In one of the most important of the Aztec festivals, a month of fasting was ended by observers of the fast cutting up the figurine of a god made of amaranth seeds and honey and sharing it in small pieces. In Amaranth, Robert Carr feeds his readers portions of a god fashioned out of terror, longing, infidelity, wasting sickness, humor, and a searing lyrical tenderness. Crafted with the fingers of a careful and nimble musicianship, these poems vibrate with a current that simultaneously sets the teeth on edge and soothes the agitation the words produce. Even the most casual reader will be astonished by the muscular audacity of these poems--and pleasured by the harsh honey that flows from the poet's deft pillaging of the heart's unease. This is a remarkable debut. --Tom Daley The poetic drama in Amaranth arises from Robert Carr's intuition that a healthy enabling relation to one's past depends on an unflinching re-encounter with the details of the past. The poems choose not to settle for comfortable "lessons"--instead, they swim down, bravely, into haunted caverns of memory, seeking affirmations inseparable from the facts of moments, as in "Cremation," where the difference between two kinds of powder does it all. --Mark Halliday Slow, deliberate, and finely wrought, the poems in Amaranth remind the mouth that it has a tongue, remind the ear that it has a heart. Robert Carr's expressive voice is spare, honest, precise, and inventive as his poems careen from the furnace of love to the brutality of death all while offering the reader a gorgeous lyrical accuracy that's both delicate and unforgiving. --Ada Limon Robert Carr was born in Annapolis, Maryland and grew up in New Hampshire. He holds a BA in Philosophy from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine and a MEd in counseling psychology from the University of Massachusetts. He is Deputy Director, Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Amaranth is his first collection.

Amaranth (Indolent Books Spring 2016)

Literature & Fiction

Carr,Robert

Poetry

Indolent Books

Joseph Osmundson is a scientist and writer from rural Washington State. His writing has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review, Gawker, Salon, The Rumpus, and The Feminist Wire, where he is an Associate Editor. He's currently a post-doctoral fellow in systems biology at New York University. Osmundson describes Capsid: A Love Song as an essay "On HIV, desire, science, queerness, love." The book is a long-form essay that incorporates eight prose poems, each one inspired by a different phase in the life cycle of HIV. A person infected with a virus is called a host, and that makes the virus the guest, and sometimes a guest becomes a friend, and sometimes a friend becomes a lover. Osmundson explores the intimacy of the relatioinship between an HIV-positive person and his virus. His scientific perspective makes this young gay man an especially poignant singer of this love song.

Capsid: A Love Song

Osmundson, Joseph

Sarah Sarai's Geographies of Soul and Taffeta takes place in a universe where the real and the unreal meet each other in a careful, ecstatic dance, where words melt into their partners and opposites, and Yin and Yang swirl together like the best kind of soft serve ice cream. The ideas and images here are exact, surprising, and often humorous: in fact, Sarai's poems strike new ground in being intelligent and far reaching while maintaining an air of humility and matter of factness. --Christine Hamm The poems in Sarah Sarai's Geographies of Soul and Taffeta are little transgressions, butterflies a-wing. They present a poetry of surprise. Don't expect candy (though there might be some); don't expect demons (even the ones who live there). Dive in, world-hunter, dream-needer. Let Sarai's vision and images wing you to your next place, fiercely reflective and very much alive. --Richard Loranger Sarah Sarai's Geographies of Soul and Taffeta is a strong and beautiful sequence of poems. What haunts me most has to do with the emotional acuity and authority, how the poems' subjectivities are rendered essential. The generosity, the word play and re-play, the variations, the real world and its perpetual redemptions, the imagination's power not to transform exactly, but to reveal, which is transforming--all make Sarai's new collection a rewarding and an astonishing read. --Debora Lidov Sarah Sarai was born in Port Washington, grew up in California, and lives in New York. A former English teacher and college professor, she is now an editor and researcher. She has an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College. Collections include The Future Is Happy, I Feel Good, Emily Dickinson's Coconut Face, O You of the Cotton Pajamas, and The Risen Barbie. Her poems appear in numerous journals and anthologies.

