Bøger udgivet af Black Lawrence Press, Inc.

"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.

WHEN A PURPLE ROSE BLOOMS is a collection of poetry and essays that reflect writer Jeneé Darden's journey through Black womanhood. Through heart and humor, Darden engages us in conversations about race, love, sex, and mental health. Like a rose, being a Black woman in this society comes with its thorns and beauty. Darden brings that complexity to every page.Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Essays. African & African American Studies. California Interest.

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

The thirteen stories in Rebecca Turkewitz's debut collection, Here in the Night, are engrossing, strange, eerie, and emotionally nuanced.With psychological insight and finely crafted prose, HERE IN THE NIGHT investigates the joys and constraints of womanhood, of queerness, and of intimacy. Preoccupied with all manner of hauntings, these stories traverse a boarding school in the Vermont woods, the jagged coast of Maine, an attic in suburban Massachusetts, an elevator stuck between floors, and the side of an unlit highway in rural South Carolina.At the center of almost every story is the landscape of night, with all its tantalizing and terrifying potential. After dark, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, boundaries loosen, expectations fall away, and even the greatest skeptics believe-at least fleetingly-that anything could happen. These stories will stay with you."Yes, disembodied voices howl. Floors creak. Hearts pound. But the real terror of Rebecca Turkewitz's unforgettable stories only begins with the eerie manifestations. Here in the Night explores the terror of human relationships, of regret and betrayal, the incalculable risk of love. Filled with piercing wisdom and the ache of understanding, these stories explore the undead dreams that trail all of us, and illuminate the debts that bind us, like ghostly chains, to one another." -Erin McGraw"What mystifies and delights me most about Here in the Night is that a story collection chock-full of hauntings and the haunted, ghost stories both (apparently) real and (probably) imagined, and harrowing deaths by drowning and other violences, should be so tender and generous and flat-out lovely a read. It's a gorgeous book-wise and charming and moving and fun." -Michelle Herman"Rebecca Turkewitz's Here in the Night is a treasure chest of psychological terror, and-as with the tales of Shirley Jackson, or Kelly Link, or Carmen Maria Machado-the terror is submerged, in the periphery of a character's eyesight, lingering just off the page. Turkewitz is a master storyteller, and her debut collection is a triumph." -Nick White"In Rebecca Turkewitz's collection of short stories, even the most ordinary moments are suffused with magic and ghosts. Yet her characters feel as real as anyone you might meet, rendered with deep empathy and complexity. Here in the Night is a rich, vibrant and enthralling book." -Dan Chaon

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