catalog
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Definition
Adeline Song is on the run. The US government has started to hunt down people like her. But when Adeline crosses paths with mechanic Finley Reyes, she must decide whether she will let other people continue to define her, or whether she will finally define herself—before the government uses them both for human experimentation.
The Trouble with Sweetheartz
If it were anyone else calling, Jamie would not have heard the phone ring. But it’s his ex-girlfriend, Micah, and she needs a ride home from Florida, almost ten hours away. On a rollicking midnight ride from Tennessee to Daytona Beach and back, Jamie turns over his relationship with Micah, his friends, and even God, as he tries to do the right thing and save her. One last time.
Manna Songs: Stories of Jewish Culture & Heritage
Manna Songs: Stories of Jewish Culture & Heritage is a stunning anthology of 32 powerful essays celebrating Jewish joy. Set in New England, Los Angeles, Seattle; across oceans in Israel, Norway, Spain; in synagogues of youth, forests, and seder tables, its stories, like manna in the desert of our ancestors, sustain body and soul.
Mangrove
Mangrove takes the reader on a journey from denial and shame to acceptance and love. In poems both narrative and lyric, comic and tragic, accessible and multilayered, Hollands explores what it was like to grow up gay in the late twentieth century, to deal with grief, and to create a family of one’s own.
Bone Valley Hymnal
Bone Valley Hymnal arrives from the molten core of Utah’s arid landscapes. Here, with the fossils mothers pass down to their daughters Franson-Thiel weaves hymns of heritage and gender performativity.
Make a Wish
If you could have one wish granted, would you ask for another? Make a Wish would. Childhood cancer, the aftermath of divorce, sexual violence, and a teenage girl’s disappearance haunt these poems, while desire and love and the sweetness of simple mornings triumph.
Twang
Set inside a crumbling rural landscape where preachers don’t do as they say and men die by violence, neglect and strange new viruses, the poems in Twang revisit and reconfigure narratives about Appalachia and the AIDS Crisis years of the 1980s and early 1990s.
Grieving Hope
Grief and hope. Two words that aren’t used together often. Yet, through stories of nature and nurture, of reckoning and coming to terms, Charlotte Hamrick, Kim Steutermann Rogers, Ronita Chattopadhyay, Kristina Tabor, and Janet Murie powerfully weave the seemingly incongruent into deeply moving and incredibly inspiring tapestries of meaning.
Magical Objects
Magical Objects is a weirdo collection of flash and short fiction drawing from fabulism and the magical power of metaphor. It's genre-bendy, queer, dark, whimsical, and ridiculous. It is a fairy tale of growing up with books and fairy tales. It is about words, identity, and broken, smart-assy girls learning how to draw strength from their scars.
NO OFFENSE: A Memoir In Essays
When Jackie "came out" in 2014, right as the Trump era was revving up, she began paying closer attention to the questions, uncomfortable reactions, and pointed assumptions about sexuality and gender she was witnessing and now experiencing.
Lightning Is a Mother
Within these lyrically rich poems, Appalachia is a kind of Eden, a paradise spoiled by humanity. Eve, the first mother, becomes a starting point for the speaker’s exploration of what it means to be a mother, an earth-dweller, a self.
Sweet Nothings Are a Diary If You Know How to Read Them
Virtuoso scream queens. Cuckholding cockroaches. Scorned mermaids. Orphaned trapeze artists. Young love. True love. Secret love. Consuming love. Sex, strippers, Stoli, and a severed human hand. A collection of 22 micros and flashes to light your fire and break your heart.
Hearty Little Beasts
A thoughtfully beautiful, eerie meditation on loneliness and addiction. Catherine evokes the starkness of Cormac McCarthy's prose with a little more soul, a little more yearning.
The Wendigo of Wall Street
Juliette is an Anthropology professor in New York City. Cole is a self-professed “Crypto Bro” who makes a killing on Wall Street. After their disastrous first date, Juliette never expects to hear from Cole again. But when Cole texts her late one night, she finds herself caught up in a sordid plot of money, mythology, and murder.
The Time Golem
In 2001, unknown artist and Holocaust survivor David Klein unveils The Time Golem, a massive sculpture inspired by the legendary protector of the Jews. At the opening, he performs a forbidden kabbalistic ritual—one not attempted in 400 years—to bring it to life.
The Fair Day
There’s something different about this county fair: a certain rush in the air each time you ride a ride, a certain sizzle in your blood. After a teenager nicknamed Electricity had her innocence stolen from her ten years ago at the county fair, she returns prepared to steal it back—not realizing all the forces at play, then and now, each chasing after innocence and power.
Em’s River
Vera, Em, and Stefan live intertwined, entangled in the damp sheets and the complexities of life under the oppressive gaze of their government. Employing lyrical prose, Em’s River explores the fall of the Weimar Republic and rise of fascism during Germany’s Third Reich through the lens of personal turmoil and privilege as it explores class, compulsive heterosexuality, and nationalism.
Calvin Klein
For twenty years, Sam has lived in fear, controlled by his father—while Cal, his brazen, chain-smoking best friend, hides in his closet. Now, with Cal facing a terminal illness, the two must race against time to break free from the expectations that have kept Sam paralyzed.
A Square of Dirt
In the unforgiving landscape of Afghanistan's Tangi Valley, a military base tells its own extraordinary story. Neither human nor fully inanimate, this “square of dirt” becomes a sentient witness to the brutal rhythms of war, listening intently to the soldiers who build and inhabit it.
Delphinium Gospel
Delphinium Gospel is a triptych-structured poetry collection that explores the blessing of creation as a manifesting interplay between horrific grief and desperate longing in the aftermath of Denzel Scott's brother, uncle, and cousin's respective murders, exploded in their interconnectedness to the sorrows that plague the United States of America.
Small Measures
Small Measures is an intense and vivid collection of poems one keeps going back to. It is filled with a startling and exquiste use of language.
