Bøger udgivet af Black Lawrence Press

MAMAS, MARTYRS, AND JEZEBELS: MYTHS, LEGENDS, AND OTHER LIES YOU'VE BEEN TOLD ABOUT BLACK WOMEN revisits notions of Black womanhood to include the ways in which Black women's perceived strength can function as a dangerous denial of Black women's humanity. This collection addresses the stigma of this extraordinary endurance in professional and personal spaces, the Black church, in interpersonal partnerships, and within the justice arena, while also giving voice and value to Black women's experiences as the backbone of the Black family and community."MAMAS, MARTYRS, AND JEZEBELS: MYTHS, LEGENDS, AND OTHER LIES YOU'VE BEEN TOLD ABOUT BLACK WOMEN serves as a needed and necessary homeplace for Black women and their truths. The essays within this collection make space for, and peace with, the oftentimes complicated, contradicting, and co-existing truths of Black womanhood. Through unapologetically honest prose, poetry, and the occasional playlist, the editors and contributors composed a beautifully honest celebration and declaration of Black women's humanity, voice, and power. For Black women who have grown accustomed to only seeing themselves in pieces, come to this kitchen table and eat and sip yourself--body, mind, and soul--whole."--Dr. Ronisha Browdy"MAMAS, MARTYRS, AND JEZEBELS: MYTHS, LEGENDS, AND OTHER LIES YOU'VE BEEN TOLD ABOUT BLACK WOMEN masterfully unravels long-standing misconceptions surrounding black women by delving into the historical, cultural, and societal constructs that have shaped these narratives. With a powerful, insightful, and unapologetic tone, the authors challenge conventional wisdom while offering a fresh perspective on the rich tapestry of Black womanhood. The book's engaging writing styles and well-researched content make it an essential read for anyone interested in understanding the complex dynamics that have influenced the portrayal of Black women throughout history. By the end of this compelling journey, readers will find themselves questioning their preconceived notions and inspired to challenge the status quo."--Dr. Janie Lacy"This book of thoughtful offerings--essays, reflections, playlists, and interviews reflect with incredible depth, Black women's lived experiences. Here, the complexity of personhood, embodiment, intellectual life, and emotional and spiritual worlds, are taken up with the personal and collective 'I.' These authors have much to say, and in the tradition of canonical Black feminist edited collections, their words will reverberate for generations."--Dr. Bettina JuddLiterary Nonfiction. Essay. African & African American Studies. Women's Studies.

A powerful debut chapbook by poet Jessica Morey-Collins.Entitlement is a hell of a drug. The load-bearing grifts, propping up a culture of dominance, range from the canonized hierarchies that inform interpersonal and social violence, to the ecological and economic abuses of extractive resource management and disaster capitalism. WE WERE MORE THAN KINDLING is a confessional account of the author's navigation of these systems, a collection of poems that endeavors to make meaning where the personal and political collide. We follow the speaker's reckoning of an intimate history of persistent sexualization and consent violation with the disillusion of coming of age in an era when abuse of power is a feature, not a bug. This collection builds momentum through a cynical premise, following its speaker's defiant claim-staking over their own body, agency, and pleasure.

Jane Morton's debut chapbook Snake Lore explores the intimacy and violence born of a particular place, weaving a broken narrative fraught with the tangled dynamics of individuals and their environment. This collection is steeped in dirt and framed within the politics of disgust concerning sexuality and the gendered body in the often-fantastical world of the American South. Morton uses formal play to hold contradictions together-a contrapuntal poem to tell two versions of a story, or a string of sonnets, which queer the form from poem to poem, invoking both familiarity and mutation. In these poems, spiritual and religious concerns-the beauty and the harm that they potentiate-converge and haunt.

The Bones Beneath captures what it means to be American, Southern, diasporan, what it means to belong and not to belong, and finding many ways home. It transports readers across place and time, focusing on race and racism, health and healing, Africa and America, and mysticism and incantations. The poems call us to remember the histories we are coaxed to forget and opens pathways to understand our shared humanity. You will not leave this work without being changed and without understanding how and why there is hope for us to be better.

