Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators
In New York City during the Truman years, two photographers met and worked with their greatest discovery – a blue-eyed, fresh-faced brunette from Nashville who stepped before their cameras, bound to change the game. The poems in Discovery – Oakland performance poet Dee Allen’s 9th book – focus on the life and career of one Bettie Page, pin-up/fetish model highly popular in super-conformist, restrictive 1950s America, as well as vagaries of real estate gentrification and racism past and current. A literary balancing act of Light and Darkness: Light represented as a beloved, groundbreaking mid-20th Century pop culture icon, whereas Darkness is represented as inner-city people being forced out of their homes by developers and rich newcomers and the senseless hate for another’s skin colour, however, that may arise to the surface.
All This Divide by Jory Mickelson
“The hard line of horizon draws the eye, always forward,” writes Jory Mickelson as they guide us in this richly-drawn pastoral of the American West. Like Whitman, Mickelson celebrates the natural world in great detail both in its landscapes and in the people who inhabit them. All This Divide is a beautiful and sensual collection that takes as it purpose “…to make every image true, or at least true enough to last.”
Please Let Me Destroy You by Rupert Taylor
While participating in a casino heist in the Cambodian jungle, Apollo Jones has a crippling panic attack. He’s no seasoned criminal—he’s a filmmaker, caught up in an absurd casino heist plan in the hopes that he can use the story for the first season of a preposterously ambitious TV show he dreams of selling to HBO or Netflix or some other global streaming powerhouse. Spoiler alert: his panic attack stuffs up the heist and as punishment, his partners slice off his right pinky. But the show is all he has, so Apollo bandages his stump and heads off on a multi-continent search for content.
From person to person, country to country, and through all kinds of addictions, Apollo chases adventure while struggling to find his own identity. As he generates, purchases, and even steals stories for his show, Apollo risks destroying himself, his relationships, and the people he comes to love.
VAGABOND CITY 