Womonster


Book Description

Taking the form of two long poems, "Interro-Porn" and "Chenille," _Womonster_ explores the often monstrous and buffoonish impossibility of a coherent self, even as its speakers take great pleasure in the performance of selves. Everywhere absorbing and leaking other media, _Womonster_ is a "sloppy" text, at once nauseating and thrilling, psychedelic and domestic. "Olivia Cronk's Womonster is a performative feat, a book that makes being out of pretending.... I was thrilled and moved by this wild book, which moves from an explosive rejection of narrative to the creation of a theater of home, that shabby, beautiful structure built with girly hope, our fortification against loss." (Suzanne Scanlon) "With _Womonster_, Olivia Cronk shows that we are other people as much as we are our various selves. We are the people who share our lives; we are our loved ones and our aggressors. If this makes us monsters, then everyone's a monster." (Jay Besemer) "Cronk's writing is forensically spooky.... We are brought closer to Cronk's territory of occult sadomasochistic desire. _Womonster_ is both a hyper-abject soap opera of beige underwear, dusty crystal, sinks full of bloodied dishes, and a redemptive horror story about the power of becoming the monster." (Laura Ellen Joyce) "Olivia Cronk is one of my favorite US poets over the past 15 years. _Womonster_ is something like Lars Noren's Revolver rewritten with Ouija board." (Johannes Göransson)




I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris


Book Description

Literary Nonfiction. California Interest. LGBT Studies. Women's Studies. Elizabeth Hall began writing I HAVE DEVOTED MY LIFE TO THE CLITORIS in the summer of 2010 after reading Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex. She was particularly struck by Laqueur's bold assertion: "More words have been shed, I suspect, about the clitoris, than about any other organ, or at least, any organ its size." How was it possible that Hall had been reading compulsively for years and never once stumbled upon this trove of prose devoted to the clit? If Lacquer's claim was correct, where were all these "words"? And more: what did size have to do with it? Hall set out to find all that had been written about the clit past and present. As she soon discovered, the history of the clitoris is no ordinary tale; rather, its history is marked by the act of forgetting. "Marvelously researched and sculpted... Bulleted points rat-tat-tatting the patriarchy, strobing with pleasure." Dodie Bellamy "Freud, terra cotta cunts, hyenas, anatomists, and Acker, mixed with a certain slant of light on a windowsill and a leg thrown open invite us... Bawdy and beautiful." Wendy C. Ortiz "Gorgeous little book about a gorgeous little organ... Mines discourses as varied as sexology, plastic surgery, literature and feminism to produce an eye-opening compendium... The 'tender button' finally gets its due." Janet Sarbanes "God this book is glorious... You will learn and laugh and wonder why it took you so long to find this book." Suzanne Scanlon "The luxury of lingering in pleasure is what Hall's book gives its readers, not only because the subject is at once sexy and scientifically compelling, but because it is rendered with graceful care, delivering in small bites an investigation of the clit that is simultaneously a meditation on the myriad ways in which smallness hides power." The Rumpus"







Stars of the Night Commute


Book Description

"Ana Božic(evic''s work is sort of animist--it's either about silence or the racket of the world. How does she do it? Clicks the switch to say it's silent & it's happening then on a distant tiny stage. She's muttering, and then it's a story and a very good one. I mean in poetry at some point you don't know what the writer means. In Ana's work I watch "it" vanish (all the time) & I trust it."--Eileen Myles.




Moon


Book Description

"Mixing fable and fact, extraordinary and ordinary, Jennifer S. Cheng's hybrid collection Moon: letters, maps, poems draws on various Chinese mythologies about women, particularly that of Chang'E (the Lady in the Moon), uncovering the shadow stories of our myths--with the belief that there is always an underbelly. Moon explores bewilderment and shelter, destruction and construction, unthreading as it rethreads, shedding as it collects."--Page [4] of cover.




Potted Meat


Book Description

Set in a decaying town in southern West Virginia, Potted Meat follows a young Aftican-American boy into adolescence as he struggles with abusive parents, poverty, alcohol addiction, and racial tensions.




