"The new flash fiction collection by Sherrie Flick, coeditor of Flash Fiction America and author of Thank Your Lucky Stars and Whiskey, Etc., a Foreword INDIES bronze prize for best story collection. I Have Not Considered Consequences delves into the complexities of grief, desire, and a peculiar intersection between humans and bears. Flick's evocative and thought-provoking stories follow characters like Bobby, a local home inspector who zips into a bear suit on his daily rounds, and a Gen-X couple, Matty and Trudy, navigating the ups and downs of their adult lives, from a dead fish named Patti Smith to dashed dreams of indie rock stardom. Women wander through small-town streets as they ponder love, allegiance, and Edith Wharton. In Flick's world, bears don't just roam the wild-they play basketball, dance, and even work as midlevel business professionals. Through this memorable cast of characters, Flick reveals intriguing secrets about humanity and yearning with her signature blend of stark honesty and humor"--
A debut collection that draws on the poet's Iranian heritage to process life-altering loss and grief. Darius Atefat-Peckham's debut poetry collection follows a boy's coming of age in the aftermath of a car accident that took the lives of both his mother and brother. Through these poems, Atefat-Peckham constructs a language for grief that is porous and revelatory, spoken assuredly across the imagination, bridging time and space, and creating a reciprocal haunting between the living and the dead. Inspired by the Persian epic The Book of Kings, the Sufi mystic poetry of Rumi, and his mother's poetry, these poems form a path of connection between the author and his Iranian heritage. Book of Kin interrogates what it means to exist between cultures, to be a survivor of tragedy, to practice love and joy toward one's beloveds, and to hope for greater connection through poems that wade through time and memory "like so many fish spreading swimming in the green-blue." Book of Kin won the 2023 Autumn House Poetry Prize.
Tender poetry chronicling a son's relationship with his mother through her battle with cancer and his move from his homeland of Nigeria to the United States. Winner of the 2023 CAAPP Book Prize from the University of Pittsburgh's Center for African American Poetry and Poetics and Autumn House Press, Okwudili Nebeolisa's debut poetry collection serves as an intimate exploration of the relationship between a Nigerian mother and son. Throughout the book, Nebeolisa navigates the guilt of starting a new life in the United States, far away from his home country and from his mother, who is battling cancer. Depicting tender moments between mother and son, Terminal Maladies highlights how the poet and his family shoulder the responsibility of caregiving together and how Nebeolisa works to bridge the physical and emotional distance between them. He reflects on the reasons behind his Nigerian mother's withholding, questioning her need to act bravely alongside his own assumed role as her protector.
A playful debut short story collection imagining women's lives in a world free of social limitations. Amid heightened restrictions about what women can and cannot do with their bodies, Lynn Schmeidler's debut short story collection, Half-Lives, is a humane, absurd, and timely collection of narratives centering on women's bodies and psyches. Playful and experimental, these sixteen stories explore girlhood, sexuality, motherhood, identity, and aging in a world where structures of societal norms, narrative, gender, and sometimes even physics do not apply. The protagonists grapple with the roles they choose and with those that are thrust upon them as they navigate their ever-evolving emotional lives. A woman lists her vagina on Airbnb, Sleeping Beauty is a yoga teacher who lies in state on the dais of her mother's studio, and a museum intern writes a confession of her affair in the form of a hijacked museum audio guide. Half-Lives is the 2023 Rising Writer Prize winner, selected by Matt Bell.
"Amie Whittemore's Nest of Matches is a lavish declaration of the beauty of the natural world, queer identity, and of the imagination set free. Whittemore's third collection explores the complexities of love - romantic, familial, and love for place - and wonders at cycles of life, finding that: "Every habit / even love-strangest / of them all-offers exhaustion / and renewal." Moving seamlessly from meditations on the moon's phases to explorations of dream spaces to searches for meaning through patterns of love and loss, Whittemore's work embodies the mysteries of dichotomies-grief and joy, consciousness and unconsciousness, habit and spontaneity-and how they coexist to create our identities. Throughout the collection, Whittemore reveals how interior nature manifests into exterior habits and how physical landscapes shape the psyche"--
"The second book by NAACP Image Award finalist Cameron Barnett, Murmur considers the question of how we become who we are. The answers Barnett offers in these poems are neither safe nor easy, as he traces a Black man's lineage through time and space in contemporary America, navigating personal experiences, political hypocrisies, pop culture, social history, astronomy, and language. Barnett synthesizes unexpected connections and contradictions, exploring the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and the death of Terence Crutcher in 2016 and searching both the stars of Andromeda and a plantation in South Carolina. A diagnosis from the poet's infancy haunts the poet as he wonders, "like too many Black men," if "a heart is not enough to keep me alive.""--
"Erica Reid's debut collection, Ghost Man on Second, traces a daughter's search for her place in the world after estrangement from her parents. Reid writes, "It's hard to feel at home unless I'm aching." Growing from this sense of isolation, Reid's stories create new homes in nature, in mythology, and in poetic forms-including sestinas, sonnets, and golden shovels-containers that create and hold new realizations and vantage points. Reid stands up to members of her family, asking for healing amid dissolving bonds. These poems move through emotional registers, embodying nostalgia, hurt, and hope. Throughout Ghost Man on Second, the poems portray Reid's active grappling with home and confrontation with the ghosts she finds there"--
St. Germain and Whitford's collaborative anthology expertly portrays the contemporary essay's vast possibilities in the range of lyric to narrative, giving any writer a firm grounding in both the craft and form of contemporary essays.
