Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators
So Much More: Abstracts, Unfinished Sequences, and Political Prose Poems by Darren C. Demaree
So Much More is a collection of interstitial wants and fears. Quilted together in a way that can amplify the abstracts, the sequences, the political prose poems, this book works with an energy meant to find the quiet and then fill with it with a modern hysteria. There are deer, and we want to be with the deer. There is a couch on the edge of a retention pond and we push it in. There is a political landscape that is mostly terror and more terror. The poems in this collection find the entry and exit points they need, and are cut together to create a forward motion. There is a desperate need for empathy in this world, and there has never been a more dangerous time to use empathy as a directional point. Led to the question, what else would you have us do? This book answers, so much more.
Plato famously defined a human being as a “featherless biped.” It’s hard not to sense the ironic humor in this definition, a reminder that, for all our talk about human dignity, our condition is contingent, vulnerable, and at some level even comic.
Perhaps that’s why the writer A.G. Mojtabai—known for her dry, understated, subtly humorous but ultimately honest and courageous depictions of the human condition—chose the name for her latest novel, set in the confines of Shady Rest Home for the Aged.
Mojtabai offers us a varied cast of characters at Shady Rest, including: Eli, who fancies himself a ladies man; Elora, anxious about her wayward nephew; the aloof but lonely scholar Wiktor; and Maddie, a bit eccentric, true, but more wise and compassionate than most. At the center of it all is Daniel, an old soul in a young man’s body, with a strange gift for caring for the elderly.
Featherless is one of those rare books that brings us news from the final frontier, the end of life. Its unflinching but humane gaze—informed by the author’s own experience—serves as a fitting capstone for a literary career of uncommon distinction.
Sundown in San Ojuela by M.M. Olivas
When the death of her aunt brings Liz Remolina back to San Ojuela, the prospect fills her with dread. The isolated desert town was the site of a harrowing childhood accident that left her clairvoyant, the companion of wraiths and ghosts. Yet it may also hold the secret to making peace with a dark family history and a complicated personal and cultural identity.
Setting out on the train with her younger sister Mary in tow, she soon finds herself hemmed in by a desolate landscape where monsters and ancient gods stalk the night. She’s relieved at first to find that her childhood best friend Julian still lives in San Ojuela, but soon realizes that he too is changed. Haunted.
Yet she’ll have no other choice than to seek out his help as the darkness closes in.
VAGABOND CITY 