Böcker utgivna av Riot in Your Throat

Avoiding the Rapture is a collection of poems about survival-surviving childhood, religion, and the ways girls are taught they should behave. Karen J. Weyant opens the Rust Belt to the reader and shows them what life is like there: hard and grizzly, but with hints of tenderness and hope. We meet troubled boys and adventurous girls, we meet the survivors of a difficult life, we meet those who are scraping by and those who aren't. This collection shows that even the difficult can be beautiful, that even the hard can contain softness. Ultimately, this collection shows the reader that to survive, one must be willing to fight for it, but if they do, they're rewarded with a lush and vibrant life.**¿¿Karen J. Weyant dedicates Avoiding the Rapture, "to all the Rust Belt girls" who did as the title suggests: survived looming fear of physical bodies of the righteous ascending to heaven. Weyant distills, in expertly crafted, evocative verse, a splendidly defiant girlhood that comes in shirking that fear to embrace base yearning for pleasures like cigarettes, cool clothes, and flavored Chapstick. This collection is a Biblical masterpiece. It captures the loss and longing of survivorship. You, too, will feel the Rapturous pull out, but will want to stay here-just a little longer. ~ Sara Moore Wagner, author of Swan Wife and Hillbilly Madonna Road map and field guide, Avoiding the Rapture documents a coming of age during the devastating effects of deindustrialization. Karen Weyant's poems reveal the hardscrabble existence of prescient girls who "smell water before the rain swells" surrounded by adults that "should have been listening." Among broken beer glass and roadkill, where the night sky is "splattered with rhinestones" and "the town river is thick brown, too dark to see," These are poems of compassion written with an unflinching gaze. A testament to survival, full of sharp edges and wonder, Avoiding the Rapture leaves no one behind. This is a remarkable debut. ~ Suzanne Frischkorn, author of Fixed Star The Rust Belt has already seen the rapture-several, in fact, and those left behind each time continue to tell new stories. In Karen J. Weyant's Avoiding the Rapture, we meet girls who've "lived among the dead" wearing craft store glitter and vanilla bean Chapstick, who've had to learn survival by listening to the river and looking for answers in the fields, whose indomitable spirits were forged where "god smelled like burned paper." Through stunning imagery and music, Weyant paints with the colors and textures of a post-industrial landscape that reflects more than simple nostalgia. This is poetry for anyone who knows that "when everyone disappears, everything you see will be yours," but only if you claim it. ~ Rochelle Hurt, author of The Rusted City and The J Girls: A Reality Show

Dispatches from Frontier Schools is a collection of poems that pulls the reader right into the brutalities, and beauty, of teaching in a struggling charter school. With humor, wit, tears, anger, exhaustion, elation, and a refusal to give up, these poems highlight the struggles of a teacher trying to maintain her dignity and her identity and do right by her students and her own children-while being pulled apart by a system that doesn''t support or defend teachers. More than just an anthem for teachers, however, this collection is a cry for all women who try to give all they can to everything and everyone.These poems are brutal, laying bare the tragic and terrible ways our country is failing us all. But they are also full of moments that are often missing in contemporary education - like humility, compassion, and empathy: "we stand in the hallway as D. tells me / she is pregnant she is due in December She cries and covers her / face with her hands I well up but hide it by biting the inside of my bottom lip." This book should be required reading for career administrators, board of education politicos, and all the legislators who pay little more than lip-service to our nation''s educators. These poems-unique in structure and perspective, and full of beautifully orchestrated lyric turns-are a criticism, and a call for a reckoning, to be sure. ~ Sarah Kain Gutowski, author of Fabulous Beast: Poems In her memoir-in-poems Dispatches from Frontier Schools, Sarah Beddow creates a vital frontline record of American education as it abuts the pandemic. Here, we meet a woman teacher in full, frank embodiment: an educator unwilling to subsume herself entirely to the twinned demands of capitalism and data-driven academic achievement bearing down on her and her students by her charter school employer, yet one who still burns to offer her entire intellectual and energetic self to her under-resourced students. Throughout Dispatches from Frontier Schools, Beddow contrasts the sterile and un-seeing language of corporate education with her own vibrant, devastating personal testimonies and disclosures, granting us an intimate, eviscerating glimpse into the negotiations, struggles, heartbreaks, and joys as lived from her side of the overflowing teacher''s desk.~ Rachel Mennies, author of The Naomi Letters These Dispatches unsparingly critique not just the institution, but the complicity of every adult working within it, including Ms. Beddow the teacher, who sometimes yells or slams a door. "I listened to my ideas     come out of his mouth my own mouth / muted / And it''s like      I am not here I am / divorced from my / thoughts I am told again and again to join the / team." An institution with incompetent management can tank the best teachers, run the best future leaders out the door. "But no amount of reflection       will reveal to me how to be / professional in a system          so broken it / shreds me            leaves me a corpse in underwear and an ancient / t-shirt    spread / on the classroom floor." The students will break your heart, but the administrators will crush it. ~ Krystal Languell, author of Systems Thinking with Flowers

