Sam Sax’s A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters, a runner up for the 2013 Button Poetry Prize.

    Jackie Kay tells the story of a black girl's adoption by a white Scottish couple- from three different viewpoints: the mother, the birth mother, and the daughter.

    There is nothing quiet about Schminkey's debut. Every page is raw, honest and unforgettable. Dead Dad Jokes brings the impact of addiction into crisp focus while also shattering our simplistic TV preconceptions about it. Ollie never lets the reader slip into the easy sadness of cliche - instead they guide us through the realities and contradictions of losing someone you love and of death - reminding us that they need not be one and the same.

    Ken, the publisher, here. I couldn't be more thrilled to make this book flesh. This collection of aphorisms concise, eloquent truths contains so much poetry and passion and deep thinking, I've been caught by single pages for hours. This book is sharp, funny, tragic, irreverent, wise. All beauty. It puts fire in me. I invite you to enjoy that fire, too."

    Nobody comes out looking good. The slippery self, surveilled yet ready with her mask, performs a peep show—booth opens wide, yet somehow the dancer isn't there. She's in character. She's "cut off the head to let the humors hose through.

    It's not like he wants to join the Army. But ever since Brayden's post-college plans fell apart, he's needed a major change to get his life back on track – whether or not his older brother Colby approves. If not the Army, then what? It's not easy to find love in the big city. But Ash has a bad habit of searching for it in all the wrong places. When Brayden comes to visit for the weekend, the two get off to an embarrassingly hot start – all the more troubling, because Brayden's supposed to be into girls. No matter how bad Ash would love to indulge a straight guy's curiosities, he knows better than to lay a hand on his roommate's brother. Colby would kill them both if he ever found out! When a winter storm puts a freeze over the city that doesn't sleep, Ash and Brayden find themselves snowed in and out of excuses – and with nobody around to stop them. Can Ash resist the temptation to corrupt the young stud, and dodge a major roommate disaster in the making? Is Brayden actually curious, or is he just using Ash to hurt his brother? Is Brayden destined for the Army ... or will he have a change of plans? Change of Plans is a sweet slice of NYC life for the holidays! This 59,000 word romance novel has an HEA, and no cliffhanger or cheaters. Narrated in alternating first-person past tense.

    With a gift for delicate, violent imagery, Ashe invites us to lose ourselves in her world. Wrong Side of a Fistfight feels like getting lost in the woods, with someone holding your hand promising to guide you home. This is the second book of poems by Ashe Vernon, spoken word poet and author of the blog Late Night Corner Store.

    Aspiring and accomplished writers will find a place to breathe, in both the memoir-stories and tips that seamlessly address major aspects of creative life—from inspiration to individual voice; from helpful habits, networking and publishing, to reasons we create and write. Says the first chapter, "There are so many things standing in my way this morning, I can hardly begin. Yet I've heard there are rumors of water. Maybe that is enough." And apparently it is

    This book chews with its open mouth full of the juiciest words, the most indigestible images. This book undoes me. . . . francine j. harris brilliantly ransacks the poet's toolkit, assembling art from buckets of disaster and shreds of hope. Nothing she lays her mind's eye on escapes. You, too, will be captured by her work."—Evie ShockleyLyrically raw and dangerously unapologetic, play dead challenges us to look at our cultivated selves as products of circumstance and attempts to piece together patterns amidst dissociative chaos. harris unearths a ruptured world dictated by violence—a place of deadly what ifs, where survival hangs by a thread. Getting by is carrying bruises and walking around with "half a skull."From "low visibility":I have light in my mouth. I hunger you. You wantwhat comes in drag. a black squirrel in a black tar lane,fresh from exhaust, hot and July's unearthed steam.You want to watch it run over. to study the sog. You want the stink of gristle buried in a muggy weather.I want the faulty mirage. a life of grass.we want the same thing. We want their deathsto break up the sun.francine j. harris is a 2015 NEA Creative Writing Fellow whose first collection, allegiance, was a finalist for the 2013 Kate Tufts Discovery and PEN Open Book Award. Originally from Detroit, she is also Cave Canem fellow who has lived in several cities before returning to Michigan. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan, and currently teaches writing at Interlochen Center for the Arts.

    From his earliest songs of the 1960s to his years with Island Records, these are the potent lyrics to the international reggae sound that was to make Bob Marley an unforgettable music legend.

    Christ has just been crucified, and they are heartbroken—until a third man joins them on the road and comforts them. Once they reach Emmaus and break bread, the pair realizes they have been walking with Christ himself. But in the moment they recognize him, he disappears. Spencer Reece draws on this tender story in his mesmerizing collection—one that fearlessly confronts love and its loss, despair and its consolation, and faith in all of its various guises.Reece’s central figure in The Road to Emmaus is a middle-aged man who becomes a priest in the Episcopal Church; these poems follow him to New York City, to Honduras, to a hospital where he works as a chaplain, to a prison, to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. With language of simple, lyrical beauty that gradually accrues weight and momentum, Reece spins compelling dramas out of small moments: the speaker, living among a group of orphans, wondering "Was it true, what they said, that a priest is a house lit up?"; two men finding each other at a Coming Out Group; a man trying to become visible after a life that had depended on not being seen.A yearning for connection, an ache of loneliness, and the instant of love disappearing before our eyes haunt this long-awaited second collection from Spencer Reece.

    Lauren Zuniga has made a name for herself for fearlessly confronting legislators and being an ambassador for the Heartland. This collection is the underbelly. No emotion is spared. No image is lost. It is a field guide to blisters and curtsies. It is a chronicle of women/children/animals coming together in a house named Clementine.

    Her previous volumes--Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Practical Water--have addressed earth, air, and water. Here, Hillman evokes fire as metaphor and as event to chart subtle changes of seasons during financial breakdown, environmental crisis, and street movements for social justice; she gathers factual data, earthly rhythms, chants to the dead, journal entries, and lyric fragments in the service of a radical animism. In the polyphony of Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, the poet fuses the visionary, the political, and the personal to summon music and fire at once, calling the reader to be alive to the senses and to re-imagine a common life. This is major work by one of our most important writers. Check for the online reader's companion at brendahillman.site.wesleyan.edu.

    This was published as a Clarkesworld audiobook podcast in 2020.

    These poems dip their hands deep into the fabric of black womanhood, pulling out all of its threads. This book establishes Porsha O firmly in the lineage of black queer poetics, pulling equally from Audre Lorde and Danez Smith. This is a book of gentle breaking and inventive reconstruction. This is a book of self-care, and community-care--the pursuit of building a world that will keep you alive.