Set in the fictional California town of San Encanto - a place where suburban angst coexists with the astonishing - a lonely wife finds her oppressive husband has become a dirigible who follows her from the sky, a neglected boy spends his summer unwinding a parasitic Guinea worm from his little sister's belly, and an aspiring life coach attends a self-actualization seminar that goes wildly off the rails. In Things I Want Back From You, Elizabeth Stix's hilarious and poignant debut of 20 linked stories, hopelessly flawed characters flail against their own insecurities, seeking one true moment of connection, and if they're lucky, winning that rarest of gifts - a second chance.

Historically poets have explored no two themes more than love and grief because they are opposite sides of the same emotional coin that we will all experience in unique and often unexplainable ways. While other anthologies validate the necessity of the elegy, none examine the relationship between the body in grief and the body of the poem a poet crafts to recreate an individual, visceral experience of grief. By pairing contemporary poems with micro-essays, wherein each poet considers briefly the connection between their included poem(s) and their corresponding grief, In the Tempered Dark initiates a dialogue designed to engage teachers, students, readers, and writers. This collection doesn't instruct poets how to craft grief poems but illuminates the bond between bodies in grief and bodies of poems.In the Tempered Dark brings together contemporary work and voices that demonstrate the range of grief which feels urgent to twenty-first century poets from diverse backgrounds, at different stages in their careers, confronting assorted losses through various styles and forms. Poems coupled with micro-essays offer intimate and inside insights appealing to novices and veterans of all genres. This book will allow readers to identify with poets and poems to grieve and to heal, and it will also consider the relationship between poet and poem. Such an examination of content and form will show how poets manipulate craft, giving voice to what can seem unsayable, transcending elegy.

The linked stories in UNBEND THE RIVER are set along a forested stretch of land between Lake Erie and the upper Allegheny River in Western New York, places dense with rivers, hills, and forest. The characters, all of whom are tied to a modern knife manufacturing plant, illustrate all the ways love and longing shapeshift over the course of a long life. A host of elderly hockey players, Franciscan Friars, loser heroes, budding conmen, and unintentional historians are all wired to search for meaning. Each flash their creative genius when fighting off idleness, anger, and disappointment. They build nightmare hotrods and race school buses; train wild dogs, homing pigeons, and dancing horses; and fight wildfires and grasshopper swarms. They crash headlong into the chaos, confusion, and confluence of their homes, never losing their energy to seek out the essential miracles hidden all around them.

Adrian Van Young beckons readers further into the shifting borderlands of the Gothic and uncanny in his second collection, MIDNIGHT SELF. Space colonists menaced by a grotesque alien creature adapt a grim charter to ensure their survival. An exhausted new mother makes an uneasy discovery when her baby monitor's signal gets crossed with another. An heiress imprisoned in a labyrinth of her own making is forced into an obliterating confrontation with grief. A carnivorous car lot tube man terrorizes a gang of transphobic bullies. An army nurse discovers that war's terrors still hound her in new, chilling forms. Written in the tradition of Angela Carter, George Saunders and Mariana Enriquez, MIDNIGHT SELF explores the dissociation of being human and the humanity of being monstrous.

"...(T)he thing I love most about a great story of provocative fiction is that despite being drawn to it, despite feeling enriched by it, it's impossible to feel completely good about. It contains at least one thing that is chilling and repellant that the power of the text forces us to move through despite our reservations. We cannot escape the piece without confronting fear or abjection. I need provocative fiction because it helps me remember I cannot ever fully protect myself. It centers my attention in all the very places I try to avoid. My former professor Dave Hickey once said, 'Art is what tells you things are not going to be okay.' I hope you find in this collection a story that does indeed affirm for you this agonizing truth-how things are not alright-in a way that is profoundly unsettling, yes, but also helps this actuality feel a bit less lonely. I know I found many."-from the foreword by Alissa NuttingContributors include: Laura Benedict, Paula Bomer, Karen Brown, Shannon Cain, Kim Chinquee, Monica Drake, Kathy Fish, Amina Gautier, Tina May Hall, Nancy Hightower, Jessica Hollander, Holly Goddard Jones, Stacey Levine, Kelly Luce, Nina McConigley, Janet Mitchell, Ethel Rohan, Karin Tidbeck, Damien Angelica Walters, Claire Vaye Watkins

