Bücher veröffentlicht von Black Lawrence Press, Inc.

Another title for Jacob Appel's engrossing new story collection could be what one character calls 'a conspiracy of fantasies.' Characters imagine rekindling romances from the distant past, pursue prestigious apprenticeships and dramatic deaths, even attend the funerals of movie stars in order to avoid or infuse meaning into their own ordinary losses and suffering. Appel portrays these characters with such compassion that we willingly join the conspiracies, recognizing ourselves in every effort to understand the sum and value of human lives. These are wise and achingly beautiful stories."-Chauna Craig"WINTER HONEYMOON is a remarkable collection, full of Appel's keen depictions of human interactions in their most intricate subtleties. Many of the stories manage that ever-elusive quality of great short fiction: a novelistic scope miraculously fitted into a handful of pages. And there is the weight of history in all of these stories, of characters who have lives far beyond the glimpses we are given. The prose manages to dazzle throughout as well, though without ever drawing attention to itself. Appel is a genuine stylist is the vein of Salter or Munro, though with flourishes all his own."-Brad J. Felver"Short stories are normally the territory of literary tricksters like de Maupassant, O. Henry and anyone with an MFA or a sinecure in TV, sleight-of-hand artists know their ending before they begin building a careful scrim to obscure the reveal. Unlike these showbiznicks, Appel starts from one character, one phrase, even one key word and lets his story tell itself, so the author is as much ambushed by the outcome as his awe-struck readers. There is only one word to describe these nine tales of humans trapped within their own humanity: magisterial. No one writes like Jacob Appel."-Hesh Kestin"Jacob M. Appel's stories are more than just slices of life; they contain entire worlds. In smart, sharp, penetrating prose he draws the reader into not just the complicated modern lives of his protagonists, but their struggles, hopes, dreams and frustrations. Middle aged men and women dealing with elderly parents, marriages under strain, illnesses, and difficult children form the central conflicts, and are universal in their pathos. Appel manages to make the extraordinary plausible and the poignant humorous. These stories will delight and destroy you; you won't be able to put them down."-Allison Amend"From a widow pursuing an old flame to an architect caught in a collapsing relationship, WINTER HONEYMOON reminds us that life is fleeting but love, in all its forms, is a survivor. These are stories of sometimes quiet, sometimes incredible, and always complex lives that shout at us in their telling. With Jacob Appel's devilish eye for detail, the stakes grow, the plots turn, and the reader is hit in the head as much as the heart. These are as much affirmations as they are stories, and this is an adventurous and accomplished collection by any measure."-R. Dean Johnson

THEY SAID: A MULTI-GENRE ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY COLLABORATIVE WRITING includes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, as well as hybridized forms that push the boundaries of concepts like "genre" and "author."Contributors to this anthology include: Kelli Russell Agodon, Nin Andrews, Elisa Gabbert, Ross Gay, Carol Guess, Carla Harryman, j/j hastain, Lyn Hejinian, Persis Karim, Ada Limon, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Julie Marie Wade, G C Waldrep, and many more.

"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

Poetry manuals, at their most essential, are aimed at demystifying aspects of poetry, in order to make poetry less daunting-especially for beginner poets. Such manuals are also reminders that poetry itself is a discipline with a landscape and a history. FAR VILLAGES builds on the body of work in this tradition by bringing a number of established and emerging poets together in a single volume to welcome new and beginner poets to the art of poetry, its craft, and the long journey within it.Contributors to this anthology include Abayomi Animashaun, Jose Araguz, Stacey Balkun, Chaun Ballard, Christine Beck, David Bergman, Marina Blitshteyn, Michelle Bonczek, DanielBosch, Zoe Brigley, Aaron Brown, Guillermo Cancio-Bello, Rob Carney, Kelly Cherry, Michael Collins, Tasha Cotter, Rishi Dastidar, Noah Davis, Victoria L. Davis, Todd Fleming Davis, Jaydn DeWald, Melanie Faith, Jenny Ferguson, Kyle Flak, Leonard Franzen, Robbie Gamble, John Guzlowski, David Harris, Duane L. Herrmann, Jon Hoel, Natalie Homer, Kathryn Hummel, Ashton Kamburoff, Laura Kaminski, C. Kubasta, John Langfeld, Joan Leotta, Tanis MacDonald, David Maduli, Katie Manning, Michael Martin, Jason McCall, Nathan McClain, J.G. McClure, Megan Merchant, Amy Miller, Norman Minnick, Jennifer Moore, James B. Nicola, Dike Okoro, Stephen Page, Gillian Parrish, Barbara Perry, Kevin Pilkington, Darby Price, Jessamine Price, Michael Rather, Jr., Nancy Reddy, Christine Riddle, John Robinson, Diana Rosen, Helen Ruggieri, Claudia Savage, Nancy Scott, David Shumate, Linda Simone, Tara Skurtu, Carol Smallwood, Emily Stoddard, WhitneySweet, Thom Tammaro, Sophia Terazawa, Kari Treese, J.S. Watts, Kari Wergeland, and Ben White.

