A COAL HILL REVIEW special edition. Carson's words strike the most personal cords of Irish and Appalachian life by exploring what it means to be both. These poems are vivid and moving.
"This anthology amplifies and centers LGBTQIA+ voices and perspectives in a collection of contemporary nature poetry. Showcasing over two hundred queer writers from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, Queer Nature offers a new context for and expands upon the canon of nature poetry while also offering new lenses through which to view queerness and the natural world."--Publisher description.
"Poems considering self, masculinity, and culture through the spectacle of professional wrestling. In this stunning debut, John Belk looks at the world of professional wrestling to excavate the real within the artificial and explore the projections we create, run from, and delight in. In The Gardens of Our Childhoods, the distance between spectacle and reality blurs. Belk uses the spectacle of wrestling to stare deeply into American culture and masculinity, parsing the intersecting threads of patriarchy and gender, and unpacking identity formation and performance. As Belk pries into toxic masculinities, he leaves space also for tenderness, queerness, and resistance to normative structures, opening the potential for love and admiration. Populated by classic and contemporary wrestlers like Andrâe the Giant, Hulk Hogan, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, Ricky Steamboat, Bruno Sammartino, Marcus "Buff" Bagwell, and more, this book is ultimately about the constant deconstruction and reconstruction of our identities that smudge fiction and reality. Like wrestlers in their operatic and winding storylines, we learn how to project and inhabit identities while growing into and fighting against the scripts we write for ourselves and those that are imposed on us. The Gardens of Our Childhoods is the winner of Autumn House Press's Rising Writer Prize in Poetry."--
Poems that imagine a world beyond the prevailing public speculation on Black death. Shayla Lawz's debut collection, speculation, n., brings together poetry, sound, and performance to challenge our spectatorship and the reproduction of the Black body. It revolves around a central question: what does it mean?in the digital age, amidst an inundation of media?to be a witness? Calling attention to the images we see in the news and beyond, these poems explore what it means to be alive and Black when the world regularly speculates on your death. The speaker, a queer Black woman, considers how often her body is coupled with images of death and violence, resulting in difficultly moving toward life. Lawz becomes the speculator by imagining what might exist beyond these harmful structures, seeking ways to reclaim the Black psyche through music, typography, and other pronunciations of the body, where expressions of sexuality and the freedom to actively reimagine is made possible. speculation, n. contends with the real?a refracted past and present?through grief, love, and loss, and it speculates on what could be real if we open ourselves to expanded possibilities. speculation, n. won the 2020 Autumn House Poetry Prize, selected by Ilya Kaminsky.
Cho A.'s poetry wonders at small everyday delights. Sean Cho A.'s debut poetry chapbook directs a keen eye on everyday occurrences and how these small events shape us as individuals. This collection is filled with longing for love, understanding, and simplicity. But these poems also express great pleasure in continued desire. With exuberant energy that flows through the collection, the speaker announces: "I won't apologize for the smallness of my delights." Filled with questions and wonder, these poems revel in the unknowing and liminal spaces, and we as readers are invited to join in this revelry. Cho A.'s poetry reminds and allows us to pause, to wonder, and enjoy our many pleasures. American Home was selected by Danusha Laméris for the 2020 Autumn House Chapbook Prize.
Poems that explore the wilderness in order to find rest and divine providence.
A collection of personal essays examining relationships, whiteness, and masculinity.  Nicholas Wardâ¿s debut essay collection, All Who Belong May Enter, centers on self-exploration and cultural critique. These deeply personal essays examine whiteness, masculinity, and a Midwest upbringing through tales of sporting events, parties, posh (and not-so-posh) restaurant jobs, and the many relationships built and lost along the way. With a storytellerâ¿s spirit, Ward recounts and evaluates the privilege of his upbringing with acumen and vulnerability. Wardâ¿s profound affection for his friends, family, lovers, pets, and particularly for his chosen home, Chicago, shines through. This collection offers readers hope for healing that comes through greater understanding and inquiry into oneâ¿s self, relationships, and culture. Through these essays, Ward acknowledges his position within whiteness and masculinity, and he continuously holds himself and the society around him accountable.  All Who Belong May Enter was selected by Jaquira DÃaz as the winner of the 2020 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize. Â
Poems following a Black queer woman as she seeks refuge from an unsafe world.
