Böcker utgivna av Steel Toe Books

Memory and myth. Cigarettes and summer nights. Worship songs and circle pits. don't call us punk because we hate that traverses the backroads ofAmerica's suburbia in the days before smartphones and AirPods at the very time of life when the aimless youth are waking up to their disillusionment atthe world their parents were planting for them. These starkly direct poems speak to the human need for authentic community and escape before theydrown in middle-class expectations. The characters, places, and times are pulled from a lived experience and expanded into a universal narrativearound the search for something sustainable and true. Adam Oyster-Sands has written a love letter to punk and to those who wove in and out ofthe various shows, record shops, skate spots, and fast-food joints of his formative years. Whether you've spent a Saturday night in a circle pit andSunday morning in a church pew or not, don't call us punk because we hate that speaks to anyone who, at the exact right time, found their people inthe unexpected places beyond the boundaries of a world passed to them through the stories they inherit.

The poems in The Ghost Owl Says Go Now focus on place, specifically the vast American landscape from California to Key West and points in between. Guided by the wandering spirit of Bash¿, some of the travel poems in this collection are wistful; others reflect on harsh realities experienced under the spell of wanderlust. Along the way, there are encounters with a variety of people-neighbors, relatives, strangers-that might be described as instances of synchronicity: encounters that seemingly offer significance beyond the random. Still other poems take their cues from culturalmanifestations of Americana: music, artwork, literature, film. In this collection of poems, Stephen Benz continues his probing explorations into the topographies of Americana.

"Magic the real" writes Nancy Botkin in The Honeycomb. These poems explore the necessity of art and the imagination, the ability to see that even the darkest places can resonate with beauty when the eye is trained to see it. Memory, that constant companion, also resonates; its fuzzy and fickle nature can be buoyed by artistry. As she combs the past, she discovers that a rich inner life is a powerful defense against a random and precarious existence. She delivers this message with clear language, subjecting the ordinary events of life to pressure, making them new, bright.

When Emerson was twelve, she was enamored by her grandmother Amelia and believed that what others saw as eccentricity or mental illness was instead a misunderstood gift. Five years later, hardened by her mother's suicide and worried that she might be destined for a similar fate, Emerson visits Amelia at The Lavender House, a mental health facility for the elderly, to learn more about the enigmatic women in her family who found either magic or madness in response to a world that often seemed too small to contain them. As Amelia's warped fairy tale emerges, buried stories are unearthed, and everything Emerson thinks she knows shifts as she begins to confront her own magical thinking and burgeoning feelings toward her best friend, Courtney.

Amy Roa's Radioactive Wolves inhabits an ecosystem teeming with the dreamlike imagery of a long-lost animal kingdom. To open this book is to step through a portal leading straight to the heart of a blazing meteor about to crash land on an unsuspecting planet. In this world, an electric catfish develops a mammalian heart, a two-headed rabbit predicts the future, a starling wields a machete, an American alligator wanders the streets of war-torn Berlin, a girl turns into a grain of rainforest soil, and New Caledonian crows become expert bomb-builders. Explorer of the whimsical and fantastical, builder of mangrove forests, conjurer of megafauna, platypuses, mermaids, and wolves, Amy Roa leads readers into the strange and unknown where the unexpected is sure to occur.