MFA Alumni

A dazzling, evidence-based account of one man’s quest to heal from complex PTSD by turning to endangered coral reefs and psychedelic plants after traditional therapies failed—and his awakening to the need for us to heal the planet as well.

Professor Greg Wrenn likes to tell his nature-writing students, “The ecological is personal, and the personal is ecological.” What he’s never told them is how he’s lived out those correspondences to heal from childhood abuse at the hands of his mother.

Weaving together memoir and cutting-edge science, Mothership is not just a queer coming-of-age story. It’s a deeply researched account of how coral reefs and a psychedelic tea called ayahuasca helped Greg heal from complex PTSD—a disorder of trust, which makes the very act of bonding with someone else panic-inducing. From the tide pools in Florida where he grew up, to Indonesia’s Raja Ampat archipelago and the Amazon rainforest, this is his search for wholeness when talk therapy and pharmaceuticals did little to help. Along the way, as his ecological conscience wakes up, he takes readers underwater to the last pristine reefs on earth, and into the psyche.

Written with prophetic urgency, Mothership ultimately asks if doses of nature will be enough to save us before it’s too late.

In thrilling poems of metamorphosis and birth, death and dissolution, Stephanie Pippin’s debut collection returns us to a world unshorn of wildness. Delivering accident and hunger, love and grief, nature in these poems is beautiful and brutal, “a hellish magnificence” that both invites and denies the meanings we project onto it. Refusing the domesticated comfort of our usual myths, Pippin reminds us of our place as creatures among others in a world where “what isn’t dead / is dying,” and where the thrill of predatory flight commingles with the desperation of the prey.

This mesmerizing and astonishingly assured collection offers a message as harrowing as it is essential. Faced with the hard master of necessity—“angel stinking of his own / excitement”—and bare before what Mallarmé called “the horror of the forest,” we are helpless, finally, to do anything to save what we love. Our sole task, these poems insist, is to look on while we can, and to love harder.

Winner of a Wisconsin Library Association “Outstanding Achievement Award”

What is the deep web? A locked door. A tool for oppression and for revolution. “An emptying drain, driven by gravity.” And in Patrick Johnson’s Gatekeeper—selected by Khaled Mattawa as the winner of the 2019 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry—it is the place where connection is darkly transfigured by distance and power.

So we learn as Johnson’s speaker descends into his inferno, his Virgil a hacker for whom “nothing to stop him is reason enough to keep going,” his Beatrice the elusive Anon, another faceless user of the deep web. Here is unnameable horror—human trafficking, hitmen, terrorism recruitment. And here, too, is the lure of the beloved. But gone are the orderly circles of hell. Instead, Johnson’s map of the deep web is recursive and interrogatory, drawing inspiration and forms from the natural world and from science, as his speaker attempts to find a stable grasp on the complexities of this exhilarating and frightening digital world.

Spooky and spare, Gatekeeper is a striking debut collection and a suspenseful odyssey for these troubled times.

Francofilaments by Eileen G'Sell is a poetic exploration of the intersections between Francophilia, feminism, and cinema. Informed by her work as a culture critic, the collection is marked by a blend of sharp wit, inventive wordplay, and a candid voice that traverses themes of desire, sex, and loss. G'Sell's poems move with a rhythmic, almost cinematic quality, conjuring vivid imagery and unexpected juxtapositions that invite the reader into a world where the everyday and the extraordinary coalesce. With a deft hand, she captures the nuanced interplay of language, identity, and the ever-present allure of French culture, offering a fresh perspective on what it means to navigate modern womanhood.

In this ingenious, sweeping novel, Phillip B. Williams introduces us to an enigmatic woman named Saint, a fearsome conjurer who, in the 1830s, annihilates plantations all over Arkansas to rescue the people enslaved there. She brings those she has freed to a haven of her own creation: a town just north of St. Louis, magically concealed from outsiders, named Ours.

It is in this miraculous place that Saint's grand experiment--a truly secluded community where her people may flourish--takes root. But although Saint does her best to protect the inhabitants of Ours, over time, her conjuring and memories begin to betray her, leaving the town vulnerable to intrusions by newcomers with powers of their own. As the cracks in Saint's creation are exposed, some begin to wonder whether the community's safety might be yet another form of bondage.

Set over the course of four decades and steeped in a rich tradition of American literature informed by Black surrealism, mythology, and spirituality, Ours is a stunning exploration of the possibilities and limitations of love and freedom by a writer of capacious vision and talent.

If she can find her way through the forest of grief, she will discover an incredible adventure waiting on the other side. Hers is no ordinary journey—it is a journey into the nature of the soul. Each step takes her further into uncharted lands. The cave of darkness. The lake of time. The human heart. Each place she goes and each person she meets has a new lesson to teach her, and soon she comes to learn the most astounding one of all: her loved ones have never left her. They are with her throughout the lifetimes. They are eternal and immortal.
And so is she.
And so are we.

