The poems in Working Hypothesis celebrate curiosity. They revel in the discoveries of Natural Science as well as the hoaxes and scientific jokes that litter our history of knowing. These are the product of Charles Malone's rural upbringing and connection to the natural world, his family's passed-down bookishness, and his mother's work as a chemist. Poems like Beneficial Insects and Papilio Ecclipses look to the intersections of these ideas with our most intimate personal relationships. The poem About the River comes from Malone's work using poetry writing in the community to talk about the history of the Cuyahoga River. These pieces balance intellectual searching with domestic moments of childhood, marriage, and the making of a home.

Amid his wonder for the natural world, Malone's poems also grow from doubt. We have painted butterfly's wings to claim a new species, imagined animals that burst from the seeds of plants, and written of man-eating trees in the jungle of Madagascar. We have lied to and amused ourselves. We have made mistakes. Adecula Ridiculi considers the metaphors offered by a typo that bred a fake history of a temple constructed to mock Hannibal's failed siege of Rome. Jokes of Nature / Jokes of Knowledge and Truthfully catalog a cabinet of curiosities in the history of Natural Science, and The Man-Eating Tree of Madagascar imagines that lie as something akin to the way an older sibling might mislead a younger one.

The final section of the book, Experiments & Tricks draws from Robert J. Brown's 333 Science Tricks & Experiments. Brown's 1984 book offers up an abundance of ideas to bring science into the home. This infusion of metaphor and vocabulary invites us to consider the simple act of counting the seconds between lightning and thunder differently in How Far the Storm? This poem connects to the history of Malone's home town, Kent, Ohio, and the shootings on the campus in 1970. He writes, We can count the seconds between / explosions. / We can feel them in our teeth. / Even as one voice says / a storm is coming, another says it isn't. Other experiments inspire Mirror Tricks, Smoke from the Fingertips, and Ghost Light. In all, these poems encourage us all to follow our questions and our doubts. They invite us into overservation and to be childlike in embracing our curiosity.

How to extract wonder from sediment, especially if the sediment is vaguely toxic? This is the central question of Charlie Malone's Questions About Circulation. One answer is to dig--the literal trace of land use, the lateral spread of material history, the billowing field of childhood memory. These poems brim with glacial moraine, crumbling mills, wild blackberry thickets, and a big peaceful cement pond reflecting] tarnished copper. But it is aftermath that concerns the present, and these poems haunt the body's arterial connections: a vein is a way elsewhere, and part of a circuit. Tracing our entanglements, Charlie Malone's Questions About Circulation returns us to the ground of our senses: and slow down/put the o in close the boy has flown.

-Matthew Cooperman, author of Spool

Questions About Circulation is vivid and visceral and palpable. All the perks of James Wright and Wendell Berry, and lyricism all his own. The work is somehow softly abrasive.

-Erica Dawson, author of When Rap Spoke Straight to God

Using American constitutional law and history, this book succinctly and expertly explains the fundamental principles that establish the foundation for what the American republic is supposed to stand upon and how the conservative movement has systematically attempted to pull the nation away from those bedrock principles. In chapter after chapter, the author reveals that the apocryphal stories told by conservatives about America's founding are nothing more than attempts to remake the country into something different than what the Founding Fathers intended.

This is the story of a young, white Southerner who is drafted - against his will - into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam conflict - which he opposes. His coming-of-age journey is influenced by his conflicted, yet progressive-minded family as he grows up in a small town in North Carolina during the reign of Jim Crow in the American South. His instinctive sense of social justice guides him during tense racial moments as a kid on the beach, through the desegregation of his high school, and as a soldier in the Army. He is also challenged by having to adapt from his easy civilian life to the rigors of the military, where he learns that his truth may not be the only truth. Ultimately, he is sent to Vietnam where he finds his way, not through the jungles, but through the streets of wild and wooly Saigon - a place of crazy traffic, drugs, women, music, graft, and tensions among the troops as America's role in the war is winding down.

The Rise of Annie Lone is a suspenseful story of one woman's struggle to survive to be reunited with her young child. After killing her violently abusive husband, Annie Lone is wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to nearly twenty years in prison to be served at the Mount Baker Corrections Center for Women (MBCCW) outside of Bellingham, Washington. Annie discovers that she is housed in one of the most corrupt prisons in American history. Using their positions of power, the prison staff engages in coerced sexual acts with many of the women. As Annie quickly learns, those who resist are summarily punished, tortured, and, in some cases, killed. Will Annie be able to unite divided prison inmates to rise up against the oppressive prison regime that is exploiting them despite the insurmountable odds they face? This novel is the first of a new series.

An unknown man has been terrorizing women in the normally quiet town of Olympia, Washington. With women living in fear and the police no closer to making an arrest in the string of attacks, Annie Lone steps in when yet another woman suspiciously disappears. Once she discovers the kidnapper's sick secret, Annie puts herself in harm's way in an effort to stop him but will she be too late? An unrelenting roller coaster of heart-stopping suspense and shuddering plot twists, Primal Crimes proves yet again that no one can write a more gripping piece of suspense than Charles Malone.