Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Essays. Two American women, born a generation apart, surf the feminist third wave in these thirteen thematically linked and formally innovative lyric essays. Julie Marie Wade was born the day Denise Duhamel took her first college class. Duhamel published her first poetry book Smile! in 1993, the year Wade entered high school. Duhamel's writing helped to shape the third wave of Wade's emerging feminist experience. Wade came of age reading Duhamel's confessional poetry but was also influenced by what James Atlas of The New York Times named "the age of literary memoir" in 1996. As a consequence, Wade grew comfortable genre-bending and writing hybrid prose. These writers met in 2012 when Wade was hired to teach in the MFA program at Florida International University where Duhamel had been teaching for more than a decade. Duhamel was mesmerized by Wade's work, although her own past collaborations had been in poetry. When Wade asked her new colleague why she didn't write nonfiction, Duhamel said, "I would, if I could write it with you!" THE UNRHYMABLES {COLLABORATIONS IN PROSE} is a dual female reading experience that navigates the social clock, desire across the gendered spectrum, marriage, divorce, fertility/non-motherhood, violence, and body image with humor, poignancy, thoughtful reflection, and striking narrative scenes. Duhamel (b. 1961) and Wade (b. 1979) harmonize their unique voices that bracket "Generation X."

THE UNRHYMABLES: Collaborations in Prose

Literature & Fiction

Wade, Julie Marie

Duhamel, Denise

Essays & Correspondence

Noctuary Press

Fiction. "A skeptical, pottymouthed Cinderella. A Hungarian nude model who debates consciousness. A clerk in a gun shop run by a jerk named Jesus. A respite caregiver looking for change. The characters in Virginia Konchan's ANATOMICAL GIFT pop off the page and onto the barstool next to us to give us the rough wisdom we need."—Daniel Nester

Anatomical Gift

Konchan, Virginia

Short Stories & Anthologies

F IN: A Novel

Carol Guess

Poetry. Women's Studies. "Joanna Penn Cooper's debut collection, WHAT IS A DOMICILE, interrogates the philosophical geographies of female/human embodiment. With the hypnotic languor of time-lapse photography, these dreamy poems, 'lived by the movement of cloud shadow,' document the quotidian rituals of moving through domestic, urban, psychological, emotional, aesthetic, and textual spaces. 'I've cured myself of being / so meta, or else I've embraced it,' Cooper writes in these alternately lush and witty poems, as she wrestles with the art of '[h]ow to wear the crown of love and fresh pita for lunch and let it go.' Like a Russian Matryoshka doll, spaces and lives nest and layer one inside the other—strange palimpsests over other days, hours, histories, ghosts—culminating in the Coke-can sized life growing within the speaker, who forms the vulnerable core from which these existential questions ripple with a gorgeously aching intensity: 'You are in love with someone you just met, who's lying there, too. You barely touch, but you're also the same person. Part of the movie is a tiny spine, tiny kidneys. A four-chambered heart. Look at all the wonder.'"—Lee Ann Roripaugh

What Is a Domicile

Cooper, Joanna Penn

Poetry

Poetry. "'When white is well managed, it ought to be strange,' writes Eva Heisler in her brilliant new hybrid collection DRAWING WATER. Here narrative falls away, replaced by repetition, which creates both music and color. DRAWING WATER is a meditation on the significance of the line in both poetry and visual art. 'The right hand margin / is profile— / is oar— / is brink.' Each page functions as a poem or image that challenges convention: 'What I learned from Matisse's black— / to creep downstairs in the middle of the night and exchange blue silk for black wool.' Writing as both poet and art critic, Heisler captures the tension between innovation and history that informs 'two experiences of time: the random glitter of / unmeasured minutes; the geometry of schedules.'"—Carol Guess"Not since Marguerite Duras's Writing or Maggie Nelson's BLUETS have I been so excited by a new book, but Eva Heisler's DRAWING WATER has done it, has entered my 'heart line / fate line / life line.' It is a book for the back pocket, for a train ride or a rainy weekend, the kind of book that complements staring out a window at the changing landscape—shifting scenes sliding by, tiny beads of rain refracting light. Make no mistake: when Eva Heisler breaks a line she breaks a heart, just 'as the sea / breaks at our back door.' And throughout, her touch is as delicate as if she has been 'drawing the wing on a fly,' and the result is as mighty and 'broad as the breast of a hero.'"—Molly Gaudry

Drawing Water

Heisler, Eva

Lisa Marie Basile's first full-length collection of poetry is the essence of summer-noir -- detailing vice, sexuality and grief through luscious poetics. Set in a Lynchian seaside town, Apocryphal is a holy, girly, neurotic text obsessed with its own secret, dark world. Apocryphal attempts at truth but is littered with false memories and untenable hopes. THE RUMPUS says, "I came to Lisa Marie Basile's Apocryphal eager to travel off the beaten paths--of genre, of narrative, of self-disclosure and self-discovery. I was never once disappointed."

Apocryphal

Basile, Lisa Marie

History & Criticism

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. "What MEDI(T)ATIONS leaves us with, then, is a universal articulation of suffering evident across many levels of expression (form, narrative, autobiography, cultural critique) and the spaces—both the whiteness which separates printed words on a page and the gaps between our various selves—that best articulate the rendered experience."—The Southern Literary Review

medi(t)ations

Bolden, Emma

Poetry. Women's Studies. "THE DARK LENGTH HOME is the physical representation of pouring, nude, into a foamy sea during a storm while some siren whispers—breathy and wet—things about love and sex and sorrow and desire. The book blends the essence of a young girl's dreamy diary with the calculated sexual and emotional hunger of womanhood. Its obsessive dedication to location- as-character is what will trap you, but you will stay for the relationships, the confession, the sweat and the religion of both body and god. I rarely have *fun* reading a book, but I devoured this, feeling each grain of salt and every lick of table wine along the way. I wanted to know more, to feel what the speakers felt. I got lost in the vanishing act of the voices, and each time I picked it up again it was like I was transported. That's a power not often found in poetry. Read this book. Get lost."—Lisa Marie Basile "In unison, spoken as one voice, one woman voicing many men, poets Anne Champion and Sarah Sweeney collect memories of passion that add up to elegant strength or rogue loneliness. Or both, because each of these lovely, lyrical poems asserts a fierce independence of speech and sway: 'being alone / is like being god.' The complicated truth here is that being a white American visitor in Puerto Rico carries tremendous privilege; but being an unmarried, childless woman brings questions and stares. This gorgeous voice resists both slut shaming and national anthems: 'I don't need anyone anymore. / When he presses me down, / it's the salt air that unpins my hair.'"—Carol Guess "THE DARK LENGTH HOME is undoubtedly a force of a collection. Champion and Sweeney pull the reader into their hypnotic tide from the first page and never let go. We come to wonder with the honest and powerful narrator, 'Who am I if I don't need anyone at all?' Amidst the backdrop of Puerto Rico, the poems in this collection wrestle with gender, sexuality, and identity. Just when we think we understand, we only come to realize that we are all like the narrator in some ways, just 'a trail of smoke...exhaled out the window.'"—Jenny Sadre-Orafai

The Dark Length Home

Champion, Anne

Sweeney, Sarah

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