Bücher veröffentlicht von Black Lawrence Press, Inc.

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

Nen G Ramirez's ALL WOMEN ARE BORN WAILING confronts myriad forms of violence against Latinas. Drawing on personal and family experiences with mental illness, the poet challenges the "crazy Latina" stereotype and examines the ways it has been used to belittle and dehumanize people who deserve treatment and care. Unflinching in their critique of sexist and racist tropes, in these poems Ramirez experiments with persona and familial history, including the murder of a cousin, in order to imagine more hopeful futures.Poetry. Latinx Studies.

Translated from the German by Daniele Pantano. "Pantano, a renowned poet and translator, has brought both of these talents to bear on his project. His process was to loosely translate all of the poems of Georg Trakl, then order the lines in alphabetical order by their first words. One further aspect of the organization is that while these lines share this overt linguistic kinship-due to the alphabetical ordering, but also due to the frequent repetition of a starting word-the lines do not share any apparent meaning relations. Like the Persian ghazal, where each couplet is meant to stand alone, seemingly disconnected from the others, yet also force by way of lyric disjoint a powerful effect on the reader, Pantano's conceptual poetry forces us to leap from line to line, navigating the voids along the way. There is a jarring-yet-also-pleasurable effect created by this structure and organization. Also, the reader will immediately notice that the title of the book is only one letter off from Trakl's name, transforming it into an oracle of sorts. This is entirely fitting, given that the lines in Pantano's collection echo the enigmatic pronouncements of an oracle from ancient myth and given that Pantano himself serves as a sort of oracular medium in translating/altering/arranging these lines."-from the introduction by Okla Elliott

Jason Tandon is a minimalist, a poet who manages stunning effects using the fewest possible elements of his medium. I am reminded of Uta Barth, who says her photographs "talk about the passage of time while looking at things that don't change that much at all." That moment of change is what shines in these poems, focused, refined, and magnified as it is by a lens of Tandon's flawless language. The intelligence in these poems is razor-sharp, lean, and efficient; the kind spirit behind them is generous and immense.-Eric PankeyIn a world of distraction, Jason Tandon's This Far North sings: be here now. Tandon is a master at collecting the overlooked splendor of the daily world and turning the common into the complex. Each poem is a delight-profound and precise, image-rich and mindful, with humor weaving its way through as well. The gift of this book is how the lyrical and timeless intertwine, and we are lost in this stunning space Tandon has created. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to fall in love with poetry again.-Kelli Russell AgodonEvery poem in This Far North seizes a glimpse and expands it into a jolting, sweeping panorama. I finished reading this book feeling, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, that "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience."-John Skoyles

What happens when one's illusions unravel? This is the question that animates Patricia Horvath's debut story collection, But Now Am Found. A young man experiences heartbreak for the first time when his girlfriend rejects him on religious grounds. One woman fixates on a crossword puzzle to avoid thinking about her missing daughter while another, in a deeply troubled marriage, gives birth. The characters in these stories struggle to make sense of upheaval in their lives. But Now Am Found is a compelling exploration of the human spirit confronted by abrupt and rending change.

A low-income Baltimore neighborhood is targeted for a controversial urban renewal project-an amusement park in the theme of Baltimore itself-that forces its residents to reckon with racism, displacement, and their futures. Peter Cryer is a queer teenager who fantasizes about leaving Baltimore and the instability of his home life while also seeking a place to belong. Ruth Anne, his prickly mother, is terrorized by her estranged husband and the indecision of what to do after the wrecking ball comes through her neighborhood. Thomas, a cleric and History teacher at Peter's school, questions his vocation in the face of the neighborhood's destruction. These three voices braid together a portrait of a neighborhood in flux, the role of community and violence in our time, and the struggles of a very real and oft misunderstood city.

Hell/a Mexican is an appreciation of the tragicomedy that is existing on American soil with foreign roots. These stories shed light on the boundless experience of living and learning through your identity. This collection, much like us, reaches for hope; Sometimes we find it, sometimes we don't.