High Priestess of the Apocalypse
High Priestess of the Apocalypse is a lyrical exploration of disobedience, grief, and healing (often simultaneously). This is a memoir that reckons with climate grief, the impulse to fight for what we love, and how to turn dread into action.
What Blooms in the Dark
The stories in What Blooms in the Dark imagine worlds where nature is magic, queer love transcends universes, and relationships pulse with the fear of inevitable grief. Capitalism preserves ghosts and produces cyborgs. Women are inspired by cicadas’ screaming songs and sparrows that transform into light.
These Strange Bodies
These Strange Bodies is an intimate account of two tumultuous years and a clarifying dissection of how the female body exists in public and social spaces that are rooted in gendered and sexual violence.
So Long This Wound Stayed Open
So Long This Wound Stayed Open is a map toward forgiving and healing your inner child. In her poetry collection, Chang names core wounds like fear of rejection, loss of heritage and home, and welcomes them into her arms, saying: we need not let our scars turn us into islands. Let them instead be the light others use to find us in the dark.
Resembling a Wild Animal
Resembling A Wild Animal is a collection of poems which explore what it means to be wild and what it means to be only human. The poems delve into the wildness of motherhood, animal personas, and the weird streaks of feral that can be found in everyday life.
All Lovers Burn at the End of the World
All Lovers Burn at the End of the World is a collection of 50 micros and flashes that straddle our world and beyond in a voicy mix of speculative and literary fiction.
If You Love Me, You’ll Kill Eric Pelkey
Mark is a disgruntled adjunct professor and middling poet. One night at a reading, he meets Donna, a walking hurricane who challenges him out of his complacency into a passionate love affair. But it’s not enough for them to have each other when the world is being destroyed by billionaires and corruption.
The Monsters Are Here
The thirty stories in this collection can be described as Kelly Link meets Bram Stoker and Nathaniel Hawthorne in a forest or an alternative universe with aliens. The stories rely on both humor and terror to capture the reader’s attention.
All the Parts You Haven’t Lost
All the Parts You Haven’t Lost is a hybrid collection of poetry and lyrical prose that navigates a violent nosedive into early motherhood, exploring the depths of identity loss and self-perception outside of what a “good mother” is permitted to discuss.
Throwaway Stories
Reminiscent of the styles of Lorrie Moore and Raymond Carver, Throwaway Stories is a collection of modern American fiction about the small moments that define our lives. Rich with irony, humor, and some darkness, these stories are about the choices we make, and how we justify them to ourselves.
Dating Silky Maxwell
From a rundown coal country dog track to a glittering Washington, DC highrise, Butler brings to life a chorus of passionate, damaged characters who leave their pasts behind and reinvent themselves until their mistakes no longer define them.
A Family Thing
In her thought-provoking debut full-length collection, A Family Thing, Ashley Elizabeth invites you into the depths of her childhood, marked by tragedies including childhood sexual assault, ailing parents, and the loss of innocence. With raw vulnerability, she guides the reader throught the corners of her past, with language that is as haunting as it is cathartic.
One Night We Will No Longer Bear the Ocean
One Night We Will No Longer Bear the Ocean tells the story of a life-changing encounter between two people haunted by past trauma and anxieties. Their connection and mutual fascination dispels the darkness—but only for a while.
Awakenings
What happens when 49 authors sit down to craft their experiences of living in a body? Magic! Curated by Diane Gottlieb, with a foreword by Gayle Brandeis, Awakenings: Stories of Bodies & Consciousness is truly a magical anthology of short essays, filled with trauma and triumph; pleasures and pain; challenges, resilience, and growth.
The Eleanor
The Eleanor, is a delightful romp through the streets of downtown Reno. After a mysterious hum nearly debilitates Leland Powers, he seeks to liberate the throwaways who have lived in his transient hotel for many years.
The Sky Is an Elephant
The Sky Is an Elephant is part imaginary playmate, part near-death high jinks, and part love song from the body to the soul and back again. It’s a shaggy dog story, a story within a story, maybe even a koan. A little humor, a little Zagajewski. Finally, it’s in homage to poets Jack Spicer and Federico García Lorca, who played with the greathearted gift of poetry until the day they died. And after.
The Details Will Be Gone Soon
The Details Will Be Gone Soon is a close investigation of the primordial underpinnings behind Alzheimer’s disease and the emotional wreckage left in its wake. This poetry collection follows the speaker and his grandmother, Nana, and the various memories shared between the two.
Roadkill
Steven has one year left of college when he returns to his small New Hampshire hometown for the summer. He says he is home to help his friend John, whose mother is dying, but he just might be escaping the uncertainty of his future. While he’s home, Steven finds himself drawn to the mysterious Catherine, an out-of-towner who drives around with a shovel in the back of her truck. The two must decide if they can trust each other – and themselves when a natural disaster is sparked nearby.
Wild Plums
Wild Plums follows Maya, a young city dweller grieving the death of her mother. Maya’s future after college is unclear—until her much older partner invites her to relocate with him to Marionberry, Oregon. When Maya is exposed, it becomes impossible to continue underestimating the women in her life, and where she fits among them.
AIRLOC
When two London widows arrive at Scotland's eerie Fairloch Hotel, Muriel's unsettling visions of a shape-shifting angel force the friends to flee—only to uncover the hotel's dark wartime secrets and a mysterious secret: elderly guests check-in, but no one ever checks out.
Consignment
When a ne’er-do-well cousin dies unexpectedly, Mary Ellen and Charles Hawley agree to take his young son Steven into their home. The boy’s birth mother, who is mentally ill, has already inflicted some psychological damage, but Mary Ellen is determined to help Steven start over. This act of charity soon takes its toll on a marriage that is already quietly fading. As Mary Ellen struggles to adapt to new parenting challenges, she begins to withdraw from her husband and cling to their two-year-old daughter. Finally, in a fit of longing for her former life, Mary Ellen indulges herself in a shopping trip and misses an afternoon pickup from school. And Charles, who must take up the slack, discovers a secret.
