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Charlie Peck's debut collection WORLD'S LARGEST BALL OF PAINT began with a world record. Through a series of fragmented narrative poems, WORLD'S LARGEST BALL OF PAINT navigates place and self, memory and remembering. Peck uses a cast of characters and poetic form to reckon with the past and the present, layer by layer.

Collaboration means creation. These poems expand from that natural cycle of visionary poetry, that invites more than one poet to get involved with the poems, until language itself becomes a complete process of imagination and meaning. The result is a book that shares a complex world with the reader and proves that true poetry does not leave anyone alone. -- Ray Gonzalez

"Cynthia Manick's BLUE HALLELUJAHS bring us to a broil like Koko Taylor's 'white-toothed love coils on repeat.' Here, we have a gospel of womanly sharpness, a kitchen sinked and hot combed diary of the way Blues grinds into the 21st century. Gifted with the ability to smolder into surprise and swelter, Manick's reflections on discovery and loss will bring you to a 'slow applause under the skin.' Thank you for this bouquet of sheet music filled with church organ and pistol smoke, Ms. Manick. We gone need it to get to the other side."-Tyehimba Jess"What we remember is what we become. Rocking chairs holding mothers and 'animals that root the ground for peaches, bones and stars.' In BLUE HALLELUJAHS Cynthia Manick holds fast to what brought us across. These are not the things you will hear about Black people on the nightly news. But they remain the things that lock the arms of Black people around Black people when we need what we need to keep moving on. I am so grateful to this sweet box of sacred words."-Nikky Finney"The speaker of Cynthia Manick's haunted debut collection admits 'a love for surgery porn at 1 a.m.' And one early poem begins, 'Today I am elbow deep / in some animal's belly // pulling out the heart and stomach / for my mother's table.' Throughout, BLUE HALLELUJAHS approaches aspects of a woman's development-from 'feet first' Caesarean delivery to a grandmother's admonition 'to pull flesh / from the throat not the belly'-blade at the ready, moving from slaughter to surgery to a kind of deep southern haruspication. At the center of girlhood we find The Shop with its inventory of inherited hungers. 'Is this what the heart eats?' Manick renders visceral a longing to avoid extinction, to escape the museum, to live fully embodying one's identity as a woman who 'knows / how to wield a knife.'-Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

A new collection from poet Lisa Hiton.Arriving to the pastoral happens repeatedly and full of worry in THE CLEARING. For the pastoral stands for the fields of the Holocaust, of the imagination, of the Midwest, of the body, and even the empty field of the blank page. In the absence of knowing how to properly bury our inheritances of the 20th century, Hiton turns to fictive spectacle--to narrative invention, sensory desires, and malleable landscapes--as a last gesture toward hope. As the intellectual ambitions and fears ramp up, the urgency of the body (and the refusal to look at it) does too."Erotic and liturgical, the poems in Lisa Hiton's chapbook The Clearing summon a Jewish North Shore of Chicago that shifts under iterative, imagined futures and pasts. Here, we continually mourn the speaker's living father, who dies in several different Jewish histories; we reach past simple desire all the way inside the speaker's lover to 'turn [her] heart over.' Hiton's evoked intimacies in The Clearing are precarious, dangerous, and heartbreakingly beautiful; in this, they match the world's. In this dazzling chapbook (and all of Hiton's oeuvre), I remain grateful for the poet's commitment to capturing the ongoing instability of our safety--as Jews, as queer women, as daughters--alongside the blessed, profound joys of Jewish queer womanhood."--Rachel Mennies"Lisa Hiton's poems bring me in close, then hurt me. To heal, to recover, to touch truths that have been denied, she reimagines a family's history. 'Obsessed with death, but having no desire to die, ' her speaker pushes herself to see a super bloom out of ash filled ground. This sequence moves through tundra, heat, grief, and the surreal. It celebrates love, across painful expanses, that she will not let go. It's a celebratory, queer collection. I am grateful for the way mourning rituals, in Hiton's voice, become chants of persistence."--Dan KrainesPoetry.

Fiction. Cursed by tenderhearted witches, saved by Nazarene healers, and haunted by brazen lunatics, the characters in FIELD NOTES FOR THE EARTHBOUND yearn to escape the relentless horizon of Northwestern Ohio. These connected stories chronicle an area dying to itself: shedding its history and awakening to modernity--to highways, speed, bottled beer, and rock-n-roll.

