[ artful autobiographical writing ]
PROSE [2nd gen design]
ABOUT THE BOOK
Inspired to “take a break from life” by the idyllic housesitting situation they were offered for the summer, Aaron and Amber find themselves in Aaron’s hometown of Tacoma, Washington. Amber works her remote job, Aaron tries to write and goes for runs along the waterfront, and they explore their temporary summer city on daily walks and regular excursions. Soon, noticing that the landscape seems to keep shifting around them, Aaron starts drawing a map of it all, attempting to document and make sense of the changes. When Tacoma starts to open up bigger and bigger with possibility and wonder, Tacoma starts to fold in on itself, becoming both more self-referential and more like the spontaneous, fantastical stories Aaron has been writing. A friend rides an orca to come visit. Pirates guard a wormhole in the forest. A secret doorway in the Tacoma Mall tunnels back to Aaron’s childhood bedroom. Blending autofiction with fantasy, meta with magic, and earnestness with absurdity, Tacoma presents a recognizable but also magical world where we ask, if nothing is real, then why not have as much fun as possible?
PRAISE FOR TACOMA
“A charming story of coupling and nostalgia. This airy romance, much like its summer-home setting, is both beautifully constructed and packed with secret rooms. Tacoma feels like a new Burch era, though it's packed with plenty of what I've always loved. As always, Burch’s self-assured prose shines.”
—Amelia Gray, author of Isadora
“Aaron Burch's Tacoma is a shape-shifting feat of pure magic. It's a book about friendship and love and the moments in life that lift you up so you can see just how perfect and strange it all is. Big-hearted, playful, ironic, and yet somehow also strikingly sincere, this is the kind of book you read straight through, all the while hoping it will never end.”
—Colin Winnette, author of Users
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aaron Burch grew up in Tacoma, Washington.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: February 10, 2026
Print Length: 136 pages
Dimensions: 5 × 8 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-45-5
ABOUT THE BOOK
Lauren Lavín is trying to embrace the boundaries imposed upon life by love and death. But there are distractions: the younger brother she lost to suicide, the friends and ex-lovers who’ve passed, her husband’s illness and fear of dying, her own pull toward the abyss. In The Third Beat, Lavín examines her related impulses to seek, to be seen, to exit the body (through sex, music, alcohol, humor), and to return into it. With liberating scope and candor, Lavín’s short essays consider the ways that we consume ourselves and allow ourselves to be consumed: in grief, in a lover’s eye, in obsessive patterns, in decay, in pursuit of the perfect punch line. And much like comedy’s rule of three, expectations in The Third Beat exist to be subverted. Lavín’s fast and loud prose always renders her existential dread captivating and alive. Rather than answers, Lavín offers pauses at the places our minds are afraid to stop.
PRAISE FOR THE THIRD BEAT
“Lavín’s essays are an intoxicating brew of honesty and heart. This is a collection to read when you’re lost and return to after you find your way. Sharp and furious, gentle and understanding, the way Lavín writes life will make you forget to breathe. The Third Beat seduced me from page one.”
—LJ Pemberton, author of Still Alive
“Lauren Lavín's debut essay collection is a phenomenal work of full-bodied honesty. The Third Beat is a book for anyone who's found it hard to see or be themselves in a world that demands we carry the weight of its constant and, often erroneous, perceptions, i.e. everyone. The best non-fiction I've read this year.”
—Jillian Luft, author of Scumbag Summer
"Lauren Lavín’s The Third Beat is a visceral, spellbinding meditation on the body, both how to inhabit it more fully and how to leave it, and how sometimes that looks like the same thing. Lavín’s work rides that thrilling edge between excruciation and euphoria, digging into the uncomfortable gray, and the effect is a raw, bloody honesty which blurs and deepens everything surrounding it. You cannot be fully open to the beauty of life without being intimate with death, and Lavín knows that. Meaning: you want to feel fucking alive? Read this book.”
—Emily Costa, author of Girl on Girl
"In under a hundred pages, Lauren Lavín's essays in The Third Beat boldly cover sex, art, comedy, the body, travel, and, of course, death. She writes with blunt ferocity, unapologetic about the desire to be seen and wanted. I’d follow her voice anywhere she leads me. Maybe right off a cliff.”
—Kristen Felicetti, author of Log Off
“I love seeing the world through Lauren Lavín’s eyes. The Third Beat has the same effortlessly cool depiction of adolescence on the fringes as cult classics like Reality Bites and Slacker. Full of Bay Area punk shows, skater boys, and garage bands, Lavín’s essay collection is a portal to another time—but instead of the soft-edged nostalgia these types of stories are so often packaged in, her prose reveals the pain of yearning to belong in a world not built for outcasts. Like the people in these stories, The Third Beat is as cool as it is honest.”
—Shelby Hinte, author of Howling Women
“The Third Beat reimagines the essay collection as an altar—a lyric meditation on ghosts, night terrors, and self-destruction. It chronicles an era defined by skate parks, indie bands, and pre-internet ventures where a slimy entrepreneur could build a billion dollar business in a trash can. Lavín writes the way Frida Kahlo paints: visceral self-revelations, brutal in their honesty, that will leave readers devastated, alive, and begging for more.”
—Ryan-Ashley Anderson, Managing Editor of Pool Party, and Kevin Maloney, author of The Red-Headed Pilgrim
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lauren Lavín was made in Mexico, born in Oakland, and currently lives in Seattle.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: February 3, 2026
Print Length: 98 pages
Dimensions: 5 × 7 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-46-2
ABOUT THE BOOK
It takes a lot of work to erase the rules of being a teenage girl.
Desperate to know what behaviors would produce the “right” adolescence, during the late 1990s Kristine Langley Mahler sought instruction from outdated etiquette guides and Seventeen magazine to subdue her central fear: how to convince someone to choose her. Twenty years later, married and mothering three adolescent daughters of her own, Mahler stumbles upon a 1963 edition of The Seventeen Book of Etiquette and Entertaining—elegant, archaic directives that push her right back into her old frustrations and propel the creation of Teen Queen Training: a series of 26 erasure essays created from its 26 chapters, illuminating the differences between what she was told and what she really learned.
PRAISE FOR TEEN QUEEN TRAINING
“From the chapters of an overwrought 1963 etiquette manual for girls, Kristine Langley Mahler has gifted us with a series of concise, insightful, and often playful texts that turn the mirror back on the contrivance of its source material. In Teen Queen Training, Mahler serves as a different kind of guide from the original—wise, knowing, and experienced in navigating the minefield of instruction, expectations, and limitations that American girlhood can be. ‘The real problem for every unattached female,’ she tells us, ‘is the expectation that a kiss has value.’ Mahler finds the pointed needles of language in each haystack of admonition, reminding us that the messy and problematic artifacts of our past can—and perhaps must be—inverted, subverted, and made new.”
—Mary-Kim Arnold, author of Litany for the Long Moment
“Using subversive technique, Mahler’s Teen Queen Training transforms the prescriptive advice of a mid-century etiquette manual about how young women are taught to be. Form meets content in these essays, where the act of crossing out becomes a critique of the very lessons meant to shape girlhood. Inventive and haunting, Teen Queen Training is a bold look into the possibilities of the genre.”
—LaTanya McQueen, author of And It Begins Like This
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kristine Langley Mahler is the author of A Calendar Is a Snakeskin and Curing Season: Artifacts. Her work has been supported by the Nebraska Arts Council and Art at Cedar Point and thrice named Notable in Best American Essays. A memoirist experimenting with the truth on the suburban prairie outside Omaha, Nebraska, Kristine is also the director of Split/Lip Press. Find more about her projects at kristinelangleymahler.com.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: February 17, 2026
Print Length: 160 pages
Dimensions: 5 × 8 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-43-1
ABOUT THE BOOK
Erin Slaughter's father was murdered by his newlywed wife the night before Erin's senior year of high school began. In the years following, her family was fractured by cancer, alcoholism, and estrangement, and Erin entered her coming-of-age attempting to leave the trauma of the murder in her past (except when she joked about it inappropriately to new friends and on first dates), while secretly navigating her own struggles with addiction and mental illness. As she sought to understand her father's complicated past and how it led him to marry the woman who killed him, Erin became the collector of artifacts and retracer of family histories, redefining the "five stages of grief" for her own fragmented experience. Part true-crime story, part poetic meditation on seeking to know a parent posthumously, The Dead Dad Diaries confronts the impact of domestic violence and hereditary addiction on a family lineage, and questions the extent to which we can trust the stories we tell ourselves about our memories, our lives, and the people in them.
PRAISE FOR THE DEAD DAD DIARIES
“This raw, unflinching memoir is a love letter to the author’s fractured family and to her devastated (and devastating) teenage self. The Dead Dad Diaries is a remarkable collage of surviving unimaginable loss and heartbreak.”
—Betsy Bonner, author of The Book of Atlantis Black
“The Dead Dad Diaries is one of the most powerful and moving memoirs I’ve ever read. In gorgeous, devastating, and inventive prose, Slaughter deconstructs and rewrites traditional narratives about grief, family, and identity. Here, grief doesn’t come and go in stages; grief becomes part of Slaughter’s identity, shaping who she is, who she becomes, and who and what she lets into her life. The Dead Dad Diaries is a powerful examination of how family both heals and harms us, how we are all our own people and, at the same time, shaped by our pasts and the people who populated them—and by their pasts, too. This is a book that will take you apart and put you back together as a new person, smarter, more whole, and with a deeper understanding of how we become who we are. I’m in awe of what Erin Slaughter achieves in these pages.”
—Emma Bolden, author of The Tiger and the Cage: A Memoir of a Body in Crisis
“Grief is not a linear process—it slinks and slithers its way through what is left behind. Some days it hangs heavy like Alabama humidity a few hours before the sky opens up. In The Dead Dad Diaries, Erin Slaughter collages the loss of her father, as she says, 'archiving our parents' fears and mistakes'—a careful unearthing of the fossils of a beast that she simultaneously knew intimately, but not constantly. Slaughter graciously allows us to witness this excavation in all of its forms, allowing the reader to take comfort and solace in the shapes we recognize."
—Brian Oliu, author of Body Drop: Notes on Fandom and Pain in Professional Wrestling
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Erin Slaughter is the author of the short story collection A Manual for How to Love Us (Harper Perennial, 2023), and two books of poetry: The Sorrow Festival (CLASH Books, 2022) and I Will Tell This Story to the Sun Until You Remember That You Are the Sun (New Rivers Press, 2019). Her writing has appeared in Lit Hub, Electric Literature, CRAFT, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Originally from Texas, she holds an MFA from Western Kentucky University and a PhD from Florida State University. She is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Coastal Carolina University.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: September 23, 2025
Print Length: 278 pages
Dimensions: 6 × 9 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-40-0
ABOUT THE BOOK
Lena Ziegler doesn't know how to talk about love. In 2017, five years after she had been raped by a stranger on the morning after her twenty-third birthday, she came to a startling realization: three out of four of her serious relationships also involved rape that she had never acknowledged, or named, up until that point. She spent the next five years researching sexual violence and excavating the darkest parts of herself and her life to compose A Revisionist History of Loving Men, a personal and critical exploration of the sexual scripts that exist between women and men, and the normalization of sexual violence as a routine part of heterosexual relationships in the landscape of American rape culture. Braiding memoir, scholarly research, fragmented lyricism, and cultural commentary, this book is as much a reclamation of the self, as it is an invitation for all of us to reimagine what we consider "normal" when it comes to love and sex, and how easy it is to lose oneself along the borderlines.
“A Revisionist History of Loving Men is beautifully rendered proof that the moments we live through live on inside us, permeating flesh and psyche; trauma is an ever-shifting narrative offering no clear answers, no easily won happy endings—but the opportunity to reclaim one's own story in its barest joys, horrors, and contradictions. Ziegler expertly braids the raw truth of her lived experiences with sharp and vital scholarly critique on cultural myths of love, sexual violence, and the failings of language to represent their many nebulous intersections. This book is nothing short of an exorcism, radiant and burning: a house fire, a signal flare, a beacon.”
—Erin Slaughter, author of A Manual for How to Love Us
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lena Ziegler is a multi-genre writer with a special interest in hybrid work. Her writing has appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Indiana Review, Literary Orphans, Miracle Monocle, Duende, Dream Pop Press, Anti-Heroin Chic, Gambling the Aisle, and others, and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is a co-founder of the literary journal and press The Hunger. She holds an MFA from Western Kentucky University and a PhD from Bowling Green State University. She is the host of the music and literature podcast Reading Michael Jackson, available on all major podcast platforms. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband. She believes in magic, the transformative power of language, and the resilience of the human heart. You can find her online at www.lenaziegler.com.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: September 30, 2025
Print Length: 210 pages
Dimensions: 5.5 × 8.5 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-41-7
ABOUT THE BOOK
“What does it mean to dissolve into one’s text?” Naomi Washer asks in Marginalia: An Autobiography. Comprised of a decade’s worth of notes made in the margins of other writers’ books, collected and arranged into an original work, Marginalia accumulates into an essay that interrogates both its own form and its author’s sense of self. From her own readings of writers like Kate Zambreno, Roland Barthes, Maggie Nelson, and Robert Walser, among countless others, Washer arrives at an uncanny rediscovering of a self both her and not, visible and hidden. And in the act of re-reading, she distills the experience of one’s ongoing transformation in writing and everyday life.
PRAISE FOR MARGINALIA
“Naomi Washer’s introspective approach beautifully shows us that literature can be our most enduring and provoking companion. At once poetic and psychoanalytical, Washer’s fragmented curation of side notes keeps us hooked on the dialogue unfolding between past versions of herself. Marginalia is an original, intimate work that prompts reflection on how our relationships to books can change us, and how those ties evolve.”
—Mrittika Ghosh, Skunk Cabbage Books
“Naomi Washer’s Marginalia made me wonder what books she was annotating—and in that wondering, those books emerged like ghosts. I imagined a book’s margins as its hidden spine, quietly holding the text together. I love how Washer illuminates the invisible life of reading, and for how she conjures the intimate, unseen dialogue between reader and text.”
—Claire Donato, author of Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts
“With Marginalia, Naomi Washer puts into words the offhand impressions, half-thoughts, and sensations that constitute our inner lives, that give them depth. Together, these collected fragments reveal how the act of reading shapes writing, or more generally, creativity, but also how it shapes a self, rendering the world legible. How reading works its magic in ways both formative and generative—you just might find yourself writing your own notes around the edges of this searching, beautiful book.”
—Deborah Shapiro, author of Consolation
“Marginalia is a book that interests itself in space both empty and occupied—the marginal space that surrounds text on the page and the physical space that surrounds its reader, who might also be its author. Washer understands that a room's grammars—the colors of its surfaces, the textures of its interruptions, and the windows that illuminate its corners—are responsible for the making of the reader inside it. Marginalia's narrator is this reader: a woman theorized in the third person, a self described in the second, and a fiction slouched into the first. Syntax, Washer underlines for us, is something to be worn like a black velvet dress.”
—Claire Foster, Type Books
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Naomi Washer is a writer and psychoanalyst in formation in New York City. She is the author of a novel, Subjects We Left Out (Veliz Books, 2021), and several chapbooks across genre. Her work has appeared in the anthology In the Footsteps of a Shadow: North American Literary Responses to Fernando Pessoa (MadHat Press, 2025), Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Seneca Review, Asymptote, Essay Daily, and other journals. She writes Process Notes about psychoanalytic thoughts on reading and subjectivity, and hosts the podcast Reading Around the Margins.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: September 16, 2025
Print Length: 72 pages
Dimensions: 5 × 7 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-39-4
ABOUT THE BOOK
Katharine Coldiron sees her life through a film projector. She watches The Sound of Music and observes that time is peculiarly preserved in a narrative film; she watches Singin' in the Rain and finds truth and falsehood layered in it like dental veneers; she watches Apocalypse Now and thinks about her father, and a certain Pulitzer-winning photograph of an American POW. Out There in the Dark is a dynamic collection of essays that blends film criticism with memoir and fiction, as well as lists, visual diagrams, and Wikipedia collaging. It plumbs deeply some of our most knotted, abstract concepts: truth, kindness, the West, the female body, war, and—inevitably—Hollywood.
PRAISE FOR OUT THERE IN THE DARK
“Katharine Coldiron’s iconoclastic critical gaze and decadent prose alchemize cinema and autobiography into a book as vivid and resonant as the classic films within. Out There in the Dark is a hybrid wonder, a must.”
—Henry Hoke, author of Open Throat
“Katharine Coldiron’s essays are a marvelous combination of personal and pop cultural reflections, seen through the lens of the films she’s loved. Out There in the Dark threads its way somewhere between Roland Barthes and Emily Nussbaum, resulting in a collection that is thoughtful, trenchant, and keenly observed.”
—Elizabeth Gonzalez James, author of The Bullet Swallower
“Out There in the Dark is jargon-free, provocative, persuasive, and insightful. The critical intelligence in the imaginative position: this is what Katharine Colidron deploys to a remarkable degree and across an impressively wide range of material.”
—David Shields, author of Reality Hunger
“A luminous object lesson in how we create our selves out of our experience of art, in the meaning that making meaning out of art can make out of our lives, Katharine Coldiron's Out There in the Dark is surprising and moving whether it's taking on Apocalypse Now or Alien from L.A. Sometimes mournful, sometimes ecstatic, always insightful and personal, Coldiron's hybrid essays are a joy to read and think through.”
—Gabriel Blackwell, author of Madeleine E. and Doom Town
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Katharine Coldiron is the author of Ceremonials, Junk Film, and Wire Mothers. Her work as a book critic has appeared in the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, and many other places; as an an essayist, in Conjunctions, Ms., Booth, and elsewhere. She and her books have been profiled in three countries on radio and television. Find her at kcoldiron.com.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: June 17, 2025
Print Length: 160 pages
Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-37-0
ABOUT THE BOOK
E.N. Couturier has decided, against the wishes of everyone in her life, to work on a vegetable farm after her college graduation instead of going to grad school. In a series of diaristic entries, Organic Matter documents Couturier’s experience in the fields and hoop houses over the course of one growing season as she labors alongside an eccentric cast of characters. The work is mundane, brutal, and often absurd. Pea plants slip free of their twine, diamond squash bugs munch the blighted cucumbers, and Couturier’s joints grow stiff and swollen as her alienation from the urban world beyond the farm grows. With incisiveness and wry humor, Couturier grapples with her uncertain future and the uncertain future of the land that sustains us. Organic Matter paints a luminous portrait of the rural ecosystem that feeds the city and explores one perceptive young woman’s relationship with faith, labor, love, family, the body, and the ground.
PRAISE FOR ORGANIC MATTER
“E.N. Couturier writes, ‘If you don't think you could love a place eventually, you can't survive it.’ In her moving, fragmented, essayistic memoir, Couturier has captured viscerally the exhausting, knee-cracking, yet always lively and surprising work on a small farm. This book sneaks up on you--come for the food writing, for the thousands of pounds of cabbage, the spinach growing sweaty in its farmers market bags, and stay for the rousing meditations on faith, family, and making your own way in early adulthood.”
—Krys Malcolm Belc, author of The Natural Mother of the Child
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
E.N. Couturier is an award-winning journalist and recreational farmer. Organic Matter is her first book. Her work has appeared in numerous Maine news outlets, on local radio and in publications including New World Writing, Peripheries, Eclectica Magazine, FRiGG, and jmww, and has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She never did go to graduate school.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: June 24, 2025
Print Length: 174 pages
Dimensions: 5 x 8 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-38-7
ABOUT THE BOOK
Andrew Bertaina is going through a mid-life crisis: failed marriage, child-rearing, self-doubt, ennui, the works. Naturally, Bertaina does what any of us would do; he draws inspiration from the poster boy of mid-life crisis chroniclers, the 16th-century essayist Michele de Montaigne, channeling misgivings into meditations, lostness into longing. The essays in The Body Is A Temporary Gathering Place deal with a variety of timeless and universal topics: e.g., how to woo a French woman on a train, male caregiving, how to cannibalize your spouse, and the riddle of time. The essays promise no answers. They do, however, strive to capture the beauty that lingers in a life passing all too quickly.
PRAISE FOR THE BODY IS A TEMPORARY GATHERING PLACE
“The essays in this beautiful book are not only elegant meditations on parenthood, marriage, and the passage of time; they are celebrations of the simple pleasures of life—a first kiss, a quiet morning coffee, the way light fills a room. I was profoundly moved by this collection and by Bertaina’s graceful and unflinchingly honest prose. Here is a writer unafraid to make himself vulnerable on the page, and the result are essays that resonate with authenticity and insight.”
—Andrew Porter, author of The Disappeared
“In The Body Is A Temporary Gathering Place, Andrew Bertaina indulges his ‘near erotic delight’ in digression to bring us a book of quietly transcendent essays. God, cows, trains, ex-lovers, the Bermuda Triangle, 80s movies, the philosophers of ancient Greece, fatherhood, the writing life—it’s all here, the world, in its enormity and specificity. To read these essays is akin to awakening in a train’s sleeping car and looking out at a landscape that overnight has indelibly changed. Who am I now? you ask, turning a page. Who have I been?”
—Steve Edwards, author of Breaking Into the Backcountry
“In The Body Is A Temporary Gathering Place, Andrew Bertaina brings us essays that balance the longing of an outsider with the intimacy of a denizen. As a result, we have a lyric collection that offers up a master class in psychic distance wherein the reader is danced adagio through worlds both dreamy and true. The prose in this debut book of nonfiction is sentient, willing, always, to double back on itself with harder questions or to sit long enough in front of a mirror for meaning to either emerge or erode. And what a feat, to create tension out of intelligence on every page. Bertaina’s wry voice will float you through the uncertainties, his poetry will crack open your heart.”
—Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams, author of The Man Who Danced With Dolls
“Andrew Bertaina’s The Body Is A Temporary Gathering Place is one of those rare, magical books you can open to any page and find a sentence so perfect you won’t stop thinking about it for days. In fewer than two hundred pages, Bertaina takes you on a years-long journey through one man’s thought-life as he enters middle age. It deals with kids, marriage, divorce, art, trains, bathing, and plants. It deals with life and death. It deals with those things, but it’s not about those things. ‘An essay can only be about everything,’ Bertaina says in another one of his perfect sentences. This book is about everything.”
—Mike Nagel, author of Duplex and Culdesac
“The Body Is a Temporary Gathering Place is a collection of personal essays exploring the inner life of Andrew Bertaina, a divorced father who is torn in too many directions at once. He’s simultaneously a philosopher, a writer, a university lecturer, a father, a photographer, a history buff. In this collection, he captures the struggles of trying to balance responsibilities with personal aspirations.”
—Independent Book Review
“Bertaina’s collection of essays dances gracefully between offbeat humor and existential dread.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“These essays are not predictable; they bend and loop and expand like a sunlit path through Dante’s dark woods.”
—TriQuarterly
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Bertaina is the author of the short story collection One Person Away From You (2021), which won the Moon City Short Fiction Award. He has an MFA from American University in Washington, D.C., where he currently lives with his wife and four children. You can find more of his work at andrewbertaina.com.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: May 28, 2024
Print Length: 188 pages
Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-30-1
ABOUT THE BOOK
At 21, Holly Pelesky gets pregnant after her second time having sex. She decides to place her daughter up for adoption and then move far away from her fundamentalist Christian upbringing to start a new life. Cleave is a tight collection of epistolary creative nonfiction that examines the ambiguous grief of being a birth mother caught in the momentum of adulthood and the constant choices that come along with it. In these letters to the daughter she didn’t keep, Pelesky attempts to make peace with the decisions she’s made as a mother and those she's made as someone’s child. Full of hard realizations and tender moments, this book will break and mend your heart.
PRAISE FOR CLEAVE
“Adoptees might spend their lives wondering ‘Who Am I?’ but so do birth mothers who surrender their children. With unflinching honesty, Holly Pelesky considers the confounding nature of ‘love in absence’ that characterizes the relationship between her and the child she didn’t raise. Nuanced, compassionate, and fearless, Cleave confronts the complexity of the human heart.”
—Jody Keisner, author of Under My Bed and Other Essays
“In spare chapters that read like epistolary confessions to the daughter she placed up for adoption, Pelesky grapples with what it means to choose a life, a love. With sharp, lyrical sentences and the raw reveal of her prose, it is clear she lives her life the way she delivers lines on the page: with unflinching honesty and careful intention. CLEAVE is a masterful look into what it means to be a mother, a daughter, a wife—but most of all, how to fall in love with yourself.”
—Dina L. Relles, editor at Pidgeonholes
“Driven by a razor-sharp voice piping with insight, power, and grace; Pelesky's Cleave will empty the ashtray in your heart and replenish it with kisses and hard candies. You will put this book down only to come up for air!”
—Jessica Anne, author of A Manual for Nothing
“A powerful new addition to the memoir genre, perfectly balancing formal innovation with heartbreaking and moving reflections on what it means to be a mother and how to make a life that is truly one’s own.”
—Joe Neary, Chicago Review of Books
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Holly Pelesky writes essays, fiction, and poetry. She was once a homeschooled kid living in the suburbs of Seattle but has spent her adulthood in the Midwest, outgrowing her Fundamental upbringing. She received her MFA from the University of Nebraska. She works in a library, coaches slam poetry, and raises four boys with her partner in Omaha. Placing her daughter up for adoption will forever be the hardest thing she’s done.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: Aug, 23, 2022
Print Length: 116 pages
Dimensions: 5 x 8 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-09-7
ABOUT THE BOOK
Emily Costa has had obsessive-compulsive disorder since childhood. After decades of unsuccessful treatments, her condition worsens significantly during the pandemic, and she decides to try an intensive program of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Until It Feels Right is a series of framed and stylized diary entries written during the three weeks of this treatment. It’s a closer look into the realities of OCD outside traditional media depiction, a peek behind the curtain of the processes involved in CBT, and an entertaining complex portrait of a mind fighting against itself.
“‘I have to be okay with fear. I have to be okay,’ Emily Costa writes in Until It Feels Right, her gripping, unvarnished account of an intense course of exposure therapy she underwent in October 2021 to treat her OCD. Costa, a young mother who recently lost her father, connects with a voice at once honest, rhythmic, and immediate, making her memoir an indispensable addition to the historical registry of those privately struggling amidst the collective, public trauma of a global pandemic. That is, it's a book for all of us.”
—Sara Lippmann, author of LECH
"I absolutely adored Emily Costa's Until It Feels Right. It really helped me feel less alone as a parent with my own mental health issues."
—Elle Nash, author of Gag Reflex
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Emily Costa’s work can be found in X-R-A-Y, Hobart, Barrelhouse, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a novel sort of about her father's video store, as well as a book of short stories. You can follow her on Twitter @emilylauracosta.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: June 21, 2022
Reissued: July 12, 2025
Print Length: 80 pages
Dimensions: 5 × 7 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-05-9
ABOUT THE BOOK
Sara Rauch is in a long-term, committed relationship with another woman when she begins a low-residency MFA in fiction. Though it goes against the promises she’s made, she finds herself pulled into an intense affair with a married man, a well-known writer in the program. More than an essay about bisexual infidelity and the resulting heartbreaks, XO unfolds Rauch’s story like a map of psychic terrain, allowing the author to explore her longstanding obsessions with romantic love, personal faith and belief systems, and the stories we tell ourselves to get through our ever-changing lives.
PRAISE FOR XO
“At once pensive and energetic, romantic and self-aware, XO thrills both the mind and the heart. A skillful story of bisexual desire, Rauch layers meaning onto the titular X and O until we're torn between those letters, her lovers, and the gulf between spirit and self. This book illuminates the many faces of love, from the queer to the safe to the erotic to the irrational. The world needs more bisexual stories with heat, nuance, and beauty—XO delivers and then some.”
—Jen Winston, author of Greedy: Notes from a Bisexual Who Wants Too Much
“How do the lines of desire both cross and encircle us? Sara Rauch’s XO sorts through the mythology of love, pushing against her long-term relationship with a woman by pulling herself into an affair with a married man. Rauch balances the saudade of choice and the weight of conclusion on the tender threads of heartbreak, weaving in hard-won revelations about the meaning of the X and the meaning of the O. Like any treasure map, XO includes both the landmarks to watch for and the spot to dig—but like any good treasure map, readers will discover the real reward is in this journey.”
—Kristine Langley Mahler, author of Curing Season: Artifacts
“Like a spider weaving its web, Sara Rauch deftly spins the romance and betrayal of a secret affair into the sparklingly complex XO. Something between a memoir and a meditation, this is less a straightforward narrative than a trace along the crooked whorl of self-discovery, as Rauch is shaped, reshaped, and perhaps at times misshapen by her deepest musings and most vulnerable moments of being. At turns exquisite and a little bit feral, XO offers a rich and profoundly generous exploration of love, spirituality, and the ways we find to make sense of life’s most enduring mysteries.”
—Marin Sardy, author of The Edge of Every Day
“In XO, Sara Rauch showcases an intricate honesty and lays bare the tender mercies of her life with such mesmerizing artistry. Here, Rauch shines as a mighty chronicler of identity and connection and love and how our own sweeping mythologies, like some unfolded map, can yield universal truths. A profound and sincere work.”
—Robert James Russell, author of Mesilla and Sea of Trees
“Rauch’s deliberately meandering essay…ultimately arrives at a state of grace… The magic of the text she leaves behind is the unflinching examination of the root systems that have supported that emergence—all the intertwined threads that give life to what finally breaks through to the surface.”
—Richard Scott Larson, Colorado Review
“One thing I love about XO is Rauch’s commitment to the story and her absolute resistance to flinching as she tells it. We may judge her, and she may judge herself, but it’s her story, and who she is, and it’s all laid out before us to lose, and find, ourselves in should we choose to.”
—Ben Tanzer, LitReactor
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sara Rauch is the author of What Shines from It: Stories, which won the Electric Book Award. Her prose has appeared in Paranoid Tree, Autofocus, Paper Darts, Hobart, Split Lip, So to Speak, and elsewhere. She lives in Massachusetts with her family. sararauch.com
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: April 5, 2022
Print Length: 172 pages
Dimensions: 5 x 8 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-02-8
PROSE [1st gen design]
ABOUT THE BOOK
Shayne Terry’s fourth trimester is not going as planned. Instead of bonding with her new baby, she’s stuck on the couch with a third-degree tear, barely able to walk. When the women in her family show up to help, they come bearing family secrets and old wounds that also need repair. Begun as notes on Terry’s phone documenting a parental leave gone awry, Leave examines a healing process complicated by capitalism, intergenerational trauma, and a healthcare system with a long history of devaluing women. This powerful postpartum account treats birth as a portal, one that can connect us to a lineage of pain, joy, death, and life. And at a time when our bodily autonomy is being stripped away, Leave is an urgent exploration of one woman’s experience recovering from birth in America.
PRAISE FOR LEAVE
"Leave stitches together, fragment by fragment, a reconstruction of all the ways a woman can be in pain, and all the ways a woman can pay a price, from birthing to living to dying. Shayne Terry offers herself as the reader’s doula, artfully guiding us through the complex tradition of maternal injuries that run through her family line, leaving no stone unturned in her search for truth. Through intimate vignettes, and rippling with astute intergenerational insights, Terry examines injuries that split through the core. Finally, someone asks on behalf of all women: what is normal when it comes to pain?"