Poetry. African & African American Studies. "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 w

"Cante Jundo, or 'Deep Song, ' is what Garcia Lorca called poetry attached to the rhythms and waves of a continent, its people, its waters, its history. In Alan Chazaro's PIÑATA THEORY, those resonances echo across the field 'between the countries of your body, ' the shared stories of cousin-cultures stretching across manmade boundaries. 'I've become a borderland of tongues, ' writes Chazaro, 'a mezcla of eyes.' Here is the piñata, unbroken, containing, holding together all the promise of youth and imagination. When it spills, it spills lavishly and generously its treasures."-D A Powell"The great American philosopher Jay Z once said, 'You can't heal / what you don't reveal.' Such is the ethos of this debut collection. Pugilistic, unflinchingly honest, and damn right gorgeous, PIÑATA THEORY no se raja in decirnos how broken we are, how broken we've been. Alan takes the hyphen in Mexican-American, this unruly papier-mache we've inherited, and clothes the hollow of us. So before leafing this book, dear reader, take a breath-for your sake, for those who still can't breathe. Stomach his hard-hitting truth, because 'We were made for beatdowns.' This some strong shit, as blunt as a spliffed Swisher, as the dusty 2x4's we'd wield at dangling dulce. Whenever you ready, step inside this circle of homies. We're cheering on our Yay Area champ as he plants both feet in this poetry world. It's his turn. And as he swings for our freedom, sing like we did as kids, 'Dale dale dale, no pierdas el tino.'"-Antonio López"We don't get to witness a root as it reaches out and absorbs from all around itself. But PIÑATA THEORY by Alan Chazaro is evidence of this Mexican-American navigation-it is the bud and the strange blossom that doesn't resist itself like Xicanos sometimes do. And in this way, it is like the serious ache a family joke leaves. It's the men watching other men cry, lost gold teeth and the person that misses it, the thoughts loose like dogs on the street and how in their wildness, we must honor them. These poems reverb under the skin but not necessarily in the colonized body. The speaker in this collection knows better than to make their body fully responsible for the world. And yet, they know where they participate. They don't 'live with dust in [their] eyes, ' or with unaccounted admiration for life. PIÑATA THEORY is a record of layer, and speaks of us in a humor that is pure pocho-dimensional. Its truth is a deep wound and the 'fuck it' that follows. And still, each poem seems to be written in a special wonder that gathers itself from many places inside the speaker's one body, one root."-Sara Borjas