What can happen to a director on a failing shoot? Plenty, as all aspects of life are thrown his way. Amid his efforts to save the doomed project, eccentric locals crack open his heart and jumpstart his creative juices.

"This is a poet unafraid of being understood, who will not hide behind decorativeness or the oblique. Read these poems aloud and you will hear an authentic and quintessentially American voice not only writing but also speaking to you."-Thomas Lux"I take guilty pleasure in the poems of Kevin Pilkington, and consider him an essential voice in contemporary poetry."-Jay Parini"In this rich collection of tender poems, he celebrates the small consolations of daily life that offer spiritual relief in the face of disappointment and loss. There are no easy epiphanies here-just one poet working as hard as he can to get through daily life with dignity and grace."-Jim Daniels

"In TETHER, a spacecraft of a book superbly conceived and assembled, Lisa Fay Coutley engineers both recovery and healing in poems that swerve emotionally between the landing bays of grief, longing, and wonder. A bright hunger constellates around these poems, but so too the immensities of love. TETHER is a burning inquiry into the miracle of being here on earth and what keeps us fastened to each other, for better or worse."-Major Jackson"Lisa Fay Coutley's TETHER is characterized by a compressed tension, each line, each word, hitched to the next, quivering with the effort to remain connected and with the opposing desire to be released. The image of the tether accrues intensity in the course of the book: astronaut tethered to the ship, poet to the poem, mother to the homeless, addict child and child to the mother, and in the space between 'the two / great opposing poles' is God, who learns, in that chasm, 'wonder & suffering.' Indeed, oppositional forces reign in these poems; there are no conventional false resolutions to be had. 'Every event / that's saved my life has nearly killed me,' the speaker declares, and 'I would rather live / with my burning than sleep with my dead.' This is a far-reaching book, a political book, a deeply personal and heroic book. Its thesis is reflected in its enviably honed diction. 'Mystery is her / bitch,' the speaker writes of the eclipsing sun. The same is true of Lisa Fay Coutley and the ravishing poems of tether."-Diane Seuss"TETHER is a book of distances and intimacies, of letters never sent and dream talks and delayed communiques. It is a study of distance between us,between an astronaut and a poet, between lovers, between ourselves and eachother, ourselves and ourselves. 'We are the beached boat / with a hole inits hull,' admits the poet. Each of us, even as 'baby in a womb is a cloud.' And yet there is so much love. And yet, everything that happens tous, happens for a purpose. And when one turns worthy, a giant squid washes ashore.It is this knowing, this insight into our distances (of years, of geography, of a space of a single day) here that I find compelling: '& how far / must you back away / from yourself / to see / yourself / as the Astronaut / sees/ Earth.' Beautiful work."-Ilya Kaminsky"Is it desire, wonder, duty, or memory that keeps us most firmly tethered to the world, where 'truth is every bird starving,' and we live in constant awareness of all the forces that threaten to break the bonds between us and our loved ones? A mother's death, a son's drug addiction, the disastrous world news filtered daily through the internet: how do we reconcile the painful events that define our existence with our hope for a more secure future? Through sinewy, sometimes hallucinogenic syntax that threatens to (but never does) spin out of control, TETHER's poems examine a contemporary and very human paradox, in which we long to absent ourselves from our grief, while also needing to document our losses so as to ensure we won't forget. TETHER reminds us that we are formed as much from pain as from delight and that, in her ability to look back upon her past, upon today's terrible and compelling news, the contemporary poet is like an astronaut, able to regard the world 'from a great height,' a witness to what most of us cannot bear to see."-Paisley Rekdal

¿In her third book, PREY, Jeanann Verlee examines predatory relationships from childhood onward. Drawing parallels between human and non-human predators, the poems collected here strive to illuminate the trauma of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse-exploring what it is to become prey.

