Poetry & Kindle Unlimited Finds (April 2019)
Poetry
I Gave Birth to All the Ghosts Here by Lyd Havens Nostrovia Press — Free (PDF)
Like a howl through a crowded room, this collection draws attention, an urgency unconcerned with politeness. An honest, youthful exploration of personal history and the queer body, I Gave Birth to All the Ghosts Here builds a world and invites you in. Lyd Havens is special, plain and simple. They are truly an artist to watch. (Clementine von Radics, In A Dream You Saw A Way To Survive)
portrait of my body as a crime i’m still committing by Topaz Winters $7.00 (PDF) / $15.00 (Print)
Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing is a book in which tenderness has given way to hunger, both literal and of the soul. Queer desire, mental illness, and loving a girl likened to the moon in poems sharp and explosive. … Love and desire cleave two sick girls together, the journey of their ascent and descent chronicled in poems so bright with want they ache, they cut. … This collection ends softly. It ends with forgiveness. Topaz Winters takes you to the edge of destruction and holds out a saving hand, inviting you into the warmth of healing.
What Loss Taught Me by Stephen Furlong Nostrovia Press — Free (PDF)
If you want to know what tenderness means, and what it looks like, and how it graces the lines of a poem, you should read Stephen Furlong’s What Loss Taught Me. If you want to know the courage of tenderness, or the way it can be turned toward the self, you should read this. These poems take the hard risk of being honest, and vulnerable, of making out of deep, impossible hurt a kind of home. They inhabit and transcend the wounds that make up our everyday. When I lift my eyes from the page and look around, I see how everything is capable of holding some kind of violence, some kind of beauty, and some kind of love. Stephen’s work is a work of grace in that way. “Eventually, love,” he writes, and I say yes. But also: the love is here. In the aftermath of cruelty, violence, and fear, Stephen has brought it out. No more eventually. This book ushers love back into the world. (Devin Kelly, In This Quiet Church of Night I Say Amen)
The Cartography of Sleep by Laura Villareal Nostrovia Press — Free (PDF)
Laura Villareal’s The Cartography of Sleep is a sublime map of dreams and a guide to the heart’s darkness. Finding your way in her poetry is no easy journey. Villareal offers her readers new mythologies and seasons. The turns are sometimes bloody, sometimes funny, sometimes wild, sometimes surreal, but all the time enlightening. Make no mistake, these poems bite back, sweetly, vengefully, and with grace. Or put simply, these poems are dangerous. (Willie Perdomo, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon)
HONOR/SHAME by Jesse Rice-Evans Gap Riot Press — CAD 3.00 (PDF)
The Sea That Beckoned by Angela Gabrielle Fabunan Platypus Press — $3 (Kindle) / $13 (Print)
From the silt shores of yesterday, where land meets ocean, where here meets there, The Sea That Beckoned is an exploration of all those places we’ve sought to call home. The ghosts of the past intertwine and dissipate, colliding and coalescing with our seemingly assured present. It is a book of recollections, of understanding, of our continued search for belonging.
Build Yourself a Boat by Camonghne Felix Haymarket Books — $8.00 (Print) / $8.50 (Ebook)
“Camonghne Felix is a brilliant writer, thinker, imaginer, builder—a young leader who shifts and opens the possibilities for a more just, better lit world, with each step, each word, each question.” —Kathy Engel
This is about what grows through the wreckage. This is an anthem of survival and a look at what might come after. A view of what floats and what, ultimately, sustains.
Build Yourself a Boat redefines the language of collective and individual trauma through lyric and memory.
dolores in spanish is pain, dolores in lolita is a girl by Ashley Miranda Glass Poetry Press — $7.50 (preorder) / $8.50
Ashley Miranda writes from a world where a special category exists for the expendable girl: “nymphets / defined as suicide, sex crimes, special victims unit.” In this (our) world, “nymphets are fictional,” but real girls are nonetheless assigned the role. dolores in spanish is pain, dolores in lolita is a girlis written for girls whose pussies taste like grief, girls who “don’t know very well,” girls who drape themselves in pink and question what that makes them, and Miranda’s Dolores aka Lolita delicately treads the split identity of sexual empowerment and exploitation.“ (Isobel O’Hare, author of all this can be yours)
A Live Thing, Clinging with Many Teeth by Kolleen Carney Hoepfner Spooky Girlfriend Press — $6 (Print)
“Kolleen Carney Hoepfner’s voice in these spare, elegant poems warns us that ‘A part of her insisted/that there was a darker truth.’ Her words are alive with this darkness, guiding the reader in and out of shadows, looking for escape, and then daring us to explore even darker recesses. Hoepfner writes that ‘people // won’t want to look/ at the horror of you,’ but A Live Thing, Clinging with Many Teeth, asks us to look, again and again.” (Sarah Nichols, author of This is Not a Redemption Story and Dreamland for Keeps)
Kindle Unlimited
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays by Alexander Chee Mariner Books — Free (Kindle Unlimited) / $9.99 (Kindle) / $15.99 (Print) Essays
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is the author’s manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He examines some of the most formative experiences of his life and the nation’s history, including his father’s death, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, the jobs that supported his writing—Tarot-reading, bookselling, cater-waiting for William F. Buckley—the writing of his first novel, Edinburgh, and the election of Donald Trump.
