black lawrence press us (809 risultati)

Paperback. Condizione: New. Winner of the Spring 2018 Black River Chapbook Competition In his debut short collection, poet Alan Chazaro takes us from the moonlit Bay Bridge to dark Oakland bars to tire shops to backyards to the fireworks and dirt paths of Mexico City. Chazaro' s speakers battle to find internal truths in a world defined by external opposition. Here, we glide from Frank Ocean to 80s synthpop, from Half Moon Bay to Athens, from Oscar De La Hoya to Wolverine. This is a collection about navigating multiple worlds, about traversing from boyhood into manhood. In poems that crackle with " scorpions in the dark" and " Lauryn Hill' s voodoo" and " fat / Adidas laces and barbershop fades$$ Chazaro explores what it means to curate a sense of self as a millennial first-generation California Chicanx writer. His speakers are driven by a desire to control their identity in a world where they haven' t been able to control much else-as the children of immigrants, as the occupants of ever-shifting spaces, as bodies that belong and don' t belong. Structured like a rap mixtape, each poem on the " track list" is an ode to some vibration of memory, sound, or Chazaro' s native Bay Area landscape. This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album, just as we are not ever actually ourselves-but a collection of fragments from our component influences and cultures, a reflection of the choices we make in search of a more genuine self.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Through intertwined threads of autofiction, lyric science writing, and the tale of a newly queer Hawaiian volcano, Sabrina Imbler delivers a coming out story on a geological time scale. This is a small book that tackles large, wholly human questions- what it means to live and date under white supremacy, to never know if one is loved or fetishized, how to navigate fierce desires and tectonic heartbreak through the rise and eventual eruption of a first queer love.

Paperback. Condizione: New.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Winner of the Fall 2020 Black River Chapbook Competition Dominant Genes, the new hybrid collection from Stonewall Honor author and Lambda Literary Award finalist SJ Sindu, is equal parts power and astonishing beauty, tenderness and shimmering anger, poetry and lyric essays interwoven in a gorgeous exploration of family, heritage, and the construction of nonbinary and queer identities. " We learn our anger through osmosis," Sindu writes of the inherited rage of South Asian women, " or maybe it' s in the breast milk, spreading through our veins long before we learn how to look only at the floor and walk without showing our ankles." There is hope in this collection, and the lead weight of expectation, and warm moments of empathy too. Thematically linked and stylistically nimble, Sindu' s pieces play with the fragmentary nature of memory and identity, her speakers traversing with intelligence and compassion the complexities of mental health, love, and pressurized relationships with the people closest to us- those who love us intensely, even when they understand us the least.

Paperback. Condizione: New. In this collection of flash fiction, Veronica Montes conducts an intimate exploration of the interior lives of eight women searching for voice and agency. Sometimes bewildered by their circumstances, sometimes determined to change them, Montes' characters are driven by desire and despair and a thirst for transformation. They are silenced; they are enraged.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Inspired by Virgie Townsend' s own experiences growing up in an independent fundamental Baptist church, the seven stories in Because We Were Christian Girls examine religious and gender oppression through an unforgettable cast of Christian fundamentalist girls. In the titular story, Townsend writes, " All Christian girls know what happens when they disobey, even if it' s by accident. We end up pregnant, kicked out of our churches, and used as examples in sermons about what happens to disobedient Christian girls. Eventually we go to hell, where we fall for eternity in a dark, fiery pit, bound in rough chains that tear and burn our flesh, deprived of any human contact except for listening to the eternal screams of other Christian girls who are also bound, falling, and should have listened to their elders.".

Paperback. Condizione: New. We Were More than Kindling follows the speaker' s reckoning of an intimate history of persistent sexualization and consent violation with the disillusion of coming of age in an era when abuse of power is a feature, not a bug. This collection of poems builds momentum through a cynical premise, following its speaker' s defiant claim-staking over their own body, agency, and pleasure.

Paperback. Condizione: New.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Jane Morton' s debut chapbook Snake Lore explores the intimacy and violence born of a particular place, weaving a broken narrative fraught with the tangled dynamics of individuals and their environment. This collection is steeped in dirt and framed within the politics of disgust concerning sexuality and the gendered body in the often-fantastical world of the American South. Morton uses formal play to hold contradictions together- a contrapuntal poem to tell two versions of a story, or a string of sonnets, which queer the form from poem to poem, invoking both familiarity and mutation. In these poems, spiritual and religious concerns- the beauty and the harm that they potentiate- converge and haunt.

