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 a memoir that celebrates the creative possibilities of intimate relationships, writer and psychotherapist Wayne Scott's The Maps They Gave Us: One Marriage, Reimagined is an unlikely love story: a distraught couple with three school-aged children, on their way to get a divorce, are surprised when they fall in love again.

In a voice at once vulnerable, tender, lucid, and funny, Wayne Scott offers the perspective of a queer (bisexual) man in a mixed-orientation marriage. After the couple separate, stunned and careening toward divorce--the expected outcome--they find themselves in a tiny room with a quirky and compassionate relationship therapist who offers them a challenge: find a common story about what brought them together to help them navigate the next iteration of their relationship.

Wayne Scott's marriage memoir will appeal to readers who loved the messy rawness and emotional complexity of Noah Baumbach's film Marriage Story --suffused with a more expansive sense of possibility and hope.

Mother/land, winner of the 2020 Hudson Prize, is focused on the intersection of motherhood and immigration and its effects on a speaker's relationship to place, others and self. It investigates the mutual and compounding complications of these two shifts in identity while examining legacy, history, ancestry, land, home, and language. The collection is heavily focused on the latter, including formal experimentation with hybridity and polyvocality, combining English and Portuguese, interrogating translation and transforming traditional repeating poetic forms. These poems from the perspective of an immigrant mother of an American child create a complex picture of the beauty, danger and parental love the speaker finds and the legacy she brings to her reluctant new motherland.

A combination of the mystical, magical, and marvelous, Sequoia Nagamatsu weaves a collection of bold, hysterical, and moving tales into an unforgettable debut. From shape-shifters, to star-makers, to babies made of snow, the characters in WHERE WE GO WHEN ALL WE WERE IS GONE form a community of longing, of the surreal, of wonder. What a joy it is to read each and every story.-Michael Czyzniejewski

Sequoia Nagamatsu's universe is one in which modern Japan and its ancient folklore play in the same delightful puddle. Creepy, unnerving, and full of heart, these tales of love and demons, death and Godzilla, loss and possibility, will creep into your dreams and enchant your imagination.-Kelly Luce

Black Lawrence Press Immigrant Writing Series Selection

In The Book of Redacted Paintings, the narrative arc follows a boy in search of his father's painting, but it is unclear whether the painting exists or not. The book, a poetry collection, is also populated by a series of paintings. Some are real, incomplete, and/or missing, while most are redacted from reality. The withdrawn paintings concept is the emotional arc of the book, a combination of wishing one could paint the pieces he/she/they envision and the feeling of something torn out of a person due to a traumatic upbringing. A sort of erasure ekphrasis, to foresee artwork that was never painted.

Formally various, narratively propulsive, and relentlessly earnest in its psychospiritual excavations, Arthur Kayzakian's The Book of Redacted Paintings is a sincere achievement. That it represents the author's first full-length collection makes it even more remarkable. In one poem, the sound of gunfire splits the wind in half. In another, It rains, as if heaven crashes, it rains. Kayzakian's are poems of real stakes and scale, of the minute and the hour and the lifetime. His subjects-art, family, masculinity, empire-remain as timely as ever, but it's the uncanny juxtapositions of lyric and visual art that make The Book of Redacted Paintings an unforgettable text.

-Kaveh Akbar, Author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf and The Pilgrim Bell

In his poignant and devastating debut collection, Arthur Kayzakian skillfully excavates personal memory and family history to reclaim a missing heirloom. Through poems ranging in documentary, to visual, to lyrical, Kayzakian confronts how the grief of war and displacement are compounded by the loss of stolen familial objects, beloved items that served as a reminder of the life before. Where the harms of war are intensified by new harms, these poems push against historical erasure to establish a new narrative. Kayzakian stirs with poetic prowess while achieving generational reclamation.

-Mai Der Vang, Author of Yellow Rain

I love Arthur Kayzakian's The Book of Redacted Paintings for its lyricism and its honestly which comes at us not directly but by way of images and music and always speaks in tongues in a way that alerts and awakens. There is both hunger and wisdom in these poems, both silence inside the singing and the fresh music out of rooms that might have been silenced once. Not any more! The new, original, inimitable poet is in the room. Kayzakian deserves our warmest welcome.

-Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

Arthur Kazakyan's The Book of Redacted Paintings is a deft and daring first collection. It's also one of the best examples I've seen of a narrative sustained from poem to poem without sacrificing momentum. Constantly surprising, this gallery of moments is exquisitely curated; you will want to linger here. Themes of love, heritage, wonder, and the life of the artist are embodied in strokes that always seem fresh, still drying. Forgive me collector, he says, I'm trying to get back to my world. Follow this exhibition, it's on the move.

-Brendan Constantine, Author of Dementia, My Darling

Poetry. Middle Eastern Studies.

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.

J. Marion Sims, the legendary, now controversial, 19th century gynecologist looms large in Bettina Judd's recent collection Patient. Sophisticated, complex, haunting, Patient. beckons readers to remember, to feel, to think deeply, to discover, to probe. Slavery's stench, the bodies of Black women, death, scientific racism, memory-these themes link the poems in extraordinary ways. Judd is a masterful new poet. Patient. is unforgettable!!

-Beverly Guy-Sheftall

Dressing the Saints, the second selection for the Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series, vividly explores the lives of Cuban Americans. Set in the lushness of Cuba and Florida, and spanning decades, the stories chronicle lives left behind and new ones forged with struggle, melancholy, and hope. Old loves are reencountered, enemies confronted, family secrets are revealed, and women fight for agency. Memory, what can't be forgotten and what is elusively fading away with the passage of time, is ever-present in the stories of people fiercely confronting fate with grace and compassion.

Poetry. Women's Studies / Gender Studies. Writing About the South. No Spare People documents the joys and perils of a tiny mother-daughter family navigating life on the margins. From poems about finding autonomy as a queer, unpartnered parent by choice in the South to those chronicling a generation's economic instability, Hoover rejects so-called acceptable losses stemming from inequalities of gender, race, and class. The book asks, what happens to the woman no longer willing to live a lie? How does language invent not only identity, but possibility?

Wandering from Detroit to Haifa, Tripoli to Brooklyn, the poems of FOUR CITIES reveal the underbelly of cities, bearing witness to narratives of love, occupation and faith. These testimonies are harvested from displaced landscapes, histories and languages, revealing the unsettled lives of immigrants. Using urgent, haunting language, Alyan evokes the unlikely backdrop of Palestinian bazaars and Midwestern junkyards, policed checkpoints and boisterous nightclubs. A Lebanese village burns while lovers kiss in Paris. A traveler unpacks her grief in the homes of strangers. This lyrical collection captures the interplay between adopted and imposed homes, the poignant legacy of exile.