Bøger udgivet af Black Lawrence Press, Inc.

"The men in this collection seethe with something close to rage or desperation or both while remaining recognizably and sympathetically human, and that rare combination makes the experience of reading THE BEAUTIFUL WISHES OF UGLY MEN feel as dangerous as a knife fight."-Michael Knight"Woman can learn more from these stories than from thousands of issues of Cosmopolitan."-Ellen Gilchrist"To read THE BEAUTIFUL WISHES OF UGLY MEN is to know the power and sweep of what short stories can do. These full-bodied, full-throated stories show us men in trouble and men in love, and they show us how those are often one in the same. Prince is a profoundly gifted and muscular writer, a writer who understands the intimacy of violence and the violence of intimacy, a writer you read again and again and again."-Bret Anthony Johnston

From his first appearance on the page, "we knew he was bound for something unsolvable." But a little thing like futility can't stop our hero from holding up a magnifying glass to a world "so bright it's impossible to understand." In this searching, provocative collection of coming-of-age sonnets, the sad boy detective listens close, collects the evidence, and reimagines the strange landscapes of a life, a body, a boy, a self. Through a questioning, fervent lens, sam sax's SAD BOY / DETECTIVE reminds us how deeply bizarre and at times undecipherable all this existence stuff truly is.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, resulting in a cataclysmic series of events affecting all persons of Japanese ancestry then residing on the West Coast of the United States. So calamitous were these actions that a noted scholar asserted that this action constitutes "the defining event in the history of Japanese Americans."What does this have to do with a book of poetry titled A COLD WIND FROM IDAHO? Those Americans familiar with the Pacific Northwest Japanese American World War II experience will understand the imagery wrought by the title as being both evocative and apt. The metaphor of freezing winter winds chilling the body and then entering the soul of those affected conveys fittingly how the Japanese Issei and Japanese American Nisei encountered, braved, and then survived the cold iciness of Idaho's winters while they were huddled in a primitive American barbed wire concentration camp.

Winner of the 2020 Big Moose PrizeSpanning the mid to late 20th century and set in the Elkhorn Valley of southwestern Montana, The Stone Sister is told from three points of view - a father's, a nurse's, and a sister's. Together they tell the unforgettable story of a child's birth, disappearance, and finally discovery in a home for "backward children." Robert Carter, a newly married man just back from World War II, struggles with his and his wife's decision to entrust the care of their disabled child to an institution and "move on" with family life. Louise Gustafson, a Midwestern nurse who starts over with a new life in the West, finds herself caring for a child everyone else has abandoned. And Elizabeth Carter, a young journalist, uncovers the family secret of her lost sister as she struggles with starting a family of her own.The Stone Sister explores the power of family secrets and society's evolving definitions of "normal"-as it pertains to family, medicine, and social structure. The novel sheds light on the beginnings of the disability justice movement as it follows one family's journey to reckon with a painful past. Incredibly, the novel is based on Caroline Patterson's personal story. As an adult, she discovered she had an older sister with Down syndrome who had been written out of her family history. In fact, that sister's name was also Caroline Patterson.

Winner of the Spring 2020 Black River Chapbook Competition. The poem from which BLACK UNDER derives its title opens with a resounding declaration: "I am black and black underneath." These words are an anthem that reverberates throughout Ashanti Anderson's debut short collection. We feel them as we navigate her poems' linguistic risks and shifts and trumpets, as we straddle scales that tip us toward trauma's still-bloody knife in one turn then into cutting wit and shrewd humor in the next. We hear them amplified through Anderson's dynamic voice, which sings of anguish and atrocities and also of discovery and beauty.BLACK UNDER layers outward perception with internal truth to offer an almost-telescopic examination of the redundancies-and incongruences-of marginalization and hypervisibility. Anderson torques the contradictions of oppression, giving her speakers the breathing room to discover their own agency. In these pages, declarations are reclamations, and joy is not an aspiration but a birthright.

"You and I were told to swallow / our hexed howling, refuse the reptilian // and the mammalian, unless it's tame, / you know, cow-eyed, with a roundness eager / for petting." A powerful evocation of the feminist voice, HEX & HOWL both applies and upends textuality and tradition, parsing and refuting prior masculinist treatments of women's bodies. The poems in this collection forge multi-vocalities, some exhibiting pleasure in the parameters of the sonnet, others designing new poetic architectures through the double and multiple voicings of centos and self-portraits."Now we do the refusing; now // we flame in the celluloid dark." HEX & HOWL is collaborative writing at its most innovative, playful, and powerful. Muench and White allow for the creation of a chimeric construction, a third-bodied poem that engages in language-play to explode notions of subjectivity, as the "I" and "you" and "we" shift and shimmer with agency and possibility beyond the page.

