Spring/Summer 2022 Catalogue

Selected out of the open reading period, the shifting speakers and landscapes of Rotura allow the poet to explore the themes of the Latinx experience and life itself; truth, family, longing are searched through language both direct and lyrical. It’s a long journey, but Araguz’s poems travel borders and boundaries creating an essential collection.

Through deeply personal and culturally grounded narratives, Water Lessons explores the relationship between reality and imagination, faith and doubt, presence and absence, as the speaker grapples with multiple dimensions of grief arising from her mother’s alcoholism and eventual death; her father’s deepening dementia; and her own childlessness. Against the backdrop of these personal griefs, the speaker scrutinizes the patriarchal underpinnings of the world she grew up in as well as her complicity in systemic racism as a white girl growing up in the 70s and 80s. Woven throughout the book are the speaker’s meditations on a divine presence that, for her, is both keenly felt and necessarily elusive, mirroring the speaker’s ultimate celebration of her unborn daughter as a “lovely fiction” who is both here and not here.

Live Caught is the story of Lenny, who finds himself out of options. He’s lost his arm to his abusive older brothers and lost his bearing within his family. Desperate to escape and determined not to lose hope, Lenny steals a skiff and attempts to ride the Carolina rivers from his family’s farm deep in the western North Carolina mountains all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. When a storm sinks his boat, he is suddenly in the hands of a profanity-slinging priest, whose illegal drug operation provides food and wages for the local parish. Snared within a power struggle between a crooked cop and the priest, Lenny must once again rely on the thinnest shred of hope in his attempt to escape.

This is a survival adventure that dives deep into the mystifying relationship between hope and choice and examines the peril of remaining in an untenable situation or taking that terrifying first step towards change.

In What Follows, the poet writes: “It’s the end of the world and we can’t stop saying the word tender.” Tenderness runs through the book, even as Webster demonstrates brutality and strength in the face of life’s experiences. These poems explore the vastness of the human experience, from sexual powerplays and the crimes commited against fellows to the mundanity and beauty of factory work. There is very little that escapes H.R. 's glance and raw lyricism. 

The strange and sometimes horrific stories in Fantasy Kit could easily draw comparison to the work of Angela Carter or even the master lyrical horror, Edgar Allen Poe, but they are also entirely unique. Made up of fairy tales, myths, traveling through mazes of space and time; each of these stories creeps through the mind long after the last page. 

Mongolian Horse is a collection of stories about Asian American experience, about Maryland, about youth and music. Each story delves into the place where love meets estrangement. These are the narratives each character worries over, and in that anxiety, their person is defined.

Daylight Has Already Arrived spans six years and countless styles. Motifs and images reappear, but the formal choices are wide-ranging. The poet utilizes prose, analysis of Shakespeare, erasure, and even footnotes to create neither memoir nor mediation, but a deeply intimate perspective on a vast landscape of ideas. Darling creates a sense of urgency without ever sacrificing her delicate, but firm grip on her work.

WINNER OF THE 2020 ST. LAWRENCE BOOK AWARD

In her debut full-length poetry collection, Always a Relic Never a Reliquary, Brazilian American poet, editor and abolitionist Kim Sousa interrogates inheritance by reaching both backwards and forwards: backwards towards her father’s first border crossing and forwards past her own. Centered around a specific personal trauma, a later-term miscarriage, the poems also contain collective trauma: they ask what it means to live in the United States both as immigrant and citizen, addressing State terror and violence as if by megaphone at the protest line. In Sousa’s poems, the personal is political: they are anti-racist, ecocritical and proletariat. She sings diasporic resilience as both a horror and celebration. The poems are haunted but hopeful; here, there is always hope in rage and resistance.