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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

Analog Poet Blues captures the journey of a poet searching for romance and seeking justice in a world transformed from the analog to the digital age. This dazzling collection ventures beyond the mainstream at intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and religion. These poems deftly reveal how an outsider becomes even stranger in an ever-evolving computer dominated landscape. Come take a trip around this wondrous electronically connected planet.

San Franshitshow is an emotional reckoning with self, love, and the world that unfolds amidst a turbulent gender transition upon arrival into a new city. It chronicles the pain of loss and of coming to terms with yourself in a world that would prefer you did not: how this struggle impacts every area of your life. It expresses the power of self-acceptance with grace and humor. Calamia's debut is a unifying force of a memoir-a poignant, tender collection of poetry that will open your heart-every poem as raw as a tear-stained diary page.¿¿San Franshitshow is a wildly powerful collection of all the little moments that define who we are. This book goes beyond the gender binary and labels, it is human! Cal's artistic and genuine recounts of loss, love and identity are what I wish I could've read as a teenager to help navigate through my own narrative. This book can connect with anyone regardless of their label and will be championed by the LGBT community. Cal says all the words that never leave your head when experiencing adolescent love and defining queerness for the first time. Empathetic, heartfelt, and useful in defining (or redefining) your own past. We need more honest literature like this about the LGBT experience! Whether you are out, unsure, curious, a parent, a youth, or a teacher, this book should be in your hands.- Miles McKenna, actor, activist, author of Out! How To Be Your Authentic SelfThis debut is a song-of coming of age, of coming out, of love, of America's present moment. And yes, of San Francisco and the shitshow our city can be as the poems' speaker navigates what it is to become an adult, become a trans* man, become a teacher, and so much more in this hectic and sometimes heartbreaking city. The book shines, and I too want to shout, "There's glitter on my heart motherfucker" to my lover, to all my loves, to my beloved hometown of glittering sidewalks. There is both humor and incredible vulnerability in these poems, even when they "don't know what to believe in / but it has to be something."- Caroline Mar, author of Special EducationCal Calamia walked into my long-running open mic one Sunday afternoon and taught me some things. Reading the work taught me a few more. I love it when that happens. These poems are self-aware and not self-pitying. Cal has good comic timing but doesn't go for a laugh as much as an A-ha. I listen to and read a lot of poetry and he has been a favorite since that first time. Pronoun antecedent disagreement will probably remain a cherished poetic moment for years to come. Read this book and be reminded that some things are simple and made difficult. Some things remain easy, direct, logical. Some things hurt like hell. There is pain in this collection, sure. There is earnest and unpracticed love. It's a generous group of poems, direct and honest. If you only own a few books of poetry this should be one of them.- Kim Shuck, 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco

In THE VIOLENCE ALMANAC, Miah Jeffra complicates the boundaries between culture and nature, fiction and true-crime, desire and pain. In this powerful fiction debut, Jeffra takes us through the California landscape to map the various ways that violence emerges, terrorizes and shapes our most familiar social structures.An ostracized child yearns to be the hero for a rural community threatened by an escaped penitentiary inmate. An ambitious young writer receives mysterious film clips that thrust her and her boyfriend into a spiral of grief. A sex worker attempts to move on after her best friend is murdered by a john. A seismologist struggles to control his rage over a breakup that summons his internal racism. A biographer seeks to capture the truth of Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five children.Familiar and real, ripped from headlines yet a fiction all its own, THE VIOLENCE ALMANAC vacillates between visceral horror and heartbreaking humanity. With a broad array of voices, these stories paint a portrait of the vastly diverse, complicated, hyper-mediated state of California and the state of ourselves, and blurs the line between safety and danger, love and obsession, victim and agent of violence.

"THIS IS HOW THE BONE SINGS by W. Todd Kaneko carries the pulse of ancient lament through the boneyards of war and unspeakable trauma. This lyric collection of profound beauty and grief reminds us to share our tales of generational trauma and topography-shaping our individual and collective memories-in place of forgotten histories."-Karen An-hwei Lee"What does it mean to be safe in America? In THIS IS HOW THE BONE SINGS, W. Todd Kaneko explores the legacy of concentration camps in the United States and how memory is carried forward. This book knows how to sing-to America, not its expected script, but the anthems of its history; and to a son, lessons on how to bring back the dead with stories, with a fading map, with birds."-Traci Brimhall"The best books about history are those that are also about the future. W. Todd Kaneko's marvelous THIS IS HOW THE BONE SINGS is more than a mere song-it is a singing across time and distance. In lyrics both personal and political, Kaneko composes a score that spans four generations, connecting his grandparents, who were prisoners in the unfathomable Minidoka concentration camps, to his young son and this unfathomable era in which he was born."-Dean Rader"To enter this book is to enter an orchard alive with memory's beasts. To read THIS IS HOW THE BONE SINGS is to witness how a poet at the height of his powers can alchemize history's violence into lyric and myth."-Brynn Saito"These are much-needed poems of unapologetic tenderness and talent-in other words, this collection does the near-impossible: it points us towards love even if what we know of this world doesn't."-Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Winner of the 2020 Big Moose PrizeSpanning the mid to late 20th century and set in the Elkhorn Valley of southwestern Montana, The Stone Sister is told from three points of view - a father's, a nurse's, and a sister's. Together they tell the unforgettable story of a child's birth, disappearance, and finally discovery in a home for "backward children." Robert Carter, a newly married man just back from World War II, struggles with his and his wife's decision to entrust the care of their disabled child to an institution and "move on" with family life. Louise Gustafson, a Midwestern nurse who starts over with a new life in the West, finds herself caring for a child everyone else has abandoned. And Elizabeth Carter, a young journalist, uncovers the family secret of her lost sister as she struggles with starting a family of her own.The Stone Sister explores the power of family secrets and society's evolving definitions of "normal"-as it pertains to family, medicine, and social structure. The novel sheds light on the beginnings of the disability justice movement as it follows one family's journey to reckon with a painful past. Incredibly, the novel is based on Caroline Patterson's personal story. As an adult, she discovered she had an older sister with Down syndrome who had been written out of her family history. In fact, that sister's name was also Caroline Patterson.

