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"Cynthia Manick's BLUE HALLELUJAHS bring us to a broil like Koko Taylor's 'white-toothed love coils on repeat.' Here, we have a gospel of womanly sharpness, a kitchen sinked and hot combed diary of the way Blues grinds into the 21st century. Gifted with the ability to smolder into surprise and swelter, Manick's reflections on discovery and loss will bring you to a 'slow applause under the skin.' Thank you for this bouquet of sheet music filled with church organ and pistol smoke, Ms. Manick. We gone need it to get to the other side."-Tyehimba Jess"What we remember is what we become. Rocking chairs holding mothers and 'animals that root the ground for peaches, bones and stars.' In BLUE HALLELUJAHS Cynthia Manick holds fast to what brought us across. These are not the things you will hear about Black people on the nightly news. But they remain the things that lock the arms of Black people around Black people when we need what we need to keep moving on. I am so grateful to this sweet box of sacred words."-Nikky Finney"The speaker of Cynthia Manick's haunted debut collection admits 'a love for surgery porn at 1 a.m.' And one early poem begins, 'Today I am elbow deep / in some animal's belly // pulling out the heart and stomach / for my mother's table.' Throughout, BLUE HALLELUJAHS approaches aspects of a woman's development-from 'feet first' Caesarean delivery to a grandmother's admonition 'to pull flesh / from the throat not the belly'-blade at the ready, moving from slaughter to surgery to a kind of deep southern haruspication. At the center of girlhood we find The Shop with its inventory of inherited hungers. 'Is this what the heart eats?' Manick renders visceral a longing to avoid extinction, to escape the museum, to live fully embodying one's identity as a woman who 'knows / how to wield a knife.'-Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

A new collection from poet Lisa Hiton.Arriving to the pastoral happens repeatedly and full of worry in THE CLEARING. For the pastoral stands for the fields of the Holocaust, of the imagination, of the Midwest, of the body, and even the empty field of the blank page. In the absence of knowing how to properly bury our inheritances of the 20th century, Hiton turns to fictive spectacle--to narrative invention, sensory desires, and malleable landscapes--as a last gesture toward hope. As the intellectual ambitions and fears ramp up, the urgency of the body (and the refusal to look at it) does too."Erotic and liturgical, the poems in Lisa Hiton's chapbook The Clearing summon a Jewish North Shore of Chicago that shifts under iterative, imagined futures and pasts. Here, we continually mourn the speaker's living father, who dies in several different Jewish histories; we reach past simple desire all the way inside the speaker's lover to 'turn [her] heart over.' Hiton's evoked intimacies in The Clearing are precarious, dangerous, and heartbreakingly beautiful; in this, they match the world's. In this dazzling chapbook (and all of Hiton's oeuvre), I remain grateful for the poet's commitment to capturing the ongoing instability of our safety--as Jews, as queer women, as daughters--alongside the blessed, profound joys of Jewish queer womanhood."--Rachel Mennies"Lisa Hiton's poems bring me in close, then hurt me. To heal, to recover, to touch truths that have been denied, she reimagines a family's history. 'Obsessed with death, but having no desire to die, ' her speaker pushes herself to see a super bloom out of ash filled ground. This sequence moves through tundra, heat, grief, and the surreal. It celebrates love, across painful expanses, that she will not let go. It's a celebratory, queer collection. I am grateful for the way mourning rituals, in Hiton's voice, become chants of persistence."--Dan KrainesPoetry.

Fiction. Cursed by tenderhearted witches, saved by Nazarene healers, and haunted by brazen lunatics, the characters in FIELD NOTES FOR THE EARTHBOUND yearn to escape the relentless horizon of Northwestern Ohio. These connected stories chronicle an area dying to itself: shedding its history and awakening to modernity--to highways, speed, bottled beer, and rock-n-roll.

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.

If you, like the speaker in Laura McCullough's poem, "Almost Nothing Something [stars / plates / cells]" have grown "tired & suspicious of poetry" Women & Other Hostages will absolutely revitalize you. These are riveting, wholly moving narratives of a life lived. Out of sorrow McCullough invokes a stunning grace where "What is stripped from you" becomes a gift because "what's left behind is all your own." Women of all circumstances inhabit these poems. They shed their skin like snakes, "memory in flesh," and consider the bones of what holds us together in these divisive times. This beautiful book will knock loose what is lodged in your heart. -Suzanne Frischkorn Early in this collection, McCullough offers this: Tilt back your neck; expose your throat. / You know you want to be devoured. Each of these poems contains universes that quiver with desire, in one form or another. With heat. Both the fear of it as well as the joy. Desire is the engine that got us here, yet these poems push even beyond that, beyond forgiveness even, beyond this cage we all inhabit, out and into the deeper mysteries-don't I know what it is like / to walk in a cloud of my own making?- Nick Flynn

Moon Trees and Other Orphans is a gritty collection of short stories set along the Gulf Coast, focusing on themes of desperation, loneliness, and love. Filled with hard-living characters who are deeply lonely, it tracks the ways they fight for survival, often making very bad decisions as they go. Populated by gun toting women, ex-cons, desperate teens, and other outsiders, it is a collection about what life is like in hard places, both beautiful and dangerous.

This collection of essays reveals an impressive new voice, both poignant and observant. McQueen suggests loneliness is also the accomplishment of understanding how far away you can move from other people's expectations. Her clarity rings brightly throughout these works of self-discovery and cultural re-connection. -Wendy S. Walters