Fiction. STAN puts the reader quickly into the throes of fresh madness, with a voice as committed to lyrical beauty as it is to understanding our species' basest, most persistent desires. The titular object of affection is just one of the many subjects that its narrator yearns for, as she confesses her shame, desire, and humiliations with a rigor and insight that will make Marream Krollos, author also of FC2's Big City, an author worth following for years to come. "This is a report from a wound that is a kaleidoscope. Written from the outpost of the female body--which is at least here to say a threatened, denigrated, unfairly framed place--Krollos suggests (in a lineage with Qiu Miaojin, Christine Angot...) that obsession, yearning, and unashamed negativity, too, are antidotes to the popular sentence. Perfect as novella, this packet of restless anguish is a good look at what the world looks like from something stung."--Caren Beilin "According to the narrator of Marream Krollos's STAN, if you stare at your lips long enough, 'they eventually begin to look like foreign things and not like lips at all. They become a shape you are interested in, a shape you might want to understand with your mouth.' Likewise with this novel, which stares down your assumptions about what is good and what is bad, about what is pretty and what is ugly, about what is worth loving and what is not. Until nothing looks, sounds, feels, smells or tastes the same: a place to begin (gently, softly) again. I would call this a beautiful and moving book, if such words were still available."--Elisabeth Sheffield "Bleak, terribly terribly beautiful and absolutely modern, Marream Krollos' STAN is an exquisite and original cri de couer, written in blood and flesh, with sentences that explode like grenades, piercing our hearts with fine glass shrapnel."--Jeffrey DeShell

STAN

Literature & Fiction

Krollos, Marream

United States

Meekling Press

These frank, neo-confessional poems blend observation, autobiography, and cultural criticism in an exploration of embodiment, identity, and identity-making. There is no shortage of adjectives at the ready which one might claim as descriptors of themselves, and no shortage of modes and mediums through which one might express those adjectives. But how do we come to know these identities, and how do we come to claim them as our own? Further, in an era of heightened awareness of the fragility of the Earth and the temporality of human life, what purpose does the rush to adopt these identities truly serve? When is identity or identification a useful means of organization, and when is it merely distracting? These poems engage literature, pop culture, music, and movies in an exploration of these questions, ultimately asking, what do we mean when we say "I"? "Reading this heir to Hemphill and O'Hara reminds me that the lyric is like a dressing-room mirror, reflecting infinities of ourselves: made-up, sincere, alone, untouchable--lovely, rigorous, divine-adjacent, flooded with muses. How do we meet ourselves in this world, how many times must we replay its well-worn tape before something better pushes through? 'I wake up and the world is still there, the aluminosilicate world.' This book with its marvelous observations opens up litanies of recognition-- Spring, doves, 'libertine daffodils which gape erogenously,' Julianne Moore wearing furs to the pharmacy in Magnolia. Like wearing furs to a pharmacy inside a magnolia, and being more, Chad Morgan's poetry is lovely, rigorous, divine-adjacent, flooded with muses. You're magnificent."--Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne "Chad Morgan's debut poetry collection is suffused with desire, longing, ache, and oodles fantastic of pop culture references, which all alchemize into a beautiful excavation of the self. This dazzling book is bursting with resonance and risk. Morgan writes, 'The goal is to talk myself into the world,' and that's exactly what these gorgeous poems reveal in this dazzling book bursting with resonance and risk."--Tiana Clark, author of I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood "Deftly balancing an ironic acidity with deeply felt humor and warmth, Morgan redirects the doomscrolling energies of our bleak historical moment, offering a vital reminder that we are delighted and delightful, desiring and desired, in our efforts to navigate this treacherous world. As he writes in 'Practical Advice for Your Queer Son': 'Here, everything / is proof of your goddamn nerves.'"--Tony Trigilio, author of Proof Something Happened "Effervescent and profound, heartbreaking and joyous, this is poetry that unsettles any notion one may have of camp, pastiche, popular culture...The autobiographical project is dazzling and troubling terrain here. A head-turning debut."--Lisa Fishman, author of Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition Poetry. LGBTQ+ Studies.

