Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators
La Movida by Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta: Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta croons in the voice of a lovesick teenaged folklorist time traveler about revolution, housework, anti-colonialism, folk tales, post-punk, anti-fascism, anorexia, and alcoholism. Named both for the Chicana feminist concepts of revolutionary maneuvers and submerged technologies of struggle and the explosive queer punk movement that emerged in Spain during its transition from Franquist Fascism to democracy, La Movida moves from bed to street to river, defending memory and falling in love along the way.
A Calm and Normal Heart: Stories by Chelsea T. Hicks: From Oklahoma to California, the heroes of A Calm & Normal Heart are modern-day adventurers—seeking out new places to call their own inside a nation to which they do not entirely belong. A member of the Osage tribe, author Chelsea T. Hicks’ stories are compelled by an overlooked diaspora happening inside America itself: that of young Native people.
Morgan (a Lyric) by Boyer Rickel: Morgan (a Lyric) accumulates impressions of the complex emotional landscape of a relationship in which one of the lovers is facing early death through cystic fibrosis. Rather than a more traditional memoir that results in an epiphany, the memoir is fashioned from brief narrative episodes, patterned sentence collages, and notes on cognition and perception. Shifting repeatedly in time and location—from a hospital dialysis unit to sex in a parked car to a romantic writers’ Baja retreat to an ICU following lung transplant—a portrait builds of a love lived under the intensifying pressure of mortality.
Melanin Sun (—) Blind Spots by Danae Younge: Melanin Sun (—) Blind Spots is a micro-collection of 10 poems that mystify self-identification. How can the passing of a Black father figure cause racial ambiguity when staring at one’s own reflection? Riddled with moments of redaction, strikethrough, and experimental punctuation, this collection lives in the blurred spaces between the truths we are told to internalize. Though drawn from a biracial experience, these poems are applicable to anyone who has struggled to self-label and/or has battled grief. It was awarded the 2022 Florence Kahn Memorial Award by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies and will be available through various sellers on July 1st.
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