"Although MANY RESTLESS CONCERNS illuminates the horror of absolute control over others, it also shines a beacon on the strength of women sharing their truths one by one, of spirits joining together to topple the seemingly untouchable. This work speaks to our own times, to our #metoo reckoning, to our power as survivors to take back our stories and reclaim the darkness. Oppression of any kind never holds, even if it takes the dead to bring it down. This book is a haunting, essential read for all uneasy souls."-Laraine Herring"'Just know we all have stories worth your time. Just know we're just starting to understand our own worth.' This is how Gayle Brandeis opens MANY RESTLESS CONCERNS. Countess Bathory of Hungary allegedly killed up to 650 girls and women between the years 1585 and 1609, in a variety of cruel, heartless ways. Brandeis brings these words to our attention-stab, strangle, pummel, hack, burn, drown, freeze, scald. 'Your body remembers even when you no longer have a body, some tender part of you still flinches; some immaterial nerves still flare,' she writes. 'We want you to bear witness,' voices the chorus. I urge you, the reader, to bear witness to these centuries of silent voices rising up clearly, often beautifully, more often tragically. Bear witness."-Alma Luz Villanueva"Feels like a terrifying and gorgeously lyric fairy tale but never once does the author let us forget that the pain is real and the point is empathy, understanding and protecting the ones who come after. Ethereal and beautiful as its ghostly chorus, but with 'muscle and scent,' 'meat' and 'bone,' MANY RESTLESS CONCERNS is quickened with the blood of the victims, the essential, and ultimately healing, blood of story."-Francesca Lia Block"If all the women and girls who have been murdered, tortured, abused and disappeared were to raise their voices, they would create a song that would drown the world. In Gayle Brandeis' haunting and haunted novel-in-poems, MANY RESTLESS CONCERNS, she invokes such a chorus, the true story of hundreds of young women tortured to death by the Countess Bathory. Brandeis presents their gifts, their dreams, as well as the ways they died, and demonstrates that it is through collective action that they ultimately find justice. You will never un-hear their mournful, defiant and triumphal song."-Terry Wolverton"Gayle Brandeis is a miracle. From the forgotten memories of murdered women, she's created a monument of hope, pain, and demands for the justice of recognition. This is a startling, glorious, gorgeous book. What a vision. Read this book and be transformed."-Rene Denfeld

"What is it to be poor? Discovering an ATM's smallest withdrawal is more than the little left in your account? Counting out food stamps or working phone scams? Living in a bleak rental or a house made of 'shiplap and tarpaper and corrugated tin?' Or is it something far more subterranean and corrosive, like the backwards kindness of a grandfather who guns down stray dogs? Or is it women who, with their bodies as their only asset, believe it 'better to have a husband who beat you bloody than to be single?' And what of their daughters, of their perceived competition, such as a little girl shining 'like a scrubbed apple' before her body is found locked in ice? The question of privilege-of what it can buy, really-demands uncomfortable, often violent answers, and Jenny Irish's unflinching collection, I AM FAITHFUL, holds steady aim, writing the truth, bitter as it may be, that few understand but everyone needs to hear. Reader, witness: here, in burnished, exquisite prose, is a precise telling of class in America, a portrait of those who must compromise to survive, who scrape and save, and though acting out of the grim fury misery provides, they never, under whatever circumstance, deserve to be called 'trash.'"-Nickole Brown

"What does Beth Mayer's intimate collection of short stories want to tell us? That the dead have much to teach the living, that madness can point the way to clarity, that the burn of departing never cools, that inside abandonment can be redemption. Mayer's prose rattles like bones, proving that no matter how far you live in the margins, you can't escape the telling."-Desiree Cooper"Beth Mayer's stories unflinchingly explore the tough and the tender sides of family life as well as offering us a window into the lives of those we often prefer not to notice when we pass them in our neighborhoods. I was moved by the deep emotional truths in WE WILL TELL YOU OTHERWISE, and the slyly ironic and often sardonic wit of these stories kept me smiling all the way through. What a lovely collection of stories this is!"-David Haynes"The stories in Beth Mayer's WE WILL TELL YOU OTHERWISE are indelible treasures, full of poignancy and pathos. Mayer is the best kind of writer-one who doles out her wisdom with humor, who mines the intricacies of love, friendship, and family effortlessly."-John Jodzio