The Ill-Fitting Skin is layered with surreal story telling but remains an extraordinarily realistic read, in the sense that even the most solid realities of life—and death—tend to blur and shimmer at their raw edges. The talkative bird that nests in a woman’s womb is as real as the “previous tenant.” The love of a mother for her uncontrollable son is as real as the wildness that is in her too. The women of The Ill-Fitting Skin are real women—who work and grieve and create and destroy, who love and do not love, whether at the roll of the dice or because “the pages are paths, and you will have to choose among them.”

The “f**k” count is just over sixty. The images are screenshots. The metal is mostly nu. And the grant money’s gone. From the author of The Malevolent Volume and National Book Award–winning Indecency comes a gory new mutation in the shape of nonfiction and criticism.

In 2019, Justin Phillip Reed’s romantic maiden voyage through the waters of American poetry and its communities ran aground in the barrens of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, when he found himself with two years of writing time on the horizon and no social context to keep him afloat. In anxiety and estrangement soon deepened by global pandemic, popular fascism, virtual being, intestinal distress, and the obscenity of his own privilege as a university pet, he retreated to the comforts of horror films with no intent but diversion. What happened instead was this reckless, unprecious, in-process reckoning.

Backdropped by sprawling cemeteries, soundtracked by too much Type O Negative, and totally hung up on cameras, With Bloom Upon Them and Also with Blood is a chase and a trip where lyric essays, ekphrastic poetry, and lectures grapple with alienation, professional disillusionment, perversion, and internal contradiction under racial capitalism through playful and critical encounters with horror cinema and cultural iconography. 

This collection holds a mirror to the self and in its reflection we find the elegiac and the ecological, as in "how much of enjoying a place / is destroying it?"; the worlds both domestic and natural, as in "when the redbird strikes the window, it is me / who takes blame"; a daughter shattered, but not without humor--"I can feel it coming on, my season of lavish suffering, the why me why me why me why me / that leaves me snowblind in the asking"--and, certainly, not without tenderness. Shaped by both concision and unfolding sequences, The Last Unkillable Thing is a journey across landscapes of mourning.

For readers of Rachel Cusk and Maggie Nelson, the rapturous memoir of a soon-to-be-mother whose obsession with the reclusive painter Agnes Martin threatens to upend her life

Five months pregnant and struggling with a creative block, JoAnna Novak becomes obsessed with the enigmatic abstract expressionist painter Agnes Martin. She is drawn to the contradictions in Martin's life as well as her art--the soft and exacting brushstrokes she employs for grid-like compositions that are both rigid and dreamy. But what most calls to JoAnna is Martin's dedication to her work in the face of paranoid schizophrenia.

Uneasy with the changes her pregnant body is undergoing, JoAnna relapses into damaging old habits and thought patterns. When she confides in her doctor that she's struggling with depression and suicidal ideation, he tells her she must stop being so selfish, given she has a baby on the way, and start taking antidepressants. Appalled by his patronizing tone and disregard of her mental health history, JoAnna instead turns to Martin for guidance, adopting the artist's doctrine of joyful solitude and isolation.

JoAnna heads to Taos, where Martin lived for decades, and gives herself three weeks to model her hermetic existence: phone off, email off, no talking to her husband, no touching the dog. Out of a deep, solitary engagement with a remarkable artist's body of work emerges an entirely new way for JoAnna to relate to the contradictions of her own body and face up to the joys and challenges of impending motherhood.

A stunning look at the labor of obsession and the industry of self-destruction

In her lush, lyrical, and unflinching short fiction debut, JoAnna Novak examines the restless throb of desire amid the rote work of jobs and obligations, from the walk-ins of a New York banquet kitchen to the pier of Venice Beach. Fueled by jellyfish pad Thai and Necco wafers, Mountain Dew and Xiaolongbao, the characters in these stories defy boundaries and mores: In "MEMO 19," a former anorectic, bored of recovery and her clerical job, invites an unparalleled act of sexual defilement and in "Rio Grande, Wisconsin," a fleshly preteen fantasizes about Bill Murray on a family vacation to Wisconsin. Celebrating the grueling beauty of the shift and the ticking virtues of self-restraint, Meaningful Work is a pageant of formal experimentation, in fearless, glittering prose.

While the bomb was being developed, babies were born, friendships were forged, children grew up, and Los Alamos transformed from a boys school on a hill into a community: one that was strained by the words they couldn’t say out loud, the letters they couldn’t send home, and the freedom they didn’t have. The end of the war brought bigger challenges to the people of Los Alamos, as the scientists and their families struggled with the burden of their contribution to the most destructive force in the history of mankind. The Wives of Los Alamos is a novel that sheds light onto one of the strangest and most monumental research projects in modern history, and a testament to a remarkable group of women who carved out a life for themselves, in spite of the chaos of the war and the shroud of intense secrecy.

Ten years after the Mayflower pilgrims arrived on rocky, unfamiliar soil, Plymouth is not the land its residents had imagined. Seemingly established on a dream of religious freedom, in reality the town is led by fervent puritans who prohibit the residents from living, trading, and worshipping as they choose. By the time an unfamiliar ship, bearing new colonists, appears on the horizon one summer morning, Anglican outsiders have had enough.