Winner of the 2022 Big Moose PrizeThis debut is a literary mic drop. From its propulsive start to its satisfying close, Down Here We Come Up captures the convergence of three women who must weigh what's unpalatable against what's best for their children. Maternal sacrifice beats at the heart of this book, but its blood courses through the evolving landscape of race and class in the American south, the expanding drug trade, and the exploitation and abuse of migrant workers. It's an origin story and an examination of belonging composed in vibrant detail, with tone and themes reminiscent of Where the Crawdads Sing and Netflix's Ozark. Down Here We Come Up, like the hospitality attributed to its setting, will draw you in and won't easily let you go.-Alena Dillon, author of Mercy House and Eyes Turned SkywardGripping! A fiery young woman returns home, compelled to undo a heart-twisting mistake. Layers of trouble meet her in a sultry North Carolina summer. Sara Johnson Allen delivers a pulsing, gorgeous debut novel full of schemes of survival, schemes of love.-Mary-Beth Hughes, author of The Ocean HouseIn exquisite prose, Sara Johnson Allen explores motherhood in the face of wrenching economic and racial realities of the American south yet weaves moments of joy and exhilaration throughout. Down Here We Come Up is written with such empathy and grace that I felt I knew these women and will carry them with me for a long time.-Ana Reyes, author of The House in the PinesDown Here We Come Up stings, and it stings good. A mother's love can be as real as it is transactional. A daughter's roots can endure even as they destroy. Sara Johnson Allen's North Carolina and larger American landscape are startlingly alive on the page. In the space between its scorched grass and freezer burned peas, the book sizzles and aches. A tenacious and moving work.-Simon Han, author of Nights When Nothing HappenedKate thought she'd escaped the poverty and shame of her childhood, but when the mistakes and betrayals of her past come calling, she's faced with the debts she owes to history, to blood, and must decide how much she is willing to risk to settle them. Tender, honest, and thought-provoking, Down Here We Come Up is an illuminating journey to the dark heart of forgiveness and self discovery. A daring debut from a writer to watch.-Meagan Lucas, author of Songbirds and Stray Dogs and Here in the DarkWith Down Here We Come Up, Sara Johnson Allen reminds us that home can be an emotionally messy place--and our mothers even messier. Allen masterfully captures these complexities with propulsive, wholehearted storytelling. This is a remarkable and beautifully written debut!-Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

Black Lawrence Press Immigrant Writing Series SelectionIn The Book of Redacted Paintings, the narrative arc follows a boy in search of his father's painting, but it is unclear whether the painting exists or not. The book, a poetry collection, is also populated by a series of paintings. Some are real, incomplete, and/or missing, while most are redacted from reality. The withdrawn paintings concept is the emotional arc of the book, a combination of wishing one could paint the pieces he/she/they envision and the feeling of something torn out of a person due to a traumatic upbringing. A sort of erasure ekphrasis, to foresee artwork that was never painted."Formally various, narratively propulsive, and relentlessly earnest in its psychospiritual excavations, Arthur Kayzakian's The Book of Redacted Paintings is a sincere achievement. That it represents the author's first full-length collection makes it even more remarkable. In one poem, the sound of gunfire "splits the wind in half." In another, "It rains, as if heaven crashes, it rains." Kayzakian's are poems of real stakes and scale, of the minute and the hour and the lifetime. His subjects-art, family, masculinity, empire-remain as timely as ever, but it's the uncanny juxtapositions of lyric and visual art that make The Book of Redacted Paintings an unforgettable text."-Kaveh Akbar, Author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf and The Pilgrim Bell"In his poignant and devastating debut collection, Arthur Kayzakian skillfully excavates personal memory and family history to reclaim a missing heirloom. Through poems ranging in documentary, to visual, to lyrical, Kayzakian confronts how the grief of war and displacement are compounded by the loss of stolen familial objects, beloved items that served as a reminder of the life before. Where the harms of war are intensified by new harms, these poems push against historical erasure to establish a new narrative. Kayzakian stirs with poetic prowess while achieving generational reclamation."-Mai Der Vang, Author of Yellow Rain"I love Arthur Kayzakian's The Book of Redacted Paintings for its lyricism and its honestly which comes at us not directly but by way of images and music and always speaks in tongues in a way that alerts and awakens. There is both hunger and wisdom in these poems, both silence inside the singing and the fresh music out of rooms that might have been silenced once. Not any more! The new, original, inimitable poet is in the room. Kayzakian deserves our warmest welcome."-Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa"Arthur Kazakyan's The Book of Redacted Paintings is a deft and daring first collection. It's also one of the best examples I've seen of a narrative sustained from poem to poem without sacrificing momentum. Constantly surprising, this gallery of moments is exquisitely curated; you will want to linger here. Themes of love, heritage, wonder, and the life of the artist are embodied in strokes that always seem fresh, still drying. "Forgive me collector," he says, "I'm trying to get back to my world." Follow this exhibition, it's on the move."-Brendan Constantine, Author of Dementia, My DarlingPoetry. Middle Eastern Studies.

