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

Analog Poet Blues captures the journey of a poet searching for romance and seeking justice in a world transformed from the analog to the digital age. This dazzling collection ventures beyond the mainstream at intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and religion. These poems deftly reveal how an outsider becomes even stranger in an ever-evolving computer dominated landscape. Come take a trip around this wondrous electronically connected planet.

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%

Low Rent Prophet is poetry for anyone who has ever wanted to burn it all down. This book is about what's left to be saved and the possibility of change and resurrection in our world today.--------¿¿I've been waiting for Dani Gabriel's second book of poetry for so many years. These are exactly the poems we need right now in late Trump, written in the June Jordanian tradition of precise and radiant truth to light our way. "Like fine night", these are poems brimming with the everyday hustle for justice, joy and faith, in a working-class, queer, spirit filled psych survivor parenting voice. Gabriel's words punch you right in the chest and the heart, and help you remember your breath and what you were put here to do. Like the author, "I don't want to zip my boots grab my keys and head out into a world that hates me," but these poems help me do it anyway, and make it to the protest or the next poem.- Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, author of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Tonguebreaker, and BodymapGabriel's expertly crafted poems go down easy and create change from within. Flowing one to the next, with loving and devastating attention to detail, they reveal a world where sidewalks are holy and miracles are daily occurrences. While the fires of past activism and youth may be embers now, Dani's singular voice singes the page. This book is a reminder that redemption is never out of reach, and that the god we search for was with us all along.- Dani Thea Hillman, author of Intersex: For Lack of a Better WordSuch beautiful, arresting truth. Maybe for someone, somewhere, a lifeline. - Ruth FormanDani Gabriel, Poeta, Activista, Molotov Mouth y Low Rent Prophet has the real talk for you in her new collection of poetry...These are profound everyday poems that bear witness that "the worst things are done by good people on ordinary afternoons"...these poems are the details that weren't suppose to be seen by anyone, the scars, the lingering pains that we are told to forget, forced to forget...But they are also poems filled with a humble and genuine gratitude, a mil gracias for the simple and pure things in our vida that keep us present and keep us going. "it's better than a lost heirloom/rescued from the heating grate,/better than the candy someone hid,/better than any lucky penny." Dani's words brings us back so that we feel, reconnect and remember, always remember the pain as well as the love. Step into this collection for awhile wanderer. Sit and open this book in the sun at the BART station plaza or among the shade of the trees in Tilden Park and listen to this Low Rent Prophet's words. Neta, Pura Neta. Amen.- Josiah Luis

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.

With a disco ball as a north star, My Boyfriend Apocalypse responds to the myriad, simultaneous apocalypses we are and are not surviving, from the everyday crises of being a body to the global emergencies of devastating climate change and unfettered white supremacy. These poems ask what it would be like to make out with the end of the world: Who slipped tongue first? Is the apocalypse a good kisser? Are you?-------¿¿The speculative tenderness at the heart of antmen pimentel mendoza's poetry embraces life, not just survival, while the future is still ours to imagine. The opening poem of My Boyfriend Apocalypse begins, "Baby, dance," and all we have to do is let the gentle swaying hold us. These poems aren't trying to outlast the apocalypse because they already know it's "now and forever," but the urgent conjunction that bridges the two is just enough time to love unabashedly. The end of the world is the expanse where all of the poet's wonders coalesce. She asks: "Who cradles us?" and the question tends to longing without forcing an answer. The poet bears witness to histories of imperialism, grief, and violence with unwavering insistence on the intimacies our kinship makes possible. Every YouTube rabbit hole-portal, every photo of beloveds tucked into wallets, every kiss that we meet with eyes closed. In her sensual poetry, everything that keeps us soft keeps us listening, keeps us alive. José Esteban Muñoz wrote, "We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality." Rarely have I felt more possible than in the wonder of antmen pimentel mendoza's poetry, the worlds she makes a touch closer with her tenderness.- Sanjana BijlaniFor those of us still coming to terms with global health crises and general sense of everything being a total trash fire, antmen pimentel mendoza's My Boyfriend Apocalypse is the antidote to doom scrolling our way to numbness. Drawing on internet trends, pop music references, post-therapy assessments, and more, pimentel mendoza skillfully makes a case for seemingly mundane acts like ass eating as a political gesture in a book that insists "Spill, baby" and cheekily (tenderly) asks you "to fold/ your way /into more bravery, or at least, fewer fonts of shame." This book seems to recognize no bounds to radical love, sex, and survival in a time when we keep waking up to the chill world ending. In the face of incessant apocalypse, pimentel mendoza beckons us to laugh, fuck, fall in love, and hold each other for just a minute longer.- Muriel Leung, author of Imagine Us, The SwarmDelectable, magical, and sparkly tomorrows: these words glittered in my brain as I devoured pimentel mendoza's My Boyfriend Apocalypse. A mixture of eroticism, queer yearning, and transformative grief-pimental mendoza asks us to imagine and materialize what a future-oriented and world-making apocalypse looks like. Whether it is the way our "flesh betrays our secret stinks" or "if a starry sky waits on the other side," pimentel mendoza reminds us how being ravaged and unraveled can feel oh-so-gratifying, opening us to new dimensions of pleasure, possibility, and existence we have not thought of before.- MT Vallarta, author of What You Refuse to Remember