Dilworth's first anthology is an exemplary compilation of short fiction by American writers of great promise that present an astounding variety of content and voice.
"I am a butterfly at half-mast. Muscles coiled like springs. I have not unwound yet," writes Julie Marie Wade in Otherwise. In this series of intimate, braided essays written throughout her 30s, Wade traces her own unwinding and becoming through probing lyricism. As a daughter, lover, lesbian, and writer, she invites readers on a journey of self-discovery framed by memory, literature, and popular culture. Touching and tender, empathic and insightful, Otherwise revels in its author's self-acceptance at the threshold of mid-life"--
"In Ishmael Mask, Charles Kell reminds us that identity is precarious. Kell's collection is a collage of the journeys and interior lives of various wanderers-from Ishmael, the son of Hagar, to Melville's Ishmael, and from Pierre of The Ambiguities to Pierre Guyotat. Each poem strips back the mask and beckons us to witness humanity in its barest forms. Captain Ahab's leg, Ishmael's arm, and Pierre's severed head serve as invitations to consider hunger and hope. The inspirations behind these poems-the Bible, Heraclitus, Melville, Guyotat, Tomaéz éSalamun-are transformed by Kell, conjuring dreamscapes both dazzling and haunting. Ishmael Mask masterfully allows a glimpse into the human experience of feeling lost-even when right at home, even in our own bodies"--
"Liza Katz Duncan's debut collection is a poignant exploration of the unpredictable shifts that shape our lives. Given considers the notions of home and family and how to survive the changes and losses associated with both. Duncan conjures her home, the New Jersey Shore, in clear and unsentimental lines: "Call of the grackle, / whine of the turkey vulture. Blighted clams, // raw and red in their half-shells." Duncan's poems also explore the devastation brought to this place and its community by Superstorm Sandy and the continued impacts of climate change. Interwoven into this thread is the narrator's miscarriage; the parallels between the desecrated landscape and the personal catastrophe further contribute to the layers of tenderness in this collection, as Duncan urges us to remember and to witness. Despite tragedy and loss, Given is imbued with persistent, dogged hope, showing how survival persists amongst the wreckage, and from this debris is a path towards healing our grief"--
"In this poetry collection, J.D. Debris focuses on characters who live on society's outskirts and demand greater visibility in the face of marginalization. At the book's heart are extended narrative elegies for two musicians. First, the poet follows Mexican singer and songwriter Chalino Sâanchez as he avenges his sister's sexual assault, and then he turns to Gato Barbieri, an influential Argentine tenor saxophonist who is haunted by a shadowy 'man in dusk-colored glasses.' As these musicians question their purpose, we as readers are invited to reflect on our lives, our legacies, and ourselves. The Scorpion's Question Mark is personal and mythological, representational and abstract. These formally inventive and metrically attuned poems compose a range of contrasts-boxers Manny Pacquiao and Marvelous Marvin Hagler appear alongside Tupac and Herman Melville, and apparitions of the Virgin Mary manifest in both human and mirage-like forms on public beachfronts. Looking to the scorpion's tail that forms the shape of a question mark, Debris seeks to occupy uncertain space within the poems, bending forms to find both expansiveness and tension"--
Includes text: The caging of America: why do we lock so many people up? / by Adam Gopnik.
Winner of the 2013 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize, selected by Phillip Lopate.
Diane Goodman's third story collection explores class, community, and culture through the lens of a party.
Hoerr's first novel but fourth book paints a vivid portrait of labor relations in industrial McKeesport.
Robert Isenberg’s travelogue explores an intimate view of the Balkans through the eyes of a young American adventurer.
"Wendy Wimmer's debut short story collection, Entry Level, contains a range of characters who are trying to find, assert, or salvage their identities. These fifteen stories center around the experience of being underemployed--whether by circumstance, class, gender, race, or other prevailing factors--and the toll this takes on an individual. Wimmer pushes the boundaries of reality, creating stories that are funny, fantastic, and at times terrifying. Her characters undergo feats of endurance, heartbreak, and loneliness, all while trying to succeed in a world that so often undervalues them. From a young marine biologist suffering from imposter syndrome and a haunting to a bingo caller facing another brutal snowstorm and a creature that may or not be an angel, Wimmer's characters are all confronting an oppressive universe that seemingly operates against them or is, at best, indifferent to them. These stories reflect on the difficulties of modern-day survival and remind us that piecing together a life demands both hope and resilience."--
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