Red Hen Press

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

But where?

The answer is the moon of course, and that’s what this book explores: the many ways in which today’s scientists, entrepreneurs, architects and, yes, a few loonies are working to get colonies established there ASAP. Filled with research, interviews and expert projections, these pages reveal how a web of fantastic new technologies could give mankind a brand new start off-world.

The only worm in the ointment is human nature. It’s the one thing pioneers in this business almost never discuss. Yet it’s of vital concern: given a second chance on the moon, will we use it to create at last a sane and peaceful society? Or will we make a desperate hash of things all over again?

Here’s your doorway to the moon of tomorrow. Pass through and decide for yourself.

Dancing at the End of the World is a sprawling collection of connected stories and lives that span a century of Berlin’s rich and complicated history. 

Beginning in 1933 amidst the rumblings of fascism and the demise of the Weimar Republic, and concluding in the fraught social and political climate of the present day, the collection weaves seamlessly through the defining years of the iconic city.

From the first story, we are introduced to Klara von Arnsberg, the aristocratic daughter of a famed industrialist, whose fierce instinct for both survival and reinvention is a mirror for that of Berlin itself. The life—or rather, many lives—that Klara builds for herself over the decades to come, are ever entangled with the fate of the city as we bear witness to the Holocaust, the post-war years, the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the ensuing years of dramatic transformation. 

As we move through the decades of the twentieth and twenty-first century, Klara is ever-present in the stories and the characters we encounter: Turkish guest workers in the 1960s and Syrian refugees in the twenty-first century, frustrated housewives in the new Berlin of money and rampant gentrification, Cold War Berliners hardened by unimaginable cruelty, expats in search of themselves, tech entrepreneurs who dream of immortality, and the lost children of the cultural revolution. All are linked to Klara, to her desires and fears, her greatest love, and the ultimate fate of both her legacy and the country itself.

On the cusp of her 1993 college graduation in Olympia, Molly McCloy spends her time drunk and high, pulling dykey pranks, and thrashing in mosh pits—anything to avoid the troubled, working-class family she left behind in Arizona. But after a vivid nightmare involving her dad, Molly writes him a letter, asking him to apologize for nine instances of mental, verbal, and physical abuse. To her surprise, her dad writes back. Nine Grudges is the story of Molly’s nine heartbreaking moments, her humor as a coping strategy, and her queerness as a source of joy. Celebrating dark victories snatched from the jaws of trauma, this book asks whether grudge-wielding is an act more powerful than forgiveness itself.

Amy Speace’s debut collection of poetry, The Cardinals, is a lyrical investigation of marriage, divorce, mothering, and mysticism told through poems that read like intimate conversations but evoke the complexities of love and loss through the natural world. An award-winning songwriter, championed early by Judy Collins (who has recorded her songs), she is an established presence in the Nashville songwriting scene and has been playing concerts throughout the world for the last twenty years. Her songs have always been celebrated for their poetic lyrics, and during Covid and a break in her touring career, Speace received her MFA in poetry from Spalding University. She was mentored by Maggie Smith and clearly comes from the lineage of Smith and Sharon Olds. Speace tackles the internal language of coming together and splitting apart, evoking rivers and birds, the South and the North, weather and racism and family history and it all comes together like birdsong.

In Mexico City for a family funeral, Detective DJ Arias encounters a group of Robin Hood-style thieves who call themselves the Jaguars. Their activities reach across the border into Los Angeles with a Hollywood murder that entangles LA's elite anchthe nannies, housekeepers, and gardeners who serve them, and threatens DJ's own loved ones. A follow up to the mystery A Punishing Breed, A Shadow of Jaguars finds DJ and partner Bobby Talbot struggling to untangle a murder where Hollywood, wealthy powerbrokers, and an immigrant population struggle to coexist and survive. Throughout it all, his faithful dog Evidence is by his side.

"When the sound of water shapes sleep. / When cranes disappear from the river. / When maps unfold on hardwood floors. / When north becomes the only direction." The poems in This Far North hold reverence for the natural world and the ways we find home when we pay attention to what it is offering. Tethered to northern landscapes, Susan Campbell invites readers to look, look deeper at the world's myriad wonders, to pause and consider what we can learn when we stand still long enough to listen to the trill of kinglets, the susurration of water, snow sloughing in December rain. Seeking gratitude while navigating a world suffused with grief and loss, these poems are compass points, cairns to help us find our way.

Mud on the Moon is a hybrid memoir that intertwines a daughter's exploration of her Filipino immigrant father's obscured past with a reimagined version of his untold story.

Born in Southeast Alaska, Nita Noveno traces the legacy of her father, who arrived in the US in 1928 as part of a wave of Filipino men seeking better opportunities through manual labor in agriculture and other industries. The book alternates between Nita's coming-of-age story and imagined chapters of her father's life, revealing the gaps and silences that lie between their experiences. With a blend of personal and historical imagery, Mud on the Moon offers a rare glimpse into the lives of Filipino immigrants in America. It is a meditation on how family, memory, and identity are shaped by the stories we inherit, both spoken and unspoken, across generations.

AUTHOR OF THE PEN OPEN BOOK AWARD WINNER, PERFUME DREAMS: REFLECTIONS ON THE VIETNAMESE DIASPORA • AUTHOR OF BIRDS OF PARADISE LOST, the widely taught and anthologized debut short story collection • Andrew Lam returns with a literary exploration of love, lust, and loss among Vietnamese immigrants in America.

