From the author of the National Book Award finalist The Suicide Index - hailed by the Los Angeles Times as an extraordinary magical mystery tour of a book - comes a startlingly original exploration of the unpredictability of fate and the mystery of our own mortality.

No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck is a poetic and philosophical meditation ignited by a beautiful, frightening, and mysterious object: the seventeenth-century Swedish warship Vasa, which sank only minutes into its maiden voyage, lay forgotten underwater for more than three hundred years, and then was rediscovered by an independent researcher who conceived the improbable idea of raising the ship and building a museum around it.

Beginning with Joan Wickersham's first sight of the ship in the museum in Stockholm, her pieces - intimate, irreverent, urgent - weave together Vasa's story and the surprisingly personal associations it evokes. She addresses the shipbuilders, the divers and restorers, the men and women who drowned in the wreck and the objects they left behind: shoes and cooking pots, game boards and bones. She interrogates the wind that capsized the ship, and engages with the shipworms that failed to eat the wreck. Constantly rising up are the lingering echoes of her father's suicide; memories of her mother's final illness and death; and the paradoxical presence of the ship itself - an emblem of death and rebirth, a monumental failure in its own time whose flaws made it an enduring success, a mysterious vessel both destroyed and preserved by catastrophe.

No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck is a contemplative, strange, passionate, funny, and haunting book that both is and isn't about the ship - a personal yet universal reckoning with mortality, and with the question of what vanishes and what endures.

In the tradition of confessional and lyrical poets like Cynthia Cruz, Linda Gregg, Sylvia Plath, and Franz Wright, Another Woman explores female sexuality, anguish, and abjection within the decline of a romantic relationship as well as through biblical, mythical, or pop cultural figures such as Delilah, Aphrodite, or Karen Carpenter. Through compressed prose and a fierce attentiveness to the natural landscape, Another Woman depicts the atomization of heartbreak with, what Dwight Garner writes of Frank Stanford's poetry, a dirt-flecked urgency. The collection culminates in new gradations and understandings of what it means to be a woman-and the multiplicity of selves that live within one body.

Linda Michel-Cassidy's stories are born of the mountain areas in the American Southwest, and they depict the lesser-known lives of characters who discover, reckon with, and often seek to escape the mostly rural landscapes that made them.

In As Happy as I Ever Was, the narrator is dropped into the rural Southwest, on a road trip engineered by her cousin. When they become separated, the narrator eventually tumbles into a sort of eco-mini-cult. One of the folks with whom she ends up living the off-grid lifestyle is out there looking for her missing brother, whom the narrator conjures into an almost physical presence. She is unsure of what she is looking for, but finds her time out in the scrub closer to salvation than was her cloistered suburban upbringing. As utopias always do, the undersides reveal themselves in curious ways.

In When We Were Hardcore, a nouveau-comfortable couple move to a picturesque rural northern New Mexico hamlet. Uneasiness with the place and with each other surfaces when a bear takes up residence just outside. The bear encamps while the couple's anxiety grows. Meanwhile, questions about the couple's new neighbors abound, especially regarding whether the elderly Hispanic woman nextdoor may or may not be home. The couple's lack of knowledge about their own surroundings leads to multiple surprising disasters.

The Tides Were Within Him is set on a houseboat in California, but has its origin in the high mountain desert. After a landlocked childhood spent longing for the sea, Ed joins the navy, and upon retirement, moves to a houseboat to captain booze cruises. After a time of aloneness, he becomes involved with Cindy, who didn't realize people actually lived on boats and tried to force Ed to a less odd (to her), land-based life. This doesn't work at all, yet when they split, Ed turns Cindy into an idealized Cindy and her new local celeb boyfriend into an anti-hero.

Soon it Will Be Summer is set in a small-but-steep old-school style ski town. The narrator, Ez, and his sister, parentless, raised themselves in their mother's old double-wide. Willow and Ez are locally-known freeskiers, and Ez works as a lifty and later, a patroller. He is a stellar student and is being encouraged to get out of the only place he knows to save himself. As he decides to make his exit, his sister becomes pregnant, and plans to raise her baby alone. Meanwhile, Ez's best buddy and coworker, Slice, loves his life here, never wanting for the larger world. Michel-Cassidy explores what it means to be a known entity in a small town, the love of the outdoors (and snow), that there are so many different kinds of comfort, and whether there is such a thing as escape.