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

ADAPTATIONS is an exercise in envisioning the worst case scenario and asking, "What next?" It explores concepts of alienation and survival in a world that's largely inhospitable, and what it means to be human once traditional mechanisms of control and safety cease to exist.

In his debut chapbook-length collection of poetry, Brennan "B Deep" DeFrisco examines change and the spectrum of lenses through which we view it."Brennan "B Deep" DeFrisco is one of my favorite up-and-coming performance poets. A HEART WITH NO SCARS is a fantastic look into the fire he brings to the stage. 'Empty Glass' feels like good whiskey after the last bad day of a terrible week."--Toaster"The first line in this collection, 'Descend at your own risk,' should stand as a warning. Prepare to fall in love, into mourning, mourn with the poet a city transforming and displacing, mourn the distance between friends and lovers, imagine a future lover's apocalyptic kiss. Brennan "B Deep" DeFrisco is a romantic and a realist all at once. Step with caution and don't say you haven't been warned."--Cassandra Dallett, author of ON SUNDAY, A FINCH (Nomadic Press, 2015).

In her tenth poetry collection, Allie Marini explores the stories of women in religion and mythology who challenged the roles and expectations given them by patriarchal society."Allie Marini's poems are tiny offerings that leave me wanting more. The women that inhabit these poems wear masks which become the mirrors we hold up to ourselves. Marini's 'true face' is that she can wear them all, the ones that 'steal fire,' and the ones that 'suffer.'"--J. Bruce Fuller, author of Flood (Swan Scythe Press, 2013) and editor of Yellow Flag Press.Poetry. California Interest. Women's Studies.

Norma Smith's poems come out of a long life filled with its share of grief and healing, thwarted and unthwarted love, sex, and words. HOME REMEDY reflects the tension and ease of finding the cure for what ails you at home, among family and lovers. More experienced than innocent, the poems are deeply sensual, which means they can be painful. The book is full of skepticism and hope. HOME REMEDY will take you through to a place where you can see that life is much more complicated than mortality."Norma Smith's words have their feet planted firmly, balance with certainty, and lay claim to a wealth of experience. This work is kitchen philosophy, emergency room direct and grandma's china beautiful. If poetry is medicine there are indeed cures in HOME REMEDY. 'We survive by laying down breadcrumbs,' says Smith, and I remember doing something like that. Some of us will recognize ourselves in these poems, some will see the future in these brewed tea leaf words. Not many poets create work that have the potential to change the way that their readers use language. Norma Smith may well be one of those."--Kim Shuck"How does one make a home inside the suspended breath of diagnosis, or find laughter in the face of the limited use of one's body? How can we conjure sweet, nostalgic pain with courage and open arms? Norma Smith's collection reminds us how to connect to ourselves and to one another in a world of forced battles. Her poems encourage personal healing; they call us to resist the fading and silence of inevitable change and loss. HOME REMEDY is a ceremony of recovery and re-envisioning made possible through humor, witness, and full participation in all the spaces we inhabit: from the body, to memory, to the open ocean horizon that calls us to humble ourselves before the natural world. Invite in the medicine of these poems and allow yourself to 'leap / some chasm that [lies] between / body and time.'"--Suzy Huerta Quezada"Norma Smith's HOME REMEDY is compelling, clever, and tender. Her devotion to technique and truth-telling thrive in this personal collection of poetry. Norma's swift and cunning words will both haunt you and throw you into a fit of dark giggles."--Kelechi Ubozoh"Norma Smith writes with an immediate and honest longing that cuts straight to the heart. She braves the universal subjects of disease, death, food, family and then--we get to end with sex--the slutty muse, sex on the couch and the floor! Norma fearlessly takes some surprising, exciting risks that spark joy. This work is heartbreaking and beautiful, revealing moments of beauty and love that exist inside of painful circumstances."--Jennifer BaronePoetry. California Studies.

