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The Los Angeles Review is a literary journal of divergent literature with a West Coast emphasis. Established in 2003, LAR publishes both the stories of Los Angeles, endlessly varied, and those that grow outside our world of smog and glitter. LAR seeks voices with something wild in them, voices that know what it means to be alive, to be fallible, to be human.

Issue 23 features work from Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Oliver de la Paz, Pete Hsu, and more.

The Los Angeles Review Masthead
Publisher: Tobi Harper
Editor: Kate Gale
Managing Editor: Deirdre Collins
Assistant Managing Editor: Eric Howard
Fiction Editors: Meredith Alder and Amy Sather
Assistant Fiction Editor: Meredith Westgate Russo
Flash Fiction Editor: Brittany McLaughlin
Poetry Editors: Blas Falconer and Vandana Khanna
Nonfiction Editor: Florencia Ramirez
Translation Editor: Piotr Florczyk
Book Reviews Editor: Alyse Bensel
Assistant Book Reviews Editor: Daniel Pecchenino
Contributing Editor: Sophia Ihlefeld
Editor-at-Large: Riley Mang
Production Editor: Rebeccah Sanhueza
Copy Editor: Breana Gomez

Lexicon is a worthy successor to Allison Joseph’s award-winning breakthrough, Confessions of a Barefaced Woman. This time around, this self-professed “barefaced woman” is setting her sighs/sights on language and what it does for and with and to her. Joseph loves language, making it her slippery passion in poems about childhood griefs and fashion faux pas, movie musicals and empty airports, “rules” for writing and rules for reading. Though Joseph loves language, it doesn’t always love her back—but in her wise, readable, and imaginative way, she persists while documenting the minefields of racism and sexism. Joseph finds joy in the most unlikely of places, and in Lexicon, her adoration for the written word lets us see those places in sharp and evocative relief. All hail this bounty, this Lexicon!

In these moving and meditative poems, Adam Kirsch shows how the experiences and recognitions of early life continue to shape us into adulthood. Richly evoking a 1980s childhood in Los Angeles, Kirsch uses Gen X landmarks—from Devo to Atari to the Challenger disaster—to tell a story of emotional and artistic coming of age, exploring universal questions of meaning, mortality, and how we become who we are.

AUTHOR OF 2024 INT’L LATINO BOOK AWARD HONORABLE MENTION, VOLCANIC INTERRUPTIONS • CALIFORNIA ARTS COUNCIL RECOGNIZED ESTABLISHED ARTIST FOR CENTRAL CALIFORNIA REGION

“This poetry collection is heart-led, a feast for the eyes, ears, and soul.”—Odilia Galván Rodríguez • “Myths and loss, yearnings and magic”—Cristina García

The poems in Variations in Blue address the aftermath of domestic violence through the transformative power of language, leading to healing and empowerment via the author’s journey into her Latine/x culture. 

The poems in Variations in Blue cycle through the traumatic residue of dysfunctional relationships, the complexities of Latinx representation through a series of ekphrastic poems, and reimagine Nicaragua as a homeland set in a volcanic landscape. Each section contains a series of poetic variations on a theme, and the poems reverberate and rotate through the indeterminacy of language. Najarro’s Variations in Blue insists that the complexities of experience must be understood one version at a time, each distinctly unfolding its unique design.

Beloved by contemporary German readers, the poetry of Max Sessner is gathered for the first time in English in Whoever Drowned Here: New and Selected Poems. Painstakingly chosen from Sessner’s celebrated three collections and from new work, these poems employ a matter-of-fact magical realism to engage the profound, philosophical mysteries of the everyday. Sessner makes nimble use of the material world as he choreographs poignant reenactments of human yearning. Smocks in the window of a dry cleaner “trade stolen / caresses” at night. Death tries on your clothes while you sleep and eats your chocolate. A poem tires of being a poem, “a small mortal / thing that no one notices,” and sets off into the world to make a new life. The poems of Max Sessner are like compact, musical fairytales. They delight us and frighten us. They touch us with their ghostly, melancholy fingertips and lead us onward.