“Universal and personal.”—Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior • “Will be read and studied for years to come.”—Noël Alumit, author of Music Heard in Hi-Fi • “Maps the moveable feast of the Vietnamese diaspora.”—Scott Lankford, author of Tahoe Beneath the Surface • “Lam’s most lyrical and wide-ranging collection yet.”—Matthew Spangler, playwright • “For anyone who has loved and lost a lover, a landscape, a home."—Fenton Johnson, author of At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life • “Taste the desires of comedians, soldiers, tomboys, friends, queers, mothers, and refugees.”—Long Bui, author of Returns of War: South Vietnam

At times humorous and ecstatic, other times poetic and elegiac, the fourteen pieces in Stories from the Edge of the Sea explore love and loss, lust and grief, longing and heartbreaks through the lives of Vietnamese immigrants and their children in California. A younger dancer is haunted by memories of almost dying on a boat when they escaped from Vietnam, a widow processes her husband’s death through frantic Facebook postings, a writer enters an old lover’s home and sees a ghost at twilight. If the human heart is a vast, open-ended terrain, then Andrew Lam’s short stories are its mountains, valleys, and lakes. Together they seek to chart barely explored country.

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 22 features work from Victoria Chang, Francisco Aragón, Susannah Nevison, and more.

The Los Angeles Review Masthead Editor: Kate Gale
Managing Editor: Keaton Maddox
Assistant Managing Editor: Deirdre Collins
Editor-at-Large: Riley Mang
Poetry Editors: Blas Falconer and Vandana Khanna
Fiction Editors: Meredith Alder and Amy Sather
Nonfiction Editor: Ann Beman
Assistant Nonfiction Editor: Florencia Ramirez
Translation Editor: Piotr Florczyk
Book Reviews Editor: Alyse Bensel
Assistant Book Reviews Editor: Daniel Pecchenino
Copy Editors: Ian McElfresh and Eric Howard
Publisher: Tobi Harper

The pieces in this collection capture the feeling of being buffeted by great gusts of middle-aged longing. What began as one woman’s quarrel with Buddhism, especially its doctrine of non-attachment, morphs into a larger question: What’s the right way to love a person or a thing? With voluptuous detail and rigorous self-interrogation, Jennifer Brice looks for answers in family lore, personal experience, conversations with friends, and beloved books. The result is a tender, moving, far-reaching—sometimes delightfully funny, sometimes achingly poignant—exploration of the powerful ties that bind us to one another and to the world around us.

From the Introduction: “The goal with this anthology is to represent that full range of contemporary expressions of Islam, as well as a full range of genres—poetry, fiction, essay, memoir, political writing, cultural writing, and of course plenty of texts which mix and match and blur all of these modes . . . the trajectories between the pieces—like that of kismet—will be multiple, nonlinear, abstract. The Muslim community is plural and contradictory. This collection of voices ought to be symphony and cacophony at once, like the body of Muslims as they are today.”—Kazim Ali

Dive into the depths of the unknown with The Underwater Mystery, where Jin Tan leads the adventure! Imagine a world where the ocean holds incredible secrets—like waves you can’t even see from the surface. Follow Jin as she unravels the fascinating science of internal waves, mysterious forces that can stop ships in their tracks, and even affect submarines. Travel back in time to learn about the strange “dead water” phenomenon, first experienced by real-life explorer Dr. Fridtjof Nansen. Explore how these invisible waves shape our climate, protect coral reefs, and present unexpected challenges to submarines!

Packed with mind-blowing facts, hands-on experiments you can try at home, and thrilling true stories, Jin guides you through a hidden world beneath the ocean’s surface. Find out why the Arctic ice is melting faster, how waves can form and travel between layers of water without losing its identity, and what makes these mysterious waves so powerful. Ready to dive into an ocean full of hidden wonders? Join Jin Tan in The Underwater Mystery for an unforgettable adventure!

A grieving Hector Peterson and his estranged father Winston Telemacque arrive on the lush island of Dominica in 2017 to spread his mother’s ashes when Hurricane Maria strikes. Amid the devastation, the fragile peace between father and son is tested as long-buried family secrets at the heart of Hector’s identity are unearthed. Hector faces down his failed marriage, shipwrecked career, and his own failures as a father, while Winston, after three decades of striving as an immigrant in Boston, seeks to reclaim the losses from a painful childhood and the bloody betrayal by his one true love. In Island Man, the ruins of past and present are reconciled and shattered generational bonds are restored.

“Part mystery, part magical, and completely captivating."—Karen Winn, author of Our Little World

Queenie Rivers was raised by her grandparents in coastal Los Angeles. As she approaches thirty, her erratic lifestyle is forced back on course by a car accident and her grandmother’s intervention.

But her recovery is interrupted by a break-in and Gran’s death. Gran’s last act was to set Queenie up with a job at an upscale seaside bistro with a shady reputation—the owner of which, it turns out, was once a close friend. As Queenie digs into Gran’s past for answers about the break-in, the murder, and the unnerving circumstances surrounding the restaurant and her new boss, she discovers that her grandmother, a Romani Holocaust survivor, kept many secrets, some of them otherworldly—secrets that become hers to unravel when she becomes a suspect in Gran’s murder case.

What Monsters You Make of Them interrogates ecology and injustice through shifting landscapes and ancient cities.

Stand astonished at a painting, venerate the mugshot of a poet, riff on a comedian’s quip, and recall a mentor persevering through grief. Speak of headhunters, of word origins, of saints and gods stitched into a newfound pantheon, of the multiverse as a source of reincarnation. Visit ancient cities, national parks, a sundry of gardens, and the ruins of a farmhouse. A teacher fails to help a student. A student explains war to her teacher. Seize back the forgotten. Kneel to not knowing. Interrogate ecology and injustice through shifting landscapes and know What Monsters You Make of Them.

