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Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach's The Bear Who Ate the Stars, winner of the 2014 Split Lip Uppercut Chapbook Awards, is a collection of poems that bite like sharpened nails and enlighten with historical, spiritual and political accounts. In the words of poet Michael Meyerhofer (Blue Collar Eulogies, Damnatio Memoriae), "There's a wonderful range to Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach's poems, rendered all the more remarkable by their consistent depth and polish. These poems feel meticulously crafted, despite a certain primal, sometimes sensual quality often falsely seen as antithetical to intellectual poetry. These poems smell of stars and campfires, a deeper sense of story, a mythological thread running, river-like, all the way back to the dawn of time."
In Kelly Ann Jacobson's An Inventory of Abandoned Things, winner of the 2020 Split/Lip Press Fiction Chapbook Contest, there are cockroaches in the walls and anoles trapped in the doors. Squirrels roll across the attic rafters, and red ants patrol the car floor. A lazy gopher tortoise chews lettuce in the neighbor's butterfly garden. At once the story of a pregnant graduate student separated from her wife and an inventory of the Florida panhandle, this book of linked stories questions what it means to fight the land for a place in it-and whether, in the fighting, there can be a bond between human and landscape formed that is stronger than love.
Set along the 455 Nebraska miles of Interstate 80, the 48 stories in Brett Biebel's debut collection, 48 Blitz, introduce characters who search for roadkill, play high school football, drink on rooftops, and strive to find purpose amid the cornfields and humidity of the Great Plains. Whether it's the politician on a bowling alley tour, the local loudmouth, or the Husker diehard slated for execution, the people who make up this collection struggle with the legacy of the American frontier, its sometimes empty promises, and often stubborn beauty. By turns experimental and character-driven, 48 Blitz goes inside the heads of characters not often seen in literary fiction, inviting readers to immerse themselves within, rather than fly over, the wide-open Midwestern prairie.
Winner of the 2017 Turnbuckle Chapbook Contest, The Quiet Part Loud is a collection of eleven flash fictions diving into the lives of restless, often lawless youths on the rural East Coast during late-aughts. Whether having lost a home or feeling like home is slowly disappearing, these characters act out in ways familiar and strange. Runaways fight security guards, houses explode, theft is flagrant, sex abounds, mannequin arms bob from Buick windows, and all forms of communication get very loud before fully breaking down.
"His territory is [where] passion and eloquence collide and fuse.'—The New York Times "Richard Siken writes about love, desire, violence, and eroticism with a cinematic brilliance and urgency."—Huffington Post Richard Siken's debut, Crush, won the Yale Younger Poets' Prize, sold over 20,000 copies, and earned him a devoted fan-base. In this much-anticipated second book, Richard Siken seeks definite answers to indefinite questions: what it means to be called to make—whether it is a self, love, war, or art—and what it means to answer that call. In poems equal parts contradiction and clarity, logic and dream, Siken tells the modern world an unforgettable fable about itself. The Museum T...
This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love. contains thirteen stories, full-length and flash, that explore love-sexual, platonic, filial, and beyond-in its gritty and beguiling forms. A small-town teenager pursues an eccentric pinball wizard after her grandfather's move to her home shakes up her parents' marriage; a chronic depressive turns to a TV animal psychic in hopes of mending her relationship with her dog-loving dad; a middle-aged recovering alcoholic goes back to college and becomes fixated on his stern professor. Throughout the collection, as characters in various stages of life try to navigate love, they court obsession, madness, and transcendence.Advance Praise for This. This. This. I...
A young interfaith chaplain is joined on her hospital rounds one night by an unusual companion: a rough-and-tumble dog who may or may not be a ghost. As she tends to the souls of her patients—young and old, living last moments or navigating fundamentally altered lives—their stories provide unexpected healing for her own heartbreak. Balancing wonder and mystery with pragmatism and humor, Ellen Cooney (A Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances) returns to Coffee House Press with a generous, intelligent novel that grants the most challenging moments of the human experience a shimmer of light and magical possibility.
In Esteban Rodríguez's debut essay collection Before the Earth Devours Us, a young boy emerges from the valley of childhood memories, curious and seeking to understand a world that is violent, uncertain, and as full of loss as it is of life from the people who inhabit it. Here, the pages unfurl with uncles engaged in physical conflict; dogs roam neighborhoods and alleyways; a dead bird is used as a play object; and our protagonist, through observation and conflict of his own, begins to make sense of the impact he and his body have on others. Lyrical, engaging, and always honest, Rodríguez's memorable collection reminds us that the past is never beyond language's redemption.
Through flashbacks, photographs, confessions and letters, we discover our narrator--as queer sex store worker, suicide survivor, isolated lover, immigrant's daughter, deliberate alcoholic and artistic failure. She cycles through images, obsessions and memories, as she tries to glue together the unhinged parts of herself, both in the physical world and the one in her mind. She recalls Sloan, the girlfriend-who-got-away; Mischa, her heartbroken best friend and co-conspirator; and her elusive older brother whose absence continues to shape her life. With razor-sharp imagery, the fractured story of our narrator comes to life: A young woman at an emotional crossroads embarking on a journey to her future. Or is she falling into her past? In New York's City's bars, bedrooms, and elsewhere, Jaroniec evokes the lives of queer underground angels, their deep friendships, their passions and their struggles.