Böcker utgivna av Black Lawrence Press, Inc.

The Postcards I Never Sent is a beautifully sensual poetic memoir, rich with raw emotion and vulnerability. Patterson's words dance between love, loss, leaving, and returning. It is an honor to witness these poems becoming their own small rebellions on the page. This book transports us between time and place, from nature to the divine, all in a search for new and cosmic beginnings."-Nia McAllister, poet, Senior Public Programs Manager at Museum of the African Diaspora

In this "hybridiary" of historical fiction and personal memoir, we peer inside baby incubators at Coney Island, waiting for childhood to take wing. We overhear the dying dreams of the Imperial Romanov family, and we fret the simple act of watching a child walk to class. Hope is a bright and constant thread: a tornado cuts a tender swath; a lady bides time inside a tiger's claws; teenagers preen on screens during pandemic lockdown. Rescues are fumbled but perpetually launched-and love is a gift the way the sun is a gift: constant and consoling, but also blinding, near-obliterating. Tragic, funny, and surreal, FEATHER ROUSING nests in the spaces between caretaking and grief, secret and spectacle, recollection and imagination, global anguish and private joy.

Dressing the Saints, the second selection for the Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series, vividly explores the lives of Cuban Americans. Set in the lushness of Cuba and Florida, and spanning decades, the stories chronicle lives left behind and new ones forged with struggle, melancholy, and hope. Old loves are reencountered, enemies confronted, family secrets are revealed, and women fight for agency. Memory, what can't be forgotten and what is elusively fading away with the passage of time, is ever-present in the stories of people fiercely confronting fate with grace and compassion.

The raw and tender truths that map out the shard sharp pain and deep dull ache beside the unrelenting resilience in this exquisite poetic plea, wail, and declaration personify the writer and the woman behind the words. They are a gift that Amber Allen-Peirson has dared to share with us all.-Nina Vincent

Analog Poet Blues captures the journey of a poet searching for romance and seeking justice in a world transformed from the analog to the digital age. This dazzling collection ventures beyond the mainstream at intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and religion. These poems deftly reveal how an outsider becomes even stranger in an ever-evolving computer dominated landscape. Come take a trip around this wondrous electronically connected planet.

San Franshitshow is an emotional reckoning with self, love, and the world that unfolds amidst a turbulent gender transition upon arrival into a new city. It chronicles the pain of loss and of coming to terms with yourself in a world that would prefer you did not: how this struggle impacts every area of your life. It expresses the power of self-acceptance with grace and humor. Calamia's debut is a unifying force of a memoir-a poignant, tender collection of poetry that will open your heart-every poem as raw as a tear-stained diary page.¿¿San Franshitshow is a wildly powerful collection of all the little moments that define who we are. This book goes beyond the gender binary and labels, it is human! Cal's artistic and genuine recounts of loss, love and identity are what I wish I could've read as a teenager to help navigate through my own narrative. This book can connect with anyone regardless of their label and will be championed by the LGBT community. Cal says all the words that never leave your head when experiencing adolescent love and defining queerness for the first time. Empathetic, heartfelt, and useful in defining (or redefining) your own past. We need more honest literature like this about the LGBT experience! Whether you are out, unsure, curious, a parent, a youth, or a teacher, this book should be in your hands.- Miles McKenna, actor, activist, author of Out! How To Be Your Authentic SelfThis debut is a song-of coming of age, of coming out, of love, of America's present moment. And yes, of San Francisco and the shitshow our city can be as the poems' speaker navigates what it is to become an adult, become a trans* man, become a teacher, and so much more in this hectic and sometimes heartbreaking city. The book shines, and I too want to shout, "There's glitter on my heart motherfucker" to my lover, to all my loves, to my beloved hometown of glittering sidewalks. There is both humor and incredible vulnerability in these poems, even when they "don't know what to believe in / but it has to be something."- Caroline Mar, author of Special EducationCal Calamia walked into my long-running open mic one Sunday afternoon and taught me some things. Reading the work taught me a few more. I love it when that happens. These poems are self-aware and not self-pitying. Cal has good comic timing but doesn't go for a laugh as much as an A-ha. I listen to and read a lot of poetry and he has been a favorite since that first time. Pronoun antecedent disagreement will probably remain a cherished poetic moment for years to come. Read this book and be reminded that some things are simple and made difficult. Some things remain easy, direct, logical. Some things hurt like hell. There is pain in this collection, sure. There is earnest and unpracticed love. It's a generous group of poems, direct and honest. If you only own a few books of poetry this should be one of them.- Kim Shuck, 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco

In THE VIOLENCE ALMANAC, Miah Jeffra complicates the boundaries between culture and nature, fiction and true-crime, desire and pain. In this powerful fiction debut, Jeffra takes us through the California landscape to map the various ways that violence emerges, terrorizes and shapes our most familiar social structures.An ostracized child yearns to be the hero for a rural community threatened by an escaped penitentiary inmate. An ambitious young writer receives mysterious film clips that thrust her and her boyfriend into a spiral of grief. A sex worker attempts to move on after her best friend is murdered by a john. A seismologist struggles to control his rage over a breakup that summons his internal racism. A biographer seeks to capture the truth of Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five children.Familiar and real, ripped from headlines yet a fiction all its own, THE VIOLENCE ALMANAC vacillates between visceral horror and heartbreaking humanity. With a broad array of voices, these stories paint a portrait of the vastly diverse, complicated, hyper-mediated state of California and the state of ourselves, and blurs the line between safety and danger, love and obsession, victim and agent of violence.

"THIS IS HOW THE BONE SINGS by W. Todd Kaneko carries the pulse of ancient lament through the boneyards of war and unspeakable trauma. This lyric collection of profound beauty and grief reminds us to share our tales of generational trauma and topography-shaping our individual and collective memories-in place of forgotten histories."-Karen An-hwei Lee"What does it mean to be safe in America? In THIS IS HOW THE BONE SINGS, W. Todd Kaneko explores the legacy of concentration camps in the United States and how memory is carried forward. This book knows how to sing-to America, not its expected script, but the anthems of its history; and to a son, lessons on how to bring back the dead with stories, with a fading map, with birds."-Traci Brimhall"The best books about history are those that are also about the future. W. Todd Kaneko's marvelous THIS IS HOW THE BONE SINGS is more than a mere song-it is a singing across time and distance. In lyrics both personal and political, Kaneko composes a score that spans four generations, connecting his grandparents, who were prisoners in the unfathomable Minidoka concentration camps, to his young son and this unfathomable era in which he was born."-Dean Rader"To enter this book is to enter an orchard alive with memory's beasts. To read THIS IS HOW THE BONE SINGS is to witness how a poet at the height of his powers can alchemize history's violence into lyric and myth."-Brynn Saito"These are much-needed poems of unapologetic tenderness and talent-in other words, this collection does the near-impossible: it points us towards love even if what we know of this world doesn't."-Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Winner of the 2020 Big Moose PrizeSpanning the mid to late 20th century and set in the Elkhorn Valley of southwestern Montana, The Stone Sister is told from three points of view - a father's, a nurse's, and a sister's. Together they tell the unforgettable story of a child's birth, disappearance, and finally discovery in a home for "backward children." Robert Carter, a newly married man just back from World War II, struggles with his and his wife's decision to entrust the care of their disabled child to an institution and "move on" with family life. Louise Gustafson, a Midwestern nurse who starts over with a new life in the West, finds herself caring for a child everyone else has abandoned. And Elizabeth Carter, a young journalist, uncovers the family secret of her lost sister as she struggles with starting a family of her own.The Stone Sister explores the power of family secrets and society's evolving definitions of "normal"-as it pertains to family, medicine, and social structure. The novel sheds light on the beginnings of the disability justice movement as it follows one family's journey to reckon with a painful past. Incredibly, the novel is based on Caroline Patterson's personal story. As an adult, she discovered she had an older sister with Down syndrome who had been written out of her family history. In fact, that sister's name was also Caroline Patterson.

