Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators

All Us Beautiful Monsters by Alex Lemon

Having extensively detailed his experience with a traumatic brain injury, Alex Lemon writes with the remarkable ability to transform the depth of pain into brilliant light. His enthralling new collection charts a visual map of the sprawling mind, translating images that alight behind the eye. It is a luminous study in contradictions: corporeal bewilderment and overwhelming apathy, the levity of dreams and the acridity of existence, aching grief and radiant joy. In turns evoking an imperative you and a collective we, our omniscient speaker is urgent and complex; he’s existential, dissociative, unable to recognize himself in photographs, and powerless in the face of the world’s crises. “I’m right here,” our speaker says. “Smack dab on planet nowhere, awaiting / The infinite ways a body can absorb / Pain.”

But in spite of its melancholia, this collection embraces the lightness and beauty that prevails. Lemon interrupts the banal imagery of the everyday with surrealist fantasia—he paints “the purpled vault of night” with “glowing eels” and visualizes “grief etched into / The air by songbirds.” These poems turn their lines into nesting dolls of images, holding “The world. In my chest.”

All Us Beautiful Monsters renders in loving, painstaking detail the complexities of life, of the earth, of humankind—in all our terror and wonder.

Run It Back by Kortney Morrow

Kortney Morrow’s luminous debut collection, Run It Back, creates an iridescent dreamscape where early 2000s nostalgia is intricately woven into rigorous questioning around belonging, borders, fugitivity, and freedom. From a heroic crown sonnet stitching the colorways of an iconic basketball shoe with the economic development of a region to reimagining American Girl Dolls at a mandatory diversity training, Morrow’s playfulness and humor uncover more than meets the eye. Using the principles of material culture studies and an evocative display of poetic forms, Morrow flips everyday pop culture on its head, revealing the hidden seams running through our lives.These dazzling poems quietly refute the myth of linear progress. In the search for freedom, Morrow explores how the desire to move forward can be a rallying cry to run it back. Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize judge, Carmen Giménez, calls Morrow “a cultural archaeologist,” solidifying a stunning new voice in American arts and letters.

Theory for Moving Houses by Renee Gladman

You are asking me where I live and it’s making me think all these things about space, where I start and end in space and where space starts and ends in me and when, in space, I am a body and when I’m a book, in space.

So begins Renee Gladman’s Theory for Moving Houses, and with these lines we are invited into a liminal space of imagination and investigation, as Gladman guides us through the architectures of her poetics. Foundational here is a sense of fluidity, a slippage of time, a devotion to “non-linear and hyper gestural movement,” a communal spirit. Gladman’s inquiry into her intersecting practices of writing and drawing reveals a deep commitment to uncertainty and “fictional knowing.” Yet again, Gladman upends traditional expectations of prose, as she leads us through landscape of her Ravicka series novels, ultimately surprising us with a novel within nonfiction. The latest volume in Wave’s Bagley Wright Lecture Series, Theory for Moving Houses is not only visionary in its contemplations but also is a virtuosic example of the ways in which language can shape utopian sites of possibility.

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.