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.
Scrap: Salvaging a Family is a hybrid flash memoir tracing the long shadow of childhood fear and the complexities of forgiving a dying parent. As a daughter uncovers her father’s painful origins, she begins to understand the man behind the anger—and reclaims pieces of herself in the process.
When our narrator’s house is reclaimed by the wilderness, she embarks with her Pooch on a rambling and rollicking journey. She meets undead deer and living skeletons, travels through dream worlds and deserts of longing, and untangles truths from the messy web of life.
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.
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.
Pretend I’m Not Here features characters struggling with sex, identity and meaning in a world collapsing around them. Everyone is longing for something—the beloved, a newborn child, even annihilation. Cities burn, protests rage, isolation intensifies. A motif of masks and costumes runs throughout as characters experiment with who they are and struggle for connection in an absurd world. Though bleak, many of the stories end with a moment of dark optimism.
How Far a Night Can Reach follows six characters whose lives intertwine after a St. Patrick’s Day celebration at an Irish pub. What begins with music, tension, and a kiss unfolds into a surreal, year-long journey of shifting relationships, unexpected reunions, and the strange ways we search for connection.