With gripping, immersive details and exquisite prose, TaraShea Nesbit reframes the story of the pilgrims in the previously unheard voices of two women of very different status and means. She evokes a vivid, ominous Plymouth, populated by famous and unknown characters alike, each with conflicting desires and questionable behavior.

Suspenseful and beautifully wrought, Beheld is about a murder and a trial, and the motivations--personal and political--that cause people to act in unsavory ways. It is also an intimate portrait of love, motherhood, and friendship that asks: Whose stories get told over time, who gets believed--and subsequently, who gets punished?

This collection is a record of one man’s navigation of loss, addiction, and labor. At once a meditation on the allure of a legacy in self-destruction and a giving over to hope, Felling is an exploration in honesty. Rendered in direct language and through clear eyes, this book, as its title indicates, is concerned with tensions of agency, creation, and destruction— upward and downward motion. 

Fleet-footed and capricious, the essays in Glass, Light, Electricity wander through landscapes both familiar and unfamiliar, finding them equal parts magical and toxic. They explore and merge public and private history through lyric meditations that use research, association, and metaphor to examine subjects as diverse as neon signs, scalping, heartbreak, and seizures. Shena McAuliffe expands the creative possibilities of form.

Here the “beheaded” poet displaces her mind into the landscape, exploring territories as disparate as India’s Western Ghats and the cinematic Mojave Desert, as absurd as insomnia and dream. Some Beheadings asks three questions: “How does thinking happen?” “What does thinking feel like?” “How do I think about the future?” The second question takes primacy over the others, reflecting on what poets and critics have called “the sensuous intellect,” what needs to be felt in language, the contours of questions touched in sound and syntax.

Set in the once-great Midwestern city of Trude—a treacherous maze of convoluted shopping malls, barricaded libraries, and elitist assisted-living homes—this novel follows a disconsolate legal clerk named Sven Norberg, who sets out to investigate his wife’s disappearance. Written with boundless intelligence and razor-sharp wit, The Facades is a comic and existential mystery that unfolds at the urgent pace of a thriller.

Failure to Thrive follows the interconnected stories of three families as they navigate issues of disability, illness, and substance abuse in a former coal town: a landscape that is itself sick. A married couple argues over how to raise their neuroatypical child. A former nurse cares for her aging father, processing guilt over her addiction. A young man returns home after experiencing a traumatic brain injury, rediscovering a space where the past and present bleed uncannily together. Meanwhile, a two hundred-year mine fire burns beneath the town, a whispering dread that pervades the atmosphere.

In the spirit of Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent comes an extraordinary debut novel that breathes life into Noah’s wife and combines history and mythology in an intensely suspenseful, page-turning narrative.

The young heroine in Sinners and the Sea is destined for greatness. Known only as “wife” in the Bible and cursed with a birthmark that many think is the brand of a demon, this unnamed woman lives anew through Rebecca Kanner. The author gives this virtuous woman the perfect voice to make one of the Old Testament’s stories come alive like never before.

Desperate to keep her safe, the woman’s father gives her to the righteous Noah, who weds her and takes her to the town of Sorum, a haven for outcasts. Alone in her new life, Noah’s wife gives him three sons. But living in this wicked and perverse town with an aloof husband who speaks more to God than to her takes its toll. She tries to make friends with the violent and dissolute people of Sorum while raising a brood that, despite its pious upbringing, develops some sinful tendencies of its own. While Noah carries out the Lord’s commands, she tries to hide her mark and her shame as she weathers the scorn and taunts of the townspeople.

But these trials are nothing compared to what awaits her after God tells her husband that a flood is coming—and that Noah and his family must build an ark so that they alone can repopulate the world. As the floodwaters draw near, she grows in courage and honor, and when the water finally recedes, she emerges whole, displaying once and for all the indomitable strength of women. Drawing on the biblical narrative and Jewish mythology, Sinners and the Sea is a beauti­fully written account of the antediluvian world told in cinematic detail.

Nestled against the backdrop of Seattle's flora, fauna, and cityscape, Luther Hughes' debut poetry collection wrestles with the interior and exterior symbiosis of a gay Black man finding refuge from the threat of depression and death through love and desire.

Hughes draws readers into a Seattle that is heavily entrenched in violent anti-Blackness, and full of vulnerable and personal encounters from both the speaker’s past and present. With reverent and careful imagery, Hughes fashions deeply saturated, tender vignettes that reckon relationships between family and friends, lovers, nature, and the police-state.

A Shiver in the Leaves is stunningly cinematic in its layered portrayal of the never-ending dualities of a queer Black poet’s life in the city. Hughes's interrogation of selfhood renders a sharply intimate and viscerally powerful reimagining of what it means to be alive in a body, and what it can mean to live.