Paperback. Condizione: New.

Paperback. Condizione: New. In this " hybridiary" of historical fiction and personal memoir, we peer inside baby incubators at Coney Island, waiting for childhood to take wing. We overhear the dying dreams of the Imperial Romanov family, and we fret the simple act of watching a child walk to class. Hope is a bright and constant thread: a tornado cuts a tender swath; a lady bides time inside a tiger' s claws; teenagers preen on screens during pandemic lockdown. Rescues are fumbled but perpetually launched- and love is a gift the way the sun is a gift: constant and consoling, but also blinding, near-obliterating. Tragic, funny, and surreal, FEATHER ROUSING nests in the spaces between caretaking and grief, secret and spectacle, recollection and imagination, global anguish and private joy.

Paperback. Condizione: New. In thirteen slick, innovative, and gut-wrenching flashes, the young women and girls in Breaking Points, the debut chapbook from Chelsea Stickle, hit the walls around them- walls constructed by family, friends, significant others, and insidious cultural perils. " Stranger danger doesn' t disappear when you start wearing a push-up bra," notes one of Stickle' s pre-teen narrators when confronted by a leering threat that will forever sever her path from that of her best friend. In " How to Make Stock with Thanksgiving Leftovers," a queer young woman takes us through a wry recipe for boiling turkey stock and raging against small-minded relatives and the traumas they inflict.

Paperback. Condizione: New. There' s no such thing as society," Margaret Thatcher famously- and cruelly- proclaimed. " There are individual men and women and there are families." Through three stories in Ten More Things About Us, Nancy Welch illuminates the consequences of this philosophy-writ-policy in the very particular lives of women who labor to care for family as devastating illness frays familial ties and tests social consciousness.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Positioned at a nexus of poetry (regarding which our ideas about form condition our expectations for content) and nonfiction (regarding which our ideas about content condition our expectations for form), the poems in Nonfiction are singing essays on race in America and the racialized American self, on child abuse and parenting, on love, and envy, and imprisonment.

Paperback. Condizione: New.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Winner of the Spring 2013 Black River Chapbook Competition Fantastical and disquieting, yet utterly familiar and human in their strangeness, the six short tales in Blake Kimzey' s Families Among Us introduce us to the work of a wildly imaginative and masterfully nuanced new writer. In the tradition of Franz Kafka' s The Metamorphosis, but also of Roald Dahl and Aimee Bender, Kimzey taps into the dark and darkly beautiful plights of six families pitched against mysterious and uncontrollable conditions. We encounter characters at the painful point of transformation: from sea to land, from human body to animal body, from compassion to rejection. When confronted with the surreal, the unknowable, the impossibly strange, we could choose to run. Or we could make the difficult choice, the one that leads us to weirder and better things. Kimzey' s stories ask us to do just that, and in doing so, to be a little more human.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Winner of the Spring 2017 Black River Chapbook Competition The landscape of Amy Sayre Baptista' s Primitivity is mapped by cracked asphalt and dark woods, by broken bridges spanning greedy rivers, sunbaked dirt and ghost roads, sé ances held in gun repair shops, and retribution exacted in long grasses and hog pits and Segway tracks. These nine stories weave together a community borrowed from history and spanning centuries in a re-imagined Pike County, a geographical conundrum found in three different states yet joined by the same hungry river. From strangers to spiritualists to families bound by love and blood, the characters who populate Sayre Baptista' s stories tell tall tales of survivorship in the American south. To enter Primitivity' s pages is to arrive in a harsh yet beguiling topography of ghosts, thieves, and a hangman' s lament.

