Curtis L. Crisler's Doing Drive-bys on How to Find Love in the Midwest is a lyrical poetic topography embodying his urban Midwestern sensibility (uMs). Through his uMs lens, his poems transfigure and chronicle the humanity of the past, present, and future of Black Midwesterners (and all globe-stompers)-transforming our dead and living into one sacrosanct body that traverses this earth with our surreal and haggard breaths.

Renisha McBride. Tamir Rice. Jordan Davis. Trayvon Martin. Michael Brown. Freddie Gray. Aiyana Stanley-Jones. At a certain point, BIPOC families must have the Conversation, a discussion and set of instructions for surviving a world of policing, presumed guilt, and the racial inequities that threaten our very lives. It's labeled the Conversation, but this discussion is never an intimate moment, never a one-time event. Instead it's a constant choir of dissent and disembodied voices whispering and wailing night and day. Through a mix of lyric, found text, and hybridity, How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children highlights some of these voices: adults and children, murderers and victims, bookshelves and wanted posters, carnival barkers and political pundits. Inspired by Audre Lorde's Power How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children calls upon the past and present in an attempt to find a language higher than the circular rhetoric that falls in and out of mass media, to hold a conversation that is constant even in silence, to escape the cycle of violence and Black death.

The stories in Transubstantiation are windows that the characters peer through, hoping to see more clearly. They're in the real world but their reality is skewed - things disappear, people change or vanish, ideas that seemed irrefutable are swept away. There are bad people in the world, Dove tells her daughter in Dove and Ellie, a warning that she's not sure will do any good. The places they live hold the imprint of their lives, and that imprint keeps hold of them. They dream and sometimes their dreams follow them out of sleep. The characters are struggling, but even so, they don't give up. Are we dead? they ask, but they keep talking. They keep looking, as Irene does in Going to Moonville, hoping to feel the lightness and space next to her heart.

Reflecting on the charged, difficult passage from childhood and the arbitrary nature of personality, JUNIPER STREET explores, in an interspersed series of snapshots, its narrator's memory of her strange, formative adventures with her then-best friend, a spirited young artist who lives down the street. In autumnal tones, JUNIPER STREET considers the movement of time, the selves we shed over years, and-like remembered music-a mysterious, burnished quality of inevitability about the past.

ADVANCE PRAISE

In this dazzling novella, Joan Frank writes of two perfectly realized young girls in their distinctly sad families. Frank's detail of the interior lives of her characters is as remarkable and beautiful as her detail of the homes they inhabit and the California seasons and cities they wander through. I could not stop reading this beautiful story.

-Martha Bergland, author of A Farm Under a Lake

A tale of parental secrecy and disrupted friendship, Juniper Street takes readers on a poignant journey through time, emotion and revelation-as unforgettable as it is devastating. Frank has long distinguished herself as masterful stylist with a distinctive gift for the short novel; the lyrical resonance of Juniper Street reaffirms her place alongside Penelope Lively and Jane Smiley in the pantheon. Part gem, part amulet, all magic.

-Jacob M. Appel, author of Einstein's Beach House

This novel's embedded mysteries shake the heart. Joan Frank bends time, illuminating the romance of children's desires and fears, bafflement and dreams, followed hard and fast by the alert sorrow of adult regret. Who writes like this, one beautiful sentence after another, with such elegant tenderness and capacious intelligence? The closest I can imagine: the astonishing Shirley Hazzard. Frank strikes at what it means to learn, too late, about the suffering of those we love and what in those we love we shun and fear most in ourselves. This extraordinary novel is meant for all of us.

-Lee Upton, author of Visitations: Stories

Nabokov wished to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; in Juniper Street, Joan Frank has done just that. Delving into the confluence of memory and place, she shows us the joys of the lost world, as well as its terrors-and for the reader, the great provocation to remember one's own past. A beautiful novel.

-Lewis Buzbee, author of The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

With Sober Ghost Jeffrey Skinner presents the reader with a kind of eschatology of the past, as well as of the future. He writes of visitations by the ghosts of a life's worth of people loved and lost, including father and mother, as well as previous selves. One of those ghostly selves is addicted to drugs and alcohol, and even though present Skinner has been clean for nearly half his years, the alcoholic self is a stubborn one, ever ready with an itemized list of the catastrophic errors and choices of the past. Nevertheless, the book retains Skinner's usual humor, as well as his unique, shaded species of hope. The poems leave the reader with a redemptive glow, in which the vastness of our ignorance is balanced against our joy in creation, and our joy in each other.

