Kyle McCord's You Are Indeed an Elk, but This Is Not the Forest You Were Born to Graze consists of thirty single-stanza wonders of the world-ferociously associative, disjunctively digressive, and melodiously surprising wherever they roam. Their acro-battery blasts of talky power are rich with joy and pathos, not to mention also an abiding, and sometimes biting, ambivalence toward both the meadow of contemporary American culture and "the unspeakable acts of kindness/ we committed together." This is a wonderfully tricked-out barrage of a book, the "wild life" in "wildlife," and especially for you.-Matt Hart, author of Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless I love the roaming and attentive eye through which we are invited to experience Kyle McCord's new book, You Are Indeed an Elk, but This Is Not the Forest You Were Born to Graze . Here are poems at once mystic, intimate, hilarious, and completely enamored with the impossible world--"the smoothest crest / of skyline smirked by a river / without a single thing to lose / itself inside" is just one way this book amazingly imagines living and loving with others. I too, feel that some days "decorum may be all I have." Thank God this book reminds me that I'm wrong. -Wendy Xu, author of You Are Not Dead In this, Kyle McCord's fourth collection, someone is always doing something ill-advised. There's both trespassing (going where you shouldn't) and trespassing (doing what you shouldn't, or "sinning"-- a word that has its etymological roots in archery: sinning as "missing the mark." In other words, the "sinner" has tried to do right and failed). I've come to admire characters/ speakers/ real actual people who live bravely enough to sin in that kind of way. And McCord's speaker is heroic as he journeys, slaughters, and devotes himself to potentially dangerous love affairs. I find this book's title unusually helpful: "Sure, you're a an elk, but you're not supposed to be doing that otherwise acceptable elk-thing here!" which, of course, my brain translates to "Sure, you're a human, and you're trying to be good at that by doing things you know humans do, but don't do it that way!" So. What I'm saying is that this book is wondering how to live rightly. I wonder that all the time, so I'm glad someone as thoughtful and inventive as Kyle McCord is wondering with me. -Hannah Gamble, author of Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast

You Are Indeed An Elk, But This is Not the Forest You Were Born to Graze

Literature & Fiction

McCord, Kyle

History & Criticism

Gold Wake Press Collective

Mary Buchinger (Bodwell) is the author of both Aerialist (finalist for the May Swenson Poetry Award/ Utah State University Press; semi-finalist for the OSU Press/The Journal Wheeler Prize and the Perugia Press Prize) and Roomful of Sparrows (Finishing Line Press). Her work has appeared in various anthologies and journals, including AGNI, DIAGRAM, Homesickness and Exile (Emma Press, England), Nimrod, PANK, Salamander, The Anthology of New England Writers, The Cortland Review, The Massachusetts Review. She was an invited reader at the Library of Congress and recipient of the Daniel Varoujan and Firman Houghton Awards from the New England Poetry Club, a Cambridge Poetry Award, and a prize from The Poetry Society of Virginia. She grew up on a small family farm in the thumb area of Michigan and served as an agriculture volunteer in the Peace Corps in Ecuador. She holds a Ph.D. in applied linguistics from Boston University and is Associate Professor of English and Communication Studies at MCPHS University. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and two sons, two tuxedo cats, and a dog named Dover.

Aerialist

Buchinger, Mary

Joshua Butts is from Jackson, OH. He received a B.A. and an M.A. from The Ohio State University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati, where he was a Charles Phelps Taft Dissertation Fellow. His poems have appeared in various journals including Sonora Review, Tampa Review, Harpur Palate, Forklift, Ohio, and Quarterly West. Butts is currently a Visiting Professor of English and Philosophy at the Columbus College of Art and Design. He lives in Columbus, OH with his wife Lesley Jenike and daughter Willa Mae.

New To The Lost Coast

Butts, Joshua

With his debut poetry collection, A Stranger's Heart, Philip J. Cozzi joins the ranks of physician poets, enhancing this tradition and offering fresh perspectives of the patient and the curer. These poems shimmer, displaying imaginative range and verbal dexterity. Cozzi's acute sense of empathy 
informs his work, whether the speaker is contemplating an orange "waiting in a bowl on a kitchen island" or, more poignantly, preparing his beloved mother for her deathbed. In his poem, "Language Line," Cozzi writes: ". . . and you/lashed to the mast of the cell phone, / learn love translates to something carnal, /a drowning, a catastrophic craving." Reading this book is a tonic and an inspiration for us all.

A Stranger's Heart: Poems by a Critical Care Physician

Cozzi, Phillip J

Poetry

To call To call the prose in this book invigorating would be an understatement. Charles Rafferty's stories invite you to damn the collar and charge the invisible fence: there's a shock to the system, and then you have the freedom to move in the world that was right in front of you but somehow unexplored. The air is better on his side of the barrier, bracing and clear. I'm not sure whether one should call them stories or incendiary devices. --Sarah Harris Wallman, author of Senseless Women, Juniper Prize for Fiction Charles Rafferty's stories present almost recognizable scenarios: we meet a man stealing cemetery flowers to bring to his date, another presenting his neighbors with their dead cat, another pondering the arrival of peacocks to the neighborhood. Rafferty's world is just a little stranger, just a little sharper, just a little funnier than our own. After spending some time in this marvelous world, we return to our own, surprised and enlightened, ready to appreciate it anew. --Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, W. W. Norton Charles Rafferty is a master of the short form, and the micro-stories that make up. Somebody Who Knows Somebody are like the lights of a city that blink by your train window as you ride quickly into the night. And what lights! These stories are precise, each glimpse beautifully rendered; they are alternately funny, menacing, and are both tender toward and unforgiving of what feels like a very particular American disquiet. I loved it. --Ethan Rutherford, author of The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories, Ecco Whether huffing breath into the lungs of the forsaken figures of classical myth or bearing witness to the quiet desperation of threadbare neighbors of otherwise quiet exurban lanes, these brief, fierce tales strike a smack to the forehead, like a branch stretched taut and then released on a winding, wooded trail. --Ian Morris, author of When Bad Things Happen to Rich People and Simple Machines