Somewhere, a Woman Lowers the Hem of Her Skirt is a collection of poems that takes the reader on a journey through life as a woman breaking free from the constraints of a quiet, midwestern life, to fighting battles for equality, to raising boys in a harsh society, to teaching students and making connections in a unjust world. These poems are about hope and happiness and heartache and finding your way home.Every single poem in this gorgeous collection seems to spring whole from a moment of achingly sharp perception. Uttich writes directly into Adrienne Rich's "dream of a common language" - that place where the impossibility of connection is breached by love, and care, and justice. "I want to write a happy poem..." she says... "something that would never/use the words silver-lining" and indeed no easy hope is offered. Something far greater is kindled in her words, though - the precious shimmer of the world as it is in all its violence and unbidden joy. Few poets are natural makers of stunning endings; Uttich is one of them. Her poems never speechify or slip delicately away; rather they offer a vision of the depths possible if one is brave enough to stay close to hard truths, ask - and wait for - wisdom, and witness with awe and tenderness. Lia Purpura, author of four poetry and four essay collections, including It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful (2015) and All The Fierce Tethers: Essays (2019) These poems will take you out, spin you around, and teach you just how important a woman's life is. They'll remind you of the distance between where you grew up and where you live now, and then they'll collapse that distance so you see who you are is everyone you've ever been. And they'll do all that with breathless grace, humor, and compassion. Katherine Riegel, author of two poetry collections: What the Mouth Was Made For (2013) and Castaway (2010) Laurie Rachkus Uttich's collection feels like the best kind of church. I want to shout, "Hallelujah! Amen!" at the end of each poem. Her words rock with hymns of struggle, love, family, community, and "girl power." And while they build us up, they also remind us of our responsibility to call out unjust systems and to walk alongside everyone who crosses our paths. It's an invitation to embrace the authentic in ourselves and others, to love instead of judge. In all of these poems, Uttich's dazzling language avoids sentimentality and captures the raw details of life. These poems are honest, tender, rugged, and unflinching. Terry Ann Thaxton, author of three poetry collections: Mud Song (2017), The Terrible Wife (2014), and Getaway Girl (2011)