Paperback. Condizione: New. In 25 TRUMBULLS ROAD, Christopher Locke weaves together a series of eerily gorgeous narratives in which fathers, mothers, children, and dogs stumble into waking nightmares. Each ghostly flash glows with damage, mystery, and inevitability. This enchanting chapbook of tiny horror stories chills and entertains from beginning to end.-Meg Pokrass.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Winner of the Spring 2014 Black River Chapbook Competition From his first appearance on the page, " we knew he was bound for something unsolvable." But a little thing like futility can' t stop our hero from holding up a magnifying glass to a world " so bright it' s impossible to understand." In this searching, provocative collection of coming-of-age sonnets, the sad boy detective listens close, collects the evidence, and reimagines the strange landscapes of a life, a body, a boy, a self. Through a questioning, fervent lens, Sam Sax' s sad boy / detective reminds us how deeply bizarre and at times undecipherable all this existence stuff truly is.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Winner of the 2018 CHAUTAUQUA JANUS PRIZE, celebrating an emerging writer' s single work of short fiction or nonfiction for daring formal and aesthetic innovations that upset and reorder literary conventions, historical narratives and readers' imaginations. Growing up in poverty in the American south, Maya yearns to escape and find something better than anything she' s known. " She is so hungry. It is not food, but everything else, the world . What she needs is not on her street with the one-eyed houses. It is not in the patch of trees she once thought was a forest. It is beyond, somewhere she can' t quite imagine." Brought to vivid and visceral life through Nicole Cuffy' s aching, lyrical prose, Maya' s childhood fascination with anatomy and her adult pursuit of a career in medicine leads her to discover what it means to lose-and what it means to break free. At times raw and at others melodic and tender, Atlas of the Body is a deeply resonant meditation on hunger and the costs of realizing a dream.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Notes on the End of the World is a quiet apocalypse. You won't find explosions or sudden extinctions in Privitello's poems. Here, the days are marked instead by quiet disappearances, abandoned objects, details that might be otherwise overlooked. Objects double as warning signs: "The asbestos siding is a hologram in the leftover sun. / At once, it is a dollhouse made of bones." Animals speak in prophetic visionsThese poems hold a microscope to life's mundane details, but they are also poems of agency- when the apocalypse comes, what use is a "good life?" Privitello asks us to be honest, unflinching. With each passing day, Notes on the End of the World gets louder and quieter, lonelier and lovelier. The end of the world does not look so different from an ordinary day, so pay attention. In the end, Privitello's poems leave room for regret and the hope of redemption- but not much.

Paperback. Condizione: New. In Reddy' s south Louisiana, gods, saints, and sibyls walk among us. Set against the approach and aftermath of a hurricane, Acadiana' s swamps and bayous are liminal spaces where the boundaries between this world and the next, between comfort and catastrophe, are porous. In this sometimes lyrical and sometimes sinister polyvocal collection, the sibyls' oracular voices foretell the approach of the storm and the disaster it leaves in its wake; before her death, the folk-saint Saint Charlene whispers her last invocation to the Lord she can no longer hear; a girl tells the story of being momentarily possessed by the Holy Spirit; and Saint Catherine sits in a lawn chair before a storm, reading the sky for signs: " The sky' s a still and cloudless blue / and tells us nothing. Only certain birds // can guide us. They do not appear." By placing the rituals of Catholic faith alongside ancient practices like augury and divination, these poems ask about the role of ritual and faith in warding off and making sense of disasters, both natural and man-made. The collection closes with the stark, oracular pronouncement of the sibyls, after the storm: " Saved and spared are different / and you will learn that now.".

Paperback. Condizione: New.