A finalist for the Fall 2019 Black Lawrence Press Black River Chapbook Competition, the Cupboard Pamphlet's 2020 Annual Contest, and the 2021 Newfound Prose Prize.Inspired by Virgie Townsend's own experiences growing up in an independent fundamental Baptist church, the seven stories in BECAUSE WE WERE CHRISTIAN GIRLS examine religious and gender oppression through an unforgettable cast of Christian fundamentalist girls. In the titular story, Townsend writes, "All Christian girls know what happens when they disobey, even if it's by accident. We end up pregnant, kicked out of our churches, and used as examples in sermons about what happens to disobedient Christian girls. Eventually we go to hell, where we fall for eternity in a dark, fiery pit, bound in rough chains that tear and burn our flesh, deprived of any human contact except for listening to the eternal screams of other Christian girls who are also bound, falling, and should have listened to their elders."In prose alternately lyrical and humorous, and through stories sometimes dwelling in poignant realism and at others in the surreal, Townsend's girls navigate child abuse, body image issues, sexual curiosity and homophobia, addiction, racism, and classism on their paths to self-actualization and, ultimately, freedom. This is a debut short fiction chapbook you won't soon forget.----------"BECAUSE WE WERE CHRISTIAN GIRLS is a burst of holy fire. Written with lyric heart and beautiful insight, Virgie Townsend rips open the longing heart of good girls everywhere and reveals them for all their bloody complexity. This book is a triumph of insight and imagination. Virgie's prose is both tender and excoriating, like a loving and holy spirit. The stories and the heart of this book are burned into my soul. I'll be thinking about this book for a long, long time." -Lyz Lenz, author of God Land and Belabored"BECAUSE WE WERE CHRISTIAN GIRLS is a revelatory story collection of girlhood desire for selfhood. With evocative prose and wit, Townsend portrays the harrowing world of God's love at the turn of the millennium where sparkling grape juice is a road to sin, 'The internet has potential for great evil,' and Britney Spears' midriff might be the Devil. Under parental oughts and steeple crosses, the girls yearn for answers that don't exist in their world. BECAUSE WE WERE CHRISTIAN GIRLS is an urgent portrayal of fundamentalist repression of femme and queer personality through girls who to know the Spirit, must know their own." -Crystal K, author of Goodnight

"With the precision of a surgeon and a poet's reverberant intelligence, Vedran Husi¿ gives us stories of children growing up in war-ravaged Bosnia, a world of vanishing fathers, games invented around an alley sniper's bullets and the bittersweet aspirations of adolescent Bosnian immigrants and refugees in America. In taut yet voluptuous prose, with philosophic ferocity, BASEMENTS AND OTHER MUSEUMS marks the debut of a crucial new voice in contemporary fiction."-Melissa Pritchard"In an age of conformity, this is a writer who boldly stands apart. Language is unfixed. Time is stretched like taffy. The sniper's finger drifts to the trigger as the tale is told. When history, society, and culture conspire toward collapse, all we have left is language-Vedran Husi¿ knows this. He is the natural heir to Bruno Schulz, Danilo Ki¿, Gombrovicz: stylists and story-tellers battered by war."¿-Matthew Neill Null

Poetry. Fiction. California Interest. Classroom guide and introduction written by author inside. The brief narratives in ANIMAL CHILDREN by Hugh Behm-Steinberg work like a deceptively simple pinhole camera, a way of gazing at the deepest secrets of the heart through a lens of surrealism, humor, and pathos that renders clear that which is too intense, too personal, or too profound to be directly gazed upon. From the inner workings of 4-H clubs raising prize-winning nuns to the trials and tribulations of dating (and breaking up with) Death and Nature, to the insistence of cattle demanding to learn Kung Fu and people falling asleep during poetry readings, you will leave this book cleansed of your illusions, dazzled by hypnotic story-telling, and filled with a sense of wonder that lasts and lasts.

In her debut poetry chapbook, THE BODY HAS MEMORIES, Adrienne Danyelle Oliver gives voice to being and becoming the whole self. While memory may in its traditional sense be the discoveries of a single individual, Oliver is very aware that the act of remembering is a much greater collective process. It is the historical dialogues among the ancestors and the living. Memories dwell not just within the mind, but are made up from the struggles and triumphs of one's entire existence. Oliver expects her readers to share at least some of her cultural and historical memories. She is well-versed in Hip Hop and in the rich legacy of her African American heritage. She invites us to enter, to embody and to embrace these poems through three very personal portals "the physical, the mental and the heart." Yet no matter where you are in your exploration of this work, you too become aware of the vulnerability and fragility of the body and of the mind, if left on its own. In her poem ": #forareason____," Oliver encourages readers to respond to their own why "she is a limitless being" and welcomes you to a collective affirmation. Oliver is confident in her craft as a poet. In her poem ": belly," she does not let the constraints of form define how she navigates the visual space of the page. Her freedom to explore form enhances the intensity and tension of the language of the body.