In thirteen slick, innovative, and gut-wrenching flashes, the young women and girls in BREAKING POINTS, the debut chapbook from Chelsea Stickle, hit the walls around them-walls constructed by family, friends, significant others, and insidious cultural perils. "Stranger danger doesn't disappear when you start wearing a push-up bra," notes one of Stickle's pre-teen narrators when confronted by a leering threat that will forever sever her path from that of her best friend. In "How to Make Stock with Thanksgiving Leftovers," a queer young woman takes us through a wry recipe for boiling turkey stock and raging against small-minded relatives and the traumas they inflict.Written in the style of a classic glossy magazine personality quiz, "How Mature Are You?: A Quiz" provides whip-smart A, B, C responses to situations such as: "When that bitch in your book club calls you a space cadet" then furnishes the reader with irreverent, pull-no-punches results. This is a collection as darkly humorous as it is heartbreaking and disquieting. Within Stickle's thirteen walled worlds, some will break, some adapt, and others soar. Pushed to the breaking point, none escape unscathed.

"In astonishing lyrics that give us more than intimate negotiations of memory, the poems in WOMEN IN THE WAITING ROOM work an entrancing weave of Hindu mythology, ravishing songs, and the language of crisis hotlines as a means of limning the fate of women's bodies and psychological distress. If O'Hara's Personism figures a poem as a telephone call then Kapur's wondrous lines serve to heal, like all poignant and meaningful human to human exchanges: interventionist language that disrupts easy sanctuaries of meaning yet is consoling in its artfulness. I call this life on the page, one you'll be happy to encounter."-Major Jackson

Poetry. African & African American Studies. California Interest. DIVINE, DIVINE, DIVINE is an exploration of the divine and the deviant. A consideration of the Black tongue as a home. Life and death through the lense of language. This collection is an ode to the experiences that make us whole and an acknowledgment of those things that fracture us.

"Jody Chan writes, 'have you ever found your specific wounds curled up in a song / written by someone else?' SICK is medicine and music. This book unearths a tenderness unknown to me before reading these poems and witnessing their 'humble magic.' Chan's lyric is a landscape I return to find myself. How lucky are we to be living and reading while Jody Chan is writing and teaching us how to be 'warm & unafraid'-what a tremendous, marvelous gift."-Yujane Chen"This striking debut-poems of history, of beauty, of violence, of grief-will surprise you at every turn of phrase and page. Chan's work is innovative, their treatment of the universal human condition meticulously unique. Do not miss this collection."-Erica Dawson"In SICK, Jody Chan examines loss through brilliant and stunning lyric, each poem urgent with gentle ferocity. So much exists here in the absence of what is said, so much feels vestigial-a phantom limb that keeps aching through deftly crafted nuance, simply mesmerizing. The many exigencies of grief appear and reappear in this collection like a 'hungry ghost,' but Chan proclaims/reclaims, 'this is a love story this is a love story this is a love story.'"-Jay Ward

Though Joe Wilkins's new collection of short fiction set under the big Montana sky may have all the trappings of a traditional Western-long shots of sage flats and blue mountains, late nights at the dingy local watering hole, and a hard-working cowboy making time with the boss's daughter-FAR ENOUGH is far from traditional. A series of short prose fragments told from several viewpoints, FAR ENOUGH follows Willie Benson, Wade Newman, and young Jackie Newman as they crisscross the high plains of eastern Montana, each searching for something to hold onto. Wilkins's narratives-splintered, wending, intertwined-sprawl out beneath a huge, dazzling sky filled with "blue lightning run the wrong way, red eruptions and the slow fade to gold, a white ache along the horizon." Poetic, darkly humorous, subversive-FAR ENOUGH is a Western for our time.

This house has seen things it won't let you forget. When a new family moves into the house at 25 Trumbulls Road, the narrator's vivid dreams of a teary-eyed, raw-smelling woman who lives beneath the floor turn chillingly real. Five years later, the house's new set of inhabitants are visited by the spectral presence of the little girl they lost. In these five tales, linked by a single haunted house, the characters move through a world suspended between nightmare and loss, where the unexplainable and disquieting are fueled by ordinary grief and longing. Christopher Locke explores the ways in which our unspoken fears and everyday regrets sustain the darker heart of a home-its doorways and windows, its basements and lights-until it fills those corners of our lives with something close to terror. His stories ask: how does a home feed on this energy, growing stronger with each new, sinister end? As compulsively readable as it is unsettling, 25 TRUMBULLS ROAD takes us to the places we're afraid to go, then leaves us at a destination where we are our most human.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"A haunting, surreal, visceral collection of tales that is lyrical and poetic, while not losing its bite. Christopher Locke has channeled the ghosts of Matt Bell, Denis Johnson, and Jac Jemc, while retaining his own unique voice."-Richard Thomas"Locke is a master of the slow burn. The events at 25 TRUMBULLS ROAD will stick and cycle back through your head for weeks."-Richard Peabody"In 25 TRUMBULLS ROAD, Christopher Locke weaves together a series of eerily gorgeous narratives in which fathers, mothers, children, and dogs stumble into waking nightmares. Each ghostly flash glows with damage, mystery, and inevitability. This enchanting chapbook of tiny horror stories chills and entertains from beginning to end."-Meg Pokrass