Paperback. Condizione: New. In a text that doubles back on itself, revising and reinventing its own trajectory several times over, The Muddy Season is an excavation into narrative form and political oppression. Set in the steaming jungle of a colonial dystopia somewhere in the developing world, The Muddy Season depicts the struggle of an indigenous village to maintain its freedom and dignity in the face of the repressive policies of a racialized bureaucratic state. The villagers alternately press back and stand by as armed forces arrive to impose their tyrannical will: removing newborn babies from their mothers for indoctrination in the capital. Against the backdrop of poverty and overt political conflict, Matthew Raymond presents us with the complex inner struggle of the government agent tasked with overseeing the removal of the infants. As he carries out his duty on behalf of the state, the agent finds himself caught between bureaucratic obligation and his own burgeoning desires. At once enthralling and unflinching, brutal and impassioned, The Muddy Season is a sophisticated, narratively complex story that is as alluring as it is dark." Pulling her blue and wet from her mother and saying quietly, Life is suffering, the midwife smacked her" -and, thus, the reader finds herself thrust into the damp murk of afterbirth and the muddy season: into an absolutely captivating story that is as unflinching as it is bewitching. Told in four parts, The Muddy Season is a sophisticated, scorching story whose narrative choreography unfurls in an electrifying dance between soldiers and villagers, a girl and an agent. With a literary nod to the great innovative novelists Julio Cortá zar and John Fowles, Raymond upends conventional fiction, while maintaining the brutal realism of the world' s bureaucracies and oppressions. Analogous to the two central characters in section IV, in which one character leads and the other trails " into the dark of the jungle beyond" when this author beckons, I too must follow.-Simone Muench, author of Wolf Centos, Trace, and Orange CrushMatthew Raymond' s The Muddy Season is a beguiling and prismatic gem of short fiction, yet bursting with a novel' s share of action, drama, pathos, and idea. In it, Raymond has precision-extracted the best of Cormac McCarthy and Graham Greene and injected the resulting mixture into a universe out of Kafka. Painterly, structurally inventive and darkly moving.-Adrian Van Young, author of Shadows in Summerland and The Man Who Noticed Everything.

Paperback. Condizione: New. A young Au Pair living in Germany reads Goethe' s famous tragedy, The Sorrows of Young Werther, for the first time. Years later, she crafts an answer as she considers the storm of early love in her own life, the drudgery of work, and even Goethe' s later response to his own text. In this exquisite cycle of prose poems, Jenny Drai' s language twists around corners and bends at odd angles, delivering a voice at once deft and aching, sharp and hungry: " passion-trigger-passion. someone, somewhere, worships in a grotto at a shrine to suicide. the pain of. the remittance of. love." The New Sorrow Is Less Than the Old Sorrow navigates the sturm und drang of early love, loss, and distance, and the timeless perplexity of heartbreak.

Paperback. Condizione: New.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Winner of the Spring 2020 Black River Chapbook CompetitionThe poem from which Black Under derives its title opens with a resounding declaration: " I am black and black underneath." These words are an anthem that reverberates throughout Ashanti Anderson' s debut short collection. We feel them as we navigate her poems' linguistic risks and shifts and trumpets, as we straddle scales that tip us toward trauma' s still-bloody knife in one turn then into cutting wit and shrewd humor in the next. We hear them amplified through Anderson' s dynamic voice, which sings of anguish and atrocities and also of discovery and beauty.Black Under layers outward perception with internal truth to offer an almost-telescopic examination of the redundancies- and incongruences- of marginalization and hypervisibility. Anderson torques the contradictions of oppression, giving her speakers the breathing room to discover their own agency. In these pages, declarations are reclamations, and joy is not an aspiration but a birthright.

Paperback. Condizione: New. In Life There Are Many Things is a portrait of adolescent mental illness after the end of history: " I have / this body- / residue- and I don' t know what / left it." This chapbook' s unmoored speakers seek, alternately, to root themselves more firmly in the world and to exit it entirely. Autobiography and allegory merge to track the inexplicable shapeshifting of the self as it ages, heals, dies, and lives again.

Paperback. Condizione: New. At the heart of all violence is fear: Lupine is a gathering of feminist prose poetry engaging themes of ecology, animality, and the human unknown. A series of interconnected dramatic monologues, the poems inhabit the personae of figures traditionally deemed Monstrous, giving them voice to confront and reclaim the violent mythologies that have so often been imposed upon them. As these unmuzzled monsters speak, the collection collapses the boundaries between the self and the subjugated other, ultimately upending the discourse of monstrosity itself. By exposing how women are villainized and sacrificed in response to cultural fear, Lupine offers a corrective to social narratives in which notions of the bestial and notions of the feminine are intimately entwined.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Arriving to the pastoral happens repeatedly and full of worry in The Clearing. For the pastoral stands for the fields of the Holocaust, of the imagination, of the Midwest, of the body, and even the empty field of the blank page. In the absence of knowing how to properly bury our inheritances of the 20th century, Hiton turns to fictive spectacle- to narrative invention, sensory desires, and malleable landscapes- as a last gesture toward hope. As the intellectual ambitions and fears ramp up, the urgency of the body (and the refusal to look at it) does too.