"THIS IS HOW THE BONE SINGS by W. Todd Kaneko carries the pulse of ancient lament through the boneyards of war and unspeakable trauma. This lyric collection of profound beauty and grief reminds us to share our tales of generational trauma and topography-shaping our individual and collective memories-in place of forgotten histories."-Karen An-hwei Lee"What does it mean to be safe in America? In THIS IS HOW THE BONE SINGS, W. Todd Kaneko explores the legacy of concentration camps in the United States and how memory is carried forward. This book knows how to sing-to America, not its expected script, but the anthems of its history; and to a son, lessons on how to bring back the dead with stories, with a fading map, with birds."-Traci Brimhall"The best books about history are those that are also about the future. W. Todd Kaneko's marvelous THIS IS HOW THE BONE SINGS is more than a mere song-it is a singing across time and distance. In lyrics both personal and political, Kaneko composes a score that spans four generations, connecting his grandparents, who were prisoners in the unfathomable Minidoka concentration camps, to his young son and this unfathomable era in which he was born."-Dean Rader"To enter this book is to enter an orchard alive with memory's beasts. To read THIS IS HOW THE BONE SINGS is to witness how a poet at the height of his powers can alchemize history's violence into lyric and myth."-Brynn Saito"These are much-needed poems of unapologetic tenderness and talent-in other words, this collection does the near-impossible: it points us towards love even if what we know of this world doesn't."-Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Through intertwined threads of autofiction, lyric science writing, and the tale of a newly queer Hawaiian volcano, Sabrina Imbler delivers a coming out story on a geological time scale. This is a small book that tackles large, wholly human questions-what it means to live and date under white supremacy, to never know if one is loved or fetishized, how to navigate fierce desires and tectonic heartbreak through the rise and eventual eruption of a first queer love."When two galaxies stray too near each other, the attraction between them can be so strong that the galaxies latch on and never let go. Sometimes the pull triggers head-on wrecks between stars-galactic collisions-throwing bodies out of orbit, seamlessly into space. Sometimes the attraction only creates a giant black hole, making something whole into a kind of missing." In vivid, tensile prose, DYKE (GEOLOGY) subverts the flat, neutral language of scientific journals to explore what it means to understand the Earth as something queer, volatile, and disruptive.

"In this marvelous debut collection, Charlotte Pence provides us with all the pleasures of poetic tension. We have the pull of narrative and the flares of the lyric, the graceful rhythm of blank verse and the thrill of innovative forms, the contest for survival both between a father and a daughter and between Homo Sapiens and other species within our genus. The poems explore the idea of survival, not only the survival of a speaker who transcends a precarious childhood but, for example, a 'juvenile male bear with his head stuck in a plastic Walmart candy jar' who 'learned to drink by laying down in shallow streams.' In language that is sometimes word-crunchy and dense, sometimes delightfully simple ('In her small life, she is happier than before'), Pence's MANY SMALL FIRES is a beautiful, necessary book. Come, warm your hands."-Beth Ann Fennelly

In this new collection of flash fiction, Veronica Montes conducts an intimate exploration of the interior lives of eight women searching for voice and agency. Sometimes bewildered by their circumstances, sometimes determined to change them, Montes' characters are driven by desire and despair and a thirst for transformation. They are silenced; they are enraged.Throughout the course of these eight poignant glimpses, a woman contemplates her aging body through the whorls of her hair. A routine morning doing laundry inspires viral and violent dreams. A grieving daughter undertakes a difficult journey. A married couple fails to communicate, while a young couple learns the language of sex. Sun rises on a bed of broken glass. Montes' spare, compelling prose magnifies the power that small moments hold as we make and re-make our notions of self. This is an unflinching new collection from a rising voice in fiction.

"Rob Carney is tuned to some amazing frequency-it comes from 500 North and Morton, it comes from beyond, it comes from when we were wooded slopes-but he listens and returns with these poems, thrumming with 'lifeblood,' these songs which throw down and call out (see 'Poetic Justice'), which are often rich with praise but never falsify. Sure, one might want to 'lovetalk' nature but nature will always kick our ass. It's always there, underneath us, 'with teeth.' I find this book both serious and joyful. CALL AND RESPONSE is such a good journey."-Kate Northrop

With raw, lyrical ferocity, All the Comfort Sin Can Provide delves into the beguiling salve that sin can promise-tracing those hidden places most of us are afraid to acknowledge. In this collection of brutally unsentimental short stories, Grant Faulkner chronicles dreamers, addicts, and lost souls who have trusted too much in wayward love, the perilous balm of substances, or the unchecked hungers of others, but who are determined to find salvation in their odd definitions of transcendence.Taking us from hot Arizona highways to cold Iowa hotel rooms, from the freedoms of the backwoods of New Mexico to the damnations of slick New York City law firms, Faulkner creates a shard-sharp mosaic of desire that careens off the page-honest, cutting, and wise.