The poems in Lucky Wreck trace the excitement of plans and the necessary swerving detours we must take when those plans fail. Looking to shipwrecks on the television, road trips ending in traffic accidents, and homes that become sites of infestation, Ada Limón finds threads of hope amid an array of small tragedies and significant setbacks. Open, honest, and grounded, the poems in this collection seek answers to familiar questions and teach us ways to cope with the pain of many losses with earnestness and humor. Through the wrecks, these poems continue to offer assurance. This darkness is not the scary one, it's the one before the sun comes up, the one you can still breathe in. Celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of Limón's award-winning debut, this edition includes a new introduction by the poet that reflects on the book and on how her writing practice has developed over time.
Michael Walsh's poetry collection Creep Love explores a family contending with a complex and ongoing crisis, the aftermath of which creates a shockwave that reverberates through these poems. Stories, half-truths, and lies combine into disturbing fable: A young pregnant woman flees her abusive boyfriend only to discover with terror that he is focused on her younger sister. When her younger sister later gives birth to her abusive ex's other sons, the unsettling presence of the child's father becomes unavoidable, and the family soon forces the first son to become a family secret. We come to find out that the father carries a secret of his own. As tensions rise, attacks within the family escalate and finally culminate in an attempted murder. In Creep Love, Walsh captures the terror of this event, and these poems take us through the surprising outcomes. Near death, rather than floating into light due to hypoxia--a temporary release from the grip of compounding trauma--the speaker sinks into all-encompassing darkness. The anxiety of this moment returns him to his body from the edge of death. These poems give witness to the fallout, demonstrating how love can be charged with something ultimately unknowable.
John Foy's newest collection is a tour de force of formal poetry, offering a blend of wit, cleverness, and deftness. Working in the lineage of poets like Billy Collins, Robert Frost, Frank O'Hara, W. H. Auden, and Elizabeth Bishop, Foy probes everyday experiences to generate compassionate, clever, and deeply knowing verse. While moments in No One Leaves the World Unhurt may appear absurd or even funny on the surface--such as a psychological exploration of the Lord of the Rings character Gollum--beneath this lightheartedness lies a tone that is grim and foreboding. Foy satirizes various elements of contemporary society, reflecting on war, wandering through the Museum of Sex in New York with his wife, and plucking apart idiomatic speech, which he breaks down, saying "It is what it is. / It's not what it might have been." Influenced by pop art and fine art and his New York home, which forms the backdrop of many of these poems, Foy's vibrant collection is simultaneously philosophical, whimsical, serious, and searching.
Through the poems in The Dream Women Called, Lori Wilson attends to the spirits of depression, uncertainty, and fear while wondering at the beauty in what's broken, the remarkable in the ordinary, and the balm that the natural world can offer. Following a single speaker, we're reminded how many lives one woman can live. This book is about crossing into a new version of your own story--after a marriage ends, the parents die, the children are grown, or the faith is discarded--and finding a place to stand, a new way to take up space in the world. Uniting past and present, these poems create multifaceted portraits, particularly of relationships between mothers and daughters. Wilson's poems sift through memory, dreams, art, imagination, nature, and close observation, turning each discovery over in order to see it fully. Beneath the fine-grained imagery of these lyric excavations are the sometimes opposing but fundamental desires to be whole and to be seen, which often means looking within as well as turning toward the world outside. The speaker is listening always for the dream women who call, for whatever may beckon from the present and future, preparing her in some way for a life that's truly hers.