Where We Were Then
Possibility takes root in unexpected places, often in the seemingly inconsequential, and thus the chance meeting of Vicki and Jacob in a Seattle dive bar brings with it books and bus rides and bangs. It brings foot rubs and literature adapted for film and tears for the sake of a fictional loss. It also brings a proposition. Vicki takes the lead, and Jacob can’t help but follow even though he’s unsure of where it’s all going. There is talk of sex, the expectation of it, and of the fear of what it might cost. A date is set for Valentine’s Day, but will they find it? Will the now of the date transform into a beginning? Or will their connection be a brief moment that leads only to half-remembered memories?
The Reasons We Had to Meet
In this poignant tale of transitions, Chris moves to New York and his path soon intertwines with that of Jane’s, a young woman looking for a missing cat. The Reasons We Had to Meet is a magical story that weaves itself around themes of mortality, affliction, and the profound impact of lending a helping hand.
All Burn Down
When the apocalypse comes a brother and sister flee deeper into an America that was dying before the firestorms started. Grappling with meaning they abandon their names and fall in with a group of survivors led by Bradley Cooper and come to find that life has changed, but also not as much as they would've thought.
Harboring
Takeshi Furuya is an alien who has adopted contemporary Kobe, Japan as his new home. While fully assimilating, he defends the nation against other more dangerous extraterrestrial visitors—often with lethal force. When he meets a Japanese man who unsettles him even more than these hostile outsiders, he begins to question the simple morality of his mission. Could he ever truly belong to a place so far removed from his birth? And to secure his place there, what must he sacrifice?
Boomerang
When the 2008 financial crash forces Cassie and her high-achieving friends back to their conservative hometown, they confront an unexpected truth—the dreams they ran from might hold the key to rebuilding their futures.
Good Catholic Girl
Kathleen Mazzetti has transferred to a small Catholic high school in the North Bronx to escape years of harassment from an older boy at Teddy Roosevelt High. It is the 1970s and neither the courts nor the police will protect her from John Rovazzi. At St. Finbarr’s, she keeps her head down, eager to avoid attention. Her classmate Paul Hanlon is sympathetic to the shy newcomer but busy with his own life of sports and friends. Then, thanks to a well-meaning priest, he learns that Rovazzi has followed Kathleen to her new school and threatened not only her but also her family. When it becomes clear that her life is truly in danger, Kathleen and Paul come up with a risky plan to stop the stalker once and for all, a plan that involves a carefully written script, the Rocky Horror Picture Show and the New York City subway system.
Like a Compass in Her Bones
After spending her childhood traversing the country with her free-spirited mother, Emily Gates has done a good job of giving her son a stable, rooted childhood on the Southside of Chicago. But as much as she tries to be “normal,” Emily has one secret: she can see the souls of the recently dead, and even helps them cross to the other side in a place she refers to as the Tunnel of Souls. When she’s called to help the dying soul of the father she never met, she realizes that maybe her definition of home has been wrong all along.
Proof of Life
Proof of Life examines small moments in the lives of normal people who struggle with the same foibles and baggage we all possess. This focus on human interaction—the things people do for and to one another—captures the human condition in stark contrasts and in every shade of gray.
Winners & Losers
Gene McCullough is a local redneck who’s just starting to figure out what really matters, particularly as it relates to his on-again-off-again girlfriend, Darla. But what will it take for this rabble-rouser to embrace change? Winners & Losers is a story about hearts like wheels, and the limitation and loss that amplify what’s truly meaningful in our lives.
Wolfsong
Through a series of flash narratives, Kathryn Silver-Hajo’s powerful debut story collection, Wolfsong, draws us irresistibly into the lives of a constellation of female characters.
For What Ails You
A flash collection about Black femmes and new conjure women who take MARTA and battle a multiverse of woes, racism, and generational trauma. They have the water, the juice, and the juju, and they're healing each other through the powers of food, prayer, sex, and other un/known medicinals
The Peeling of a Name
The Peeling of a Name is an exploration of the idea and the power of names, what it means to grow up Asian American, what it means to be Asian American during a time in our country with so much violence and hate towards Asians and Asian Americans.
Things Hard and Lovely
Things Hard and Lovely is a collection of poems about motherhood, identity, time, and fragility spanning a decade spent witnessing and reflecting on the mundane miracles of life. The poems kaleidoscope between the personal and the universal, dancing with the physical world and the spaces untethered to the earth (digital, spiritual, and otherwise).
It Came From Beneath the Ink!
Step into the world of R.L. Stine as seen through the eyes of 14 writers. This anthology includes frightening fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction filled with all the nostalgia and childhood memories that go bump in the night.
This Is How We Learn to Pray
18 poems complimented by 18 illustrations derived from the rawness within those poems emboss themselves onto a paper canvas meant for the reader to crawl into and color their emotional reaction to the work on the pages provided.
Growing Pains
Growing Pains presents five microchapbooks in one volume. Each microchapbook threads coming-of-age anguish and popular culture references throughout, which lends for a cathartic experience of our youth through these powerful micro-chapbooks.
The Grief Lottery
Reading Becca Yenser's new collection, The Grief Lottery, is like looking down into a trash-strewn alley and finding the glitters of hope and joy in the mere act of living.
Little Astronaut
Little Astronaut is a literary kaleidoscope blending the cerebral and emotional, and humor with darkness. These essays dig into the tiny, intimate moments that stitch us together: awaiting sunrise on Christmas mornings with a brother, the unexpected grief of finding a wounded bird, and the meaning of objects passed between sisters.
Icaros
Icaros is a psychedelic odyssey that roams from Los Angeles to Andromeda and is set to a soundtrack of 1960s and 70s rock and roll classics, this playful debut collection of prose poems from Matthew Schultz riffs on counterculture literature from The Beats and Surrealists to Science Fiction and Fantasy. An encomium to poets like Max Jacob, Jim Morrison, Terrance Hayes, and Jose Hernandez Diaz, Schultz considered the intersections among prose and poetry, space and time, imagination and reality, the known and the unknown.