Lenny's out of options. He's lost his arm to his abusive older brothers and he's lost his bearings within his family. But he's determined not to lose hope. He attempts an escape on a stolen skiff, hoping to ride the rivers from his family's farm deep in the western North Carolina mountains all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. A torrential storm sinks his boat and delivers him into the hands of a profanity-slinging priest whose illegal drug operation provides food and wages for the local parish. Snared within a power struggle between a crooked cop and the priest, Lenny once again relies on the thinnest shred of hope in his attempt to escape.Live Caught is a survival adventure which dives deep into the mystifying relationship between hope and choice, and examines the peril of remaining in an untenable situation rather than taking that terrifying first step toward change. Lenny takes that step, and then another and another in his journey back toward his abusers and the unlikely prospect of family reconciliation.

With raw, lyrical ferocity, All the Comfort Sin Can Provide delves into the beguiling salve that sin can promise-tracing those hidden places most of us are afraid to acknowledge. In this collection of brutally unsentimental short stories, Grant Faulkner chronicles dreamers, addicts, and lost souls who have trusted too much in wayward love, the perilous balm of substances, or the unchecked hungers of others, but who are determined to find salvation in their odd definitions of transcendence.Taking us from hot Arizona highways to cold Iowa hotel rooms, from the freedoms of the backwoods of New Mexico to the damnations of slick New York City law firms, Faulkner creates a shard-sharp mosaic of desire that careens off the page-honest, cutting, and wise.

"With equal measures of hilarity and heartache, Joe Dornich collects the stories of America's middle-class cast-offs: the under-employed, the under-appreciated, and most devastatingly, the under-loved. Whether it is the plight of a professional snuggler-offering comfort to strangers, but unable to express his feelings to a co-worker-or a son whose summer spent working alongside his father serves only to deepen their disconnection, truths are laid bare through these darkly humorous pieces. Searching not only for connection with others, but for value in their lives, Dornich's characters find themselves employed in positions that demand more than can be offset by a wage. Though young, they are soul-weary. In a world full of expectations built and then toppled, Dornich's collection asks: How does it feel to have your whole life ahead of you?"-Jenny Irish"This bizarre, charming, darkly comic irreality of paid cuddlers and mean-spirited parents, where intimacy is commodified and heroes nonexistent might at first resemble something far off and fanciful. But take another look. This is the desperate, inscrutable world we've come to inhabit. And those outsiders and losers our own bewildered selves. Dornich is a master of the present moment."-Adam PrinceA wild, dazzling collection that reaches whole new altitudes of comic absurdity. You'd be hard-pressed to find a phrase that fails to crackle with hilarious electricity. You never quite know where a Joe Dornich story will take you, but once you've reached your destination, prepare to have your heart cracked in half."-Patrick Michael Finn"The world of THE WAYS WE GET BY is askew, and while that makes for sly social critique, the book's real capacity to surprise is nestled in the missteps and errors committed by its main characters. They become more endearing as a result, reminding us that we're all more mess than messiah, helping us reconnect to our humanity."-Craig Bernier

ADAPTATIONS is an exercise in envisioning the worst case scenario and asking, "What next?" It explores concepts of alienation and survival in a world that's largely inhospitable, and what it means to be human once traditional mechanisms of control and safety cease to exist.

In her tenth poetry collection, Allie Marini explores the stories of women in religion and mythology who challenged the roles and expectations given them by patriarchal society."Allie Marini's poems are tiny offerings that leave me wanting more. The women that inhabit these poems wear masks which become the mirrors we hold up to ourselves. Marini's 'true face' is that she can wear them all, the ones that 'steal fire,' and the ones that 'suffer.'"--J. Bruce Fuller, author of Flood (Swan Scythe Press, 2013) and editor of Yellow Flag Press.Poetry. California Interest. Women's Studies.