On December 22, 2018, the 40th anniversary of Bernadette Mayer's writing of Midwinter Day, 32 women poets typed into Google Docs titled Dreams, Morning, Noontime, Afternoon, Evening, and Night. Following the six-part structure of Mayer's book, they composed alongside each other all day, dozens of cursors blinking in a virtual happening. MIDWINTER CONSTELLATION is the result. Part patchwork quilt, part collective consciousness, the book hopes "to prove the day like the dream has everything in it," as Mayer wrote in 1978, and to extend her vision into a global 21st-century everyday.A radical experiment in collective writing, the book embroiders, echoes, and blurs the voices of poets across the U.S. and beyond. They wake up in bed together and spend the day writing while nursing babies, grading papers, driving home for the holidays, making meals, and gathering in bookstores and living rooms to read Midwinter Day aloud. While threads of identity can be traced through the repeated names of children, highways, books, and pets, MIDWINTER CONSTELLATION declines to identify who's speaking when, exceeding the territory of authorship and rejecting the illusion that we are separate.MIDWINTER CONSTELLATION was written by Stephanie Anderson, Hanna Andrews, Julia Bloch, Susan Briante, Lee Ann Brown, Laynie Browne, Shanna Compton, Mel Coyle, Marisa Crawford, Vanessa Jimenez Gabb, Arielle Greenberg, Jenny Gropp, Stefania Heim, MC Hyland, erica kaufman, Becca Klaver, Caolan Madden, Pattie McCarthy, Monica McClure, Jenn Marie Nunes, Danielle Pafunda, Maryam Ivette Parhizkar, Khadijah Queen, Linda Russo, Katie Jean Shinkle, Evie Shockley, Sara Jane Stoner, Dawn Sueoka, Bronwen Tate, Catherine Wagner, Elisabeth Workman, and Mia You.

Bone Moon Palace is a contemplation on what it means to remake one's home while also remaking one's community in a time of plague and political turmoil. Which is to say it is a hot mess of ritual trying to find the comfort inside the poem of the self crying out for companionship in the heat of the inferno and the cold of the small horse of the night. It is an elegy of mourning for family lost to the politics of fear and gentrification, and a manifesto of reuniting the people who have poetry into the family that will stand and make a difference for the voiceless in a society obsessed with its own destruction.

Animal disorders-those erratic, contradictory, irrational relationships that humans have with their nonhuman compatriots-abound in contemporary U.S. culture. In a series of personal essays, Deborah Thompson relates her own complicity in some of these disordered approaches to nonhuman animals, including such practices as pet-keeping, animal hoarding, animal sacrifice (both religious and scientific), magical thinking, and grieving. The sometimes funny, sometimes poignant essays in this collection deliver dispatches from one representative sufferer of animal disorders."ANIMAL DISORDERS is a compassionate but clear-eyed critique of the contradictions and hypocrisies embedded in humankind's messy relationship with animals. In reflective, lovely, often funny prose, Deborah Thompson explores the deep emotions that animals evoke in us, and the ways that emotion, especially grief, upends our beliefs about animals, about ourselves, and about our place in the world."--Claire Boyles, author of Site Fidelity

Winner of the The Big Moose Prize and the Balcones Fiction Prize. Set in the 1930s, and spanning the globe, THE GOOD ECHO is the story of a marriage between controversial nutritionist and dentist Clifford Bell, and his quietly courageous wife Frances. After their young son dies from surgery Clifford performs, the two seek to escape their grief through unconventional means, traveling from Ohio to Sudan, to substantiate a theory of which Clifford's colleagues are skeptical. Narrated in turn by Frances and Clifford, and by the ghost of their son Benjamin, THE GOOD ECHO is composed of postcards and bedtime stories, folktales and family legends, travel and research notes. THE GOOD ECHO celebrates the healing that can arise through sustained curiosity, and how our deepest sadness sometimes initiates the boldest adventures of our lives.

