Bøger udgivet af Black Lawrence Press, Inc.

Poetry. Women's Studies / Gender Studies. Writing About the South. No Spare People documents the joys and perils of a tiny mother-daughter family navigating life on the margins. From poems about finding autonomy as a queer, unpartnered parent by choice in the South to those chronicling a generation's economic instability, Hoover rejects so-called "acceptable losses" stemming from inequalities of gender, race, and class. The book asks, what happens to the woman no longer willing to live a lie? How does language invent not only identity, but possibility?

EXCISIONS investigates the feeling-the problem and the syntax-of being on a threshold. If you don't know what will happen next, you can't yet say what has happened. These poems arise from states of precise unknowing, desperate imagination, inchoate emotion, encounters with mortality and power when they're closing in but haven't caught you yet. What is choice, given the terms of an ill body, survival in a grotesque empire? Tenderly and acutely, these poems examine the life of before and after: when something is excised from you, it was you, and you are what remains."Out of hospitals, marriage bedrooms, woodland parks and city centers-the vanishing borders between the healthy and the sick-Hilary Plum's poems emerge hard-edged and fully formed. She is dynamically attuned to the fragility and ferociousness of our attachments to one another, "a long storm of hello." Densely lyrical and possessed of austere beauty, Excisions recalls the poetry of Jorie Graham, Victoria Chang and George Oppen, but Plum's voice is her own-flinty, incantatory and undeniable."-Daniel Poppick"A compass works because our inner core, part crystal, contains intense pressure preventing iron from melting beyond the melting point. This is Excisions' poetic consciousness. Repairing the illusion of mindbody disconnect, yet in this book there's no word for cure or its tailspin outside of artistic reconnaissance. We're at the hospital so much as to redraw transportation schemas-a gas guzzling gurney-one awakens from their dreams in a paper robe staring at the bluest bulge of vein. To be is to recognize intense stares from eyes who don't yet exist totally inside. Outpatient futurity and fugitivity is the same evolutionary experience of the civilizational body. Between poet and patient is warm sea foam from the moon's unrest of having to be so old a witness! Plum's transmissions from the funeral of Aesculapius surrealism. In Plum's poems, the people with names dig up and brush off the bones."-Dot Devota

Winner of the 2021 St. Lawrence Book AwardSet entirely in the Bangalore region of South India, BOOMTOWN GIRL explores the ambitions, delusions, and struggles of people navigating a rapidly developing city. A rebellious teenager and her workaholic father confront their mutual distrust while dining at a newly opened Pizza Hut; a tailor nostalgic for his past glory in the employ of an Englishman grows obsessed with an American customer; a techie, his fiancée having broken off their engagement, takes a young, eager intern into his confidence. These stories trace Bangalore's warp-speed transformation from a leafy backwater into India's Silicon Valley-a place where Digital Age values clash with tradition, where British colonialism casts its strong shadow, and where visions are inspired and distorted by the forces of globalization."Boomtown Girl is a volume of finely wrought stories. Shubha Sunder writes with such intelligence, grace and care that the common, ordinary lives depicted in these stories are dignified. This is a moving and necessary book." -Ha Jin"A sure-footed, magisterial and magical collection of stories." -E.C. Osondu"Boomtown Girl charts the transformation of Bangalore and its environs, in all its grit and glitter. In virtuoistic and vital prose, Shubha Sunder's nine stories bring indelible characters to life, portraying their hopes, dreams, and despair. A compelling debut." -Vanessa Hua"In Boomtown Girl, the immensely talented Shubha Sunder takes us into the heart of Bangalore society in the 1990s, a decade of great change. With writing that sparkles and flares, we become privy to individuals' deepest striving and disappointment, their utterly relatable yearnings to burst beyond restrictions and to belong. I could read these fresh characters and their captivating stories for hours." -Jennifer Acker