Geographies of Soul and Taffeta

Sarai, Sarah

Antoinette Brim's These Women You Gave Me brings front and center Biblical mythology and legend to prove a truth that can only be proven through poetry. Brim's poems sing of the ability women have always had to love and thrive in spite of the most oppressive odds, or as Brim herself would say, "His heavy breath filled her ears. She awakened beneath." This is really gorgeous work. --Jericho Brown In These Women You Gave Me, Antoinette Brim weaves her personification poems of Lilith, Eden and Eve into a collection that is intimate and powerful. Her sensual, precise poems take root and resonate with the feminine in each of us. "Amidst the waters of the firmament: / male and female float; as only indigo shadows/stitched to the depths with light can do...."Antoinette Brim's poetry is evocative, risky and true. --Suzanne Frischkorn In These Women You Gave Me, Antoinette Brim employs a meticulous, lyric sensibility to remind readers of the first women of the Bible and the roles women in the Judeo-Christian tradition have occupied since. This is a bold symphony to Lilith, the first woman, who "has read the Book and found her name erased." Eve, the second wife, submits; Lilith owns her name, her reflection, her body, and soul. Brim counters the erasure with a brilliant light and language that empowers all women, that gives cause for each reader to consider that the story is often not fully told. --Georgia Popoff

These Women You Gave Me

Brim, Antoinette

Wit and nihilism, deadpan intelligence, and candid examinations of human hungers abound in J.G. McClure's The Fire Lit &amp; Nearing. McClure's smoldering poems take on the grind of time, obsessive love, manliness and its illusions, alternative fates, being and nothingness, and much more. His is a winning voice, dark and self-critical, a bit reminiscent of John Berryman's, a brave and true voice one might dub melancholic/comic/heroic. 
AMY GERSTLER 
The recurrent mode of J.G. McClure's The Fire Lit &amp; Nearing is a version of lament and complaint (both with long distinguished poetic traditions), but this tone is relieved and complicated and enriched by McClure's distinctive zaniness and invention, which gives the reader great enjoyment in this kind of "gaiety transfiguring all that dread" À la Yeats. This inventiveness also makes use of McClure's intelligence in a fundamentally writerly way and communicates the mind-of-the-writer at work in an exhilarating act of making that extracts beauty even from human pain and despair. 
MICHAEL RYAN 
J.G. McClure's first book, The Fire Lit &amp; Nearing, is a wild cosmically inclusive, sometimes surreal, sometimes hilarious but always compelling thought experiment about contingency as both a source of freedom and inescapable pain. These poems embody an irrepressible charm, a formal poise and wit that I find welcoming, even life affirming, even in the midst of sorrow. A truly beautiful book. 
ALAN SHAPIRO

The Fire Lit & Nearing

McClure, J G

"It is difficult to get the news from poems," wrote William Carlos Williams, "yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." In Headline News, John Deming gives us the news and makes a poem of it, springboarding into a prosody informed by brevity, clarity and precision, a kind of decalinear sonnet unfolding itself into blossom. Deming's great gift here is a capacious and capricious mindfulness, improvising and responding to the deadpan lunacy of newspaper headlines in such a way as to make them seem almost mystical. 
--D. A. POWELL 
In Headline News, John Deming makes us feel the strangeness of what we've been hearing and seeing in 21st century America. Reading these poems, "I'm feeling weirder/and clearer tonight." Quoted headlines appear in all caps, but the rest of the writing is equally telegraphic and punchy--until we get punch drunk, wondering what's real news and what isn't. This mix-up seems telling and inevitable now. 
--RAE ARMANTROUT