EVOLUTIONARY HEART is one journey of love, from self-- to partner--love, dissolution, and back to self, the home to which we all ultimately return.Poetry. California Interest. African & African American Studies. Women's Studies.

Youssef Alaoui's short-story collection, Fiercer Monsters, is concerned with the symbology of letters and the word as invocation, contrasted with the futility of language. In these stories, Alaoui presents a Neanderthal oracle, a little girl in Venezuela in the 1950s, a 19th-century hallucinating sailor, and a WWI soldier. The voices are sometimes salty, always salient. Each voice ultimately laments the fall of the tower of Babel and the resulting confusion.-----¿¿Youssef Alaoui's investigation sifts through language finding and discarding gods along the way. Not so much a trip down rabbit holes, but rather the invention of mirrors. Storytelling in which you find instruments where time should be. Or the monologue of a man who is shuffling cards near his own crime scene.- Tongo Eisen-Martin, author of someone's dead alreadyWhen unraveling the layers and folds of a Fabulist, you are never sure whether your experience is new or if you are lost in the embroidery. With Youssef Alaoui you get some kind of delirious weave reminiscent of Donald Barthelme and Arthur Conan Doyle. The ultimate critique is whether you stay engaged or find yourself dumped overboard. That is the game and mystery of Fiercer Monsters. Youssef Alaoui delivers!- Michael Rothenberg, author of Big Bridge MagazineFiercer Monsters is a colorful tapestry of stories striking and bleak, elusive and blunt. Alaoui weaves his spicy and tangy world together with gusto. He smudges edible paints on his literary canvas, molds his literary dough without fear, everything goes into his boiling, steaming cauldron and-voila!-he serves you the bright jambalaya of his own folkloric jazz. Dare to meander along his pungent alleys and sunny paths, and connect to your very own Brothers Grimm and the mysterious.- Zarina Zabrisky, author of We, MonstersThe fiction of Youssef Alaoui illuminates the labyrinth of mysticism in the body. His book, Fiercer Monsters, navigates unique terrain ranging from the borders of legend to visceral city encounters. Alaoui combines intoxicating visions with an intellectual clarity that challenges the nature of language itself.- John Swain, author or Under the Mountain BornWhether he is recasting the Tower of Babel story with forest creatures saved by a shamanic chihuahua, or deciphering Arabish text slang in the mind of a tortured prisoner whose last refuge-that of his imagination-is threatening to implode, Youssef Alaoui is never merely out to entertain, though the richness of his metaphors and the kookiness of his tales do not fail to charm and delight. No, Alaoui is engaged in a fiercer struggle, between cultures intent on destroying each other and themselves, in the cavernous gaps between what can be felt and known and what can be spoken and understood. Vibrantly lonely, steeped in the sad funk of human pathos, the fables and incantations in Fiercer Monsters sing from the belly, from the groin, from the broken bone, and from the whole and sheltering heart.- Sarah Fran Wisby

