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Built Around the Fire delves into notions of place, the enveloping wonder and plight of our environment, and the complexities of rural culture: an examination of hierarchies, conservatism, generational religion, and the perpetuation of patriarchal norms. Such concepts are juxtaposed with a personal narrative: the rise and failure of a relationship, the deafening silence that arrives within any new vacancy, and the eventual need to learn to adapt in order to grow. These two themes--the notion of a midwestern place and its ideologies, and the notion of a failed relationship-- work in tandem to speak for a shared struggle. The small family farm is dying out and the personal relationship dies right alongside it. What remains is a chance at rebirth, change, a looking outward, finally, as much as a looking inward. Though there is brokenness, and pain, there is also hope.

Now and Then is an anthology of original compositions written over the last five years. Nevertheless, they represent a lifetime of personaland private experiences, insights, ideas, and impressions. The poems represent, strong or weak, a serious first attempt to share these verypersonal expressions with others. Writing them was a creative exploration and immersion for a person with dubious, unpromising, and unexpectedscholarly origins. The title of the book is meant to convey two meanings. First, the title reflects the occasional nature of the creation of the poems as inspiration occurred. They were written, triggered, and driven by inspiration, written at various times and in various places, because, as most writersand artists know, inspiration is frequently unexpected, serendipitous, and fleeting. Second, the title conveys the content of the poems froma temporal perspective. Some of the poems contain historical content, "then," while others contain rather contemporary themes or currentevents occurring "now."

Set in Nazi Germany's only all-female concentration camp, Across the Lake is a story of survival amid overwhelming brutality. With a keen eye towards historical accuracy, this is an unflinching portrayal of how prisoners supported each other while holding onto their humanity. This is also a story of the female guards--the Aufseherin--who were every bit as vicious as the SS in Buchenwald, Dachau, and Auschwitz. What did it mean to be a woman in a concentration camp like Ravensbrück? Across the Lake is an unforgettable story about gender and violence in the Holocaust. As Svea Fischer struggles to survive yet another day, she has to forget her past and endure the brutal reality swirling around her. Meanwhile, a new guard, Anna Hartmann, enters Ravensbrück and sees not horror, but opportunity. As the story unfolds, these two women find their futures inextricably tied together. Told with historical insight, Across the Lake explores a concentration camp that was totally unique in the Third Reich.

In Crosshairs of the Ordinary World, the author, Dixie Salazar explores social justice issues such as the pervasive violence in our modern society, incarceration and homelessness filtered through the author's experiential lens. Salazar has taught art in the prisons and currently volunteers on two boards dedicated to solving the local homeless crisis. Avoiding negativity and cynicism, the author searches for and finds elements of hope and redemption in these lyrically inspired poems.

The protagonist of James Cherry's Edge of the Wind is rooted in history, in a lineage of African-American men, real and those that take life in literature, for generations; and yet remains a voice for today and even tomorrow. An iconic individual as much influenced by Wright and Ellison and Wideman as The Staples Singers and James Brown, Alex van der Pool is a remarkable creation. In this novel, James Cherry writes with an assured voice and a deep compassion, a blazing intellect and a heart fueled by hope. This novel is a joy to read.