When Hollywood Comes to You, Guerra’s debut collection, explores the conflict between the story we tell ourselves about our life (“I have participated / in a series of anticipations since / my birth, each with its own measure / of worry. Each with its own / power of imbuing worth.” (from “Lost in the Trinket Machines”)) and the actual, everyday occurrences that makes up our life, which, when looked at closely, is often surprising in its oddness, silliness, and sometimes mercy. Guerra looks at how we create meaning in our life from the mundane (from roadside garbage to the person in line behind you at K-Mart to odd names of ordinary-looking plants) and how this meaning can be put in jeopardy by events like illness. The poems evoke the loneliness and anxiety of not living up to our life story as well as the transcendent feeling when these two lives align. As he says in “No Class Enjoyments”: “I, too, enjoy the day and that all the ocean’s refuse and animal froth I used / to fear as a child…I don’t fear anymore, / that I walk among the highway rubble–– / the honeycombs of windshield glass, shreds of rubber, a fast / food wrapper’s flattened wings––along the roar of the shore: / these are reason enough to feel / calm and cheerful.”

“The Television Detective’s Red Hair” from When Hollywood Comes to You:

Is carnival light. Is morning’s worn out arrival for the victim’s parents. Is coffee in a styrofoam cup and packets of sweetener the pink and blue of baby’s clothes. Is an abalone glow in a little brother’s bedroom window. First, the bad news. After walking a wide row in a wet field poking the soil. Is the loss that brings the weather on. That boxes up belongings. In the drone of the day. In the din and double-talk. Doldrums of work and feeling useless. Something resurfaces in us. A partial print. A partial plate. And her voice as plain and sure as a Texas porch. The taciturn of sacred. Waiting alone in a dreary car. In the orange light outside the suspect’s apartment. You have the right to remain as you are. Or pursue that noise. Through the cracked door of the pines. That strain in the lake’s distortion. Song massaging the feeling back in. What is worth our devotion. What charges us. A charmed sequence of words. The jangle. The strum. Truth and beauty. And what have I done with my life. Is the sheer of decision. Is the from here on out. Is one’s own thought. One’s own moment. This is the good news.

A poet's life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain. The pain brings him to his knees, and eventually to the ICU. Confined to bed, plunged into the dysfunctional American healthcare system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years in his mind.

This is a searching, sweeping novel set at the furthest edges of human experience, where the forces that give life value―art, memory, poetry, music, care―are thrown into sharp relief. Time expands and contracts. Sudden intimacies bloom. Small Rain surges beyond the hospital to encompass a radiant vision of human life: our shared vulnerability, the limits and possibilities of sympathy, the ideal of art and the fragile dream of America. Above all, this is a love story of the most unexpected kind.

Sofia, Bulgaria, a landlocked city in southern Europe, stirs with hope and impending upheaval. Soviet buildings crumble, wind scatters sand from the far south, and political protesters flood the streets with song.

In this atmosphere of disquiet, an American teacher navigates a life transformed by the discovery and loss of love. As he prepares to leave the place he’s come to call home, he grapples with the intimate encounters that have marked his years abroad, each bearing uncanny reminders of his past. A queer student’s confession recalls his own first love, a stranger’s seduction devolves into paternal sadism, and a romance with another foreigner opens, and heals, old wounds. Each echo reveals startling insights about what it means to seek connection: with those we love, with the places we inhabit, and with our own fugitive selves.

Cleanness revisits and expands the world of Garth Greenwell’s beloved debut, What Belongs to You, declared “an instant classic” by The New York Times Book Review. In exacting, elegant prose, he transcribes the strange dialects of desire, cementing his stature as one of our most vital living writers.

On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher enters a public bathroom beneath Sofia’s National Palace of Culture. There he meets Mitko, a charismatic young hustler, and pays him for sex. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months, drawn by hunger and loneliness and risk, and finds himself ensnared in a relationship in which lust leads to mutual predation, and tenderness can transform into violence. As he struggles to reconcile his longing with the anguish it creates, he’s forced to grapple with his own fraught history, the world of his southern childhood where to be queer was to be a pariah. There are unnerving similarities between his past and the foreign country he finds himself in, a country whose geography and griefs he discovers as he learns more of Mitko’s own narrative, his private history of illness, exploitation, and want.

What Belongs to You is a stunning debut novel of desire and its consequences. With lyric intensity and startling eroticism, Garth Greenwell has created an indelible story about the ways in which our pasts and cultures, our scars and shames can shape who we are and determine how we love.

Shadeland is not only the name of the Illinois farm on which poet Andrew Grace was raised, it is also that elusive space where language attempts to recover all that has been lost. Deeply concerned with the state of today’s rural spaces, Grace’s poems describe a landscape and a lifestyle that are both eroding. Stylistically rangy, yet united by an ardent eye for intricate imagery, Shadeland features allusions and influences as classical as Homer, Virgil, and Hopkins while still exhibiting a poetic sensibility that is thoroughly contemporary. Employing a blend of baroque and innovative language, these 21st-century pastorals and anti-pastorals both celebrate and elegize the buckshot-peppered silos and unstill cornfields that are quietly vanishing from the countryside.

