Southern poetry with a gothic twist A Southerner by birth, Susan Swartwout's history and writing are steeped in the gothic elements of quotidian life in the Deep South, a celebration of difference and the uncommon odd beauties who embellish our plain lives. These poems explore the lives of freaks celebrities of Southern fairs' sideshows such as conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker's married lives, the Fat Lady's work schedule, Tom Thumb's Barnum-warped ego, all parallel to the hidden desires, plots, and jealousies of the rest of us. Our exterior normality belies the internal twisted landscapes how complicity and silence echo abuse, how depression infects entire families, how a five-year-old learns to use words as weapons, how human need dispels language's boundaries. From circus oddities to real-life boogeymen, from Louisiana to a Central American village, earth has no dearth of the gothic's strange fruit, illuminating the complexity of what it is to be human.

Odd Beauty, Strange Fruit

Literature & Fiction

Swartwout, Susan

Poetry

Brick Mantel Books

Menashe Everett is a tormented man. He's ruled by depression and addiction. He's haunted by his past. At 37, he barely holds onto his job and lives in a haze of blurred reality. But to many in his life, he's their only hope. For the past ten years, Menashe has been acting as a counselor to similarly afflicted clients who agree to his unorthodox brand of pseudo-therapy. After a grim but revelatory trip to Las Vegas in his late twenties, Menashe decided to open up a "glass museum," an underground safe place where clients can vent their anguish by destroying rooms filled with clear glass art. The museum brings hope to those who have not responded to traditional therapy, but also gives Menashe a sense of purpose he desperately needs. Menashe's work is always challenging, but now he s taken on a particularly taxing caseload. Among others, he counsels Austin Gendron, a gruff Vietnam veteran prone to psychotic breaks; Murray Henderson, a timid college student trying to understand his episodes of anger and anxiety; and John Cook, Menashe's best friend. As he works tirelessly for his clients, Menashe must also handle his increasingly complex personal life, which constantly forces him to relive his past and question his abilities as a therapist. Set in Cleveland in the late 1980s, Glass tests traditional ideas of interpersonal responsibility and what it means to struggle with mental illness.

Glass

Kort, Kate

Literary

Luce Garrison narrates the unraveling of her stoic Midwestern family: a mother plagued by bipolar disorder, a father guilt-ridden by his inability to confront his wife's descent into madness, and Luce's own unassailable conviction that she can never be as loved as the brothers she has lost. As a child, Luce often lingered over albums of glossy photographs, longing to be just like her lovely, enigmatic mother. But images frozen for an instant could not capture the lightless depression and manic bouts of frenzied activity which demonized Bets Garrison. Luce does not know the depths of her mother's undiagnosed mental illness. Her only certainty? She is an inadequate substitute for the older brother who was stillborn just three months after her parents' marriage. After giving birth to Jonny, eleven years Luce's junior, Bets develops an obsessive, disturbing devotion which trumps every other relationship in the Garrison home. Although Luce tries to minimize the gulf, she is excluded from the smothering attention her mother lavishes upon Jonny. Caught in a void, she can neither be loving sister nor cherished daughter. She can only be in the way. Set in rural Wisconsin, We Dare Not Whisper explores the toxic legacy of a self-destructive family. With hauntingly beautiful prose, Jan Netolicky illuminates the suffering of individuals with bipolar disorder and the unthinkable challenges facing those closest to them.

We Dare Not Whisper

Netolicky, Jan

Some storms bring destruction. Others bring salvation. In 1934 the tiny town of Barmy, Oklahoma, is in desperate need of a miracle. The cows are hungry, the rain won't fall, most of Main Street is boarded up. Young aspiring trapeze artist Sugar Watson is dumped unceremoniously into this bleak setting with little money and only one thing on her mind—escape. Beulah Clinton, a Holy Ghost preacher, has dedicated herself to helping the distressed in this ragged little wasteland, and Sugar soon finds herself thrown in with Marigold Lawford, the simple-minded widow of the richest man in town, and Homer Guppy, a boy trouble follows like dust after a wind. Despite Sugar's immediate distaste of Barmy, Beulah's patience, Marigold's kindness, and Homer's unconditional love make her reconsider the meaning of home. On Black Sunday, the worst dust storm in history brings with it a choice: Sugar must decide whether or not to return home, leaving the hospitality and love of Barmy's inhabitants. A stunning Depression-era literary novel with a touch of magical realism, Beulah's House of Prayer captivates until the very end.