With Ghosts
With Ghosts is a collection of twenty ekphrastic vignettes, an experiment of communication across and between generations. Matthew Schultz distills poetic memories from the abstract visual compositions painted by his four-year-old son, Arthur. This series of prose poems wonders at the possibility of speaking about our past and future selves, indeed to them and with them—like a game of telephone connecting text to image, childhood to childhood, father to son.
Something Dead in Everything
Something Dead in Everything—a collection of flash fiction that explores the intricacies, intimacies, and strangeness of grief, in whatever form it may take; in it the reader is weaved into the fabric of everything and nothing at once—unsettling, dark truths meet the numbness we will all come to understand one day.
Butterflies Over Flame
This full-length of centos, Butterflies Over Flame, is Aura Martin’s debut collection. Assembled as a collage, each cento draws from novels, short stories, and poetry. Butterflies Over Flame tells a story in three acts, exploring the various complicated stages of life. These centos build and swell off each other, yet maintain a coherent storyline throughout, from a girl experiencing her first period, a young woman searching for meaningful relationships, a mother grieving the death of her child, and an old woman living alone by the sea. These themes reflect life, death, upheaval, recovery, and love. Wrenching and triumphant, this collection is a must for lovers of found poetry and prose poetry.
Whoever Said Love
All at once, a man finds he’s packed a Subaru wagon for college, and, as his eager son pulls out the drive, he realizes most of his parenting has been done in an anxious hush. Each of the poems in Whoever Said Love stops at a quiet way station in a two-decade journey of father-and-sonhood.
Flight Instinct
Flight Instinct is a collection of short stories that explores characters who are feeling trapped in the circumstances of life. They struggle to express their true identities and desires, and ultimately find small ways to reckon with big choices. They yearn for...
Lone
Lone is an ode to suburbia and all the girls who grow up in these beautiful yet isolating slivers of the world. In Lone, girls write their own alternative lives, make friends with the natural environment, test and steal new names, and wander through memories before they escape them.
A World Beyond Cardboard
A gang of beached octopuses, a flat stripped bare, a dead husband appearing in condensation, a sip of Soju and a secret, an egg boiling in a pan…
A World Beyond Cardboard collects twelve of Jonathan Cardew’s award-winning micro stories, each investigating a character or characters at crisis points, in worlds at once familiar and in the end very strange.
swerve
Burning hotter than a late-night motel sign, Rachael Crosbie’s Swerve is a compelling exercise in liminal spaces, bodily and otherwise. It does not limit its own innovations in language, of course—all the while maintaining a thorough, moving readability for all levels of reader.
We Love in Small Moments
The most beautiful moments are when we love and see love in unexpected places. We Love in Small Moments is a collection of snapshots into love, however that looks for you.
Manifold
Travis Cravey’s short fiction arrives like a punch. His stories are lean, hard, and deeply insightful about the human condition. Read this book now, remember it forever.
Mother Figures
Amy Barnes has a knack for what Jennifer Pieroni has called “smart surprise.” Each of these mother/daughter stories grabs the attention with its first sentence then continues to wrongfoot the reader willfully as it proceeds. The stories are focused, lean, yet packed with unexpected details—stigmata, plastic eyes, industrial bras, a watermelon called Trudy, vulture balloons. Barnes has a voice that is entirely her own.
Covenants
In these 14 flash stories, you'll find characters risking their lives and striving in a dystopian world. Will they flourish and crumble like the buildings around them? Dean writes with sharp prose and keen insights into the desires and challenges of being human in a disappearing world.
The Cake, The Smoke, The Moon
Dark, glittering, and dead serious when it's not hilarious, The Cake, the Smoke, the Moon is a delight. Within these pages you'll find potent gems by a master miniaturist; stories that crackle with the sheer electricity of their inventiveness. This is a book of and for the haunted among us, where only the moon (and Francine Witte) know the truth.
MIXTAPES
MIXTAPES shows us the connections between memories and dreams and nightmares like no other collection of poetry I have ever read. This collection does not hesitate to push boundaries and break expectations. Ambitious, daring and human.
SOFTENING
SOFTENING is Olivia Braley’s debut chapbook. This series of linked vignettes explore a girl’s coming-of-age as she seeks refuge within a body that is simultaneously being hardened by the world she inhabits. In its consideration of gender and girlhood, the collection seeks to interrogate what is remembered, what can’t be forgotten, and how memory manifests in the physical body.
Like Us
In Like Us, L comes into their own. As a queer and mentally ill person, they use micro memoir to piece together the formative experiences of their sexuality and recovery. The road is winding. Join them.
In the Rooms of a Tiny House
“Merchant expertly reimagines the Adam and Eve myth in this collection; in lieu of Eden, we have a tiny house, a dollhouse perhaps, a metaphorical fish bowl where we can observe Eve loom large as loving partner, shameless adulteress, and eager mother-to-be.”
Petunia
Chance Castro is a recent graduate of Cal State San Bernardino’s M.F.A. program in poetry. He lives and writes in Southern California. His work has appeared in RHINO, Superstition Review, Santa Clara Review, as well as others. He is the founding poetry editor of The Great American Literary Magazine and a member of the PoetrIE literary community in the Inland Empire.
Heart Radicals
A book about love that's always in movement, the most human kind of love. Movement from city to city, movement of the snow around you as you reflect, movement of feelings in and out of uncertainty, all grounded by the details of conversations and relationships and the spaces where they unfold.
Lost City Museum
Layered and nuanced, the poems of Lost City Museum submerge us in worlds fashioned out of our world. We find ourselves in sea or fog, in petrified lava, in glass, in night, in an organ’s pipes of bones. And always, always, we are submerged in language that rouses and compels. These are deeply inhabited landscapes, precise and perceptive.