Denny works nights as a tech in a labyrinthine facility outside of D.C., readying fruit flies for experimentation. Her life’s routine is straightforward, limited. But when her father announces that he won’t be treating his recurrent, terminal cancer, she responds by quietly dismantling her life. She constructs in its place the fantasy of perfect detachment. Unsure whether her impulse is monastic or suicidal, she rents a secluded cabin in the mountains.

Without saying goodbye, she leaves her parents behind and enters a new, solitary world. It’s not without disruption: her blowsy trash bag of an imaginary pal is still lingering. And then a house cat appears out of nowhere. And after a bad storm rips through the mountainside, someone else shows up, too. Her time in the wilderness isn’t the perfect detachment she was expecting. Denny is forced to reckon with this failure while confronting a new life with its own set of pleasures and dangerous incursions.

Morbidly funny, subversive, and startling, Hard Mouth, the debut novel from 2018 NEA Creative Writing Fellow Amanda Goldblatt, unpacks what it means to live while others are dying.

Selected by Ben Marcus as winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, Catapult follows Emily Fridlund's acclaimed debut novel History of Wolves. Sometimes calculating, at other times bewildered, Catapult's characters orbit around each other, enacting a deeply human tragicomedy of wit, misunderstanding, and loss. With dexterous, atmospheric, and darkly comic prose, Fridlund conjures worlds where longing is open-ended, intentions misfire, and the line between comfort and cruelty is often difficult to discern. This is a gripping collection, unsettling as much in its familiarity as in its near-gothic strangeness.

Fourteen-year-old Linda lives with her parents in the beautiful, austere woods of northern Minnesota, where their nearly abandoned commune stands as a last vestige of a lost counter-culture world. Isolated at home and an outlander at school, Linda is drawn to the enigmatic, attractive Lily and new history teacher Mr. Grierson. When Mr. Grierson is charged with possessing child pornography, the implications of his arrest deeply affect Linda as she wrestles with her own fledgling desires and craving to belong.

And then the young Gardner family moves in across the lake and Linda finds herself welcomed into their home as a babysitter for their little boy, Paul. It seems that her life finally has purpose but with this new sense of belonging she is also drawn into secrets she doesn’t understand. Over the course of a few days, Linda makes a set of choices that reverberate throughout her life. As she struggles to find a way out of the sequestered world into which she was born, Linda confronts the life-and-death consequences of the things people do—and fail to do for the people they love.

Winner of the McGinnis-Ritchie award for its first chapter, Emily Fridlund’s propulsive and gorgeously written History of Wolves introduces a new writer of enormous range and talent.

At the center of this affluent suburban universe is Emily Vidal, a smart and snarky teenager, who gets involved in a dangerous relationship. Among the cast of unforgettable characters is Emily’s father, whose fiftieth birthday party has the adults descending upon the Vidals' patio; her mother, who has orchestrated the elaborate party even though she and her husband are getting a divorce; and an assortment of eccentric neighbors, high school teachers, and teenagers who teem with anxiety and sexuality and an unbridled desire to be noticed, and ultimately loved.
An irresistible chronicle of a modern young woman’s struggle to grow up, The Adults lays bare—in perfect pitch—a world where an adult and a child can so dangerously be mistaken for the same exact thing.

t’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years—she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe's plan—which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can’t stop confiding in each other.

In turns absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is ultimately an incredibly nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined—and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.

Released in October 2005 to a near-banning by the Notre Dame bookstore (it has since reluctantly agreed to carry a copy or two), Scott Eden’s Touchdown Jesus is a book about fanaticism, obsession, passion, Catholicism, and that peculiarly American sporting phenomenon: college football. It's also about a place that inspires devotion to the point of pilgrimage and loathing to the point of bigotry. It is a portrait of an ensemble cast of those fans who die the hardest when the Irish lose on autumn Saturdays. And it is a narrative of ivory-tower political machinations and the uniquely Notre Dame personalities—priests, administrators, academics, coaches—who must deal with this institution's greatest boon and its direst dilemma, which is football. It is, at bottom, an attempt to understand what drives big-time spectator sport: the money, the tribalism, the myth-making power of the masses, the need to believe.

A yacht races to outrun a tsunami. A young man jailed on a drug charge forms a relationship with his cellmate that is by turns tender and brutal. A family buys a rural slaughterhouse, and tensions with their religious neighbors quickly escalate. A teen raised by his eccentric gay father, a Turkish immigrant, finds his life fractured by violence. A fictionalized Coretta Scott King, surveilled and harassed by the FBI, considers the costs of her life with her husband.

Here Is What You Do is a bravura, far-ranging collection, its stories linked by sorrow and latent hope, each one drilling toward its characters’ darkest emotional centers. In muscularly robust prose, with an unfailing eye for human drives and frailties, Chris Dennis captures the raw need, desire, cruelty, and promise that animate our lives.

