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Interweaving visceral, atmospheric prose with historical photographs, images and texts, The Pink Institution traces four generations of Mississippi women from their run-down, post-Civil War plantations to the modern-day trailer parks that house the youngest generations. As the impoverished decay of the Deep South expresses itself through their bloodlines, a new impression of Southern history and heritage emerges. The lyrical gravity and singular style of this unforgettable debut novel will transform the reader in its wake. Selah Saterstrom's writing has appeared in 3rd Bed and Pitkin Review. She is the editor of Soul Collections, a collection of prose and poetry written by at-risk teenagers in North Carolina. Born in Mississippi in 1974, she now lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where she teaches at Warren Wilson College.
Literary Nonfiction. Film. Religion & Spirituality. How does one participate (read and write) from within the membranous precinct between our multiple bodies, from within the larger rhizomic field of resonances, where much is sounding and also unsounded? By employing various "divinatory generators" (instructions, methods, trances), the essays in IDEAL SUGGESTIONS: ESSAYS IN DIVINATORY POETICS genuflect to practices that celebrate engagement with uncertainty while cultivating strategies through which one might collaborate with both rupture and rapture.
Rancher follows paths of pain and healing into the uncanny territories of life after rape.
Rosemary Candwell's past has exploded into her present. Down-and-out and deteriorating, she drifts from anonymous beds and bars in Providence, to a homeless shelter hidden among the hedge-rowed avenues of Newport, and through the revolving door of service jobs and quick-fix psychiatric care, always grasping for hope, for a solution. She's desperate to readjust back into a family and a world that has deemed her a crazy bitch living a choice they believe she could simply un-choose at any time. She endures flashbacks and panic attacks, migraines and nightmares. She can't sleep or she sleeps for days; she lashes out at anyone and everyone, especially herself. She abuses over-the-counter cold medicine and guzzles down anything caffeinated just to feel less alone. What if her family is right? What if she is truly broken beyond repair?Drawn from the author's experience of homelessness and trauma recovery, It's Not Nothing is a collage of small moments, biting jokes, intrusive memories, and quiet epiphanies meant to reveal a greater truth: Resilience never looks the way we expect it to look.
There is no other book that has addressed the meaning of flowers to human beings so diversely, comprehensively, and thoughtfully as Not a Rose. Masked as a traditional coffee table book, it quotes from the genre while turning it inside out, for the images it offers are not innocent pretty flowers but elegant, compelling, and yet grotesque sculptures that the artist has created from the offal, sex organs, and other parts of animals, reminding us that the flowers that grace our homes are really the detached dead sex organs of living beings, and making us question the foundations of aesthetic reception in general. Woven through the images, and taking its cue from them, is the writing of more than eighty prominent intellectuals, writers, and artists who address "the question of the flower" from a multiplicity of perspectives, including anthropology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and art history.
Set in a decaying town in southern West Virginia, Potted Meat follows a young Aftican-American boy into adolescence as he struggles with abusive parents, poverty, alcohol addiction, and racial tensions.
Fiction. Operating somewhere between fiction and poetry, biography and theory, the stories in ATTEMPTS AT A LIFE do what lively stories do best, creating worlds of possibility, worlds filled with surprises. Like the "experiments in found movement" one character conducts (in "Everybody's Autobiography"), Dutton's stories find movement wherever they turn, each sentence a small explosion of images and anthems and odd juxtapositions. This is writing in which the imagination (both writer's and reader's) is capable of producing almost anything at any moment, from a shiny penny to an alien metropolis, a burning village to a bright green bird. "Danielle Dutton's stories remind me of those alluring puzzles where the pool is overflowing and emptying at the same time. Dutton's answer? That the self is a rush of the languages of storytelling and moments of helpless intimacy"--Robert Gluck.
Fiction. Like a gothic teleplay by Gertrude Stein, filmed by Andy Warhol, and transcribed into a stunning lyrical novel by the very voyeuristic monster at its center, lustful in equal measure for the scintilla of soap opera set pieces and the two women one master, one slave trapped in an ever-shifting atmosphere of vamp and apprehension. "Deep in this fabulous book someone says 'i watch to aid her loneliness.' The many meanings of that phrase suggest the glittering accomplishment, the rare morality of this book. I have never read a more gorgeous novel in which the beauty is all in the mystery, not in any solution." Bin Ramke "In gorgeous sentences, Roxanne Carter translates the uncanny paradoxes of intimacy through shadow, ocean, ash. To read BEYOND THIS POINT ARE MONSTERS is to wake in a dream, from a dream, and realize you are in a room illuminated by darkness. Its enchantments are both important and a pleasure." Selah Saterstrom"
"Here is an astonishingly generous gathering of poetic energies and imaginations aimed toward turning more and more classrooms into scenes of transformative engagement with the prime instrument of our humanity, language. The essential work of exploratory play with words is presented in heartening variety in its necessary wildness, surprising pleasures, gravitas, illumination. This book is a catalogue of invention: visionary, pragmatic, surprising, fun---useful because it's inspiring and vice versa. The poets' essays are themselves an affirmation of the vital presence of poetry in our culture, proof and promise, Q.E.D."---Joan Retallock, coeditor, Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary, and author, The Poethical Wager --Book Jacket.
Poetry. How do we care for a broken world, especially when we ourselves are broken-hearted? How do we nurture others when we have scarce resources? How do we maintain our own sense of self under these pressures? The work of care falls disproportionately on women and often renders them lacking and unacknowledged in their labor. GENTLEWOMEN explores personal and historical trauma, bonds between mothers and sisters, and our estrangement from the natural world and from ourselves due to an exploitative and extractive relationship to land and peoples (human and otherwise). Through an allegorical envisioning of a world that is like our own but heightened through the individual lives and responsibilities of three sisters, Natura, Providentia, and Fortuna, the poems sound out in mourning and frustration--and try to imagine the world otherwise. A transformative journey through the shadows towards reconciliation both between sisters and with oneself.