Bøger udgivet af Black Lawrence Press, Inc.

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

Meet Zelda McFigg. She is 4-feet 11-inches tall, 237 pounds, and convinced that she could be somebody, if only someone would recognize her inner beauty and star quality. Cousin to Ignatius J. Reilly (A Confederacy of Dunces) and Homer Simpson, Zelda runs away from home at age 14, and at age 49 ¿ writes this furiously funny memoir to "set the record straight" about her lifetime of indiscretions.Behind Zelda's rollicking tale of destruction lies a story of exile. Exile from oneself. Readers will see much more about Zelda than she knows about herself. Says author Susan Trott (The Holy Man series and many other books), "Ingenious comic author Betsy Robinson, in finely wrought prose, tells the life story of Zelda McFigg. Zelda is a heavyweight, seemingly guided or misguided by a ruinous wrath and the feeling that dishonesty is the best policy. Robinson designs a remarkable pilgrimage for Zelda and uncovers under her many, many layers, a sorrowful affectionate heart."The Something Wordy Blog calls the book "Mark Twain-esque [with an] undercurrent flowing through it: direct, call-a-spade-a-spade honesty, that had me laughing, while I actually wanted to cry.""Zelda is an iconic voice of our media-struck age, ferociously trying to rectify the gross injustice of her non-celebrity. A character angry, proud, and desperate to be seen." -John Sayles, writer and filmmaker"A thoroughly delightful new novel-in parts funny, tragic, angry, heartbreaking, caustic, absurd and totally all-too true. A comic geshrei from the heart, and pleasure from first page to last!"-Steve Kaplan, script consultant, author of The Hidden Tools of Comedy

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.

Another title for Jacob Appel's engrossing new story collection could be what one character calls 'a conspiracy of fantasies.' Characters imagine rekindling romances from the distant past, pursue prestigious apprenticeships and dramatic deaths, even attend the funerals of movie stars in order to avoid or infuse meaning into their own ordinary losses and suffering. Appel portrays these characters with such compassion that we willingly join the conspiracies, recognizing ourselves in every effort to understand the sum and value of human lives. These are wise and achingly beautiful stories."-Chauna Craig"WINTER HONEYMOON is a remarkable collection, full of Appel's keen depictions of human interactions in their most intricate subtleties. Many of the stories manage that ever-elusive quality of great short fiction: a novelistic scope miraculously fitted into a handful of pages. And there is the weight of history in all of these stories, of characters who have lives far beyond the glimpses we are given. The prose manages to dazzle throughout as well, though without ever drawing attention to itself. Appel is a genuine stylist is the vein of Salter or Munro, though with flourishes all his own."-Brad J. Felver"Short stories are normally the territory of literary tricksters like de Maupassant, O. Henry and anyone with an MFA or a sinecure in TV, sleight-of-hand artists know their ending before they begin building a careful scrim to obscure the reveal. Unlike these showbiznicks, Appel starts from one character, one phrase, even one key word and lets his story tell itself, so the author is as much ambushed by the outcome as his awe-struck readers. There is only one word to describe these nine tales of humans trapped within their own humanity: magisterial. No one writes like Jacob Appel."-Hesh Kestin"Jacob M. Appel's stories are more than just slices of life; they contain entire worlds. In smart, sharp, penetrating prose he draws the reader into not just the complicated modern lives of his protagonists, but their struggles, hopes, dreams and frustrations. Middle aged men and women dealing with elderly parents, marriages under strain, illnesses, and difficult children form the central conflicts, and are universal in their pathos. Appel manages to make the extraordinary plausible and the poignant humorous. These stories will delight and destroy you; you won't be able to put them down."-Allison Amend"From a widow pursuing an old flame to an architect caught in a collapsing relationship, WINTER HONEYMOON reminds us that life is fleeting but love, in all its forms, is a survivor. These are stories of sometimes quiet, sometimes incredible, and always complex lives that shout at us in their telling. With Jacob Appel's devilish eye for detail, the stakes grow, the plots turn, and the reader is hit in the head as much as the heart. These are as much affirmations as they are stories, and this is an adventurous and accomplished collection by any measure."-R. Dean Johnson

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.

