Orange Balloon

short fiction by Samantha Priestley illustrations by Megan Graustein ISBN 978-1-61019-232-3 paperback, 80 pages List price: $10.50 Released August 2016 Seeking sanctuary from his memories, a man carries a balloon, but its orange glow marks him as different from others: wounded. Water has fallen “from the heavens and covered him till it was in his…

The Book of Wishful Thinking

flash fiction by Darla K. Crist ISBN 978-1-61019-231-6 5×7 paperback, 100 pages List price: $16 Released July 2016 Do not confuse this with a book of wistful thinking: This compact guide from Darla K. Crist conjures all you need for proper and useful wishing. A pocket knife with blades “called sorrow and joy, so you…

And I Began to Entertain Doubts

a poem by A.V. Christie ISBN 978-1-61019-601-7 5×7 paperback, 56 pages Retail price: $10.50 US Release: May 2016 With exquisite craft, A.V. Christie (1963 — 2016) threads “the body’s beautiful secrets” all “splitting and doubling” through “what a sky can hold: the rising up in it and all that falls.” As her lines suspend across…

LITTLE TOWN gods

Echoing across the Jordan River and back again, navigating among languages that have just walked away, L. Ward Abel’s poems traverse overgrown ruins, seeing all – transforming all they see. Abel is one of those rare poets who can dig deep below where we live, down to where a “swelling without sound / meets and greets and holds on to all / that is…”

Points of Reference

by Matthew James Babcock

In POINTS OF REFERENCE, Matthew James Babcock takes us on a roadtrip through poems as vast and straight as Montana highways. On this roadtrip, the sun is unleaded. The air smells of diesel and thawed manure. The laughter of fifth graders accompanies the migration of crows. POINTS OF REFERENCE takes us to a land where a park-invasion by teenagers transforms into the Battle of Agincourt, where Henry Ford is simultaneously reviled and revered, and where family still – always – comes first.

Cosmophagy

by David Oestreich –
If you sit up at night thinking about leaves realizing they’re each alone / and out on a limb, or wait for each day to be sliced in half — even if you don’t admit you do — David Oestreich is your poet. Like Thoreau, he begins by turning to nature; like Whitman, he sees every plant, every animal (even the newly-departed) as a brother. COSMOGRAPHY is a love song to the earth, to language, and to you. Come. Listen. The voice you hear may speak to your own.

Mosquito Rain

MOSQUITO RAIN is a story of discovery as travel writer Dan Szczesny (The Nepal Chronicles and The Adventures of Buffalo and Tough Cookie) searches Alaska for the true meaning of its nickname: The Last Frontier. From Anchorage to Denali to Fairbanks to Valdez. From the Arctic Circle to Delta Junction. From glaciers to pipelines to the ferry through Prince Edward Sound. Szczesny and his wife bomb their way over dirt roads and broken highways, making their adventure up as they go. Whether he’s finding a hidden salmon-fishing spot, walking inside a glacier, or watching eagles soar over Valdez Bay, Szczesny’s Alaska is terrifying and beautiful: a land of equal parts danger and wonder. So brush off the mosquitoes, boil up some dehydrated noodles, and enjoy discovering an Alaska you never knew existed.

Premeditations

by Michelle Ristuccia –
With these compulsively readable stories, Michelle Ristuccia creates a new genre in PREMEDITATIONS. This chapbook achieves a fresh look at our times, seeming to simplify while posing new questions about all we accept as reality — much as fairy tales and sci fi must have when first told. Ristuccia reveals forbidden texts, such as the complete “Articles of Faith” concerning cookies: tenets that are funny and a little sad, that cut to the core of our many belief systems. She dares tell first-person, true-life accounts of encounters with stick figures that become threatening; with a father who has a dangerous, rejuvenating secret; with immature non-human beings that in no way resemble anything we’ve come to expect. Whether humanoid, android, or otherwise sentient, PREMEDITATIONS is a must read.

L’Anguille

by Jon Trobaugh –
L’ANGUILLE is a triptych of mesmerizing stories. Each is told by a child struggling to shelter another, even more helpless, from a fraught situation that to them seems all-too normal. One boy has a crush on a new girl in town who disappears and turns up in a mess. Another tries to save his sister from a fire in a cemetery. And a girl resists adult efforts to rescue her from a civil defense emergency, because it would mean abandoning her pet rabbit. Told with the kind of sensory impact that can come only from painful honesty, these stories remind us how helpless and courageous — even misguided — we all can be.

Ephemeral

by Miguel Lupián & translated by Joseph Hutchison –
A haunting chapbook of flash fiction about a man documenting the last things he sees before going blind.

2016 Chapbook Series

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The Satire Lounge

by Joseph Hutchison –
The Satire Lounge is a guide to the underbelly of the writing world, lit by a lone “laptop’s screenlight glint” and fed by “Mike’s Fine Sardines.” Here, “Thought Police” patrol “high-speed poetry,” while cowpies take over haiku. A “PhD Candidate Contemplates His Future” in a world where only old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons can remind us of…what was it? Oh yes, those open “miles and miles / of miles and miles” we used to call poetry.