Headline News

Deming, John

Exploring the performative complexities of female embodiment, bell lap is a gorgeous muscular surge of linguistic athleticism and sensory endorphins. Athenian, mud-streaked, and spiked with adrenaline, this smart and sexy poem cycle running the course of a cyclocross race caroms with imagistic verve and chiseled diction through rugged physical, gendered, psychological, and poetic terrains--glistening with sweat-sheened splendor and pure animal joy. 
Lee Ann Roripaugh 
What a great book [bell lap] is. It races along and is racy and exhilarating and unapologetic for flinging mud into the air. Laura Winberry is Sappho on a bicycle. 
Lisa Jarnot 
In bell lap, Laura Winberry takes you on a ride through "the carnival of cyclocross" with her badass girl gang of spandex-clad cycling Eves in tow. These poems whoosh past you at lightning speed, blowing your hair back as you cheer on their unapologetically gutsy &amp; gritty, joyful &amp; vulnerable version of womanhood. 
Marisa Crawford

Bell Lap

Winberry, Laura

Nominated for Best Literature of the Year from POZ Magazine This wild and forceful debut collection centers on an obsession with killers, both specific and abstract: whether that is the suite of poems exploring the suspects in the infamous murder of JonBenét Ramsey, or a reflection on the dark appeal of true crime stories. SAFE DANGER is self-conscious of its obsession, and makes it clear that this is an intersection of an interest in pop culture (a particular poem about Lindsay Lohan stands out), and more personal fears. Much of the collection focuses on the speakers' anxieties about sex, the body, strangers -- and these anxieties are overwhelmingly made specific to a queer experience. This context apparent in the text roots Zerance's work firmly in the tradition of Auden and Capote.

Safe Danger

Zerance, Stephen

These poems grapple with how romantic relationships, both gay and straight, are defined--and what we gain or lose from these definitions. The poems reflect on the experience not only of the poet, but also of wives throughout history, particularly as represented in classic literary texts, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Joan Didion.
Fitzpatrick's "The Genius of Wives of Geniuses I Have Sat With," for example, is inspired by a paragraph in Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, while the fragments of the central poetry sequence, "Mr. &amp;," draw their language from the final chapters of books by Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Kate Chopin, Joan Didion, Marguerite Duras, Sheila Heti, Susanna Kaysen, Sylvia Plath, Rebecca West, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf. "The Definition Of" comprises various Google results for different manipulations of the phrase "marriage is," and his poem "Vow" reimagines what is thought to be Anne Boleyn's last letter to her husband Henry VIII, written while she was awaiting execution at the Tower of London.
Together, these poems constitute an extended meditation on what comes after the ampersand in the phrase that serves as the title of the book: "Mr. &amp;."
Jameson Fitzpatrick is the author of the chapbook Morrisroe: Erasures (89plus/LUMA Publications, 2014). His poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2017, The New Yorker, Poetry, and elsewhere. A 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Poetry, Fitzpatrick lives in New York City and teaches writing at New York University.

Mr. &

Fitzpatrick, Jameson

Le's furious and steeled voice leaves nothing unturned, propelling these poems through explorations on displacement, womanhood, the body and its endured violences, by confronting a history as tenuous and elusive as the ghosts it conjures. She has created her own version of the Ark, one where the whale, forgotten in the original, is now carried as 'a child of immigrants, like me.' In these tender, earnest yet fierce poems, Le does not reinvent myth, but expands it to include our most damned outsiders. And how lucky we are that, like the great Robert Hayden, she has created a vision where 'Nothing human is foreign...' As such, this book is as much about loss as it is about art-making and being human--and utterly, forgivably alive.
--Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky With Exit Wounds
It has been a long time since I have read a book as memorable as Jenna Le's A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora. She makes the forms sound new, but it is also the memorability of her subject matter. An immigrant is compared to a whale; Noah's ark is replayed in a taxi; and physical self-love is transformed into 'fish's skin [that] will turn crisp / in a copper pan above a kitchen blaze.' The work is both clever and poignant, with unexpected characters like William Butler Yeats's mistress and a narcoleptic who is scripted into a romance narrative that involves abuse; yet, as Le writes, 'At seven years old, that's what I thought love was.' If you thought you knew what formal poetry was, you need to read Jenna Le's magical, original book.
--Kim Bridgford, author of Human Interest

A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora

Le, Jenna

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