Dear Ted

Self-Help

Vodicka, KIm

Relationships

Really Serious Literature

"CAKE is alive and crackling with absurdity and unpredictability, operating at a speed and on a scale we don't often find. Like a contemporary Dadaist experiment revealing the doomed 21st century to itself, CAKE is a daring and irreverent expression of discontent, with subterranean seriousness and wisdom."\n- Lindsay Lerman, I'm From Nowhere\n"Cake has better mixed medium literary work than a group of MFA grads, better speculative/futurist anti-capitalist theory than a group of Thomas Piketty's, and more believable elegies for what may be wrought from a dead technological age than even the most heartbroken of modern cynics."\n- Robert Lashley, Up South\n"Cake! Who doesn't like cake? The best cakes are multilayered, and this cake is no different. It's a rich mélange of rich nutty humor, creamy fugues of vertiginous erudition, generous thrusts of tangy provocation, rich swirly comedies of toasted coconut and pure Dada extract. It's got songs and dreams and sinister experiments. It's got a seasoned wit and an unseasonable "wormwood sun." How many things go wonderfully wrong in this book? As many things that go wonderfully right, and taste like a lush creamy sentence on the tongue, a wavy oscillation of chaos and strawberries. You know what I like best about this collection? It's chock full of the madness of imagination, the light of the bakery never dims, and every slice is served on a universe of words."\n- John Olson, Larynx Galaxy

Cake

Literature & Fiction

Edenfield, Bryan

Poetry

Nadine Antoinette Maestas is a poet's poet and believes that the empire of the sentence is an extremely oppressive totalitarian regime. She prefers the company of poems so much that she would rather read a bad poem than a good novel, but when she is not doing poetry, Nadine loves mountain biking and trail running in dangerous and remote places in the Northwest. She teaches Creative Writing and Literature in New Hampshire, has facilitated writing workshops through Youthspeaks and has helped to pioneer poetry workshops in several public schools in California and Michigan. Nadine holds an M.F.A. from University of Michigan's Hellen Zell Writer's Program where she was awarded the Faraar award for playwriting. Her hybrid poem play "Hellen on Wheels: A Play of Rhyme and Reason" was performed at California College of the Arts. She is the co-author with Karen Weiser of "Beneath the Bright Discus" (Potes & Poets Press, 2000), and is a co-editor for the poetry anthology Make It True: Poetry from Cascadia. You can find her poems published in Snail Trail Press, Pageboy Magazine, Lyric &, The Germ, Poor Mojo's Almana(k), Really Serious Literature, and the bilingual anthology Make It True Meets Medusario. Her dissertation, Calling out the State: Postmodern American Anthropoetics landed her a Ph.D. from the University of Washington.\nOn one hand Nadine Antoinette Maestas is a literary Latinx dominatrix having her way with language and patriarchy while scrupulously avoiding the scourge of sentences. On the other hand she's alive in a decaying capitalistic empire trying to survive without frying her adrenals with her: "mouth open to every time everywhere." Singing despite not knowing all the notes. Surviving despite not being a white guy in a masculinist culture dying before our eyes. Emerging: "full of sunlight ringing." She might bemoan books as "useless butter," but this is a 21st century poet with a debut book you should read before the alphabet crumbles.\n-- Paul E Nelson, Founder of SPLAB, author of A Time Before Slaughter/Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia, American Prophets (Interviews 1994-2012) and American Sentences. 
This is a poetry of "quiet sounds bursting," the poems flutter and flatter as lullabies, then jar by a sudden "you are my kiss sour lemon quench," and we're mesmerized, seduced by the dreamsong of Maestas' music, a music that finds our "most midnight of places" and "knots our toes in canticles"\n-Thomas Walton (author of All the Useless Things Are Mine)\nCover by Janet Nechama Miller.