Aisle 228 is a book of poems about the Chicago Cubs and listening to baseball on the radio. The speaker also details attending games with her father. The book highlights milestones across baseball in the past 70 years and culminates in the Cubs 2016 World Series win. "Sandra Marchetti knows that baseball, like life, is struggle punctuated by victories but ending in failure. This is a fine book of verse." > "Sandra Marchetti writes like a poet who knows the strike zone. There was a time when being a Chicago Cub fan was another way of romancing the blues. Disappointment was only surpassed by devotion to the game. I love the poems where Marchetti plays catch with her father. I like how the radio is playing throughout this book. Aisle 228 avoids the static of cliché. The poems are new and smooth like a ball ready to be rubbed by a pitcher. Sandra Marchetti writes from inside the ballpark, that holy sacred place. Let her poems guide you from the aisle to the altar." E. Ethelbert Miller, Author of How I Found Love Behind the Catcher's Mask "A beautiful meditation on the highs and lows of this beloved game--both the heartbreak and elation it delivers, and how it perfectly hums in the backgrounds of our lives. Aisle 228 offers the near religious experience of finding your seat for first pitch, the prayer said before the ball leaves the mound and the bat cracks, the magic and magical thinking that keeps us believing it's (finally) our team's turn. This collection beautifully evokes our deep devotion to baseball--regardless of who we cheer for--making it clear why we keep coming back to the stands and getting on our feet to cheer." Stacey May Fowles, Author of Baseball Life Advice . . . The poems in Aisle 228 elevate the experience of baseball and the speaker's devotion to the Chicago Cubs by engaging with loss, hope, love, and connection. With an eye and ear for imagery and sound, Marchetti reaches into the heart of "America's pastime," to the choreography of baseball, family, and poetry. The poems become prayers, and who hasn't prayed for their home team....I will make my baseball confession here: I was raised in Red Sox nation and married the first cousin of Tony Conigliaro. I am well-acquainted with disappointment; I am also the least interested of all my family in the sport. And yet, I found myself transported by these poems. Marchetti's "Inning Ending Twin Killing" pays homage to my favorite poem, "Poem," by Elizabeth Bishop. An ode to Pat Hughes, the radio announcer for the Chicago Cubs, Marchetti reflects on the connections made by the sport and the play-by-play announcing, much like Bishop does with the little painting in her poem. "What a thing / it is to listen / to you describe / grounding into / a double play. . . ." When I think of baseball, I think of all the sounds: the "thwack" of the baseball against wood, the organ music, the announcers, all that cursing! Marchetti, a master poet, weaves sound throughout this book, not only by poetic form and meter, but by her emphasis on sounds and their conveyance. . . . Poetry as a part of baseball--or baseball's poetics--serves as a means to convey loss as well. The sport becomes numinous and ghostly. . . .There is an elegiac quality to many of these poems, as if the speaker is attempting to reach back to older connection, much like tuning a radio dial. Baseball is a connection to the speaker's father and to her lineage. . . .The poems of loss are grounded in place, in majesty of the ballfield. "1060 W. Addison," is described as "Little haunt, this/was the first heart/break we knew." It's as if the speaker's need to keep things in a place is a way to hope . . . . Baseball is the thing that returns "spring/after spring." This is a hope generated through a collective love and listening. "My father thinks you can find/a signal from anywhere--" Marchetti writes in "Listening for Bob Uecker." There is a surety, not only in the poetry, but in "the distance//spun out its curve/to find you." The diamond from Ebbets Field to Wrigley finds its way into Marchetti's ode to the 2016 World Series win by the Cubs. Aisle 228 is a book for any lover of baseball, community, or poetry. Sandra Marchetti is a master whose "Hands work the blur." Baseball--that heartbreaker for so many--becomes illuminated in this collection, as the concave diamond spreads against the night: a shallow bowl filled quick to white-- the stadium breath flared then folded tight. -Jennifer Martelli

"A dog's run leads us into an opening in the continuum, into wildness intercepted by man, taking us into the precise pulse of it all, in this wild place we all know...."― Allison Hedge Coke, Reynolds Chair of Creative Writing Platte Valley Review, Senior Editor "Harrison...draws us into the terrain he knows. He scans his memory for those moments that remain clear and shining years after they happen. Above all, he sheds light on his past and ours in celebration and sorrow. These poems pay attention, and they force the reader to do the same." ―Maria Mazziotti Gillan, All That Lies Between Us. "Harrison's poems derive from a curiosity and passion for the out-of-doors.... Individually and collectively these poems offer a marvelous and compelling journey into the animal kingdom, a journey that 'sets us spinning / out once more into the awe-filled everlasting....'" ―William Kloefkorn, Nebraska State Poet

Harmonia explores the psychic distance and damage created by loss as it considers art, physics, geology, and literature. These poems offer an intimate look at how grief can sink us, forever changing how we see our closest relationships and the spaces we share.