Borrowing Your Body is a collection of poems that focus on the duties of being a daughter, sister, partner, and how to survive grief, sickness, and the ails that plague a person. The collection explores the unknown and imagined worlds, the boundless edges of invention, and the creative leaps the brain can make. Tackling themes of illness, death, sorrow, and the vast universe, these poems remind us we are all human.Passin has written a book of the declining body, the disintegrating mind, the shredded remnants of what's left: glistening shards of language, the glowing soul, humor, beauty. Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men Laura Passin's gorgeous debut, Borrowing Your Body, is a heartfelt delving into the strange places where science ends and the human begins. This work considers the cyborg-ian qualities of how "Chemistry is what makes you not you anymore."I can't help but also hear the words burrow and bury tucked inside this title. Passin is deeply aware of the resonances here, how the defamiliarization of a loved one's body, speech, and identity opens into the space of the poetic, a space of multiplicity, a place where language is "stitching a name across the bone where my [our] thinking lives." Andrea Rexilius, author of Sister / Urn (Sidebrow Books)In Laura Passin's Borrowing Your Body, poetry is liquid gold that floods the gaps where words and memory fail. Charting the course of a mother's dementia, a brother's intellectual disability, and the pains of body and spirit, these poems unlock the door to inexpressible grief: "you need another tongue to tell it." Like kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing pottery with gilt lacquer, Passin's forthright, self-aware poems restore what is broken by illuminating, not hiding, the cracks. These profound lyrical meditations on motherhood and daughterhood, memory and loss, pain and recovery empower with their courage while healing with their radiance. An extraordinary voice in extraordinary times, these poems will linger long after you've read the last page. "What billion eyes will blink at the light [she's] given back." Angela Narciso Torres, author of What Happens Is Neither (Four Way Books)

Where the Water Begins refers to the origin, the root, the remembering of the incident itself while understanding the fluidity of memory. Where the water begins asks where we started, where we first learned about loss, where we inherited our grieving processes from, where our forefathers and foremothers learned from, and what we may unconsciously carry in the currents of our blood. Who were you before this troubling event? What within the core of you changed? If you could go back to the root, would you? Or, is your memory of your past self also inaccurate, fluid, making you homesick for a time that never exists, for a you that never was?I have known water to be a mysterious thing-full of peace or death, life or danger. In Where the Water Begins, Kimberly Casey enters, deliberately and with unquestionable poetic skill, into that uncertainty, that life-giving and taking body. These poems are delicate in their sight and sound, and they hold multitudes of pain, memory, and the way in which the self can always find itself, even in the wash of waves. It is an incredible book, one which takes the reader to her own ocean's bottom and up toward the air which waits above the water's edge. It is a prayer of a book, it is a wrestling which ends in release. Ashley M. Jones, author of REPARATIONS NOW! Bearing witness to generational trauma and survival, Kimberly Casey's debut collection asks, "What in our blood begs us to drown ourselves?" With tenderness and honesty, these poems reveal our most human scars - those of the flesh and those of the spirit, the accidental and self-inflicted. When you discover part of yourself reflected in Where the Water Begins, honor that wavering image, "[p]raise it for its resilience. Kiss [its] palms." Emari DiGiorgio, author of Girl Torpedo In this aptly titled collection, a body of griefs comes to life slowly, slowly, unfurling throughout the pages as quietly as it can, taking the reader by surprise. Here, is a body filled with water, a body filled with scars, a body filled with water-memories, a body filled with deaths it keeps churning and churning upon itself, as if these remembrances will keep the lives lost, and itself, breathing, breathing. There is strength in such brokenness, it seems to say, and the poet does a stunning job of rebuilding it brick by brick, bone by bone, a tender care weaved throughout, as if to say, there is no salvation here, but there is home. And home is riddled with new griefs. Whether the poems are talking about familial relations, or pulling memories out of their graves, or counting the deaths of loved ones, they beckon us with difficult questions; through their tenderness, we are enshrouded with care too, and, suddenly, we find ourselves unspooling too - with this poet, we are reminded that what was once broken, can be mended, slowly, slowly. This is indeed a stunning, stunning collection. Mahtem Shiferraw, author of Your Body is War