"Enzo Silon Surin's poetry brings an honest lyricism to the body of work by people of African descent that began in the eighteenth century in a country that struggles to realize its ideals. Inspired by such heroic voices as Martinique's Aimé Cé saire, Surin brings his Haitian roots to bear on the landscape of America in an epic sweep of incantatory rhythms evoking the enduring spirit of the African Diaspora. The immediacy of his poetry is grounded in his sense of history, as twenty-first century black immigrants come to the U.S. to negotiate race and culture. His delicate unveiling of hurt and courage are the American story in miniature. He is the poet as warrior priest, his work the prophet's homily redefining what it means to become and be an American." -- AFAA MICHAEL WEAVER

Home for Difficult Children: A Memoir in Verse is a book based on personal and familial experiences and memories of exile, trauma, migration, immigration, refugeeism, translingualism, transitoriness, social justice, and writing one's way home. Daniele Pantano writes with remarkable empathy and uncommon beauty. It is a book in defiance of solipsism. It is a book for us all.

THE WIZARD'S HOMECOMING is a sword-and-sorcery tale of heroes and villains on a cosmic and human scale. Paired with ten years of poetry, this is the next step in Cotman's hybrid bibliography."Elwin Cotman draws from a rich vein - subversive, blistering, playful, and always surprising. The world feels a little more vivid, a lot more haunted, every time I pick up one of his collections."-Kelly Link"In The Wizard's Homecoming, Elwin Cotman offers his readers an opportunity to imagine reality as we might like it to be. Whether it's poetry that describes a subculture of anarcho-punks, squatters and folk-heroes like Valerie Solanos or prose that follows a wizard 'to the edge of the galaxy...across the surface of Mercury...onto a Wyoming prairie stippled with tall grass' to another adventure, Cotman attunes his readers to spaces & times set within &/or against late capitalism. Through processes of defamiliarization, displacement and cognitive estrangement, new openings for radical transformation begin to seem possible. I found myself contemplating the possibility of existing in more than three dimensions & the possibility of communication across dimensions between people trying to get free." -Wendy Trevino"Elwin Cotman's The Wizard's Homecoming fills a void in black poetry, serving scathing critiques of white oppression and the black bourgeoisie. It's Afro-punk, 'punk-adjacent, ' outsider gaze will keep you turning pages and following the footsteps of a black rebel protagonist whose insights spare no one. From love letters to Valerie Solanas and time leaps to the Tulsa Oklahoma Massacre, it's an unexpected, fast-paced adventure that startles with its magic, complexity, contemplations, and rage." -Yona Harvey"The Wizard's Homecoming, Elwin Michael Cotman's hybrid collection of poems and prose, unmasks tyrants, calls bullshit, and uses fantasy to improve reality. Cotman, like his speaker and protagonist, is an extraterrestrial anarchist who understands Earth better than its own inhabitants. His writing embodies the elements of punk that remain relevant; it elevates those who do not benefit from capitalist-patriarchal systems while condemning and occasionally even conquering those who do. It's also got ferocious feminist attitude. Valerie Salonas would approve." -Kim Vodicka, author of Dear Ted & The Elvis Machine

Michal "MJ" Jones' debut Hood Vacations is a rhythmic & quiet rumbling - an unflinching recollection of Blackness, queerness, gender, and violence through lenses of family lineage and confessional narrative. A nostalgia for an unreachable home permeates these poems: "We were mighty beautiful once, in golden dust." The speaker of Hood Vacations tells of magic: of praying mantises, bathtub octopuses, Black ghosts, & bringing back "rainbow soap colors". It is a book of passing - as, through, and on. Hop on in.

