As you read this, hundreds of bands are on tour, criss-crossing the country. Some are traveling in tour buses, playing huge venues to thousands of people. Others are in beat-up Ford Econoline vans, playing in tiny clubs to no one. They all have stories about their tours. Some are funny, some are nightmares. This is a compilation of those stories.

Adverts, ALL, The Almighty, aMiniature, Mark Arnold, Asexuals, Babes In Toyland, Bad Religion, The Bellrays, The Besnard Lakes, Big DRILL Car, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, The Bronx, Cadillac Tramps, Chune, Circle Jerks, Henry Cluney, Coffin Break, Crass, The Cult, The Damned, Danzig, Dead Boys, Dead Kennedys, Descendents, D.O.A., Doughboys, Dwarves, Faces, FEAR, fIREHOSE, fluf, Generation X, The Get Up Kids, The Heathens, Hirax, Hot Snakes, Inch, The Jesus Lizard, Kill Sybil, Luscious Jackson, Kevin Lyman, Ian MacKaye, MAD PARADE, Mary's Danish, Minutemen, M.I.A., Naked Raygun, Nashville Pussy, New Model Army, No For An Answer, Overwhelming Colorfast, Petrol Girls, POPDeFECT, Ramones, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rocket from the Crypt, Scratch Acid, Screamin' Sirens, Sharp Shock, Skin Yard, Dave Smalley, S.O.D., The Specials, Superchunk, Supersuckers, Teen Idles, T.S.O.L., Vandals, Warped Tour, Wax, Wendy O Williams, and X.

Against Common Sense is a collection of poems. Against Common Sense is a collection of poems that thinks that complexity is a form of accuracy-which is to say, a form of honesty-and that simplicity itself is not a virtue; in fact, simplicity has been used many times as a form of violence. The poems in Against Common Sense do not think that there is a type of knowledge that a person can obtain that detracts from said person's overall ability to think: this is the theory that is invoked when common sense is employed; that it is possible somehow that learning can separate us from ourselves; that learning is a dangerous activity that will leave us with less information than we began with. Against Common Sense is a collection of poems, it is hoped, that thinks. Against Common Sense is a collection of poems.

For nearly twenty years, the events behind the Strasbourg hotel's closure have remained a mystery known only by the few who frequent the back alleys of Hollywood Boulevard. There are whispers there, of girls in glass boxes, legendary art installations wiped from the record, after one of the performers was found dead in her box. The Box Girls are a myth or a memory that only few can recall, until now. From the detritus, a transcript emerges and, with it, an intimate narrative, the definitive record of what really happened that summer to the Box Girls of the Strasbourg hotel. Over one hundred and twenty-eight interviews, and hundreds of hours of recordings, a frenzied tapestry of voices reveals answers to the mystery few knew existed, and explores visibility, identity, and the boundaries of perception in a world teetering on the brink of collapse.

Ensconced in the black hole between childhood and adulthood, a glorious degenerate-grade freedom endures. A rebellion from respectability. An anathema to normalcy. It is the type of defiance that's hopeful--hurt by the world but looking to reconcile it.

Enter Gogo Germaine and her girl gang of delinquents.

As manic teens in the '90s punk scene, they engage in a vivid spectrum of misbehavior--from truancy to tattoos to trespassing. Here, in the underbelly of adolescence, music is God and the rest is a rush of nihilism. Gogo and her friends stumble through sound and fury into questionable firsts at varying degrees of sobriety.

Many of us blunder through that black hole. It is a point of universal convergence, manifested by divergent experiences. Gogo's rebellion may look different from yours, but the soaring highs and visceral lows will be familiar.

Conventional wisdom holds that art and science are mutually exclusive.

Leah Noble Davidson disagrees. Consider the laboratory of the human endeavor: The absolute magnitude of love. The combustion of passion. The gravity of pain.

Davidson guides us through the physics of us and introduces a breakthrough theory: Poetry in motion.

Poetic Scientifica is at once urgent and gorgeous and brutal. Davidson catalyzes cognitive and behavioral psychology, visual culture, and linguistics to remind us that science, like life, is a sequence of experiences that result in deeper understanding of our own stories.

Call it a book; Davidson wrote an experiment.

Turn your passions

into walls
and live inside them
until they grow old
and collapse
and crush
you.

It's
the only way
to live

and it's
the only way
to die.