In NEXT TIME YOU COME HOME, Lisa Dordal distills one hundred eighty letters she received from her mother over a twelve-year period (1989-2001) into short, meditative entries that reflect upon motherhood, marriage, grief, the beauty of the natural world, same-sex relationships, and the passage of time, as well as on issues such as racism, sexism, and climate change. The entries-which are something between letters and poems-portray a mother who, despite her alcoholism, maintains an engaged and compassionate presence in the world, one nourished by intellectual curiosity, life-long relationships with family and friends, and active involvement in a religious community."A newly recovered trove of letters is the source material for Next Time You Come Home, but the collection's true genius lies in the communion of mother and daughter across time. In distilling her late mother's letters to their loving essence, Lisa Dordal focuses not on the "nighttime mother" who drank until her speech was slurred but on the vibrant, nurturing "daytime mother" who taught her how to love the world. This is a radical compassion that heals, offering understanding without excuses or justifications, love without benchmarks or conditions. From its haunting title onward, Next Time You Come Home is an utter original." -Margaret Renkl, author of Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss"In the tradition of the epistle, this wonderful collection of letters turned into poems transports readers back in time. Inside we find reports from Lisa Dordal's mother on the gorgeously mundane moments of life: shopping at Sears, trying out new shoes, planning dinner. These blessings of the everyday sit beside larger more worldly events all the while marvelously punctuated by the comings and goings of various birds and the cold and warm days of the seasons. Chickadees and sandhill cranes appear within the same lines of letters announcing a loved one's death. And such is life, isn't it? These small, brilliant moments? How fortunate to be able to bear witness to the daily joys and sorrows that could otherwise be long forgotten. These transformative poems leave me even more in awe of each of our precious, fleeting, singular lives." -Didi Jackson, author of Moon Jar"In Next Time You Come Home, Lisa Dordal exquisitely sculpts her rediscovered letters from her mother into what she describes as 'something between letters and poems-not fully letters and not fully poems, but, instead, their own thing.' The result is a book that captures the ways excision, distillation, rewriting and reshaping play crucial roles in how we might remember and make sense of the lives that shape our own. The quotidian details that Dordal leaves on the page-requests for soup recipes, reports of bird sightings, seasonal shifts-accrue new poignancy as Next Time You Come Home moves with a sneaky momentum through months, then years, then decades. What remains on the page feels like a new and ghostly dialogue between the writer, her mother, and the reader, too-a conversation that is both courageous and illuminating." -Lee Conell, author of The Party Upstairs

2022 Hudson Prize WinnerA young couple raises crickets for food, a woman in a caged complex is witness to the deterioration of her neighbor, a homeless man contemplates an infant's grave from the Westward Expansion, and an uncompromising ego takes on a Biblical rain. These are among the stories from HIGHWIRE ACT & OTHER TALES OF SURVIVAL, where the climate crisis arrives not just as strange and violent weather, but as upheavals in our political and emotional climates as well. As characters struggle for survival with Covid, ecological destruction, grief, or mental illness, they attempt to find solace and restoration from a nature that is increasingly no longer in a position to give back. And with science unable to keep up, fake suicides, fairy tales, and delusion are the thorny tools humans are left with to carry on, yet carry on they do.--------------"JoeAnn Hart's extraordinary stories take you on a trip: to a dystopian future; to the tidewaters of Gloucester; to the chambers of a haunted mill. But in the end, the real place she takes us is the center of the human heart. These unforgettable tales are generous, brilliant, and fierce." - Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of She's Not There, and co-author (with Jodi Picoult) of Mad Honey"In her short story collection, HIGHWIRE ACT & OTHER TALES OF SURVIVAL, JoeAnn Hart's characters go to the sea, deadhead flowers, eat artisanal pizzas, with humor and with humanity. These luminous stories shine long after you've read them." - Ann Hood, author of Fly Girl