Imperialism as Sweet as Insult

Maestas, Nadine

"You gotta find reflections of yourself however you can to survive this country," writes Said Shaiye in this innovative AF (Afrofuturist) memoir. Are You Borg Now cyphers with trauma through a poetics of refusal via hard and beautiful language. Finding vigor in Islam and mirrors in Star Trek: Voyager, Shaiye shifts achingly between memory and improvisation. This is a serious debut." 
-Douglas Kearney, Author of Sho\n"Are You Borg now? heralds the arrival of a bold and important voice. Shaiye's deeply personal self-interrogation blurs genre and form to examine how intersections between culture, race, class, gender and nationality shape one's identity. Vulnerable, affecting, humorous and haunting, so often I clutched my chest and nodded in agreement to Shaiye's keen observations. The reflections collected in these pages will benefit all who read this book."\n-Donald Quist, Author of Harbors & For Other Ghosts\n"Why should one write? This is the question that pervades Said Shaiye's experimental approach to memoir in Are You Borg Now? This book offers many different kinds of answers to such a question, answers that involve facing the effects of trauma and violence with courage, honesty, and a willingness to risk vulnerability. One reason to write is to call forth a voice in solidarity with others who suffer. Shaiye is a writer who transforms the pain of alienation into beautifully lyric writing and from that writing springs a profound faith that one is never really alone."\n-Kathryn Nuernberger, author of The Witch of Eye\n"This book cut me as it wowed me. Shaiye can't help it. He invites you in. But he doesn't want you there. He doesn't want to be there himself, but needs to be. On every page, I found a reflection of an America that sickens and alienates with its easy fast food and easy pop culture. But then, Shaiye recognizes quality, too. And you recognize yourself in it even as you gain Shaiye's very particular viewpoint. Every page you find Shaiye struggling to be okay, to be good, to both honor his culture and struggle to move it forward towards health. This is an honorable project. This is a courageous project. This is the Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man."\n-Geoff Herbach, Award Winning Author of Hooper & Stupid Fast

Are You Borg Now?

Biographies & Memoirs

Shaiye, Said

Community & Culture

Welcome to the Aftermath - an outside-time war-ravaged city that both is-and-is-not the Pacific Northwest of today, and things are bleak. Framed by a series of film photographs by Justin Plinz, photos that seem at first like they could've been taken in the past (until easily-missed details like a cat tractor at the edge of a frame, a website on a poster on the side of a chapel, or the too new cars give it away), this book and these poems by Graham Isaac "question my hometown's innocence" by exploring a city and its people in the wake of war. But it's hard not to read this book as an allegory for Seattle in the era of Amazon and the tech boom. "Things grew and businesses thrived and large buildings came and we felt important. Companies hired and fired and churches and cults and sports, so many sports." And "architecture enthusiasts took photos / of the city's largest shelter, stepping / over those sleeping outside it." I could be biased since I live here. Whether it is or isn't, these poems grapple with the past and present of what a place - a home - is, what it means to its people, and what it can and should be.\nAmber Nelson, author of The Sexiest Man Alive\nFor years now, Graham has haunted the corners and alleys of every city he's lived in, his fragmentary, laconic narratives by turns hilarious, haunting and heartbreaking. I never thought I'd be glad to see Filthy Jerry again, but man, it's timely.\nWood Ingham, room207 press\nThis book begins on a jagged edge and ends on a surprisingly sweet sigh. Its observations are satisfying while mocking any sentimentality that erupts. This is a parallel city that is too close to home for comfort. You are immersed in the narrative staples of Tarty Jane, Filthy Jerry, and Goloth the Destroyer, but again, it is a discomforting reckoning. They are simply background characters on the stage of a bleak city. Waves of narrative, of history, call back to each other, tie together with a dirty, unstable thread. By the end I really wanted Filthy Jerry to find a damn coat. This book is fucking brilliant.\nCourtney A. Butler, author of Wild Horses

