Ellen Kennedy's debut full-length poetry collection. When I finished reading SOMETIMES MY HEART PUSHES MY RIBS I had to go to lunch with people in a restaurant with enormous beverages and misnamed sandwiches. I kept tapping my hand on the table and I didn't listen to anything anybody said. All I wanted to do was go home to read and write the kind of poetry Ellen Kennedy writes, declarative and nervous and wild and free. This is the sort of thing you want. This is the sort of book you should buy and you should buy it now instead of having lunch with those `friends'--Daniel Handler. Ellen Kennedy was born in 1989 and lives in Boston.

    Megan Boyle's debut poetry collection is at once confessional, sociological, emotional, detached, funny, sad, delightful, reckless, and meditative. Written in the naturally meticulous, defaultedly complex, always affecting voice of a person too imaginative and self-aware and intelligent to be fully consumed by depression and loneliness but too aware of the meaninglessness and ephemeral nature of existence (and too depressed and lonely) to write on any level but an existential, emotionally-driven, unsimplified one, Megan Boyle's debut poetry collection is the rare work of art that conveys troubling and scary information, undiluted, about humans and the universe but in a way, ultimately, that makes you excited to be alive, eager to be troubled and scared, grateful to simply be here....unbelievably engaging and mesmerizing. Boyle writes with such openness about living in a world that constantly mystifies you, the strange act of watching yourself do things you can't quite understand, making a mess of things and figuring out how to keep living [...] I can't think of another book quite like it, can't think of a voice as distinctive and strange as Boyle's.--Kevin Wilson, author of The Family FangJust reading this collection, [Megan Boyle] immediately became one of my favorite modern poets.--Benn Ray, WYPR's The Signal[O]ne of the funniest, most satisfying, most original, most satisfying books of poetry I've come across in years.--Rachel Whang, Atomic Books[A] blunt work that challenges the reader, dares the reader to find out what this woman has on her mind. Boyle exhibits a generous exhibitionist quality that leaves one wondering if she might be the next Laurie Anderson.--Nicolle Elizabeth, The Brooklyn Rail

    You Are a Little Bit Happier Than I Am has the energy and oddness of a thing that is rising very fast that is not supposed to be rising, or that is supposed to be rising but for a moment you forget that, and for a moment this ordinary thing looks very strange and exciting

    Then open up Young Americans, seems obvious what Jordan Castro is doing is revolutionary, he expressing emotions through poetry that have never been done before. The style, the way the subject matter is portrayed, even the meter, are new." - Noah Cicero (author of The Human War, The Insurgent, and more)“If you are a person who doesn’t really know what they are doing and you would like to read about another person who doesn’t really know what they are doing either, I recommend reading this poetry book. I enjoyed reading these poems. Or something.” - Chris Killen (author of The Bird Room)“I read these poems three times in one night, then put the duvet over my head and held my knees for a while. It’s good when something makes sense. I really really liked these poems.” - Ben Brooks (author of Grow Up)

    Expanding the palette of contemporary surrealism while harkening back to the stories and prayers at the origin of poetry, DESTRUCTION MYTH is a series of absurdist myths of creation and destruction that are at times both inventively silly and surprisingly emotionally direct. This book attempts the world again and again, only to find that even the most ridiculous of creations contains the seeds of its own destruction.

    You will feel at home eating your own heart off a commemorative plate featuring a picture of your corpse.You won't learn anything except that, "No one can do anything to you that's worse than what you're already thought to yourself. No one can do anything worse to you than the things you've already done. No one can do anything worse to you than you can."

    This debut full-length poetry collection by Ben Mirov was the winning manuscript in the 2009 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, as judged by Michael Burkard.

    In THE REALLY FUNNY THING ABOUT APATHY, Chelsea Martin's charming but merciless prose employs mathematical paradoxes and theories of infinity to examine the inner workings of the bored and culturally over-stimulated while they idly consider the meaning of life. Overwhelmed and assaulted by their own inner monologues, these characters stumble through a series of external events, obsessing over the possible connections and ultimately assigning deep meaning to them.

    From maple ice cream to Z-shaped fire escapes, these poems carry a flashlight you'll want to follow: unexpected as night swimming, entertaining as a music video in sign language.