Somebody Who Knows Somebody

Rafferty, Charles

We're The Flowover. We Come From Flyoverland. introduces a roving, Baudelarian speaker seeking to "translate pigeon into English" (the bird's music, or grammatically simplified language), among the streets of "bone and ash," post-empire USA: home to "The Longest Winter on Record." Amid "mirrors not made of metal amalgam and glass," and indexical signs replacing reality ("food we want to eat via pointing"), he mourns the tendency to kill "not the enemy but the messenger," in a world where what's sacred is unprotected: a "a temple where the door is never locked." But this speaker is not dissuaded by simulacra nor the steady thrum ("wrong, goddamnit") that "grows into what I hear" instead, he tunes into a "species forgotten," a "small print none have ever bothered to read." The title delivers its promise: the flownover (disregarded) from flyoverland (transcendent) arrive at a Carpe Diem not rapacious but ecstatic, as tourists of the body, in "climax," become those of the mind. -Virginia Konchan, author of Any God Will Do and The End of SpectacleReading Mauch's work, I'm reminded over and over of Stanley Kunitz's statement that "The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems." Here we have the kind of shimmering lyric insights that can come only from a mind and heart far along the path of enlightenment. What a great gift Mauch has given us by inviting us to share in the journey, offering us no less than "a temple where the door is never locked." -Melissa Studdard, author of Like a Bird with a Thousand Wings and I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast

We're the flownover. We come from flyoverland.

Mauch, Matt

Where do writers go when they die? The forgotten ones, at least, go to The Cafe of Minor Authors where they drink endless cups of cappuccino, self-obsess, and nurse their shattered dreams. Some authors, it's rumored, can escape Oblivion if they try hard enough to write something the universe can't ignore, even after death. This is the story of one ambitious writer stuck in oblivion who not only risks upturning his own fate but also the fate of his literary hero, and that of his great grandmother, Hanna, an aspiring actor in the Yiddish theater in the Prague of 1911. This book is for anyone who has ever wanted to be an author, anyone who knows an author, anyone who is an author, recognized or not, and anyone who loves books enough to want to spend their afterlife reading forgotten classics in the great library of Oblivion. "A mesmerizing meditation on immortality, both the literary and fleshly kinds and its ultimate unattainability... like language, like summer, like love, Oblivion is irresistible."- Junot Diaz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 
"A tour de force. Oblivion is a marvel of the imagination and intellect. Hemley has . . .created a book that is a relentless page turner: funny and wise, exuberant and sad, insightful and magical, and-most wonderful of all-deeply, deeply human."-Connie May Fowler, author of How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly\n"Oblivion is a deeply intelligent and strikingly honest exploration of what ultimately drives a writer to write, and the cold loneliness of the journey, and how literary success in one's lifetime is, at best, a fickle proposition. I will tell every writer I know, struggling or successful, to read this book." 
- Kaylie Jones, author of Lies My Mother Never Told Me: A Memoir.

Oblivion

Hemley, Robin

United States

"I take deep pleasure in these poems, wishing to park in front of them--sexy and larger than life as they are--with my feet up and a big bowl of popcorn." In a collection peppered with odes to films and stars, an elegy for Whitney Houston, and more than a few surprises, Eileen G'Sell gives us more than a little 'history, hilarity, the strewn blooms of rhyme.' Settle in, my friends. You are in for a treat." --D.A. Powell

Life After Rugby

G'Sell, Eileen

Justin Bigos' Mad River is a wide-eyed, sensitive, haunted book of poems--one so delicately and lovingly descriptive and incanted, it's nearly miraculous in the clarity of vision it achieves regarding so much that's unclear, so much seen through its mad river water. Every poem here is a portrait, a lamentation, a meditation, an elegiac commingling of lives into life--and death--the homeless father with mad John Clare, the preacher with the river, the son with the scripture, the birds in the air with a feral cat darkness. This book does not look away. It leaves nothing out. To write this little note in loving support of it, I am leaving everything out; this book is too big and too much--ecstatic, cathartic, troubling and blessed. And yet, the trouble in its heart is worth every second you spend in the throes of it. These are astonishing and unforgettable poems, poems of loneliness and mercy, of violence and grace. Justin Bigos has written here one of the best books of poetry I've read in a very long time--monumental, memorial, and alive! -Matt Hart

Mad River

Bigos, Justin

Sarah Strickley's work is bold, honest, and confident. Her language is the perfect combination of lyricism and directness. Fall Together is remarkable for its inventive stories that carry the reader into dark territory. A remarkable debut! Chris Offutt, author of My Father, the Pornographer and Country Dark The sensibility overseeing these powerful stories is quirky and playful; Strickley is a connoisseur of a myriad of source materials, from contemporary tabloid fodder to age-old literature and legend. In each piece, a wholly human character comes to life to delight and instruct the reader, to make her revisit what she thought was the familiar world and find it, somehow, faintly shifted and newly fresh. Antonya Nelson, author of Bound and Funny Once This collection is both artful and absolutely ferocious. Sarah Anne Strickley calmly follows her stories into darkness. I honestly can't think of many writers who are this fearless. Chris Bachelder, author of National Book Award Finalist, The Throwback Special

Fall Together

Strickley, Sarah

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