Far from the glitz of the Santa Fe Plaza or the showy Saguaro Cacti of the borderlands, these characters hardfight their way towards just getting by.

In Don't Take This the Wrong Way, Magowan and Ross probe the stories we tell each other and ourselves. The characters in these 25 stories deceive and manipulate, they scrutinize and admonish, but also, they earnestly seek to draw meaning from the flotsam of their lives. Two friends mocking the needy, sancitmonious co-worker they call the Kindness Woman, '' confront their own painful longing for someone to accept them. A woman who developed unusually acute vision during the last stages of her marriage wonders after the divorce if perhaps she'd been wrong to make so much of what she'd observed; perhaps her ex's best qualities are visible only at a distance. Many of these characters are trying to get by with clumsy skills, limited resources, and impaired caretakers. Grown siblings recall bitterly their father's neglect when their mother died: You hear about kids being raised by wolves, but the three of us were for a while there raised by kitchen cabinets and vacuum cleaners--nothing sentient. A girl living on a military base grapples with the terrible violence of war by playing a game she knows better than to tell her mother about. These characters enjoy burning bridges. A woman reluctantly enscripted by the self-satisfied friend she doesn't much like to be each other's accountability buddies, gleefully learns that her friend's eight-year-old daughter has started a Sexy Club. The characters in these stories bond over their mutual love of words, and they battle and break up over callously or sloppily chosen words. A college student living back at home for the summer begins an affair with an older coworker after noticing that he was also someone who found language revealing, worth inspection. In some instances, wanting connection, these characters may read a lot into very few words, as when a pleasant stranger at the gym hands one narrator a towel to wipe off a sweaty exercise bike: In that mutual exchange-'Gross, ' 'Gross, ' 'Thanks, ' which she responded to not vocally but with a commiserating nod-I felt a meeting of the minds. Through precise prose, deep affection, wry humor, and a measure of snark, Magowan and Ross invite readers to recognize how lonely, petty, yet hopeful people are, and how desperately they want to be properly understood.

A collection of outstanding short stories by Iowa teacher, writer, and editor Keith Pilapil Lesmeister. This second edition has been republished by EastOver Press of Rochester, Massachusetts. .

In What is it Like to be Alive? Fourteen Attempts at an Answer, prize-winning essayist Chris Arthur looks into life's mirror and offers an account of what can be seen in ordinary things. Each of the book's fourteen essays is an exercise in seeing beyond the obvious, and finding hidden depth in the places and things we might otherwise take for granted. Arthur ranges over subjects as various as a patch of lichen growing on a windowsill, memories of a childhood barber's shop, the inscriptions on park benches, goldcrests (Europe's smallest bird), different ways of seeing a statue, and the dimensions of a moment. Whether he's writing about the plight of nineteenth century Japanese prostitutes, a ferret's momentary appearance through a letterbox, a girl's obsession with the Holocaust, or a black and white photograph of a child holding a horse in a snowy field in Sweden, these unorthodox meditations, with striking lyricism, tap into unexpected seams of mystery in our everyday terrain. The book offers a virtuoso demonstration of the potential of the creative essay, and shows how different it is from the tedious academic assignments that share its name.

If anyone can lure out of hiding the mysterious secrets of the things of this world, and turn the familiar unfamiliar, the everyday, magical, it's Chris Arthur. One of our greatest living essayists.... -Philip Lopate, author of Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body, and A Year and A Day: An Experiment in Essays

Belfast-born Chris Arthur is not only the most accomplished Irish essayist working at present, he also stands among the finest practitioners of the form in the Anglophone world. -Eoghan Smith, author of The Failing Heart and A Provincial Death

GREEN FOR LUCK is a unique collection of original poems by American midwestern poet Margaret Yapp, who lives and writes in Iowa.

