. .to come nearer to a realm of experience little explored in American poetry, the lives of those who are engaged in the complex project of transforming their own gender... Oliver Bendorf writes from a paradoxical, new-world position: the adult voice of a man who has just appeared in the world. A man emergent, a man in love, alive in the fluid instability of any category. --Mark Doty, from the ForewordBest Poetry Book of 2014— Entropy Magazine30 Must-Read Poetry Debuts from 2015 — LithubSpectacular Books of 2015 — Split This Rock“Bendorf’s poems give us all we have ever wanted, to wake up and feel that the body we are in is ours, that the hands on the ends of our wrists—our body’s gates of tenderness—are large enough to hold in them all the things we have desired.” —Natalie Diaz, author of When My Brother Was An Aztec“Astonishing.” —The Literary Review“Oliver Bendorf’s poems draw unflinching attention to the process of making… Bendorf strips a poem to its scaffold with an honesty that is at once funny and unbearably sad.” —Blackbird“Bendorf’s collection indeed opens the door to a spectral wilderness, an otherworldly pastoral, a queer ecology endlessly transformed by possibility, grief, and the unruly wanting of our names and bodies. Stunningly lyrical and beautifully theoretical, The Spectral Wilderness is an invitation one cannot turn down; the book calls us to travel with Bendorf, to study the topography of becoming because ‘what we used to be matters’ in the way that language matters— however fleeting, however mistaken, however contradictory it might be.” —Stacey Waite, author of Butch Geography“What gorgeous and ravenous rackets Oliver Bendorf’s poems are made of; what a yearning and beautiful heart. ‘Lift a geode from the ground and crack me open,’ he writes, which is more or less what these poems do for me: break me open to what might sparkle and blaze, what might glisten and burn inside. The Spectral Wilderness is a wonderful book.” —Ross Gay, author of Against Which and Bringing the Shovel Down“The Spectral Wilderness is full of beautiful little bodies, written into being (into becoming) by a maker from whom we’ll continue to be amazed and enchanted.” —Lambda Literary

    . . a powerful interpreter of the American experience.” —The Philadelphia InquirerArguably the most important writer to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ‘30s, Langston Hughes was a great poet and a shrewd and lively storyteller. His work blends elements of blues and jazz, speech and song, into a triumphant and wholly original idiom.Vintage Hughes includes the poems “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “I, Too,” “The Weary Blues,” “America,” “Let America Be America Again,” “Dream Variations,” “Young Sailor,” “Afro-American Fragment,” “Scottsboro,” “The Negro Mother,” “Good Morning Revolution,” “I Dream a World,” “The Heart of Harlem,” “Freedom Train,” “Song for Billie Holliday,” “Nightmare Boogie,” “Africa,” “Black Panther,” “Birmingham Sunday,” and “UnAmerican Investigators”; and three stories from the collection The Ways of White Folks: “Cora Unashamed,” “Home,” and “The Blues I’m Playing.”

    Men with picked voices chant the names of cities in a huge gallery: promises that pull through descending stairways to a deep rumbling.

    Jody is in his forties and runs a map store. Not one for the outside world, he stays in his store all the time. His friend, Carl is in his late thirties and has been bringing chairs of dead friends into Jody's store and leaving them there. When Jody needs to take an AIDS test, Carl tries to convince him it is not only okay to leave the store, but also that he must take responsibility for his life. If he doesn't, he will join the set of chairs that Carl has taken great pains to place in the right spots around the store. Jody finally leaves the map store to take his HIV test and return to find Carl sitting in a chair of his own. With this gesture, we know that Carl has joined the many of their friends who have died, but now Jody must take Carl's place as the caretaker.

    Here, the body is a fixation-as if to look away from it, even briefly, is to risk having it erased. As such, this is a book of unblinking human preservation, and how we trespass ourselves seeking safer spaces. "There is nothing I love more than an honest storm," Espinoza writes. There Should Be Flowers is a storm to ravage and rearrange us from our crushing certainties. This book doesn't need a blurb. It simply needs to be read."-Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds

    Narrated by a speaker in mourning marked as an at-risk juvenile, psychologically troubled, an offender, expelled and sent to alternative school for adolescents with behavioral issues, and eventually, a psychiatric hospital, she survives the school to prison pipeline, the immigrant working class condition, grueling low- pay service jobs, conservative classism against Latinos in Texas, queerness, assimilation, and life wrapped up in frivolous citations, fines, and penalties. The traumatic catalyst for the long line of trouble begins with the death of a beloved young grandmother from preventable cervical cancer—another violence of systemic racism and sexism that prevents regular reproductive and sexual health care to poor immigrant communities—and the subsequent deaths of other immigrant family members who are mourned in the dissociative states amidst the depressive trauma that opens the book. The dissociative states that mark the middle—a surreal kind of shadowland where the narrator encounters her animal self and ancestors imagined as animals faces brutal surreal challenges on the way back to life beyond trauma—is a kind of mictlan, reimagined as a state of constant mourning that challenges American notions of "healing" from trauma, and rather acknowledges sadness, mourning, and memory as a necessary state of constant awareness to forge a "way back" toward a broader healing of earth, time, body, history.

