Poetry. Michelle Lewis' poetry collection ANIMUL/FLAME was selected by renowned poet Bob Hicok as the winner of the first annual Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize. Lewis uses language, both strange and familiar, to create an enchanted world full of shadows and poems that read like fables for the future. A raw, explicit, and personal book that conjures the dark, the mysterious, and the mythological. "ANIMUL/FLAME is charged by an emotional integrity that yields exacting bite and insight. This is a marvelous debut."--Terrance Hayes

Animul/Flame

Literature & Fiction

Lewis, Michelle

Poetry

Conduit Books & Ephemera

Poetry. In her second poetry collection SACRIFICIAL METAL, Esther Lee's poems offer a meditation through the lens of dance and human movement about the quiet dignities and alienation of illness, caregiving, and living in a racialized body. Part documentary poetics, part mourning diary, part textual choreography, and part nautical-inspired elegy, the poems in SACRIFICIAL METAL serve as inquiries about how we may become socialized or exiled from a community, along with how movement and dance offer possibilities of interconnectedness with one's own body and a sense of collective identity. "In SACRIFICIAL METAL, Esther Lee dances with astute curiosity and deep tenderness across the shifting grounds of grief, touch, bearing witness, memory, and our obstinate human instinct for future-planning. With great compassion, Lee's poems remind us that everything human eventually unravels, but her poems remind us too that joy is "like tragedy, it occurs--undeniably, relentlessly--every day." Every breath, every dusk, every dinner, every doctor's visit is at once both "tourniquet and artery"--just one of many gorgeous truths revealed in these pages." --Sean Dorsey, choreographer/dancer, writer and trans-justice activist "I see SACRIFICIAL METAL as a collection of letters to the self as though the self were a familiar stranger who speaks all the same languages, and happens to also be a scientist interested in the nature of time. This is a correspondence in which the world, and a person's understanding of its many forms of data, is rigorously contemplated and recorded. "Where am I in your body now," asks a poem. It's a beautiful question, one that bears repeating. Esther Lee writes worthy poetry that reveals a keen mind, as well as a spirit that is as intelligent as it is compassionate." --Tarfia Faizullah, author of Seam and Registers of Illuminated Villages

Sacrificial Metal

Lee, Esther

A gibbous moon arrives in shadow and light. First at waxing then at waning, two moons in one cycle just shy of full. Poet Dennis Cooley's eloquent words merge with photographer/composer Michael Matthews' decadent abstract photographs. These two celebrated artists draw connections and parallels to each other's masterful art forms, tying the two together seamlessly. The antecedent and subsequent illuminate the night sky with their dance; the shadows and the light taking turns at showing us the way through the darkness. Poetry. Art.

The Miraculous, Sometimes

Shevenock, Meg

Poetry. PRESENT TENSE COMPLEX by Suphil Lee Park won the third annual Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize awarded by Conduit Books & Ephemera. Bob Hicok, the final judge, offered: "Suphil Lee Park's poems investigate, tear at, and adore physical and emotional dislocations, separations, and losses. She has a way of combining tones that should never fit together --lush austerity, calm fury --even peaceful unrest. I'd even say that she seems at ease...with unease, in large part because she recognizes her own nature and is not afraid to give her poems over to it."

Present Tense Complex

Park, Suphil Lee

About the Author David Keplinger is the author of seven books of poetry, recently Another City (Milkweed Editions, 2018), which was awarded the 2019 UNT Rilke Prize, and The Long Answer: Selected and New Poems (Texas A&M, 2020). He was the 2020 recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America, as well as a past recipient of the Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, the Colorado Book Award, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. His volumes of translations include the 2017 collection, The Art of Topiary by Jan Wagner, and FORTY-ONE OBJECTS by Carsten René Nielsen (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2020 National Translation Award. He lives in Washington, D.C., and teaches at American University. Product Description Poetry. THE WORLD TO COME by David Keplinger, the author of seven books of poetry, is the winner of the third annual Minds on Fire Open Book Prize awarded by Conduit Books & Ephemera. A dazzling collection of prose poems THE WORLD TO COME imagines the future while honoring the prose poem's rich tradition.