Gate: threshold, corridor, barrier. Sahar Muradi engages power, war, illness, and language to evoke the physical and literary passages that accompany individual and collective loss. In [ G A T E S ], the loss of a homeland meets the loss of a dying father meets the loss of meaning amidst war, racism, and environmental degradation. Muradi's highly charged, deeply transformative poems interrogate the contemporary moment's collapsing of space, where near and far, private and global are no longer distinct. In the sometimes elliptical, sometimes rapidly changing spaces inhabited by these sixteen poems, languages of politics and intimacy exist in constant tension so that the sweeping violence of an occupied Afghanistan cannot, for instance, be separated from the intimate violence of the dying of a loved one. Muradi's speakers call out to us from a world of tightly-braided oppressions to ask how language can be a function of (in)justice, how a life is valued, and how poetry, like a gate, may function as a passage from pain to pain, promise to promise, truth to truth."These charged, elliptical poems make space for the unknown and unknowable, even as they vividly summon the tangible body of the world. Shot through with sudden glimpses of violence and beauty, Sahar Muradi's poems refuse us comfort or closure. They offer only what is-yet, paradoxically, haunt us with the sense that we're standing on holy ground."-Joan Larkin"I get the sense reading Sahar Muradi's richly layered and quietly transformative poems that what's there is all that has to be there, that the poetry depends on nothing outside of the various shapes it takes, and that complex life conditions and feeling spaces are in a constant dance with certainty and doubt at all points, always on the move. There is an unfettered, inviting, and wryly unconventional voice at work in [ G A T E S ], one capable of making the necessarily enigmatic turns scale demands when distances known and felt on numerous levels have to be closed in on. These poems animate and search through multiple lived-in centers that are real and imagined simultaneously, always open, and always irreducible."-Anselm Berrigan"If you open Sahar Muradi's [ G A T E S ] and follow each line into the entryways and departures, passed 'convention centers and expos / and festivals that begin at sunset,' you will witness the poet's memories as tiny explosions of intimacies that devastate with their precision and candor. On images of Ferris wheels and 'prayer on the side of the road,' the poet 'kneels and spreads [her] picnic' of wonder. Sahar Muradi makes sense of the fragments of memory, the broken buildings of Kabul, Mazar, and Panjsher, the innocence of childhood punctured by journey, a father's illness, losing a language, and the politics of a war uninvited. Muradi beckons you, asks how you 'authored poorer nations with the hope of freeing / others. The architects of what's left.' Indeed the political act of poetry in this fierce collection is a pained beauty that does not look away as it rebuilds the human starting with the heart."-Rajiv Mohabir

Named one of Kirkus Reviews' Best Fiction Books of 2014. Each of the characters in SCOUTING FOR THE REAPER faces an unanticipated challenge: transporting a truckload of penguins across the country, arranging a proper Jewish burial for the remains of Gregor Samsa, and selling tombstones dressed as a Girl Scout. These stories explore the domestic and professional adventures of people in over their heads, while leavening their struggles with humor.

REVENGE BODY traces moments in the aftermath of survival and rebuilding toward a more livable future for survivors. While refusing to hide, minimize, justify or ignore instances of trauma, it also refuses to succumb to them. Instead, it probes these histories as a strategy to move through the pain and forge an alternate path for a new tomorrow.

A carnivorous ferris wheel, exploding chickens, a theme park that's home to a god, and a centuries-old Spanish ship found in the Texas hill country. MORE ENDURING FOR HAVING BEEN BROKEN includes stories of children abandoned, forgotten, and ignored, their trauma and the desperate need to survive it. Whether it's living in a rusted stingray above a tourist shop in coastal Florida, feeding faces to monstrous catfish in the bayou, maintaining a derelict and fog-shrouded hotel in South America, or escaping through the labyrinthine caves of Crete, the boys and girls in this collection weather their aloneness in a world touched by the strange and fantastical.

Jillian Guzmán, who is nine years old at the beginning of the book, communicates through drawings rather than speech as she travels with her mother, Angie O'Malley, throughout the borderlands of Arizona and northwestern Mexico. Later she creates survival maps for border crossers and paints murals at the Casa de los Olvidados, a refuge in Sonora run by the traditional healer Juana of God. These darkly funny tales, focusing on Mexican-American, Euro-American, and Mexican characters, feature visionary experiences, ghosts, faith healers, a deer's head that speaks, a dog who channels spirits of the dead-and a young woman whose drawings begin to create realities instead of just reflecting them.