Bücher veröffentlicht von Black Lawrence Press, Inc.

In thirteen slick, innovative, and gut-wrenching flashes, the young women and girls in BREAKING POINTS, the debut chapbook from Chelsea Stickle, hit the walls around them-walls constructed by family, friends, significant others, and insidious cultural perils. "Stranger danger doesn't disappear when you start wearing a push-up bra," notes one of Stickle's pre-teen narrators when confronted by a leering threat that will forever sever her path from that of her best friend. In "How to Make Stock with Thanksgiving Leftovers," a queer young woman takes us through a wry recipe for boiling turkey stock and raging against small-minded relatives and the traumas they inflict.Written in the style of a classic glossy magazine personality quiz, "How Mature Are You?: A Quiz" provides whip-smart A, B, C responses to situations such as: "When that bitch in your book club calls you a space cadet" then furnishes the reader with irreverent, pull-no-punches results. This is a collection as darkly humorous as it is heartbreaking and disquieting. Within Stickle's thirteen walled worlds, some will break, some adapt, and others soar. Pushed to the breaking point, none escape unscathed.

"In astonishing lyrics that give us more than intimate negotiations of memory, the poems in WOMEN IN THE WAITING ROOM work an entrancing weave of Hindu mythology, ravishing songs, and the language of crisis hotlines as a means of limning the fate of women's bodies and psychological distress. If O'Hara's Personism figures a poem as a telephone call then Kapur's wondrous lines serve to heal, like all poignant and meaningful human to human exchanges: interventionist language that disrupts easy sanctuaries of meaning yet is consoling in its artfulness. I call this life on the page, one you'll be happy to encounter."-Major Jackson

Poetry. African & African American Studies. California Interest. DIVINE, DIVINE, DIVINE is an exploration of the divine and the deviant. A consideration of the Black tongue as a home. Life and death through the lense of language. This collection is an ode to the experiences that make us whole and an acknowledgment of those things that fracture us.

"Jody Chan writes, 'have you ever found your specific wounds curled up in a song / written by someone else?' SICK is medicine and music. This book unearths a tenderness unknown to me before reading these poems and witnessing their 'humble magic.' Chan's lyric is a landscape I return to find myself. How lucky are we to be living and reading while Jody Chan is writing and teaching us how to be 'warm & unafraid'-what a tremendous, marvelous gift."-Yujane Chen"This striking debut-poems of history, of beauty, of violence, of grief-will surprise you at every turn of phrase and page. Chan's work is innovative, their treatment of the universal human condition meticulously unique. Do not miss this collection."-Erica Dawson"In SICK, Jody Chan examines loss through brilliant and stunning lyric, each poem urgent with gentle ferocity. So much exists here in the absence of what is said, so much feels vestigial-a phantom limb that keeps aching through deftly crafted nuance, simply mesmerizing. The many exigencies of grief appear and reappear in this collection like a 'hungry ghost,' but Chan proclaims/reclaims, 'this is a love story this is a love story this is a love story.'"-Jay Ward

Though Joe Wilkins's new collection of short fiction set under the big Montana sky may have all the trappings of a traditional Western-long shots of sage flats and blue mountains, late nights at the dingy local watering hole, and a hard-working cowboy making time with the boss's daughter-FAR ENOUGH is far from traditional. A series of short prose fragments told from several viewpoints, FAR ENOUGH follows Willie Benson, Wade Newman, and young Jackie Newman as they crisscross the high plains of eastern Montana, each searching for something to hold onto. Wilkins's narratives-splintered, wending, intertwined-sprawl out beneath a huge, dazzling sky filled with "blue lightning run the wrong way, red eruptions and the slow fade to gold, a white ache along the horizon." Poetic, darkly humorous, subversive-FAR ENOUGH is a Western for our time.

This house has seen things it won't let you forget. When a new family moves into the house at 25 Trumbulls Road, the narrator's vivid dreams of a teary-eyed, raw-smelling woman who lives beneath the floor turn chillingly real. Five years later, the house's new set of inhabitants are visited by the spectral presence of the little girl they lost. In these five tales, linked by a single haunted house, the characters move through a world suspended between nightmare and loss, where the unexplainable and disquieting are fueled by ordinary grief and longing. Christopher Locke explores the ways in which our unspoken fears and everyday regrets sustain the darker heart of a home-its doorways and windows, its basements and lights-until it fills those corners of our lives with something close to terror. His stories ask: how does a home feed on this energy, growing stronger with each new, sinister end? As compulsively readable as it is unsettling, 25 TRUMBULLS ROAD takes us to the places we're afraid to go, then leaves us at a destination where we are our most human.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"A haunting, surreal, visceral collection of tales that is lyrical and poetic, while not losing its bite. Christopher Locke has channeled the ghosts of Matt Bell, Denis Johnson, and Jac Jemc, while retaining his own unique voice."-Richard Thomas"Locke is a master of the slow burn. The events at 25 TRUMBULLS ROAD will stick and cycle back through your head for weeks."-Richard Peabody"In 25 TRUMBULLS ROAD, Christopher Locke weaves together a series of eerily gorgeous narratives in which fathers, mothers, children, and dogs stumble into waking nightmares. Each ghostly flash glows with damage, mystery, and inevitability. This enchanting chapbook of tiny horror stories chills and entertains from beginning to end."-Meg Pokrass