Creature Feature
Ruth Foley’s masterful second collection emerges from the black-and-white shadows of the Golden Age of Horror, but these missives to characters we all know and, on occasion, love, refuse to cease their interrogations with nostalgic bromides or simplistic answers. The monsters here are not merely others; they are us, performed with a meticulous attention to history and detail that rivals our best auteurs.
Requiem for a Doll
What is the appeal of the miniature, of the simulacrum? What does the dollhouse reveal in its cut-away display of room upon connecting room with Victorian wallpaper, tiny utensils, a roast in the oven, teardrop chandeliers? In this chapbook, Ellie White takes us inside domestic spaces to show us a landscape of wild and disjointed nature, against and in which girlhoods unfurl and develop. In these sharply chiseled, dream-like poems.
The Pretty Machine
The Pretty Machine will quicken your pulse. The Pretty Machine will hyperventilate you. In a good way. Everything about The Pretty Machine is urgent and necessary and damn beautiful.
Love Letters to Michigan
A dead mother, a deaf cat, an ex-nun, and a waitress forced to dress as a milkmaid—these are some of the ordinary characters that populate the extraordinary stories in Christine Lasek's Love Letters to Michigan.
The Emily Fables
In The Emily Fables, Dickinson’s writing changes the body/the being of anyone tough enough to read what she writes, how it makes that person gasp, makes that person's throat catch, heart skip skip a beat as word after word she nails something that has never before been nailed.
How to Break My Neck
Kinetic, wary, tense with language that switches gears, contradicts itself, Jessica Walsh’s How to Break My Neck is a collection that makes us readers hold on tight.
According to the Gospel of Haunted Women
Judith Rooney reminds us that vivid objects, massed around those who are absent or estranged, may let us touch what we never could in the world. From cradle-jars to mothball pouches (a husband is even married twice!) all find their way richly home in these wise, sad poems.
Invincible Summers
Invincible Summers is a gorgeous meditation on history and family, innocence and experience. Robin Gaines has created an unforgettable character in Claudia, but by following her through eleven years of her life, she shows us how each one of us is many characters throughout a single lifetime. Her voice and sensibility changes, and we change with her, as the years pass and events alter her time and place and self.
Man on Fire
Zack Bean has put together here a wonderful and memorable collection of stories. I was surprised and delighted by the unusual landscape, sometimes lush, sometimes stark, often full of secrets and always peopled by 'bad boys' of one kind or another. Bean's masterful and original use of language throughout the book is an additional delight.
The Story Ends — The Story Never Ends
Joyce Goldenstern’s stories chart the fierce bonds of love and deep yearning that run across childhood, adulthood, and between generations. Set against a Midwest of the past and present, these twelve stories mine devotion, regret, betrayal, and loss, at once rich with nostalgia and the drama that inhabits ordinary lives—a testament to the enduring attachments of people and place.
The Whitings
Whenever I read one of Josh Penzone’s stories, from a dusty corner of my brain, I hear Charlie Rich singing, “No one knows what goes on behind closed doors.” And so it is with The Whitings. Penzone opens the doors and unlocks the secrets of his characters’ hearts, exposing the double lives of neighbors, friends, spouses, parents, children—people who thought they knew each other so well, but man, oh man, were they wrong.
Last of the Species
Two people, who before meeting came dangerously close to extinction themselves, find connection in their concern about the demise of a species. In Fifield's beautifully crafted story, hope is the ultimate destination as the characters come to terms with life’s wounds.
These Acts of Water
Nina Bannett’s These Acts of Water traces a daughter’s journey through the depths of her mother’s mental illness. These beautiful, finely crafted poems chronicle love, loss, grief, and the redemptive power of memory. The intensity of Bannett’s imagery and her deft use of language cohere to form a tightly woven whole that demands to be read more than once. This unflinchingly honest collection resonates with courage, wisdom, grace, and the abiding strength that flows out of suffering but is never submerged by it.
Girl Power and Other Short-Short Stories
Composed of forty-four stories fewer than 2,000 words apiece, the universally-female protagonists of Girl Power each navigate a portion of the labyrinthine trail from maidenhood through motherhood and into matronhood while negotiating the many complexities of being female in the contemporary era.
Concealed Weapons
In this deeply felt first collection, Kindra McDonald asks us to consider the great variety of unmeasured things nested inside “a simple life.” To read through these poems is to encounter the familiar at closer range, so we can see and experience anew what we might have overlooked before.
Before Fire: Divorce Poems
Each poem in this collection is a stepping stone in a swollen, stormy river, to the other side where a new wholeness awaits. They are rendered through the center of the fire with a sense of trust that fireburns away the unnecessary, to the necessary self.
Shhh
A nuanced and emotionally relentless story. As fascinating as it is beautifully written and compassionate
Machinist in the Snow
The juxtaposition of the material and natural world is everywhere present in Larry Eby’s long work, Machinist in the Snow, where echoes of Whitman and Oppen accrue into an original voice that attempts to find a new spirit and home in “a post industrial world: / When the mechanism fails, remove / ice from jar: an engine labeled Body will ignite / a new fire.” Machinist in the Snow is a sustained, layered and compelling work.
Everything We Create Smells Like the Earth
Everything We Create Smells Like the Earth is a rhapsodic primal scream for lovers of poetry today. Reading this volume of poems was similar to sitting down over a stiff drink with Allen Ginsburg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and chit-chatting about the predicament of the world. Paul McGlamery reminds us of our ever present relationship with Mother Earth and yet the nuances and mysteries of primitive life are still resonating in our modern lives.
Nobody’s Looking
With a tender, wised-up voice, J.R. Miller writes about the mysteries of attachment like no one else, reminding us that childhood and adulthood were never separate categories, but continuous, alive, and enmeshed.
Pyrophitic
In the tinder-dry Southwest, a few natural species, pyrophites, manage to tolerate the intense heat of wildfires—even need it to survive. So, too, for the women in the chancy terrain of Susan DeFreitas’s new story, negotiating flare-ups of human heat, lust and betrayal, choice and consequence.
