part sensitive melancholia, part railing against cruelty and injustice.

A former curator of poetry events in North Beach and a present schoolteacher, Henares is somewhat of a sparkly pink angel to the poets she publishes. Approaching friends in the poetry community with the dazzling phrase "I'd like to do a book for you," Henares lovingly produces aesthetically darling books. Sure, they're simple, Kinko's-printed jobs with staple bindings, the kinds of books enterprising poets can print for themselves, but poets got enough to do just being poets. Just feeling their feelings and thinking their thoughts and getting it all down in a ratty notebook is more than enough for lots of scribes. What every poetry scene needs is someone like Henares, a community-minded poetry fanatic with a lust for linen paper and covers that sparkle with glitter dust.

While Henares found that turning teenagers on to underground poetry by day and facilitating underground poetry readings by night to be too much of a strain, she's found Magenta to be a way she can serve the poetry community without running herself ragged. "With chapbook production, all I need is a weekend," she says. "I can focus and get it done at my own pace."

And now for the living, breathing poets Henares is busy putting into modest print today. Firstly there is the publisher's own chapbook, Lush, whose cover is both sparkly and gray, overcast and optimistic. San Francisco is all over the poems of Lush, as are the voices of the high schoolers Henares works with. In "Caught in the Crossfire," a girl recounts a gun killing on the 29 bus, not recognizing the victim to be her classmate because "his face was so covered in blood"; in "High Terror Warning," a zoned-out special ed student comes alive at the mention of the "war on terror," railing against terror-fied neighborhoods "Where some families sleep in their bathtubs at night / because of all the shootings, / there isn't god bus service, / not enough jobs, / no grocery stores with fresh fruit and vegetables ..."

Henares recently put out a collection of poetry by Bambi Lake, a longtime staple of the local punk and poetry worlds. Smash and Grab dashes between elegant poetic fragments and frantic journal entries, referred to at the start as "a screen play, an opera, a show-time sitcom ... an impressionistic nonlinear record from a female mind." Mostly it is about street glamour and the families found in bars, romantic obsession and the mythologizing of self – a survival skill for queers like Lake. An untitled piece recounts a night at the old bar Sacrifice, where the poet reveals a damaging secret and muses, "I never lie but am often guilty of telling the truth." Lake rhapsodizes like a love-struck girl on prom night; in "Son of a Preacher Man," a single kiss conjures "the pastel 50s vintage / Bridesmaid dresses / float single file / before me."

Lake swirls name-dropping dish into poetry, extracting cultural history through gossip even when she doesn't know the dirt, such as in this tease regarding rumors linking Dead Kennedys' vocalist to White Trash Debutante's Ginger Coyote in "Jell-O": "But the truth is, / I don't know / because / I wasn't there."

But like most poets, Lake is best when she's singing the blues, pulling a glamorous capelet of melancholy around her mythic shoulders, as in the epic "I," which flashes back and forth between a past saturated with celebrity in the form of Tony Wards and Iggy Pop and a more wistful present:

"I sit in working class / Hipster Bars / and write in my notebook / everybody seems to be in love / I'm sort of heroic / sort of legendary / my lovers have / always preferred to / love me in private. / So the outside world / has always seemed / a bit unreal to me."

Lake is a serious San Francisco treasure, one of the crucial figures of the cultural landscape here, and Henares's inclusion of her work on Magenta's roster speaks to an understanding of the variety of local poetry traditions. Magenta will continue to crank out the erratic, lovely volumes as the humble Henares continues to meet poets whose work moves her.

"I never considered myself a press; I was just doing books," she says, laughing, from her studio in the Mayflower, which is cluttered with books and cats and whimsical purses. "I guess I am a press now!"