The World to Come

Keplinger, David

Winner of the Fourth Annual Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize\nA deft reimagination of the fable, THE BIRTHDAY OF THE DEAD is dark, rich, and immediately accessible, capable of conjuring tears, laughs, and both earth-shattering and life-affirming revelations. Selected by Bob Hicok, THE BIRTHDAY OF THE DEAD won the fourth annual Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize. 
Poetry.\nBook Description\nWinner of the Fourth Annual Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize

The Birthday of the Dead

Abramowitz, Rachel

THUNDERBIRD INN chronicles the drug-addled misadventures of a man and his friend, Richard, on a transcontinental bender that bottoms out in the Florida panhandle. Fueled by cheap booze and various powders, the duo loiters on the fringes of a decaying America. The poems in the collection are often casket-shaped, not unlike shoebox time capsules. Intimate spaces to die inside. Or live. Or snort horse tranquilizer. Which the narrator and Richard do often in neon lit parking lots. Do they commit a few small crimes? Sure. But there is a loving tenderness to their dysfunctional codependence. The collection itself is shaped by addiction and routine. This is less a tale of recovery and more of a doom spiral. Like a seedy motel, THUNDERBIRD INN is inhabited by outcasts and weirdos. Perhaps near an interstate, in valley stitched together with telephone wires. "These are dark, end-times poems that Bash? could have written, they're that intimately observed and described. There's a run-down small-town America here that Callahan looks at more carefully than most, uncovering the beauties and horrors of roadside motels, the ubiquity of ceiling fans, and a nacho machine that "vomits gold." But there is a curious love about all of this, and friends who move alongside you when you pass through this book. And there is a magic to the close observation that redeems what is often squalid, like a contemporary American Georg Trakl, with just as many drugs."--Matthew Rohrer Poetry.

Thunderbird Inn

Callahan, Collin

Most of the poems in THE ART OF BAGGING were written while Joshua Gottlieb-Miller worked in a grocery store, often in fragments on the folded-up piece of paper he kept tucked in his pocket. Gottlieb-Miller worked at Trader Joe's after getting his undergrad degree, left the store to pursue an MFA, and then returned after completing his advanced degree. Feeling stuck, watching time tick away stocking shelves, Gottlieb-Miller found himself dreading the store but writing more and more. This is a hybrid book. Because so many of his co-workers said or did things that inspired poems, Gottlieb-Miller knew he wanted to interview as many as he could. Many of these poems of retail labor are informed by meditations on visibility or invisibility, the accessibility of the setting and that frustration giving way to lyrical and meditative flights. The book's arc traces the speaker's recognition of these workers' shared positions--thoughtful individuals enmeshed in a singular, larger system--within an economic and, by the end of the book, metaphysical space. 
"The Art of Bagging unpacks the American obsession with livelihood-as-personhood. Through an inventive structure--spare lyrical narrative, surprising aphorism, and raw interview--Josh Gottlieb-Miller works over definitions of what work is. The grocery store is only a setting, a crucial one though, for the book's astonishing revelations. This is ontology bagged, in which disparate voices are identified (a rarity for poetry of labor) and the apocrypha of retail work is examined. Here's an example of Gottlieb-Miller's ars poetica from the powerful 'The Fiction I am a Grocery Store Employee,': 'I've already divided/what's false from true./As in a shortcut you/can only use once.' Later, in 'Grocers Debate the Apocalypse For Its Effect on Backstock,' the poet writes, 'I don't like to be reduced,/even to something bigger than me.' I am grateful for this book."--Martha Serpas 
"Do you think you would go out of your way to see an opera if it was about a grocery store?" Joshua Gottlieb-Miller asks at the very beginning of The Art of Bagging. What follows is extraordinary, lyrical, invigoratingly intelligent and, indeed, operatic. In this hybrid collection, Gottlieb-Miller considers the grocery store as a site for meditations on vast economies, complex labor systems, and the ordinary, often nearly invisible, people who work within them. Always thoughtful and humane, the poems are unified by Gottlieb-Miller's own voice--a voice characterized by wit, warmth, keen awareness, and a desire to understand the many worlds of the grocery store and those who labor alongside him, within it."--Kevin Prufer 
Poetry. Hybrid.

The Art of Bagging

Gottlieb-Miller, Joshua

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