Heat Washes Through
Sometimes things happen. Memories store themselves in your head like stories written in a book. Heat Washes Through is a collection of poems of recollections from a year of madness and loneliness. William L. Alton takes confessional poetry to a new and journalistic level, making each poem visceral and timely, recording his own life with an emotional depth couched in minimal and detailed images.
Cover the Sky with Crows
Cover the Sky With Crows is haunted—by shadows, lost love, lost lives. Osayande fashions doors into mirrors and invites readers to see grief for what it plainly is--an embarrassed sword swallower. This work walks the line of the interior and exterior landscapes of Detroit while boldly naming the complex realities of blackness on fire in America.
The Upper Peninsula Misses You
The Upper Peninsula Misses You is a book of poems that tells an unpitying family tale with brutal sympathy—a narrative that is fractured by semi-historical acts or section breaks. While it is very much writing of place, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the broken landscapes and languishing families can be found all across America.
Audrey: A Book of Love
Audrey: A Book of Love is an important look at intricate facets of love as it surprises, delights, challenges, sometimes defeats, and always honors our lives. "She came with a painted dragon and cinnamon hearts for Valentine’s. Her name was Audrey and I am hard pressed to remember what anyone else brought to the party."
Simple Pleasures
Amidst the known and predictable elements of this world, A.W. Marshall’s fictions open up uncanny new spaces, ruled by the unexpected, the inexplicable. Thanks to mysterious encounters and turns of event, the very human characters in Simple Pleasures come to experience life as “weirder and full of more possibility” than before.
Speaking Through Sediment
Speaking Through Sediment began as an adventure in a speculative style of leaping that Cindy Rinne and Cooper simultaneously experimented with. Both poets are seekers, and as such were engaged in a style of play where they leapt without being sure of where they were going to land.
The Great and Terrible
In The Great and Terrible, Natalie Byers seamlessly weaves together the narrative and the lyrical to bear witness to tragedies most people would prefer stayed safely locked away—childhood abuse, a brother's murder, and the trauma adult survivors must learn to endure.
What Becomes Within
Lilius maps her bipolarity with elegant intensity and rage of spirit. Sifting through a body scape of emotions twenty miles wide, Lilius’ poems bravely plunge the reader head first into an icy pool of depression and alienation only to catapult our minds upward where we shake, grasp at strong holds, and attempt to balance on a high wire act of fiery mania.
Heart Full of Tinders
Heart Full of Tinders is a hybrid—it is not quite poetry, and it is not quite prose either. The book exists in the space between these forms, just as we all exist in gray spaces--our bodies in slow decay from day to day, our bodies that vie for dominance over the less tangible, but arguably more real, human soul.
Dreams of the Living
Dreams of the Living has poems in it which I wrote as early as 2001, but the book really began to take shape in 2007 while I was obtaining my MFA in Poetry from the University of Arizona.The book is an intensely personal response to the death of my mother in 2004, and the death of my partner in 2006. It is an exploration of the intricacies of grief, the body, and the intangibility of all things.
Polly & Veronica
Phyllis Green gives us, with Polly & Veronica, a charmingly-told, though bittersweet, coming-of-age story. As it unfolds in intimate letters between two cousins, we, as readers, are drawn irresistibly into their individual changes and challenges even as the complexity of their epistolary relationship evolves. Green’s writing has that rare quality of using plain language to paint vivid pictures—like a painter’s masterpiece done in primary colors
Strange Tapestry
Justin Parnell’s poetry mini-collection, Strange Tapestry, is a fusion of poetic styles including confessionalism, formalism, and hermeticism, a work which resists concrete definition in order to explore the multiple valences of meaning and uncertainty involved in the retrieval, recollection, and writing of memory. In Strange Tapestry, moments from the author’s familial and personal history are sites from which to explore the human processes of communication, interpersonal connection, and the construction of self.
Fingertip Scripture
“Fingertip Scriptures is one part Sam Shepard play, one part surreal Gothic gospel, and one part American History 101 drunk on Netflix. This is a rare and seething and hilarious American original, like nothing I have ever read. May its burning lights lead you to whole new vistas and visions of what the genius of collaboration can do and is in this brilliant montage.”
Twenty-Something
The short fictions of Twenty-Something flirt and sparkle through moments, both small and large, of a young life. Tatiana Ryckman's steady hand and clear vision give these stories a sense of beautiful independence with a pleasing touch of melancholy.
A Pile of Crosses
Each story in Steven Ostrowski’s enthralling collection A Pile of Crosses provides us with a vivid, electrifying glimpse at the life we might have led, and the friends and lovers we lost and found along the way. These are the best kinds of stories: honest and invigorating.
What Becomes of Ours
What Becomes of Ours maps the twisted terrain of love and marriage. Is there such a thing as too much love? Does love shrink under vows? With bewitching prose and refreshing honesty, Jeremy Broyles navigates the seductive but treacherous path lovers take when they try to sidestep loss.
The Abridged Autobiography of Yousef R. & Other Stories
Joseph Rathgeber’s The Abridged Autobiography of Yousef R. is a taut, piercing collection of short stories, filled with a mordant sense of humor and keen insight into the messy, discordant, wildly unpredictable state of contemporary American life.
File Cabinet Heart
File Cabinet Heart is a unique lens that magnifies our everyday lives to show a sharper picture of our intimacies. Curtin’s poems are often weapons that fend off the dangers of closeness. They range from cautionary tales of the brutal truths of being exposed to a lover to the rebirth and forgiveness necessary to our navigation of life and love.
Everything I Know…
Everything I Know…, the new chapbook of poems by Anthony Frame, in which a suicidal astronaut tries to eat a banana, the Lincoln Memorial is turned into a drag queen dance hall, Kermit the Frog dabbles in existentialism, and Marvin Gaye covers Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun.”