By turns commanding, heartbreaking, and wry, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel asks questions about how we create ourselves in life and in art, and how to fight when our dearest truths are under attack.
The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch Harper — Free (Kindle Unlimited) / $10.99 (Kindle) / $15.99 (Print)
In the near future, world wars have transformed the earth into a battleground. Fleeing the unending violence and the planet’s now-radioactive surface, humans have regrouped to a mysterious platform known as CIEL, hovering over their erstwhile home. The changed world has turned evolution on its head: the surviving humans have become sexless, hairless, pale-white creatures floating in isolation, inscribing stories upon their skin.
Out of the ranks of the endless wars rises Jean de Men, a charismatic and bloodthirsty cult leader who turns CIEL into a quasi-corporate police state. A group of rebels unite to dismantle his iron rule—galvanized by the heroic song of Joan, a child-warrior who possesses a mysterious force that lives within her and communes with the earth. When de Men and his armies turn Joan into a martyr, the consequences are astonishing. And no one—not the rebels, Jean de Men, or even Joan herself—can foresee the way her story and unique gift will forge the destiny of an entire world for generations.
A riveting tale of destruction and love found in the direst of places—even at the extreme end of post-human experience—Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan raises questions about what it means to be human, the fluidity of sex and gender, and the role of art as a means for survival.
Made For Love by Alissa Nutting Ecco — Free (Kindle Unlimited) / $11.99 (Kindle) / $15.99 (Print) Fiction
Hazel has just moved into a trailer park of senior citizens, with her father and Diane—his extremely lifelike sex doll—as her roommates. Life with Hazel’s father is strained at best, but her only alternative seems even bleaker. She’s just run out on her marriage to Byron Gogol, CEO and founder of Gogol Industries, a monolithic corporation hell-bent on making its products and technologies indispensable in daily life. For over a decade, Hazel put up with being veritably quarantined by Byron in the family compound, her every movement and vital sign tracked. But when he demands to wirelessly connect the two of them via brain chips in a first-ever human “mind-meld,” Hazel decides what was once merely irritating has become unbearable. The world she escapes into is a far cry from the dry and clinical bubble she’s been living in, a world populated with a whole host of deviant oddballs.
As Hazel tries to carve out a new life for herself in this uncharted territory, Byron is using the most sophisticated tools at his disposal to find her and bring her home. His threats become more and more sinister, and Hazel is forced to take drastic measures in order to find a home of her own and free herself from Byron’s virtual clutches once and for all. Perceptive and compulsively readable, Made for Love is at once an absurd, raunchy comedy and a dazzling, profound meditation marriage, monogamy, and family.
You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman Harper — Free (Kindle Unlimited) / $9.99 (Kindle) / $15.99 (Print)
A woman known only by the letter A lives in an unnamed American city with her roommate, B, and boyfriend, C, who wants her to join him on a reality show called That’s My Partner! A eats (or doesn’t) the right things, watches endless amounts of television, often just for the commercials—particularly the recurring cartoon escapades of Kandy Kat, the mascot for an entirely chemical dessert—and models herself on a standard of beauty that only exists in such advertising. She fixates on the fifteen minutes of fame a news-celebrity named Michael has earned after buying up his local Wally Supermarket’s entire, and increasingly ample, supply of veal.
Meanwhile B is attempting to make herself a twin of A, who hungers for something to give meaning to her life, something aside from C’s pornography addiction, and becomes indoctrinated by a new religion spread throughout a web of corporate franchises, which moves her closer to the decoys that populate her television world, but no closer to her true nature.
Lady Parts by Jeni De La O Grey Borders Books — Free (Kindle Unlimited) / $2.99 (Kindle) / CAD 3.99 (Ebook) / $15 (Print) Poetry
Lady Parts is a meditation on the current moment around sexual agency and gender dynamics. In it, various aspects of womanhood are confronted from the lens of different political views and different generations. The ideas presented here are designed to uncover thoughts and discern intent, they’re meant to provoke conversation.