Chad Morgan & Other Poems

Morgan, Chad

Poetry

THE ENHANCERS is a polyvocal novel that follows three teenage friends coming of age in a techno-pharmaceutical society. Hannah is born and raised in a town whose industry revolves around Lumena Corp., maker of the supplement Valedictorian. When Hannah and her friends start taking Valedictorian, or V., a mandated mental augmentation, they start to witness its untoward effects--Celia is institutionalized after an accidental drug-induced psychotic break, and not long after Hannah's mental stability begins to slip. When a factory fire halts production, it threatens to throw the entire town into withdrawal. The Enhancers questions who we are when defined by our ability to process information. With mental augmentation as a baseline: how do we know ourselves, and what does it take to break free from this alienation? 
"Animated by the absurdity of a Yorgos Lanthimos film, The Enhancers is a wildly original and contemporary tale about chemical augmentation, memory, yearning, and loss. Imagine the fearlessness and wild imagination of Jenny Erpenbeck if she had a background in the pharmaceutical industry and you might come close to approximating the tremendous brilliance of Anne Yoder. " ñPatrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace 
"Fans of Ling Ma and Jennifer Egan, here is your next book. Anne K. Yoder, in a lyrical voice of the many, gives us a haunting tale of pharmacology and a story of boundaries: human, chemical and industrial. Where are those boundaries again? Where does a body start and end? Or, as Yoder puts it, How much information could one memory hold? In a text that is itself a wild, wonderfully written ride through a wormhole, The Enhancers thrills and horrifies with profound ramifications." ñSamantha Hunt, author of The Unwritten Book and The Seas 
"The Enhancers experiments with language and ideas the way its characters experiment with chemicals, leaving the reader dizzy with excitement, asking: What is a fact? What is natural (and can it be saved)? Is self-enhancement also self-erasure? In a world where every activity is regimented yet ever-changing outside of one's control, Anne Yoder cautions to be careful what you wish for (especially since you're always being watched and tested). My brain feels like a honeycomb full of bees after reading her latest work."-- Sarah Gerard, author of True Love and Sunshine State 
EDITORIAL REVIEWS: 
"Are there side effects? Oh, yeah . . .. This tragicomic thriller about sinister corporations is highly recommended for fans of Apple TV's Severance or Ling Ma's Severance."--Kate Knibbs, WIRED 
"Yoder's prose is outstanding as she unravels a modern coming-of-age story tinged with some science fiction . . .. There's something haunting in this book that isn't overtly unsettling, but enough to make you question enough about our reality."--Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful 
"The most impressive aspect of Yoder's debut novel, outside its vivid imagery and wrestling of indication--and warning-label language to suit its ends, is the world-building taken to construct Lumena Hills, the factory town named for the pharma company that's actively medicating its residents. Satire's too easy; Yoder interrogates the fine line between saying no to medication and being in control of one's faculties."--J. Howard Rosier, Vulture 
Fiction.

The Enhancers

Yoder, Anne K.

Genre Fiction

Composed using words chosen from children's early to mid 20th-century readers and from early 20th-century natural history textbooks, Men & Sleep exposes hidden currents and meanings in teaching materials from the past. The two long poems presented in this volume draw readers into a strange yet quotidian world of ordinary wonder and transformation. Inhabiting creaturely life & plant/animal co-embodiment--queering sexual, gender & even species distinctions--this book invites readers to mix (in) their own evanescent experiences. Moving beyond the limits of linear narrative or cause and effect, Men & Sleep requests and makes space for repeated engagements, just as if readers were exploring a forest or a marsh. When it's never quite clear whether the being you encounter here is a human, a tree, an insect or some unique combination of all of these, how do you behave? How does their behavior impact you? How do you both change in the encounter? Perhaps these questions will help Men & Sleep reveal itself to you. "Can poetry be both mysterious and physical? I am utterly intrigued by Jay Besemer's Men & Sleep. It is an immersive book that hums with the sensuality of "spore-filled organs" as it meditates on the relationship between language, masculinity and nature. While it is a book of trees, it's also a decidedly horizontal book: we creep through the mosses and leaves, smelling the 'puzzling odor.'"--Johannes G^ransson "When I see a tree I think "Trees enjoy being trees." Or maybe it's more accurate to say I feel them; their commitment to the vitality of struggle and survival as enjoyment and pleasure. As I was reading this collection I thought, Jay Besemer understands what I mean by this, even though we've never met or had a conversation. Human beings are also this way, like trees, or are we trees? The word "like" here doesn't feel quite right, to designate separateness. In "the sexual autumn" we respond to change entangled with the earth beings we've othered through language. Poetry brings us back home to where we belong."--Nikki Wallschlaeger Poetry. LGBTQ+ Studies.

Men & Sleep

Besemer, Jay

A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in

Lee, Janice

Iijima, Brenda

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