Original Grace is the last book in the Snake Quartet. In it, the journey from destruction leads through the darkened rooms of an enormous house where occasionally outside the windows creatures past, present, and future appear—asking for help or solace or trying to break the glass to get in. But the house is made of poetry and is unassailable unlike those who live in it.
By this time, Snake has undergone the transformations from sole survivor into the mythic voice of the collective with all their throats open and in full song. She has undergone the movement from original gender into all genders. The rough linguistic artifacts left from the first book—the dialects and fogginess she experienced living both in and out of a dream—slowly become more coherent as she learns to filter the collective voices back into her personal speech. Original Grace is not just the end of what was but the beginning of what comes next. The sun has gone down. The long wait for a new sunrise is nearly over.

The Patient Body: A Personal Narrative in Pieces chronicles one man’s journey as he attempts to lead a balanced life as a father, husband, friend, and literary citizen during traumatic times.

Written as a mosaic of ‘flash’ encounters, meditations, memories, and travel pieces, The Patient Body explores the ways the past resides inside the present and the present points to an uncertain future. An abecedary lies at the center of the book, composed for a former self, the twenty-six ‘micro’ sections create a dialogue that plays out across the divide created by a devastating car accident that changed everything.

The poems in The Gentle Man were composed between 1999 and 2001. The title poem speaks to those of us who seek to simplify our lives by enriching what it is we give to others, especially what we offer them in kindness and devotion. If the very act of love is patient and wise, then those who are fortunate enough to receive it are blessed by its gift and know, quite naturally, what to offer in return.

And yet, when that love somehow cannot be met through blindness, happenstance, history, remorse, or sorrow, we are habitually haunted by past apparitions who remind us that our need for affection, and a place called home, is an inclination not easily forgotten. Be they “Broken Heats,” “Photograph (circa 1960),” “Your Father’s Ghost,” “Last Request,” or “Locomotive to Hell,” these poems address what it means to constantly search for meaning both inside and outside of ourselves—to travel down tracks in an attempt to discover or rediscover our identity. By doing so, we examine what went wrong in our testament to friendship and love and how we can still approach the longing and desire that resides in each of us, applying for “Forgiveness” as a starting point.

If by the mere act of consequence, we can keep the solemn prayer alive—this striving for peace through reconciliation, then we ultimately retain a chance at the relief that so often escapes us and keeps us at bay with ourselves along the dangerous curves we face. Perhaps, then, “The Cost of Being Me” will not be so great, the sacrifice so difficult to bear, as we turn the bedcovers down and read the next page of the book we continue to write, night after night after night. And in the end, hopefully, certainly mercifully, we come to understand that “The Gentle Man” and what he entails is all we’ve ever wished to know—and become.

Freefalling from a scandal of her own making, reporter Frances Treadwell only thinks she has hit bottom when she finds herself alone and out of work in her ancestral farmhouse in Maine. Soon after she arrives, a meteorite crashes to earth in the woods behind her house, igniting a firestorm of malicious chatter among locals who suspect Frances is somehow connected to a larger, more sinister phenomenon. Caught between a petty criminal she can’t resist and a pair of unlikely suitors, Frances watches in horror as the events turn from near farce to life-shattering, irreversible tragedy.

Sweetly sexy, miserably funny, and a little scary, View From a Burning Bridge is an enthralling debut novel from a natural heir to Flannery O’Connor and Shirley Jackson.

Irrevocably tied to the Carolinas, these stories tell tales of the woebegone, their obsessions with decay, and the haunting ache of the region itself—the land of the dwindling pines, the isolation inherent in the mountains and foothills, and the loneliness of boomtowns. Predominantly working-class women challenge the status quo by rejecting any lingering expectations or romantic notions of Southern femininity. Small businesses are failing. Factories are closing. Money is tight. The threat of violence lingers for women and girls. Through their collective grief, heartache, and unsettling circumstances, many of these characters become feral and hell-bent on survival. Gilstrap’s prose teems with wildness and lyricism, showing the Southern gothic tradition of storytelling is alive and feverishly unwell in the twenty-first century.

What happens when a Midwestern girl migrates to a haunted Southern town, whose river is a graveyard, whose streets bear the names of Southern slave owners? How can she build a home where Confederate symbols strategically stand in the center of town? Can she sage the chilling truths of her ancestors? What will she do to cope with the traumatizing ghostliness of the present-day South?

Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat is a heart-wrenching reconciliation and confrontation of the living, breathing ghosts that awaken Black women each day. This debut poetry collection summons multiple hauntings—ghosts of matriarchs that came before, those that were slain, and those that continue to speak to us, but also those horrors women of color strive to put to rest. Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat examines the haunting feeling of facing past demons while grappling with sexism, racism, and bigotry. They are all present: ancestral ghosts, societal ghosts, and spiritual, internal hauntings. This book calls out for women to speak their truth in hopes of settling the ghosts or at least being at peace with them.

Seventeen-year-old Annika Rose and her father Wes have spent the years since the death of Annika’s mother in self-imposed social isolation on their farm on the edge of the woods. When a young woman named Tina moves into a house down the road, the result is a sudden explosion of feelings in both father and daughter and a fierce rivalry. At stake in the competition is not only their relationship, but the life of the vulnerable young woman at the center of it all.

I discover a "lost" aunt, separated from our family due to racism and discrimination against the disabled. She had a mental disability due to childhood meningitis. She was taken away in 1942 when all Japanese Americans were considered the enemy and imprisoned. She then became a "ward" of the state. We believed she had died, but 70 years later found her alive and living a few miles from our family farm. How did she survive? Why was she kept hidden? How did both shame and resilience empower my family to forge forward in a land that did not want them? I am haunted and driven to explore my identity and the meaning of family—especially as farmers tied to the land. I uncover family secrets that bind us to a sense of history buried in the earth that we work and a sense of place that defines us.

"This book is a brouhaha of fun and cleverness, where many of the poems are double-edged with humor and lasting wisdom. ... These poems are delivered with the perfect clarity of everyday language."

—The Cafe Review

"Brewer is the most consistently dark-side-of-the-moon poet around...his...athletic style exactly suits the subject."

—Hugh Fox, Small Press Review (Review of Presently A Beast)

"I love the edgy laughter I hear on almost every page...There's a 'camaraderie of betrayal, lust, and song'."

—David Kirby

“It is a difficult thing to write simply and eloquently with quiet and intense passion in ways that are unflinchingly personal but also fold the reader into the depths of history and myth. This is partly what Adrianne Kalfopoulou’s poems do for me. They are also celebrations reminding me how words can perform acts of affirmation and joy no matter what griefs or complex experiences they contain. These poems attain the beauty of ritual.”

—T. Alan Broughton

Sex Augury is a collection that practices divination with the symbolism of our radically changed and changeable world. Exercising trans poetics, C. Bain denormalizes the violence embedded in the most intimate strata of American life. Confrontationally queer, urgently wounded, deeply political, and metaphysically transported, these poems create their own system of meaning in an environment that is increasingly hostile to meaning of any kind. This collection spans digital culture, gender reversals, and archetypal-mythic vocabularies, alongside close observation of the surround of “ordinary” urban existence. Sex Augury is a work of dyads, not binaries—concepts bound together which nonetheless refuse to form a coherent, harmonious whole; humor and despair, tenderness and brutality, desire and revulsion. These poems bristle with intelligence, acuity of feeling, and refusal to gloss the complexity of our moment into a false narrative of progress.

At the heart of Joshua Rivkin’s debut collection Suitor is a profound wrestling with desire, history, and the big questions of how we make and perform a self in the world. In conversation with the confessional tradition, Suitor begins with a sequence of poems about a mother’s boyfriends and lovers, and how these relationships inform the speaker’s own understanding about eros and masculinity. At the center of the book is a lyric essay, “The Haber Problem,” that moves beyond the self and personal history to retell the story of the scientist Fritz Haber. Later sequences and poems reflect on the past with erotic directness, longing, and lyric intensity. With grace and honesty, the poems of Suitor ask what it means to be a suitor in the fullest sense—to follow, to pursue, to chase the inexplicable hunger at the heart of desire.