No Timid Electra
he voice in No Timid Electra is bold, “more schoolboy than shrinking violet”, the kind of guide a reader can rely upon for an unflinching look at the world. In Katherine MacCue’s hands, the everyday, the ancestral and the mythic blend together to heighten both the strangeness and the beauty of life.
It Would All Happen in Barcelona
Jessica Barksdale Inclan's writing is gorgeous and moving. With relatable characters and real dilemmas, It Happened in Barcelona moves us through the sights, sounds and smells of an unexpected European underworld, and shows us the ways – in the name of love – that we avoid hard truths about ourselves and others.
Farmstead, Fire, Field
Bucolic and brutal, Farmstead, Fire, Field moves us through landscapes of farmland and longing. These poems explore the complexity of the rural with keen observation and gorgeous images: sugar maples trickling “in unison / from metal taps, sap boiling / off as honeyed vapor,” the barns and houses all painted the same “cheap red, / because, of all things, it is rust / and blood that are plentiful."
What the Dying Man Asked Me
In his debut chapbook poet Derek Graf pushes back against those forces that would box him in, define him: the night sky's pitch blackness, the night sky pregnant with stars, a cold apartment in the middle of nowhere, an airport layover, dead birds in driveways, lost loves, the wonders and burdens of creativity in a universe that's either indifferent or hostile
Superhero Questions
Beatific, luminous tales in the expressionistic tradition. Haunting to the extreme.
The Mistake Tea Can Sometimes Make
More than the story of a life, of a marriage, Brittany Clark's stunning novelette The Mistake Tea Can Sometimes Make is the story of a culture which too often swallows the individual up in expectation and domestic subterfuge, until we, like Julia, no longer can see our own faces no matter how hard we look in the mirrors handed to us.
Death Tells Me Jokes
John Mitchel’s Death Tells Me Jokes heralds not just the arrival of another great book of verse but a completely new voice in American poetry. Once you begin reading, you will be so enthralled and astonished by its outlook and its lyricism that you will not be able to stop. This is fatalism with a sense of humor, sarcasm with a soft heart, self-reproach leavened by the memory of beauty.
5th Generation Immigrant
One subject of Lee Busby’s poetry is love: careless love, love done and gone, blood-deep love of place, love of the gods of song and verse, the anchoring love of true friendship, the healthy love we glibly categorize as self-esteem. All these, in his first collection 5th Generation Immigrant, go a long way towards kindness and care, through a troubling, troubled voice free of postured affirmation and open to such doubts that are prerequisites to faith.
evaporatus
In the beginning there was the word. And then God gave Adam the power to name. Christopher Klingbeil's evaporatus works within the trouble with language, with naming, and its many failures, even as he troubles the language for us.
Psalmandala
Michael Patrick Collins confronts the conflicts of the modern world with a mystic's intensity. The music in these poems, their fierce proclamations and sideways spirituality, remind me of James Wright, Trakl, or Rilke, but the voice in Psalmandala may speak with that authority and within the lyric poem's best traditions, but there is a strangeness here that is all new, and all this poet's, and this book is a thrilling find.
Stronger Than Cleopatra
In Jacqueline Jules’ poetry collection, Stronger Than Cleopatra, the reader accompanies Jules on a heart-wrenching journey of devastating loss to come out on the other side, embracing a new life, one changed forever.
Opening the Doors of the Temple
Annalee Kwochka’s Opening the Doors of the Temple cries and decries, the powerful, desolate person at the center of these poems a victim of wonder and woe. She’s right to invoke Sexton, Freud, and Kübler-Ross, to name the terms of her sentencing. And the poems are right as well—too right, down to the meanest enjambment, 'Always so carefully / pieced together,' and full of terror.
Splattervision
Sometimes fierce as 'a burning array of fuses,' at others tender as the image of two slugs’ making love in mid-air, these poems collude close observation of both nature and middle-America with a dark and poignant sensibility that recognizes its own endangered animal nature.
By the Windpipe
Leslie McGrath’s courageous, compassionate, clear-eyed, and thoughtfully made poems in By the Windpipe grant the irrational—the “madness” that resides in each of us—permission to be in the world, another aspect of our humanness, and without pathology or judgment.
EveryHerDies
In Jennifer MacBain-Stephens' startlingly collection EveryHerDies, the reader is unsentimentally transformed by a cast of two women, a girl, and the local deer herd decimated by Epizootic Hemorrhagic disease. A young narrator who "pretended to look through People," leads us through the horror.
A Jellyfish for Every Name
David Rawson’s A Jellyfish for Every Name is a collection of short stories that almost connect to each other, sharing characters and images that resonate throughout. The characters in these stories are also attempting to connect (through family, relationships, religion, science, and history) but are failing.
The Truck Driver’s Daughter
In The Truck Driver’s Daughter, Denise R. Weuve offers us a collection of characters, flawed and striking. Sometimes beaten, sometimes beaten down and sometimes victorious, this exhilarating collection is like a pin-up girl crossed with a housewife with a knife hidden in the bed and a needle in her arm.
Without Dorothy, There is No Going Home
Like a fairy tale affixed to real life contemporary multi-hued cloudbursts, Alex Stolis’ poetry collection twists the quirks of L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz tales into unsettled relationships of today. It’s filled with its own unique up & down spins of sad, dark and powerful kinks.
The Storyteller’s Sister
In The Storyteller’s Sister, Amber Holinger has mixed three genres into a perfect literary bowl, creating an original and remarkable work. Hollinger shows us “truth in pieces,” portrays Scheherazade in a new light, and molds veracity out of fiction until it becomes poetic and ultimately, unveils life’s Truths
The Formulas
In Jordan Sanderson’s marvelous collection The Formulas, you will be told where you are and where you will go, and just when you think you are sure, you will go somewhere new. You will worry, want, have, beg, learn, and fall. You’ll have injuries. You’ll crave. You’ll listen to The Flaming Lips and Adele. You will “do your part.”