Lenny's out of options. He's lost his arm to his abusive older brothers and he's lost his bearings within his family. But he's determined not to lose hope. He attempts an escape on a stolen skiff, hoping to ride the rivers from his family's farm deep in the western North Carolina mountains all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. A torrential storm sinks his boat and delivers him into the hands of a profanity-slinging priest whose illegal drug operation provides food and wages for the local parish. Snared within a power struggle between a crooked cop and the priest, Lenny once again relies on the thinnest shred of hope in his attempt to escape.Live Caught is a survival adventure which dives deep into the mystifying relationship between hope and choice, and examines the peril of remaining in an untenable situation rather than taking that terrifying first step toward change. Lenny takes that step, and then another and another in his journey back toward his abusers and the unlikely prospect of family reconciliation.

With raw, lyrical ferocity, All the Comfort Sin Can Provide delves into the beguiling salve that sin can promise-tracing those hidden places most of us are afraid to acknowledge. In this collection of brutally unsentimental short stories, Grant Faulkner chronicles dreamers, addicts, and lost souls who have trusted too much in wayward love, the perilous balm of substances, or the unchecked hungers of others, but who are determined to find salvation in their odd definitions of transcendence.Taking us from hot Arizona highways to cold Iowa hotel rooms, from the freedoms of the backwoods of New Mexico to the damnations of slick New York City law firms, Faulkner creates a shard-sharp mosaic of desire that careens off the page-honest, cutting, and wise.

"With equal measures of hilarity and heartache, Joe Dornich collects the stories of America's middle-class cast-offs: the under-employed, the under-appreciated, and most devastatingly, the under-loved. Whether it is the plight of a professional snuggler-offering comfort to strangers, but unable to express his feelings to a co-worker-or a son whose summer spent working alongside his father serves only to deepen their disconnection, truths are laid bare through these darkly humorous pieces. Searching not only for connection with others, but for value in their lives, Dornich's characters find themselves employed in positions that demand more than can be offset by a wage. Though young, they are soul-weary. In a world full of expectations built and then toppled, Dornich's collection asks: How does it feel to have your whole life ahead of you?"-Jenny Irish"This bizarre, charming, darkly comic irreality of paid cuddlers and mean-spirited parents, where intimacy is commodified and heroes nonexistent might at first resemble something far off and fanciful. But take another look. This is the desperate, inscrutable world we've come to inhabit. And those outsiders and losers our own bewildered selves. Dornich is a master of the present moment."-Adam PrinceA wild, dazzling collection that reaches whole new altitudes of comic absurdity. You'd be hard-pressed to find a phrase that fails to crackle with hilarious electricity. You never quite know where a Joe Dornich story will take you, but once you've reached your destination, prepare to have your heart cracked in half."-Patrick Michael Finn"The world of THE WAYS WE GET BY is askew, and while that makes for sly social critique, the book's real capacity to surprise is nestled in the missteps and errors committed by its main characters. They become more endearing as a result, reminding us that we're all more mess than messiah, helping us reconnect to our humanity."-Craig Bernier

ADAPTATIONS is an exercise in envisioning the worst case scenario and asking, "What next?" It explores concepts of alienation and survival in a world that's largely inhospitable, and what it means to be human once traditional mechanisms of control and safety cease to exist.

In her tenth poetry collection, Allie Marini explores the stories of women in religion and mythology who challenged the roles and expectations given them by patriarchal society."Allie Marini's poems are tiny offerings that leave me wanting more. The women that inhabit these poems wear masks which become the mirrors we hold up to ourselves. Marini's 'true face' is that she can wear them all, the ones that 'steal fire,' and the ones that 'suffer.'"--J. Bruce Fuller, author of Flood (Swan Scythe Press, 2013) and editor of Yellow Flag Press.Poetry. California Interest. Women's Studies.