Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators
As if hauled up squirming from the bowels of the internet, Sex Goblin metabolizes sex writing, popular culture, and autofiction to present the real and the imagined as equally surreal possibilities. In the narrator’s childlike voice, all things become both mundane and strange—a child and their dog fused after a car accident, moments of tenderness amidst frat hazing, witches, and hiking accidents. At turns charming and bizarre, Cook’s work channels sexual violence through the lens of the absurd to alchemize shame and abuse into something that registers differently than trauma. Sex Goblin is a barely factual but deeply felt field guide to relationships and relatability.
LOSERS AND FREAKS by C.E. Hoffman
A pixie and werewolf plan to thwart a prophecy; a medical mannequin attempts to foil a viral attack. A girl befriends a spider; a janitor stalks a ghost; and Cupid makes a deadly mistake. LOSERS AND FREAKS is a 45K #OwnVoices short story collection. Exploring the psychology—and humanity—of outcasts, C’s second full-length release is worthy to its predecessor, SLUTS AND WHORES, which helped earn the author a grant from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.
Iridescent Pigeons by Candace Walsh
Candace’s poems in Iridescent Pigeons, her debut chapbook, serve as a restoration project by articulating the everyday unsaid of love, not just in romantic contexts, but as a friend, sister, daughter, dog parent, wildflower admirer, and mother. Amid free verse, Candace’s use of archaic poetic forms (the Sapphic stanza, ode, curtal sonnet, and cento) and homages to Virginia Woolf, William Wordsworth, and Gerard Manley Hopkins claims literary legacies that have historically excluded women and queer writers.
This wry celebration of good, bad, ugly, thirsty, reverent, compassionate, unrequited, and fully granted love rouses new lexicons of connection and belonging. As poet J. Allyn Rosser observes of Candace, “Her poems—intensely, warily—celebrate familial, platonic, and romantic bonds, even as they ponder vestiges of the trauma love can leave behind.”
VAGABOND CITY 