Playful, fantastical, gruesome, and tender by turns, this debut collection of short fiction by Jeremy M. Davies runs the gamut from parody to tragedy and back. "Sad White People" follows a souring hipster love affair that finds itself brutally hijacked by a far more interesting story, while "The Terrible Riddles of Human Sexuality (Solved)" introduces us to a dominatrix whose life is splintered into a series of children's brainteasers. "The Excise-Man" pastiches Robert Burns and Flann O'Brien in a rowdy tale of moonshine and tax evasion, while "Forkhead Box" catalogs the professional and personal embarrassments of a New York State executioner in the days of the Rosenbergs. Finally, the epic "Delete the Marquis" looks back to the nineteenth-century novel, chronicling the woes of an impecunious ghostwriter who has inadvertently turned the entire world into a lurid fiction. Overflowing with "wit, irresistible ingenuity, and a stupefying narrative abundance" (Harry Mathews), Davies's fiction takes dead aim at literary convention while reimagining the art of storytelling for the twenty-first century.

In his debut collection, Aaron Coleman writes an American anthem for the 21st century, a full-throated lyric composed of pain, faith, lust and vulnerability. Coleman’s poems comment on and interrogate the meaning of home and identity for a black man in America, past and present. Guided by a belief system comprising an eclectic array of invented saints—Trigger, Seduction, Doubt and Who—Coleman’s quest finds answers in the natural world where “[t]he trees teach me how to break and keep on living.”

Worlds ring softly
with the blows of the past

Circadia is a shattering testament to the fragility of life. With visionary imagination and rapt musicality, this concluding volume in Bishop’s award-winning trilogy on time sings in the mind long after reading.

When people think about space travel, they usually look skyward. But much of spaceflight history happened down here on Earth. Space Age Adventures presents more than one hundred terrestrial sites across the United States related to space exploration, where enthusiasts can have their own space age adventures.

Before astronauts walked on the Moon, they trained at locations you can visit today—from NASA space centers and telescope observatories to impact craters and atomic testing grounds. Inside vast museum hangars, a visitor can walk beneath towering Saturn V rockets left over from the Apollo program or peer inside American and Soviet capsules. Elsewhere visitors can visit historic rocket pads, retired space shuttles, landed SpaceX boosters, and even watch scheduled launches.

Mike Bezemek brings the artifacts and spacecraft to life with interwoven true stories that collectively span the entire Space Age. These stories offer a deeper understanding of the adventures behind the famous images. The combination of terrestrial sites and true stories makes this book the perfect guide for having unique adventures and discovering one of the most dramatic eras in human exploration.

An engrossing work of literary suspense that illuminates the push and pull of female friendship and the costs of being good when the rules for women begin to chafe.

The last time Nicola Bennett saw Lauren Ballard she was scraping a key along the side of a new cherry-red Chevy Silverado. That was the night before her friend mysteriously vanished from her home, leaving a bloodstained washcloth and signs of a struggle—as well as her grieving husband and young daughter—behind.

Now, nearly twenty years later, Nicola, newly unemployed and still haunted by the disappearance of her childhood friend, is returning to her Appalachian hometown. For Nicola, Tyndall County has remained frozen in time. Everywhere she turns she’s reminded of Lauren. Yet shockingly, her former friends and neighbors have all moved on. Drawn to stories of missing girls, Nicola obsessively searches the internet, hoping to discover a clue to Lauren’s ultimate fate.

Driven by a desperate need to know what happened to her friend, Nicola takes a job in her hometown, determined to uncover any bit of information, any small clue, that can help. Deep down she knows the answers are tucked in the hollows and valleys of this small Blue Ridge county. As secrets come to light and the truth begins to unravel, will Nicola finally find release and break free of the past—or lose herself completely to unanswered questions from her adolescence?

In the once-great Midwestern city of Trude, ornate old buildings lie in ruins, shrouded in disappointment and nostalgia. Trude has become a place to "lose yourself," as one tourist brochure puts it: a treacherous maze of convoluted shopping malls, barricaded libraries, and elitist assisted-living homes.

One night at Trude's opera house, the theater's most celebrated mezzo-soprano vanishes during rehearsal. When the police come up empty-handed, her husband, a disconsolate legal clerk named Sven Norberg, takes up the quest on his own. To uncover the secret of his wife's disappearance, Norberg must descend into Trude's underworld and confront the menacing and bizarre citizens of his hometown: rebellious librarians, shifty music critics, a cop known as the Oracle, and the minister of an apocalyptic church who has recruited Norberg's teenage son. Faced with the loss of everything he loves, Norberg's investigation leads him to the heart of the city and through the buildings of a possibly insane modernist architect named Bernhard, whose elaborate vision offers him an astonishing revelation.

Written with boundless intelligence and razor-sharp wit, THE FACADES is a comic and existential mystery that unfolds at the urgent pace of a thriller.

It's a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn, dressed in a green dress and gold heels, carrying no bags and arriving alone. Mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding guests, Phoebe is actually the only person at the Cornwall not attending the big event. She has dreamed of coming here for years, hoping to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband. Instead, she's here alone, at rock bottom, determined to have one last indulgent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has meticulously planned every detail of the weekend, accounting for every possible disaster except for Phoebe and her unexpected plans. This makes it all the more surprising when the two women find themselves confiding in each other.

