Poetry. In BLACK BIRDS : BLUE HORSE, Natalie Peeterse explores grief and loss. The chapbook is dedicated to Nicole Dial, a woman who died in Afghanistan. The reader experiences the poet's loss of her friend—a loss she is reminded of in nearly everything, and charts in others who knew Dial. "Natalie Peeterse's BLACK BIRDS : BLUE HORSE is remarkable for its urgency and power. This precisely envisioned elegiac sequence is both intimate and public, reckoning its speaker's passage through both the urban landscape of Washington, D.C. and the distant wartime nightmare of Afghanistan. We live in an age that is corrosive in its details, and this superb chapbook reminds us of the raw weather we all now live within—and of the ways the world, at times, can simply collapse upon us."—David St. John

Black Birds : Blue Horse

Literature & Fiction

Peeterse, Natalie

Poetry

Gold Line Press

Fiction. "With descriptions that flash and sparkle with the same youthful exuberance of his young characters, Jay Shearer gives a different and welcomed kind of coming-of-age tale. This work is touching, surprising and, most of all, smart."—Percival Everett

The Pulpit vs. The Hole

Shearer, Jay

United States

Fiction. "Good stories destabilize a reader's view of the world. And when this happens, the experience is exciting and mystifying. BAD HABITATS is just such a remarkable read. Startling in its ambition and stunning in its achievements, the amalgamation of the animal and human leaves us with serious questions about who we think we are and who we want to be."—Dana Johnson

Bad Habitats

Slaughter, Alisa

Contemporary

Fiction. Iver Arnegard's debut short fiction collection takes us into the desolate landscape of the Northern Plains and Western states, where man is but another animal seeking sustenance. The hardscrabble men and women who populate these fictions must survive and contain wildness within and without, a struggle fraught with violence, wonder, and moments of crystalline beauty.

Whip and Spur

Arnegard, Iver

Poetry. Cynthia Marie Hoffman's poetry chapbook explores memory, family history, loss, and selfhood through a hypnotic and airtight series of prose poems whose focus and singularity bloom from every page. Hoffman's finely honed powers of observation and personal prophecy propel this collection to a stunning conclusion that readers will not soon forget.

Her Human Costume

Hoffman, Cynthia Marie

Poetry. African American Studies. DEAR GIRL: A RECKONING revisits the biography of 18th century poet Phillis Wheatley and reimagines her journey through the Middle Passage to Boston. The poems are a gathering of ghosts whose voices shift from slaver to enslaved, from the mouths of the sacred to haunted dreamer. Echoes of loss and fracture each peer into silences and gaps to uncover narratives of restoration. The poems are letters and mausoleums, voices of ghosts interspersed with theories of transgenerational trauma, that take on a range of forms and innovative strategies that visualize not only grief but a range of possibilities for healing. DEAR GIRL: A RECKONING is a book of conjure that aims to call and quell ghosts of a past not past.

dear girl: a reckoning

brown, drea

Fiction. A boy crawls through a tunnel in the Gaza Strip to bring back supplies to his family and neighbors despite the high risk of the tunnel being flooded, gassed, or bombed. On the eve of the Arab Spring in Libya, a girl and her best friend disguise themselves as boys to train for a school sports competition, knowing that if they're caught they will be severely punished. Four young girls, three of them pregnant, decide to escape their abusive husbands and attempt to cross from Morocco to Spain. Set against these turbulent backdrops, this chapbook of short stories features children's voices, free of political influence, to remind the reader of the distilled best of human relationships. With no resources and armed with only loyalty, guts, and tenacity, they risk their lives for their friends in the belief that this is the only right thing to do.

Small Change

Hunter, Sandra

Poetry. These condensed, narrative poems all describe initial-contact experiences with alien societies and exoplanetary civilizations, in the form of summary reports from diplomatic missions or expeditionary forces that encounter failures of communication and intent at nearly every venture. Readers will see the shortcomings of our contemporary Terran culture and some of its historical errors reflected in the narrators' ill-fated attempts to achieve rapport with beings they cannot understand—and whom it may be impossible to understand. Whether the doomed relationships can be blamed on the expedition members, on the aliens, or on the inherent physics of our universe may be due to sheer bad luck and unfortunate timing as much as lapses in logic or ethics. Countering every well-intentioned overture, insidious oppressions also take familiar forms in extraterrestrial cultures.

A Catalogue of the Further Suns

Bergmann, F.J.

Literary Nonfiction. LGBTQIA Studies. ON THE MEZZANINE is a lyrical, intertextual work that explores an unfolding relationship between the unnamed narrator and her lover, C., to whom the writing is addressed. The lives of the two characters are thrown into upheaval as they interrogate issues of gender and sexuality, and as C. goes through a divorce and struggles with mental illness. The narrator writes through her own mounting confusion and desire as she attempts to play multiple roles: new partner, counselor, caregiver, and friend. She draws on other sources, from poetry to philosophy to film, in an attempt to understand her experiences of eros and queerness. As the situation intensifies, both characters grapple with the complex relationships between socially determined narratives, identity, and agency.

On the Mezzanine

Donish, Cassie

Literary

Poetry. Alysse Kathleen McCanna's debut poetry collection interrogates the self through the concept of pentimento. An art historical term, pentimento occurs when traces of previous work are revealed, indicating the artist changed aspects of her composition during the process of creation. Employing a playful exploration of layers, alteration, and history, these poems map the myriad paths that unfold before us, and catalogue our navigation through lust, love, and loss. Also the Italian word for repentance, pentimento is made visible using infrared reflectography; in these poems, McCanna shines a light upon the lives we paint ourselves into, and the revisions and revelations we find there. What's exposed is a refractive, multidimensional portrait of selfhood, rendered in twin layers of grief and hope.

Pentimento

McCanna, Alysse Kathleen

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