    Prose that actually feels like the 21st century. Rare. Exhilarating. I love this work.”–Mark Leyner, author of the The Sugar Frosted Nutsack“Heiko Julien’s prose pieces, poems and fragments are where the Buddha meets the internet—the trope of the shark, the void and the triangle in a state of simultaneous orgasm with the holes we feel we need to fill, the terrifying reality, the wanting to be a man of the people (but slightly better than the people) and the fear. Julien is a writer who never says ‘or’ only ‘and.’ This book is non-duality at its most neon.”–Melissa Broder, author of Meat Heart and Scarecrone“What’s constant in Heiko Julien’s work is that he’s engaging directly and nakedly with his experience of being a human being. He’s a poet in the old sense: he’s trying hard to find wisdom and truth, like Socrates or something. That’s an important aspect of literature to keep alive as we move forward into the forms of the Internet. Heiko Julien is a model of someone who refuses to live an unexamined life.”–Steve Roggenbuck, internet bard“I feel excited about Heiko’s writing and I don’t feel excited about many other things I think.”–Ben Brooks, author of Grow Up and Lolito

    "A terse, polemical and often violent book that follows Mark, a disaffected American everyman, through the trailer parks, bedrooms, dive bars and strip joints of humdrum Youngstown, Ohio during the final two hours leading up to the dawn of America's supposed 'War on Terror.'... America's finest literary pariah? You bet"--Dazed & Confused. "This alarmingly well written book is a new voice that has rankled more than enough people back home in America. This vitriolic stance against Bush, God and War is just the book we should be reading in today's climate"--Scarecrow.

    I can think of just about no contemporary poets who publish such consistently great work.” —Corduroy Books “Bob Hicok's poetry is a fleeting comfort, a temporary solace from the chaos of the world. Smart, honest, powerfully inventive, his writing asks the biggest questions while acknowledging that there are no answers beyond the imposed structure of the page.” —Los Angeles Times on This Clumsy Living “The most potent ingredient in virtually every one of Bob Hicok's compact, well-turned poems is a laughter as old as humanity itself, a sweet waggery that suggests there's almost no problem that can't be solved by this poet's gentle humor.” —New York Times Book Review on Insomnia Diary

    Michael Martone is its own appendix, comprising fifty “contributors notes,” each of which identifies in exorbitant biographical detail the author of the other forty-nine. Full of fanciful anecdotes and preposterous reminiscences, Martone’s self-inventions include the multiple deaths of himself and all his family members, his Kafkaesque rebirth as a giant insect, and his stints as circus performer, assembly-line worker, photographer, and movie extra. Expect no autobiographical consistency here. A note revealing Martone's mother as the ghost-writer of all his books precedes the note beginning, “Michael Martone, an orphan . . . “ We learn of Martone’s university career and sketchy formal education, his misguided caretaking of his teacher John Barth’s lawn, and his impersonation of a poor African republic in political science class, where Martone's population is allowed to starve as his more fortunate fellow republics fight over development and natural resource trading-cards. The author of Michael Martone, whose other names include Missy, Dolly, Peanut, Bug, Gigi-tone, Tony's boy, Patty's boy, Junior's, Mickey, Monk, Mr. Martone, and “the contributor named in this note," proves as Protean as fiction itself, continuously transforming the past with every new attribution but never identifying himself by name. It is this missing personage who, from first note to last, constitutes the unformed subject of Michael Martone.

    Christopher holds the spheres of ordinary days and weeks in precarious balance against the shifting field of images and voices that lies behind them. A series of traumas shatters this balance. The parallel narratives recount Christopher's youth in San Francisco, where he struggles within the icy Victorian household of his mother, and his subsequent journey to Bhutan for answers to questions that haunt him. Sea of Hooks is comprised of the shattered fragments of Christopher's world and is driven by the forces that compel him to reassemble it...at any cost.

    Every day we're the strongest we'll ever be. What doesn't kill you hasn't killed you yet." From Greek mythology to Top 40, Pavlov to Sartre, the space station to the zoo, "Everyone I Love is a Stranger to Someone" collides dark humor and unexpected sweetness.