PEN / REGINALD LOCKETT LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN LITERATURE • PRIZE-WINNING NOVELIST, POET, AND PAINTER • GEORGIA WRITER’S HALL OF FAME

"A world traveler's notebook of gentle, affable observations."—The New York Times Book Review • “A remarkable mind and the talent to match.”—Toni Morrison, Nobel-prize winning author • “A very powerful book!”—Cornelius Eady • “Radiant with attentiveness and loving compassion”—Rikki Ducornet • “A feast to be reckoned with.”—Allison Joseph • “A new book by Major is a literary event.”—John Beckman • “For forty-five years Major has been on the cutting edge of literature.”—Richard Price • “Major is an essential American writer.”—Steve Yarbrough

Clarence Major’s Four Days in Algeria is a poetic feast of travel, taking us to Paris, Florence, Ghana, Algeria, and many other places. We also experience the seasons in fresh ways. Delicious food, too, is laid before us. There are quiet moments, as on a houseboat, where the poet is writing poetry. Major gives us adventurous encounters with ordinary life rendered through poems of dazzling agility and fearless bluntness. These are also poems of unfettered Augustan honesty. They radiate with lyrical purity. Allegorical and spontaneous, they are full of holiday energy as the poet passionately affirms life, whether as he travels or simply in quiet moments of reflection.

A Spanish woman trying to retire as an assassin, a French Foreign Legion deserter from Madagascar, a mysterious (perhaps CIA) woman from America, a billionaire military contractor, and a man wandering the seas alone on a sailing ship bump into each other in the Indian Ocean, and not all of them survive.

Mónica has had enough of her life as a contract killer when she meets lonely wanderer Frank Baltimore in a stupidly expensive resort in Madagascar. A few hundred miles away, Alain has had more than enough of his solitary post on a tiny island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and so when the mysterious Skye offers him a job, he says yes—he doesn’t know if she is CIA, Wagner, Darkwater, or a gangster, but he wants in. She takes him to Diego Garcia, the top-secret US military base in the middle of the Indian Ocean, for training. Things turn ugly and deadly when a man from Frank’s past turns up trying to break into the lucrative, secretive, already crowded world of paramilitary contractors. He, Monica, Alain, and Skye end up on his bad side and turn to each other for help.

AUTHOR OF THE BESTSELLER, ZABELLE • AUTHOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES REVIEWED, ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS

Nancy Kricorian named a creative activist on the Wallpaper* USA 400 list

In vivid, poetic prose, Nancy Kricorian’s The Burning Heart of the World tells the story of a Beirut Armenian family before, during, and after the Lebanese Civil War.

“You won’t be able to put this book down."—Marie Myung-Ok Lee, author of The Evening Hero • “vivid, reverberating life.”—Aram Saroyan, author of Still Night in L.A.

Returning to the fabular tone of Zabelle, her popular first novel, Kricorian conjures up the lost worlds and intergenerational traumas that haunt a family in permanent exile. Leavened with humor and imbued with the timelessness of a folktale, The Burning Heart of the World is a sweeping saga that takes readers on an epic journey from the mountains of Cilicia to contemporary New York City.

AWARD-WINNING POET • AUTHOR OF ELEVEN POETRY COLLECTIONS

FORMER POET LAUREATE OF NEW ZEALAND

David Eggleton explores the voices of New Zealand, Australia, and Polynesia in his latest collection, LIFTING THE ISLAND

“This is vital, elastic, expertly handled language in a Pacific voice of cultural and musical sensibility, poetry to be spoken aloud or in the mind.”–Cilla McQueen, MNZM, and former New Zealand Poet Laureate

This own-voices collection is a kind of lyrical world map of the South Pacific, built up through a lush epic catalog of flora, fauna, and artifacts.

This collection is a kind of lyrical word map of the South Pacific, built up through a lush epic catalog of flora, fauna, and artifacts. The poems are frequently infused with a wry humor—and while they often eschew both narrative and personal epiphany, they make intensely detailed, vigorous observations of place and landscape that are curious, sparkling, and sometimes hilarious.

Linguistically agile, this book’s stanzas bring together the lyrical and the slangy, celebrating the local vernaculars of New Zealand, Australia, and Polynesia. Many of its poems work as cascading streams of image; of pronouncements; of dramatic tonal shifts almost line by line; and with dense, daring metaphor clusters that entertain as well as illuminate.

Boy Oh Boy is a collection of queer fabulist stories and flash fictions told via second person, asking readers to share Doss’s explorations of joy and longing. Your boyfriend is many boyfriends, possibly all the boyfriends you’ve ever had or will have. But you must ask yourself whether you have them or they have you. Your boyfriend plays jokes on you—plays jokes on the world. He is forever unattainable, and still you love your boyfriend, even when it hurts you. Doss explores how relationships can be all-consuming, how we transform ourselves to fit within their contour. Eventually, you might change so much that you don’t even fit inside your own body. This book is so much about space—the physical, emotional, and mental spheres that everyone inhabits. Doss uses humor to deal with the isolation that each of us experiences—not because we’re alone, but because we’ve become detached from ourselves, our needs, and our desires. Boy Oh Boy is our chance to understand Zachary Doss, as well as our strangest selves.

