In this visceral debut poetry chapbook, My Mother, the Butcher, Mexican American poet, Gerard Robledo, sets his speaker to confront the lasting scars of a traumatic childhood marked by alcoholism, neglect, and emotional cruelty. Undaunted, he dredges the devastating history of familial pain and a mother's callousness which haunts his daily life as ......
Memory is a luminous centerpiece of Distributary, now presented on its own as a handmade, limited-edition chapbook. Each of the 126 copies-100 numbered and 26 lettered-is signed by the author and individually crafted by hand. Presented as a standalone work, Memory invites readers to encounter the poem in its own right: expansive, finely wrought, ......
Living Fossils invites readers into an unnatural history museum where coelacanths, horseshoe crabs, goblin sharks, and other curious creatures illuminate a narrative of queer and trans survival. Born in Paraguay and adopted to the United States, Guay navigates complex experiences of gender, commodification, and otherness through fish that order at ......
Weaving diverse cultures, vast landscapes, and ecological concerns, crossing beauty with danger, these poems are an invitation to the realm of possibility and enchantment. A flamenco dancer seduces his audience in Spain, and lovers travel through Istanbul. Writers live in exile while a menu for a dictator endangers the earth. The full moon shines ......
Is Is Enough begins in heritage and harmony then breaks apart into the strange world and tautly stretched emotions that accompany dementia. The collection flickers through and locates in distorted realities, loss, and gentling. By haunting the past, the author reweaves and reorients against a continual vanishing. Ordinary situations begin to seem ......
In This Distance examines the relationship between distance and desire, the erotic and the ecstatic, pleasure and paradise. Esther Perel, Audre Lorde and the biblical figure of Eve co-exist in this collection, offering their real and imagined insight as the speaker grapples with questions such as: do we need distance in order to maintain desire? ......
Holy the Body wrestles with ghosts and shadows, discovers Mother Teresa in a cinnamon bun in Nashville, Tennessee and Jesus's tears in a trick of light. At once dark and humorous, these poems confront the religiosity of the US and explore the experience of faithful doubt, as God himself "goes under the knife." The poems in this manuscript take the ......
Intimate, urgent, and relentlessly inventive, the poems in Ghostlit reflect upon mythology and feminist pop culture and contemporary ideology as they may become embedded in the psyches and even the bodies of their inheritors. Through visceral and sometimes gothic-inspired images, mythological allusions, and the assemblage of strands of narrative, ......
Frame Inside a Frame by Daniel Lassell explores the boundaries, overlaps, and portals of memory and seeking. Lassell's collection is wildly surprising at every turn, greeting readers with visceral childhood memories, gritty landscapes of climate collapse, a quirky neighbor transfixed on love, a sexual predator who breaks into homes, a bat that ......
