Bücher veröffentlicht von Kallisto Gaia Press

The Ocotillo Review, based in Austin, Texas, showcases the best in Shortform Fiction, Poetry, and Nonfiction. While we are Texas-based, we welcome and publish submissions from across the country and internationally. It's all about the quality of the work.

A collection of short fiction, poetry, and essays from an international perspective. Juried selections from post-graduate editors assembled in a thematic compilation - entertaining, thought provoking, and educational.

The work of a young 1st generation American poet with strong cultural ties to India. Her obsevations on social dynamics exhibits skill and insight beyond her years.

Roger Hart writes with savvy, grace, and abiding tenderness about people in love and in trouble. He's an enchanter casting his spell with impeccable sentences and exquisite details. He knows that characters only truly exist when they interact and entangle with other characters. What ingenuity on these pages, what nerve, and what an exhilarating collection of stories Mysteries of the Universe is. And in this universe, future events can influence the present, characters pop in and out of existence, and premonitions upstage reason. I have a feeling that you'll read this collection in one sitting and that you'll start reading the stories slowly, as I did, so they will not end. This book is a revelation. And now I'm going to read it again.- John Dufresne, No Regrets, Coyote

The 13th volume of The Ocotillo Review. This theme of Alternative Family occurred organically through the selections presented by our team of editors and editorial assistants. It is the most diverse and expansive edition we have released in our seven years of publishing international poets, writers, and journalists.

In The Geography of First Kisses, one finds portrayals of quiet elegance reminiscent of early-20th-century art films. The fourteen ethereal stories are tethered to the bays and backwaters of southern Louisiana, the fields of Iowa and Oklahoma, the pine woods of Florida, places where girls and women seek love and belonging, and instead discover relationships as complicated, bewildering, even sorrowful. A New Orleans girl spends a year collecting boyfriends and all the while considers the reach of her misadventures; a newlywed couple travels to Tulsa in search of a horse gone missing, perhaps more in search of themselves; a new mother is faced with understanding the miracles and mysteries of faith when her baby disappears; a young daughter travels to Tallahassee with her mother, trying to unravel the meaning of love crossed with abandonment. Saturated with poetic illusion and powered with prose of a dark, pulsating circuitry, the collection combines joy, heartache, and tenacity in a manner sorely missed in today's super-structured literature.

Since 2013, Dan Smart has devoted himself to writing a poem a day. After the 3,000+ poems this project has so far produced, he has proved that the old masters were right when it comes to the value of ritual: daily devotion invests "the ordinary" with curious new powers. Crafting unseen connections between mundane objects and events of this world-the rotting flesh of an avocado, the sound of a bell not being rung, the decision to either crush or spare a spider-Smart uses sparse poetic forms and wry humor to cultivate moments of genuine surprise. The Flowers of Nonchalance gathers a few dozen of these simple-yet-eclectic poems and arranges them into a snapshot of a turning year in his life as an artist-from spring through winter, and back again to spring. Recalling at times the inventive economy of William Carlos Williams, the haunting musicality of Emily Dickinson, and the backyard mysticism of Wallace Stevens, each of these short missives reads like an air-tight Logic proof; the conclusion? That existence is as funny as it is interesting-as strange as it is precious.

Not Yet a Jedi is the 2022 winner of the Saguaro Poetry Prize.Partridge Boswell's Not Yet a Jedi rockets through the late 20th century and into the present with its diction in hyperdrive, fusing whimsy to seriousness, blunt statement to syntactic complexity. These tautly constructed poems evoke the aspirations, fresh-cut grass smell, and low-level depression that characterize cookie-cutter suburbia-and the ways the adults who grew up there cling to a played-out, optimistic vision of the American Dream despite themselves. Poems span a range of emotional registers, but even in their pensive moments, they are so kinetic that their full force can only be appreciated if you read them while popping wheelies on your BMX or grooving under the splattering light of a disco ball, where the melancholy will still find you, as "your black-lit heart blooms luminous in the blue dark."