Bücher veröffentlicht von Black Lawrence Press

The Bones Beneath captures what it means to be American, Southern, diasporan, what it means to belong and not to belong, and finding many ways home. It transports readers across place and time, focusing on race and racism, health and healing, Africa and America, and mysticism and incantations. The poems call us to remember the histories we are coaxed to forget and opens pathways to understand our shared humanity. You will not leave this work without being changed and without understanding how and why there is hope for us to be better.

Historically poets have explored no two themes more than love and grief because they are opposite sides of the same emotional coin that we will all experience in unique and often unexplainable ways. While other anthologies validate the necessity of the elegy, none examine the relationship between the body in grief and the body of the poem a poet crafts to recreate an individual, visceral experience of grief. By pairing contemporary poems with micro-essays, wherein each poet considers briefly the connection between their included poem(s) and their corresponding grief, In the Tempered Dark initiates a dialogue designed to engage teachers, students, readers, and writers. This collection doesn't instruct poets how to craft grief poems but illuminates the bond between bodies in grief and bodies of poems.In the Tempered Dark brings together contemporary work and voices that demonstrate the range of grief which feels urgent to twenty-first century poets from diverse backgrounds, at different stages in their careers, confronting assorted losses through various styles and forms. Poems coupled with micro-essays offer intimate and inside insights appealing to novices and veterans of all genres. This book will allow readers to identify with poets and poems to grieve and to heal, and it will also consider the relationship between poet and poem. Such an examination of content and form will show how poets manipulate craft, giving voice to what can seem unsayable, transcending elegy.

The linked stories in UNBEND THE RIVER are set along a forested stretch of land between Lake Erie and the upper Allegheny River in Western New York, places dense with rivers, hills, and forest. The characters, all of whom are tied to a modern knife manufacturing plant, illustrate all the ways love and longing shapeshift over the course of a long life. A host of elderly hockey players, Franciscan Friars, loser heroes, budding conmen, and unintentional historians are all wired to search for meaning. Each flash their creative genius when fighting off idleness, anger, and disappointment. They build nightmare hotrods and race school buses; train wild dogs, homing pigeons, and dancing horses; and fight wildfires and grasshopper swarms. They crash headlong into the chaos, confusion, and confluence of their homes, never losing their energy to seek out the essential miracles hidden all around them.

"Although MANY RESTLESS CONCERNS illuminates the horror of absolute control over others, it also shines a beacon on the strength of women sharing their truths one by one, of spirits joining together to topple the seemingly untouchable. This work speaks to our own times, to our #metoo reckoning, to our power as survivors to take back our stories and reclaim the darkness. Oppression of any kind never holds, even if it takes the dead to bring it down. This book is a haunting, essential read for all uneasy souls."-Laraine Herring"'Just know we all have stories worth your time. Just know we're just starting to understand our own worth.' This is how Gayle Brandeis opens MANY RESTLESS CONCERNS. Countess Bathory of Hungary allegedly killed up to 650 girls and women between the years 1585 and 1609, in a variety of cruel, heartless ways. Brandeis brings these words to our attention-stab, strangle, pummel, hack, burn, drown, freeze, scald. 'Your body remembers even when you no longer have a body, some tender part of you still flinches; some immaterial nerves still flare,' she writes. 'We want you to bear witness,' voices the chorus. I urge you, the reader, to bear witness to these centuries of silent voices rising up clearly, often beautifully, more often tragically. Bear witness."-Alma Luz Villanueva"Feels like a terrifying and gorgeously lyric fairy tale but never once does the author let us forget that the pain is real and the point is empathy, understanding and protecting the ones who come after. Ethereal and beautiful as its ghostly chorus, but with 'muscle and scent,' 'meat' and 'bone,' MANY RESTLESS CONCERNS is quickened with the blood of the victims, the essential, and ultimately healing, blood of story."-Francesca Lia Block"If all the women and girls who have been murdered, tortured, abused and disappeared were to raise their voices, they would create a song that would drown the world. In Gayle Brandeis' haunting and haunted novel-in-poems, MANY RESTLESS CONCERNS, she invokes such a chorus, the true story of hundreds of young women tortured to death by the Countess Bathory. Brandeis presents their gifts, their dreams, as well as the ways they died, and demonstrates that it is through collective action that they ultimately find justice. You will never un-hear their mournful, defiant and triumphal song."-Terry Wolverton"Gayle Brandeis is a miracle. From the forgotten memories of murdered women, she's created a monument of hope, pain, and demands for the justice of recognition. This is a startling, glorious, gorgeous book. What a vision. Read this book and be transformed."-Rene Denfeld

"What is it to be poor? Discovering an ATM's smallest withdrawal is more than the little left in your account? Counting out food stamps or working phone scams? Living in a bleak rental or a house made of 'shiplap and tarpaper and corrugated tin?' Or is it something far more subterranean and corrosive, like the backwards kindness of a grandfather who guns down stray dogs? Or is it women who, with their bodies as their only asset, believe it 'better to have a husband who beat you bloody than to be single?' And what of their daughters, of their perceived competition, such as a little girl shining 'like a scrubbed apple' before her body is found locked in ice? The question of privilege-of what it can buy, really-demands uncomfortable, often violent answers, and Jenny Irish's unflinching collection, I AM FAITHFUL, holds steady aim, writing the truth, bitter as it may be, that few understand but everyone needs to hear. Reader, witness: here, in burnished, exquisite prose, is a precise telling of class in America, a portrait of those who must compromise to survive, who scrape and save, and though acting out of the grim fury misery provides, they never, under whatever circumstance, deserve to be called 'trash.'"-Nickole Brown