An unflinching new collection from poet, Jenny Irish, in which cultural violence against women is explored through various personae.At the heart of all violence is fear: Lupine is a gathering of feminist prose poetry engaging themes of ecology, animality, and the human unknown. A series of interconnected dramatic monologues, the poems inhabit the personae of figures traditionally deemed Monstrous, giving them voice to confront and reclaim the violent mythologies that have so often been imposed upon them. As these unmuzzled monsters speak, the collection collapses the boundaries between the self and the subjugated other, ultimately upending the discourse of monstrosity itself. By exposing how women are villainized and sacrificed in response to cultural fear, Lupine offers a corrective to social narratives in which notions of the bestial and notions of the feminine are intimately entwined."A fang concealed inside a flower, Lupine has a mythological sense of ecopoetics, one in which nature is often vindicated, in all its mossy, sinewy, animal luster, for the violence we as humans have enacted upon it. Jenny Irish has an unflinching eye, interrogating 'spectacle and specimen,' wielding a mirror against cruel and patriarchal abuses of power. This language of survival drips with 'darkness as she welcomes herself in' to reconsider what has traditionally been called wicked, or monstrous, or other. Challenging our preconceived notions of narrative, Irish lets wildness pulse against the edges of her sentences, 'obscene up close,' but 'all a-light'-the reader is left dazzled, transformed." -Jenny Molberg, author of Refusal"Lupine is a rare feat of a chapbook, in which the poet Jenny Irish dawns the masks of so many monsters to tell us vividly how our culture fails women. From shadows, we make stories" our speaker reminds us, and Irish shows us how the object casting the shadow is often the haphazard negligence we regard each other with. This book is a bestiary of deep lyric knowing, from the first poem to the closing, immaculate question that makes Lupine's final line, what we're given is a chorus of beasts we can't help but think look like us." -C.T. Salazar, author of Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking"Just like the botanical ferocity that accompanies its title, Lupine by Jenny Irish cracks the fangs from the aggressor, reveling in a primitive magic where women confront and disrupt their default historical fates. A delightfully dark examination of fear, and interrogation of the cautionary tale, Irish's collection offers advice that resonates from deep past into contemporary life. For example, in "Harpy," we are told, 'Girl-child, if you must hate yourself, let it be for lack of talent rather than the body your soul inherited,' while in 'Witch' we hear, 'A good girl keeps her mouth shut, and a bad girl gets the sound smacked out, and a smart girl knows she will be punished either way.' Resplendent with magnificent animals, abundant flora, and unforgettable voices, Lupine is a showcase of the dramatic monologue at its wicked best." -Mary Biddinger, author of Department of Elegy

Black River Chapbook Competition winner, Lucy Wainger, is a portrait of adolescent mental illness at the end of history.IN LIFE THERE ARE MANY THINGS is a portrait of adolescent mental illness after the end of history: "I have / this body- / residue-and I don't know what / left it." This chapbook's unmoored speakers seek, alternately, to root themselves more firmly in the world and to exit it entirely. Autobiography and allegory merge to track the inexplicable shapeshifting of the self as it ages, heals, dies, and lives again."Lucy Wainger is a brilliant poet whose ability to follow the visceral logic of her electrified imagination leads to lines so bright I want to eat them. She dazzles me with her deadpan humor and breaks my heart with her sudden utterances of love or hurt. While these poems are skillful and intelligent, they also give a feeling of guilelessness, the wild and askew openness children know and are taught to forget. Wainger is in touch with ungovernable forces. The lines she pulls down onto the page are virtually humming with energy; it is possible that when you read them you will produce sparks from your fingers and tongue." -Heather Christle"Reader, I envy you: you're about to meet Lucy Wainger and read her work for the first time. Wainger is obsessed with the way the largest questions in the world-what it means to be human, how we cope with embodiment, how we respond when in danger, how we shift and morph as we experience the passage of time, how we realize we love life and how we bear it when we don't-can feel achingly specific and material, like a 'big red cut shaped like a fingernail' or 'the smell of flapping fins and failing gills.' Whether Wainger is inhabiting a persona-which include Scheherazade and Teen Wolf, among others-or wielding her 'I,' which is at once relentlessly contemporary, Gothic, and pastoral, you always have a sense that you are sharing a world with her and her speakers, so close to them that the juice that 'spurts' from their oranges may well also get on you as you read. I am so jealous that you get to experience In Life There Are Many Things freshly, although I know that even after you've read it, every subsequent encounter with this relentlessly curious, seeking, and dynamic chapbook will always feel like a fresh experience, no matter how many times it has already stood in front of you and asked, 'What else do you remember?'" -Sumita Chakraborty