Beulah's House of Prayer

Graham, Cynthia A.

Laika is a finalist in the Best Book Awards for Literary Fiction and the Next Generation Indie Book Awards for Young New Adult and Second Novel. You feel watched. It's nothing new, but the feeling is amplified when the streets are busy. That hum in your head is now a buzz. 
Laika desperately wishes for a new life. At fourteen, she’s hardened and independent, living on the streets of Southern California. She’s finally free of her volatile home but yearns for true stability. As Graham, a waiter at a local Russian restaurant, watches Laika steal and struggle to survive, he sees there is something else going on. Something dangerous. An insidious disease that gnaws at her mind and drags her deeper into a world of chaos and delusion. Laika brings to light the often-shrouded world of paranoid schizophrenia. It also examines the socially stigmatized issues of homelessness, addiction, and PTSD, in the hopes of fostering greater awareness and compassion.

Laika

You are The Girl, and The Girl is a Badass.From the opening lines, it’s clear The Girl at the center of these poems is damaged—which is another way to say she’s a survivor. If the Girl Never Learns moves from the personal to the mythic to the apocalyptic, because The Girl would do anything, even go to hell, to save her soul. So, she resists, takes action to overturn society’s suffocating ideal of Good Girldom. The poems’ sense of breathlessness reflects The Girl’s absolute need to control her own destiny, to outrun her past, while at the same time chasing a future she alone has envisioned and embodied. Because The Girl is, above all else, a badass.

If the Girl Never Learns: Poems

Silverman, Sue William

Europe is in flames, Nazis are at the gates of the city, and the Chernofsky family's only chance for escape rests firmly on the slim shoulders of seventeen-year-old Lilli. With war at their doorstep, Lilli Chernofsky flees Lithuania with her brother Aaron and a group of yeshiva students. Along with other Jewish refugees, Lilli makes a home in the ghettos of Shanghai. Though they managed to escape the horror in Europe, they are now faced with starvation, subhuman conditions, and violence at the hands of Japanese soldiers in Shanghai. Lilli Chernofsky provides a portal to history, a glimpse into the lives of ordinary people in tragic circumstances. The mystery of who people really are, what they will do in adversity survive honorably or by betraying others is at the novel's heart, but it is young Lilli's startling metamorphosis from sheltered teen to unwavering heroine that is its cri de coeur.

Lilli Chernofsky

Vida, Nina

A novel steeped in the air and water and people of the rural Midwest 
Overcome with grief following the death of his youngest child, Cal Franklin uproots his wife and teenaged children to a ramshackle subsistence farm in far northern Wisconsin. Withdrawn and estranged from all they know, JJ and her stepbrother, John, struggle to adapt to life off the grid and to Cal’s increasingly erratic behavior. Without electricity or even running water, the family suffers a series of calamities until Cal feels a call to preach. He builds a small log church on the property, and his unconventional message soon attracts a following. When elderly locals profess to be healed by the touch of Cal’s hands, word spreads, and desperate people descend on the church from across the country. Though overwhelmed and doubtful of his powers, in a final act of love and faith, Cal seeks to raise his young son from the dead. 
Narrated by Cal’s stepson, John—named for “the chronicler of Christ’s miracles”—Breathing Lake Superior is a poignant exploration of the mystic borderland where the mental strain of overwhelming grief becomes entangled with the promise and hope of ecstatic faith.

Breathing Lake Superior: a novel

Rindo, Ron

Tempered (Glass)

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