"What does Beth Mayer's intimate collection of short stories want to tell us? That the dead have much to teach the living, that madness can point the way to clarity, that the burn of departing never cools, that inside abandonment can be redemption. Mayer's prose rattles like bones, proving that no matter how far you live in the margins, you can't escape the telling."-Desiree Cooper"Beth Mayer's stories unflinchingly explore the tough and the tender sides of family life as well as offering us a window into the lives of those we often prefer not to notice when we pass them in our neighborhoods. I was moved by the deep emotional truths in WE WILL TELL YOU OTHERWISE, and the slyly ironic and often sardonic wit of these stories kept me smiling all the way through. What a lovely collection of stories this is!"-David Haynes"The stories in Beth Mayer's WE WILL TELL YOU OTHERWISE are indelible treasures, full of poignancy and pathos. Mayer is the best kind of writer-one who doles out her wisdom with humor, who mines the intricacies of love, friendship, and family effortlessly."-John Jodzio

"THIS IS HOW THE BONE SINGS by W. Todd Kaneko carries the pulse of ancient lament through the boneyards of war and unspeakable trauma. This lyric collection of profound beauty and grief reminds us to share our tales of generational trauma and topography-shaping our individual and collective memories-in place of forgotten histories."-Karen An-hwei Lee"What does it mean to be safe in America? In THIS IS HOW THE BONE SINGS, W. Todd Kaneko explores the legacy of concentration camps in the United States and how memory is carried forward. This book knows how to sing-to America, not its expected script, but the anthems of its history; and to a son, lessons on how to bring back the dead with stories, with a fading map, with birds."-Traci Brimhall"The best books about history are those that are also about the future. W. Todd Kaneko's marvelous THIS IS HOW THE BONE SINGS is more than a mere song-it is a singing across time and distance. In lyrics both personal and political, Kaneko composes a score that spans four generations, connecting his grandparents, who were prisoners in the unfathomable Minidoka concentration camps, to his young son and this unfathomable era in which he was born."-Dean Rader"To enter this book is to enter an orchard alive with memory's beasts. To read THIS IS HOW THE BONE SINGS is to witness how a poet at the height of his powers can alchemize history's violence into lyric and myth."-Brynn Saito"These are much-needed poems of unapologetic tenderness and talent-in other words, this collection does the near-impossible: it points us towards love even if what we know of this world doesn't."-Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Through intertwined threads of autofiction, lyric science writing, and the tale of a newly queer Hawaiian volcano, Sabrina Imbler delivers a coming out story on a geological time scale. This is a small book that tackles large, wholly human questions-what it means to live and date under white supremacy, to never know if one is loved or fetishized, how to navigate fierce desires and tectonic heartbreak through the rise and eventual eruption of a first queer love."When two galaxies stray too near each other, the attraction between them can be so strong that the galaxies latch on and never let go. Sometimes the pull triggers head-on wrecks between stars-galactic collisions-throwing bodies out of orbit, seamlessly into space. Sometimes the attraction only creates a giant black hole, making something whole into a kind of missing." In vivid, tensile prose, DYKE (GEOLOGY) subverts the flat, neutral language of scientific journals to explore what it means to understand the Earth as something queer, volatile, and disruptive.

"In this marvelous debut collection, Charlotte Pence provides us with all the pleasures of poetic tension. We have the pull of narrative and the flares of the lyric, the graceful rhythm of blank verse and the thrill of innovative forms, the contest for survival both between a father and a daughter and between Homo Sapiens and other species within our genus. The poems explore the idea of survival, not only the survival of a speaker who transcends a precarious childhood but, for example, a 'juvenile male bear with his head stuck in a plastic Walmart candy jar' who 'learned to drink by laying down in shallow streams.' In language that is sometimes word-crunchy and dense, sometimes delightfully simple ('In her small life, she is happier than before'), Pence's MANY SMALL FIRES is a beautiful, necessary book. Come, warm your hands."-Beth Ann Fennelly

In this new collection of flash fiction, Veronica Montes conducts an intimate exploration of the interior lives of eight women searching for voice and agency. Sometimes bewildered by their circumstances, sometimes determined to change them, Montes' characters are driven by desire and despair and a thirst for transformation. They are silenced; they are enraged.Throughout the course of these eight poignant glimpses, a woman contemplates her aging body through the whorls of her hair. A routine morning doing laundry inspires viral and violent dreams. A grieving daughter undertakes a difficult journey. A married couple fails to communicate, while a young couple learns the language of sex. Sun rises on a bed of broken glass. Montes' spare, compelling prose magnifies the power that small moments hold as we make and re-make our notions of self. This is an unflinching new collection from a rising voice in fiction.