Aftermaths: Ghosts, Identity and Architecture

Arts & Photography

Isaac, Graham

Photography & Video

Thankful for this book, and Michael Chang's ability to weave seamlessly in between scenes, to honor the full ecosystem of a narrative-people, places, images, metaphor. This is a rich book, it felt like stepping into a generous and welcoming world.\n-HANIF ABDURRAQIB\nMichael Chang's debut collection is bold, unapologetic, and vibrantly defiant. An interrogation into the confines that govern us on our nation's journey to racial and gender equality.\n-RICHARD BLANCO\nThis book attempts to have more fun and fuck more shit up than any debut collection I've ever read. Michael Chang's irreverence is an ethos, their way of pushing back against a culture that finds them "disposable ... not colored/White enough ... not the arbiter of anything ..." Against that tide, Chang stands the fuck up and says things most poets wouldn't dream of saying, in the process queering American poetry in a bracingly necessary way.\n-JASON KOO\nMichael Chang hits hard and refuses to apologize. Unabashedly crass, brash, provocative and funny, these poems, beneath their comic exteriors, explore an American landscape full of joy and despair-never flinching from the big subjects of desire, belonging, sexuality and race. Chang takes everything in, somehow managing to console even as they trouble us. Once you start reading, it's hard to look away. As they write: "I will dominate you. I will come back."\n-BRUCE SNIDER\nThis collection is, and I mean this literally, everything: grief-full and endlessly flirtatious, an epic ars poetica with an undercurrent of hero's journey, incisive critique of white supremacy and PoBiz, a little hurty and hurt, bursting with heart and language lavish with tinder and fire. We don't need Whitman. We've got Michael Chang to take us beyond the beyond. We're heading out now. It's "time for the beautiful revenge of self-love."\n-TC TOLBERT

Boyfriend Perspective

Chang, Michael

"Welcome to indie poetry's hottest 14-karat bromance." -KIM VODICKA, author of The Elvis Machine "...experimental literature's best kind of gold rush." -JESSIE JANESHEK, author of MADCAP and The Shaky Phase "Long and Hannett have come together in this dual book of the everyday and the seen / heard world of our culture which some would call pop culture but is our actual reality. Long and Hannett are both writing into an exploration of this world and an escape from this microcosmos of early 21st century late stage capitalism. This book is the tl;dr poetics of the metamodern and post postmodern. As it is written: the synopsis is the story." -KENNING JP GARCIA, author of Dawn

The Gold Boys Are Back In Gold Town

Hannett, C. C.

Long, Joshua Robert

This Is Strange June

Gresham, Tex

Spiders. Cancer. Civil war in Syria. Frankly, there are a lot of awful things out there in the world, and most of them aren't fair. But life is so much more than its disasters and grief...and everyone knows that poetry is a balm. These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things is an account of everything we tend to hate, a deeply personal reflection on trauma and mental illness and the evil clowns who haunt our dreams. It is also an exploration of what we can do with the circumstances we are given; it is a search for gratitude in spite of the pain. By illustrating the many kinds of darkness, this collection ultimately strives to find true sources of light...because for every one of our least favorite things, there is an equal and opposite favorite to love.\nPraise for These Are a Few of My Least Favorite ThingsThese Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things is a book that begins--literally--with "a spark" that Shannon Frost Greenstein breathes into a fire that's half hearth, half inferno, and always illuminating. Unflinching and authentic, whether interrogating a history of personal trauma or the poisons of capitalism, Greenstein's poems show us how being a witness to suffering is to become an accessory to suffering, that the pain we internalize becomes what we know foremost about ourselves. "I inhabit -- flawlessly and with surprise -- the character of my own body" Greenstein writes, and it's true: how flawlessly we inhabit our flaws. But then--as Greenstein shows over and over--how wonderful to rise from the wreckage of ourselves and know goodness, beauty, and righteousness. "Today, / I lived and / tomorrow / I will live again."\nTodd Dillard, author of Ways We Vanish, finalist for the 2021 Balcones Poetry Award\n﻿In These Are A Few Of My Least Favorite Things, Shannon Frost Greenstein sings the body pharmacologic. This is a poetic ode to the soul at struggle with maladies, mental illness and the sometimes malevolence of mankind. It is a masterful medicinal release in verse of the toxins that taint mortality.\nKristin Garth, author of The Stakes and other books

These Are A Few Of My Least Favorite Things

Frost Greenstein, Shannon

Barely Half In An Awkward Line

Jay Halsey

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