The thirteen stories in Rebecca Turkewitz's debut collection, Here in the Night, are engrossing, strange, eerie, and emotionally nuanced.With psychological insight and finely crafted prose, HERE IN THE NIGHT investigates the joys and constraints of womanhood, of queerness, and of intimacy. Preoccupied with all manner of hauntings, these stories traverse a boarding school in the Vermont woods, the jagged coast of Maine, an attic in suburban Massachusetts, an elevator stuck between floors, and the side of an unlit highway in rural South Carolina.At the center of almost every story is the landscape of night, with all its tantalizing and terrifying potential. After dark, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, boundaries loosen, expectations fall away, and even the greatest skeptics believe-at least fleetingly-that anything could happen. These stories will stay with you."Yes, disembodied voices howl. Floors creak. Hearts pound. But the real terror of Rebecca Turkewitz's unforgettable stories only begins with the eerie manifestations. Here in the Night explores the terror of human relationships, of regret and betrayal, the incalculable risk of love. Filled with piercing wisdom and the ache of understanding, these stories explore the undead dreams that trail all of us, and illuminate the debts that bind us, like ghostly chains, to one another." -Erin McGraw"What mystifies and delights me most about Here in the Night is that a story collection chock-full of hauntings and the haunted, ghost stories both (apparently) real and (probably) imagined, and harrowing deaths by drowning and other violences, should be so tender and generous and flat-out lovely a read. It's a gorgeous book-wise and charming and moving and fun." -Michelle Herman"Rebecca Turkewitz's Here in the Night is a treasure chest of psychological terror, and-as with the tales of Shirley Jackson, or Kelly Link, or Carmen Maria Machado-the terror is submerged, in the periphery of a character's eyesight, lingering just off the page. Turkewitz is a master storyteller, and her debut collection is a triumph." -Nick White"In Rebecca Turkewitz's collection of short stories, even the most ordinary moments are suffused with magic and ghosts. Yet her characters feel as real as anyone you might meet, rendered with deep empathy and complexity. Here in the Night is a rich, vibrant and enthralling book." -Dan Chaon

Poetry. Women's Studies / Gender Studies. Writing About the South. No Spare People documents the joys and perils of a tiny mother-daughter family navigating life on the margins. From poems about finding autonomy as a queer, unpartnered parent by choice in the South to those chronicling a generation's economic instability, Hoover rejects so-called "acceptable losses" stemming from inequalities of gender, race, and class. The book asks, what happens to the woman no longer willing to live a lie? How does language invent not only identity, but possibility?

EXCISIONS investigates the feeling-the problem and the syntax-of being on a threshold. If you don't know what will happen next, you can't yet say what has happened. These poems arise from states of precise unknowing, desperate imagination, inchoate emotion, encounters with mortality and power when they're closing in but haven't caught you yet. What is choice, given the terms of an ill body, survival in a grotesque empire? Tenderly and acutely, these poems examine the life of before and after: when something is excised from you, it was you, and you are what remains."Out of hospitals, marriage bedrooms, woodland parks and city centers-the vanishing borders between the healthy and the sick-Hilary Plum's poems emerge hard-edged and fully formed. She is dynamically attuned to the fragility and ferociousness of our attachments to one another, "a long storm of hello." Densely lyrical and possessed of austere beauty, Excisions recalls the poetry of Jorie Graham, Victoria Chang and George Oppen, but Plum's voice is her own-flinty, incantatory and undeniable."-Daniel Poppick"A compass works because our inner core, part crystal, contains intense pressure preventing iron from melting beyond the melting point. This is Excisions' poetic consciousness. Repairing the illusion of mindbody disconnect, yet in this book there's no word for cure or its tailspin outside of artistic reconnaissance. We're at the hospital so much as to redraw transportation schemas-a gas guzzling gurney-one awakens from their dreams in a paper robe staring at the bluest bulge of vein. To be is to recognize intense stares from eyes who don't yet exist totally inside. Outpatient futurity and fugitivity is the same evolutionary experience of the civilizational body. Between poet and patient is warm sea foam from the moon's unrest of having to be so old a witness! Plum's transmissions from the funeral of Aesculapius surrealism. In Plum's poems, the people with names dig up and brush off the bones."-Dot Devota