2019 Lambda Literary Award finalist for Lesbian Poetry. In her debut short collection, poet Kristin Chang bursts onto the page and into our consciousness like a dazzling, dizzying uproar: "I suck / until my teeth riot / with rot & I have nothing / left in my mouth to keep / quiet." Quiet Chang's speakers are not. In these nineteen poems, the body is personal and communal, hunter and hunted: "My mother says / women who sleep with women / are redundant: the body symmetrical / to its crime. Between your knees / I mistake need for belief / in a father figure: once, we renamed / our fathers by burning them / out of our bodies, smoking the sky / into meat."

"No one is safe from Nina Boutsikaris' gaze in this book-she looks at the world and people around her just as intensely as she turns her gaze inward, questioning her desires, her actions, and asking what it means to see something for what it truly is. I'M TRYING TO TELL YOU I'M SORRY pairs art with experience, youth with introspection, and gender with power-the dance between these topics makes for an utterly absorbing read."-Chelsea Hodson"I'M TRYING TO TELL YOU I'M SORRY is not so much a memoir as an experience. Be prepared to fully immerse yourself in a world that's both gorgeous and dangerous, led by a guide who has found herself at the outermost edges of what language can bear. I've never read anything quite like it. Nina Boutsikaris is a compelling new voice in creative nonfiction."-Brenda Miller"An intelligent and radical rumination on gender, sexuality, fear, and romance. A topical and evocative book for anyone with a brain."-Chloe Caldwell

In Shane McCrae's NONFICTION, the self is repeatedly re-figured as the site of rupture between truth and fiction, present and past, first-person and third-person-the rupture in which the dichotomies we live by, the dichotomies that erase us, originate. The speakers of these poems inhabit impossible situations, and the poems themselves speak neither of overcoming, nor of being overcome by, these impossibilities, but of the moment of equilibrium between extremes, the moment of uncertainty from which the future emerges. As McCrae writes at the end of his two-part poem on Solomon Northup, "in the darkness / I after a while couldn't be sure / My eyes were open." These poems assert, and foreground, possibility; the rupture they describe is hope.

MOTHERMORPHOSIS is an exploration of the sublime terrain of mother. Poems situate the reader in the conflict between the idea and reality of what mother is in love, loss, sanity, and motherland."The extraordinary poems in MOTHERMORPHOSIS place readers in the particular life of a daughter and her schizophrenic mother; however, a larger world, full of war and tenderness, misunderstanding and clarity, vulnerability and empowerment, our world, is present, too, so the book speaks with great urgency for all and to all of us."--Blas Falconer, author of A Question of Gravity and Light"Chavez, despite the darkness of her subject matter, is a good enough poet, a powerful enough voice, to make the reader sometimes forget how harrowing these works really are... Ms Chavez has, more than other poet I've read in recent memory, made a real case for the validity of poetry in the 21st century. Her words sing. They scream."--John Sweet, winner of the first Lummox Poetry Prize"I have found over the years there are poets that influence. Poets that spark something we may not even be aware of and poets you go back to because you can't get enough. MK Chavez is all three of these."--Scot Young"It is in the adornment of Chavez's dictions that--to paraphrase Chimamanda Adichie's magnificent speech 'The Danger of a Single Story'--a sort of restoration, or reconciliation, might occur."--Elizabeth Treadwell"In a world of oversharing, MOTHERMORPHOSIS, by MK Chavez, is even more impactful due to its relentless restraint. These meticulously crafted poems bear witness to the shipwreck that can be a brown girl's childhood, especially with a US-backed Salvadoran civil war, shaming Catholic patriarchs, a mother with mental illness, and unforgiving streets. Yet, she masterfully tells these stories, not with a rapid spilling, but with the measured assurance of having digested the perilous escape--literally, what has not killed her has made her strong. A stunning collection."--Aya de LeonPoetry. California Interest. Latino/Latina Studies. Women's Studies.

