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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.”