One Never Eats Four
With One Never Eats Four, poet Samantha Duncan performs linguistic and associational acrobatics with content that delves into the deep recesses of the psyche.
The Smell of Snow
Holly Day speaks spiritual, otherworldly unity, peace in a land of human garbage and garbage generated by humanity. It is hard to find nirvana in the intellectual and literal rubble of the world. Still, the quest yields a small amount of contentment in reality.
The Weight of Paper
In Mark Lee Webb's The Weight of Paper you'll eavesdrop on the voices of children, parents, performers, movie characters, and outsiders whose secret lives and thoughts mirror your own. You'll experience a guilty blush of recognition at these snapshots of human struggle.
Diary in Irregular Ink
Lori Lamothe's poetry mini-collection Diary in Irregular Ink traces the connections between past and present, light and shadow, the sublime and the mundane. The poems fuse and dissolve to create an impressionistic, ever-shifting record of seemingly incongruous times, people and places: a nail salon in a shopping mall and a pattern factory during the Civil War, a mermaid in full moonlight and Joan of Arc, a seaside wedding and a post-apocalyptic backyard.
The Amputation Artist
At the crux of The Amputation Artist, Michael Broek escorts Walt Whitman on a poetic homage throughout northern Jersey and NYC, commenting on architecture, culture, and identity to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. These poems echo Williams’ “no idea but in things” and Olson’s “projective verse.”
Shutters : Voices : Wind
A series of linked dramatic monologues in the voices of women around the globe.
Every Word Was Once Drunk
In Ian Bodkin’s first book of poems Every Word Was Once Drunk, the oracular and the ecstatic meet in the searing character of Drunk who is splashed across these pages like so much lighter fluid. His poems make me want to laugh and dance and wail deep into the night all the way to the stars. He is already a poet to be cherished and celebrated, already a poet to be loved and read again and again.
Ripple & Snap
One horrible tragedy in a high school gym that could have easily been taken as the next news story in this nation’s culture of violence is the setting for Laura McCullough’s compelling and inventive Ripple & Snap which not only looks unflinchingly at gun violence through the souls it most nearly destroys, but also at protection as metaphor—what does it mean to have it?
Splayed
Christopher McCurry’s first chapbook, Splayed, is a book of love poems.
Great Conversations, Greater Wasps
A year ago, I sent Jake Russell a poem of mine for review, and he did something he had not done previously. He responded with a poem: “Sans Ephesus” or “a poem critiquing your poem,” as he described it – a conversation.
Our Small Faces
Selma and Zeke are two African American youth living in a small town in Northern California. As the novelette switches between their voices, they learn the limits of love, friendship and family. Feeling trapped by their community, the constraints of race and class weigh heavy on their lives. Jamie L. Moore explores the persistence of racism and how it forces these friends to question if the boundaries already set for them determine their fate.
The Sum of Two Mothers
In this small book of poems, Dennis Etzel, Jr. recounts a fragmented chronology from his childhood to his fatherhood. Living their lives with love and integrity, Etzel's two mothers raised him together, despite the resistance they faced daily in Topeka, KS.
Artesian Well
With tenderness and clarity, C. Malcolm Ellsworth documents what lies above and below the surface. Using the Midwestern landscape, she fearlessly navigates a topography of love, violence, regret, and forgiveness – and unearths whatever it is that seeks to be revealed.
The Intimacy Archive
In The Intimacy Archive, Leigh Anne Hornfeldt explores the tensions that bring us together as well as separate us. Relationships with loved ones, the world, and ourselves are examined with sharp language and deep insight. What we are left with is a sense of longing—a longing to open, to experience the depth of intimacy in each day.
Precipice Fruit
Precipice Fruit tells the story of Jenna, a young girl with an autism spectrum diagnosis whose spirit transcends the stigmatizing forces around her. Often pigeon-holed, manhandled, and misunderstood by her doctors and teachers, Jenna blossoms into a young girl with a perspective entirely her own. Different points of view clash against each other in this series of poems—the cold objectivity of the clinician, the private terror and faith of the mother, the punitive decree of the teacher, the spirited self-narration of the child.
A Shape & Sound
We think we know language. We think it is ours. The body speaks it. Words are pieces and parts of humans. However, like people, language morphs. Andrew Ruzkowski investigates the complications of language in his long poem A Shape & Sound. The poet explores what words can do to us, in us, and for us. His love of writing, the world, and the beloved take us to a connected space. This long poem begs the reader to explore our collective and individual happenings.
You Might Curse Before You Bless
Allie Marini Batts’ artistic path has shot like a meteor in the last several years. She is the most published writer I know. She approaches her art with steadfast commitment; wild imagination; and a prodigious, literary mind steeped in classical literature and popular culture.
The Breath before Birds Fly
The Breath before Birds Fly explores longing, family, and identity through rich imagery drawn from Jewish tradition and universal human experience. In poems filled with mud angels, mermaids, dybbuks, and a modern-day Baba-Yaga, Silverman crafts beauty from water, earth, and mud. This chapbook is more than a collection—it is a dance with language.
Birth in Storm
Leah Sewell uses the language of the plains, and of the body, to open a gulf in us—a gulf of memory, of disaster—whatever is precarious, all around us. These are storm poems in the best possible way, full of threat, but also centers of unsettling calm; that which we love, but can no longer reach. Someone leaves town forever; a child stubbornly grows up, and away; the weather turns, maybe for the worst, and we must ride it out.
The Smashing House
Taut, vivid, and uncanny, the stories in Laura McCullough's The Smashing House conjure up the displacement and disorientation that haunt our contemporary lives. McCullough moves seamlessly between our "real" world and the worlds of the possible, bringing a poet's fire to her compact tales of longing and disaster.
Let the Body Beg
Tara Shea Burke’s poems invite us to step into a current that carries us into ourselves and simultaneously toward the larger story. If we often feel sick-hearted in our efforts to wrestle with so much of the so much these poems are part of the cure.