"The poems of Anne Champion''s collection THE GOOD GIRL IS ALWAYS A GHOST start loud and strong with Qiu Jin speaking about her bound feet turning ''to concrete / and every step bashes the earth to wreckage, the cracked terrain / wrinkles into canyons and craters, hidden paths for my sisters to follow.'' And we do follow through eras and ages, through politics and poetics, through the killing and the healing. Persona poems give voice to forgotten women, to complicated women, and when the speaker arrives in other poems, we see how the ''I'' herself is complicated by her relationship to these women. In ''Dear Marilyn Monroe'': ''People tell me I''m beautiful too...I watched them watch you, Marilyn, and I''m afraid.'' While the women of this book are ghosts, the poems themselves are what will continue to haunt."-Jennifer Jackson Berry"''A woman''s smile / can be a muzzle.'' With shocking dexterity, Anne Champion invokes the voices of her foremothers. Like Florence Nightingale, we must become ''everything.'' Like Sylvia Plath, we should aspire to be ''the most horrible thing'' until the good girl/bad girl binary collapses, until we are whole. Champion''s poems urge us to wake up, to check our pulses, that the ''good girl'' has already died-and this is the book that buries her."-Brandi George

Winner of the Big Moose Prize. In CHILDREN AND LUNATICS, the 21st century is new and fragile, the center barely holding. Wars, terrorists, and hurricanes are on TV. A silent street person and a suburban mother share intimate spheres of love and grief and odd obsessions, although they barely meet. As their paths converge, an eerie world hovers, casting shadows and flickering lights, igniting fears and dreams."CHILDREN AND LUNATICS pieces together a nightmare landscape-the one we all live in. It''s recognizable, strange, and subtly frightening. You can''t lay this book aside unchanged."-Rick DeMarinis"Megan McNamer''s CHILDREN AND LUNATICS reminds us that madness is created by life''s tragedies and that comfort is found in the most ordinary of places: every third house on a block, a chair, a thrift store purse, a cafe table. We are taken on a skillful journey full of mystery and sadness while being reminded that it is our connection to one another that keeps us from total despair. McNamer''s two central characters are nameless, which means they might be anyone, they are our invisible neighbors, and our potential friends and saviors. There are acts of kindness and acts of violence in this book and I cared so much for the characters that I couldn''t stop reading, and I couldn''t stop hoping for their salvation."-Mary Jane Nealon

"Renée Ashley's stunning new book is indeed a 'view from the body,' but it's a 'body named / bone, named brain.' Haunted at times by the dead, by the past, by death itself, Ashley finds her most frequent specter in the self and its disturbances, which few poets since Dickinson have explored so unflinchingly. Language is the means of both exploration and transcendence: words burst into double meanings, invent themselves, and reverse our linguistic expectations, carried throughout by the musical exuberance of consonant and vowel. Taut, resonant, lyrical, edgy, these poems are, as one title has it, 'Such Threads of Light As Exist in Deep Pools.'"-Martha Collins

Fiction. Sharply strange and eerily familiar. Absurdly funny and terrifyingly serious. Surreal, fantastic, gritty, real. The stories in Matthew Cheney's Hudson Prize-winning debut collection range across various styles, modes, genres, and tones as they explore the worlds of family, love, memory, and loss. BLOOD: STORIES reprints work originally published in such different venues as One Story and Weird Tales, and it includes four new stories that travel from contemporary New Hampshire to historical Prague to might-have-been Mexico to a future world where no reality stays real for long. Reality flows through these stories, even at their most surreal and lyrical, because reality is more than just what is or even what might be: reality is whatever gets beneath our skin and into our blood. The pages of BLOOD: STORIES not only take an axe to the frozen sea within us--they make a course for the heart.