A LOVE LETTER has the power to speak outside of time (or through time) as did my beloved aunt who left a paper trail that evidenced she kept me in her thoughts. She'd drafted an Advance Directive, and purchased some modest burial insurance, and protected a few memories that might have otherwise been forgotten. A love letter became how she chose to say goodbye and go with grace. So, I wish in many ways to reciprocate her love with this little book-a re-memory-a reflection of where I was when she left this world, and where I am now, and where in the future any one of us might be."A Love Letter is a profound and gorgeously rendered tribute to a person, to a place, and to life itself. I really enjoyed the vivid characters and the sensitivity and elegance of Carmen Kennedy's writing." -Vendela Vida, author of We Run the Tides"A Love Letter is the reader's honor of being brought into the sharp tenderness of a loved one's transition. To enter this room also offering your mind to the various mirrors of embrace. To walk down the predatory nodes of a medical system serving capital and rage along. In a few pages, you are years changed." -Tongo Eisen Martin, San Francisco Poet Laureate"A Love Letter 's lyrical vignettes place witness pinnacle as the speaker both chronicles and begets introspection. We observe cyclical mourning and cyclical hope. In these pages, we gather empathy as a cure for our human condition, with passages like, 'this journey is eminently finite and someone's departure can seem abrupt if you miss as little as a day, week or month.' Praise this work that allows us to look into another's eyes and see something beautiful." -Daniel B. Summerhill, Monterey County Poet Laureate, author of DIVINE, DIVINE, DIVINE"Carmen's exquisite memoriam moves between the harshness of loss and ways in which our bodies accept its inevitability. It snapshots a personal moment with such beautiful transcendence that it draws in all the senses and will serve as lastly a guide to anyone else who has to later turn the pages of their own scrapbooks... I am forever changed." -Tshaka Campbell, Santa Clara County Poet Laureate, author of Tunnel Vision"As a person who witnessed two loved ones' minds sail away before their bodies departed, I can assure you that Carmen Kennedy has captured a maelstrom of emotions and delicately drew them onto the spathe of a calla lily. This profound prosimetrum captures the rememory of loss in a sequence of window panes all shattering with the sorrow, doubt, and the tenderest moments of humans coming together to hold one another up when the world seems like it is drifting away. Carmen captured the stages of grief in stained-glass. This is one of the most delicate works I have read in a long time-but the carefulness of how it was written relays the strength of the writer into the minds of those who read it-especially those who find pieces of themselves in the elegant layering of these pastel paned moments. This is a declaration of healing." Vernon Keeve III (Trey), author of SOUTHERN MIGRANT MIXTAPE

Nen G Ramirez's ALL WOMEN ARE BORN WAILING confronts myriad forms of violence against Latinas. Drawing on personal and family experiences with mental illness, the poet challenges the "crazy Latina" stereotype and examines the ways it has been used to belittle and dehumanize people who deserve treatment and care. Unflinching in their critique of sexist and racist tropes, in these poems Ramirez experiments with persona and familial history, including the murder of a cousin, in order to imagine more hopeful futures.Poetry. Latinx Studies.

Translated from the German by Daniele Pantano. "Pantano, a renowned poet and translator, has brought both of these talents to bear on his project. His process was to loosely translate all of the poems of Georg Trakl, then order the lines in alphabetical order by their first words. One further aspect of the organization is that while these lines share this overt linguistic kinship-due to the alphabetical ordering, but also due to the frequent repetition of a starting word-the lines do not share any apparent meaning relations. Like the Persian ghazal, where each couplet is meant to stand alone, seemingly disconnected from the others, yet also force by way of lyric disjoint a powerful effect on the reader, Pantano's conceptual poetry forces us to leap from line to line, navigating the voids along the way. There is a jarring-yet-also-pleasurable effect created by this structure and organization. Also, the reader will immediately notice that the title of the book is only one letter off from Trakl's name, transforming it into an oracle of sorts. This is entirely fitting, given that the lines in Pantano's collection echo the enigmatic pronouncements of an oracle from ancient myth and given that Pantano himself serves as a sort of oracular medium in translating/altering/arranging these lines."-from the introduction by Okla Elliott

Translated from the German by Daniele Pantano. Introduction by Carolyn Forché. OPPRESSIVE LIGHT represents the first collection of Robert Walser's poetry in English translation and an opportunity to experience Walser as he saw himself at the beginning and at the end of his literary career-as a poet. The collection also includes notes on dates of composition, draft versions the printed poems represent, which volume of the Werkausgabe the poems were first published in, and brief biographical information on characters and locations that appear in the poems and may not be known to readers.