    To anyone familiar with this writer -- whom the New York Times calls "taut, chillingly ironic," the Washington Post Book World terms "brilliant," and the Village Voice deems capable of "religious intensity" -- it will come as no surprise that before he achieved success as a novelist, Dennis Cooper was best known as a poet. The Dream Police collects the best poems from five of his previous books and also includes a selection of new works. From his darkly erotic early verse to the more refined, post-punk poems that led critics to dub him "the spokesman for the Blank Generation," to his later experimental pieces, Cooper's evolving study of the distances and dangers in romantic relationships has made him a singular voice in American poetry. The Dream Police is a vital addition to Dennis Cooper's riveting and disarming vision of life, love, obsession, and the depths of human need. "There can be no doubt about the power and originality of Cooper's writing." -- The Washington Post Book World; "Cooper's vision is at first intense, nearly minimal, then suddenly it ascends into vision." -- Kathy Acker; "In another country or another era, Dennis Cooper's books would be circulated in secret, explosive samizdat editions that friends and fans would pass around and savor like forbidden absinthe. He would risk his life for them, or maybe he'd just be sent to a mental asylum, like the Marquis de Sade, to whom he has been compared. This is high risk literature. It takes enormous courage for a writer to explore, as Mr. Cooper does, the extreme boundaries of human behavior and amorality, right to the abyss where desire and lust topple to death." -- Catherine Texier, The New York Times Book Review.

    But these unpretentious vignettes are laced with compassion, as she learns to balance the sting of death with the tender strangeness of life.

    I've had that lesson beaten into me ever since I was a child. Some people might think that's a tragedy, but not me. Because you know what's even better than love?Power.I clawed my way to the top of the food chain and became the leader of the Beaufort crime syndicate at only twenty years old. Now, nobody crosses me and lives to tell the tale. There's just one little problem:You don't build an empire without making a few enemies.My past is coming back to haunt me with a vengeance, but I have no intention of going down without a fight. Hiring a K-9 handler for added security was a simple business decision.But I wasn’t counting on Ayla. Aloof attitude, dark hair, tattoos--exactly my type. She’s far more than just a K-9 handler, and I want to peel back that carefully composed exterior and see what’s underneath.I know I'm bad for her, but sometimes, being bad feels too good to stop. I just hope we both make it out of this alive.AYLAI’ve always had three rules for how I handle my work: Get in. Get the job done. And don’t get invested.When a mysterious client offered me a fabulous sum of money to come work for them, I jumped at the opportunity. I thought it would be just another job.Turns out I probably should have asked a few more questions.Now I'm stuck working for a woman who is equal parts terrifying and gorgeous. My new employer has a reputation for being ruthless, and I've seen firsthand what she's capable of. She crushes hardened criminals beneath the point of her stiletto heels without breaking a sweat.I should be running away from her as fast as I can.So why can't I get her out of my head?

    . . . Each poem adds its incisive particulars to the general stoic wreck; but what startles, then reassures in all this canon of the inconsolable, the unsanctified, the dispossessed, is Hugo’s poetics, the analogy of language to experience. . . . Richard Hugo is such an important poet because the difficulties inherent in his art provide him a means of saying what he has to say. It is no accident that he must develop a negative in order to produce a true image.”

    White's deliberate, dominating voice evokes a Plath-like dynamism turned on to queer pleasure and displeasure, indulgence and raison d'être, the bedevilments of a gay bitch on the pole.

    In poised yet unrelenting lyric poems, Shanahan—queer and mixed-race—confronts the challenges of a complex cultural inheritance, informed by colonialism and his mother’s immigration to the United States from Morocco, navigating racial constructs, sexuality, family, and the globe in search of “who we are to each other . . . who we are to ourselves.” With poems that weave from Marrakesh to Zürich to London, through history to the present day, this book is, on its surface, an uncompromising exploration of identity in personal and collective terms. Yet the collection is, most deeply, about intimacy and love, the inevitability of human separation and the challenge of human connection. Urging us to reexamine our own place in the broader human tapestry, Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing announces the arrival of a powerful and necessary new voice.

    40 Haiku in English inspired by the practice of Zen Buddhism and Zazen (seated meditation) in particular.I hope you enjoy!

    is a reflection on the what ifs, the almosts, and every blown dandelion wish. This work confesses the words never said; the naivet� of a first love, the echoing absence of what could have been, and the awareness of self-significance. Written from a LGBTQ perspective, this collection is pertinent for any member to confide in. It also explores the self-discovery in sexuality and the bravery of coming out, even in fear. Divided into three separate parts, each chapter displaying how the heart acts during different emotional moments in life. This book is best read in a bookstore, cafe, or in the comfort of your home.

    He didn’t realize that learning how to dance and exercise at the same time would change his life. Years have gone by since his break-up and Salsex has become a regular part of who he is. Things are okay for Jason, though he doesn’t have anyone special in his life. After his last long-term relationship exploded so spectacularly, he has resigned himself to the foregone conclusion that he won’t ever find another long-term boyfriend. He’s slowly settling into the idea that he’ll be single forever when Taylor walks into his life. Taylor’s career in football hit a roadblock when the bones in his arms were shattered after an accident. Now that Taylor is recovering, he needs to do some cardio so that he’s in tip top shape when he goes back to playing football. Taylor’s aspirations are more academic than athletic, however, but it doesn’t matter, He needs his sports scholarship to continue his degree. When Taylor walks into Jason’s Salsex class, all he expects is an interesting and fun way to do the cardio part of his exercise routine. What he gets is Jason, a gorgeous Salsex instructor who makes him question everything that he thought he knew about himself. At first, Taylor thinks that he may have just found a friend, but when Jason calls him after a personal crisis, Taylor realizes that everything has changed for him. That, added to a roommate that may or may not be sabotaging his potential relationship with Jason – if it can even be called that – and his celebrity status in a small city are enough to further to complicate things. When Jason’s ex-boyfriend shows up to his apartment, Jason needs to confront a lot of issues that he thought he had left behind years ago, when all he wants to focus on is the gorgeous man that keeps going to his Salsex class. Can they overcome life’s obstacles to come together or will it all be too much for them? Please Note: This book contains Adult Language & Steamy Adult Activities, it is intended for 18+ Adults Only. Novel, approx. 70,000+ words in length. HEA (happy ever after ending). Does not end with a "cliffhanger".