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A Book So Red was the winning manuscript in the 2014 Caketrain Competition, as judged by Peter Markus. ### "A Book So Red's linguistic singularities, formal contractions, and world comprised of the existential non-sequitur coalesce into an astonishing aesthetic teratoid: the vacuum-packed denarration. The narrator's skewed, oblique and painful relationships teach us the only real comedy is the sound of laughter in the dark all the way down." -Lance Olsen, author of Theories of Forgetting ### "Rachel Levy is a wizard-gory, tender and wickedly funny." -Noy Holland, author of Bird ### "It's as if Rachel Levy put the carcass of the novel on the butcher block: choice language cutlets remain." -Sa...
"Megan Martin's muscular, gleaming prose contends with how we as humans cope with the itchy banality of reality. Stuffed with imagi-nary men, future bathtub deaths, sick black jellies, meteor lettuce, and vagi-nas full of Jesus light, Nevers emerges from the tension between what is real, what is perceived, what is felt and what is completely imagined. What makes Martin such an amazing writer is that it's hard to discern the differences-and it doesn't even matter." Melissa Broder, author of Scarecrone * "Nevers is that feeling you get when you are suddenly inside your-self, looking around, going, Hey, that's my coffee mug. That's my pen. I am me. It's like standing in your childhood home as t...
This debut full-length poetry collection by Ben Mirov was the winning manuscript in the 2009 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, as judged by Michael Burkard. “The character, Ghost Machine, in Ben Mirov’s extraordinary poems creeps me out. It makes me feel uncomfortable, frustrated, and, at times, flat-out angry. I want to tell it to do something and be done with it. ‘Get a life,’ I say. But it never leaves me alone. Creepy’s good. Discomfort and anger are good. Feeling anything intensely in this life is good, from both sides of the grave.” -Ralph Angel, author of Exceptions and Melancholies “Ben Mirov is the champion of the sentence. Every sentence is perfectly carved from a cold metal machine in the BART tunnels of Oakland that loops reality. They erase what they compress. I read this book and then puke in the shower. I read this book and then bleed on the sheets. My earlobes are wet. My pants are too small. These poems are about needing to touch something that you know your hand will go through. Mirov’s poems are sick and crushing. This book marks the end of fucking around.” -Zachary Schomburg, author of Scary, No Scary
The debut full-length collection of poetic fictions from Santa Fe, New Mexico author Kim Parko.
Collects short stories of people losing touch with reality or for whom reality has become frightening, dark, and unsettling.
"Eleven stories that traverse a gritty, surreal terrain between madness and freedom"--
Fiction. Mapping a utopia on the brink, THE MOTHERING COVEN's rare blend of charisma and pyrotechnic wordplay makes for an utterly original act of storytelling. Bertrand has disappeared from the house she shared with seven women--artists, scientists, and of course, witches. As the women plan a party for Mrs. Borage's hundredth birthday, Bertrand's absence threatens to dissolve the world they've created. "Deliriously imagined, THE MOTHERING COVEN is a work of wonder. Joanna Ruocco arrives: marvelous, and fully sprung!"--Carole Maso. "[A]n engagingly whimsical tale, graceful and inventive, with its own distinctive lexicon"--Robert Coover.
It is early spring in AD 980 Iceland, and a young boy named Von Koa is witnessing the whole of his island be overtaken by a strange illness. By listening to old tales of his people, he learns of a magical pearl that has the potential to save everyone but only if it can be found...and in time. In the path of his search, Koa realizes he must rediscover lost knowledge of how to unleash the pearl's power. He sets out across the rugged and violent beauty of Iceland and, in the path of his adventure, enlists the help of ambitious Viking warriors and his uncle who hailed from Scotland in the hope of solving the mysterious turmoil that threatens the island.
Poetry. "In LOST LETTERS AND OTHER ANIMALS Carrie Bennett explores what words can and cannot express. Animals abound--birds sing and stop singing, dogs breathe and stop breathing, deer appear and disappear. All along the human brainbox records, remembers, and then forgets. In five long fragmented poems, we put together a collage that is a meditation on the eternal tension between beauty and truth. Bennett's touch is light but cuts deeply into the impermanence that marks our lives. A beautiful collection."--Barbara Hamby
The Physics of Imaginary Objects, in fifteen stories and a novella, offers a very different kind of short fiction, blending story with verse to evoke fantasy, allegory, metaphor, love, body, mind, and nearly every sensory perception. Weaving in and out of the space that connects life and death in mysterious ways, these texts use carefully honed language that suggests a newfound spirituality.