Fiction. This updated 2017 edition includes a new story. A man in search of a golden bead that is rumored to grant immortality. A would-be astronaut's manifesto. An Archivist who can't help but record all of life's statistics. In these thirteen small stories, Anne Valente takes us to worlds both fantastic and familiar, forgotten and foretold, and in tight, layered prose, she strives to unravel all the tangled questions we have about ourselves. From the field guides of anatomy to permutations on desire, these small stories are expansive and encyclopedic, a cataloging of love and loss, an attempt to find a formula for everything that courses through us.

Elegy For Mathematics, An

Literature & Fiction

Valente, Anne

United States

Bull City Press

House is an Enigma is an investigation of the language used to house descriptions of the body, which so often seek to define and determine the boundaries and behaviors of the spirit that lives within. Written after Bolden’s radical hysterectomy, during which she noted her doctors’ use of house metaphors to describe her body and discuss her inability to have children, these stunning poems set out to expose the fissures in the foundations of the language we use to define human bodies and their behaviors, using these cracks as a lens through which she can see her own body, at last, as her own flawed but beautiful home.

House is an Enigma (Cowles Poetry Prize Winner)

Bolden, Emma

Poetry

Michael McFee, in his new book, The Smallest Talk, squeezes the conventions of poetry-- image, rhythm, language and meaning-- into the smallest possible package. These monostiches, as one-line poems are often called, are extraordinary feats of wit, as much kin to prose poems as to a comedian's smartest lines. If comedians zing, then McFee zings darkly, with the verbal charge and resonance of longer poems. The Smallest Talk is an examination of poetic line in its barest terms, a celebration of compactness. Yet, there is a hint of narrative across these one-line poems, the implication that even as a line stands alone, it consistently speaks to its surroundings. "William Matthews' chapbook, the long out-of-print An Old Oar in the Water, lit me up, because before I read it, I don't know that I'd ever even thought about one-line poems," says McFee. "The challenge became to take all of the virtues that you usually develop over ten, or thirty, or five hundred, lines and squeeze it down to the smallest possible talk that still has the evocativeness and the memorability that good poems have." "Then I started poking around on my own and reading other one-liners, monostiches as they are called, which have a very ancient tradition. Most of them felt not so much unfinished as unbegun-- they were like a line that needed to be surrounded by a dozen other lines. The trick became not to do that-- to have a self-sufficient verbal unit that's intriguing enough to want to read again and again and again."

The Smallest Talk

Michael McFee

State Street, Katie Bowler's long poem about post-Katrina New Orleans, chronicles Bowler s journey to salvage the historic work of photographer Donn Young. Accompanied by a crew from NBC Nightly News, she traverses the destroyed city to reclaim what could be salvaged of more than 1.5 million images -- more than 35 years' worth of photography that was identified by the Association of Records Managers and Administrators and Louisiana State University Hill Memorial Library Special Collections as being "historically significant." Throughout the journey, Bowler explores loss of home and homeland, experiences the panic and awe of the familiar becoming unfamiliar, and finds among the wreckage humanity, humor, and hope.

State Street

Katie Bowler

Poetry. Winner of the 2010 Bull City Press First Book Prize, LITHOPEIDA marks the emergence of a haunting and lyrical new voice.  "The lithopedion—the stone baby, calcified, entombed within a woman's body or on display in a museum case—lies at the heart of this rich and moving collection of poems concerned with generations of women, with what is kept or withheld, birthed or lost. Anne Keefe's poems are graceful, elegiac, and ghosted by the specter of the irretrievable: the children who could have been, who haunt the children who are."—Mark Doty