In NEXT TIME YOU COME HOME, Lisa Dordal distills one hundred eighty letters she received from her mother over a twelve-year period (1989-2001) into short, meditative entries that reflect upon motherhood, marriage, grief, the beauty of the natural world, same-sex relationships, and the passage of time, as well as on issues such as racism, sexism, and climate change. The entries-which are something between letters and poems-portray a mother who, despite her alcoholism, maintains an engaged and compassionate presence in the world, one nourished by intellectual curiosity, life-long relationships with family and friends, and active involvement in a religious community."A newly recovered trove of letters is the source material for Next Time You Come Home, but the collection's true genius lies in the communion of mother and daughter across time. In distilling her late mother's letters to their loving essence, Lisa Dordal focuses not on the "nighttime mother" who drank until her speech was slurred but on the vibrant, nurturing "daytime mother" who taught her how to love the world. This is a radical compassion that heals, offering understanding without excuses or justifications, love without benchmarks or conditions. From its haunting title onward, Next Time You Come Home is an utter original." -Margaret Renkl, author of Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss"In the tradition of the epistle, this wonderful collection of letters turned into poems transports readers back in time. Inside we find reports from Lisa Dordal's mother on the gorgeously mundane moments of life: shopping at Sears, trying out new shoes, planning dinner. These blessings of the everyday sit beside larger more worldly events all the while marvelously punctuated by the comings and goings of various birds and the cold and warm days of the seasons. Chickadees and sandhill cranes appear within the same lines of letters announcing a loved one's death. And such is life, isn't it? These small, brilliant moments? How fortunate to be able to bear witness to the daily joys and sorrows that could otherwise be long forgotten. These transformative poems leave me even more in awe of each of our precious, fleeting, singular lives." -Didi Jackson, author of Moon Jar"In Next Time You Come Home, Lisa Dordal exquisitely sculpts her rediscovered letters from her mother into what she describes as 'something between letters and poems-not fully letters and not fully poems, but, instead, their own thing.' The result is a book that captures the ways excision, distillation, rewriting and reshaping play crucial roles in how we might remember and make sense of the lives that shape our own. The quotidian details that Dordal leaves on the page-requests for soup recipes, reports of bird sightings, seasonal shifts-accrue new poignancy as Next Time You Come Home moves with a sneaky momentum through months, then years, then decades. What remains on the page feels like a new and ghostly dialogue between the writer, her mother, and the reader, too-a conversation that is both courageous and illuminating." -Lee Conell, author of The Party Upstairs

An unflinching new collection from poet, Jenny Irish, in which cultural violence against women is explored through various personae.At the heart of all violence is fear: Lupine is a gathering of feminist prose poetry engaging themes of ecology, animality, and the human unknown. A series of interconnected dramatic monologues, the poems inhabit the personae of figures traditionally deemed Monstrous, giving them voice to confront and reclaim the violent mythologies that have so often been imposed upon them. As these unmuzzled monsters speak, the collection collapses the boundaries between the self and the subjugated other, ultimately upending the discourse of monstrosity itself. By exposing how women are villainized and sacrificed in response to cultural fear, Lupine offers a corrective to social narratives in which notions of the bestial and notions of the feminine are intimately entwined."A fang concealed inside a flower, Lupine has a mythological sense of ecopoetics, one in which nature is often vindicated, in all its mossy, sinewy, animal luster, for the violence we as humans have enacted upon it. Jenny Irish has an unflinching eye, interrogating 'spectacle and specimen,' wielding a mirror against cruel and patriarchal abuses of power. This language of survival drips with 'darkness as she welcomes herself in' to reconsider what has traditionally been called wicked, or monstrous, or other. Challenging our preconceived notions of narrative, Irish lets wildness pulse against the edges of her sentences, 'obscene up close,' but 'all a-light'-the reader is left dazzled, transformed." -Jenny Molberg, author of Refusal"Lupine is a rare feat of a chapbook, in which the poet Jenny Irish dawns the masks of so many monsters to tell us vividly how our culture fails women. From shadows, we make stories" our speaker reminds us, and Irish shows us how the object casting the shadow is often the haphazard negligence we regard each other with. This book is a bestiary of deep lyric knowing, from the first poem to the closing, immaculate question that makes Lupine's final line, what we're given is a chorus of beasts we can't help but think look like us." -C.T. Salazar, author of Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking"Just like the botanical ferocity that accompanies its title, Lupine by Jenny Irish cracks the fangs from the aggressor, reveling in a primitive magic where women confront and disrupt their default historical fates. A delightfully dark examination of fear, and interrogation of the cautionary tale, Irish's collection offers advice that resonates from deep past into contemporary life. For example, in "Harpy," we are told, 'Girl-child, if you must hate yourself, let it be for lack of talent rather than the body your soul inherited,' while in 'Witch' we hear, 'A good girl keeps her mouth shut, and a bad girl gets the sound smacked out, and a smart girl knows she will be punished either way.' Resplendent with magnificent animals, abundant flora, and unforgettable voices, Lupine is a showcase of the dramatic monologue at its wicked best." -Mary Biddinger, author of Department of Elegy