"Rob Carney is tuned to some amazing frequency-it comes from 500 North and Morton, it comes from beyond, it comes from when we were wooded slopes-but he listens and returns with these poems, thrumming with 'lifeblood,' these songs which throw down and call out (see 'Poetic Justice'), which are often rich with praise but never falsify. Sure, one might want to 'lovetalk' nature but nature will always kick our ass. It's always there, underneath us, 'with teeth.' I find this book both serious and joyful. CALL AND RESPONSE is such a good journey."-Kate Northrop

With raw, lyrical ferocity, All the Comfort Sin Can Provide delves into the beguiling salve that sin can promise-tracing those hidden places most of us are afraid to acknowledge. In this collection of brutally unsentimental short stories, Grant Faulkner chronicles dreamers, addicts, and lost souls who have trusted too much in wayward love, the perilous balm of substances, or the unchecked hungers of others, but who are determined to find salvation in their odd definitions of transcendence.Taking us from hot Arizona highways to cold Iowa hotel rooms, from the freedoms of the backwoods of New Mexico to the damnations of slick New York City law firms, Faulkner creates a shard-sharp mosaic of desire that careens off the page-honest, cutting, and wise.

Part post-punk ghost story, part Gen-X pastoral, Mary Biddinger's poetry collection DEPARTMENT OF ELEGY conjures dim nightclubs, churning lakes, and vacant Midwestern lots, meditating on moments of lost connection. With the afterlife looming like fringe around the edges of this book, Biddinger constructs a view of heaven as strange as the world left behind. These poems escort us from forest to dance floor, bathtub to breakwater, memory into present."In DEPARTMENT OF ELEGY, Mary Biddinger examines the hot pink ignorance of youth and the equally vulnerable present. These thrillingly nimble, funny poems empathize with hunger and long for longing."-Jennifer L. Knox"The Talking Heads once asked, 'How did I get here?' a rhetorical interrogation that happens at the very point where our past and present lives intersect. Time's fulcrum, and all its possibilities, even the imaginary ones, are the deep gothic heart that powers Mary Biddinger's DEPARTMENT OF ELEGY. This collection savors its sadness but never wallows in it, just as it asks the reader to take all the joys of the world and taste them. If an elegy is a song of mourning, these poems-with their abiding love for the human experience and a generous dollop of empathy-are an invitation to the most rollicking Irish wake you've ever attended. They remind us that we come together not only to mourn but also to celebrate the things that ask us to say goodbye."-Steve Kistulentz"Mary Biddinger's seventh poetry collection guides readers across the dangerous terrain between memory and chaos with confidence, bravado, and-ultimately-hard-won expertise. The speakers' words themselves sustain a series of exquisite and delicate tensions between utterance and erasure, between form and improvisation, anchored throughout by a series of 'Book' poems ('Book of Hard Passes, ' 'Book of the Sea, ' 'Book of Misdeeds, ' 'Book of Transgressions, ' 'Book of Disclosures, ' 'Book of Mild Regrets'). The emotional undercurrent of this collection samples such a wide range of life and existence that we are left wondering where time goes and why so quickly, from the ritualistic taste of the insides of gloves, to the realization that once '...your friends have perished under tragic circumstances / eventually they become like beloved characters from books.'"-Erica Bernheim

"T.J. Sandella's poems have compassion, humor, grace, and range. He writes about himself and others, about music and sex and trees and Houdini, and death, of course, else how would we recognize him as a poet? But what moves most deeply across and within these poems is an engaging mixture of curiosity and conscience, a need to discover various kinds of truth, whether ethical or aspirational. In poems that 'keep bending / into questions,' he moves graciously across what he sees, what he has done and what he has imagined doing or becoming. One poem asks, 'How long / until we become what we've always wanted to be?' That none of the poems answer that question shouldn't be held against Sandella. That all of them try is to his credit and our immense benefit."-Bob Hicok"WAYS TO BEG risks the big questions. These poems ignite, they incinerate the straight line-the easy road to sweetness-to ask: What does it mean to be sanctified? In an avalanche of grit and tenderness, Sandella roils with heartbreaking humanity. He speaks in the voice of the working class, of salvation and truth as a wild act. This is a brave and beautiful book."-Jan Beatty"WAYS TO BEG aches as it gazes into the upended present with an unflinching eye, searching for a home. There's loneliness here, and a belief in companionship and the power of another to both heal us and to open us. I love the way surprise leads us to the familiar and the familiar to surprise, and how the poet renders the ordinary and the tragic as equals. Woven together into a fugue, each poem builds moment by intimate moment. These poems begin in the noise and commotion of the world and travel toward quiet reflection after the loss of a mother. It is here that the work crescendos, the pain of grief reminding us to hold each moment and to make it, in no small way, sacred."-Dorianne Laux

A subversive glimpse into the dark wildness of preparing for motherhood. New Life is a meditation on the changing/changeling body, wrought in lyric decadence. Novak leads a seductive tour through plashy islands, Great Lakes hideouts, cursed apartments, and castaway nightmares, sighting the baroque and the barren, and celebrating the romance of isolation amidst an interior of plenty.