In Alison Espach’s The Wedding People, absurd humor and tender moments intertwine, offering a nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we take to places we never imagined, and the chance encounters that can reroute our lives.

In her lush, lyrical, and unflinching short fiction debut, JoAnna Novak examines the restless throb of desire amid the rote work of jobs and obligations, from the walk-ins of a New York banquet kitchen to the pier of Venice Beach. Fueled by jellyfish pad Thai and Necco wafers, Mountain Dew and Xiaolongbao, the characters in these stories defy boundaries and mores: In “MEMO 19,” a former anorectic, bored of recovery and her clerical job, invites an unparalleled act of sexual defilement and in “Rio Grande, Wisconsin,” a fleshly preteen fantasizes about Bill Murray on a family vacation to Wisconsin. Celebrating the grueling beauty of the shift and the ticking virtues of self-restraint, Meaningful Work is a pageant of formal experimentation, in fearless, glittering prose.
 

Meghan Lamb's "Coward" is an edgy and intense read, perfect for readers looking for something bold and different. The book explores themes of love and identity in a unique and thrilling way, blending elements of horror and romance. It's a vivid and daring story that pushes boundaries, offering a fresh perspective on coming-of-age tales. With a mix of zombies, intense relationships, and a gripping plot, "Coward" is a standout work that's both captivating and thought-provoking.

Conor O'Toole has never experienced anything like Cutters Neck, a gated community near Cape Cod. It's a sweet summer deal: in exchange for tennis lessons, he receives free lodging in a luxurious guest cottage, far from the cramped Yonkers apartment he shares with his diabetic mother.

In this oceanfront paradise, new clients are hard to come by, and Conor has bills to pay. When Catherine, a sharp-tongued divorcée, offers double his usual rate, he soon realizes she expects additional, off-court services for her money. Conor tumbles into a secret erotic affair unlike anything he's experienced before.

Despite his steamy flings with a woman twice his age, he simultaneously finds himself falling for an artsy, outspoken girl he meets on the beach. With cautious, strategic planning, Conor somehow manages this tangled web—until he makes one final, irreversible mistake.

A dark, explosive literary thriller that brilliantly skewers the elite, Teddy Wayne's unputdownable novel is cinematic, shocking, and a psychological masterpiece.

In 1996, the unnamed narrator of Teddy Wayne's novel is attending Columbia's MFA writing program, funded by his father, and living in an illegal sublet of a rent-stabilized apartment. Feeling guilty about his good fortune, he offers his spare bedroom—rent-free—to Billy, a talented and charismatic classmate from the Midwest struggling to make ends meet in Manhattan.

It's 1930, the midst of the Great Depression. After her mysterious role in a family tragedy, passionate, strong-willed Thea Atwell, age fifteen, is cast out of her Florida home and exiled to an equestrienne boarding school for Southern debutantes. High in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the school's complex social strata are ordered by money, beauty, and girls’ friendships. The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls is a far cry from the free-roaming, dreamlike childhood Thea shared with her twin brother on their family’s citrus farm—a world now partially shattered. As Thea grapples with her responsibility for the events of the past year that led her here, she finds herself enmeshed in a new order, one that will change her sense of what is possible for herself, her family, and her country.

Weaving provocatively between home and school, the narrative powerfully unfurls the true story behind Thea’s expulsion from her family. But it isn’t long before the mystery of her past is rivaled by the question of how it will shape her future. Part scandalous love story, part heartbreaking family drama, this is an immersive, transporting page-turner—a vivid, propulsive novel about sex, love, family, money, class, home, and horses, all set against the ominous threat of the Depression—and the major debut of an important new writer.

From the acclaimed author of The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls comes a tale of enduring female friendship—full of its intense struggles and delights—set against a backdrop of affluence, elegance, and high expectations.

Joan Fortier personifies Texas glamour, reigning supreme over the 1950s Houston social scene. With her tall, blonde beauty and commanding presence, she captivates both the men who desire her and the women who envy her. Cece Buchanan, Joan's lifelong friend, is seen as either her loyal companion or her accomplice, depending on who you ask. But when Joan's reckless behavior intensifies during the summer they turn twenty-five, Cece feels compelled to rein her in, leading to a single, consequential decision.

The After Party offers a mesmerizing glimpse into the world of the rich and glamorous during a memorable era, revealing a friendship as passionate, exhilarating, consuming, and complex as any romance.

Starting work at just fourteen, Lydia Paar has held an impressive array of jobs—twenty-seven in total—across twenty-five homes in eight states. This collection of essays delves into her efforts to navigate and redefine the lower-middle-class American experience across a variety of urban and rural settings. From the bustling streets of Portland to the barren deserts, from Army basic training to long-distance bus rides, and even to the somber St. Louis funeral homes, Paar's journey is one of seeking peace, connection, and freedom.

Each essay examines the internal emotional labor involved in her journey: the work of love and friendship, learning, movement, maintenance, and faith in the potential for positive change. Traversing diverse interior and exterior landscapes, Paar reflects on subcultures, agendas, violence, alliances, and the interplay between the natural world and human endeavors. Ultimately, she contemplates how our attempts at transformation often lead to our own transformation.