In John Hazard's collection of poems, Interrupt the Sky, the title comes from a line in "Hills," in which the speaker imagines an Ohio River landscape, with hills that send their chatter out to interrupt the sky, which has been too vast, too long. The hills have had about enough. Attending to detail and gesture, these poems present humans and other modest creatures set against larger forces, usually in nature. With varying degrees of hope and affection, Hazard is pulling for the small and the vulnerable to interrupt the sky, to declare themselves in one way or another. The book's three parts are titled "Small," "Beautiful Clowns," and "Home Before Dark." In each section, the poems move from darkness toward cautious affirmation. The light comes at angles, muted by realism and shadow, but it seems right there, on the horizon, if we look hard.

Cyrus Cassells, a masterful poet and translator, has created a unique and powerful hybrid translation/poetic homage to Catalunya's great twentieth-century poet Salvador Espriu. The lion's share of To the Cypress Again and Again is a supple translation of Espriu's first book, Sinera Cemetery, along with selections from other collections. A reader will come away with a poignant sense of Espriu's beloved seaside landscape as well as, in Espriu's words, his "precious Catalan's/ mysterious gold."

In its own way, the American South is riddled with elements of the gothic genre. Instead of empty, isolated castles it has small towns, though just as haunted, just as full of secrets. The Southern Gothic is a clash between the old and the new, tradition and breaking the cycles its people are, or should be, ashamed of. It's grotesque and violent, surreal and symbolic but it makes people listen. It's about calling people to change or be forgotten. In the past, this genre had writers like O'Connor, Faulkner, Allison, and Williams, but these ideas and experiences are just as present today as they ever were. Hard to Find: An Anthology of New Southern Gothic, with a foreword by Joe Lansdale, is an anthology focused on giving writers an opportunity to shed light on the issues faced by the people of the American South today, whether those are new issues or just new ways of taking on the same ghosts. How do you define the South? What makes Southern people different? Has anything really, truly changed from its history? "As Charlie Parker, better known as the 'Bird' said about his love of country music, 'It's the stories, man, it's the stories.' We will call these stories neither snail nor escargot, but what is clear is they wear the lanyard of Southern Gothic dangling around their necks. Beneath the lanyard is the skin, blood and bones of all good fiction." >

Fight or Flight artifacts the trauma of McFadyen-Ketchum's divorce and the journey he took across the wilds of America (living in a tent on the California coast, getting intentionally lost in the Utah desert, tracking wild animals in the bitter cold of Indiana winters) in search of healing that led to the greatest discovery of all: his indigenous wife and her three children he now calls his own.

A tribute to the Catalan poet Salvador Espriu, consisting of translations of Espriu's poetry, commentary, and poems inspired by his work.

Gerry LaFemina is not so much a presence in contemporary poetry as a blur of movement, a quick phrase of enlightenment, a dharma bum of punk and junk. He watches nuns getting drunk in a bar, hears Leonard Cohen on the juke, drinks the blaze of light in every glass. Like Whitman, who inspired both Kinnell and Kerouac, LaFemina understands the body's demands, "Its sweat, toils, & passions. It's holy vigor." LaFemina rides the rapids of contemporary America: pain and ecstasy, ruin and treasure, angels and vultures, half-moon like a half-eaten cookie are confused in a cascade of feeling, an elegy for wild love and boundless grief. -Michael Simms"What is it about the past / that it seems to want to last, to linger into the present?" poet Gerry LaFemina asks us in this powerful collection of poems. Here, remembrances of a precarious childhood in a decaying city illuminate the details of our contemporary moment. These are songs of innocence and experience, in which the gaze of an adult reminiscent narrator makes meaning of a complicated past-unearthing both unnoticed beauties and unacknowledged terrors. Hurtling into the uncertainties of a future that is simultaneously unrecognizable yet familiar, LaFemina finds foothold in fleeting sweetness, in the beauty of the ephemeral moment. In these gorgeously tumbling lyrical lines, meticulously-honed images and details are polished to a burnished glow by the sheen of memory and loss. LaFemina writes, "This is how / we learn heartache, how even a name can be haunted / because a name can be a house we live in for years / waking in the empty rooms of its syllables." After all that is named within this syllabary of poems, the reader will depart the book feeling recognized, feeling haunted, feeling sung to and prayed for, feeling comforted and irrevocably human. -Lee Ann Roripaugh

