Bücher veröffentlicht von Black Lawrence Press, Inc.

Dressing the Saints, the second selection for the Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series, vividly explores the lives of Cuban Americans. Set in the lushness of Cuba and Florida, and spanning decades, the stories chronicle lives left behind and new ones forged with struggle, melancholy, and hope. Old loves are reencountered, enemies confronted, family secrets are revealed, and women fight for agency. Memory, what can't be forgotten and what is elusively fading away with the passage of time, is ever-present in the stories of people fiercely confronting fate with grace and compassion.

The raw and tender truths that map out the shard sharp pain and deep dull ache beside the unrelenting resilience in this exquisite poetic plea, wail, and declaration personify the writer and the woman behind the words. They are a gift that Amber Allen-Peirson has dared to share with us all.-Nina Vincent

San Franshitshow is an emotional reckoning with self, love, and the world that unfolds amidst a turbulent gender transition upon arrival into a new city. It chronicles the pain of loss and of coming to terms with yourself in a world that would prefer you did not: how this struggle impacts every area of your life. It expresses the power of self-acceptance with grace and humor. Calamia's debut is a unifying force of a memoir-a poignant, tender collection of poetry that will open your heart-every poem as raw as a tear-stained diary page.¿¿San Franshitshow is a wildly powerful collection of all the little moments that define who we are. This book goes beyond the gender binary and labels, it is human! Cal's artistic and genuine recounts of loss, love and identity are what I wish I could've read as a teenager to help navigate through my own narrative. This book can connect with anyone regardless of their label and will be championed by the LGBT community. Cal says all the words that never leave your head when experiencing adolescent love and defining queerness for the first time. Empathetic, heartfelt, and useful in defining (or redefining) your own past. We need more honest literature like this about the LGBT experience! Whether you are out, unsure, curious, a parent, a youth, or a teacher, this book should be in your hands.- Miles McKenna, actor, activist, author of Out! How To Be Your Authentic SelfThis debut is a song-of coming of age, of coming out, of love, of America's present moment. And yes, of San Francisco and the shitshow our city can be as the poems' speaker navigates what it is to become an adult, become a trans* man, become a teacher, and so much more in this hectic and sometimes heartbreaking city. The book shines, and I too want to shout, "There's glitter on my heart motherfucker" to my lover, to all my loves, to my beloved hometown of glittering sidewalks. There is both humor and incredible vulnerability in these poems, even when they "don't know what to believe in / but it has to be something."- Caroline Mar, author of Special EducationCal Calamia walked into my long-running open mic one Sunday afternoon and taught me some things. Reading the work taught me a few more. I love it when that happens. These poems are self-aware and not self-pitying. Cal has good comic timing but doesn't go for a laugh as much as an A-ha. I listen to and read a lot of poetry and he has been a favorite since that first time. Pronoun antecedent disagreement will probably remain a cherished poetic moment for years to come. Read this book and be reminded that some things are simple and made difficult. Some things remain easy, direct, logical. Some things hurt like hell. There is pain in this collection, sure. There is earnest and unpracticed love. It's a generous group of poems, direct and honest. If you only own a few books of poetry this should be one of them.- Kim Shuck, 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco

every revelation (for the reader) seems powerful by the moment, "earned" as they say-this is no mere stylist, but someone who can turn the camera to the violent, sensual and passionate by turns. There's a great deal of formal constraint, elegance and mastery, and shout-outs to predecessors to whom he has apprenticed, only there to advertise the bounds he, himself, has broken. Counter to the tyranny of the social media Blitzkreig, James's poems are filled with acts of attention that, in a way, are what I am most envious of-he's taken the ephemeral, intense, and perhaps better-left-forgotten, moments of anxiety, love, eroticism, the strictures of the family, the wilds of momentary encounters when aesthetics and lust mix ("You'd have made me do anything with /your Sal Mineo-James Deanwattage"), the bumping up of the individual with the city, largely Los Angeles, itself ("Beyond our fly-spattered / windshield soft-lit brides and grooms / wave along the i-95") and let them find their way into his poetry. But for all of his focus on the body and desire, situation and society, language thrives: "At MacArthur Park, kobicha and svelte, / Derek walked in and out the frame / befitting the stomach's swell./ He omm'd himself silly in the echo / of the underpass ever after." Regardless of where James is "going" with his poetry-I think it will be far, this is an awesome first step-read this modest set and relearn to live.- Brian Kim Stefans, author of "Viva Miscegenation": New Writing and many other books"There's something deeply celebratory about Shifters, as the poems follow the shape of the moon or the turn of the mind as it weaves in and out of a world of traffic. Randy James takes us through all the permutations of love between men: familial, devotional, romantic, eternal. 'Some men love each other by the angle of mirror reflection,' he writes, 'other men in other ways.' These poems vogue freely, love deeply, dream endlessly. They are small pleasures of seeing; the eye as it caresses, tenderly, the visible world."- D A Powell, author of Useless Landscape, or a Guide for Boys: Poems and Tea, Lunch, and CocktailsRandy James brings nerve and nuance to a handbook of poetic forms: abecedarian, bop, ghazal, ode, ekphrastic and concrete poems-writes of passage for a tough and tender son, brother, lover on a journey to happily-ever-after with stops in Clubland on the way to a Vegas wedding chapel. "Where shall I take my Bride?/ I will take him where metalwork points all directions."- Harryette Mullen, author of Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary"I am invisible," the poet tells us of his childhood. "I am thought an afterthought." But that was then; these poems are Now. In Shifters, Randy James explodes into visible power, an explorer of form, a magician of image. These are poems of Black queer manifestation, of maturing, of naming. James's lyrics are packed with action and object: road trips and voguing, fireworks and an eighth of mushrooms, blood and spit. Desire is fuel, language is combustion, and James blazes across these moonlit pages like a charioteer. He puts form to feeling and makes you see what you didn't know was right there all along.- K. M. Soehnlein, author of The World of Normal Boys and You Can Say You Knew Me When

Spring 2022 Black River Chapbook Competition Winner"There's no such thing as society," Margaret Thatcher famously-and cruelly-proclaimed. "There are individual men and women and there are families." Through three stories in Ten More Things About Us, Nancy Welch illuminates the consequences of this philosophy-writ-policy in the very particular lives of women who labor to care for family as devastating illness frays familial ties and tests social consciousness.-----I just finished reading Nancy Welch's brilliant TEN MORE THINGS ABOUT US. I'm writing from a hole in my heart because she's managed, through impeccable handing of detail, to remind me of life as it is, not the lucky life we sometimes live on the border of catastrophe. I love the way the stories overlap, points of view shifting, names and circumstances changing. Yet the stories resist the magnetism of chapters to stand alone, each one nudging us into recognition. Nancy Welch has written a powerful book.Hilda Raz, author of Letter from a Place I've Never Been: New and Collected PoemsIn this astute and moving collection, Nancy Welch shines a light on caregiving as both a personal and cultural act. Welch's portraits of families navigating illness and frailty are intimate, tender, and a pleasure to read, but her skill at gesturing to abiding social questions makes this trio of stories impossible to forget. Fans of Claire Keegan, Edna O'Brien, and Elizabeth Strout, here's another author to cherish.Maria Hummel, author of Still Lives and Lesson in RedIn Ten More Things About Us, like a highly skilled lapidarist, Nancy Welch guides us through illness and wellness. We meet people, broken and whole, as they navigate the multiple meanings of care, and also un-care. As one mother learns to let go of a home full of history, another demands that her daughter bring her meals. This book, like life, is held together by women's unpaid labor-by teachers and nurses, by family, both kin and made. And because Nancy Welch makes legible such labor with such extraordinary compassion, as a reader, I found myself, like Trudy, "practicing at being in no hurry."Tithi Bhattacharya, co-author of Feminism for the 99%

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. With a close eye on the past and an outstretched hand to the future, DEAD DAD CLUB traces the death of a father and ties it to the rebirth of a son. Weaving together the hilarious and the grotesque, DEAD DAD CLUB is a starkly honest collection of poems and musings that manage to make light of even the heaviest topics.

