The cardinals

“Amy Speace is an accomplished singer-songwriter, so she knows how to tell a story, how to make the listener care, and how to create something beautiful and meaningful that will live inside a person for years to come.”—Maggie Smith, author of Goldenrod Amy Speace’s debut collection of poetry, The...

Kill dick

#25 in Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers! Featured on FOX11 Los Angeles Local News discussing Kill Dick, a literary thriller exploring wealth, addiction, and corruption in Los Angeles. Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by LIT HUB and PLAYBOY, and featured in the NEW YORK POST'S “31 Page-Turning Ne...

Nine grudges

Award-winning debut author, four-time Moth StorySLAM winner, and Lambda Literary Fellow “Funny, soulful, absolutely unafraid to look life in the eye, Molly McCloy’s tough and tender voice is addictive. An electric debut!”—Michelle Tea, author of Knocking Myself Up  A raw, defiant, and darkly hila...

Cold fire

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 ...

Walking wheel

“Molly Fisk reminds us what poetry can do, put to the service of Story.”—Molly Gloss, author of The Hearts of Horses and The Jump-Off Creek Walking Wheel is a tender, lyrical portrait of pioneer love and labor that revives the quiet heroism of everyday life in 1875, where intimacy, resilience, an...

The soldier's house

“An unprecedented breakthrough novel about life after war.”—Cara Hoffman, author of Running, Be Safe, I Love You and So Much Pretty  “This is not only a massively good book, it is absolutely necessary.”—Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, author of The Storyteller of Marrakesh and The Watch A bold and comp...

Yellow

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...

Mud on the moon

 "A beautiful story of a daughter in the act of knowing her father. . . . stitching and restitching memories, records, artifacts, history, mystery, and fiction.”—Ananda Lima, author of Mother/land Mud on the Moon by Nita Noveno is a hybrid memoir that weaves a daughter’s journey of discovering he...

The kitchen activist

The Kitchen Activist empowers readers to transform everyday meals into joyful, practical actions that reduce waste, restore the planet, and, with a 30-day meal planner and 17 approachable recipes, make the home kitchen a catalyst for meaningful environmental change.The Kitchen Activist is a spiri...

The opposites game

AUTHOR OF FIVE POETRY COLLECTIONS • NATIONALLY RECOGNIZED AUTHOR, Brendan Constantine presents his newest collection, The Opposites Game. A playful and profound meditation on language, binaries, and the radical act of seeing each other more clearly. In his fifth collection of verse, The Opposites...

The lifeguard

AUTHOR OF BESTSELLER, IN A PERFECT WORLD AUTHOR OF THREE BOOKS ADAPTED TO FILM: SUSPICIOUS RIVER, THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES, AND WHITE BIRD IN A BLIZZARD NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER IN POETRY FOR SPACE, IN CHAINS Laura Kasischke dives back into novels with this thrilling small town m...

Taxi dancer

"Welcome to the electrifying underworld of California’s Depression-era taxi dance halls, where a dance could cost you a dime, a chance at romance, or a bullet in your back.”—Rick Bonus, Professor and Chair at the Dept. of American Ethnic Studies in the Univ. of Washington Based on a true story, T...

Stories from the edge of the sea

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...

Animal wife

Animal Wife was selected as the winner of the Red Hen Fiction Award by New York Times bestselling author Ann Hood, who says, “From the first sentence Animal Wife grabbed me and never let go. Sensual and intelligent, with gorgeous prose, it made me dizzy with its exploration and illumination of th...

Variations in blue

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 ...

Beyond repair

After recovering from a head-on collision and its attendant trauma, the author struggles to reconnect to a world in the throes of a form of cultural PTSD.

Tea by the sea

From Brooklyn to the island of Jamaica, Tea by the Sea traces a mother’s circuitous route to find the daughter taken from her at birth.

In the key of new york city

In this lively and deeply affecting memoir, Rebecca McClanahan tracks the heartbeat of New York as only a stunned newcomer can: in overheard conversations on park benches, songs and cries sifted through apartment walls, and in encounters with street people dispensing unexpected wisdom. Having upr...