"This collection addresses issues of identity as two people find themselves living in an uncommon landscape. Through hybrid narrative prose poems, Hank and an unnamed narrator try to navigate their relationship and understand their identities amid a landscape that offers them almost nothing. The continent at first seems empty, but something emerges in the vacuum of Antarctica. The narrator's gender skips and changes, and the characters' self-awareness grows into a sort of horror. Dennis James Sweeney's poems consider the fullness of emptiness, revealing attempts to love and grow when surrounded by a white and frigid landscape that seems to go on forever. The space of these poems is something beyond the Antarctic of scientific exploration, the icy outpost that has served for so long as a masculine proving ground for polar explorers. This is the Antarctica of domestic disharmony, of love amid loneliness, where two people encounter themselves in the changeless breadth at the end of the world." --
M. Randal O'Wain's debut short story collection, Hallelujah Station and Other Stories, introduces readers to a wide and diverse cast of characters struggling with and responding to changes and loss. These gritty and poignant stories follow the tragic parts of life, the pieces that may neither start nor end in comfortable resolution and the pieces that make up complex realities. In the first story, a former drug dealer reflects on a life-changing decision he made years ago that ended up hurting the person he most wanted to protect. Later in the collection, we meet a would-be robber who turns out, in strange ways, to be the hero. O'Wain's characters are often deeply flawed or totally lost, but in each instance, these traits serve to reveal the characters as real, compassionate, and, ultimately, human. Sprinkled with humor and heartache, O'Wain's stories bring us into contact with the curious, the tragic, and the authentic.
"The poems in under the aegis of a winged mind are inspired by the life and times of the jazz composer and pianist Earl "Bud" Powell. Powell was a leading figure in the development of jazz, but throughout his life, he also faced struggles with police brutality, harassment, drug and alcohol abuse, and mental illness. In this collection, makalani bandele explores Powell's life through a blend of both formal and free verse persona poems. These poems are multivocal, with the speaker often embodying Powell himself and sometimes a close friend or family member, the spectator of a performance, or a fellow musician. While the book follows the narrative of Powell's life, the poems are experimental in form and presentation. As the book recounts Powell's life, it also explores how Black genius has encountered, struggled against, and developed mechanisms to cope with White supremacy in the United States"--
Steeped in a long history of violence and suffering, Michael X. Wang's debut collection of short stories interrogates personal and political events set against the backdrop of China that are both real and perceived, imagined and speculative. Wang plunges us into the fictional Chinese village of Xinchun and beyond to explore themes of tradition, family, modernity, and immigration in a country grappling with its modern identity. Violence enters the pastoral when Chinese villagers are flung down a well by Japanese soldiers and forced to abandon their crops and families to work in the coal mines, a tugboat driver dredges up something more than garbage polluting the Suzhou River, and rural and urban landscapes are pitted against each other when young villagers are promised high-paying work in the city but face violent persecution instead. In this world where China has regressed back to its imperial days, we meet an emperor who demands total servitude and swift punishment for attempts at revolution, and we follow a father who immigrates to the United States for a better life and loses everything in a tragic accident--aside from his estranged son--with whom he stubbornly refuses to make amends. Further News of Defeat is rich with characters who have known struggle and defeat and who find themselves locked in pivotal moments of Chinese history--such as World War II and the Tiananmen Square massacre--as they face losses of the highest order and still find cause for revival. Further News of Defeat is the winner of the 2019 Autumn House Press Fiction Prize.
"Named after a magical textbook, Cherene Sherrard's Grimoire is a poetry collection centered on the recovery and preservation of ancestral knowledge and on the exploration of black motherhood. Incorporating experiences of food preparation, childrearing, and childbearing, the book begins with a section of poems that re-imagine recipes from one of the earliest cookbooks by an African-American woman: Mrs. Malinda Russell's A Domestic Cookbook. Mrs. Russell's voice as a nineteenth-century chef is joined in conversation with a contemporary amateur cook in poetic recipes that take the form of soft and formal sonnets, introspective and historical lyric, and found poems. In the second section, the poet explores black maternal death and the harrowing circumstances surrounding birth for women of color in the United States. Throughout Grimoire, Sherrard explores the precarity of black mothering over the last two centuries and the creative and ingenious modes of human survival."--Publisher's website.