"This is a poet unafraid of being understood, who will not hide behind decorativeness or the oblique. Read these poems aloud and you will hear an authentic and quintessentially American voice not only writing but also speaking to you."-Thomas Lux"I take guilty pleasure in the poems of Kevin Pilkington, and consider him an essential voice in contemporary poetry."-Jay Parini"In this rich collection of tender poems, he celebrates the small consolations of daily life that offer spiritual relief in the face of disappointment and loss. There are no easy epiphanies here-just one poet working as hard as he can to get through daily life with dignity and grace."-Jim Daniels

INSTRUCTIONS FOR KILLING THE JACKAL reinvigorates the poetic tradition of myth-making using a combination of Southern folklore, urban legend, and Greek mythology. "The poems in Erica Wright's bold debut balance their investigations of danger, dysfunction and bad weather not merely with beauty and poise (although she is generous with both) but also with an imaginative counterforce all her own."-Timothy Donnelly

"In TETHER, a spacecraft of a book superbly conceived and assembled, Lisa Fay Coutley engineers both recovery and healing in poems that swerve emotionally between the landing bays of grief, longing, and wonder. A bright hunger constellates around these poems, but so too the immensities of love. TETHER is a burning inquiry into the miracle of being here on earth and what keeps us fastened to each other, for better or worse."-Major Jackson"Lisa Fay Coutley's TETHER is characterized by a compressed tension, each line, each word, hitched to the next, quivering with the effort to remain connected and with the opposing desire to be released. The image of the tether accrues intensity in the course of the book: astronaut tethered to the ship, poet to the poem, mother to the homeless, addict child and child to the mother, and in the space between 'the two / great opposing poles' is God, who learns, in that chasm, 'wonder & suffering.' Indeed, oppositional forces reign in these poems; there are no conventional false resolutions to be had. 'Every event / that's saved my life has nearly killed me,' the speaker declares, and 'I would rather live / with my burning than sleep with my dead.' This is a far-reaching book, a political book, a deeply personal and heroic book. Its thesis is reflected in its enviably honed diction. 'Mystery is her / bitch,' the speaker writes of the eclipsing sun. The same is true of Lisa Fay Coutley and the ravishing poems of tether."-Diane Seuss"TETHER is a book of distances and intimacies, of letters never sent and dream talks and delayed communiques. It is a study of distance between us,between an astronaut and a poet, between lovers, between ourselves and eachother, ourselves and ourselves. 'We are the beached boat / with a hole inits hull,' admits the poet. Each of us, even as 'baby in a womb is a cloud.' And yet there is so much love. And yet, everything that happens tous, happens for a purpose. And when one turns worthy, a giant squid washes ashore.It is this knowing, this insight into our distances (of years, of geography, of a space of a single day) here that I find compelling: '& how far / must you back away / from yourself / to see / yourself / as the Astronaut / sees/ Earth.' Beautiful work."-Ilya Kaminsky"Is it desire, wonder, duty, or memory that keeps us most firmly tethered to the world, where 'truth is every bird starving,' and we live in constant awareness of all the forces that threaten to break the bonds between us and our loved ones? A mother's death, a son's drug addiction, the disastrous world news filtered daily through the internet: how do we reconcile the painful events that define our existence with our hope for a more secure future? Through sinewy, sometimes hallucinogenic syntax that threatens to (but never does) spin out of control, TETHER's poems examine a contemporary and very human paradox, in which we long to absent ourselves from our grief, while also needing to document our losses so as to ensure we won't forget. TETHER reminds us that we are formed as much from pain as from delight and that, in her ability to look back upon her past, upon today's terrible and compelling news, the contemporary poet is like an astronaut, able to regard the world 'from a great height,' a witness to what most of us cannot bear to see."-Paisley Rekdal

¿In her third book, PREY, Jeanann Verlee examines predatory relationships from childhood onward. Drawing parallels between human and non-human predators, the poems collected here strive to illuminate the trauma of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse-exploring what it is to become prey.

2019 Lambda Literary Award finalist for Lesbian Poetry. In her debut short collection, poet Kristin Chang bursts onto the page and into our consciousness like a dazzling, dizzying uproar: "I suck / until my teeth riot / with rot & I have nothing / left in my mouth to keep / quiet." Quiet Chang's speakers are not. In these nineteen poems, the body is personal and communal, hunter and hunted: "My mother says / women who sleep with women / are redundant: the body symmetrical / to its crime. Between your knees / I mistake need for belief / in a father figure: once, we renamed / our fathers by burning them / out of our bodies, smoking the sky / into meat."