Born of a personal ache, an unquenchable desire to animate the shadow archive, Saito’s journey unfolds in lyric correspondences and epistolary poems that sing with rage, confusion, and, ultimately, love. In these works, descendants of wartime incarceration exchange dreams, mothers become water goddesses, and a modern daughter haunts future ruins. To enter this book is to enter the slipstream of nonlinear time, where mystical inclinations, yellow cedars, and sisterhood make a balm for trauma’s scars. Altogether, the work enacts a dialogue between the past and the present; the radical ancestor and the future child; and the desert prison and the family garden, where Saito’s father diligently gathers stones.

BOOK 1 OF THE CURSEBREAKERS SERIES, FEATURED #1 ON KIRKUS REVIEWS’ 20 SCIENCE FICTION FANTASY NOVELS THAT WILL BLOW YOUR MIND

Debut Author Madeleine Nakamura captivates readers with a tale of magic, adventure, and unexpected friendships in this thrilling fantasy, CURSEBREAKERS

“Superbly developed.”—Kirkus Reviews, STARRED
“An exciting read.”—Booklist 
“Outrageously good—phenomenal.”—Independent Book Review

Adrien Desfourneaux, professor of magic, must survive his own failing mental health and a tenuous partnership with a dangerous ally in order to save the city of Astrum from a spreading curse.

Adrien Desfourneaux, professor of magic and disgraced ex-physician, has discovered a conspiracy. Someone is inflicting magical comas on the inhabitants of the massive city of Astrum, and no one knows how or why. Caught between a faction of scheming magical academics and an explosive schism in the ranks of the Astrum’s power-hungry military, Adrien is swallowed by the growing chaos. Alongside Gennady, an unruly, damaged young soldier, and Malise, a brilliant healer and Adrien’s best friend, Adrien searches for a way to stop the spreading curse before the city implodes. He must survive his own bipolar disorder, his self-destructive tendencies, and his entanglement with the man who doesn’t love him back.

WINNER of the 2025 Tennessee Book Award in Poetry

In her second collection, My Infinity, Didi Jackson continues her exploration of the paradoxical meaning of a world where joy and sorrow simultaneously coexist.

These poems investigate both sacred and natural spaces. Her poems move grief and emotional suffering to language as a site of recovery and renewal. Much of this collection is ordered around the work of the Swedish visual artist Hilma af Klint. As the first artist to arguably use abstraction, her radical work brims with enigmatic botanical images painted to grasp the seemingly boundless and hermetic realm of the dead. Similarly, Jackson’s poems explore plant life and natural species in the Green Mountains of Vermont, where perceived thresholds blur in acts of spiritual reimagining. This is a book that questions all that is endless, all that has been thought as limiting, and all that remains unknown.

Former best friends Scott and Errol meet unexpectedly at Oso Lake, a remote Canadian fly-fishing paradise where, five years before, fresh out of college, they had the time of their lives. Their situations, though, have changed, their high hopes quashed by workaday realities and, in Errol’s case, marriage to Claire, who has come with him trying to stave off divorce. But Oso Lake has changed. The fall before, a woman’s severed head was left in a campfire pit beside the lake. The shadow cast by her murder is darkened further by a fire-scarred white truck driver who claims to be a long-dead Native shaman and has plans to eradicate not only Scott, Errol, and Claire, but all of Western civilization. The beauty of the wilderness becomes, every day, more threatening and perverse. But the worst danger the vacationers face may be themselves.

“Soyer's beautiful debut is essential reading for anyone trying to understand how, why, and through what means we construct ourselves.”—Cyrus Dunham, author of A Year Without a Name

Dreams in Which I’m Almost Human is a genre-defying memoir of disability, identity, and desire that fuses lyricism, myth, and medical truth to explore what it means to live and love a body defined by others.

At eight years old, Hannah Soyer had no choice but to undergo an intensive spinal fusion surgery, in order to keep her lungs from eventually collapsing. Fourteen years later, she chose another treatment for her neuromuscular condition: regular drug injections into her spinal fluid. But what does “choice” really mean, and how much weight do our choices hold?

In taut, lyrical chapters, Dreams in Which I’m Almost Human confronts and communes with bodily autonomy, medical and sexual consent, traveling abroad in a wheelchair, caregiving and caretaking, appreciating the natural world, family history, bedtime stories, fantastical creatures, Irish poetry, and the limits and wonders of language and love. A bold collection of genre-bending essays, this memoir is an investigation into what we (and our words) are capable of, as we yearn to make sense of our relationships to ourselves, each other, and the worlds we inhabit.

Wild Honey, Tough Salt offers a prismatic view of Earth citizenship, where we must now be ambidextrous. The book takes a stern look inward calling for sturdy character and supple spirit, and a bold look outward seeking ways to engage grief trouble. The book begins with poems that witness a buoyant life in a difficult world: wandering New Orleans in a trance, savoring the life of artist Tove Jansson, reading the fine print on the Mexican peso and the Scottish five-pound note. Clues to untapped energy lie everywhere by the lens of poetry. The book then moves to considerations of the worst in us—torture and war: how to recruit a child soldier? How to be married to the heartless guard? What to say to your child who is enamored by bullets? In the third section, the book offers a spangle of poems blessing earth: wren song, bud growth, river’s eager way with obstacles. And the final section offers poems of affection: infant clarities of home, long marriage in dog years, a consoling campfire in the yard when all seems lost. The book will soften your trouble, and give you spirit for the days ahead.

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

Featured in the New York Times!

Percival Everett’s The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, VA, 1843, Annotated From the Library of John C. Calhoun, is poetry within the harsh confines of a mock historical document—a guidebook for the American slave owner. The collection features lists of instructions for buying, training, and punishing, equations for calculating present and future profits, and handwritten annotations affirming the brutal contents. The Book of Training lays bare the mechanics of the peculiar institution of slavery and challenges readers to place themselves in the uncomfortable vantage point of those who have bought and enslaved human beings.