Winner of the 2021 St. Lawrence Book AwardSet entirely in the Bangalore region of South India, BOOMTOWN GIRL explores the ambitions, delusions, and struggles of people navigating a rapidly developing city. A rebellious teenager and her workaholic father confront their mutual distrust while dining at a newly opened Pizza Hut; a tailor nostalgic for his past glory in the employ of an Englishman grows obsessed with an American customer; a techie, his fiancée having broken off their engagement, takes a young, eager intern into his confidence. These stories trace Bangalore's warp-speed transformation from a leafy backwater into India's Silicon Valley-a place where Digital Age values clash with tradition, where British colonialism casts its strong shadow, and where visions are inspired and distorted by the forces of globalization."Boomtown Girl is a volume of finely wrought stories. Shubha Sunder writes with such intelligence, grace and care that the common, ordinary lives depicted in these stories are dignified. This is a moving and necessary book." -Ha Jin"A sure-footed, magisterial and magical collection of stories." -E.C. Osondu"Boomtown Girl charts the transformation of Bangalore and its environs, in all its grit and glitter. In virtuoistic and vital prose, Shubha Sunder's nine stories bring indelible characters to life, portraying their hopes, dreams, and despair. A compelling debut." -Vanessa Hua"In Boomtown Girl, the immensely talented Shubha Sunder takes us into the heart of Bangalore society in the 1990s, a decade of great change. With writing that sparkles and flares, we become privy to individuals' deepest striving and disappointment, their utterly relatable yearnings to burst beyond restrictions and to belong. I could read these fresh characters and their captivating stories for hours." -Jennifer Acker

An unflinching new collection from poet, Jenny Irish, in which cultural violence against women is explored through various personae.At the heart of all violence is fear: Lupine is a gathering of feminist prose poetry engaging themes of ecology, animality, and the human unknown. A series of interconnected dramatic monologues, the poems inhabit the personae of figures traditionally deemed Monstrous, giving them voice to confront and reclaim the violent mythologies that have so often been imposed upon them. As these unmuzzled monsters speak, the collection collapses the boundaries between the self and the subjugated other, ultimately upending the discourse of monstrosity itself. By exposing how women are villainized and sacrificed in response to cultural fear, Lupine offers a corrective to social narratives in which notions of the bestial and notions of the feminine are intimately entwined."A fang concealed inside a flower, Lupine has a mythological sense of ecopoetics, one in which nature is often vindicated, in all its mossy, sinewy, animal luster, for the violence we as humans have enacted upon it. Jenny Irish has an unflinching eye, interrogating 'spectacle and specimen,' wielding a mirror against cruel and patriarchal abuses of power. This language of survival drips with 'darkness as she welcomes herself in' to reconsider what has traditionally been called wicked, or monstrous, or other. Challenging our preconceived notions of narrative, Irish lets wildness pulse against the edges of her sentences, 'obscene up close,' but 'all a-light'-the reader is left dazzled, transformed." -Jenny Molberg, author of Refusal"Lupine is a rare feat of a chapbook, in which the poet Jenny Irish dawns the masks of so many monsters to tell us vividly how our culture fails women. From shadows, we make stories" our speaker reminds us, and Irish shows us how the object casting the shadow is often the haphazard negligence we regard each other with. This book is a bestiary of deep lyric knowing, from the first poem to the closing, immaculate question that makes Lupine's final line, what we're given is a chorus of beasts we can't help but think look like us." -C.T. Salazar, author of Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking"Just like the botanical ferocity that accompanies its title, Lupine by Jenny Irish cracks the fangs from the aggressor, reveling in a primitive magic where women confront and disrupt their default historical fates. A delightfully dark examination of fear, and interrogation of the cautionary tale, Irish's collection offers advice that resonates from deep past into contemporary life. For example, in "Harpy," we are told, 'Girl-child, if you must hate yourself, let it be for lack of talent rather than the body your soul inherited,' while in 'Witch' we hear, 'A good girl keeps her mouth shut, and a bad girl gets the sound smacked out, and a smart girl knows she will be punished either way.' Resplendent with magnificent animals, abundant flora, and unforgettable voices, Lupine is a showcase of the dramatic monologue at its wicked best." -Mary Biddinger, author of Department of Elegy

