Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators

When Whales Went Back to the Water by Lisa Baird

Steely, tender, and sensual, Lisa Baird’s When Whales Went Back to the Water creates a reverent container for a broken world. These poems are hymns to living in wonder through loss, joy, motherhood’s sleepless nights, domestic violence, and isolation. Offering a courageous account of queer intimate partner violence, including the impacts of femme erasure in queer communities, this book is also grounded in the tastes and textures of a new parent’s everyday and is keenly interested in our capacities during personal and global catastrophe. Haunted by hawks, coyotes, frogs, and forests, the collection also speaks to the power of the beyond-human sphere in the translation and transformation of pain and sorrow. Reaching through stories of survivorship to touch on personal and collective pain with tension, nuance and care, Baird’s poems remind us that grief is inextricably intertwined with love and joy.

I Hope This Helps by Samiya Bashir

I Hope This Helps reflects on the excruciating metamorphosis of an artist, “a twinkle-textured disco-ball Jenga set” constrained and shaped by the limits of our reality: time, money, work, not to mention compounding global crises. Think of a river constrained by levees, a bonsai clipped and bent, a human body bursting through shapewear. Begging the question, what can it mean to thrive in the world as it is, Bashir says, “Rats thrive in sewers so / maybe I’m thriving.” In these moving, sometimes harrowing meditations, Bashir reveals her vulnerable inner life, how she has built herself brick by brick into an artist.

Romanticization of Grief and Ghosts by Annalisa Hansford

What if romanticizing one’s grief is the only way to cope with it? If you kill your grief does the ghost of that grief linger? Romanticization of Grief and Ghosts seeks to answer these questions by exploring the intimacy between a person and their grief. The poems in this collection reflect on the ache of emotionally abusive friendships, trauma that resurfaces through dreams, and the obsessive nature of the speaker’s desire.

Do you have a lit journal issue, chapbook, book, or other work that’s about to be published? Email us at vagabondcityliterary@gmail.com to be added to our Books Available to Review list and/or featured on an upcoming Now Read This list.