When we talk about hybrid literary genres, what do we mean? Unprecedented in both its scope and approach, Family Resemblance is the first anthology to explore the answer to that question in depth, providing craft essays and examples of hybrid forms by 43 distinguished authors. In this study of eight hybrid genres--including lyric essay, epistolary, poetic memoir, prose poetry, performative, short-form nonfiction, flash fiction, and pictures made of words--the family tree of hybridity takes delightful shape, showcasing how cross-genre works blend features from multiple literary parents to create new entities, forms that feel more urgent than ever in today's increasingly heterogeneous landscape. Introductions and an afterword discuss the importance and current popularity of hybridity in literature and culture and offer methods for teaching hybrid works. Intended for both scholarly and general readers, this seminal collection sparkles with inventiveness and creative zeal--an essential guidebook to a developing field.

FEATURING ESSAYS AND HYBRID WORK FROM: Kazim Ali, Susanne Paola Antonetta, Andrea Baker, Jennifer Bartlett, Mira Bartók, Jenny Boully, Julie Carr, Katie Cortese, Nick Flynn, Sarah Gorham, Arielle Greenberg, Carol Guess, Terrance Hayes, Robin Hemley, Takashi Hiraide, Tung-Hui Hu, Mark Jarman, A. Van Jordan, Etgar Keret, Joy Ladin, Miriam Libicki, Bret Lott, Stan Mack, Sabrina Orah Mark, Brenda Miller, Ander Monson, Maggie Nelson, Amy Newman, Gregory Orr, Julio Ortega, Jena Osman, Kathleen Ossip, Pamela Painter, Craig Santos Perez, Khadijah Queen, David Shields, Mary Szybist, Sarah Vap, Patricia Vigderman, Julie Marie Wade, Diane Wakoski, Joe Wenderoth, Rachel Zucker

This novella-in-verse explores the high-stakes minutia of living with other people related by blood and marriage, through fables, ledgers, etymologies. The Fault takes on generational anxiety and blended families while counting costs, grinding axes, and laying bare the joys, dangers and absurdities of domestic intimacy.
Sometimes surging with the dark power of a fairy tale, sometimes verging on surreal, we meet a Step Mother who confides, We are throwing / the new house a party, so it will know who its mommy / and daddy are. Charged with humor, simmering with just-off-kilter antics.-- Beth Ann Fennelly
Here, wife and husband meet to fault each other. Truthful surrealisms abound, like landmines or dreams... Sulak wonders if our human faults and gaps are what build a version of love that is gorgeous, sometimes painful, and ultimately more faithful to the love/danger of family making.-- Connie Voisine

Marcela Sulak's Mouth Full of Seeds is a fierce and tender hybrid memoir that is wholly unique to Sulak's lived experiences as an academic, single mother, farmer's daughter, translator, convert to Judaism, native of Texas, and immigrant to Israel. Weaving together lyric essays and poems, Sulak addresses big themes-- time, feminism, motherhood, transformation, violence, spirituality, immigration, sense of place, and language itself-- while rooting her poems in the corporeal and earthly details of childbirth, divorce, gardening, fairy tales, and even potatoes. I can love almost anything, writes Sulak in Dear Honeysuckled, Dear Fire Department, and we believe her as she renders the particulars of her worlds with riveting and exacting grace--Erika Meitner

On writing CITY OF SKYPAPERS: CITY OF SKYPAPERS was an effort of daily writing in Tel Aviv for a span of about three years during which time I tried to inhabit and reconcile Jewish sacred time (holidays, Shabbat, daily prayer rituals) with private, social, and civil secular time-two wars with their worries and missiles, explosions, and a sense of solidarity, as well, with beloved friends in Gaza or West Bank, a custody lawsuit, daily small-scale agriculture, running along the Yarkon river, riding public transportation in Tel Aviv and Ramat-Gan, teaching, friendship, love and its disappointments, mothering. It attempts an openness to the daily world, and an attention to these details, charged by an interpenetration of the sacred and the secular, aspirations and reality. I wanted to mimic in writing the way the mind works, the reality its imagination builds, the relationships it creates, among people, objects, and geography.

My technique involved a morning ritual of moving through time in space-running, bussing, urban farming, preparation for Shabbat or holiday or for work, all the while attending to the details of the ritual. I would write down observations, and then, to separate out what was essential, I would place the writing in a poetic form-ottava rima, sonnet, heroic couplet, or syllabic, usually. Sometimes the forms fit, and highlighted the essential. Sometimes the forms did not, and I let them fall, but the exercise was useful in identifying the heart of each piece. Sometimes the routines were disrupted by war, internal travel, bureaucracy gone awry, and other trauma. These provided intense opportunities of observance and attention to the human condition in the worlds we create, and the worlds that were made before we arrived on the scene.

IMMIGRANT began as a collection of sonnets rooted in the history, myths and customs surrounding fruits and vegetables, and now it includes snapshots of displaced people recreating themselves and the world in which they find themselves. Marcela Sulak draws upon travels and research for a 500-year history of the Sephardic Jews of Venezuela, and her years in Central Europe as a translator, and her early years on a rice-farm in Texas, describing immigrants of all kinds, and showing how deeply connected we are.

Decency celebrates the spunky wenches, the unfortunate queens, the complicated translators, the wistful wives who have been hustled off the spotlit stages of history. Through the lens of Victorian manuals of etiquette, through the unfolding of religion from the Middle East to the American Southwest, Decency thinks through the brutal things we do to one another, recording the ways the individual operates in relation to society's mores and harms. From the Sumerian queen Puabi to contemporary female recruits to the Israeli intelligence's 'Honeytrap' operation, Decency is a mix of the documentary and the lyrical, the wrathful and the joyful.