Against the advice of family and friends, a middle-aged couple leaves their home and jobs in North Carolina to pursue a long-held desire: to live in New York City. As they struggle to find work and forge friendships in a city of strangers, Rebecca decides to take her mother’s advice to “make a home wherever you land.” She finds it in surprising ways: in overheard conversations on park benches and subway stations, in songs and cries sifted through apartment walls, in the oil-spilled rainbow colors of the pigeons who mate on the window air conditioner, and in encounters with street people dispensing unexpected wisdom. The 9/11 attacks and a serious cancer surgery turn her attention inward: to memories of marital affairs and separation, the deaths of mentors and friends, and to the books and poems that have always sustained her. Inner and outer landscapes merge, her life touching the lives of the now-familiar strangers. Alternating between brief vignettes and sustained narratives, Rebecca McClanahan tracks the heartbeat of New York, finding in each face she meets the cumulative loss, joy, and stubborn resilience of a city that has claimed her for its own.

Worship the Pig, Gaylord Brewer’s eleventh collection, is by the poet’s own definition his “Americas book.” The migration begins from his Tennessee home to the Inside Passage of Alaska, then detours sharply south in a return to his beloved Costa Rica, then onward finally to the qualified paradise of Brazil’s Ilhabela. Brewer’s persistent obsessions—translating the call and challenge of the feral world, negotiating some truce with private ghosts—have never been more poignantly and sharply drawn. From chiseled lyrics to more expansive narratives—by turns reserved and raucous, always heartfelt and riveting—these new poems exhilarate. “No schematic for conquest, / no reckless conclusions, // no tenuous argument for connection / beyond the simple truth / of what accrues together.” At mid-career, the author called “the most natural poet in the country” by the Asheville Poetry Review continues to astonish.

AWARD–WINNING AUTHOR OF HUSH NOW, DON’T EXPLAIN

2014 USA BEST BOOK AWARD LITERARY FICTION FINALIST 

Dennis Must explores the boundaries of reality and myth in his final book in a series, CIRCLING TOWARD NIGHTFALL

Circling Toward Nightfall is a lyrical exploration of blood, duality, and the search for origins—a meditation on reconciling the body with the innermost self. Its narrator, Jeremiah Coombs, may be the only man on earth with two fathers. Told by Billy Coombs that he had no mother, Jeremiah later learns from his grandmother that her name was Bernadette and that she died in childbirth—despite his vivid memories of her presence in his early life.

As the mysterious neighbor “Ichabod” Ernest Tyner takes on a growing role in Jeremiah’s life, he reveals that Bernadette was a nun from the Sisters of Conscience who gave birth to Jeremiah on the banks of the Ohio River before drowning herself. When the truth of his conception comes to light, Jeremiah is seized by a patricidal urge that drives the novel toward its haunting revelation. With characters who drift in and out like echoes from another world, Circling Toward Nightfall is an enigmatic and mythic final work.

Still Water Carving Light tenderly navigates the depths of loss and memory. 

How does the awareness of death shape the ways we live? What language brings us deep into questions we can never resolve? Elegies open us, challenge us, sometimes restore us. In these elegiac poems, Peggy Shumaker honors those gone before us, those nearly done, and the unending life we pass on. With compassionate insight, Shumaker reminds us that while grief endures, it can be embraced, allowing for profound growth and deeper understanding.

A haunting, lyrical reckoning with war’s aftermath, The Afterlife of a Threadbare Jester confronts the brutality of Vietnam’s reeducation camps while illuminating the enduring power of memory, loyalty, and the human will to survive. 

Centering on a Vietnamese intelligence officer’s years-long ordeal in communist reeducation camps, The Afterlife of a Threadbare Jester offers a heartrending and an illuminating look at the Vietnam War and its aftermath. War, literature, religion, politics, loyalty—they are all expertly interrogated through the protagonist’s compelling voice and the memorable cast of characters he encounters. Despite the struggle and suffering, the story never veers into the sentimental or cynical. Instead, it returns again and again to the complexities of the human heart and its will to endure. This is not a novel of ism excoriation; it is, in fact, a story that seeks questions to the truths of life and asks the question: “How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand a man who’s cold?” A moving, unforgettable, and enlightening must-read.

The Book of Spells is a collection of poems that believes the world around us is shaped and reshaped by language and that changing our language is a revolutionary act of political and social magic that can replace long-standing destructive agreements with the benignity of loving clarity.

This collection of spells begins by following the tracks of a mythical creature composed of language and blood across an unblemished field of silence. We can never catch this creature, who perhaps is made real by our pursuit of it. There are glimpses—shadows—made into poems in a poor attempt to construct the whole from the parts. This book is a brush dipped in flowers—corpses—schoolyards—the smell of ocean and tears attempting to paint over without erasing the world we’ve constructed as it is.

AUTHOR OF THE PULITZER PRIZE AND NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER, JAMES

AUTHOR OF ERASURE, now adapted for the screen as the OSCAR-WINNING FILM, AMERICAN FICTION

In Trout's Lie, Percival Everett explores the semantic relationship between sense and so-called nonsense—and questions whether either is actually possible.

The Switchback family has inhabited Crawford County since before the War Between the States, and it has eked out an existence, and even prospered, by virtue of hard work and honesty. Peter Switchback, Jr. is the current inhabitant of the family estate and caretaker of the farm, and in many ways stands as a symbolic paragon of virtue. The Morgan family has been in Crawford County at least as long as the Switchback family, and has made its way in the world by means of greed, pride, and dishonesty. Sheriff Cecil Morgan is the third in his line to hold his office, and like his ancestors he is an avowed enemy of the Switchback family and all that they stand for.

The life of Crawford County plays out through the course of short tales told by several of its inhabitants, some tragic, some whimsical. The stories wind their way through the lives of Switchback and Morgan, framed by several ponderings of moral philosophy and existence. We are faced with Peter Switchback's obituary on the opening page of the story, and the balance of the pages works its way to that eventual outcome.

CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED AUTHOR

“Mysterious and mesmerizing.”––Claire Stanford, Author of Happy for You 

Yellow is a luminous, genre-defying debut that fuses cosmic mystery, trauma, and transformation. It will take you on a journey through time, space, and the inner wilderness of one girl’s mind.

It’s 1973: summer of the Watergate hearings and Skylab’s launch into space when 12-year-old Z discovers an unclassified slime mold growing in her Louisiana backyard. Something compels her deep coherence with this magical creature—until an incident with a serial killer at the lake disrupts their connection. Both mystifying and metaphorical, Yellow becomes a guiding force for her brother Clem, a New Orleans seeker. As years pass, Z tries to recover what life has taught her to forget. A multi-threaded novel, Yellow weaves fact, physics, space exploration, and philosophy to create a transcendent reading experience.

Set in contemporary Iran, Mirage delves into the complicated relationship between Roya and her identical twin sister, Tala.

Their inseparable bond becomes hard to maintain as they grow older, but when they both get pregnant at the same time, their relationship is rekindled. After an accident causes Roya to miscarry and Tala to go into labor, grief, jealousy, suspicion, and guilt fracture that recently renewed relationship. Delving deep into the human psyche, Nahid Rachlin intricately explores themes of sisterly identity, betrayal, envy, depression, loss, and the impact of memories. Like Ottessa Moshfegh's Death in Her Hands (Penguin Press, 2020), Mirage artfully juxtaposes the sociopolitical dynamics of contemporary Iran with a story of the nature of grief and redemption that will take firm hold of your heart.

Winner of the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize

Ruth Irupé Sanabria’s second collection of poetry, Beasts Behave In Foreign Land examines the internal landscape of a family confronting the psychological and emotional aftershocks of genocide and exile. Drawing on her personal experience during Argentina’s military dictatorship (1976 to 1983), these poems emerge from the defining moment in which she had the opportunity to testify in the trials against the Fifth Army Corps in Bahia Blanca, thirty-seven years after soldiers kidnapped, tortured, and imprisoned her parents. Weaving metaphor, ekphrasis, and voice, Sanabria’s poems pay tribute to the ways women in her family use art, music, and testimony to process the unspeakable and confront profound loss. Written in two sections and set in various cities throughout Argentina and the United States, the poems in Beasts Behave in Foreign Land explore the insistence and resiliency of love.

With all the power of a long-brewing storm, the brilliant poet Jenny Factor finally returns to make public the interior work and spoils of decades in Want, The Lake, her second poetry collection.

This book of fifty-two poems spans twenty years of life—accumulated wisdom, images, and desires—with a dedication to craft that has been honed and clarified by time.