Rubble Square explores the power of art and the fickleness of art history across three millennia of artifacts, paintings, photographs, architecture, and film. In both traditional and experimental forms, these ekphrastic poems interrogate timeless questions.

Karla, or The Weight Liftress is her portrait drawn in a series of five sketches, first as a student athlete, then as a young woman in a dead-end job, then as a partner in a happy marriage, then as an adventurer in Paris, and finally as an old woman reviewing her life from a bed in a dilapidated nursing home.

With its roots in a true but little-known incident involving the aerial bombing of a Midwest powder production plant in 1969, Summer of Rain, Summer of Fire is a family conflict that illuminates the struggle between conservative and liberal, between conformity and independent thought. It portrays the effects of a war that was fought not only on foreign soil, but in living rooms in the middle of America. Above all, Summer of Rain, Summer of Fire is an illumination of the timeless conflicts on the battlefield of the human heart. It's the spring of 1967, during the turbulent protest days of the Vietnam War. Eighteen-year-old Phil Keyhoe takes a summer job mowing lawns at the Strongs Ammunition Plant, a place that manufactures powder for use in the Vietnam War. His father, Karl, a powerful security supervisor at the plant and World War II hero, has arranged the job for Phil. When Phil's father faces a medical crisis, Phil is forced to put his college plans with Mariah, a rebellious new love interest, on hold and work full time in the gunpowder production lines. Meanwhile, Mariah joins a radical anti-war group and becomes involved with its charismatic leader. As her commitment against the war intensifies, she plans to orchestrate a major protest against the Strongs Plant. Phil is caught in a web of indecision and must choose between his loyalty to his father and his feelings for Mariah. The choice he finally makes not only affects him, but his father and mother, the plant, and the entire town. > "This novel captures those small, powerful details that combine to produce an indelible image of one of the most wrenching eras in our nation's history. Bill Meissner has the storyteller's gift for creating living characters, living speech, living emotions, living drama. The novel will not only entertain--in the highest sense--but will also touch the reader's heart." --Tim O'Brien, National Book Award winner and author of The Things They Carried "A storyteller with remarkable gifts." > At the center of this compelling novel is the Keyhoe family-- stern Karl at the helm, sensitive teenage son, Phil, and the quietly heroic and eminently likeable Frances, wife and mother, holding the family together--each of them trying to do what's right, motivated by duty and love. Those tensions propel this beautifully crafted and, at times, gently funny novel--a story of families and community in conflict, cultural upheaval, and, ultimately, hope for change. --Shannon Olson Author of Welcome to My Planet and Children of God Go Bowling From the opening explosion to the ending, Meissner's new novel is full of surprises as it delivers one of the best stories ever written about the most divisive period in modern American culture. As he explores the fractures of our families and country from the war in Vietnam, he paints the anguish and heartbreak we are still struggling to heal from. Although the novel is historical, it reverberates with contemporary politics that have set us against each other. In brilliant prose, Meissner evokes both the beauty and the cruelty that are hallmarks of that time of liberation and challenging questions. This is Meissner's finest portrait of the American heartland, torn, broken and resilient in its embrace of ordinary lives in the midst of extraordinary times. --Jonis Agee, author of The Bones of Paradise The compassion, sensitivity, and quiet exuberance of Bill Meissner's prose and storytelling abilities combine to make Summer of Rain, Summer of Fire a deeply moving and unforgettable tale. Set is small-town Midwestern America in the late 1960s, the novel both defines and transcends time and place with a grace and originality I find rare and utterly compelling. Sentence by sentence, detail by detail--a writer at the height of his powers. --Jack Driscoll, author of 20 Stories: New and Selected