Karen Llagas's ALL OF US ARE CLEAVED explores how we are shaped by the connections we form and are thrusted upon us. From the intimate spaces of marriage and family to the wider experiences of migration, political engagement and a global pandemic, these poems assert that we are simultaneously taken apart and put back together: by our individual efforts, yes, but also by our collective grace."Within All Of Us Are Cleaved a language of love & forgiveness emerges from the mother wound & the deepest wound of colonization. The lyric of the word blooms within this collection of poems-as your body merges with the work you begin to understand the purpose of love. Here an intimacy of poetics- each poem moving through life as life naturally does through the personal to the outer that resembles all of us. Here we rest our cheek on each other's body, un abrazo fuerte enveloping each other-medicine that is a balm- like the Vicks rubbed on your chest cuando eramos niños-here a poetics of intimacy that equals the history of each others' flesh." -Lourdes Figueroa, author of the chapbook VUELTA"Karen Llagas' much-anticipated new collection is a fresh rendering of movement, memory, and lineation. Pay close attention to space and structure, to permeability and deliberate acts of grace. Just as there are many paths to excavating lost places and histories, the speaker in these poems takes us on an imagistic journey to rituals of grieving and cleaving (a 'thirst for salt and mud'), to fields of sugarcane and the many kinds of poverty and privilege, always in proximity to the smallest of bodies-bees, spiders, yeast, rice grains, origins. ('Do you know a rosebud/ that refuses/ to bloom is called a bullet?') These are, at once, field notes and love poems, unsentimental and unimpeachable." -Aileen Cassinetto, Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow"As the contronym in the title suggests, Llagas's poems grapple with the inherent contradictions that complicate and enrich human existence, and signal the oppositions that can divide us should our vigilance in interrogating their historically-and culturally-constructed assumptions wane. Rather than goad us to take sides or force a reconciliation among such oppositions, Llagas's poems thrive at the intersections, revealing and enlarging the tensions among identities and allegiances, and in doing so create a new space -a more empathetic and giving space- for individual, interpersonal, and interrelational exchange. As the speaker tells the Covid pandemic in one poem: 'You rupture us whole.' The deeply lyrical and meditative poems in this collection break wide open the cracks that delineate facile categorizations, and from these fissures form new openings from where to more deeply and more compassionately view the world." -Abigail Licad, poet"In her bountiful new collection, All Of Us Are Cleaved, Karen Llagas writes of tending to a garden of personhoods, of having both singular and multiple selves, of being herself and of being a step-parent, an immigrant, a lover, a granddaughter. In a self-portrait, she writes, 'the want to be the garden / and finding / the slab of brick,' - but Llagas is not despondent. Alternately subversive and imaginative, Llagas creates an expansive self, and she isn't afraid to define and re-define herself beyond the negative spaces she inhabits. And that is her bounty -her willingness to imagine beyond the 'opposite of saint' and beyond the 'less field of ranunculus / and more nematodes' which so uplifts us as readers and shows us how we too may imagine ourselves and our multitudes." -Karthik Sethuraman, author of the chapbook Prayer Under Eyelids

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.

A finalist for the Fall 2019 Black Lawrence Press Black River Chapbook Competition, the Cupboard Pamphlet's 2020 Annual Contest, and the 2021 Newfound Prose Prize.Inspired by Virgie Townsend's own experiences growing up in an independent fundamental Baptist church, the seven stories in BECAUSE WE WERE CHRISTIAN GIRLS examine religious and gender oppression through an unforgettable cast of Christian fundamentalist girls. In the titular story, Townsend writes, "All Christian girls know what happens when they disobey, even if it's by accident. We end up pregnant, kicked out of our churches, and used as examples in sermons about what happens to disobedient Christian girls. Eventually we go to hell, where we fall for eternity in a dark, fiery pit, bound in rough chains that tear and burn our flesh, deprived of any human contact except for listening to the eternal screams of other Christian girls who are also bound, falling, and should have listened to their elders."In prose alternately lyrical and humorous, and through stories sometimes dwelling in poignant realism and at others in the surreal, Townsend's girls navigate child abuse, body image issues, sexual curiosity and homophobia, addiction, racism, and classism on their paths to self-actualization and, ultimately, freedom. This is a debut short fiction chapbook you won't soon forget.----------"BECAUSE WE WERE CHRISTIAN GIRLS is a burst of holy fire. Written with lyric heart and beautiful insight, Virgie Townsend rips open the longing heart of good girls everywhere and reveals them for all their bloody complexity. This book is a triumph of insight and imagination. Virgie's prose is both tender and excoriating, like a loving and holy spirit. The stories and the heart of this book are burned into my soul. I'll be thinking about this book for a long, long time." -Lyz Lenz, author of God Land and Belabored"BECAUSE WE WERE CHRISTIAN GIRLS is a revelatory story collection of girlhood desire for selfhood. With evocative prose and wit, Townsend portrays the harrowing world of God's love at the turn of the millennium where sparkling grape juice is a road to sin, 'The internet has potential for great evil,' and Britney Spears' midriff might be the Devil. Under parental oughts and steeple crosses, the girls yearn for answers that don't exist in their world. BECAUSE WE WERE CHRISTIAN GIRLS is an urgent portrayal of fundamentalist repression of femme and queer personality through girls who to know the Spirit, must know their own." -Crystal K, author of Goodnight

"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.

Bone Moon Palace is a contemplation on what it means to remake one's home while also remaking one's community in a time of plague and political turmoil. Which is to say it is a hot mess of ritual trying to find the comfort inside the poem of the self crying out for companionship in the heat of the inferno and the cold of the small horse of the night. It is an elegy of mourning for family lost to the politics of fear and gentrification, and a manifesto of reuniting the people who have poetry into the family that will stand and make a difference for the voiceless in a society obsessed with its own destruction.