Poetry. Michelle Gottschlich's debut collection of poems bears an acute &amp; tender hand toward the inscrutable nature of being. Engaged in the milieu of void sets (code elements that do not show in surface content) &amp; employing interruption, (day)dream, &amp; other fragmented mental activity as valid manifestations of voice, these poems evince &amp; commune with the buried codes &amp; elements of repressed &amp; othered worlds. Embedded in a culture latent with cruelty &amp; expectation, here are poems that make space for the beautiful aberrations found in the socially estranged realms of mental illness &amp; gender nonconformity. VOID SETS emits a harrowing &amp; necessary glow, one that extends across the enigmatic chasm between persons &amp; reveals forgotten corners, untouched depths: "The dream of mine / where you're endless water / and I'm a tiny diver." "This book reminded me what it is that I love, that I love, in poems: I love witnessing a real person talking, or trying to talk, to a real person (who might live inside oneself, yes, I know). I love the actual yearning and sorrow and prayer that the voice calling out is. I want you to hear this. I want to ask you this question. It's so goddamned beautiful and sad and true. Michelle Gottschlich's Void Sets is like a long and lovely and heartbroken call. It's an incredible book."—Ross Gay "'Void sets' are the pieces of computer code that are not content: they indicate the presence of images, or provide a blank space; they offer, say, an italic shift; they bold. Michelle Gottschlich is bold: a smart questioner and comforter who spends equal time here talking to individuals (we listen in) and talking to herself (we identify): she's talking to the reader like the reader has just finished saying something she urgently needs to respond to, in either direct or coded ways (there may be censors!) —"Do you think adults made us cruel?" she asks. It may be her directness that most distinguishes her, her refusal to avoid the difficult. Gottschlich wonders where a missed call went (and yes, that seems like a void set!) but she also has more patience for—and openness to—connection than the 'hundreds of machines that mediate [her] life' are designed to permit. She's listening, she's making content (out of discontent?) by exploring all the places contemporary culture likes to pretend there isn't any.—Sally Ball

Void Sets

Literature & Fiction

Gottschlich, Michelle

Poetry

Monster House Press

Poetry. RADIANT COMPANION is the one in the many, the spirit right beside you, the roar you can count on to lead you out of darkness. And as the companion volume to Matt Hart's book-length serial poem, Radiant Action, it's also an address book (the ones who matter most)—a constellation of singers, of hands to hold, the community of collaboration(s) that makes the action—any action—possible. These poems flash and bang with human defiance against death in all its disguises. Togetherness changes everything, impossibly so. "Simultaneously playful and poignant with tons of linguistic precision, the emotional urgency that informs Matt Hart's writing in RADIANT COMPANION raises the stakes for the reader—he is just that good. Hart, like his predecessors James Tate and Dean Young (to name two), is poised to take his place as one of America's boldest, most major poets."—Noelle Kocot "In Matt Hart's RADIANT COMPANION, echoes of poetry past merge with a present that transcends its misfortunes, leaving readers with a newfound love of the blessed ordinary: blue winter sky, raw cotton, a billion starry skulls. 'The word is pain, / and the world is pain, / but the sun on our skin / is enormous and light,' proclaims Hart's Poem with a Chorus by Jawbreaker, one of many moments where this collection provides vital insight into contemporary life. RADIANT COMPANION rewrites the parameters of the pastoral and shows us where the ghost of John Keats lingers, as a punk rock heart hammers away in our chests."—Mary Biddinger

Radiant Companion

HART, MATT

Poetry. Fiction. GOD BOX is a sacred container replete with self &amp; other, brimming with dazzling &amp; touching clarity, language, emotion, confidence, &amp; self-love. In these poems &amp; stories—pleasantly varied in style, form, subject, &amp; place—Mallory Whiten lucidly transmutes the complex magic, joy &amp; trials of a healing process from trauma, from within the quotidian performance &amp; experience of being &amp; existing as a woman. GOD BOX, Whitten's second book, is bright with offerings, dreams, blessings, boundaries, affirmations, prayers, synchronicities, &amp; her signature, meticulous &amp; necessary noticing—all of which constellate in a radiating affirmation of life that returns a self to its provenance: the holy box that holds the entire universe and—most importantly &amp; miraculously—ourselves.

God Box

Whitten, Mallory

Poetry. "Reading Anaïs Duplan's chapbook, you realize you are more than an assemblage of ideologies, a cellular plan, or even an estranged, familial relation possessing the accoutrements of a melancholic nation, but also, too, the glorious product of dense, self-referential layered texts that call to the surface your loneliness and feelings of kinship. Here are poems that revel in post- hybridity and borderless threnodies, and go straight to the stillness of the heart, to performances of language that are fierce and juicier than a papaya, and frankly, that one would only expect from a brilliant, young mind as theirs."—Major Jackson

Mount Carmel & The Blood Of Parnassus

Duplan, Anaïs

Metabolize, If Able

Clay A.D.