Sometimes the Air in the Room Goes Missing


Book Description

Fiction. Dana Green's debut collection of stories, SOMETIMES THE AIR IN THE ROOM GOES MISSING, explores how storytelling changes with each iteration, each explosion, each mutation. Told through multiple versions, these are stories of weapons testing, sheep that can herd themselves into watercolors, and a pregnant woman whose water breaks every day for nine months stories told with an unexpected syntax and a sense of deja vu: narrative as echo. "I love Dana Green's wild mind and the beautiful flux of these stories. Here the wicked simmers with the sweet, and reading is akin to watching birds. How lucky, and how glad I am, to have this book in my hands." Noy Halloand "Language becomes a beautiful problem amid the atomic explosions and nuclear families and strange symmetries and southwestern deserts and frail human bodies blasted by cancer that comprise Dana Green's bracing debut, which reminds us every ordinary moment, every ordinary sentence, is an impending emergency." Lance Olsen"




Descent


Book Description

Poetry. African & African American Studies. Women's Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. In 2013, poet Lauren Russell acquired a copy of the diary of her great-great-grandfather, Robert Wallace Hubert, a Captain in the Confederate Army. After his return from the Civil War, he fathered twenty children by three of his former slaves. One of those children was the poet's great-grandmother. Through several years of research, Russell would seek the words to fill the diary's omissions and to imagine the voice of her great-great-grandmother, Peggy Hubert, a black woman silenced by history. The result is a hybrid work of verse, prose, images and documents that traverses centuries as the past bleeds into the present. "In DESCENT, the very talented poet Lauren Russell shows us how to write what we do not know; to give with grace and dignity, humanity to names on the family tree. DESCENT is a search for truths felt in one's bones."--Brenda Coultas "An audacious, acid, lyrical re-membering that asks, what do we demand of the past, and what to do with its refusal? Russell's deep archive would not answer her back. With DESCENT, however, she speaks to us. Sit all the way down and listen up."--Douglas Kearney "Lauren Russell's stellar new book-length poem...portrays a rich, Black American ancestral record. Sifting nimbly through all manner of documentation and employing form in revelatory ways, Russell's poems are as much ascent into a present shaped by the past as descent from America's true heroic figures."--John Keene




Skin Horse


Book Description

Poetry. Like a secret date with Lizzie Borden, these moody lyrics thrill as they incriminate. SKIN HORSE shows that history is a crime scene, and that crime is theatrical, rife with costumes, masks, hats, props, weapons, scripts, dialogue, wooden scenery and dreamlike reenactments. These poems are anachronistic yet uncannily alive, furtive yet frank like an incriminating note forgotten in an apron pocket. Cronk locks words together like a lace collar which flutters attractively even as it tightens at the reader's throat. She writes, "with velvet trim / in the whistle of seeing." She writes, "Is it too untoward to say Please Go Back to Normal Life?" She writes, "Gotta nest of woe a nest of wail / and pardon my tied-on prom." "If 'the wind cries Mary' sounds to you more like 'The ring pulsed Maria' then you have your ears tuned to Cronk's idiosyncratic sonics. You can't be overtly prepared for Cronk's directions, all you can do is gladly if a little hesitantly follow the paths her word combinations offer: 'Back in the city in chains........ trees typewritering....... I am indeed a nurse.' SKIN HORSE will stimulate some neurons to try some new actions, to scare up some gathering, to be thrilled to be amongst her magnifications." Dara Wier "Welcome to SKIN HORSE: Olivia Cronk's topographical map of a version of the world in which deformed humans squirm through the muck of a mutilated nature: a burning zone of mechanical, brain-dripping horrors, a degraded rendering of the extreme consequences of natural and corporal decay." Daniel Borzutzky"




Disease Is a Mirror


Book Description

Interweaving imagery and prose, Disease Is a Mirror is a lyric memoir exploring illness, identity, intimacy, and the evolving self. Greenquist initially chronicles, and then artfully abstracts, her story, opening “the mirrored door” to the elusive realities of a life-changing diagnosis. Her narrative shows us that a diagnosis is not merely a clinical timeline; it is snails and rabbits, code and lab coats, love and clumsiness. Like an exquisite corpse, Disease Is a Mirror invites readers to explore its intricate and unconventional intersections, each reflection carefully curated; each void, a devastating erasure.