This collection picks up where someday i'm going to marry Katy Perry left off. Off-center, quirky and endearingly puerile, this heteroclite collection of prose is full of twisted metaphors and turned similes, and author Calvero plods indefatigably across the pages as a most unlikely hero.

Calvero is Everyman's champion. He struggles with Everyman's problems, he suffers Everyman's insecurities, he endures Everyman's heartache. He holds nothing back. No posturing, no pretense, just honest individuality. His absence of guile and complete dismissal of social graces are a welcome deviation from convention.

The author's playful humor is explicit; the implicit depth will take you by surprise. You come away from his work a little wiser, a little happier, a little more empathetic, but you're not exactly sure why.

i want love so great it makes Nicholas Sparks cream in his pants is a wonderfully bizarre glimpse into the remarkably unremarkable. The work is rich, raw and vastly rewarding.

Often Go Awry is a collection of poems upturned. The book works its way from the center outward, while the poems themselves examine the meaning of unraveling. The styles vary greatly, but all of the pieces in this collection insist upon attacking determinism in one form or another.

This is the fourth book of poetry from author Brian S. Ellis, but it is his first collection of poems written in his present voice. While he continues with the same obsessions that have pervaded all of his work, this is more fully in the now than he has ever been.

I'll meet you there. / Where everything is, / we will be.

Here comes the new joy.

Joy has evolved, and John W Barrios has emerged as the champion of its adaptation. Barrios' critically imagined first collection of poetry reveals the mutation and renders the reader naturally selected.

The old joy is reaction ... a product of immediacy, immediately lost. The new joy is combustion ... catalyzed by pain, threat, sexuality, loss, hunger, danger, and laughter, it is the sum and the summit of all other emotions and experiences. The old joy isolates; the new joy integrates.

With gripping personal narrative in extraordinary context, Barrios' work exemplifies the magnitude and stamina of this emotional revolution. The new joy ascends the aggregate detritus sloughed off by the old joy and stakes its claim, a mighty pen driven in victoriously at the apex. Barrios' reimagined and redefined joy in these poems is relevant for a new time. For a new us.

Here it comes.

Based on a true story and in a unique voice that is both touching and funny, A.M. O'Malley gives us a poignant and beautiful book of prose poems that captures the experience of growing up on back roads, in smoky bars, and kitchens full of women. She writes about striking out into the world alone and finding her way and her truth. O'Malley breaks from traditional forms to tell her story with a hybrid of narrative and lyricism and explores the possibilities that happen when form is broken.

Predators Welcome is a book of poems written by one sibling in search of another. Eager to recover some shared mythology with the rest of the world, the speaker of these poems calls for a witness-any witness-to confirm that the frightening cosmologies of childhood were more than just isolated daydreams. Challenging, broadening, and redefining our understanding of predatory animals-and, yes, that means us-this book lays bare both personal and societal cycles of violence and neglect, suggesting their intergenerational reenactment is one way we paradoxically prove ourselves to be a single human family, raised by the same wolves, with ancestors whose stories must not only be told, but lived and relived. Trapped in such a paradoxical circumstance, the human-as-predator is most dangerous, and yet, most connected to and emboldened by history. In this way, these poems urge us to find commonality not merely in past atrocities, but in a present and future rebellion from historical precedent itself.

The poems in Ran Walker's collection use an African-American poetic form called the Kwansaba, which was created in 1995 by Dr. Eugene Redmond. The poems follow a seven-line, seven-words per line pattern with no word more than seven letters (save proper nouns and foreign terms). All language within the form speaks to aspects of African-American history and culture.

With these forty-nine poems, each chapter of forty-nine lines, Walker offers profound commentary on a wide variety of topics ranging from interrogations of celebrity culture to issues that speak directly to the Black Lives Matter movement. Most of My Heroes Don't Appear on No Stamps offers readers a chance to engage with these subjects in a fresh new way while embracing a vibrant poetic form not often explored.

Thirst for Beginners: Poems, Prose, and Quizzes is written somewhere near the states of melancholy, loneliness, introspection, acceptance, and laughter. Thomas Lucky Richards wrote these poems hoping to find real avenues for living without destroying the trails of his quixotic quests. His stories and prose wander about the landscape of Italo Calvino, and his quizzes twist the dial filling the room with nitrous oxide causing us to laugh at the state we've now found ourselves in.

History is history.