What happens in Nebraska? Follow Cat Dixon's journey across the state as she explores misconnections, unrequited love, and longing. Dixon believes what happens in Nebraska doesn't stay in Nebraska; instead, her poems wade into the Missouri River and then launch readers into the clouds above, the ancient stars light years away, and eventually they plummet to the heartland's cornfields where the distance between people is simultaneously vast and fleeting.

"I Meant to Tell You kept me turning the pages late into the night." --Jennifer Coburn, USA Today best-selling author of Cradles of the Reich When Miranda Isaac's fiancé, Russ Steinmann, is being vetted for his once-in-a-lifetime dream job in the U.S. attorney's office, the couple worries that Miranda's parents' history as political activists in the Sixties could jeopardize Russ' security clearance. But the real threat emerges when Russ's future boss discovers that Miranda was arrested for felony kidnapping nearly a decade earlier--an arrest she'd never revealed to Russ. Miranda tries to convince Russ she was only helping her best friend, Ronit--caught up in a nasty custody battle--take her daughter to visit her parents in Israel. As Miranda struggles to prove that she's not a criminal, she either makes matters worse or stumbles into more secrets. With everything she thought she knew upended, Miranda must face the truth about her family, herself, and her future marriage. I Meant to Tell You is "an absorbing, beautifully told story" of how tenaciously we hang onto family stories and what happens when we finally let go. FINALIST for the ERIC HOFFER BOOK AWARDS FINALIST for the SARTON AWARD FINALIST for the NATIONAL INDIE EXCELLENCE AWARDS (two categories)

Sohrab Homi Fracis's innovative new collection tells a spectrum of stories under a paradoxical new umbrella category: True Fiction. Monotony is banished from this book. At a Florida coffee shop, an immigrant's voice opens up even as a hipster musician's shuts down. An underpaid bank teller in the age of ATMs is fired and goes postal. In the title story, on whose premise the book pivots away from realism, a professor recalls his favorite communication ever--and it's utterly silent. A loving husband and father finds himself inexplicably transformed into a woman. In another world, the protagonist simultaneously faces his end and a new beginning. A budding female messiah confronts a non-gendered godhead. And a bastard prince of ancient Turkey (whose legendary Persian name lives on in the author's) invades Persia to seek his father. Yet we can see ourselves in them all. Even as the resident magician in Five Points Coffee & Spice regales his fellow customers, Fracis's literary dexterity takes us on a darkly beguiling magic-carpet ride. "Sohrab Homi Fracis's new collection, True Fiction, is a tour de force. Showcasing his great gifts as a stylist and his deliciously unfettered imagination, the collection ranges across genres, transgresses expectation, creates with beauty, grace, humor, and insight a compassionate portrait of our essential humanness in these eight eclectic stories that surprise and delight." --Rilla Askew, author of Fire in Beulah (American Book Award) and Kind of Kin "Fracis is the keen voice of the outsider looking in, telling stories that we all need to hear." --E.C. Osondu, author of Alien Stories (BOA Short Fiction Prize) and Voice of America (Caine Prize for African Writing)

"Inadequacies is a collection of stories, small in scope and large in impact. Each of Morris' short stories question identity, and examine the ways in which we are unavoidably ourselves. Spanning a range of stories and narrative approaches, the characters in these stories are unable to move forward without first coming to terms with the identities they struggle against."--Publisher description.