Lithopedia

Keefe, Anne

Poetry. "As with some singing voices, there are poetic voices of such direct authority and clarity that they capture our deep engagement almost before we are aware that we have begun to listen. Jill Osier's is such a voice. Like Franz Schubert's song-cycle Winterreise, these poems of Osier's take us on a lonely winter-journey through a stripped-down world, in which, as she says, 'all the roads are well worn, all the wagons breaking.' Because the poems, each a small, superb vignette with a different angle of light or insight, comprise a true and transformational sequence, after Osier has performed her winter pageant for us, we are not the same people as when we began. To survive in winter, one must go inside, literally and figuratively, and with aching simplicity and sensuality of voice, that is what Osier does. But as much as she presents winter as 'the correctional,' a chastening and humbling space-time that every life must eventually experience, inside Osier's ice is fire. Indeed, she feeds the stove of these poems with such wit and feeling that it's warm enough inside to take off your shirt and make love—and she does, and we do."—Patrick Donnelly

Should Our Undoing Come Down Upon Us White (Frost Place Chapbook Competition Winner)

Osier, Jill

Poetry. Winner of the 2015 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. The poems of Anders Carlson-Wee's debut chapbook DYNAMITE flare with the volatile heat of discovery and loss as they follow the journeys of a speaker whose wanderlust leads him to the fringes of the American experiment. Whether hopping freight trains with his brother or sleeping in the homes of strangers, the speaker is haunted by the tragic and oddly gracious people he meets. Selected by Jennifer Grotz as the winner of The Frost Place Chapbook Competition, Anders Carlson-Wee's DYNAMITE rides into the unmappable territories and wide expanses of the spirit.

Dynamite (Frost Place Chapbook Competition Winner)

Carlson-Wee, Anders

Poetry. African &amp; African American Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Through biography, fairy tale, and history, Tommye Blount's debut chapbook WHAT ARE WE NOT FOR redraws the fatherland of manhood as a territory beyond whose borders tenderness and cruelty fight for space. The men and boys in these poems are transformed into instruments of pleasure and of destruction, worshipped artifacts and disfigured toys, victims and assailants. WHAT ARE WE NOT FOR moves its reader toward caustic longing, the hope that danger and risk promise. "Tommye Blount's WHAT ARE WE NOT FOR is an instruction manual on how to fall to our knees and crawl from the mouth of failed transformations. Here, Pinocchio's boyhood demands bloodspill for proof and the speaker's humanity is never fulfilled: 'After all, I am a broken animal.' Desire turns toward the darkest trail and does not look back through challenging forms and twisted prosody. This collection is rope and whip, daughter-sons and muzzles, and 'a prayer they mistake/ for a growl.' I am not myself, any longer, after these poems.'—Phillip B. Williams

What Are We Not For

Blount, Tommye

Poetry. African &amp; African American Studies. Women's Studies. Winner of the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. "EQUILIBRIUM searches for that point where there is a balance, even as the poems display a consciousness and self-awareness that belie that balance. The poems negotiate the colossal movement of hearts figuring and being figured by history. This is a voice that knows the intelligence of passion, that moves through and inside the questioning of who we are in the structures of things we give the power to name us until a song sends us out to question the territory. The poet moves with the exactness of math or physics, with the fearful knowledge of careful imbalances that would have us believe in equilibrium, and with the assuredness of art that knows all is change, that the semblance of order is creation, something we are given the gift of imitating in some small way. The poems in this collection summon the largeness, the volume of a voice that disembodies itself in order to search for the love that made it whole." —Afaa Michael Weaver

Equilibrium (Frost Place Chapbook Competition Winner)

Clark, Tiana

Poetry. Women's Studies. Editors' Selection from the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Then Winter vividly traces the speaker's journey in a psychiatric treatment facility. With precision and honesty, Honum cuts through the climate of silence surrounding mental illness and treatment. These fiercely intimate poems draw the reader into the boundaried world of a psychiatric ward, where moments of darkness exist alongside moments of humor and deep connection, and render the natural world beyond the facility's windows with piercing mystery and beauty.

Then Winter (Editors Selection/Frost Place Competitio)

Honum, Chloe

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