Edna Sloane was a promising author at the top of her game. Her debut novel was an instant classic and commercial success, vaulting her into the heady echelons of the 1980s New York City lit scene. Then she disappeared and was largely forgotten. Decades later, Seth Edwards is an aspiring writer and editor who feels he’s done all the right things to achieve literary success, but despairs that his dream will be forever out of reach. He becomes obsessed with the idea that if he can rediscover Sloane, it will make his career. His search for her leads to unexpected places and connections, and the epistolary correspondence that ensues makes up this book, a novel infused with insights and meditations about what our cultural obsession with the "next big thing" does to literature, and what it means to be a creative person in the world.

This harvest of poems is inspired by the plant medicine latent in Gossypium Herbeceum, or Cotton Root Bark, which was used by enslaved Black women to induce labor, cure reproductive ailments and end unwanted pregnancies. Through an arrangement of stories, secrets and memories experienced, read, heard, reimagined and remixed, gossypiin reckons with a peculiar yet commonplace inheritance of violation, survival and self-possession. In this way, Ra Malika Imhotep invites us to lean in and listen good as the text interrupts the narrative silence around sexual harm, sickness, and the marks they make on black femme subjectivity.

Within these pages, the poet is joined by a “sticky trickster-self” named Lil Cotton Flower who tells of their own origins and endings in the Black vernacular traditions of the griot and the gossip. Interspersed throughout the collection, Black feminist wisdoms and warnings meld with the poets own yearnings and Lil Cotton Flower’s tall tales.

Gossypiin is an offering towards the holding and healing of Black beings that exceed the confines of their own bodies.

Playful, kinetic, and devastating in turn, You Were Watching from the Sand is a collection in which Haitian men, women, and children who find their lives cleaved by the interminably strange bite back at the bizarre with their own oddities. In “belly,” a young woman abandoned by her only living relative makes a person from the mud beside her backyard creek. In “We Feel it in Punta Cana,” a domestic child servant in the Dominican Republic tours through his own lush imagination to make his material conditions more bearable. In “The Oldest Sensation is Anger,” a teenager invites a same-aged family friend into her apartment and uncovers a spate of disturbing secrets about her. Written in a mixture of high lyricism, absurdist comedy, and Haitian cultural witticisms, this is a collection whose dynamism matches that of its characters at every beat and turn.

Peripheral Vision, Susan Kinsolving’s fourth book of poems, explores the world from many points of view. She takes her readers to England, Hollywood, Wyoming, France, and Chile. She goes behind the scenes in a military hospital, an elementary school, and a disturbed family. Her poems were described in the New Yorker as “grand and almost terrifying.” In this new collection, she proves herself again. As a guest poet and lecturer, Kinsolving has performed at numerous venues, including Harvard, Columbia, and Yale University, as well as Bad Robot in Santa Monica and Bread Loaf in Vermont.

The Skin of Meaning is award-winning poet Keith Flynn’s sixth and most wide-ranging collection, seeking to find the tangible analogs and visceral meanings hidden behind the daily bombardment of digital information and hoping to restore the mystery in our involvement with language. From the etymologies of pop culture, history, astronomy, and rock and roll, these poems fan out into a bold multiplicity of voices and techniques. Flynn’s work illustrates the meaning that is also created through tense collisions and is populated with figures in resistance to the status quo, a gathering as varied as Caravaggio, Nina Simone, Gaudí, Villon, Wonder Woman, and Manolete. The final section examines America’s fascination with violence and death, revealing that “a human being in love with mystery is never finished.” This collection constantly challenges our assumptions about the world we think we see and is teeming with evidence of another invisible world bristling like an underground river beneath our feet.

In Ripples in the Fabric of the Universe, Jim Tilley draws on his experience as a poet and mathematician to fix a lens on the current raw state of the country and the world and on interpersonal relationships. At times, his mood is merely contemplative, especially while expressing his fondness for nostalgia and in his testaments to family and friends, but as he delves relentlessly into matters political, ecological, and environmental, that mood turns darker, even ominous, infused occasionally with humor to present a more optimistic outlook.

In a polygamist commune in the desert, a fourteen-year-old boy and a twelve-year-old girl fall in love and consummate that love, breaking religious law. They are caught, and a year later, she gives birth to his father’s child while the boy commits murder four hundred miles away—a crime that will slowly unravel the community.

Told by eight adolescent narrators, this is a story of how people use faith to justify cruelty, and how redemption can come from unexpected places. Though seemingly powerless in the face of their fundamentalist religion, these “strange children” shift into the central framework of their world as they come of age.