A LOVE LETTER has the power to speak outside of time (or through time) as did my beloved aunt who left a paper trail that evidenced she kept me in her thoughts. She'd drafted an Advance Directive, and purchased some modest burial insurance, and protected a few memories that might have otherwise been forgotten. A love letter became how she chose to say goodbye and go with grace. So, I wish in many ways to reciprocate her love with this little book-a re-memory-a reflection of where I was when she left this world, and where I am now, and where in the future any one of us might be."A Love Letter is a profound and gorgeously rendered tribute to a person, to a place, and to life itself. I really enjoyed the vivid characters and the sensitivity and elegance of Carmen Kennedy's writing." -Vendela Vida, author of We Run the Tides"A Love Letter is the reader's honor of being brought into the sharp tenderness of a loved one's transition. To enter this room also offering your mind to the various mirrors of embrace. To walk down the predatory nodes of a medical system serving capital and rage along. In a few pages, you are years changed." -Tongo Eisen Martin, San Francisco Poet Laureate"A Love Letter 's lyrical vignettes place witness pinnacle as the speaker both chronicles and begets introspection. We observe cyclical mourning and cyclical hope. In these pages, we gather empathy as a cure for our human condition, with passages like, 'this journey is eminently finite and someone's departure can seem abrupt if you miss as little as a day, week or month.' Praise this work that allows us to look into another's eyes and see something beautiful." -Daniel B. Summerhill, Monterey County Poet Laureate, author of DIVINE, DIVINE, DIVINE"Carmen's exquisite memoriam moves between the harshness of loss and ways in which our bodies accept its inevitability. It snapshots a personal moment with such beautiful transcendence that it draws in all the senses and will serve as lastly a guide to anyone else who has to later turn the pages of their own scrapbooks... I am forever changed." -Tshaka Campbell, Santa Clara County Poet Laureate, author of Tunnel Vision"As a person who witnessed two loved ones' minds sail away before their bodies departed, I can assure you that Carmen Kennedy has captured a maelstrom of emotions and delicately drew them onto the spathe of a calla lily. This profound prosimetrum captures the rememory of loss in a sequence of window panes all shattering with the sorrow, doubt, and the tenderest moments of humans coming together to hold one another up when the world seems like it is drifting away. Carmen captured the stages of grief in stained-glass. This is one of the most delicate works I have read in a long time-but the carefulness of how it was written relays the strength of the writer into the minds of those who read it-especially those who find pieces of themselves in the elegant layering of these pastel paned moments. This is a declaration of healing." Vernon Keeve III (Trey), author of SOUTHERN MIGRANT MIXTAPE