Joseph Kylander's childhood in early 20th century San Francisco has been shaped by his widowed father's obsessive photographic project and by his headstrong cousin Karelia's fanciful storytelling and impulsive acts. The 1906 earthquake upends their eccentric routines, and they take refuge with a capricious patron and a group of artists looking to find meaning after the disaster. THE BOOK OF LOST LIGHT explores family loyalty and betrayal, Finnish folklore, the nature of time and theater, and what it takes to recover from calamity and build a new life from the ashes.

Poetry. Women's Studies. California Interest. 2019 Lambda Literary Award finalist for Transgender Poetry. At the close of the frontier, during a queer elsewhen, IF THE COLOR IS FUGITIVE asks for witness to vagrants searching for landmarks amidst rubble. Peppered with invented idioms and slant colloquialisms, these poems preserve an archive of survival that reads like a folklorist translating from local dialect to earnest exhortation: how to escape with nothing but your name.

"The men in this collection seethe with something close to rage or desperation or both while remaining recognizably and sympathetically human, and that rare combination makes the experience of reading THE BEAUTIFUL WISHES OF UGLY MEN feel as dangerous as a knife fight."-Michael Knight"Woman can learn more from these stories than from thousands of issues of Cosmopolitan."-Ellen Gilchrist"To read THE BEAUTIFUL WISHES OF UGLY MEN is to know the power and sweep of what short stories can do. These full-bodied, full-throated stories show us men in trouble and men in love, and they show us how those are often one in the same. Prince is a profoundly gifted and muscular writer, a writer who understands the intimacy of violence and the violence of intimacy, a writer you read again and again and again."-Bret Anthony Johnston

From his first appearance on the page, "we knew he was bound for something unsolvable." But a little thing like futility can't stop our hero from holding up a magnifying glass to a world "so bright it's impossible to understand." In this searching, provocative collection of coming-of-age sonnets, the sad boy detective listens close, collects the evidence, and reimagines the strange landscapes of a life, a body, a boy, a self. Through a questioning, fervent lens, sam sax's SAD BOY / DETECTIVE reminds us how deeply bizarre and at times undecipherable all this existence stuff truly is.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, resulting in a cataclysmic series of events affecting all persons of Japanese ancestry then residing on the West Coast of the United States. So calamitous were these actions that a noted scholar asserted that this action constitutes "the defining event in the history of Japanese Americans."What does this have to do with a book of poetry titled A COLD WIND FROM IDAHO? Those Americans familiar with the Pacific Northwest Japanese American World War II experience will understand the imagery wrought by the title as being both evocative and apt. The metaphor of freezing winter winds chilling the body and then entering the soul of those affected conveys fittingly how the Japanese Issei and Japanese American Nisei encountered, braved, and then survived the cold iciness of Idaho's winters while they were huddled in a primitive American barbed wire concentration camp.

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.

Winner of the Spring 2020 Black River Chapbook Competition. The poem from which BLACK UNDER derives its title opens with a resounding declaration: "I am black and black underneath." These words are an anthem that reverberates throughout Ashanti Anderson's debut short collection. We feel them as we navigate her poems' linguistic risks and shifts and trumpets, as we straddle scales that tip us toward trauma's still-bloody knife in one turn then into cutting wit and shrewd humor in the next. We hear them amplified through Anderson's dynamic voice, which sings of anguish and atrocities and also of discovery and beauty.BLACK UNDER layers outward perception with internal truth to offer an almost-telescopic examination of the redundancies-and incongruences-of marginalization and hypervisibility. Anderson torques the contradictions of oppression, giving her speakers the breathing room to discover their own agency. In these pages, declarations are reclamations, and joy is not an aspiration but a birthright.

"You and I were told to swallow / our hexed howling, refuse the reptilian // and the mammalian, unless it's tame, / you know, cow-eyed, with a roundness eager / for petting." A powerful evocation of the feminist voice, HEX & HOWL both applies and upends textuality and tradition, parsing and refuting prior masculinist treatments of women's bodies. The poems in this collection forge multi-vocalities, some exhibiting pleasure in the parameters of the sonnet, others designing new poetic architectures through the double and multiple voicings of centos and self-portraits."Now we do the refusing; now // we flame in the celluloid dark." HEX & HOWL is collaborative writing at its most innovative, playful, and powerful. Muench and White allow for the creation of a chimeric construction, a third-bodied poem that engages in language-play to explode notions of subjectivity, as the "I" and "you" and "we" shift and shimmer with agency and possibility beyond the page.