ALL MY HEROES ARE BROKE is a poetry collection written from the perspective of a first generation American coming to terms with the implicit struggles and disillusionment of the American Dream. The first section takes place in New York, both implicitly and explicitly, and serves to introduce the speaker and reveal aspects of his family's history. The second section takes place in Florida, and continues to further exemplify the speaker's growing cynicism towards the circumstances of his life, and the peculiar atmosphere of solitude that it creates. ALL MY HEROES ARE BROKE primarily uses two forms: short, image driven poems inspired by the works of Robert Bly and Po Chu-I; and longer narrative poems that reveal more personal information about the speaker, in the manner of Li-Young Lee and Frank O'Hara, allowing the speaker to project his own life onto the surroundings and the people of those larger communities.

Lucian Mattison's poetry collection, Curare, is a work about remembering our humanity in the face of the destabilizing and dehumanizing forces of technology, climate change, and capitalism. The image-rich poems delight in the odd and off-kilter while walking an informal lyrical path through landscapes of the speculative, quotidian, urban, naturalistic, folkloric, and dream-like. At their core, the poems acknowledge the tragedy of humanity's self-made tools of destruction and, at once, ask us to hope that these same tools can become remedies-the arrow poison transformed into healing salve when picked apart and dosed.

In All I Should Not Tell, Conner Grayson, fourteen, wants nothing more than to see, Cudge, his intensely abusive step-father, destroyed. He considers it a blessing for himself and his younger, too-innocent, brother, Sammy, when the man disappears, though he's convinced that his mother has done something unspeakable to her husband. With Cudge gone, there's no threat of exposing Conner's deepest secret, his love for Mark, another boy in Orgull, a fictional river town outside of Louisville. But almost immediately, Mark disappears as well. Flash forward two decades. Conner remains tortured about his past, including the apparent suicides of his biological father and his brother. But, he has found a certain level of happiness with the family he's built with his wife, Lamb, as well as his boyfriend, James. It's complicated. When Cudge's octogenarian father shows up from California to investigate Cudge's long ago disappearance, Conner spirals into a series of unwise decisions culminating in discoveries about his past that may destroy his current family. It might be there's only one person who can pull him from the wreckage.

Brian Ascalon Roley's poetry collection, The Ice Beneath the Earth, is an exploration of the intergenerational effects of the violence of war, illness and occupation on individual lives and families. The collections' personas and characters, who belong to the Navarro clan of his previous works, live in the shadow of the intertwined histories, at times violent, of the United States and its former colony in Asia, the Philippines. Set in the Philippine diaspora in the United States, and in the Philippines itself, this collection spans the 20th Century and explores this history's aftereffects on the level of personal lives. The characters in these poems grapple with the challenges of disability, illness, and caregiving, as well as their effects on familial relations, in the context of the complex interplay between these countries' entangled cultures.

In her latest chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist Michelle Bitting serves up a dynamic panoply of forms & voices, wielding the sonnet, prose poem, ekphrastic modes and more in work that beguiles & thrills as it deftly embodies memory & channeled persona. With an eye for invention and ear for musical precision, this poet chisels lyric-narrative gems out of chaos in her ongoing mourning & celebration of lost landscapes & family. All this in the spirit of art's capacity to help us survive the present, animate the future, and re-imagine the past. The braided turns of dream, verse, museum piece, film, & history skillfully excavate, pay homage, and invent through imagined convergences & wordplay. Joan Didion, Film Noir, nocturnes, dead brothers, pubescent adventures, Marie Curie, the ocean, elegy, cemeteries & family luminaries, casualties of politics, pandemic, and a fierce embrace of her beloved sons & devoted husband keep this Los Angeles poet's urban & imaginal terrains piercing and lively.

The story in poems reads like a movie and exposes the bitter compromises a couple will make with abuse and love. Lyrical, accomplished poems examine and ultimately reveal why we stay as the poet recovers herself and her love through the language of healing. Courageous, honest, sometimes funny, the poet writes the book her friends said she'd have to wait to publish until her husband died, but he read the poems and, as proof of the couple's bond, told her to go ahead and send it out, It's good and it's your life. You deserve to be heard.

The old house burnt to ash. Acres sold to strangers. So many dead...

Raised in a family of seven, in a small ramshackle farmhouse without plumbing, award-winning author Debra Di Blasi maps a candid and eloquent memoir of a Midwest childhood both land rich and dirt poor, both heaven and hell. Surrounded by creatures big and small, rolling fields and pastures, weedy lawn, deep woods and shimmering waters, she wrestles with the complexity of a crowded family shaped by place and doomed to tear itself apart. Selling the Farm explores the difficult intersection of grief and love, and the many contradictions in nature, life and death, and memory itself. Her lyrical recollections move from season to season with language visually and aurally shaped to reconsider the ways that we bear witness to any place and time--and to ourselves amid all. As personal and global extinctions loom in the foreground, and family farms become increasingly scarce, these elegiac ruminations remind us how much has been--and will be--lost to us all.

