Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators
Alt-Nature moves in the desert dreams and riverbeds, an emergent chorus feeling toward languages of connection of the American Southwest.
These poems open to the desert as a practice of sensuality. Landscapes and Black queer social ecologies illuminate an anti-map of interior poetics and converging horizons. Here, geography forms the basis of feeling. Being and becoming along meridians of environmental degradation, globalized/ing militarism, and incarceration, Saretta Morgan thinks through the languages that instantiate violence alongside those which prepare the body for love.
Corey Fah Does Social Mobility by Isabel Waidner
This is the story of Corey Fah, a writer who has hit the literary jackpot: their novel has just won the prize for the Fictionalization of Social Evils. But the actual trophy, and with it the funds, hovers peskily out of reach.
Neon-beige, with UFO-like qualities, the elusive trophy leads Corey, with their partner Drew and eight-legged companion Bambi Pavok, on a spectacular quest through their childhood in the Forest and an unlikely stint on reality TV. Navigating those twin horrors, along with wormholes and time loops, Corey learns—the hard way—the difference between a prize and a gift.
Following the Goldsmiths Prize–winning Sterling Karat Gold, Isabel Waidner’s bold and buoyant new novel is about coming into one’s own, the labor of love, the tendency of history to repeat itself, and what ensues when a large amount of cultural capital is suddenly deposited in a place it has never been before.
In one of many bars, Frankie Gold sings while Sammy Silver plays piano after a day job at the anarchist newspaper. The Butch Piano Players Union meets in the corner next to the jukebox. Laur smokes on the back steps, sweaty thigh to thigh with Vic. Frankie’s childhood sweetheart Lily turns up at yet another bar to see a second Sammy play every Friday night. And before all that, there’s always dinner at Marg’s. Fabulated out of oral histories, anthologies, as well as the fiction of the butch-femme bar scene and Yiddish anarchist tradition, Greasepaint is a rollicking whirlwind of music and politics—the currents of community embodied and held inside the bar.
in defense of the goat as it continues to wander towards the certain doom of the cliff is an exploration of the importance of imagination and creativity. There is always a momentum to the day, but choosing to create with or against the human elements of this world is vital to our survival. The ocean (space and time) always gets us, but those brave enough to attempt flight before it does through artistic and humanist practices can change the tides before they splash. This book-length poetic sequence tracks the path from the town/city into the fields, through the field parties, and all the way to the edge and beyond of the cliff. Working with the metaphor elaborated on in Mary Ruefle’s On Imagination, the footprints of the goat and those tracking it are celebrated in this book. This goat has escaped the metaphor of Ruefle’s goat in the attic, and is on an artistic parade towards the end of the endeavor. The individual poems in this book twist and energize the common practices of the artist. The stillness is abandoned. The ferocity is given to the practice and it entitles those practicing it to revel away from the eyes of the non-artistic community they’ve left behind, and to imagine more freely than they ever have before. As artists we smell the salt when there is no sea, and the sea is there because we do. This book is a grand gesture towards the idea that we need a thousand more books written in the fields before they disappear.
VAGABOND CITY 