"With heartbreaking insight, Sarah McKinstry-Brown tells of Demeter and Persephone as the story of a mother who has lost her daughter to male violence. These plainspoken, elegant poems give voice to tomboys, girls coming into their sexual power, their mothers and grandmothers, newscasters unspooling the latest version of the 'gone girl' narrative, pregnant women, mothers who miscarry, and flowers who give advice. In crystalline verse, McKinstry-Brown shows us girls like 'peonies / hanging their heads under the weight / of their own blossoming,' and women who learn that 'the heart becomes offal / when a mother is told over and over / that her daughter is just another / siren.' THIS BRIGHT DARKNESS is the meditation and the medicine we need as we confront male violence in our current moment."-Lisa L. Moore"Exquisite craft and strikingly tender aesthetics merge brilliantly with the urgency of complex gender politics in Sarah McKinstry-Brown's THIS BRIGHT DARKNESS. While many of the poems in the collection reach back in time and mythology, the book could not be more essential and more poignant than it is right at this moment. McKinstry-Brown writes of a time 'when a mother is told over and over / that her daughter is just another / siren, warning, a story to be taught.' And isn't this time now? And how desperately we need these poems to teach us to know what is at stake."¿-Stacey Waite

Winner of The Big Moose Prize. Stanley Polensky and Calvin Johnson serve in Germany during World War II. Calvin, near death after being shelled, is given a bewitched herb by Stanley but then left for dead. Each soldier returns from the war and years pass. Calvin, discovering that he cannot age and cannot die, searches for Stanley to get answers.

Winner of The Big Moose Prize. Raised in a town that prizes poets above doctors and astronauts, the narrator of THE THIRTEENTH MONTH is a constant reader, and it is through books-real and imagined-that he experiences the world, from the libraries of Dar es Salaam to the dead-end streets of Cleveland. While he believes he is being prepared to write himself, he is ultimately called to a different, less romantic task-helping his increasingly demented mother die.Bruno Schulz described a thirteenth month as an unnatural time when "one may be touched by the divine finger of poetry." Hamilton shows that touch to be both divine and troubling. Elegantly structured, THE THIRTEENTH MONTH follows the elusive thread between the books we read, the actions we take and the people we become.

Introduction by Kazim Ali. No two immigrant poets are the same. Even those from the same country don't necessarily answer to the same poetics or, for that matter, speak to the same concerns. How, then, do immigrant poets in America define themselves? How do they see and position themselves within the landscape of American poetry or the poetic traditions of their own country? Who might they consider their influences? Answers to these questions are complex, individual, and varied, as seen with the essays included in this anthology.Contributors: Zubair Ahmed, Kazim Ali, Abayomi Animashaun, Lisa Birman, Ewa Chrusciel, Kwame Dawes, Michael Dumanis, Megan Fernandes, Cristián Flores García, Danielle Legros Georges, Rigoberto González, Maria Victoria A. Grageda-Smith, Andrei Guruianu, Piotr Gwiazda, Fady Joudah, Pauline Kaldas, Ilya Kaminsky, Vandana Khanna, Jee Leong Koh, Vasyl Makhno, Gerardo Pacheco Matus, David McLoghlin, Majid Naficy, Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell, Shabnam Piryaei, Barbara Jane Reyes, José Antonio Rodríguez, Matthew Shenoda, Sun Yung Shin, Anis Shivani, Ocean Vuong, and Sholeh Volpé.

Brutality, defeat, loneliness, and mournful longing haunt and ignite Finn's collection with an assembly of unforgettable characters confronted by life-changing crises that force them to make impossible choices. Two brothers try to survive their father's unexpected death by protecting their widowed mother from a drunken sexual vulture at a cousin's wedding reception; the last orphan in an aging foster mother's house tries to escape the abusive homophobia he faces in a rigidly-masculine Catholic high school; and a former quarry trucker, after thirty years in prison for murdering his sister's rapist, is hired as a bouncer by a Greek immigrant who tries to save his failing restaurant by transforming it into a nightclub of seductive belly dancers. Set in the gritty Rustbelt of Joliet, Illinois during the early 1980s, its rickety skyline of smokestacks, steeples, and rotting telephone poles, its abandoned houses, basements, quarries, and rail yards, Finn's fictional world is breathtakingly constructed with prose that is both lush and crisp, imagistic, deeply evocative, and instantly memorable.

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.

In SAVAGE FLOWER, winner of the 2019 St. Lawrence Book Award, Anna B. Sutton explores female oppression and agency in the Bible Belt South. The intertwined landscapes of Tennessee and North Carolina are the backdrop for Sutton's beautiful, warring marriage of religion, family, the body, sex and reproductive rights, and the inevitable cycle of destruction and rebirth. In the tradition of the confessional poem, Sutton looks to her past in search of redemption, while always keeping an eye on the larger meaning. Timely, affecting, and fearless, there are no easy answers in Sutton's imperfect world. As she says in the poem Center Hill, "Even the most beautiful things are full / of our blood."