Emerging from deep in America's hinterland, Michael Credico's flash fiction portrays an absurdist, exaggerated, and bizarre vision of the Midwest known as the heartland. The stories are clipped views into a land filled with slippery confusion and chaos, mythical creatures, zombies, comic violence, shapeshifters, and startling quantities of fish. The characters of Heartland Calamitous are trying to sort out where, who, and what they are and how to fit into their communities and families. Environmental destruction, aging, ailing parents, apathy, and depression weigh on the residents of the heartland, and they can't help but fall under the delusion that if they could just be somewhere or someone or something else, everything would be better. This is a leftover land, dazed and dizzy, where bodies melt into Ziplock bags and making do becomes a lifestyle. The stories of Heartland Calamitous, often only two or three pages long, reveal a dismal state in which longing slips into passive acceptance, speaking to the particular Midwestern feeling of being stuck. They slip from humor to grief to the grotesque, forming a picture of an all-to-close dystopian quagmire. With this collection, Credico spins a new American fable, a modern-day mythology of the absurd and deformed born of a non-place between destinations.
"Through the poems of Voice Message, Katherine Barrett Swett reflects on her personal tragedy and the fragility of human lives and bodies with a tender care. Her debut collection explores the powers of art and poetry to participate in the processing of catastrophic grief, speaking through both the consolation and devastation these creative works can offer. Swett's formal verse provides a lens through which sadness, destruction, and loss appear as aberrant and inevitable. In tragic lyric, the poet searches poetry, art, mythology, and her own memory for the fleeting image of her lost daughter "in music, painting, or a carved stone name." Frequently looking to visual arts for inspiration, she finds that Vermeer's paintings of distant rooms guide and contextualize pain, offering motivation, comfort, and release. Through villanelles, sonnets, quatrains, and free verse, Swett invokes the voices, narratives, and images, both personal and cultural, that haunt her speakers. Suspended in the aftermath of the unexpected and unspeakable death of her college-age daughter, the poet's language is held together in a somber and necessary restraint. But this restraint does not signal the peace of closure. Rather, these poems quietly and steadily remind readers it is still "the open wound / not the scar," that "all we have are words and flesh," and that we are forever vulnerable. The rhythm of and echoes of sonnets and songs lead us to the sticky intersections of tragedy, recovery, and strange forms of beauty"--
In The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer, Eric Tran contends with the aftermath of a close friend's suicide while he simultaneously explores the complexities of being a gay man of color. Grief opens into unraveling circles of inquiry as Tran reflects on the loss of his friend and of their shared identity as gay Asian American men. Through mourning and acute observations, these poems consider how those who experience marginalization, the poet included, may live and fall victim to tragedy. Tran explores how his life, even while in the company of desire and the pursuit of freedom, is never far from danger. Like grief that makes the whole world seem strange, Tran's poetry merges into fantasy lands and rides the lines between imagined worlds and the reality of inescapable loss. At the intersection of queerness, loss, and desire, Tran uses current events, such as the Pulse nightclub tragedy, pop culture references, and comic book allusions to create a unique and textured poetry debut. He employs an unexpected pairing of prayer and fantasy allowing readers to imagine a world of queer joy and explore how grief can feel otherworldly. This collection shows a poet learning how to be afraid, to feel lost, to grieve, and to build a life amid precarious circumstances. The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer was the winner of the Autumn House Rising Writers Prize in 2019.