*Recommended in The New York Times*

A Punishing Breed, the first in a series of novels featuring Detective DJ Arias, is a murder mystery that takes place in Los Angeles, the city of angels, freeways, Santa Ana winds, and honeysuckle slithering through chain-link fences and perfuming LA's dark streets and neighborhoods. Detective Arias hunts for a murderer on a liberal arts campus that prides itself on its progressive curriculum but is rife with jealousy, racial and sexual tensions, and a hierarchy as real and destructive as a medieval fortress. DJ Arias, good at his job because he sees the worst in people, is challenged by the college community, a neighborhood recluse, and a young Latino gardener he sent to jail ten years ago for a hit-and-run accident. Through the course of his investigation, Arias will find out no one is who they appear to be. He begins to reclaim his humanity by adopting a dog he names Evidence and finding the clues to a crime born from a dark secret not contained in the past but alive in the present, which will cast destruction and murder on the denizens of the small liberal arts campus.

American Quasar is a visual-textual collaboration between poet David Campos and artist Maceo Montoya. What began as an exploration of the precipice of violence evolved into an excavation of self, a deep meditation on how country, family, and trauma affect the ability to love. The images and words build a poetic space where the body is understood in both physical and celestial terms, giving a spiritual dimension to the collection's larger claim that the political is personal.

Nora Tyler returns to Alaska after many years away and finds work on a salmon fishing boat, but the long, hard season brings both deep friendships and unexpected violence.

Over the course of the long, hard season, Nora reawakens to the beauty of fishing for salmon on the outer coast. Her four crewmates have their own troubled pasts, and she forms a different bond with each one. A rivalry develops with another boat, the Viking Hero. When a woman is lost overboard from the Hero, Nora tries to understand what happened and finds that the Hero was dealing drugs and her crewmate Danny was part of the action. Toby’s ex-girlfriend, Sara, takes the place of the missing woman and finds herself in a difficult situation with no easy way out. At the end of the season, Nora and her crewmates go duck hunting on the Stikine River flats. Two of the Hero’s crew appear, perhaps not by chance, and the confrontation turns violent.

In his third poetry collection from Red Hen Press, Kim Stafford gathers poems that sing with empathy, humor, witness, and story. Poems in this book have been set to music, quoted in the New York Times, posted online in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, gathered in a chapbook sold to benefit Ukrainian refugees, posted online in response to Supreme Court decisions, composed for a painter’s gallery opening, and in other ways engaged a world at war with itself, testifying for the human project hungry for kinship, exiled from bounty, and otherwise thirsting for the oxygen of healing song.

The Sadness of Whirlwinds explores the world as we know it but tinged with magical possibilities that challenge our expectations. A small dog leads a man into the backyard of a blind woman who has drawn him forth from a forgotten past. A man becomes trapped between walls in his favorite restaurant. The author of a book of questions meets the author of a book that has the answers. An encounter with Mr. Death offers insights into Mrs. Birth. A woman unhappy with her life enters into an exploration of the world of whirlwinds. A man decides he must leave his dog lying beside him on the couch in order to enter the Inward City. A man travels to the remote and eccentric country of Fallada and meets the beautiful, bewildering woman known as Keeva. A woman must break through the boundaries of her comfortable grief in order to face an irascible man and unravel the mystery of her stolen dog. These and other explorations into the unknown make up the character of this new collection by Jim Peterson. Mysterious and challenging, these tales invite readers to their own inquiries into the nature of reality.

Happily married, backed by a powerful mentor, and with career prospects that would take him abroad, Serguey has more than any young Cuban lawyer could ask for. But when his estranged brother Victor appears with news that their father—famed theater director Felipe Blanco—has been detained for what he suspects are political reasons, Serguey’s privileged life is suddenly shaken.

A return to his childhood home in Havana’s decaying suburbs—a place filled with art, politics, and the remnants of a dissolving family—reconnects Serguey with his troubled past. He learns of an elusive dramaturge’s link to Felipe, a man who could be key to his father’s release. With the help of a social media activist and his wife’s ties with the Catholic Church, Serguey sets out to unlock the mystery of Felipe’s arrest and, in the process, is forced to confront the reasons for the hostility between him and Victor: two violent childhood episodes that scarred them in unforgettable ways. On the verge of imprisonment, Serguey realizes he must make a decision regarding not just his father, but his family and his own future, a decision which, under the harsh shadow of a communist state, he cannot afford to regret.

Taking the reader across our country through the varied landscapes of Colorado, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arizona, Refugee discusses the nature of seeking shelter. We are all refugees looking for a haven from whatever oppresses our lives. What constitutes a refugee is at the heart of the collection. Poems confront and explore xenophobia, sexism, gun violence, domestic violence, corporate greed, and their ties to environmental destruction and political and economic tyranny. An ovarian cancer survivor, the author also writes about her own courageous confrontation with death. These inspiring poems ultimately call for the reader to recognize the refugee condition as a human condition. They call for a change in consciousness in the forms of action and compassion. They call for the reader to thrive. Ranging from short lyric poems to narrative poems, this collection steeped in rich, sensual imagery draws inspiration and healing from the natural world. Truth lies in recognition of the interdependence of all life. Refugee is an odyssey to find grace and unity in a besieged and divided contemporary American society.     

“A magical map of memory and vision.”—Dean Rader, author of Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry

In her mesmerizing sixth poetry collection, Blood Wolf Moon, Elise Paschen weaves constellations throughout, of stars and birds and light and darkness and beauty and horror and nature and humans and history, making shape and meaning of what’s around us and even who we are.