"No one is safe from Nina Boutsikaris' gaze in this book-she looks at the world and people around her just as intensely as she turns her gaze inward, questioning her desires, her actions, and asking what it means to see something for what it truly is. I'M TRYING TO TELL YOU I'M SORRY pairs art with experience, youth with introspection, and gender with power-the dance between these topics makes for an utterly absorbing read."-Chelsea Hodson"I'M TRYING TO TELL YOU I'M SORRY is not so much a memoir as an experience. Be prepared to fully immerse yourself in a world that's both gorgeous and dangerous, led by a guide who has found herself at the outermost edges of what language can bear. I've never read anything quite like it. Nina Boutsikaris is a compelling new voice in creative nonfiction."-Brenda Miller"An intelligent and radical rumination on gender, sexuality, fear, and romance. A topical and evocative book for anyone with a brain."-Chloe Caldwell

In Shane McCrae's NONFICTION, the self is repeatedly re-figured as the site of rupture between truth and fiction, present and past, first-person and third-person-the rupture in which the dichotomies we live by, the dichotomies that erase us, originate. The speakers of these poems inhabit impossible situations, and the poems themselves speak neither of overcoming, nor of being overcome by, these impossibilities, but of the moment of equilibrium between extremes, the moment of uncertainty from which the future emerges. As McCrae writes at the end of his two-part poem on Solomon Northup, "in the darkness / I after a while couldn't be sure / My eyes were open." These poems assert, and foreground, possibility; the rupture they describe is hope.

MOTHERMORPHOSIS is an exploration of the sublime terrain of mother. Poems situate the reader in the conflict between the idea and reality of what mother is in love, loss, sanity, and motherland."The extraordinary poems in MOTHERMORPHOSIS place readers in the particular life of a daughter and her schizophrenic mother; however, a larger world, full of war and tenderness, misunderstanding and clarity, vulnerability and empowerment, our world, is present, too, so the book speaks with great urgency for all and to all of us."--Blas Falconer, author of A Question of Gravity and Light "Chavez, despite the darkness of her subject matter, is a good enough poet, a powerful enough voice, to make the reader sometimes forget how harrowing these works really are... Ms Chavez has, more than other poet I've read in recent memory, made a real case for the validity of poetry in the 21st century. Her words sing. They scream."--John Sweet, winner of the first Lummox Poetry Prize"I have found over the years there are poets that influence. Poets that spark something we may not even be aware of and poets you go back to because you can't get enough. MK Chavez is all three of these."--Scot Young"It is in the adornment of Chavez's dictions that--to paraphrase Chimamanda Adichie's magnificent speech 'The Danger of a Single Story'--a sort of restoration, or reconciliation, might occur."--Elizabeth Treadwell"In a world of oversharing, MOTHERMORPHOSIS, by MK Chavez, is even more impactful due to its relentless restraint. These meticulously crafted poems bear witness to the shipwreck that can be a brown girl's childhood, especially with a US-backed Salvadoran civil war, shaming Catholic patriarchs, a mother with mental illness, and unforgiving streets. Yet, she masterfully tells these stories, not with a rapid spilling, but with the measured assurance of having digested the perilous escape--literally, what has not killed her has made her strong. A stunning collection."--Aya de LeonPoetry. California Interest. Latino/Latina Studies. Women's Studies.

Joseph Kylander's childhood in early 20th century San Francisco has been shaped by his widowed father's obsessive photographic project and by his headstrong cousin Karelia's fanciful storytelling and impulsive acts. The 1906 earthquake upends their eccentric routines, and they take refuge with a capricious patron and a group of artists looking to find meaning after the disaster. THE BOOK OF LOST LIGHT explores family loyalty and betrayal, Finnish folklore, the nature of time and theater, and what it takes to recover from calamity and build a new life from the ashes.

Poetry. Women's Studies. California Interest. 2019 Lambda Literary Award finalist for Transgender Poetry. At the close of the frontier, during a queer elsewhen, IF THE COLOR IS FUGITIVE asks for witness to vagrants searching for landmarks amidst rubble. Peppered with invented idioms and slant colloquialisms, these poems preserve an archive of survival that reads like a folklorist translating from local dialect to earnest exhortation: how to escape with nothing but your name.