Bøger udgivet af Black Lawrence Press, Inc.

Return Against the Flow by Susana Praver-Pérez is a memoir-in-verse that travels back and forth between Puerto Rico and its diaspora, much like the island's pattern of circular migration over the years. Reflecting her personal journey across geographies and languages, Susana's poems move between English and Spanish, and capture the tempo of ambient sounds, such as drumbeats of bomba, or a black-plumed chango chirping at dawn. She unflinchingly explores the daily struggles Puerto Rico faces, while exuberantly celebrating the island's culture, its peoples, and the concept of "return". This is a voyage via words the reader will remember long after turning the last page.

The Postcards I Never Sent is a beautifully sensual poetic memoir, rich with raw emotion and vulnerability. Patterson's words dance between love, loss, leaving, and returning. It is an honor to witness these poems becoming their own small rebellions on the page. This book transports us between time and place, from nature to the divine, all in a search for new and cosmic beginnings."-Nia McAllister, poet, Senior Public Programs Manager at Museum of the African Diaspora

In this "hybridiary" of historical fiction and personal memoir, we peer inside baby incubators at Coney Island, waiting for childhood to take wing. We overhear the dying dreams of the Imperial Romanov family, and we fret the simple act of watching a child walk to class. Hope is a bright and constant thread: a tornado cuts a tender swath; a lady bides time inside a tiger's claws; teenagers preen on screens during pandemic lockdown. Rescues are fumbled but perpetually launched-and love is a gift the way the sun is a gift: constant and consoling, but also blinding, near-obliterating. Tragic, funny, and surreal, FEATHER ROUSING nests in the spaces between caretaking and grief, secret and spectacle, recollection and imagination, global anguish and private joy.

You must be connected to earth to read this book, because its effect is that of a live wire. Reader, get yourself grounded and then open these pages! You will be changed by reading, by being within the world of these words of manifestation and realization. It is the new foundation. -Dr. Raina J. LeónThese verses by Tureeda Mikell sing the centuries of abuse and exploitation of Black bodies with utmost storytelling prowess, lustrous clarity, and galactic tone. -Youssef AlaouiBoth powerful and philosophical, The Body: Oracle of Memory must be read by all lovers of poetry and the power of the written word. -Robert AlexanderTureeda Mikell's collection delineates paths to healing that open when we listen to our bodies and listen through our bodies. The Body: Oracle of Memory shows us where we've come from and points out where we should be headed. -Yeva JohnsonThis bold and urgent collection reaffirms Mikell's commitment to social justice while using the language of poetry as a "heavy dose of light medicine." -Maw Shein WinTureeda Mikell's The Body: Oracle of Memory is sacred storytelling, equal parts parable, and dream. -MK ChavezTo read The Body: Oracle of Memory by Tureeda Mikell, is to enter the space between molecules and energy fields. -Susana Praver-Pérez

We are delighted to serve up Feast: Poetry & Recipes for a Full Seating at Dinner - a scrumptious offering for the mind and body that is both a poetry anthology and a cookbook. Poems and Recipes by: Lindsay Ahl * Susanne Paola Antonetta * James Arthur * Robert Avery * Julie Babcock * Michele Battiste * Ruth Bavetta * Amy Berkowitz * Emily K. Bright * Shirley Chen * Lilian Cohen * Barbara Crooker * Elizabeth (Mimi) Danson * Jesse DeLong * Juditha Dowd * Renee Emerson * Matthew Gavin Frank * Stephen Gibson * Karen Greenbaum-Maya * Ed Happ * Elizabeth Hilts * Lynn Hoffman * Brent House * M.J. Iuppa * Arnold Johnston * Diane Kendig * Adele Kenny * Kathleen Kirk * Éireann Lorsung * Mira Martin-Parker * Laura McCullough * mariana mcdonald * Claire McQuerry * Mimi Moriarty * Eric Morris * Robby Nadler * Loretta Oleck * Daniel A. Olivas * Daniele Pantano * Kevin Pilkington * Anne Posten * Yelizaveta P. Renfro * Natasha Sajé * Tina Schumann * Amy Lee Scott * Vivian Shipley * Leah Shlachter * Martha Silano * Erin Elizabeth Smith * Sheila Squillante * Dolores Stewart Riccio * Marcela Sulak * Marjorie Thomsen * John J. Trause * Claire Van Winkle * Benjamin Vogt * Joe Wilkins * Laura Madeline Wiseman * Sarah Yasin * Tracy Youngblom

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.

