In a basement lab, a technician and a corporate analyst operate a device that views other universes. Each attempt reveals the same beige room, down to the molecule—no sign of change other than a faint smell of cumin. With little else to measure beyond their own growing connection, they attempt to extract fiscal value from the possibility that nothing could ever have been different.
Somewhere on Echo IV, there is a memory of an older, unmarred Earth that could give humanity a chance at starting over. Mission Control calls the alleged portal ‘a way back,’ and Dreyer and her team are tasked with finding it. A Way Back is a punchy cross-genre exploration of obligation, regret, and the futility of trying to escape a future that is all but predetermined by the choices we’ve made.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.