This collection takes the reader on a journey through the injustices women face - in their careers, their daily lives, in the way they walk to their cars late at night; to smashing the patriarchy and claiming their rights over their bodies and their ideas; to a love better left remembered; to eventually finding a balance with a love that stands up and fights beside the poet.Courtney LeBlanc's Exquisite Bloody, Beating Heart understands that the body "is a war / zone," especially, the female body, which LeBlanc explores through the lens of fairy tales, the story of Eve, her own journey through girlhood, womanhood, destruction, rebirth, and self-discovery. Each word in each poem is as necessary and life-giving as a heartbeat. Shaindel Beers, author of Secure Your Own Mask, Finalist for the Oregon Book AwardIn her latest collection, Courtney LeBlanc bravely and fiercely examines the burdens women carry, the societal pressures, the cultural expectations: "the heavy world / digging into our shoulders and slumping our backs." In many of her poems, she takes back agency - that others tried to take away - and never lets us forget the pluck that endures: "ready to bite" and "guns ablaze" and "I'm read / to burn" and "This body / is a weapon." This collection is one that never flinches from hard truths, always insist on strength by revealing vulnerability, and even in its exploration of our human darkness, offers flames of hope. Shuly Xóchitl Cawood, author of Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning Exquisite Bloody, Beating Heart traces the path from snake to survival to highlight the complex and often conflicted experiences of womanhood. LeBlanc's voice, both skillfully intimate and starkly blunt, speaks in blood, beauty and burden to show the many hungers and rips in the framework of femininity. With a close examination of the body, from vibrators to "belly gowls," this collection asks us to consider the dichotomy of punishment and pleasure. "I did not have a map to the body" LeBlanc writes and allows this collection to be its own cartography, a new country of strength where every woman can [grow] the fruit. [Be] the vine and the rain and the light. [Be] the dirt." This book is an anthem of urging and unlearning, reminding women to "be the key to her own opening, her becoming." Kelly Grace Thomas, author of Boat Burned

These poems tell the story of loss: loss of a father stolen by disease, loss of innocence. And while it could easily stop there this collection doesn't. Instead, it gathers strength and finds its voice and its fight. With wonder and awe and some well-placed anger, we see these poems emerge on the other side with a bit of hope and even happiness.The poems of Melissa Fite Johnson's Green excavate the bittersweet tenderness invoked by the collection's title. To be green is to be naïve, heading into a sea of defining experiences, a vantage Johnson wonderfully explores in poems that chart the pains of girlhood: the casual critiques that stick, the difficulty of relationships with boys, family, friends. She also writes movingly of her disabled father. Grappling with the grief and guilt evoked by his death, Johnson admits, "If a poem resurrects, how many times have I tried?" While some losses cannot be reversed, it is in this act of writing that Johnson offers readers another vision of green: to grow through challenge, to will oneself to flourish despite pain, is to be fully alive, a trajectory Green reminds is possible for us all.-Ruth Williams, author of Flatlands In Melissa Fite Johnson's beautiful new book, Green, a body and a heart are both things that can be divided. Johnson looks at the way grief has its own language and how a mouth is a thing that can both create and erase. In these poems, the past has crystallized into desire lessons, the fear that accompanies those first encounters, and the inherited legacies that shape how we see ourselves. This book knows time slips away quickly but holds us in unflinching memory before releasing us to the wide and green world. -Traci Brimhall, author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod In her latest poetry collection, Melissa Fite Johnson somehow manages to lace grief with hope, and questioning with reckoning. Love is at the heart of this collection, but not simple love: love that questions, love that demands, love that is irreverent and taxing, love in its fragility and strength. The poems dig through the rubble of youth and uncover hard truths, and the poems show how when we are young, we may think something horrible will swallow the rest of our lives, and then it doesn't, and how this is terrible and beautiful all at once. This poet writes of the connection we have as humans to each other, even when the string that ties us is so thin it can barely be found; yet she finds it, and she plucks. -Shuly Xóchitl Cawood, author of Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning The poems in Green, both searing and soft-hearted, span from early childhood to old age, and demonstrate with consistent poignancy that girlhood and womanhood are not separate phases of life but as interconnected as fibers in a leaf. Through the unique lens of the color green and all its complicated connotations-newness, nature, jealousy, and more-Johnson unflinchingly examines the many shades of human relationships, asking "What if?" before "time rusts the gate closed." These touching, impeccably crafted poems dare to heal the emotional wounds that come from living and loving in a gendered world.-Marianne Kunkel, author of Hillary, Made Up