San Franshitshow is an emotional reckoning with self, love, and the world that unfolds amidst a turbulent gender transition upon arrival into a new city. It chronicles the pain of loss and of coming to terms with yourself in a world that would prefer you did not: how this struggle impacts every area of your life. It expresses the power of self-acceptance with grace and humor. Calamia's debut is a unifying force of a memoir-a poignant, tender collection of poetry that will open your heart-every poem as raw as a tear-stained diary page.¿¿San Franshitshow is a wildly powerful collection of all the little moments that define who we are. This book goes beyond the gender binary and labels, it is human! Cal's artistic and genuine recounts of loss, love and identity are what I wish I could've read as a teenager to help navigate through my own narrative. This book can connect with anyone regardless of their label and will be championed by the LGBT community. Cal says all the words that never leave your head when experiencing adolescent love and defining queerness for the first time. Empathetic, heartfelt, and useful in defining (or redefining) your own past. We need more honest literature like this about the LGBT experience! Whether you are out, unsure, curious, a parent, a youth, or a teacher, this book should be in your hands.- Miles McKenna, actor, activist, author of Out! How To Be Your Authentic SelfThis debut is a song-of coming of age, of coming out, of love, of America's present moment. And yes, of San Francisco and the shitshow our city can be as the poems' speaker navigates what it is to become an adult, become a trans* man, become a teacher, and so much more in this hectic and sometimes heartbreaking city. The book shines, and I too want to shout, "There's glitter on my heart motherfucker" to my lover, to all my loves, to my beloved hometown of glittering sidewalks. There is both humor and incredible vulnerability in these poems, even when they "don't know what to believe in / but it has to be something."- Caroline Mar, author of Special EducationCal Calamia walked into my long-running open mic one Sunday afternoon and taught me some things. Reading the work taught me a few more. I love it when that happens. These poems are self-aware and not self-pitying. Cal has good comic timing but doesn't go for a laugh as much as an A-ha. I listen to and read a lot of poetry and he has been a favorite since that first time. Pronoun antecedent disagreement will probably remain a cherished poetic moment for years to come. Read this book and be reminded that some things are simple and made difficult. Some things remain easy, direct, logical. Some things hurt like hell. There is pain in this collection, sure. There is earnest and unpracticed love. It's a generous group of poems, direct and honest. If you only own a few books of poetry this should be one of them.- Kim Shuck, 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco

every revelation (for the reader) seems powerful by the moment, "earned" as they say-this is no mere stylist, but someone who can turn the camera to the violent, sensual and passionate by turns. There's a great deal of formal constraint, elegance and mastery, and shout-outs to predecessors to whom he has apprenticed, only there to advertise the bounds he, himself, has broken. Counter to the tyranny of the social media Blitzkreig, James's poems are filled with acts of attention that, in a way, are what I am most envious of-he's taken the ephemeral, intense, and perhaps better-left-forgotten, moments of anxiety, love, eroticism, the strictures of the family, the wilds of momentary encounters when aesthetics and lust mix ("You'd have made me do anything with /your Sal Mineo-James Deanwattage"), the bumping up of the individual with the city, largely Los Angeles, itself ("Beyond our fly-spattered / windshield soft-lit brides and grooms / wave along the i-95") and let them find their way into his poetry. But for all of his focus on the body and desire, situation and society, language thrives: "At MacArthur Park, kobicha and svelte, / Derek walked in and out the frame / befitting the stomach's swell./ He omm'd himself silly in the echo / of the underpass ever after." Regardless of where James is "going" with his poetry-I think it will be far, this is an awesome first step-read this modest set and relearn to live.- Brian Kim Stefans, author of "Viva Miscegenation": New Writing and many other books"There's something deeply celebratory about Shifters, as the poems follow the shape of the moon or the turn of the mind as it weaves in and out of a world of traffic. Randy James takes us through all the permutations of love between men: familial, devotional, romantic, eternal. 'Some men love each other by the angle of mirror reflection,' he writes, 'other men in other ways.' These poems vogue freely, love deeply, dream endlessly. They are small pleasures of seeing; the eye as it caresses, tenderly, the visible world."- D A Powell, author of Useless Landscape, or a Guide for Boys: Poems and Tea, Lunch, and CocktailsRandy James brings nerve and nuance to a handbook of poetic forms: abecedarian, bop, ghazal, ode, ekphrastic and concrete poems-writes of passage for a tough and tender son, brother, lover on a journey to happily-ever-after with stops in Clubland on the way to a Vegas wedding chapel. "Where shall I take my Bride?/ I will take him where metalwork points all directions."- Harryette Mullen, author of Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary"I am invisible," the poet tells us of his childhood. "I am thought an afterthought." But that was then; these poems are Now. In Shifters, Randy James explodes into visible power, an explorer of form, a magician of image. These are poems of Black queer manifestation, of maturing, of naming. James's lyrics are packed with action and object: road trips and voguing, fireworks and an eighth of mushrooms, blood and spit. Desire is fuel, language is combustion, and James blazes across these moonlit pages like a charioteer. He puts form to feeling and makes you see what you didn't know was right there all along.- K. M. Soehnlein, author of The World of Normal Boys and You Can Say You Knew Me When

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 her eleventh book release, Allie Marini explains in her collection of modern love poems how she loves her fiance more than you do."Allie Marini warns the reader: I'm bracing up to get my heart wrecked. We walk with her to the cliff's edge. She prepares us for the drop and all the dangers. With bold lyrics, she brings us along on her one open-eyed jump. In this collection, she captures her trepidation, then exhilaration with language and imagery as surprising as a sudden romance. Each poem is a dive into fresher water. The reader will want to clamber up and free fall into these poems again and again."--Janeen Pergrin Rastall, co-author of Heart Radicals.Poetry. California Interest. Women's Studies.

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 already When 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