The 2015 Red Hen Press Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award winner, chosen by Carl Phillips.

An arresting whisper of a debut, As Burning Leaves is a record of what remains. It moves through the visible world with precision and heart—delivers us to a space of aquatic light, to bruises flowering and moonlit streets covered in clothing. This collection emerges from channels of film, contemporary art, and meditations on the body: “less / if you dare winter / if you cut a star into your leg / if you find the green in the muck / less if the clouds disperse to allow blue inlets.” As Burning Leaves traces a path of queer failure that questions notions of desirability, self, and otherness. Jesiolowski asks what art is for, recalibrates the room of the stanza, proposes names for touch we never use. This book has an internal navigational system, a pact with the phenomenal. It courts the fleeting and rests in the stigma of a sunflower, lets us taste smoke in snow. “. . . the folk song says that we need a little sadness—so we invent the passing of railcars . . .” Elegant and cutting, radical and intimate, this is a book to find, to hold, to give.

“A witty, sultry, and thoughtful new collection."—Ron Charles, Washington Post

Obsessive love has never been so much fun! What She Wants: Poems on Obsession, Desire, Despair, Euphoria is a powerful tribute to the intensity of obsessive love, told through the trademark humor and heartbreak of bestselling poet Kim Dower.

Following the commercial and literary success of her bestselling poetry collection, I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom: Poems on Motherhood, Kim Dower delivers What She Wants: Poems on Obsession, Desire, Despair, Euphoria—turning her keen eye, vibrant imagination, trademark insight, and humor to the intensity of obsessive love. These steamy and provocative poems, combining humor and heartache, run through the four phases of Limerence, the state of being infatuated or obsessed with another person: Infatuation, Crystallization, Deterioration, and Ecstatic Release.

From the opening poem, “She’ll do anything for food,” to the sexy title poem, “What She Wants,” the painfully funny, “His Other Girlfriend,” to the longing in “Visiting Baudelaire,” and the sad, sweet final poem, “Fish’s Lament,” Kim Dower captures the essence of what it means to be stuck on someone—even on a squirrel! Her eclectic, growing readership will savor these poems that can be read in one sitting, like a story with an arc, or separately, each one recalling the moment of falling in or out of love, the moment our hearts skipped a beat.

American Bastard is a lyrical inquiry into the experience of being a bastard in America. This memoir travels across literal continents—and continents of desire as Beatty finds her birthfather, a Canadian hockey player who’s won three Stanley Cups—and her birthmother, a working-class woman from Pittsburgh. This is not the whitewashed story, but the real story, where Beatty writes through complete erasure: loss of name and history, and a culture based on the currency of gratitude as expected payment from the adoptee. American Bastard sandblasts the exaltation of adoption in Western culture and the myth of the “chosen baby.” This journey into the relationship of place and body compels and unhinges, with the link between identity and blood history as its driving force. Beatty rescripts the order of things: the horizontal world of the birth table where babies are switched, the complex yard of the body where names and blood shift and revolt, and the actual story into the relationship of place and the insurrection of the body erased. Issues of class and struggle run throughout this book, this narrative river between blood and continents, between work and desire.

Abracadabra, Sunshine is a series of ever-turning letters written to lovers, friends, and family as a testament to human perseverance and to art-making as a continuous defiance against the often overwhelming complexities and hardships of existence. Darting from the Czech Republic to the Andromeda Galaxy, from the films of Godard to the tales of the Brothers Grimm and the Terracotta Army of Qin Shi Huang, these poems foreground our animal need for love and connection against the background of our historical obsession with destruction. By turns dour and deeply hopeful, Booth’s poems extol the communal and healing powers of vulnerability and love.

“Each of these marvelous poems engages as instantly as a photograph: you read two or three words and you’re on the scene, recoiling in horror as Trotsky is murdered or twisting uncomfortably as your daughter buys her first bra. There’s no need to ‘develop’ Stephen Gibson’s pictures; they enter your mind so fast that you can’t help feeling that what’s happening on the page has already happened and that, very likely, you were there when it did. He’s a poet for other poets to learn from, for no one else writing today uses language as economically or to more immediate effect.”

—David Kirby