"With heartbreaking insight, Sarah McKinstry-Brown tells of Demeter and Persephone as the story of a mother who has lost her daughter to male violence. These plainspoken, elegant poems give voice to tomboys, girls coming into their sexual power, their mothers and grandmothers, newscasters unspooling the latest version of the 'gone girl' narrative, pregnant women, mothers who miscarry, and flowers who give advice. In crystalline verse, McKinstry-Brown shows us girls like 'peonies / hanging their heads under the weight / of their own blossoming,' and women who learn that 'the heart becomes offal / when a mother is told over and over / that her daughter is just another / siren.' THIS BRIGHT DARKNESS is the meditation and the medicine we need as we confront male violence in our current moment."-Lisa L. Moore"Exquisite craft and strikingly tender aesthetics merge brilliantly with the urgency of complex gender politics in Sarah McKinstry-Brown's THIS BRIGHT DARKNESS. While many of the poems in the collection reach back in time and mythology, the book could not be more essential and more poignant than it is right at this moment. McKinstry-Brown writes of a time 'when a mother is told over and over / that her daughter is just another / siren, warning, a story to be taught.' And isn't this time now? And how desperately we need these poems to teach us to know what is at stake."¿-Stacey Waite

Jessica Piazza's THIS IS NOT A SKY begins with the seed of ekphrastic literature, then yawns, then stretches, then bursts beyond those bounds. Each of these 18 poems borrows a title from the greats-from Raphael and Turner to Warhol and Twombly-and through imagined narratives, takes the reader both inside and outside the paintings. In Piazza's capable hands, the original art works serve as launch pads, and the poems are glorious departures. Through the guided commentary of an italicized speaker (sometimes commentator, sometimes companion, sometimes voyeur), we are taken to a long hallway wherein the reader wanders from room to room, peeking inside. Behind one door, "The ladies wore boas and nothing else; the beautiful men repeated themselves," and behind another, "You float, no floors, no doors in the office walls, hidden heavy hook of neck, crook of knee." THIS IS NOT A SKY is a multi-faceted sensory experience; Piazza employs QR codes in tandem with each poem to allow the reader access to the original work of art alongside its poetic departure. Through her finely tuned ear for carefully considered formal metrical structures and rhyme, Piazza merges music, painting, and poetry to breathe new, strange, and modern life into the grand themes that have long given art its universality: death, love, religion, and truth.

Winner of The Big Moose Prize. Stanley Polensky and Calvin Johnson serve in Germany during World War II. Calvin, near death after being shelled, is given a bewitched herb by Stanley but then left for dead. Each soldier returns from the war and years pass. Calvin, discovering that he cannot age and cannot die, searches for Stanley to get answers.

Winner of The Big Moose Prize. Raised in a town that prizes poets above doctors and astronauts, the narrator of THE THIRTEENTH MONTH is a constant reader, and it is through books-real and imagined-that he experiences the world, from the libraries of Dar es Salaam to the dead-end streets of Cleveland. While he believes he is being prepared to write himself, he is ultimately called to a different, less romantic task-helping his increasingly demented mother die.Bruno Schulz described a thirteenth month as an unnatural time when "one may be touched by the divine finger of poetry." Hamilton shows that touch to be both divine and troubling. Elegantly structured, THE THIRTEENTH MONTH follows the elusive thread between the books we read, the actions we take and the people we become.

Introduction by Kazim Ali. No two immigrant poets are the same. Even those from the same country don't necessarily answer to the same poetics or, for that matter, speak to the same concerns. How, then, do immigrant poets in America define themselves? How do they see and position themselves within the landscape of American poetry or the poetic traditions of their own country? Who might they consider their influences? Answers to these questions are complex, individual, and varied, as seen with the essays included in this anthology.Contributors: Zubair Ahmed, Kazim Ali, Abayomi Animashaun, Lisa Birman, Ewa Chrusciel, Kwame Dawes, Michael Dumanis, Megan Fernandes, Cristián Flores García, Danielle Legros Georges, Rigoberto González, Maria Victoria A. Grageda-Smith, Andrei Guruianu, Piotr Gwiazda, Fady Joudah, Pauline Kaldas, Ilya Kaminsky, Vandana Khanna, Jee Leong Koh, Vasyl Makhno, Gerardo Pacheco Matus, David McLoghlin, Majid Naficy, Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell, Shabnam Piryaei, Barbara Jane Reyes, José Antonio Rodríguez, Matthew Shenoda, Sun Yung Shin, Anis Shivani, Ocean Vuong, and Sholeh Volpé.