Night myths • • before the body

“A stunning debut, navigating womanhood, mythology, the body, and the surreal knowledge that dwells within.”—Jane Wong, author of Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (longlisted for the 2022 Pen/Voelcker Award in Poetry), and Overpour night myths • • before the bo...

Sixty sonnets

Calculated to reflect the sixty minutes in an hour of heightened imaginative contemplation, the poems in Ernest Hilbert's first book, Sixty Sonnets, contain memories of violence, historical episodes, humorous reflections, quiet despair, violent discord, public outrage, and private nightmares. A c...

Jazz funeral

Structured like the movements of a New Orleans jazz funeral, this all-sonnet collection deals with death, loss, war, disaster, the binding power of community, and the celebratory spirit that reemerges after all. In the words of poet and critic David Mason: “Part elegy for a city and a way of life...

Deer black out

Deer Black Out poetically constructs an impossible technology of presencing and presenting gay Southern gothic hauntings.

Pretzel, houdini & olive: essays on the dogs of my life

A young widow and her five dogs confront life.

Memento mori

Don’t look back. Did Eurydice want to return from the underworld? Did anybody ask? In this brilliant portrait of rage and resilience, a Korean woman tries to connect with her younger brother and grapple with family tragedy through bedtime stories that weave together Greek mythology, neuroscience,...

Gone to earth

These early, uncollected poems of Eleanor Wilner reveal the opening stages of a life’s work guided by confidence in the imagination’s visionary powers of change.

Chagos archipelago

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 s...

Trace

With arresting images and scintillating internal music, the poems in Trace are at turns ekphrastic, elegiac, mythic, rebellious, interlingual, and whimsical, forming a constellation of experience and its traces which transgress borders at every turn.

Morning leaves

AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR “Morning Leaves is a gift to all who open their eyes to its images and their hearts to its whispers and exhortations.”—Faith Salie, Emmy-winning contributor to CBS News Sunday Morning and author of Approval Junkie A radiant fusion of poetry and nature art, Morning Leaves: Cul...

How to feed a horse

Janice Dewey’s poems swerve out of her Southwestern cattle ranch and into the larger world, emphasizing the private, the humorous, the Earth, and a woman-centered vision.

Given away

A searing portrait of forced girlhood and generational grief, Given Away reveals the quiet strength of a woman surviving 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 sacrif...

Blue flax & yellow mustard flower

“A rich catalog of the Anthropocene, including history, research, and initiative.”—Ellen Bass, author of In Indigo Essential poems devoted to the power of language to pull us closer to Nature and each other. In her sixth poetry collection, award-winning writer Alison Hawthorne Deming extends her ...

Time's refugee

Frederick Feirstein's tenth book, Time's Refugee, is chock-full of some of his best lyric and dramatic poems. They are passionate, wise, and totally accessible to the general public. The diction is colloquial and the form excels in meter and rhyme.

As the sky begins to change

As the Sky Begins to Change is a book of poems to wake the world, lyric anthems for earth and kin. 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 Tim...

Fire summer

Fire Summer, an interplay of the fantastic and philosophical, illuminates the interconnectedness of lives, following four characters and a cat as they journey through an enduring land, from their fortuitous first meetings to love’s final acts.

A fire in the hills

In A Fire in the Hills, Afaa focuses on one of the central threads in his body of work. His ongoing project of an articulation of self in relation to the external landscape of the community and the world and the writing of spirit through those revelations of sublimation of self gives way here to ...

The way a line hallucinates its own linearity

Intimate and incantatory, The Way a Line Hallucinates its Own Linearity is a hypnotic and visceral experience.

City of smoke and sea

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

Eat less water

The solution to worldwide water shortages is in our kitchens.

From the caves

*WINNER of the 2021 Foreword Indie Book Award in Literature*Environmental catastrophe has driven four people inside the dark throat of a cave: Sky, a child coming of age; Tie, pregnant and grieving; Mark, a young man poised to assume primacy; and Teller, an elder, holder of stories. As the devast...

Summer dance of the fireflies

Two, two, lily-white boys

African sleeping beauty

Letters from the underground

In March, 1974, facing drug charges in a case in which he claims he was innocent, Abbie Hoffman, one of the Chicago Seven, became a fugitive, forced to leave behind Anita, his wife of eight years, and america, their four year old son. During this time, they could only communicate through letters....