A compelling and inspiring tale of how the vibrant world of roller derby enabled a young woman to overcome her fears and self-doubt, embracing a life filled with courage, kindness, and adventure.

In his debut collection, Aaron Coleman crafts an American anthem for the 21st century, a powerful lyric infused with pain, faith, lust, and vulnerability. Coleman’s poems explore and question the meaning of home and identity for a Black man in America, both past and present. Guided by a belief system featuring an eclectic array of invented saints—Trigger, Seduction, Doubt, and Who—Coleman's journey uncovers new ways of being in the natural world, where “[t]he trees teach me how to break and keep on living.”

"This gorgeous debut is a 'debut' in chronology only. . . . Need is everywhere--in the unforgiving images, in lines so delicate they seem to break apart in the hands, and in the reader who will enter these poems and never want to leave."--Adrian Matejka

Phillip B. Williams investigates the dangers of desire, balancing narratives of addiction, murders, and hate crimes with passionate, uncompromising depth. Formal poems entrenched in urban landscapes crack open dialogues of racism and homophobia rampant in our culture. Multitudinous voices explore one's ability to harm and be harmed, which uniquely juxtaposes the capacity to revel in both experiences.

Mutiny: a rebellion, a subversion, an onslaught. In these poems, Phillip B. Williams rebukes classical mythos and Western canonical figures while embracing Afro-Diasporic folk and spiritual imagery. He conjures the hell of being erased, exploited, and ill-imagined, and through a powerful and generous vision, propels himself into life, selfhood, and a path forward. Intimate, bold, and sonically mesmerizing, Mutiny addresses loneliness, desire, doubt, memory, and the border between beauty and tragedy. With a ferocity that belies the tenderness and vulnerability at the heart of this remarkable collection, Williams honors the transformative power of anger and the clarity that comes from allowing that anger to burn clean.

Poems merge queer ecopoetics with religious disposition, speaking through a pantheon of mythic figures—from Jesus to Aphrodite—to commune or contend with reality. What emerges is a cumulative awareness of being a physical, energetic body in a fractured world, attempting to heal some part of it while exploring and embracing the gray areas of identity and ambiguity.

Indecency is boldly and meticulously crafted, perfectly capturing a raw edge. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice, critiquing and lamenting the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful, Reed unpacks his intimacies, using poetry as a weapon to confront masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex, revealing the failures of the societal structures that confine us.

The Malevolent Volume explores the myths and transformations of Black being, ranging from the monstrous to the sublime.

National Book Award winner Justin Phillip Reed subverts celebrated classics of poetry and mythology while examining horrors from contemporary film and cultural realities. He engages darkness as an aesthetic to conjure the revenant animus lurking beneath the exploited civilities of marginalized people. In these poems, Reed finds agency in the other-than-human identities assigned to those brutalized by state savagery. By doing so, he summons a retaliatory, counterviolent Black spirit to revolt and to inhabit the revolting.

A profound reflection on physical, emotional, and psychological transformation in the wake of imperial violence and personal abuse, from a poet described as both “tender and unflinching” (Khadijah Queen).

Paul Tran's debut poetry collection, All the Flowers Kneeling, is visceral and astonishing. It delves into intergenerational trauma, sexual violence, and U.S. imperialism, fundamentally reshaping our perceptions of freedom, power, and control. Through poems exploring desire, gender, bodies, legacies, and imagined futures, Tran illuminates the intricate and harrowing processes of reckoning and recovery. Their innovative poetic forms echo the nonlinear emotional and psychological journeys of trauma survivors. At once grand and intimate, commanding and deeply vulnerable, All the Flowers Kneeling is a celebration of rediscovering and reconfiguring the self, ultimately standing as a powerful testament to human resilience, endurance, and love

This collection serves as a mirror to the self, reflecting themes of elegy and ecology, as seen in lines like "how much of enjoying a place / is destroying it?" It explores both domestic and natural worlds, capturing moments such as "when the redbird strikes the window, it is me / who takes blame." The work portrays a daughter's fragmented experience, yet retains humor: "I can feel it coming on, my season of lavish suffering, the why me why me why me why me / that leaves me snowblind in the asking." Through concisely crafted and unfolding sequences, The Last Unkillable Thing navigates landscapes of mourning with tenderness.

THE MALEVOLENT VOLUME EXPLORES THE MYTHS AND TRANSFORMATIONS OF BLACK BEING, ON A CONTINUUM BETWEEN THE MONSTROUS AND THE SUBLIME.

Subverting celebrated classics of poetry and mythology and examining horrors from contemporary film and cultural fact, National Book Award winner Justin Phillip Reed engages darkness as an aesthetic to conjure the revenant animus that lurks beneath the exploited civilities of marginalized people. In these poems, Reed finds agency in the other-than-human identities assigned to those assaulted by savageries of the state. In doing so, he summons a retaliatory, counterviolent Black spirit to revolt and to inhabit the revolting.