In this riveting sixth poetry collection, Paschen explores the story lines of her Osage heritage. The core of the book grapples with a dark period of American history, “The Reign of Terror,” when outsiders murdered individual members of the Osage for their oil headrights. Paschen searches her cultural past and family history in poems about the land, ancestors, childhood, loss, nature, transformation, flight and language.

In this cinematic book, she builds drama in overlapping narratives, reinventing ways to approach the line on the page. Described by poet Timothy Donnelly as “one of today’s most formally astute poets,” Paschen opens Blood Wolf Moon with the long poem, “Heritage,” a bracelet of crown poems, then shifts registers to formal poems and prose sequences. Poet and editor Ester Belin calls the concluding poems with their use of Osage language, “significant leaps into literary sovereignty.” Blood Wolf Moon Captivates with its emotional intensity and unrelenting quest for the translation of identity. It’s a book you can’t put down.

An astonishing debut, how to get over is part instruction manual, part prayer, part testimony. It attempts to solve the reader’s problems (by telling them how to get over), while simultaneously creating them—troubling the waters with witness and blues. ford’s poems witness via a series of “past life portraits” that navigate personal space as well as the imagined persona. These portraits conjure the blues via the imagined lives of the inanimate (a whip, a machete), the historic (a Negro burial ground, Harriet Tubman, The Red Summer), the iconic (Pecola Breedlove, Richard Pryor, Rodney King). At the same time, these portraits focus on the past lives of the author and grapple with themes including sexuality, sexual abuse, and substance abuse.

The collection’s namesake poems speak to bullying and homophobia, blackness, whiteness and gentrification, and even directly address pop culture icons like Kanye West, Chaka Khan, and Nicky Minaj. Grounded in memory and re-memory, these poems pray in the voice of the ancestors and testify on their behalf. ford’s poems not only remind how the history and legacy of slavery placed African-Americans at an unfair disadvantage, but attempt to illuminate the beautiful struggle of a people’s endurance and resilience. The reader embarks upon a journey through these poems, circa 1787 to 2013, and emerges realizing that everything is connected—the ways we live, lie, love, and die—the ways we all get over.

In Epilogue: Selected and Last Poems, Frederick Morgan reworks and amplifies, in his extraordinary poetic range, the fundamental human themes that preoccupied him—love, death, pain, the nature and transcendence of the Self. In interweaving his many themes, he recaptures the past, the confrontation with the external world of nature and the internal world of dream, the oppositions and ambiguities of body and spirit, and the reduplications of meaning in legend and fable. Assembled from eight previous collections, and including his final poems, this profoundly moving book transcends individual expression to provide a powerful insight into universal human experience.

Yes, we can make a significant difference—with our food choices—learned author and activist Florencia Ramirez as she traveled across the nation to interview farmers and food producers. Tracing Ramirez’s tour of American water sustainable farms—from rice paddies in Cajun Louisiana to a Hawaiian coffee farm to a Boston chocolate factory and beyond—Eat Less Water tells the story of water served on our plates: an eye-opening account of the under-appreciated environmental threat of water scarcity, a useful cookbook with water-sustainable recipes accompanying each chapter, and a fascinating personal narrative that will teach the reader how they, too, can eat less water.

“Angela Ball is a poet wise enough to describe love as ‘a double appetite for seeing.’ Her poems are suffused by a wary disappointment in romantic excitement, but with the piqued attention that accompanies desire she makes the world, so far as this can be done, the object of her desire.”

—Williams Matthews

In poems full of bounty, loss and the mysteries of the body, Taylor offers a rich, severe, memorable meditation about what it means to try to connect our bodies and our time on earth.

In 2010, Tess Taylor was awarded the Amy Clampitt Fellowship. Her prize: A rent-free year in a cottage in the Berkshires, where she could finish a first book. But Taylor—outside the city for the first time in nearly a decade, and trying to conceive her first child—found herself alone. To break up her days, she began to intern on a small farm, planting leeks, turning compost, and weeding kale. In this calendric cycle of 28 poems, Taylor describes the work of this year, considering what attending to vegetables on a small field might achieve now. Against a backdrop of drone strikes, "methamphetamine and global economic crisis," these poems embark on a rich exploration of season, self, food, and place. Threading through the farm poets—Hesiod, Virgil, and John Clare—Taylor revisits the project of small scale farming at the troubled beginning of the 21st century.

AUTHOR OF AWARD-WINNING, TREE SPIRITS

Teachers are calling it ‘The Antidote to Screen Time’

TREE SPIRITS AROUND THE WORLD reintroduces readers to Tilly (the curious mouse from Book One: Tree Spirits) and follows her as she searches for kindred spirits across the planet. 

During this journey, which spans ten different countries and six continents, Tilly helps children explore and appreciate the diversity our planet has to offer, and the spirits that tie us together.

With the full-color photographs, each paired with charmingly illustrated overlays, and stiff paperback binding, TREE SPIRITS AROUND THE WORLD’s high-value format makes it highly giftable. Readers can also enjoy drawing with the tracing paper included inside. 

A searing portrait of forced girlhood and generational grief, Given Away reveals the quiet strength of a woman suriving child marriage and motherhood in 1930s Iran.