Song of two worlds

From the author of the international bestseller Einstein's Dreams comes an illustrated verse-narrative—a profound scientific, philosophical, and spiritual adventure.

The los angeles review no. 10

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 th...

This far north

"Bridging landscape and time, these poems invite readers to sit with the birch, the sun, the river, the ice. ” — Nicole Stellon O'Donnell, WILLA Literary Award Winner This Far North by Susan Campbell is a luminous poetry collection that finds home, solace, and wonder in the northern landscapes of...

The adventure

The Adventure is an afterlife voyage like The Divine Comedy. Dante had the law of symbolic retribution and distinct places to put people. The Adventure has neither. If you seek a guiding principle, it’s more or less this: whoever you are, what you’ll get is—exactly and in detail—what you want.

Rorschach art

“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 yo...

White lipstick

"With these poems—sparsely worded, richly lived—Geri Digiorno reminds us again just how entangled the delicate roots and tendrils of family and “individual” identity can become. Her lovingly subjective subjects include family, neighborhood, coming of age, friendship, betrayal, initiation, baptism...

Oldguy: superhero

Another giggle-inducing, heartwarming smash—this time in a comic-chapbook blend, featuring washed up superhero Oldguy and his Quixotic misadventures through aging.

The patient body

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 ex...

Glorious boy

"A riveting amalgam of history, family epic, anticolonial/antiwar treatise, cultural crossroads, and more, this latest from best-selling author Liu (Face) is a fascinating, irresistible marvel."—Terry Hong, STARRED Library Journal review "Liu's prose is masterful. A good choice for book groups an...

Termination dust

Termination dust, the first high-altitude snowfall, marks the end of summer in Alaska. Rooted in the seasons and sense of place, the poems in this collection employ image-driven lyric and dreamlike narrative to grapple with questions of death and belonging. A strange romance between inner and out...

Offspring

On a wintry morning in 1974, Hank Preston makes a semen delivery to the New York Hospital Fertility Clinic. Running late, he takes the elevator rather than the stairway earmarked for such deliveries. A woman enters, the recipient of his semen, and a relationship develops that threatens to blow th...

Toucan nest

What happens when we enter unfamiliar realms, when we open ourselves to the unknown? Sometimes that not-knowing makes art possible. In Toucan Nest, the eighth book by Alaska State Writer Laureate Peggy Shumaker, her first vivid encounters with the rainforests of Costa Rica—with its basilisk lizar...

Feeding the animals

"Jodi Johnson writes like an Angel in love with the world. She knows the risk of being alive and alert, and makes every encounter a perilous discovery. For Johnson a horseback ride is an interior journey illuminated by the stunning accuracy of her vision." —Benjamin Saltman "Feeding the Anima...

Daphne’s lot

"The masterful wedding of the narrative and the lyric in these poems (whose subject is the maturation of a sensibility, the coming-of-age of a young Englishwoman—the power of her ties to family, husband and her 'adopted' country, Nigeria—as well as the illumination of her own soul and that of the...

Among the goddesses

In two intertwined songs, a feminist epic poem and a dreamlike opera libretto, Among the Goddesses traces one woman’s harrowing mythological journey of discovery. Tutored by encounters with seven Goddesses, both frightening and nurturing, Marie/Lily is tested by loss, rape, and abortion as she f...

Death of a circus

Death of a Circus tells the story of the Bringlebright Circus, a small fictional troupe traveling the United States in the early twentieth century, an era when circuses are falling out of favor and only the largest shows are enduring. Initially, the book follows Lor Cole, a young African American...

Gossypiin

gossypiin is a lyrical archive that reckons with the terrible beauty of Black femme interiority by quilting together scenes of family mythology, desire, performance, subjection, and survival.

The los angeles review no. 20

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 th...

View from a burning bridge

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 mal...

Circle of animals

When her hippie mother Edi goes missing the same week Sky Richard is assaulted at work—Sky wants to run away from everything. Instead, Sky goes looking for her mother and finds an estranged grandmother, the cult she was born in, and an unlikely ally. But the most important thing she discovers in ...

The los angeles review no. 23

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