The uncompromising, oppressive, outdated reins of patriarchy plaguing the entire world have never been more obvious--and perhaps never more in need of dismantling. Inspired, seemingly tireless people across the globe have always banded together in solidarity and action hell-bent on change. Sometimes this change is rooted in policy reform, sometimes revolution--and often artistic expression.

Within this gorgeous volume of erasure artworks exist differing cultural experiences connected by the desire for paradigm shift on a global political scale. Familiar statements and treatises are transformed into poetic versions of what reality looks like or could become for many of us stuck in a vicious machine. This international artistic appeal rips apart layers of deception, inequity, and fraud perpetuated by systems of power. Erasing what no longer serves us can reveal another avenue from which to begin.

When Shawn Levy had the notion to write a poem each day for a year, inspired by the obituary pages of The New York Times, he had no way of knowing that the year in question, 2016, would claim so many of the world's most iconic figures. His project became, in effect, a vehicle for surveying the breadth of the twentieth century: Titans from all fields of endeavor, lives that contained one quirky but insoluble achievement, and people who had special significance in his own life. From Nancy Reagan to Muhammad Ali, David Bowie to Arnold Palmer, Prince to Janet Reno, Antonin Scalia to Mary Tyler Moore, and including a Black Miss America, an obsessive weather reporter, the nurse famously kissed by a sailor on VJ Day, the man who put the @ in your email address, and the last man to walk on the moon, the lives recollected in these one hundred poems provoke compassion, sorrow, outrage, surprise, nostalgia, even laughter.

This book is a wailing song, with side eye when and where you need it. These poems are a resuscitation of art and heart. --Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Verge

... a staggering symphony of lives, with parallels to Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip and Jim Carroll's 'People Who Died, ' ... --Ed Skoog, author of Run the Red Lights

I'm grateful to Shawn Levy for reminding me what a generous, evocative exchange the newspaper obituary can be. --Elena Passarello, author of Animals Strike Curious Poses

With his gimlet eye and big heart, Levy takes us on a backstage tour of our own popular culture. --Dobby Gibson, author of Little Glass Planet

... moving and insightful ... a striking montage ... --Juan Delgado, author of Vital Signs

Is it over? Are we safe yet? What the hell happened? Or, rather, more aptly: What didn't happen?

In 2020, we were deceived and misled. Each day offered a new challenge, revealed some new horror, and there was no relief in being told it was simply the nature of the world, the nature of our society. 2020 was the kind of thing that happens to people in textbooks, except it was happening in real time to all of us. We probably need group therapy to make sense of it all, to address our individual and collective wounds. This book is in pursuit of doing just that: Offer some kind of catharsis to the whole ordeal.

2020 is shaping up to be one of the most garbage years in American history. What statement do you want to make about it? This was the prompt advanced to writers of the essays in this collection, capturing experiences raw and personal, and attempting to make sense of the extraordinary situation we found ourselves in. Very few walked away unscathed.

Such a confluence of issues: COVID, Trump, racism, poverty, health under siege, sexism, police brutality, Black Lives Matter, protests, federal troops occupying American cities and beating on citizens, masks and social distancing, businesses shuttered, entire industries closed, schools moved online, major sports halted, and more.

As the effects of 2020 continue rippling, the future already begs to know, What the hell happened that year? We hope this collection will clarify, or perhaps at least de-fog a bit. Essays as testimony provide an intimate lens, a snapshot in time. And perhaps a way to make sense of some of the chaos, so we can move forward with fresh eyes.

Contributors: Rashaun J. Allen, Jason Arment, Rabb Asad, Joe Austin, DeMisty D. Bellinger, John S. Blake, Shannon Brazil, Tracy Burkholder, Suzanne Burns, Brendan Canty, Adrian Ernesto Cepeda, Stacey Y. Clark, Eve Connell, Zaji Cox, Alex Dang, Leah Noble Davidson, Sean Davis, Chris Dupuy, James Jay Edwards, Brian S. Ellis, Jenny Forrester, Kenning JP García, Lauren Gilmore, Dian Greenwood, Joseph Edwin Haeger, Ally Henny, Jackie Shannon Hollis, Gabino Iglesias, Ashley James, Tim Mays, Wryly T. McCutchen, Travis Laurence Naught, Dang Nguyen, Isobel O'Hare, Florencia Orlandoni, Linda Rand, Skyler Reed, Christine Maul Rice, Kate Ristau, Leyna Rynearson, Liz Scott, Kimberly Sheridan, Corie Skolnick, Amoja Sumler, Ben Tanzer, Nancy Townsley, Chris Valle, Ran Walker, Eric Witchey, Ellen Yaffa, Jason Zenobia

It was a time of hippies, heroin, and All in the Family. It was a time, in the small town of New Canaan--a fictional town in mid-Michigan--when developers gobbled up farmland and spit out subdivisions.

