The Hook of It Is

Papadimos, Basil

Emergency Press

A poetic investigation of the public history of Tomasovich's homeland—Wisconsin—fused with a lyrical memoir of his family's struggles to become American.

Ouisconsin: The Dead in Our Clouds

Literature & Fiction

Tomasovich, Bryan

Poetry

Virga

Zieher, Scott

<div>Loesser's book is a powerful, collective plaint-a bittersweet sequence of broken love and death songs for everyone who forgets the children, doesn't do the dishes, sleeps with the dog and wants to just once touch something electric before they die. The finality of these obituaries and letters carries with it a catholic understanding for an age unwilling or unable to stop glorifying heartbreaking death and violent love-our impossibly toxic contemporaneousness so thwarted and petty. This penetrating portrait of a disordered and dysfunctional era runs the gamut of loss and dejection-even the horses die without dignity. Terse, pithy language cinches Loesser's tightly wound, universal thread-news staying news indeed. These characters range from insurance executives reeking of cheap airport Bourbon to the sad, desperate children of misfit parents too lost in their own mundane mendacity to properly care for their spawn. They are drug-smuggling grave robbers and geriatric bank robbers, fallen Hollywood starlets and bronco riders and yet so familiar as to be disturbing to the very bone. Each page of this book is a haunting recognition and convincing reminder that if we're not already dead, we're dying.</div>

Touched By Lightning

Loesser, Ernest

The voices in IMPATIENCE are a friendly squad of famished rats chewing through a stack of old magazines. Herein, some people die alone in the middle of the ocean, others buy the most fashionable dishwasher, some people sell wooden forks and others eat Bermuda onions with fresh New Jersey tomatoes and a touch of sugar. Small narratives, real and imagined, crop up throughout the poem's 52 sections-- there's a recipe for curried chicken and a receipt for fried bologna sandwiches delivered by a Manhattan hotel room-service bellboy named Chet. These are shuffled in with leaves from an obscure middle-western train stationmaster's dream diary complete with redheads from Yonkers in pencil skirts and a brief appearance of Three Martini Marlow in a road race with Road Hog Roger. Awards are given for salesmanship while open calls for summer swimming camp compete over first place with headlines for the death of a famous Hungarian magician who told reporters he was from Wisconsin. Reading this book you will scan all 50 of the United States and our two protectorates with a peripatetic gaze--dive into the brimming waters, the pace is brisk but the competition is cordial. Based loosely on a map of the 1965 World's Fair, this is the second in a thirteen volume sequence of book-length works, following 2005's acclaimed Emergency Press Book Contest Award winner VIRGA. An interview with the poet follows IMPATIENCE, with insights into his fascination with the number thirteen and a disambiguation on the inherent contradictions in the concept of projective verse via Charles Olson's chain-smoking. To read this book sit back, open a can of beer and a foil-wrapped envelope of processed cheese food to smear on your wax-wrapped sleeve of enriched flour crackers and enjoy your heritage like a true patriot.

Impatience

In American Junkie, Tom Hansen takes us on a non-stop into a land of desperate addicts, failed punk bands, and brushes with sad fame selling drugs during the Seattle grunge years. It’s a story that takes us from the promise of a young life to the prison of a mattress, from budding musician to broken down junkie, drowning in syringes and cigarette butts, shooting heroin into wounds the size of softballs, and ultimately, a ride to a hospital for a six-month stay and a painful self-discovery that cuts down to the bone. Through it all he never really loses his step, never lets go of his smarts, and always projects quintessential American reason, humor, and hope to make a story not only about drugs, but a compelling study of vulnerability and toughness.

American Junkie

Biographies & Memoirs

Hansen, Tom

Arts & Literature

Following her debut novel, My Sister's Continent, Gina Frangello continues her exploration of the power dynamics of gender, class, and sexuality in this collection of diverse, vibrant short fiction. Slut Lullabies is unsettling. Like the experience of reading a private diary, these stories leave one feeling slightly traitorous while also imprinting a deep recognition of truths you did not know you felt.It is through beauty, horror, humor and chaos that Frangello has managed to pull these ten stories out of her deep understanding of the human experience. A gay Latino man whose pious relatives are boycotting his commitment ceremony' becomes caught up in hypocrisy and splendor when his lover's Waspy mother hires a glitzy wedding coordinator; a precocious girl seduces her teacher in order to blackmail him into funding her young stepmother's escape from their violent home; a wife turns to infidelity and drugs to distract her from chronic pain following an accident; a teenage boy attempts atonement in Amsterdam after having exploited his naive girlfriend at home; and a socialite must confront her dark past as her husband's deterioration from Huntington's Disease destroys both her bank account and social standing.

Slut Lullabies

Frangello, Gina

Literary

Hester Smith is a woman who always played life near the sidelines—until she decides to rescue a teenage Mexican prostitute. She's up against the border sex trade in Southern California that works like a drug cartel, where the smuggled contraband is teenage girls forced to work as prostitutes in undeveloped canyons just outside suburbia. Law enforcement agencies know it happens, as do investigative journalists, yet the illegal sex trade continues to exist. Most people, comfortable in their homes only miles away, express some brand of shock in the moment they hear about it-and then they go on with their lives, assured there's nothing they can do. While she prepares for the rescue, Hester discovers that the man with whom she almost had an affair-her mentor when she was a 23 year-old student teacher-had been simultaneously having a sexual relationship with a 16 year-old student. Hester mines her own memories of the would-be affair and ultimately tracks down the former 16 year-old. When these two women with a shared scandal in their pasts confront one another, the meeting coincides with the last step necessary to rescue the teenage prostitute Hester has tried to protect.

Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls

MAZZA, CRIS

United States

Need a new job? Does the world need another superhero? You see the connection, don’t you? If you had the chance to save livescould you handle the adventure? The pressure, the risk, the grotesque, the insane? Most of all, could you handle your humanity? Update your resume, cause here we go. Either stick with being sucked down further into your life, or earn the lift-off of the elite. Aaron Dietz’s debut novel moves with an experimental edge into America’s heroic mythology. Structured as a novel-length job application for a superhero agency, Dietz uses his iron touch to explore themes that go far deeper than the swashbuckling world of comics and costumes. It’s a story about commitment, ability, bureaucracy, possibility, crisis, and heartbreak. Super.

Super

Dietz, Aaron

Strata is a series of interconnected lyric prose poems that fluctuate between order and chaos like flocks of swallows rearranging themselves in flight. The rhythmic oscillation of the poems builds into a postmodern story that weaves through the life of a poet who’s migrated from Poland to the U.S. The world is magnificently large from any vantage point and Chrusciel helps us locate something larger than ourselves by constantly holding both the particular of her life and the universe at each moment. With the title, Strata, meaning "loss" in Polish and "accretion" in English, Chrusciel braids, juxtaposes, and synthesizes through repetition, despite a wide range of subjects. Her alchemy includes exquisite details about parents and ancestry, the paradoxes of belonging to two languages, the miracles of existence, the joy and angst of love and belonging, the sorrow and dislocation of Eastern block politics, and a chorus of spiritual incantation and transient revelation.

Strata

Chrusciel, Ewa

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