WINNER OF THE 2020 ST. LAWRENCE BOOK AWARDIn her debut full-length poetry collection, ALWAYS A RELIC NEVER A RELIQUARY, Brazilian American poet, editor and abolitionist Kim Sousa interrogates inheritance by reaching both backwards and forwards: backwards towards her father's first border crossing and forwards past her own. Centered around a specific personal trauma, a later-term miscarriage, the poems also contain collective trauma: they ask what it means to live in the United States both as immigrant and citizen, addressing State terror and violence as if by megaphone at the protest line. In Sousa's poems, the personal is political: they are anti-racist, ecocritical and proletariat. She sings diasporic resilience as both a horror and celebration. The poems are haunted but hopeful; here, there is always hope in rage and resistance.

Fiction. By turns terrifying and humorous, clear-eyed and deep- hearted, TWISTER (Black Lawrence Press, 2015) brings us into the center of a storm as a small Midwestern town mourns the death of a young soldier. The novel opens with Rose, the soldier's fiercely independent mother, whose flame-red hair turns white overnight from grief. Chapter by chapter, her community is revealed and transformed, creating a web of secrets, betrayals, and hopes that ratchet up tension as the tornado approaches. As the storm drives into the heart of town, pasts are revealed and lives are shaken to the core. An unforgettable debut from a keen observer of people, nature, and the ineffable. "You will have to read this novel for yourself to see how a brilliant writer has found the perfect form for evoking the effects of time and place and the forces of history and nature on the lives of human beings. As the title suggests, the movement of TWISTER is as inexorable as it is unpredictable. Genanne Walsh is a writer of extraordinary powers. The work of this novel is both raw and lush with poetry. Her characters live and breathe, and in their intersections, real truths are revealed."--Laura Kasischke, author of Mind of Winter and Eden Springs "Genanne Walsh's TWISTER is a chronicle of a small town amid the calm before the storm--but so much more. This book digs beneath the surface of place to create a kind of Spoon River Anthology for our time replete with secrets, truths, startling reckonings--and very, very threatening weather. As fine a new novel as you will read this year."--Peter Orner, author of Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge "Genanne Walsh's TWISTER is a gripping page- turner, but also has that much rarer quality of transcendent, almost preternatural empathy that very few works of fiction possess

Poetry, "If you, like the speaker in Laura McCullough's poem, 'Almost Nothing Something [stars / plates / cells]' have grown 'tired & suspicious of poetry' WOMEN AND OTHER HOSTAGES will absolutely revitalize you. These are riveting, wholly moving narratives of a life lived. Out of sorrow McCullough invokes a stunning grace where 'What is stripped from you' becomes a gift because 'what's left behind is all your own.' Women of all circumstances inhabit these poems. They shed their skin like snakes, 'memory in flesh, ' and consider the bones of what holds us together in these divisive times. This beautiful book will knock loose what is lodged in your heart."--Suzanne Frischkorn

Moon Trees and Other Orphans is a gritty collection of short stories set along the Gulf Coast, focusing on themes of desperation, loneliness, and love. Filled with hard-living characters who are deeply lonely, it tracks the ways they fight for survival, often making very bad decisions as they go. Populated by gun toting women, ex-cons, desperate teens, and other outsiders, it is a collection about what life is like in hard places, both beautiful and dangerous.

Poetry. "Here are poems about papa and place. Poems about family history. Poems that rise from the casket with memories. The rooster turns its head to listen. There is something Dominican that is captured in the beak of each word as this woman moves among her people. She brings lines that are lush and filled with reminders. Yes -- 'Someone has set the cat among the pigeons.'"--E. Ethelbert Miller "The gods have bestowed a blessing on us in this radiant debut collection, LOVE LETTER TO AN AFTERLIFE. Above all else, these poems speak profoundly about survival and preservation of self and family, of language and culture, of memory and identity. These poems put in work, emboldening the many millions of us in the African diaspora in our determination to be, endure, and thrive in the new world. Ines P. Rivera Prosdocimi, we sing your name."--Jeffery Renard Allen

This collection of essays reveals an impressive new voice, both poignant and observant. McQueen suggests loneliness is also the accomplishment of understanding how far away you can move from other people's expectations. Her clarity rings brightly throughout these works of self-discovery and cultural re-connection. -Wendy S. Walters

The winner of the Hudson Prize, THE PRINCIPLE AGENT is a book of poetry that combines a fragmented love story with the concept of uncontrollable circumstance. At the forefront of this collection is the obvious narrative; however, by exploring "definitions" and "meaning" through altered repetitions, this book becomes a maze of language. ¿"Suzor seems to channel Sappho in her lean modern-day poems, a narrative made up of fragments that expose a razor-sharp intelligence, an unnerving sophistication, an echo of the poet Anne Carson."-Elaine Sexton