Praise Song for My Children celebrates twenty-one years of poetry by one of the most significant African poets of this century. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley guides us through the complex and intertwined highs and lows of motherhood and all the roles that it encompasses: parent, woman, wife, sister, friend. Her work is deeply personal, drawing from her own life and surroundings to convey grief, the bleakness of war, humor, deep devotion, and the hope of possibility. These poems lend an international voice to the tales of motherhood, as Wesley speaks both to the African and to the Western experience of motherhood, particularly black motherhood. She pulls from African motifs and proverbs, utilizing the poetics of both the West and Africa to enrich her striking emotional range. Leading us to the depths of mourning and the heights of tender love, she responds to American police brutality, writing "To be a black woman is to be a woman, / ready to mourn," and remembers a dear friend who is at once "mother and wife and friend and pillar / and warrior woman all in one." Wesley writes poetry that moves with her through life, land, and love, seeing with eyes that have witnessed both national and personal tragedy and redemption. Born in Tugbakeh, Liberia and raised in Monrovia, Wesley immigrated to the United States in 1991 to escape the Liberian civil war. In this moving collection, she invites us to join her as she buries loved ones, explores long-distance connections through social media, and sings bittersweet praises of the women around her, of mothers, and of Africa.
Inhabiting the claustrophobia of marriage and domestic life, Erinn Batykefer's poems use the deeply personal as the lens through which she investigates larger cultural ideas. She reckons with feeling simultaneously large and small, finding ways to face herself, and the need to be seen while within the confines of intimate relationships. Honest and explorative, these poems lead us through moments of fluctuation and faltering.
Not Dead Yet studies the uncertainties of loss, turning a gaze toward the often-silenced voices of the infirm, elderly, and adolescent. Rich in humor and honesty, Hadley Moore's debut collection of short stories presents a contemporary set of narratives from a lush cast of characters. We find the protagonists of her stories tenderly revealing their pain after the loss of loved ones and coping with the voids left by the passing of youth, happiness, and fulfilment. Moore invites us into the lives of characters like Morley, who struggles to adapt to new cultural norms, and Salmon, who confronts the loss of her husband while feeling isolated from his family's Judaism. The character-driven prose of Not Dead Yet offers striking detail as it dives into moments of absurdity and tragedy.
Jennifer Renee Blevins's debut memoir, Limited by Body Habitus: An American Fat Story, sheds light on her experiences living with the emotional and psychological struggles of taking up space in a fat-phobic world. Bringing together experiences of personal and national trauma, Blevins adeptly weaves the tale of her father's gastric bypass surgery and subsequent prolonged health crisis with the environmental catastrophe of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Blevins looks to each of these events as a "leak" of American society's pitfalls and shortcomings. These intertwined narratives, both disasters that could have been avoided, reveal points of failure in our systems of healthcare and environmental conservation. Incorporating pieces from her life, such as medical transcripts and quotes from news programs, Blevins composes a mosaic of our modern anxieties. Even through despair, she finds hope in mending broken relationships and shows us how we can flourish as individuals and as a nation despite our struggles. Fierce and haunting, this memoir creates a space of narrative through body, selfhood, family, and country.
The debut poetry collection of Charles Kell, Cage of Lit Glass engages themes of death, incarceration, and family through a range of physical, emotional, and philosophical spaces. In startling images of beauty and violence, Kell creates a haunting world that mirrors our individual and cultural fears.
The stunning, intimate essays in Anxious Attachments take us through the life stages of a woman living in the American Southwest from the 1970s to the present. As she moves from adolescence into adulthood, the narrator grapples with attachments that develop through her family and her ties to the wider world around her while she works as a teacher, writer, and caregiver. Though written from a single woman's perspective, these essays invite us to reflect on the many roles women play and the social factors that touch upon them. Alvarado's stories portray a broad world of experience, reflecting on class, race, and poverty in America with emotional depth and sensitivity.
In Chad Abushanab's debut poetry collection, The Last Visit, he carefully and compassionately explores a family broken by alcoholism and abuse. These poems trace the trajectory of an adolescent living with a violent father struggling with addiction, and recount both the abused child's perspective and his attempts to reckon with his past as he reaches adulthood, chronicling his own struggles with substance abuse and the reverberations of trauma in his life. Amid the violence and hurt, Abushanab's verse renders moments of compassion--even the least sympathetic figures are shown to be grappling with their flaws, and the narrator struggles to find compassion and move beyond the memories and habits that haunt him. These well-crafted poems explore how the past shapes us and how difficult it can be to leave behind.
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