Green for Luck is a book that wanders green city blocks, denying happenstance and making lists. Margaret Yapp attends to mundanity as a string that holds us close to the earth, building quotidian divinities, landing jokes just to make sure we're listening. In this book, words push the left and upper margins, forcing the body of the page to act as negative space, a place where the light gets in. Green for Luck speaks through Scrabble, through text messages, through gossip and snippets of conversation and well-worn idioms that crack open in Yapp's steady hands. The cacophony of voices is a blurred, gentle cyclone. Green for Luck listens as much as it speaks; Green for Luck listens so it can speak. And behind each word, its corresponding object is transfigured by being named. Behind each line, a glacial erratic resting on unfamiliar stone. Behind each poem, boundless grasslands where the speaker recognizes itself as a gap in the world, similarly vast but horizontal against the cyclical.

(Published in 2024 by EastOver Press, Rochester, Massassachusetts.)

Second in a series, this anthology of short stories set in in rural and semi-rural places is written by contemporary rural American writers of color. Edited by Erika T. Wurth, the collection features work by Ron Austin, Venita Blackburn, Erin Brown, Caridad Cole, Deidra Suwanee Deas, Jessica Doe, Mark Ennis, Jane Hammons, Soon Jones, Kasimma, Arah Ko, Joe Milan Jr., Jacob Moniz, Rachel Nussbaum, sheena daree romero, and Sean Sam. Themes include birth, death, immigration, love, and loneliness as experienced by of those living in the underpopulated parts of the United States.

Skies of Blur, the third and latest collection by critically acclaimed poet Elijah Burrell, navigates the depths of human connection and disconnection, love and loss, and the spaces between. Burrell breathes life into every line, crafting a world both familiar and entirely new.

While guiding us quietly between the realms of the natural and supernatural, these poems remind us of the chaos and uncertainty of modern life. Through metaphors of spinning plates and broken umbrellas, Burrell captures the delicate balance we all strive to maintain and the challenges we face in a seemingly incurable world. This blurring world demands we pay attention and stay vigilant at all costs. Burrell's poems deal with the struggle between our past and present selves. As only miracles and poems can, Skies of Blur brings the dead back to life and awakens memories of days long gone.

Throughout the collection, Burrell introduces us to a cast of unforgettable characters, like Mr. Night, the bull who inexplicably materializes, speaks, and serves as both adversary and ally. As the collection progresses, Mr. Night engages in a series of surreal encounters, challenging the reader to question the nature of identity and the boundaries between our inner and outer worlds. In other poems, Burrell showcases an uncommon ability to infuse absurd narratives with tragedy and joy, as when a man longing for connection steals a horn shark from a local aquarium.

This collection proclaims that each of us strays into unknowable places. Wildflowers will fall from our gaping wounds. We may never know our multitudinous selves, or we might meet them to destroy them. Prepare to be moved and challenged as you look up into the deep, dark Skies of Blur.

Georgann Eubanks is known for her guidebooks that invite readers to explore the literary, cultural, culinary, and ecological heritage of the South. With her first volume of poetry, Rural Astronomy, Eubanks invites new explorations. These poems shift between childhood memories and her contemporary observations of the ongoing clash between Nature and human entitlement. With incisive vision and an occasional poke at the patriarchy, this memoir-in-poems hints at the magnitude of future degradations-by climate and human character-while inviting us to remember the guiding stars of a simpler past. For Eubanks, there are no brighter stars than her grandparents, Bomer and Stella, whose stories and lives frame these poems as well as Eubanks' startlingly unique perspective.

Rural Astronomy celebrates an adventurous life through poetry that is both personal and universal, reflective and prescient.

This collection of essays, poems, and short fiction is the third annual volume of THE CUTLEAF READER, a print anthology of work previously published in the online journal Cutleaf (www.CUTLEAFJOURNAL.com). Cutleaf is a project of EastOver Press, a small publishing company that specializes in print collections of poetry and prose. In this anthology, readers will find flash fiction and longer stories, hybrid essays and more traditional nonfiction formats, and poetry of many different styles and approaches --- a snapshot of the best work in contemporary writing in English. Cutleaf engages writers from around the world, and this anthology comprises work from writers in North America, Africa, Europe, and Asia, presenting a variety of approaches to subject matter, form, and style.