In 1930s Iran, ten-year-old Mehri is given away in marriage, the first step in a life shaped by forced motherhood, loss, and sacrifice. Alone and afraid, she navigates married life far from the support of her mother and sisters. Pregnant by thirteen, Mehri bears child after child, losing many along the way, and struggles to mother her five surviving children through a haze of grief. In Given Away, Nahid Rachlin traces the hidden scars of her family’s history, carved by a system that grants men complete control and strips women of their voices. Yet within that silence, Rachlin reveals a quiet resistance rooted in sisterhood, love, and endurance.

Jane is a Los Angeles nurse who grew up in a Christian cult that puts celebrities on trial for their sins. Daniel is a has-been actor whose career ended when the cult family members nearly killed him for flirting with her. Eight years after a romantic meet-cute in Battery Park, both search for someone to fill the gap they imagine the other could’ve filled if given the chance. Jane compulsively goes on dates with every self-professed expert in art, music, and food hoping they will teach her the nuances of the culture she couldn’t access in her youth. Daniel looks for a girlfriend who will accept the disabilities left from the cult attack. A loving woman will prove to Daniel’s blockbuster star brother, Steve, that he’s capable of a supporting role in Steve’s upcoming movie and relaunching Daniel’s career. When a chance encounter unexpectedly reunites them, Jane and Daniel not only see another chance at the love they lost, but an opportunity to create the lives they’ve always wanted. The only question is whether their families will let them.

"The grace of these poems...should be a...lesson: to those who have settled for less...those who...presumed more."

—Jim Krusoe

"[Saltman]'s a fine poet, a genuine one--which is saying a great deal...Lovely...apparent plainness...depth beyond it."

—W.S. Merwin

Set in Rome, Chicago, and Anchorage, and spanning thirty years from crime to confrontation, The Book of Timothy: The Devil, My Brother, and Me recounts in lyric movements a sister’s journey, partly through trickery, but eventually through truth, to gain a long-absent admission from the priest who abused her brother. While on that journey, Nockels Wilson, a former prosecutor, confronts not only the priest, but her personal quest for vengeance. She further seeks an understanding of how the first Book of Timothy, the work of St. Paul, contributed to the silencing of women in her once loved Catholic Church. This Book of Timothy promises to take the reader on a quest for justice and down a path of unexpected coincidences that ends where it first began: out of a great love for a brother and in the power of first memory.

Danielle Vogel’s newest collection creates a latticework for repair—the repairing of past trauma, the calling-into-presence of a dissociated self—but does so while keeping the material of this net of thinking in a fragmented, diaphanous state, glowing in the space between the poem and essay. Across three sections of “displacements,” “miniatures,” and “volume,” Vogel initiates readers into the séance of the book; she asks the reader to hold vigil for the most crucial phase of its composition, which can only happen when the reader and she meet at the site of the page, within a “new, interrupted unity.” In The Way a Line Hallucinates its Own Linearity, accord—writing with, reading with—is always a verb, always kinetic, alchemical, and alive. “It only takes one letter on the page,” Vogel writes, “and we are already inside one another’s lungs.” To consent to walk through these spaces is to give up that part of you that wishes to remain anonymous and un-entrained. You will be grateful that you did.

Over a five-year period, Martha Johnson murders her four children, one by one, in order to punish her husband when they argue, but Martha is no ordinary serial killer. She murders her children by using the bulk of her 250-pound body to suffocate them. Unlike other fictionalized true-crime novels, Underneath neither valorizes nor focuses on the specific acts of violence. Instead, it attempts to understand how feelings of powerlessness, the residue of trauma, and the need to find justice in a world that refuses to give a fat body justice finds its only respite through murder.

Sinking Islands continues the story of Bronwyn Artair, a scientist who possesses the power to influence the natural forces of the Earth. After several successful interventions, including one in Siberia, she has gone into hiding, worried about unintended consequences of her actions, as well as about the ethics of operating solo. But circumstances call her to action again, and an idea takes shape: What if she could impart her skill to other people? Gathering a few kindred souls from climate-troubled places around the world—Felipe from São Paulo, where drought conditions are creating strains on day-to-day life; Analu and his daughter Penina from a sinking island in the South Pacific; and Patty from the tornado-ridden plains of Kansas—she takes them to the wilds of Northern New Hampshire where she tries to teach them her skill. The novel, realistic but for the single fantastical element, explores how we might become more attuned to the Earth and act more collaboratively to solve the enormity of our climate problem.

Body of Render explores the internal and external impacts on our humanity when political, national, and societal decisions strip away our basic human rights. What does it mean to be an underrepresented individual in a country where the most powerful seat in the land unashamedly perpetuates racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and classist behaviors? The voices document a journey before and after the last presidential election. These poems cry out for reconsideration of our broken systems to find common and safe ground rooted in equitable treatment of each other as human beings. How do we exude love when being a person of color or underrepresented person in this country means the dominate white-male-able-bodied-heterosexual narrative continues to threaten our voices? This collection carves at the physical, the political, the intimate, and the structural with poems that simultaneously create and encourage voice to seek a path toward collective mending.

“The poems in Elise Paschen’s Bestiary explore domestic preoccupations set against the backdrop of the wild-heartedness, real and imagined, of the animal world,” praises the poet Jason Shinder. In this modern-day Bestiary, or “Book of Beasts,” the line between animal and human is thinly-drawn – the daughter of a Celtic king, through love, is transformed from beast to human; lovers take flight as moon and owl; manatees transform, before the explorers’ eyes, into mermaids. This dynamic runs throughout the collection: taking flight, hovering between air and earth, plunging, and then resurfacing from water. The poems create a constant engagement between what tethers us to our daily lives – marriage, motherhood, raising a family, the loss of parents in old age – and the desire for other worlds. Exploring notions of transformation, these poems cross thresholds between animal and human, between death and life.