Poetry. African & African American Studies. Humor and terror bind themselves to one another in this wonderfully odd debut by Dustin Pearson. As much as these poems are anxious and anguished--'Make them describe it end to end'--they are also tender and redemptive--'I've been waiting for you / and this closeness we wouldn't abuse.' But MILLENNIAL ROOST is never apologetic in its truth-telling or its disappointment at a world that goes on once such awful truths are told. How do we live through (and live on ) after violation? Pearson's surrealist vision is itself a metaphor for the lie that physical resilience saves us from mental anguish. This is a beautifully necessary book.--Jericho Brown

A fierce and frightening intelligence animates Annie Christain's Tall As You Are Tall Between Them, a book of teeming references and unsettling implications. Whether they've sprung from biblical figures, pop stars, or serial killers, these wild, wide-ranging monologues can sound like depositions or fever dreams or both, testing the limits of our empathy as they haunt and beguile: I'll be eating packs of Kool-Aid, / waiting in your bushes so we can lock eyes. This boldly singular book feels like it has devoured whole cultures and spat them back at us in the form of poems that provoke us to recognize in them the darker, weirder parts of ourselves. Mark Bibbins, author of They Don't Kill You Because They're Hungry, They Kill You Because They're Full I know this is a bad way to speak, announces Annie Christain in her extraordinary debut collection Tall As You Are Tall Between Them, but I'm doing it on purpose. Assimilating the marginalized speech patterns of cult members, non-native speakers, abuse survivors, and the countless everyday victims of modernity, Christain forges a wildly inclusive lyric voice-one that can pull out the sword from the inside of collective life. Truth be told, there are actual horses, and then there are the destroyers who sometimes inhabit the horses. This poet is one of the destroyers. Srikanth Reddy, author of Facts for Visitors Where many reporters shock and numb their audiences with a relentless stream of violence and insanity while skipping or inadequately addressing inconvenient questions, Christain starts with these questions, zooms in, hovers, and rewinds. The bizarre, disturbing, and uncomfortable scenarios presented in her poems are written with an earnestness that possesses just the right degree of plausibility to leave the reader asking time and time again, What if? At first glance, Tall As You Are Tall Between Them is otherworldly sci-fi horror. In the end, the book is too familiar. In fact, it is our very own-the underbelly and in-between of a shifting and sliding world where much meaning is found through context and brain chemistry. All the while, Christain teaches us to peel back the layers, to be fearless -to jump towards the atom blast if [we're] going to be forced to fall back anyway, and to enjoy the ride.

Notes to The Beloved is full of the physical world, illuminated by a dynamic narrative sensibility, a vision of down-to-earth love, an active yearning to understand the world, and plenty of kick-ass images, metaphors, and similes: You make a matchstick of your finger, /dunk the tip in Bombshell Red./Then your lips are two flickers, /in the shadows of your ears, smoldering/ flowers. You draw a smoky line/ between lid and lash and dash out./ After reading this book not only did I understand the physical world in a more intimate and immediate way but I felt more a part of it. And what's more I wanted desperately to be the beloved, the other that an artist reaches for. Isn't this what we want from poetry? At least, isn't it one of the great desired experiences? To be turned around, made newer, have been blown up, by a collection of poems? To be like Johann Sebastian/on the banks of the Rhine, letting notes fill the rivers/of his hands, then turning back/to compose the world, /map the road/aright with song, so/we could keep time/like this, getting high?

CREDO. I believe. No other statement is so full of intent and subversion and power. A Credo is a call to arms. It is a declaration. A Credo is the act of
an individual pushing back against society, against established stigmas, taboos, values, and norms. A Credo provokes. It desires change. A Credo
is an artist or community challenging dogma, and putting oneself on the frontline. A Credo is art at risk. A Credo can be a marker of revolution. A
Credo, is thus, the most calculating and simple form of a manifesto. CREDO creates a bridge from the philosophical to the practical, presenting
a triad of creative writing manifestos, essays on the craft of writing, and creative writing exercises. CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook
for Creative Writing is a raw look at what motivates authors today.

Twenty-eight year old Horace Edgecomb, a mild-mannered and popular high school history teacher in suburban Laurendale, New Jersey, prides himself on his ability to connect with students of all backgrounds and ideologies. Yet when one of those students, Sally Royster, turns out to be the daughter of the nation's most prominent Civil War denier, Edgecomb finds himself pressured by both Royster's organization, Surrender Appomattox, and his own unscrupulous principal to teach the American Civil War as a theory, rather than as fact. Needless to say, he refuses. But after he outmaneuvers Royster's father at a Board of Education meeting, Horace finds himself recruited by an old flame, Vicky Vann, now employed as a special investigator at the Treasury Department, to convert publicly to Royster's cause and to infiltrate his organization. Surrender Appomattox's goal, he soon discovers, is to conduct DNA testing on Abraham Lincoln's bloody cloak to prove that the man allegedly assassinated at Ford's Theatre was a hired actor.

