THAT NIGHT ALIVE
by TARA DEAL
Winner of the 2016 Novella Prize
SEPTEMBER 2016 – PRE-ORDER NOW!
Part futuristic fiction and part meditative memoir, That Night Alive begins on the narrator's death date and moves backward in time to tell her story. She traces her path as a successful crypto-reporter, navigating a life of secrecy and solitude and world travel. A counter-narrative intersects, told by the same woman as a young artist struggling to create a work of beauty. That Night Alive investigates art and failure, persistence and success.
NEW 2016 POETRY TITLES!!
LEAVING CLE
poems of nomadic dispersal
JANICE A. LOWE
$18 – BUY!
Leaving CLE is made from the detritus of reverse
migration. Its poems move from Cleveland to New York City to
Tuscaloosa’s "schoolhouse door" and back again.
They travel and party with a musical Cleveland from Art
Tatum’s 1920’s to Albert Ayler and from Ohio Funk to
Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. They collage a shifting sense of home and
negotiate the gift horse of flashbulb memory. Remembering is a
character. Houses speak.
"Leaving CLE is a beautiful document of eccentric return. A collection of unforecast surprise, it keeps giving home away, disbursing and dispersing hard, pleasurable weather like a new kind of lake effect. Cleveland is Brooklyn is Chicago and elsewhere, everywhere in a set of absolute specificities, upSouth, back east, out and out. There’s a black cosmology of “difference without separation” of which Denise Ferreira da Silva, sociologist, speaks. Janice A. Lowe, poet, sings it so hard, makes her air such an irreducible element of the general air, that you couldn’t get away from it if you tried, which is fine, because that’s the last thing you’ll want. Her sound, her time, is everything you do."
—Fred Moten
HER FAITHFULNESS
LIZ WALDNER
$16 – BUY!
The poems in Liz Waldner’s
Her Faithfulness surprise and sustain. The world they know is
"daily harmed and harming," and they summon resources
against its meanness: the natural world where sight of an indigo
bunting or blue lizard presents "the kingdom of heaven,"
a fragment of song or local speech carrying memory and feeling. All
of the themes and inventiveness of Waldner’s eight earlier
books are part of Her Faithfulness, here condensed to
their essence in poems wild and smart and joyful and wise near the
end of their journey: "After a long time, I came to
love’s house /
where I was invited to stay."
These playful meditations on sex, passion and, above all, the desire for a home, belie the intensity animating them. When Waldner names the "god" she wants "she," it's easy to overlook the erased option–"goddess" –that implies the co-existence of a male god. Waldner’s position is clear: the only singular god is she. And she, the only "Mercy" worth wanting, is the "good." Her Faithfulness, the story of Waldner’s peripatetic life, rewards a reading, to say nothing of her readers, faithful to the end. –Tyrone Williams
The difference between looking anywhere you can and looking anywhere you want reasons the weather of these exquisite poems, inside which malady, melody, severity, doubt, and pleasure approach and pass to be claimed by a voice too beautiful to ever stop listening for. Liz Waldner may be here to show us how joy made sad gets to keep being joy, how to be beheld by meanness and not be it. This is the work of a vital, profuse mind undeniably at home in poetry. –Kathleen Peirce
2015 NOVELLA PRIZE WINNER
CAMP OLVIDO
LAWRENCE COATES
$15 – BUY
In the California heartland in 1932, at a migrant labor camp whose very name means forgotten, a child’s sudden illness leads to tensions between workers wishing to break camp and the land barons enforcing their contracts. Into this dispute Esteban Alas —contrabandista and self-styled businessman—is reluctantly drawn as a mediator, until an act of violence forces him into a more tragic role.
NEW POETRY
MONETIZED
ALISSA QUART
$16 – BUY
Alissa Quart’s first book of poetry sifts
brilliantly through our landscape of damaged Americana. From spam
ads to tech speak, from self-help to real estate to the lingo of
gossip or “mom” sites, these poems insistently limn a
country where nearly everything has taken on the character of
money. Quart, the acclaimed author of Branded and two
other books of reported cultural criticism, cuts into our clamorous
culture, summoning its strangeness and humor. Monetized
also reflects upon a shared longing for the analogue era, as well
as our longing for a less commercialized past. This book is a
remarkable account of a state of yearning for the passing moment in
a period of rapid acceleration, a feeling Quart calls
“right-now-nostalgia.” Read more about the
book...