Award-winning poet, Elise Paschen, creates in her third and most complex poetry collection, work which is elegant and passionate, preternaturally still and reckless all at once. Paschen displays a variety of form and nuance – from ghazals to long-lined free verse poems. Writing out of a distinct Western literary tradition, but tapping into her Native American (Osage) roots, Paschen celebrates the mythic, the unusual, the magical glimpsed in the everyday.

Ben and Corinthia spent years abducting college coeds, until one night they took the wrong victim.

No one knew witnessing their first murder at seven would propel Ben and his twin toward a killing spree in Pennsylvania. Racked with guilt, they vow to take just one more victim. Too bad they snatched the wrong woman . . .

Professional Lola is a collection of short stories that blend literary fiction with the surreal to present the contemporary Filipino American experience and its universal themes of love, family, and identity. A family hires an actress to play their beloved grandmother at a party; a couple craving Filipino food rob a panaderya; a coven of Filipino witches cast a spell on their husbands; a Lolo transforms into a Lola. These are just a few of the stories in the collection that represent its roster of stories beautifully grounded in culture and vividly and meticulously painted to make the absurd seem mundane and the commonplace, sinister. Professional Lola embodies the joy, mystery, humor, sadness, hunger, and family that inhabit modern-day Filipino American virtues.

Diane Thiel’s eagerly anticipated collection of poems, Questions from Outer Space, explores fresh and often humorous perspectives that capture the surreal quality of our swiftly changing lives on this planet. The poems travel through questions on many fronts, challenging assumptions and locating unique angles of perception. This thought-provoking book reflects a deep engagement with the natural world, a questioning of our built systems, the expansive wilderness of parenting, and the complexities of navigating outer and inner space.

FORMER COLORADO POET LAUREATE

From the volcanic landscapes of the Pacific Rim to the mythic echoes of Greece and India, Cold Fire is a radiant meditation on memory, nature, and the enduring sparks of love and creation.

David Mason’s poetry circles the globe. The urgent and beautiful poems of his new book, Cold Fire, have settings in Australia, India, Greece, Turkey and the American West. A title sequence takes up the Aboriginal practice of cool burning for fire mitigation, and moves to the Ring of Fire, the volcanoes of Mason’s childhood home in the Pacific Northwest—fires of creation and destruction. Here the dream life of art is pitched against human conflict. Here we have poems of family life, aging, and a deep conversation with history and myth. This is a book of light, love, and powerful remembrance from the edge of the world.

Theresa Bonpane’s memoir Sister Rebel is an inspiring and powerful read for anyone interested in the world of activism and social justice. The book charts Bonpane’s journey from a young Irish American woman, to a Maryknoll sister working in Chile, to a dedicated peace activist and director of the Office of the Americas. Along the way, she shares her experiences working alongside notable figures such as Howard Zinn and Martin Sheen, and how they helped shape her beliefs and actions in the fight for peace and justice. Through her personal anecdotes and reflections, Bonpane offers an insightful and thought-provoking look at the inner workings of the peace movement and the challenges faced by activists on the frontlines. This memoir is not only a testament to the power of one person’s commitment to change, but also a call to action for readers to join the fight for a better world.

Ribcage of Time, a poetry collection from a woman’s point of view, is both intimate and universal in its scope of events—family life, birth, death, rape, abortion, genocide from a poet on the ledge of some eighty years of life with language fresh and unsettling.

The poems in Jacqueline Tchakalian’s second poetry collection, Ribcage of Time, refer to Armenian genocide, public murder, rape, home abortions, including one outside the home with tragic repercussions for the writer. These poems have an ever-present wish for improvement, a more sane and equitable society for all. They reference family, the joy of having and being around children, the predicted loss of an ill husband, a plan for a different type of god. They are reflective poems that question the future, make strong assertions, and overall are imbued with hope for the future.

Undone by motherhood, judged by her husband, thirty-two-year-old Rachel Clayborne flees with her baby in the middle of the night for the one place on earth that’s been her refuge: her grandmother’s lakehouse in northern Wisconsin. Hoping to reconnect with a former, healthier self, she instead faces a confused and dying grandmother, her ever-present nurse who seems bent on thwarting each of Rachel’s desires, and a changed ex-boyfriend—her first and most passionate love. As a constant rain threatens the nearby dam, Rachel struggles to discern what’s happened to the past, who she’s become, and what kind of a life she will make for herself now—one that clings to ghosts or opens bravely to a wild new geography.

From the acclaimed author of Nina: Adolescence and The Priest’s Madonna comes a gripping new novel that depicts the transformative power of motherhood with honesty, wit, and compassion.

In this collection, Caballero imagines how memory frames and reshapes the present, how memory illuminates and limits the stories of ourselves, and how, despite the passage of time, primal moments in the past are the ghosts and echoes of our present. These poems interweave an early childhood lived in another country and in another language with experiences of immigration and family histories in the United States. They create connections between a child’s naïve perspective of dictatorship and an adult perspective informed by bodily illness and political knowledge. Ultimately, Caballero traces a lineage of memory, exploring how present moments unearth the past that ripples through them. This collection does not reconcile the past and the present. Instead, these poems remind us that how we ask questions about ourselves, our histories, and our bodies is what creates our identities, our traumas, and our future hopes and possibilities.

"Caballero bears unflinching witness to the emotional trauma inherited from war-ravaged Chile to the exiled plains of Oklahoma. As though to witness is to love. These poems negotiate the transitions of language, memory, country, her battle with cancer, counterbalancing the violence from which she fled with a transformative devotion to details."—Richard Blanco, fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet