Summer/Fall 2023 Catalogue

"Turkewitz’s nimble prose switches on a dime between soft and sharp, poignant and brutal, alien and achingly familiar. At the heart of each story, however, lies tenderness, magnified and made more precious by the dangers that surround it. This is a triumph."

-Starred Review in Publishers Weekly

The thirteen stories in Rebecca Turkewitz’s debut collection, Here in the Night, are engrossing, strange, eerie, and emotionally nuanced. With psychological insight and finely crafted prose, Here in the Night investigates the joys and constraints of womanhood, of queerness, and of intimacy.  Preoccupied with all manner of hauntings, these stories traverse a boarding school in the Vermont woods, the jagged coast of Maine, an attic in suburban Massachusetts, an elevator stuck between floors, and the side of an unlit highway in rural South Carolina.

At the center of almost every story is the landscape of night, with all its tantalizing and terrifying potential. After dark, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, boundaries loosen, expectations fall away, and even the greatest skeptics believe—at least fleetingly—that anything could happen.

These stories will stay with you.

Spring 2022 Black River Chapbook Competition Winner

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

EXCERPT from "Pretty"--

If Trudy had scooped the keys from Karl’s hand, if she had trilled, “How about I drive this time,” or if she had snapped, “You’ve got no business behind the wheel, you should know that by now,” they would have been stopped at that light, Trudy fiddling with the vents as the mist crept up the windshield and Karl bleating at the morning news. They might not have even noticed the ancient station wagon emerge from the thick valley fog, its parking beams dim yellow, the scrape of dragging muffler smothered by thick air. Certainly they would not have sailed onto Route 7, Trudy crying, “Red! Red! Red means stop!”, foot pumping madly at a brake that wasn’t there.

But Trudy had been looking for the grade book she’d failed to return to her satchel the night before, along with the pink sheet that would tell her which neurologist Karl was to see this morning and where. By the time she’d laid her hands on the latter, Karl was shuffling toward the garage. A thousand frustrations lay with the day before him: the too hot sweater he can’t wriggle out of, so it winds up bunched and binding his shoulders for the entire afternoon until Trudy gets home from school; the ringing phones whose callers hang up before he can find the word “Hello?” Even his feet are an upset, unresponsive as stones. Once he got himself moving so purposefully, Trudy didn’t have the heart to stop him. In both hands he’d clutched the keys like a prize.

“I know!” Karl shouts. His foot comes down heavy on the brake, bringing their Toyota to a citizenly halt very nearly in the middle of Route 7. “You think I don’t know what a red light means?” Trudy is reaching for the wheel, scrambling out of her seatbelt, no time to explain, with love and patience as the neurology nurses advise, that the light now lies behind them.

Entitlement is a hell of a drug. The load-bearing grifts, propping up a culture of dominance, range from the canonized hierarchies that inform interpersonal and social violence, to the ecological and economic abuses of extractive resource management and disaster capitalism. We Were More than Kindling is a confessional account of the author’s navigation of these systems, a collection of poems that endeavors to make meaning where the personal and political collide. We follow the speaker’s reckoning of an intimate history of persistent sexualization and consent violation with the disillusion of coming of age in an era when abuse of power is a feature, not a bug. This collection builds momentum through a cynical premise, following its speaker’s defiant claim-staking over their own body, agency, and pleasure.

FROM We Were More Than Kindling

A BURN A BURN

Winds kick the radius of flame
further. An ember can carry half a mile
or more. A small whir of

a bigger fury settles in some elsewhere
brush, nestles in wetless

leaves and renames them so thoroughly
they transmute into change
agents themselves,

like mediated accusations sprout legs
and sprint into silent houses.

Alarms clang. Small whirs

of fury. Call a burn a burn, a spade
a spade, abuse abuse. My parched

land with its wide stance
and its hands open—my parched land
and its wide maw gushing smoke.

The fire front shoves forward. The fire front
is indifferent to decorum,
shoves into December—

the fire, clueless and brutal, colludes
with wind, melts fur, melts skin,

shoves panicked animals
onto our asphalt, our domestic
quietude hurt, alerted.

Poetry. Women’s Studies / Gender Studies. Writing About the South. No Spare People documents the joys and perils of a tiny mother-daughter family navigating life on the margins. From poems about finding autonomy as a queer, unpartnered parent by choice in the South to those chronicling a generation’s economic instability, Hoover rejects so-called “acceptable losses” stemming from inequalities of gender, race, and class. The book asks, what happens to the woman no longer willing to live a lie?  How does language invent not only identity, but possibility?

Adrian Van Young beckons readers further into the shifting borderlands of the Gothic and uncanny in his second collection, Midnight Self. Space colonists menaced by a grotesque alien creature adapt a grim charter to ensure their survival. An exhausted new mother makes an uneasy discovery when her baby monitor’s signal gets crossed with another. An heiress imprisoned in a labyrinth of her own making is forced into an obliterating confrontation with grief. A carnivorous car lot tube man terrorizes a gang of transphobic bullies. An army nurse discovers that war’s terrors still hound her in new, chilling forms. Written in the tradition of Angela Carter, George Saunders and Mariana Enriquez, Midnight Self explores the dissociation of being human and the humanity of being monstrous.