Part post-punk ghost story, part Gen-X pastoral, Mary Biddinger's poetry collection DEPARTMENT OF ELEGY conjures dim nightclubs, churning lakes, and vacant Midwestern lots, meditating on moments of lost connection. With the afterlife looming like fringe around the edges of this book, Biddinger constructs a view of heaven as strange as the world left behind. These poems escort us from forest to dance floor, bathtub to breakwater, memory into present."In DEPARTMENT OF ELEGY, Mary Biddinger examines the hot pink ignorance of youth and the equally vulnerable present. These thrillingly nimble, funny poems empathize with hunger and long for longing."-Jennifer L. Knox"The Talking Heads once asked, 'How did I get here?' a rhetorical interrogation that happens at the very point where our past and present lives intersect. Time's fulcrum, and all its possibilities, even the imaginary ones, are the deep gothic heart that powers Mary Biddinger's DEPARTMENT OF ELEGY. This collection savors its sadness but never wallows in it, just as it asks the reader to take all the joys of the world and taste them. If an elegy is a song of mourning, these poems-with their abiding love for the human experience and a generous dollop of empathy-are an invitation to the most rollicking Irish wake you've ever attended. They remind us that we come together not only to mourn but also to celebrate the things that ask us to say goodbye."-Steve Kistulentz"Mary Biddinger's seventh poetry collection guides readers across the dangerous terrain between memory and chaos with confidence, bravado, and-ultimately-hard-won expertise. The speakers' words themselves sustain a series of exquisite and delicate tensions between utterance and erasure, between form and improvisation, anchored throughout by a series of 'Book' poems ('Book of Hard Passes, ' 'Book of the Sea, ' 'Book of Misdeeds, ' 'Book of Transgressions, ' 'Book of Disclosures, ' 'Book of Mild Regrets'). The emotional undercurrent of this collection samples such a wide range of life and existence that we are left wondering where time goes and why so quickly, from the ritualistic taste of the insides of gloves, to the realization that once '...your friends have perished under tragic circumstances / eventually they become like beloved characters from books.'"-Erica Bernheim

"T.J. Sandella's poems have compassion, humor, grace, and range. He writes about himself and others, about music and sex and trees and Houdini, and death, of course, else how would we recognize him as a poet? But what moves most deeply across and within these poems is an engaging mixture of curiosity and conscience, a need to discover various kinds of truth, whether ethical or aspirational. In poems that 'keep bending / into questions,' he moves graciously across what he sees, what he has done and what he has imagined doing or becoming. One poem asks, 'How long / until we become what we've always wanted to be?' That none of the poems answer that question shouldn't be held against Sandella. That all of them try is to his credit and our immense benefit."-Bob Hicok"WAYS TO BEG risks the big questions. These poems ignite, they incinerate the straight line-the easy road to sweetness-to ask: What does it mean to be sanctified? In an avalanche of grit and tenderness, Sandella roils with heartbreaking humanity. He speaks in the voice of the working class, of salvation and truth as a wild act. This is a brave and beautiful book."-Jan Beatty"WAYS TO BEG aches as it gazes into the upended present with an unflinching eye, searching for a home. There's loneliness here, and a belief in companionship and the power of another to both heal us and to open us. I love the way surprise leads us to the familiar and the familiar to surprise, and how the poet renders the ordinary and the tragic as equals. Woven together into a fugue, each poem builds moment by intimate moment. These poems begin in the noise and commotion of the world and travel toward quiet reflection after the loss of a mother. It is here that the work crescendos, the pain of grief reminding us to hold each moment and to make it, in no small way, sacred."-Dorianne Laux

A subversive glimpse into the dark wildness of preparing for motherhood. New Life is a meditation on the changing/changeling body, wrought in lyric decadence. Novak leads a seductive tour through plashy islands, Great Lakes hideouts, cursed apartments, and castaway nightmares, sighting the baroque and the barren, and celebrating the romance of isolation amidst an interior of plenty.