Black River Chapbook Competition winner, Lucy Wainger, is a portrait of adolescent mental illness at the end of history.IN LIFE THERE ARE MANY THINGS is a portrait of adolescent mental illness after the end of history: "I have / this body- / residue-and I don't know what / left it." This chapbook's unmoored speakers seek, alternately, to root themselves more firmly in the world and to exit it entirely. Autobiography and allegory merge to track the inexplicable shapeshifting of the self as it ages, heals, dies, and lives again."Lucy Wainger is a brilliant poet whose ability to follow the visceral logic of her electrified imagination leads to lines so bright I want to eat them. She dazzles me with her deadpan humor and breaks my heart with her sudden utterances of love or hurt. While these poems are skillful and intelligent, they also give a feeling of guilelessness, the wild and askew openness children know and are taught to forget. Wainger is in touch with ungovernable forces. The lines she pulls down onto the page are virtually humming with energy; it is possible that when you read them you will produce sparks from your fingers and tongue." -Heather Christle"Reader, I envy you: you're about to meet Lucy Wainger and read her work for the first time. Wainger is obsessed with the way the largest questions in the world-what it means to be human, how we cope with embodiment, how we respond when in danger, how we shift and morph as we experience the passage of time, how we realize we love life and how we bear it when we don't-can feel achingly specific and material, like a 'big red cut shaped like a fingernail' or 'the smell of flapping fins and failing gills.' Whether Wainger is inhabiting a persona-which include Scheherazade and Teen Wolf, among others-or wielding her 'I,' which is at once relentlessly contemporary, Gothic, and pastoral, you always have a sense that you are sharing a world with her and her speakers, so close to them that the juice that 'spurts' from their oranges may well also get on you as you read. I am so jealous that you get to experience In Life There Are Many Things freshly, although I know that even after you've read it, every subsequent encounter with this relentlessly curious, seeking, and dynamic chapbook will always feel like a fresh experience, no matter how many times it has already stood in front of you and asked, 'What else do you remember?'" -Sumita Chakraborty

A LOVE LETTER has the power to speak outside of time (or through time) as did my beloved aunt who left a paper trail that evidenced she kept me in her thoughts. She'd drafted an Advance Directive, and purchased some modest burial insurance, and protected a few memories that might have otherwise been forgotten. A love letter became how she chose to say goodbye and go with grace. So, I wish in many ways to reciprocate her love with this little book-a re-memory-a reflection of where I was when she left this world, and where I am now, and where in the future any one of us might be."A Love Letter is a profound and gorgeously rendered tribute to a person, to a place, and to life itself. I really enjoyed the vivid characters and the sensitivity and elegance of Carmen Kennedy's writing." -Vendela Vida, author of We Run the Tides"A Love Letter is the reader's honor of being brought into the sharp tenderness of a loved one's transition. To enter this room also offering your mind to the various mirrors of embrace. To walk down the predatory nodes of a medical system serving capital and rage along. In a few pages, you are years changed." -Tongo Eisen Martin, San Francisco Poet Laureate"A Love Letter 's lyrical vignettes place witness pinnacle as the speaker both chronicles and begets introspection. We observe cyclical mourning and cyclical hope. In these pages, we gather empathy as a cure for our human condition, with passages like, 'this journey is eminently finite and someone's departure can seem abrupt if you miss as little as a day, week or month.' Praise this work that allows us to look into another's eyes and see something beautiful." -Daniel B. Summerhill, Monterey County Poet Laureate, author of DIVINE, DIVINE, DIVINE"Carmen's exquisite memoriam moves between the harshness of loss and ways in which our bodies accept its inevitability. It snapshots a personal moment with such beautiful transcendence that it draws in all the senses and will serve as lastly a guide to anyone else who has to later turn the pages of their own scrapbooks... I am forever changed." -Tshaka Campbell, Santa Clara County Poet Laureate, author of Tunnel Vision"As a person who witnessed two loved ones' minds sail away before their bodies departed, I can assure you that Carmen Kennedy has captured a maelstrom of emotions and delicately drew them onto the spathe of a calla lily. This profound prosimetrum captures the rememory of loss in a sequence of window panes all shattering with the sorrow, doubt, and the tenderest moments of humans coming together to hold one another up when the world seems like it is drifting away. Carmen captured the stages of grief in stained-glass. This is one of the most delicate works I have read in a long time-but the carefulness of how it was written relays the strength of the writer into the minds of those who read it-especially those who find pieces of themselves in the elegant layering of these pastel paned moments. This is a declaration of healing." Vernon Keeve III (Trey), author of SOUTHERN MIGRANT MIXTAPE