Böcker utgivna av Black Lawrence Press, Inc.

Return Against the Flow by Susana Praver-Pérez is a memoir-in-verse that travels back and forth between Puerto Rico and its diaspora, much like the island's pattern of circular migration over the years. Reflecting her personal journey across geographies and languages, Susana's poems move between English and Spanish, and capture the tempo of ambient sounds, such as drumbeats of bomba, or a black-plumed chango chirping at dawn. She unflinchingly explores the daily struggles Puerto Rico faces, while exuberantly celebrating the island's culture, its peoples, and the concept of "return". This is a voyage via words the reader will remember long after turning the last page.

The Postcards I Never Sent is a beautifully sensual poetic memoir, rich with raw emotion and vulnerability. Patterson's words dance between love, loss, leaving, and returning. It is an honor to witness these poems becoming their own small rebellions on the page. This book transports us between time and place, from nature to the divine, all in a search for new and cosmic beginnings."-Nia McAllister, poet, Senior Public Programs Manager at Museum of the African Diaspora

In this "hybridiary" of historical fiction and personal memoir, we peer inside baby incubators at Coney Island, waiting for childhood to take wing. We overhear the dying dreams of the Imperial Romanov family, and we fret the simple act of watching a child walk to class. Hope is a bright and constant thread: a tornado cuts a tender swath; a lady bides time inside a tiger's claws; teenagers preen on screens during pandemic lockdown. Rescues are fumbled but perpetually launched-and love is a gift the way the sun is a gift: constant and consoling, but also blinding, near-obliterating. Tragic, funny, and surreal, FEATHER ROUSING nests in the spaces between caretaking and grief, secret and spectacle, recollection and imagination, global anguish and private joy.

We are delighted to serve up Feast: Poetry & Recipes for a Full Seating at Dinner - a scrumptious offering for the mind and body that is both a poetry anthology and a cookbook. Poems and Recipes by: Lindsay Ahl * Susanne Paola Antonetta * James Arthur * Robert Avery * Julie Babcock * Michele Battiste * Ruth Bavetta * Amy Berkowitz * Emily K. Bright * Shirley Chen * Lilian Cohen * Barbara Crooker * Elizabeth (Mimi) Danson * Jesse DeLong * Juditha Dowd * Renee Emerson * Matthew Gavin Frank * Stephen Gibson * Karen Greenbaum-Maya * Ed Happ * Elizabeth Hilts * Lynn Hoffman * Brent House * M.J. Iuppa * Arnold Johnston * Diane Kendig * Adele Kenny * Kathleen Kirk * Éireann Lorsung * Mira Martin-Parker * Laura McCullough * mariana mcdonald * Claire McQuerry * Mimi Moriarty * Eric Morris * Robby Nadler * Loretta Oleck * Daniel A. Olivas * Daniele Pantano * Kevin Pilkington * Anne Posten * Yelizaveta P. Renfro * Natasha Sajé * Tina Schumann * Amy Lee Scott * Vivian Shipley * Leah Shlachter * Martha Silano * Erin Elizabeth Smith * Sheila Squillante * Dolores Stewart Riccio * Marcela Sulak * Marjorie Thomsen * John J. Trause * Claire Van Winkle * Benjamin Vogt * Joe Wilkins * Laura Madeline Wiseman * Sarah Yasin * Tracy Youngblom

Dressing the Saints, the second selection for the Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series, vividly explores the lives of Cuban Americans. Set in the lushness of Cuba and Florida, and spanning decades, the stories chronicle lives left behind and new ones forged with struggle, melancholy, and hope. Old loves are reencountered, enemies confronted, family secrets are revealed, and women fight for agency. Memory, what can't be forgotten and what is elusively fading away with the passage of time, is ever-present in the stories of people fiercely confronting fate with grace and compassion.

The raw and tender truths that map out the shard sharp pain and deep dull ache beside the unrelenting resilience in this exquisite poetic plea, wail, and declaration personify the writer and the woman behind the words. They are a gift that Amber Allen-Peirson has dared to share with us all.-Nina Vincent

In Shane McCrae's NONFICTION, the self is repeatedly re-figured as the site of rupture between truth and fiction, present and past, first-person and third-person-the rupture in which the dichotomies we live by, the dichotomies that erase us, originate. The speakers of these poems inhabit impossible situations, and the poems themselves speak neither of overcoming, nor of being overcome by, these impossibilities, but of the moment of equilibrium between extremes, the moment of uncertainty from which the future emerges. As McCrae writes at the end of his two-part poem on Solomon Northup, "in the darkness / I after a while couldn't be sure / My eyes were open." These poems assert, and foreground, possibility; the rupture they describe is hope.

Though Joe Wilkins's new collection of short fiction set under the big Montana sky may have all the trappings of a traditional Western-long shots of sage flats and blue mountains, late nights at the dingy local watering hole, and a hard-working cowboy making time with the boss's daughter-FAR ENOUGH is far from traditional. A series of short prose fragments told from several viewpoints, FAR ENOUGH follows Willie Benson, Wade Newman, and young Jackie Newman as they crisscross the high plains of eastern Montana, each searching for something to hold onto. Wilkins's narratives-splintered, wending, intertwined-sprawl out beneath a huge, dazzling sky filled with "blue lightning run the wrong way, red eruptions and the slow fade to gold, a white ache along the horizon." Poetic, darkly humorous, subversive-FAR ENOUGH is a Western for our time.