Böcker utgivna av Belle Point Press

Of Fathers & Gods is a debut collection of short fiction that delves into the relationships between fathers and their children: the good, the bad, and the awful. In these emotionally charged stories, a young expectant father, on the edge of homelessness, loses his religion and duels with a street preacher; fifty-year-old twins, survivors of foster care, war, and prison, fight over the decision to finally meet the father who abandoned them as infants, and hold him to account; and a Pulitzer-winning, ageist professor seeks to quash the writing dreams of an elderly student while coming to terms with how much love he's lost as a result of his career. These nine stories open a window into the most primal elements of the human condition-childhood and parenting-and show us how, try as we might, we can never fully escape the bonds of blood.

True Grit meets Twin Peaks in this genre-bending debut novel by Chase Dearinger. This New Dark explores the haunted, broken hills of eastern Oklahoma, where over the course of just two cold days in November, the residents of Seven Suns will each face their own kind of weird. There's Wyatt, a dope-growing Muscogee whose obsession with a black cougar that shouldn't exist begins to uproot his life. The teenager who lives with him-Randy-is outraged at the world, confused about his sexuality, and haunted by the bones of his mother. And there's Esther-a dutiful, God-fearing court bailiff who finds herself thrust into the position of county sheriff, forced to find the missing girl whose disappearance sets everything in motion. Inexorably bringing them all together is a nameless cowboy junky who may or may not be some ancient shape-shifting evil. All of them must overcome this new dark while dealing with the violent undercurrents of family, religion, addiction, and death.

From the author of The World and the Zoo comes a new coming-of-age story as powerful as the Southern Plains landscape that surrounds it. With echoes of The Moviegoer, In the Morning, the City Is the Prairie follows Matt Bennet, a soulful yet aimless twenty-something who has little more to offer than a Costco discount while living with his parents in Oklahoma City.Confronted by a family health crisis, Matt becomes more attuned to the needs of those he loves-and how he can best fit himself into the world-largely inspired by the more passionate and ambitious young women in his life: his girlfriend, a public school teacher participating in the Oklahoma teachers' strike of 2018, and his younger sister, a teenage idealist determined to make a difference. Throughout the novel, Rob Roensch raises the question of what we can see if we learn how to look.

This hybrid collection of short prose pieces and Elliott Smith-inspired illustrations carries readers along a thin thread of memory-whether their own or the author's past, it becomes difficult to say. Shome Dasgupta's latest book recalls days at the movies, family heartache, and other personal experiences through soundtracks, daydreams, and attempts to remember what lingers from the spectrums of time. Whether pondering the vulnerability of a turtle or reflecting on his own fragilities, Dasgupta's dreamy prose lets us into a series of fragments that depict a world broken yet beautiful. Histories of Memories is a testament to the burdens as well as the delights of our own narratives-how they keep us tied to each other whether we realize it or not.

From a double shotgun house in New Orleans comes a true story larger than life. Teresa Tumminello Brader, niece of the convicted art forger William Toye, retells her family's experience as she discovers her uncle's misdeeds after decades of secrecy. Personal reflections and newspaper records alternate with a fictionalized reimagining of Toye's complicated life. On both sides of the story, what emerges is an attempt to honor Louisiana artist Clementine Hunter's legacy without flinching from the painful realities that come from reckoning with family bonds. Empathetic and honest, Letting in Air and Light will inspire you to look more closely at your own history and wonder what else you might have missed.

The unmistakable voice of Amy Cipolla Barnes returns in this new hybrid prose collection. To enter Child Craft is to enter a world of memories, both invented and remembered. The speakers of Barnes' stories inhabit a space at times surreal but always vivid, evoking emotional responses that take readers to a place they could not have anticipated from the opening lines. As the title implies, Child Craft explores family relationships-typically from the perspectives of mother and daughter-and the ways that we continually shape them into something that can either help or harm us. These intimate vignettes comment on the many-layered realities of womanhood in modern life in a variety of settings. Whether passing through the wreckage of the Oklahoma City bombing or pretending that a pickle jar could save a missing woman, these stories open imaginative landscapes that will leave you feeling both haunted and a little less alone.

These poems manifest the Louisiana Gulf Coast and all its capacity for an environment experienced in full color. Crafting in equal turns a coming-of-age narrative and an ecological meditation, Madeline Trosclair-Rotolo invites readers to inhabit a space where they must consider the frightening reality of hurricanes, climate change, and a home ever threatened by the prospect of loss-while nonetheless managing always to find ways to keep communion. Wholly broken and often holy, Bottomlands is a debut collection by a poet as attuned to her own voice as to the beauties and dangers of the world around her.

The poems in Anna Laura Reeve's debut collection, Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility, are wide-ranging in subject-postpartum depression, ecopoetics, creative manifestoes-yet all are rooted in the Southern Appalachia sprawl that she has made her home. Seeing motherhood as a primal rite of passage that need not be a single destination, the speaker of these poems taps into universal questions of identity and myth-making, allowing metaphors to work their magic as the rituals of caring for our land, our loved ones, and our bodies combine in startling ways. She transcends expectations by discovering a third way for the mother-artist that embraces her parenthood and her art as equally vital to a life well lived. As a result, Reeve's poems evoke a raw sensibility unafraid of the wildness inherent in the struggles of home, family, and an environment just as vulnerable-and resilient-to change as she discovers herself to be.

This anthology features forty talented writers from Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, and other surrounding states that represent a unique part of American culture. While this region is often misunderstood as one type of place, the Mid-South belongs to a little bit of everywhere: part Southwest, part Midwest, part South-always wild. Our area of the country is both a space of its own and part of a larger, complicated Southern world: the "Mid/South." In this collection, poetry, short stories, and essays offer glimpses into this in-between place as they explore the complexities of our relationships to each other as well as to the natural world. Whether through vivid landscapes, family dramas, or bittersweet love stories, each piece brings more insight into what it means to be from around here.With contributions by:Kathy M. Bates Jim Beaugez Jack B. BedellCassie E. BrownKaty Carl Lesley ClintonEli CranorShome Dasgupta Geffrey DavisHeather Dobbins Will Justice Drake Renee Emerson Elisheva FoxMelissa M. Frye Christian Anton GerardKristen Grace Taylor Greene Carolyn Guinzio Bryan Hurt Dewayne Keirn Emily Key Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster Timothy Kleiser Laurie Marshall Bryan Moats Scott Morris Benjamin MyersTodd Osborne Suzanne Underwood Rhodes Whitney Rio-Ross C.¿T. Salazar Gerry Sloan Tyler Justin SmothersCarrie Lee South Casey SpinksHolly A. Stovall Bud Sturguess Gloria Williams Tran Madeline TrosclairSeth Wieck

Originally published in 2000, this new edition of Wendy Taylor Carlisle's debut collection explores the weight of memory, the risks of love, and the life that remains possible through loss. While paying homage to the American poet John Berryman, Carlisle's voice remains distinct in its approach and vision, while staying open to the world despite its pains and promises of failure. Reading Berryman to the Dog can now reach a new audience coming to terms with similar tragic themes while seeking a hopeful path forward.