Translated from the German by Daniele Pantano. "Pantano, a renowned poet and translator, has brought both of these talents to bear on his project. His process was to loosely translate all of the poems of Georg Trakl, then order the lines in alphabetical order by their first words. One further aspect of the organization is that while these lines share this overt linguistic kinship-due to the alphabetical ordering, but also due to the frequent repetition of a starting word-the lines do not share any apparent meaning relations. Like the Persian ghazal, where each couplet is meant to stand alone, seemingly disconnected from the others, yet also force by way of lyric disjoint a powerful effect on the reader, Pantano's conceptual poetry forces us to leap from line to line, navigating the voids along the way. There is a jarring-yet-also-pleasurable effect created by this structure and organization. Also, the reader will immediately notice that the title of the book is only one letter off from Trakl's name, transforming it into an oracle of sorts. This is entirely fitting, given that the lines in Pantano's collection echo the enigmatic pronouncements of an oracle from ancient myth and given that Pantano himself serves as a sort of oracular medium in translating/altering/arranging these lines."-from the introduction by Okla Elliott

Jason Tandon is a minimalist, a poet who manages stunning effects using the fewest possible elements of his medium. I am reminded of Uta Barth, who says her photographs "talk about the passage of time while looking at things that don't change that much at all." That moment of change is what shines in these poems, focused, refined, and magnified as it is by a lens of Tandon's flawless language. The intelligence in these poems is razor-sharp, lean, and efficient; the kind spirit behind them is generous and immense.-Eric PankeyIn a world of distraction, Jason Tandon's This Far North sings: be here now. Tandon is a master at collecting the overlooked splendor of the daily world and turning the common into the complex. Each poem is a delight-profound and precise, image-rich and mindful, with humor weaving its way through as well. The gift of this book is how the lyrical and timeless intertwine, and we are lost in this stunning space Tandon has created. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to fall in love with poetry again.-Kelli Russell AgodonEvery poem in This Far North seizes a glimpse and expands it into a jolting, sweeping panorama. I finished reading this book feeling, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, that "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience."-John Skoyles

What happens when one's illusions unravel? This is the question that animates Patricia Horvath's debut story collection, But Now Am Found. A young man experiences heartbreak for the first time when his girlfriend rejects him on religious grounds. One woman fixates on a crossword puzzle to avoid thinking about her missing daughter while another, in a deeply troubled marriage, gives birth. The characters in these stories struggle to make sense of upheaval in their lives. But Now Am Found is a compelling exploration of the human spirit confronted by abrupt and rending change.

A low-income Baltimore neighborhood is targeted for a controversial urban renewal project-an amusement park in the theme of Baltimore itself-that forces its residents to reckon with racism, displacement, and their futures. Peter Cryer is a queer teenager who fantasizes about leaving Baltimore and the instability of his home life while also seeking a place to belong. Ruth Anne, his prickly mother, is terrorized by her estranged husband and the indecision of what to do after the wrecking ball comes through her neighborhood. Thomas, a cleric and History teacher at Peter's school, questions his vocation in the face of the neighborhood's destruction. These three voices braid together a portrait of a neighborhood in flux, the role of community and violence in our time, and the struggles of a very real and oft misunderstood city.

Hell/a Mexican is an appreciation of the tragicomedy that is existing on American soil with foreign roots. These stories shed light on the boundless experience of living and learning through your identity. This collection, much like us, reaches for hope; Sometimes we find it, sometimes we don't.

"With the precision of a surgeon and a poet's reverberant intelligence, Vedran Husi¿ gives us stories of children growing up in war-ravaged Bosnia, a world of vanishing fathers, games invented around an alley sniper's bullets and the bittersweet aspirations of adolescent Bosnian immigrants and refugees in America. In taut yet voluptuous prose, with philosophic ferocity, BASEMENTS AND OTHER MUSEUMS marks the debut of a crucial new voice in contemporary fiction."-Melissa Pritchard"In an age of conformity, this is a writer who boldly stands apart. Language is unfixed. Time is stretched like taffy. The sniper's finger drifts to the trigger as the tale is told. When history, society, and culture conspire toward collapse, all we have left is language-Vedran Husi¿ knows this. He is the natural heir to Bruno Schulz, Danilo Ki¿, Gombrovicz: stylists and story-tellers battered by war."¿-Matthew Neill Null