Horace's plunge into conspiracy theory brings chaos to the lives of those who surround him: his sister, Jillian, who fears his notoriety may prevent her from adopting a child; his roommate, Sebastian, who hijacks Horace's first press conference to market his own line of blasphemous coloring books depicting the prophet Mohammed; Sebastian's inamorata, Esperanza, who studies normative prosopography--the art of reading the truth from people's facial musculature; and Sebastian's friend, Albion, a schizophrenic poet who pens obscene limericks and haiku in Horace's living room. Yet as Horace becomes increasingly steeped in Surrender Appomattox's plans, he also finds himself attracted to eighteen year old Sally, an interest that clouds his judgment and leads him to a crisis of historical faith. Ultimately, he must choose between Vicky Vann and Sally Royster, and in doing so, between those who revere the Civil War as a hallowed and unifying moment in our nation's past, and those who believe the conflict to be nothing more than a hoax concocted to serve a political agenda.

Gregory de la Haba's memoir is in the tradition of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In a narrative that is engaging, insightful and precise-much like the drawings and sketches by de la Haba that adorn the book-he tells a story of artistic enlightenment, first through youthful attempts to enhance the work through life experience, and then, finding his muse within the people and places that matter most. Read this book to discover what it takes to be an artist, a friend, a husband-a man. Curriculum Vitae is a keeper.

-T.J. English, New York Times best-selling author of The Westies and Havana Nocturne

Curriculum Vitae is a wild book, as eccentric and electric as the talented artist that wrote it. Fantastic.

-James McBride, New York Times bestselling author of The Color of Water and The Good Lord Bird, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

I don't recall the last book I read continually, maybe because they've all been dry nonfiction, as opposed to what Gregory de la Haba has done with Curriculum Vitae. Aside from What Happens Next in the life of a memoirist (wanting to know), I have to be surprised, at least once a page or so, by the language, meaning, I have to be thinking 'I didn't see THAT coming...' then this follows: 'but somehow it's just right-perfect' in nuance. This way each vignette becomes a story with an ending and ENDINGS ARE EVERYTHING. No ending, no story. Period. Apart from being an incredible artist, Mr. de la Haba is a natural writer and storyteller. Anyway, a great service has been done, but only for those who love life... no wait, not necessarily that.... but a service to those who have an intense INTEREST in it... it.... it's doings, the cause and effect of it.

-Allan Weisbecker, author of Cosmic Banditos and In Search of Captain Zero

Set in the North Georgia mountains, in the fictional city of Redvale, Transcendent Gardening is the story of Angel Maso, a gardener and would-be playwright, whose life has been quietly unraveling ever since his wife, Dolores, aka Doll Maso, divorced him. Doll, who continues to live in Redvale, is happy and successful and well-adjusted in her new life. Their daughter, Claire, is also successful, wildly so, as a social media entrepreneur. Angel, however, has been struggling for years, eking out a livelihood as a gardener and part-time poets-in-the-schools teacher-and when all that falls apart, so does Angel, with consequences that shake both the city of Redvale and the nation.

ADVANCE PRAISE

Transcendent Gardening is a master class in character and motive, and Ed Falco is an absolute poet of human frailty and calamity. He finds wonder even in the deepest pain. This novel is sometimes dark, often funny, and always wise. I couldn't put it down.

-Alyson Hagy, author of Scribe

In Transcendent Gardening, Ed Falco is processing the collective trauma of gun violence in America. This is urgent, compelling reading.

-Julianna Baggot, author of Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders

Ed Falco knows how we all hurt, how we all deceive ourselves, most of all how the mechanisms of the mind can tragically misfire. Transcendent Gardening is terrifying.

-Kyle Minor, author of Praying Drunk

Things at the edge are at the center of Kate Northrop's cuntstruck: a man squatting on a roof with his arms around his knees, kids running over the roofs of row houses at night, ghost decorations tied into trees, the unfocused eyes of the Scrambler attendant at the fair, the circle of foam around a storm drain. The world of cuntstruck is at once the world that was there (the drive-in that now is only a field) and the world that wasn't (the one we walk around and around but can find no way into); it is winter (a man in the empty road in the snow) and summer (grasses frothing up against a boat); it is certainty (the rain thumping against the house) and uncertainty (the neighbor's dog in the middle of the pond in the middle of the night). In Kate Northrop's cuntstruck, things drop away from us, and we see as if on the brink. cuntstruck changes what we see, and how we see it.