—Lexi Kent-Monning, author of The Burden of Joy
"Leave asserts the power of writing, of the maternal body, and of women's voices when we say what has happened to us. It is in itself a kind of suture, a gesture toward repair. As a writer and a mother, I am so grateful this book was written.”
—Sue Rainsford, author of Follow Me to Ground and Redder Days
"I didn’t know how much I needed Leave: A Postpartum Account by Shayne Terry, and I bet you need it too. With poetic concision and linguistic daring, Terry pulls back the veil on the American pregnancy industrial complex and all of its erasures, difficulties, and joys. When Terry suffers a traumatic pregnancy and is literally torn from vagina to anus, she struggles to heal, care for her child and herself, and to navigate a world which diminishes women’s pain and suffering at every turn. The book is about healing and in reading it, I found myself revisiting my own traumatic birth story and healing myself. I’ve never read a book like this before. It’s a must for anyone with a body, struggling to right itself in these difficult times."
—Carley Moore, author of The Not Wives and Panpocalypse
“After I gave birth to my first child, I walked around in a daze thinking that birth is a trauma and it leaves a wound. Saturated in social media's carefully honed picture of motherhood, I felt like an absolute failure. I carry that shame with me now. But Shayne Terry's excellent LEAVE: A Postpartum Account exorcised that shame; it showed me a mirror inside of which I saw a friend. Terry is achingly human, generous, and forthcoming about her pain, about the generational patterns of motherhood and daughterhood in her own family, and of fighting for the re-welcoming of her self. I want to give this to every woman I know.”
— Lindsay Hunter, author of Hot Springs Drive
“Unsparing and deeply necessary, Shayne Terry's Leave is essential literature. Read it to spare yourself the ravages of silence and shame.”
— Elisa Albert, author of Afterbirth and Human Blues
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shayne Terry's work has appeared in American Chordata, Catapult, Chicago Review of Books, CRAFT, Electric Literature, TriQuarterly, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and elsewhere. She has been selected for workshops and residencies at Bread Loaf, Tin House, and the Vermont Studio Center. Born and raised in northern Illinois, Shayne received an M.A. in Literature from University College Dublin and lives in Brooklyn. shayneterry.com
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: February 25, 2025
Print Length: 158 pages
Dimensions: 5 x 8 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-35-6
ABOUT THE BOOK
Teresa Carmody has been writing a character named Marie for over a decade and across a series of unrelated books. A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others follows Marie through 25 years and 11 linked autofictions about community, friendship, writing, labor, and gossip. In this novel-in-stories, Marie is a temporary packager, a sexual assault crises worker, a learner and a seeker, a friend and a wife, a writing student, but most of all a writer. She studies everything from books and trash to her own queerness and non-human animals. She notes how humans survive by taking in each other’s looks, gestures, and language, and her curiosity takes her into the lives of others, embodied in stories that become a form of gossip. Among a lineage of constraint-based and experimental writers, Carmody, whose lived life uncannily resembles Marie’s fictional one, weaves an artist's coming of age that is also a meditation on how we make and unmake each other.
PRAISE FOR A HEALTHY INTEREST IN THE LIVES OF OTHERS
“As the fig tree needs the fig wasp, so it is that the formally dense, deeply intimate fictions of Teresa Carmody thrive on the invasion of essay, memoir, and even drawing through their branches. What satisfaction to see Marie, the protagonist of Carmody’s first novel, shift, like Balzac’s Lucien Chardon, from the provinces into a literary world previously only charted by Gilbert Sorrentino’s Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things. Carmody’s is a tree very full of figs.”
—Jonathan Lethem
“A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others is a dynamic, inventive, and hilarious novel radically attuned to the delight and awkwardness of human interaction. With an unsparing eye and the dark humor of Can Xue and Jane Bowles, Teresa Carmody depicts the life of the writer's mind.”
—Patrick Cottrell
"What is a world when writing is the drug? Dryly, refreshingly funny, Teresa Carmody's sentences act like acid droplets in this cheeky meditation where writing is both the poison and the cure."
—Pola Oloixarac
"Carmody’s latest in their long-running exploration of a character named Marie is a playfully profound meditation on self and community that centers the outcasts (poets, artists, puppeteers, masseuses, adjuncts, caregivers, activists, nonhuman animals) of a materialist, segregated, medicalizing, and oppressive heteropatriarchy. By turns lyrical, processual, and metafictional, Carmody’s writing embraces vignettes, sketches, and visions as part of a spiritual summoning of a ‘future self, queer and fluid’ in prose as beautifully tangled as our deepest selves. Carmody reminds us that books can and should be an intersubjective practice of freedom, a home for our silences and hungers."
—Urayoán Noel
“Teresa Carmody’s A Healthy Interest In the Lives of Others is an astounding novel. With craft and precision, Carmody removes any veil separating the readers from their characters, allowing us to empathize with the love and violence, passion and community, questions and humor, which fill Marie’s world and all those in her life.”
—J K Chukwu
“Observing the niche difficulties of being a writer, the shortfalls of writing communities, the challenges of lesbian dating, and nonlinear journeys in processing trauma, A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others is a rich literary novel.”
—Foreword Reviews
“Stories within stories. Threads that start, stop and pick back up again. Intriguing characters and lots of gossip. Teresa Carmody’s latest work of autofiction, A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others, is profound and playful.”
—The Writing Disorder
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Teresa Carmody (she/they) is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, inter-arts collaborations, and hybrid forms. Her books include The Reconception of Marie (2020), Maison Femme: a fiction (2015), and Requiem (2005). Their writing has appeared in LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, Michigan Quarterly Review, Matters of Feminist Practice, WaterStone Review, Lifework, and elsewhere. A co-founding director of Les Figues Press in Los Angeles, Carmody co-edited I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women and TrenchArt Monograph: hurry up please its time. She currently lives in Omaha and teaches in the Writer’s Workshop and low-residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at University of Nebraska Omaha. Find Carmody on Instagram @troseistrose and online at teresacarmody.com.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: February 18, 2025
Print Length: 200 pages
Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-34-9
ABOUT THE BOOK
Emily Adrian is determined to see her mother Ellen clearly. Part memoir, part autofiction, and part interview, Daughterhood charts a map of Ellen’s life before and after she became Emily’s mother. As a high schooler, Ellen lived alone in a trailer park on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon. At eighteen, she had a job counting wild horses in the Steens Mountain Wilderness. She was engaged three times before her twenty-first birthday and finally married in the Salt Lake Temple—but her Mormon husband left her when he found her birth control pills. For the author, these stories were half-forgotten folklore until she had a child of her own. Overwhelmed and challenged by motherhood, Emily turns a novelistic eye toward the woman who raised her.
“Emily Adrian’s memoir is a family portrait, painfully honest and true, a piercing book about how to be a good parent, or a good child, about risk and faith, feelings of inadequacy, the disappointments of aging—that is to say, life. It’s also a book about writing, about how other people help us know ourselves. About getting through pain, but not too quickly. It’s about how to fall in love and stay in love, how to let the people we love be, and how to let them change—to honor them this way. ‘It doesn’t matter what we’re capable of doing,’ Adrian writes. ‘It only matters what we do.’ You will love this book.”
—Elisa Gabbert, author of Any Person Is the Only Self
“Beautiful. Captures many things about mothers and daughters I've never seen captured before.”
—Rufi Thorpe, author of The Knockout Queen and Margo's Got Money Troubles
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Emily Adrian is the author of several novels. Her work has appeared in Granta, Joyland, EPOCH, Alta Journal, and Los Angeles Review of Books. Originally from Portland, Oregon, Emily lives in New Haven, Connecticut with her family.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: August 20, 2024
Print Length: 170 pages
Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-32-5
ABOUT THE BOOK
Jason McCall wanted to be a Hector, a hero who dies fighting for a worthy cause. Instead, he’s a Narcissus. He can’t stop seeing his own reflection. And, for him, that might be just as dangerous as being a black man in the United States. In Razed by TV Sets, McCall uses a variety of essay topics—ranging from Tupac Shakur to CM Punk to psych wards—to show how depictions of race and masculinity have affected how he sees himself and how the world sees him. Razed by TV Sets is an essay collection filled with sports heroes, musicians, and cultural icons. But, above all, it is a collection filled by mirrors and all the threats and discoveries that mirrors may hold.
PRAISE FOR RAZED BY TV SETS
"I want to write like Jason McCall when I grow up, and/or before I die. It's one thing to experience so much that you thought you'd never see in a book. It's quite another feat to experience it all beautifully shredded and synthesized through Jason's singular skill and imagination. I'm sitting here shocked at how absolutely pitch perfect this book feels. Razed by TV Sets will make some of us never ever feel alone again. It's that good, and that superbly human."
—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir
“Jason McCall's debut essay collection, Razed by TV Sets, is an anthem for all of us who are Black, deep Southern, curious, nerdy, and moving through the pains of this world by putting them on the page. McCall writes in such familiar, truth-filled prose I began to wonder how he'd read my mind and put it in ink--he knows us. In essays that challenge the American machines of race, class, and memory, Jason McCall catalogues a worthy and still-unfolding life. This book is light.”
—Ashley M. Jones, author of Reparations Now!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jason McCall is the author of the essay collection Razed by TV Sets and the poetry collections What Shot Did You Ever Take (co-written with Brian Oliu); A Man Ain’t Nothin’; Two-Face God; Mother, Less Child (co-winner of the 2013 Paper Nautilus Vella Chapbook Prize); Dear Hero, (winner of the 2012 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize and co-winner of the 2013 Etchings Press Whirling Prize); I Can Explain; and Silver. He and P.J. Williams are the editors of It Was Written: Poetry Inspired by Hip-Hop. He holds an MFA from the University of Miami. He is a native of Montgomery, Alabama, and he currently teaches at the University of North Alabama.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: March 26, 2024
Print Length: 122 pages
Dimensions: 5 x 8 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-28-8
ABOUT THE BOOK
Mike Nagel has no idea what’s going on around here. Fresh out of the duplex, he and J have rented a house in a fantasy-themed neighborhood where people walk backwards, his neighbors weedwack constantly, and mysterious arrows have begun appearing on all the sidewalks. In this follow up to his surprise smash hit, Duplex, Culdesac once again finds Mike contemplating the joys and absurdities of modern life against the looming backdrop of the American suburbs.
PRAISE FOR CULDESAC
“Mike Nagel’s Culdesac is a compact, heartfelt essay about getting sober, getting older, and finding a place to call home. Interspersing looping, offbeat imagery with black-and-white photographs of the suburban landscape, Nagel admirably explores this challenging terrain with humor and unexpected depth.”
— Amy Fusselman, author of The Means
“Exquisite, deadpan comedy. Broken-glass syntax. Anti-recovery anti-memoir. An utterly serious ode to brief, meaningless existence in Plano, TX/on planet Earth. A minor masterpiece.”
—David Shields, author of The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead
“‘Cul-de-sac is a fancy name / for a dead-end street. It’s insane,’ sings Christian Lembach. ‘I’m the one that’s alive. You’re all dead,’ says Glen Runciter in Philip K. Dick’s Ubik. Put them together and you’ve got Mike Nagel’s deceptively casual new book, in which the sacred is disguised as the profane: ‘We’re eating at Ascension, this soup and sandwich place near my office.’ Life is a dream: you can’t make this stuff up, and you don’t have to. But you do have to be able to endure it, and be able to mine clarity from its relentless absurdity. That’s what Nagel can do.”
—J. D. Daniels, author of The Correspondence
“Culdesac is a cosmic-poetic exploration of the American suburbs, a profound meditation on the meaning of life while sipping Jamba Juice and assembling IKEA furniture. In a world where too many writers are pushed on us as ‘hilarious,’ Mike Nagel is the real deal. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say he’s the funniest writer alive.”
— Kevin Maloney, author of The Red-Headed Pilgrim
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mike Nagel is the author of Duplex (Autofocus Books, 2022). His essays have appeared in apt, Hobart, Split Lip, Salt Hill, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere around the internet. He lives in Plano, Texas.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: January 2, 2024
Print Length: 98 pages
Dimensions: 5 x 8 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-27-1
ABOUT THE BOOK
Kristine Langley Mahler is tracking the signs. The year she turns thirty-eight, she keeps finding snakes, bears, ghosts, and ancestors at her doorstep, pointing toward the person she needs to become. As an eclipse approaches, she begins to follow their demands and account for their presence. Clutching the milky quartz she finds in a New Mexican canyon and picking up the pebbles dropped by returning ghosts on her bedroom floor, Mahler excavates personal meaning from astrology, tarot, mothering, siblinging, and homesickness throughout the three connected essays of A Calendar is a Snakeskin, a noctuary of a year marked by the shedding of selves and fears.
PRAISE FOR A Calendar Is A Snakeskin
“A Calendar is a Snakeskin strikes me as a book about the act of reading itself, if shifting ghosts form the letters that cast our words into stories, and if the house that is haunted is the text within. Kristine Langley Mahler’s oracular essays model ways to read the complex world of the living—crowded as it is with relations, joys, difficulties—while providing a light capable of navigating the inner catacombs of memory and uncertainty. Sometimes, this remarkable book reminds, the ghost that wakes us in the night is a guide that knows the secret way to who we are becoming.”
—Selah Saterstrom, author of Ideal Suggestions and Rancher
“Ghosts thread A Calendar Is a Snakeskin like stars pinhole the astrological sky, making a home in time. This book is a talisman of stone, of milk. It dreams and sheds its skin and lights our path beautifully, generously, past the edge of the known.”
—Dennis James Sweeney, author of You’re the Woods Too
“Navigating the animal, mineral, and astrological talismans collected in A Calendar is a Snakeskin is a reminder to hold space for magic and find comfort in the tension and ghosts of our ancestry. Facing the fear of who she really is, as Langley Mahler writes, ‘needs to be met with trust because the universe will bring us into the places we need to face.’ The moon and its eternal pull guides us as does this dreamy book.”
—Megan Culhane Galbraith, author of The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kristine Langley Mahler is the author of the essay collection Curing Season: Artifacts (West Virginia University Press, 2022). Her work has been supported by the Nebraska Arts Council, named Notable in Best American Essays 2019 and 2021, and published in DIAGRAM, Ninth Letter, Brevity, and Fourth Genre, among other journals. A memoirist experimenting with the truth on the suburban prairie outside Omaha, Nebraska, Kristine is also the director of Split/Lip Press. Find more about her projects at kristinelangleymahler.com or @suburbanprairie.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: October 31, 2023
Print Length: 120 pages
Dimensions: 5x8”
ISBN: 978-1-957392-22-6
ABOUT THE BOOK
Aaron Burch is both nostalgic and looking forward to what’s to come, all while trying to enjoy the present as much as possible. A Kind of In-Between looks at the last few years of Aaron’s life (getting divorced, teaching, being a writer, settling into life in the Midwest in his 40s) and also back to his childhood (being adopted, an almost obnoxiously happy and loving childhood, growing up on the West Coast), in curious, playful snapshots that become a whole greater than the sum of their parts. These short essays are about growing up and memory; who Aaron is and who he wants to be; road trips and home and collectibles and family and friendship; how he sees himself, how he wants others to see him, and all the overlaps and incongruencies therein; being a stepfather and son and child and adult and husband and ex and teacher and writer and friend; the things we keep and the things we let go; how to try to make sense of being a person in this world.
PRAISE FOR A KIND OF IN-BETWEEN
“Reading this amazing collection is like looking through a microscope: Through its lens, we see magic in a series of slides, each illuminating one small moment and celebrating its glorious complexity. In earnest, unpretentious prose, Burch dazzles and delights. My heart grew larger as I read, and I lifted my eyes from the page to a world that was familiar, but newly expanded and wondrous.”
—Siân Griffiths, author of The Sum of Her Parts
“In A Kind of In-Between, Aaron Burch applies his keen and charming attention to the still-unfolding story of himself, making visible the rhyming movements of his mind and heart across time and space. Powered by his ever-present wit and infectious joy, Burch’s essays mine the past to bring its power into the present, offering up nostalgia as a mode of memory through which we might more clearly see and inhabit the ongoingness of life.”
—Matt Bell, author of Appleseed
“Aaron Burch’s A Kind of In-Between is an extraordinarily powerful book—a beautiful meditation on aging and memory and the difficulty of letting go of the past, on the relationship between who we once were and who we still have time to be. These essays are luminous, profound, and brilliantly original. I loved everything about this book.”
—Andrew Porter, author of The Disappeared
"A Kind of In-Between is a best friend of a book. It has enormous heart and humor. It's generous with its confessions and open-minded with its questions. Burch's playfulness with form also makes each short essay a game and a surprise. The perfect companion for vacations and staycations and the small precious window of reading time on a quiet weekend morning."
—Jac Jemc, author of Empty Theatre and False Bingo
“A Kind of In-Between is a road trip in essays that perfectly captures the way past, present, and future touch when you leave your old life behind with only a vague idea of where you’re going. Aaron Burch’s prose is full of introspection and epiphanies, while always making time for the spontaneous detour that reveals, when you least expect it, the unbounded beauty of the world.”
—Kevin Maloney, author of The Red-Headed Pilgrim
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aaron Burch grew up in Tacoma, WA. He is the author of a novel, Year of the Buffalo; a memoir/literary analysis, Stephen King’s The Body; a short story collection, Backswing; and a novella, How to Predict the Weather. He started the literary journal Hobart, which he edited for twenty years, and is currently the editor of Short Story, Long and the co-editor of WAS (Words & Sports) and HAD. He lives in Ann Arbor, MI and is online: on Twitter and Instagram at @aaron__burch, and the world wide web at aaronburch.net.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: August 1 2023
Print Length: 118 pgs
Dimensions: 5x8”
ISBN: 978-1-957392-20-2
ABOUT THE BOOK
Mike Nagel is spending too much time in his duplex. Mostly he’s hungover. There's a squirrel in the attic, the ceiling’s caving in, and he’s not sure who to call about it. Not much else seems to happen in Mike Nagel’s Duplex, except of course everything happens there: a distinct mind is constantly working over the absurdity, meaninglessness, and mundanity of contemporary life in ways both laugh-out-loud funny and thoughtfully compelling.
PRAISE FOR DUPLEX
"A miraculous combination of comedy and despair . . . I completely loved the book."
— David Shields, author of Reality Hunger
“I loved hanging out in Mike Nagel's Duplex! It was discombobulating in all the best ways. I look forward to seeing what he does next.”
— Amy Fusselman, author of Idiophone
“‘Things, I’ve noticed, are coming apart,’ writes Mike Nagel. And: ‘One way homicide detectives can tell a suspect is lying is if their story makes perfect sense.’ If you, too, are looking for clues, my fellow detectives, then you should read Duplex: a pandemic-era chronicle in which, as things come apart, Nagel does something more important, more impressive and more difficult than making perfect sense: he tells you the truth.”
— J. D. Daniels, author of The Correspondence
“I could write about the wending and winding perfect sentences, the way your brain hypnotically starts thinking a little differently while reading, but instead I just want you to know that I read this book straight through on a cross country flight, letting my body shake a little, chuckling to myself while holding in full-on, out-loud laugher like a dork, a possibly ideal reading experience—in distraction level, activity itself, and the pleasure of starting a perfectly short book in one location and finishing just a few hours later in another.”
—Aaron Burch, founding editor of Hobart, HAD, & WAS Quarterly
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mike Nagel’s essays have appeared in apt, Hobart, Split Lip, Salt Hill, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere around the internet. He lives in Plano, Texas.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: Feb 8, 2022
Print Length: 96 pages
Dimensions: 5 x 8 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-00-4
POETRY [1st gen design]
ABOUT THE BOOK
After two years in an intense relationship that breaks apart, Kristen E. Nelson is left to pick up the pieces. In the absence of her lover, she imagines, she collects impassioned break-up stories from friends, and she writes. In the Away Time is an evocative book of epistolary prose poems that attempt to confront, process, and reanimate the dead relationship over a six-month period of the aftermath. Through time and space, these intimate lyric vignettes construct a lush, immersive, and devastating portrait of queer desire and longing grounded in the specificity of one lived experience.
PRAISE FOR IN THE AWAY TIME
“Spare and scalding, Kristen Nelson’s In the Away Time is a record of, and reckoning with, ruinous love. In the vein of Sophie Calle’s Exquisite Pain, here is an obsessive return to the site of the wound that hurts as much as it heals. In lyric prose, Nelson’s use of the disintegrating refrain embodies the felt sense of loss over time like no other. This very particular queer, gender-fucking heartbreak will be felt and remembered by me and by anyone who has been ‘subsumed into the no one, into the everyone else.’”
—TC Tolbert, author of Gephyromania and The Quiet Practices
“In the Away Time reveals an aching and kaleidoscopic portrait of Queer and tender loss, reminding us that ‘Love exists in pain or right beside it.’ Kristen Nelson masterfully renders the raw and intimate undersides of a deeply feeling and devastating epistolary tapestry. Nelson evokes a rare and vulnerable magic on the page ensuring, ‘you will understand that this is a spell even if you do not understand its intention.’ It's a work that will stay with me for a long while, rising in my chest like a heart murmuration and reminding me to be brave, open, honest, and ultimately, free.”
—Angel Dominguez, author of Desgraciado
“Here it is: the gospel truth about heartache. Kristen E. Nelson crafts the syntax of desire, submerges it in absence, and places it on the altar of the page. And on that altar? Things happen. Lamentations and incantations exchange places. Hunger and grief fuck. I love this book. I love how true it feels regarding the severity that sugars want. Maybe this book is a sort of spell—I can’t stop feeling what was conjured through its repetitions and I want to read it again and again.”
—Selah Saterstrom, author of Ideal Suggestions and Slab
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kristen E. Nelson is a queer writer, performer, and community builder. In addition to In the Away Time, she is the author of the length of this gap (Damaged Goods, August 2018) and two chapbooks: sometimes I gets lost and is grateful for noises in the dark (Dancing Girl, 2017) and Write, Dad (Unthinkable Creatures, 2012). She has published creative and critical writing in Feminist Studies, Bombay Gin, Denver Quarterly, Drunken Boat, Tarpaulin Sky Journal, Trickhouse, and Everyday Genius, among others. Kristen is the founder of Casa Libre en la Solana, a non-profit writing center in Tucson, Arizona, where she worked as the Executive Director for 14 years and the co-founder of Four Queens with Selah Saterstrom. Kristen is currently a Ph.D. student and graduate student instructor at the University of California – Santa Cruz in the Literature Department’s creative/critical writing concentration.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: April 23, 2024
Print Length: 92 pages
Dimensions: 5 x 8 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-29-5
ABOUT THE BOOK
In his late twenties, poet Russell Brakefield is diagnosed with keratoconus, a degenerative eye condition that causes blurred vision, light sensitivity, and progressive loss of sight. In the years after, his condition worsens. In My Modest Blindness, he traverses this blurry landscape, drawing connections to art, literature, natural history, and pop culture. Part celebration and part lament, this book uses a sustained conversation with Jorge Luis Borges's famous lecture "On Blindness," as well as a "catalogue of delights of the visual world in the moments just before it leaves," to examine what it means to be a writer and a person slowly losing his ability to see.
EARLY PRAISE FOR MY MODEST BLINDNESS
“Out of a struggle with literary history, medical technology, and personal loss, Russell Brakefield gives us a prismatic, revelatory collection of poetry. We receive new angles from which to see what’s right in front of us. We understand the visible world as one that becomes both more uncanny and more vibrant as it fades or is distorted. From what begins as great deprivation—this maker’s vision—becomes the beginning of great wonder.”
—Mark Yakich, author of Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide
“Carrying both the ache of loss and the sensory-rich beauty of the blurred and non-visual worlds, My Modest Blindness is deep and transfixing. Beyond the book’s apparent subject, Brakefield’s poems serve as a side-door portrait of the human mind—its taunting fickleness, its sprawling web of memories and connections, the way it accepts while pushing against.”
—Joshua James Amberson, author of Staring Contest: Essays About Eyes
“‘What is belief but held breath,’ asks Russell Brakefield in these vital poems of a disappearing self and ‘learning to love different versions of shadow.’ Too often we say ‘to see’ when we mean ‘to know,’ and I love how beautifully and playfully these poems blur the line between sight and knowledge, between knowledge and belief.”
—James Tate Hill, author of Blind Man’s Bluff
“There is something inescapably true in Russ Brakefield’s second collection, My Modest Blindness. At the surface, it is an exploration of a writer’s reckoning with ailment. A hybrid approach to capturing a fleeting visual landscape. A project that yields stunning observations of light, color and kinetic field. Perhaps in the spirit of field recording, as in his first collection, these poems make a journey through log and documentation. Along the way, Brakefield turns to old masters who navigated near or total blindness such as Milton, Audre Lorde and importantly, Jorge Luis Borges. Amidst the beauty of these poems, there is a generosity in their frankness and disclosure. And beneath all that, there is the honesty the poems come to know: ‘…and what is living / but trying to find a sea bird inside a sea bird colored storm,’ the poet writes. What a brave and haunting book.”
—francine j. harris, author of Here Is the Sweet Hand: Poems
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Russell Brakefield is the author of Field Recordings (Wayne State University Press). His writing has appeared in the Indiana Review, New Orleans Review, The Common, Rattle, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, and he has been awarded fellowships from the University of Michigan Musical Society, the Vermont Studio Center, and the National Parks Service. He is assistant professor in the University Writing Program at the University of Denver.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: October 17, 2023
Print Length: 102 pages
Dimensions: 6x8”
ISBN: 978-1-957392-26-4
ABOUT THE BOOK
Tate N. Oquendo has been cultivating an orchard of memory. In details of shears, smoke, sheds, and other objects, each poem in this collection is a kind of spell. Some works are incantations, some are evocations, and others whisper words of protection against the particular fruit growing in this metaphorical landscape. These patterns are cast along with identities Tate inhabits—disabled, queer, trans, Latinx, witch—collected into a mixture for the wards. That Spell is a sigil where each stroke of trauma and healing manifests in language.
“The poems in That Spell envelope in a sensory melancholia; a carving and cutting of identity, a pruning away of the blight of domestic expectation, of gender imperative, of love grown sour. At Oquendo's expert tending we are witness to the hard lines of labor, and soft curves of fruit: bruisable and pitted, ripe to bursting with rage. That Spell is both an invocation and inquiry into how the natural world bears witness to our wounds and how we grow ourselves from the twisted roots. It is an elliptical landscape of reversals and returns, seasonalities of grief and respite. Oquendo's gift for imagery becomes a lexicon for the brambles of queer adolescence. That Spell plants a question we all must learn to nurture: How do we unsalt the self we must tend?”
—Michael Todd Cohen, assistant editor at XRAY Literary Magazine
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tate N. Oquendo crafts occult writing, pop culture works, and multimodal art/text hybrids, as well as experiments with alla prima oil painting. Their work can be found in numerous literary journals, a hybrid memoir, a visual poetry collection, and six chapbooks. They serve as an Assistant Editor for Sundress Publications, and are a Zoeglossia Fellow and Crealdé School of Art Fellow. You can find them on Instagram at tatemakesart.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: October 10, 2023
Print Length: 82 pages
Dimensions: 5.25”x8”
ISBN: 978-1-957392-18-9
ABOUT THE BOOK
Mistie Watkins can't quit talking to herself. Raised in a close-knit and deeply religious family of storytellers in rural Central Florida, she writes to understand herself and the place and people she comes from. Hiraeth is a linked series of prose poetry snapshots that bring to life Watkins’s big family, her late sister, and the Florida scrub they call home. In this elegiac and lyric patchwork, memory and family myth compete to find truth and beauty in growing up, life after tragedy, familial bonds, and the shortcomings of religion and love.
PRAISE FOR HIRAETH
“Mistie Watkins writes the kind of Florida I long to see: one that's both tender and feral; a place that's filled to the brim with hope, despite the occasional pocket of rot. Hiraeth is a lovely and dynamic read, lyric and stylish, lush as the palm scrub sprouting throughout the state. It truly moved me. This book is a balm to the soul and Watkins is a compelling new voice.”
—Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead Things and With Teeth
“Mistie Watkins’ rich and moving collection of prose poems evokes the sensual, under-the-radar world of rural central Florida while telling a riveting family story. Watkins glides effortlessly between childhood perceptions of momentous incidents and a wiser, grown woman’s survey of the delights and the damage. This mosaic is filled with portraits and narratives that evolve into a panorama of how a young girl learns the world from her surroundings. The small, potent story-poems are interspersed with imagistic reminders of the Florida setting in all its heat, scrub, beauty, and magic. Hiraeth is a beautiful and satisfying read.”
—Susan Lilley, author of Venus In Retrograde
“Mistie Watkins' Hiraeth is a stunning collage of character studies that together construct a family mythology so deeply felt it ripples out beyond the pages. Here, the fantastical blurs seamlessly with the brutal beauty of life in Central Florida, invoking hitchhiking genies, church ladies' whispers of changeling cousins, and a lost sister whose memory is as fragile as her budding wings. The narrative voice is at once sunblistered and lush, feral and elegant; Watkins writes with devoted attention to all the fleeting details that compose a home—and all the longing we can only feel for home when it's behind us.”
—Erin Slaughter, author of A Manual for How to Love Us and The Sorrow Festival
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mistie R. Watkins is a writer, painter, and avid reader. She was born and raised in the sugar sand and scrub of Central Florida. As a child she dreamed of being either an alligator wrangler or a marine biologist but after careful consideration decided to go into the even more glamorous world of education. She lives in Orlando with her kiddo, two dogs, and two rats. You can find her work in Fantastic Floridas, The Drunken Odyssey, and Autofocus or follow her on Instagram at mistie_thebogwitch.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: September 5, 2023
Print Length: 94 pages
Dimensions: 5.25”x8”
ISBN: 978-1-957392-16-5
ABOUT THE BOOK
Since 2020, Tyler Gillespie has spent a lot of time online and in other landscapes devoid of humans IRL. While undergoing quarantine with his grandmother in Florida, he began expanding his writing practice with new forms of media expression, going as far as recording snippets of a comedy album and creating a pop diva robot persona through text-to-talk technology. Although he eventually abandoned these projects, traces of them can be found in the nature machine! Throughout this collection, Gillespie merges poetic forms with interstitial moments of sound and visual technologies to playfully theorize the now and to seriously contemplate the future. With dexterity, he threads ideas on cybernetics, pop music, the environment, desire, and recovery to examine how technology has transformed our natures. But ultimately, full of warmth and wit, this book reminds us why, despite everything, we're still not-yet-machines.
PRAISE FOR the nature machine!
"Tyler Gillespie is a smart and hilarious poet. His poems know what it's like to have fun, and are as entertaining when they're goofing around with Britney Spears as with Ferdinand de Saussure. Whether he's riffing on Sex and the City and or discussing Karl Marx, his book will move you to laugh and to think--about the moon, about the Bible, about exclamation marks, about almost everything!"
—Kathleen Rooney, author of Where Are the Snows
“the nature machine! has an urgency, a momentum, as it charts the loss of addiction, relationships, and the health of our planet. These are smart poems written with the kind of directness all of us crave. Interfused with pop icons, Gillespie takes on tough topics with cleverness and care as we get a full picture of the mechanisms of nature. Reading these poems, we get to know more about the poet, ourselves, and the world around us.”
—Steven Reigns, author of A Quilt for David
“If ‘Leave Britney Alone!’ was a Millennial mantra, Gillespie has tapped into it the aesthetic axis where effervescent pop culture hides something razor-sharp and self-aware in its shadow. These poems are haunted by the polestar of Spears herself, yes, but also interlaced with Lisa Simpson beside Saussure, Immanuel Kant next to Tyra Banks. The juxtaposition of high culture beside low traverses the disposability of Cara Cunningham's South—and by extension—the trash-contaminated planet itself. Through plastic-gut whales and trailer parks, mobile apps and gay dive bars, Gillespie journeys us to the final landfill—one that is adorned with all the alluring and putrid debris of capitalist consumption.”
—JD Scott, author of Mask for Mask
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tyler Gillespie is the author of The Thing about Florida: Exploring a Misunderstood State (University Press of Florida, 2021) and Florida Man: Poems (Red Flag Poetry, 2018). He's a fifth-generation Floridian and currently teaches at Ringling College of Art + Design. Find out more at TylerGillespie.com.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: May 9, 2023
Print Length: 116 pages
Dimensions: 6 x 8 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-15-8
ABOUT THE BOOK
Danny Caine is struggling to adapt to new fatherhood when the Covid-19 pandemic upends, well, everything. All of a sudden, the glorious world he hoped to share with his son has shrunk, at times composing not much more than his rented house in Kansas and the small parking lot across the street. Denied access to Elsewhere, Caine begins to grapple with the concept of "home." The question gains new urgency when two things happen: Caine's childhood home is sold, and Caine's family is forced into an excruciating long-distance living arrangement. With mostly short, sometimes-surreal poems, Picture Window attempts (and maybe fails) to define "home" in an era when the future is uncertain and everything feels a little bit off.
PRAISE FOR PICTURE WINDOW
"A friend said, ‘The one thing I wish everybody knew about poetry was that it doesn’t have to be 50,000 miles removed from real life.' For this friend – for everybody – I recommend Danny Caine’s poems. These poems are full of Six Flags and garbage bags, toddler care and Tupperware, chain restaurants with Italian names that aren’t really Italian. It’s a book you’ll want to pick up and read and smile at and think a minute and put down and do a chore and pick up again. Each poem is like a haiku but fatter. Each focuses on one little piece of ordinary life, and as your day flows by you so slowly that you barely notice it, each reminds you, as my favorite poem does, that ‘something / beautiful is happening.’”
—David Kirby, author of Help Me, Information
"When he isn’t braiding the dread of suburbia with the whimsy of humanity, Danny Caine becomes my favorite lonely traveller, a clever photographer of liminal spaces, bleak landscapes undercut by just the right amount of fast food trash. Give this book to every dad—no, every parent—no, every adult. Give this book to every wandering cynic who believes poetry has nothing to show them. Watch them read it. Watch them seeing, how the mind changes."
—Tyler Barton, author of Eternal Night at the Nature Museum
“I am of the utmost certainty that few poets see the curiosity of our world in as surreal a beauty as Danny Caine does. His newest collection, Picture Window, is yet another touchstone of his always far-reaching generosity. It is one thing to step into a writer’s world and feel its indescribable alchemy, but what a gift it is to enter that place walking hand-in-hand with the person who made it. Caine is with us in Picture Window the whole way, shouldering us across a landscape populated by abandoned Six Flags parks and Taco Bells, a gloaming fatherhood, and the always treacherous throes of I-480 that sometimes frustratingly spills into the jammed traffic of the North Coast. So indescribably Ohioan, I am in awe over how perfectly Caine articulates the land I grew up on, the cities I’ve long called home. What a treat to hold this book; what a joy to know there is surely, and thankfully, more to come.”
—Matt Mitchell, author of The Neon Hollywood Cowboy
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Danny Caine is the author of the poetry collections Continental Breakfast, El Dorado Freddy's, Flavortown, and Picture Window, as well as the book How to Resist Amazon and Why. His poetry has appeared in The Slowdown, LitHub, DIAGRAM, Hobart, and Barrelhouse, and his prose has appeared in LitHub and Publishers Weekly. The Midwest Independent Booksellers Association awarded him the 2019 Midwest Bookseller of the Year award. He's a co-owner of the Raven Book Store, Publishers Weekly's 2022 bookstore of the year.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: Jan 31 2023
Print Length: 94 pages
Dimensions: 5.25 x 8 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-13-4
ABOUT THE BOOK
Adrienne Barrios and Leigh Chadwick became friends on the internet. They live 939 miles apart. They found each other’s writing and liked each other’s writing. Then they started writing together. Too Much Tongue is a series of prose poems in which the writers imagine themselves into each other’s lives, stretching and bending language into constant delight and surprise, taking turns sometimes so absurd they might float into the air at any moment if they weren’t so grounded to the visceral need for human connection and recognition.
PRAISE FOR TOO MUCH TONGUE
“In Too Much Tongue, Leigh Chadwick and Adrienne Barrios created a literary adventure forged in genuine friendship. These poems draw on the ordinary to deliver the transcendent. Like Thelma and Louise, but the highway is a wormhole through your heart.”
—Mark Leidner, author of Returning the Sword to the Stone
“In Too Much Tongue, Adrienne Barrios and Leigh Chadwick carve out an unprecedented intimate space, one in which they are both separate entities and two halves of a singular voice presenting a startlingly accurate picture of our current human condition. These poems flit between hope and despair, yearning and satisfaction. They demonstrate what it might mean to stay sane during a global pandemic of illness and solitude. In this collaborative collection, Barrios and Chadwick are just like the rest of us—wandering into an endless dark with a flashlight, hoping that whatever we find is better than what we’re trying to escape.”
—Taylor Byas, author of Bloodwarm, Associate Editor of The Cincinnati Review
“Too Much Tongue reads like a psychological fairy tale in which two siblings navigate a forest of thoughts, uncertain as to whether they are lost or found—a journey into the psyches of wondering and wandering minds contemplating every meaning of existence. This collection of prose poetry is full of dreams and realities, where one blends into the other to cause a surreal state of beautiful sadness. There’s a push and a pull between the narrators—sometimes a push and a push; others, a pull and a pull—and it’s through these interactions that a quiet combustion occurs, giving us worlds upon worlds of light in all its variations. Both fierce and tender, Too Much Tongue is a gorgeous spectrum of words.”
—Shome Dasgupta, author of Tentacles Numbing
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Adrienne Marie Barrios is autistic and has an extensive collection of vintage and vintage-reproduction dresses, shoes, sweaters, accessories, and bone china teacups that she actually drinks from. Adrienne Marie Barrios is editor-in-chief of Reservoir Road Literary Review and CLOVES Literary. In addition to being co-author of Too Much Tongue, Adrienne Marie Barrios is the author of her debut solo collection We Don’t Know That This Is Temporary (Redacted Books, 2023). Adrienne Marie Barrios’s work has appeared in numerous journals, including trampset, Passages North, Rejection Letters, Stanchion Zine, and HAD, among others, and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best Microfiction. Adrienne Marie Barrios edits award-winning novels and short stories and is currently at work on both of those very things and so much more. Adrienne Marie Barrios can be found online at adriennemariebarrios.com.
Leigh Chadwick is the author of Your Favorite Poet (Malarkey Books, 2022) and Sophomore Slump (Malarkey Books, 2023). Leigh Chadwick's poetry has appeared in Salamander, Hobart, Passages North, Pithead Chapel, The Indianapolis Review, and No Contact, among others. Leigh Chadwick is the executive editor of Redacted Books and is a regular contributor at Olney Magazine, where she conducts the "Mediocre Conversations" interview series. Leigh Chadwick is currently at work on a novel. Leigh Chadwick can be found online at www.leighchadwick.com.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: November 22, 2022
Print Length: 86 pages
Dimensions: 5.25 x 8 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-11-0
IMAGE-TEXT
ABOUT THE BOOK
Like millions of others, Erin Dorney discovered Adriene Mishler's "Yoga with Adriene" YouTube videos in 2020, while isolating at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yes I Am Human I Know You Were Wondering collects epistolary prose poems written to—and in conversation with—the popular influencer, along with a series of image-text collages. Arranged in a thirty day cycle, these hybrid works test the boundaries of parasocial relationships during a time when many individuals were both highly online and reconnecting with the unmediated natural world. In her continued exploration of celebrity, Dorney brings lyrical playfulness and beauty to pervasive influencer culture, bodily hyperfixation, movement, calendars, and cycles.
PRAISE FOR YES I AM HUMAN…
"In Erin Dorney’s Yes I am Human I Know You Were Wondering, the distinction between the I and the You—already pretty flimsy in my experience—gets even murkier. Dorney orchestrates its eventual conflation through metaphysical prose poems and organically unsettling collages that foreground the power differential between an ever-widening range of relations: celebrity and fan, teacher and student, beloved and lover, pixels and flesh, writer and reader. She weaves Adriene’s wellness speak and broad directives through deftly described loneliness (‘We are the taxidermied trying to twist.’) and word music (‘Lies leaf-out late—clotted and dirty.’). Dorney writes, ‘An illusion describes a misinterpretation of a true sensation’ and I nod, happy to be lost alongside her in the slipperiness of the real."
—Sommer Browning, author of Good Actors
"I love Erin Dorney’s new collection of epistolary poems Yes I Am Human I Know You Were Wondering, so vivid, so tender, pained and human, moving through 30 days of ‘Yoga with Adriene’ videos with such evocative curiosity—epistolary as in I reach, I long for, as in I long towards, Adriene's voice floating in and out like a visiting angel. Dorney's poems, like her collages, are beautiful assemblages, made of the literal stuff of life. Somehow Dorney bends epistolary address towards elegy and utopia at once, a methodology for collective dreaming—a gift."
—Wendy Xu, author of Phrasis
“Erin Dorney’s brain is performance art reaching for new emotional levels in this collection of letters/poems and collage work. The loneliness of the pandemic is made tangible through soul, or rather source searching, yoga, and the need to reach out for human connection. Here we have an introspection that becomes full-bodied."