In THE VIOLENCE ALMANAC, Miah Jeffra complicates the boundaries between culture and nature, fiction and true-crime, desire and pain. In this powerful fiction debut, Jeffra takes us through the California landscape to map the various ways that violence emerges, terrorizes and shapes our most familiar social structures.An ostracized child yearns to be the hero for a rural community threatened by an escaped penitentiary inmate. An ambitious young writer receives mysterious film clips that thrust her and her boyfriend into a spiral of grief. A sex worker attempts to move on after her best friend is murdered by a john. A seismologist struggles to control his rage over a breakup that summons his internal racism. A biographer seeks to capture the truth of Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five children.Familiar and real, ripped from headlines yet a fiction all its own, THE VIOLENCE ALMANAC vacillates between visceral horror and heartbreaking humanity. With a broad array of voices, these stories paint a portrait of the vastly diverse, complicated, hyper-mediated state of California and the state of ourselves, and blurs the line between safety and danger, love and obsession, victim and agent of violence.

"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

Winner of the 2020 Big Moose PrizeSpanning the mid to late 20th century and set in the Elkhorn Valley of southwestern Montana, The Stone Sister is told from three points of view - a father's, a nurse's, and a sister's. Together they tell the unforgettable story of a child's birth, disappearance, and finally discovery in a home for "backward children." Robert Carter, a newly married man just back from World War II, struggles with his and his wife's decision to entrust the care of their disabled child to an institution and "move on" with family life. Louise Gustafson, a Midwestern nurse who starts over with a new life in the West, finds herself caring for a child everyone else has abandoned. And Elizabeth Carter, a young journalist, uncovers the family secret of her lost sister as she struggles with starting a family of her own.The Stone Sister explores the power of family secrets and society's evolving definitions of "normal"-as it pertains to family, medicine, and social structure. The novel sheds light on the beginnings of the disability justice movement as it follows one family's journey to reckon with a painful past. Incredibly, the novel is based on Caroline Patterson's personal story. As an adult, she discovered she had an older sister with Down syndrome who had been written out of her family history. In fact, that sister's name was also Caroline Patterson.

Lenny's out of options. He's lost his arm to his abusive older brothers and he's lost his bearings within his family. But he's determined not to lose hope. He attempts an escape on a stolen skiff, hoping to ride the rivers from his family's farm deep in the western North Carolina mountains all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. A torrential storm sinks his boat and delivers him into the hands of a profanity-slinging priest whose illegal drug operation provides food and wages for the local parish. Snared within a power struggle between a crooked cop and the priest, Lenny once again relies on the thinnest shred of hope in his attempt to escape.Live Caught is a survival adventure which dives deep into the mystifying relationship between hope and choice, and examines the peril of remaining in an untenable situation rather than taking that terrifying first step toward change. Lenny takes that step, and then another and another in his journey back toward his abusers and the unlikely prospect of family reconciliation.

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.

"With equal measures of hilarity and heartache, Joe Dornich collects the stories of America's middle-class cast-offs: the under-employed, the under-appreciated, and most devastatingly, the under-loved. Whether it is the plight of a professional snuggler-offering comfort to strangers, but unable to express his feelings to a co-worker-or a son whose summer spent working alongside his father serves only to deepen their disconnection, truths are laid bare through these darkly humorous pieces. Searching not only for connection with others, but for value in their lives, Dornich's characters find themselves employed in positions that demand more than can be offset by a wage. Though young, they are soul-weary. In a world full of expectations built and then toppled, Dornich's collection asks: How does it feel to have your whole life ahead of you?"-Jenny Irish"This bizarre, charming, darkly comic irreality of paid cuddlers and mean-spirited parents, where intimacy is commodified and heroes nonexistent might at first resemble something far off and fanciful. But take another look. This is the desperate, inscrutable world we've come to inhabit. And those outsiders and losers our own bewildered selves. Dornich is a master of the present moment."-Adam PrinceA wild, dazzling collection that reaches whole new altitudes of comic absurdity. You'd be hard-pressed to find a phrase that fails to crackle with hilarious electricity. You never quite know where a Joe Dornich story will take you, but once you've reached your destination, prepare to have your heart cracked in half."-Patrick Michael Finn"The world of THE WAYS WE GET BY is askew, and while that makes for sly social critique, the book's real capacity to surprise is nestled in the missteps and errors committed by its main characters. They become more endearing as a result, reminding us that we're all more mess than messiah, helping us reconnect to our humanity."-Craig Bernier