Against this backdrop, Swarm Theory's interlocking narratives reveal the troubled lives of Astrid (a young woman trying to hold her family together), Caroline (Astrid's best friend who has lost her mother to heroin), Will (a soldier struggling to make sense of life after being discharged from the Marines), and Father Maurice Silver (a priest caring for a young man dying of AIDS).

Nothing in New Canaan is quite what it seems.

Swarm Theory is a book that reveals life's amazing contradictions--the wonderful and the profane, devotion and infidelity, understanding and revenge--through stories told from different perspectives. These stories investigate what happens when people come together--whether to do admirable or horrific things. Here, intimates and strangers alike can't help but be intertwined; their unpredictable journeys providing a backdrop for characters complex, honorable, and not.

Swarm Theory reveals our often misguided, dark, and life-sustaining dependency on each other.

The Dead Animal Handbook is a field guide to contemporary American poetry. Collecting and compiling emerging and established writers from a range of backgrounds, this Handbook charts one of poetry's most used tropes in order to bring the dead animal back to life. We're eager and we're earnest.

Poets include: Martín Espada, Airea D. Matthews, Jericho Brown, Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, Traci Brimhall, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Franny Choi, CAConrad, Dean Young, Aziza Barnes, Rachel McKibbens, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, D.A. Powell, and many more talents.

Warning: if you dare carry on, beware carrion.

They might miss you, but, discomfort isn't always an invitation to cultivate

Sex. Bicycles. Love. A city that used to sleep and now never will again. A body's intimate war fraught with splinters of gender.

Invoking Lenore Kandel and Rainer Maria Rilke, Wryly T. McCutchen takes mundane rhythms and spins the world through the spokes of a bicycle, a card of second adolescence clipped to the fender and creating a joyful noise. At once tender and raucous, My Ugly delves deep into the heart of poetic in medias res surrounding the reader with a life lesson in power and granting guidance to weather storms we come to love.

us mouth attempts to speak to the fracturing of intimate relationships, the importance of voice, song, and empathy as an instrument of connection and healing. The poems are filled with wordplay and rhythm to create an intensity of presence of various speakers who cry out in the pain and joy of being alive.

Poets in the West love space (s), white space, caligrams, margins to the right--us mouth has them all, and yet its emotional dynamics hews close to the essence of the blues. In this new collection, California's Nikia Chaney opens wide a mouth that bravely, tactlessly, or hungrily decries the fecklessness of men; the anguish of women; their desire for love; and the family torn apart by lies, laws, divorce, violence. us mouth is about that we of Black people mostly, but that we includes all who desire sex and love...with its whipped slant and other memorable phrases. The blues like any form changes with the time and these times call for a poet like Nikia Chaney who matches emotional risk and truth telling with inventiveness and she does so vividly in us mouth. --Patricia Spears Jones, author of A Lucent Fire, Painkiller, Femme du Monde, and The Weather That Kills

The narrative seam that snakes through a list; the way a syllable serves as stitch to line; the hollow of silence a caesura opens in a sentence's certainties to give language a ledge over which to lean and look: 'dimensional blades / in / quiet, ' Nikia's poems split and suture. 'Where she is testing a moment' we find the breaks in which we conduct our blooming, in the noise and whip she pulls us toward shade, and source, and spill. --Lyrae Van Clief- Stefanon, author of Open Interval and Black Swan

Nikia Chaney in her first full-length book us mouth, writes, 'something/ heretical in the lay/ of letter, ' and at first glance readers will want to tend to her truth. However, as you push through her lush lyrics and explosive language, you will 'learn the pattern/of language the cadence, the swift speech.' How can one help but not swoon and stumble in love on Chaney's sheer sonic power, her lines reminiscent of Harryette Mullen? Whether Chaney carries the experimentalist torch or not, what is clear is the examination each poem cleaves into us as we rejoice, lament, observe, wail, live. Yes, us mouth makes you trust the life you live, and 'not your tendency to disappear and dream.' Such spectacular work! --F. Douglas Brown, author of Zero to Three, winner of 2013 Cave Canem Poetry Prize