Bøger udgivet af Black Lawrence Press, Inc.

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.

"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

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.

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.

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.