—Kevin Sampsell, author of I Made an Accident
"‘What’s being done is nothing. Imagine yourself as a baby. Now, imagine a whole country of that.’ Dorney’s prose poems—diaristic and epistolary, questing and questioning—chronicle a pandemic month of isolation and helplessness, rage and wonder. Yes I Am Human I Know You Were Wondering may be rooted in a parasocial relationship through Youtube, but Dorney offers us more than a time capsule or a one-way mirror—these poems reach out and touch, returning us again and again to the body (‘the soft coiled curve of each foot’), to the imagination (‘we are spongey, a new breed of grabbers’) and (‘How can there be so many different shades of green?’) to love."
—Annelyse Gelman, author of Vexations
“There's an infectious exuberance in Yes I Am Human, in these epistolary missives that are both breathless and halting as they catalog desire, yoga, absence, awful ordinary objects, and the awkward, tender practice of waiting, even if it's for both simply ‘a way to take back touch’ and an impossibly encyclopedic list of wants like ‘fewer people, less caring, engine data, propeller theory, an owl to fly out of a tree.’ Erin Dorney has made a book that captures what's both quietly nourishing and unsettlingly abstract about our most mediated forms of sociality, so that when we encounter ‘an Undefeated season of noise’ we think it could go on forever, even when we know the image will eventually go out like a light. The sharp, capacious moments captured in these poems glance against each other and accumulate into a noisy structure of feeling that reaches far beyond these pages."
—Julia Bloch, author of The Sacramento of Desire
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Erin Dorney is the author of I Am Not Famous Anymore: Poems After Shia LaBeouf (2018), Grating, Darling, Full of Dirt (2023), The Usual Arteries (2024), and many zines. Her writing has appeared in DIAGRAM, Tolka, Passages North, Juked, Bone Bouquet, and HAD, among other publications. Her literary artwork and installations have been featured at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, and Susquehanna Art Museum. She holds degrees in librarianship and creative writing, is the co-founder of Fear No Lit, and lives in the non-city part of New York. Find her online at erindorney.com.
BOOK INFO
Pub date: March 4, 2025
Print Length: 80 pages
Dimensions: 5×7”
Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-957392-36-3
ABOUT THE BOOK
Ryan Rivas has lived in Orlando’s Colonialtown North neighborhood for over a decade. In Nextdoor in Colonialtown, he pairs photos of the neighborhood with conversations assembled from the area’s Nextdoor.com posts. The result is at turns absurd and abject, goofy and gothic, paranoid and profound. By displacing his familiar surroundings, Rivas evokes the broader White imaginary underlying colonialism and suburbanization.
PRAISE FOR NEXTDOOR IN COLONIALTOWN
"Nextdoor in Colonialtown is by turns a documentary on the personal and collective, a treatise on loneliness, a dark comedy of manners, and an extraordinary examination of what it means to live in America."
—Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
“In this brilliant and often humorous image-text assemblage, what emerges is an uncanny echo of specters and calls: for policing, firearms, and hot tub recommendations; to see “we are all humans with the same organs” and to watch out for some suspicious creature doing some kind of harm. Note the fragility, the shadows, the lawn objects, the white fright. In the afterword, Rivas offers a succinct account of suburbia as the continued legacy of white settler colonialism, including federal laws and initiatives which, taken up and taken advantage of at the local level, made it so. In other words, maybe the unsettling fact of Florida is that what happens here, happens across the United States.”
– Teresa Carmody, author of The Reconception of Marie
“There is something to be said about people who lock themselves away in their ‘nice communities,’ desperately trying to separate themselves from ‘worse ones.’ Indeed, there’s been much scholarship on white flight and its cousin, gentrification. Nextdoor in Colonialtown, however, lets those communities speak for themselves. And their words are deafening. Seemingly facile in its mission, this project is smart, bold and successful. You will never quite view your ‘nice’ neighbors the same. So, make sure to ‘get your guns and ammo’ ready!”
– Dr. Chesya Burke, author of Let’s Play White
“Ryan Rivas is a documentarian, a silent lurker in the evenly mowed grass of Colonialtown, a neighborhood as much haunted by its history as your own. What he chronicles is unnerving, amusing, endearing, repugnant, hilarious, and alarming; a stupid, grinning shadow of Americana, against which anyone would want to lock their doors and windows.”
– Sarah Gerard, author of True Love
“A disturbing and darkly funny aperture into the South, framing Floridian Suburbs as the new frontier and its people as living documents of its Colonial history and segregationist policies. Rivas’ sometimes aloof, often satirical juxtaposition offers fluent commentary on the through-line between the “town watch” of Colonial America and the many “citizen observer” and vigilante organizations across the nation, where so many of us live out the racial drama as members of what Elizabeth Alexander has called ‘the Trayvon generation.’ . . . In the suburban theatres of suspicion rendered in Rivas’ haunting, sharp book, actors play out scripts of violent exclusion and virulent protectionism, directed by histories of racism and xenophobia to appear adjacent to each other while standing in opposition, gun or head cocked, in a surveilling intimacy that confuses a clenched fist for an extended hand.”
– Divya Victor, author of Curb and Kith
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ryan Rivas is the Publisher of Burrow Press and the Coordinator of MFA Publishing for Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas creative writing program. A Macondo Writers Workshop Fellow, his writing has appeared in The Believer, The Rumpus, Literary Hub, Necessary Fiction, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012, and elsewhere. Find more of his work at ryanrivas.net.
BOOK INFO
Pub date: December 10 2024 [reissue]
Print Length: 88 pages
Dimensions: 6×6”
Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-957392-08-0
2022 limited edition hardcover: sold out
ANTHOLOGY
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Before there was Autofocus Books, there was Autofocus Lit, an online journal dedicated to artful autobiographical writing in its various genres and forms. The online journal began in October 2020 and published 318 original pieces from established and emerging writers before it closed in October 2024 to continue building the press that grew out of it. This anthology collects over forty works of short-form prose (400 - 3,000 words), selected by the journal’s founder and editor-in-chief, Michael Wheaton. These works are arranged into the seven big thematic containers that developed over the publication’s four years: friends, family, heartbreak, the body, violence, death, and life. If I Can Be Honest provides an instructive, engrossing, and polyvocal survey of artful autobiographical prose two decades into 21st century literature.
CONTRIBUTORS [ in order of appearance ]
[Friends] Aaron Burch; Nina Perlman; Zach Savich; Mike Nagel; David Schuman; Suzy Eynon
[Family] Thad DeVassie; David Shields; D.T. Robbins; Kirstie MacKenzie; Andrew Sottile; Amy Lyons; Andrew Bertaina
[Heartbreak] Brianna Snow; Kaycie Hall; Erin Riedel; Kristine Langley Mahler; Alyson Zetta Williams; Lexi Kent-Monning
[The Body] Donna Vorreyer; Erin Dorney; Sabrina Small; Abigail Richards; Jillian Luft
[Violence] Lyd Havens; Christy Tending; Lena Ziegler; Cameron Gearen; Paul Rousseau; Erin Slaughter
[Death] Kiyanna Hill; Danielle Chelosky; WA Hawkins; Chance Dibben; Stephanie Austin; Laurie Rachkus Uttich
[Life] Holly Pelesky; Claire Hopple; Teresa Carmody; Kevin Maloney; Abigail Oswald; Beth Kephart; Diana Ruzova
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Michael Wheaton edits and publishes Autofocus Books. He is the author of the essay Home Movies (BUNNY, 2024), and his writing has appeared in Essay Daily, DIAGRAM, Cleveland Review of Books, Identity Theory, and elsewhere on the internet.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: July 15, 2025
Print length: 228 pages
Dimensions: 6×9”
ISBN: 978-1-957392-44-8
BOOK DESCRIPTION
A fun and thoughtful collection of previously unpublished essays about skateboarding, riding horses, gardening, delivering mail, shooting baskets, cooking, record collecting, knitting, stitching, running, and many more things that aren’t writing, except that, put in the context of this collection, maybe they are?
TABLE OF CONTENTS
On Finding Your Voice
Scott Mitchel May - “Take it Steezy”
Donald Ryan - “Recipe for an Authentic, From Scratch Shepherd’s Pie (When I Don’t Have Lamb in the Fridge)”
e rathke - “Fermenting Hot Sauce”
James Brubaker - “About that Time I Sold My Copies of the First Three American Analog Set Records When I Really, Truly Shouldn’t Have, and Have Regretted it Ever Since”
On Training Your Instincts
Siân Griffiths - “Dressage”
Kirsten Reneau - “On The Ancient Art of Driving on A Mountain Road”
Shane Kowalski - “How To Deliver Other People's Mail”
Ruth Joffre - “Adventures in Bird (Mis)Identification”
On Trusting the Process
Abby Harding - “A Garden is a Love Song”
Ashleigh Catibog Abraham - “Heart, Soul & Drops of Blood”
Katharine Coldiron - “Thousands of Half-Stitches”
On Noticing
Hattie Jean Hayes - “Silent Treatment”
Emma Sloley - “Notice Me”
Kevin Maloney - “Alleyman”
On Perseverance
Mitchell Nobis - “Buckets”
Abigail Oswald - “See Tom Run”
Amie Souza Reilly - “On Laundry”
Katie Darby Mullins - “Not to Mention the Parking”
On Living a Writing Life
Ellen Rhudy - “Knit, Purl”
Tasha Coryell - “The Slog Itself”
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Aaron Burch grew up in Tacoma, WA. He is the author of a novel, Year of the Buffalo; a memoir/literary analysis, Stephen King’s The Body; a short story collection, Backswing; and a novella, How to Predict the Weather. He started the literary journal Hobart, which he edited for twenty years, and is currently the co-editor of WAS (Words & Sports) and HAD (and possibly a new thing to be announced soon?). He currently lives in Ann Arbor, MI and is online: on Twitter and Instagram at @aaron__burch, and the world wide web at aaronburch.net.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: August 1 2023
Print Length: 170 pgs
Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5”
ISBN: 978-1-957392-25-7
[ FORTHCOMING ]
The Father of the Man: The Last Portrait Sitting with Cormac McCarthy— Beowulf Sheehan // [photo essay] September 1, 2026
Disenchanted — Kaycie Hall // [essay collection] September 22, 2026
What a House Can Hold — Laura Childs Gill // [memoir-in-essays] October 2026
Failure Is the Only Subject: On Documentary Film and a Life Coming Undone — David Shields // [book-length essay] February 23, 2027
Risk Tolerance— Niina Pollari // [poetry collection] March 2027
Muscle Memory — Lilly Dancyger // [book-length essay] April 2027