A gorgeous home with a 3-acre garden in a precious lakefront community. An enviable career in Chicago's competitive restaurant scene. At a time when these are some of the ultimate symbols of happiness and success, why would anyone want to give them up? 
Rescue from House Gorgeous is the brutally honest and wickedly hilarious tale of just that. Within it is The 4-Step Rescue, a no-nosense way to separate decor crap from the style of real life. Written by Dan Ho, the founder and editor of award-winning Rescue Magazine, the book will have domestic goddess cringing, makeover queens screaming, and readers cheering.

Rescue from House Gorgeous

Ho, Dan

Rescue Press

Poetry. African American Studies. In Shane McCrae's IN CANAAN, he inhabits the personae of the escaped slave Margaret Garner, who, in the mid-1800s, murdered one of her daughters in order to keep her from returning to slavery. "I couldn't stop/Hurting her because it hurt," writes McCrae in the voice of Garner, "Before that night   I never had the chance to love   / Anyone/ she was the first   person I loved." McCrae composes in broken forms and shattered fragments, retelling a harrowing historical story through the imagined first-person point of view of its tortured and terrified heroine.

In Canaan

Literature & Fiction

McCrae, Shane

Poetry

Fiction. THERE IS SOMETHING INSIDE, IT WANTS TO GET OUT is the brief and stunning debut by fiction writer Madeline McDonnell. In these technically surprising and lyrically astounding stories, the reader meets three haunted, singular, and unsettled protagonists—Wednesday, Mary, and Lucy—who are up to and up against all sorts of horrendous and hilarious trouble. The reader will discover in this trinity a deeply intelligent, comic, and chaotic view of consciousness, pleasure, and shame along with a panic-inducing proposal, cancer-basketball, and a series of passionate car crashes. Perhaps more importantly, the reader will fall for McDonnell's poetic touch and her absolute attention to the magic of the sentence.

There Is Something Inside, It Wants to Get Out

McDonnell, Madeline

Contemporary

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Andrea Rexilius's first book, TO BE HUMAN IS TO BE A CONVERSATION, combines memoir, essay, performance, research, poetry, and lyric meditation to entwine, twist, and twin the physical and spiritual consequences of sisterhood. Through a series of investigations and experiments, the text transforms initial factual fragments into the bodily material of the (heard and unheard) language of intimates. "Our crime is she began to grow in my skin," writes Rexilius, "A con artist. A mammal. A flower at the back of my skull."

To Be Human Is to Be a Conversation

Rexilius, Andrea

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Art. "I want to write you a beautiful book of prose, against not least the before-too-long loss of tongue and sense and all sun-defiant hues on the river bend, and none of us able to say or touch or see, soon enough, soon enough, aground, to give you this my voice today nevertheless, withstanding, nevertheless, given everything, for you, a clear note from a complicated bell," begins Zach Savich in his first book of prose. He goes on to compose a powerful, precise, and playfully chaotic book-length lyric memoir on art, process, friendship, place, and imagination.

Events Film Cannot Withstand

Savich, Zach

History & Criticism

Poetry. Oblique, intelligent, and sad, THE LILY WILL introduces readers to a voice beautifully sustained through compressed lyrics and long, meticulous sequences. The geography of this book is one of thistles and ice, love flashed with fear, and frail bodies seeking safety in heavy weather. In its warped miniatures (here an eye, there a red leaf, seen distended through iced glass) there is a commitment to smallness, vulnerability marked by precision, and intimations, too, of the eternal: "What is earthly? / An impulse to paradise."

The Lily Will

Dickey, Melissa

Fiction. Shot through with dark humor, desolate landscapes, and seemingly impossible plot turns, IN THE ABSENCE OF PREDATORS is a striking collection that haunts long after the stories have reached their outlandish conclusions. Here we discover the most captivating of human forms: dreamers, liars, thieves, murderers, and lovers—characters provoked to search, and those abandoned by their own fates and identities. Wilhelm's narrative crescendos disclose the most terrifying corners of this world; there are wrecks, blizzards, asylums, agents, road trips, and an army of ghosts. IN THE ABSENCE OF PREDATORS is a masterful debut collection of five cracked and astonishing stories.

In The Absence of Predators

Wilhelm, Vinnie

Poetry. Inhabited by spirits, shadows, and ghosts harmonizing from the bleak and muddy bottoms of The Lake—the One and Only Lake—Blueberry Elizabeth Morningsnow's debut collection of poems, WHALE IN THE WOODS, is a landscape of wild-hearted voices calling to us through passions so profound only Whitman has ever evoked them. Resolved, at first, to a ruined and dissolving world, these poems expand and reawaken the sounds of a mythmaking chorus. "A lake is born," we learn, "composed entirely of warm human eyes" and "a child / is born with eyes that only see when he closes him / A dark lake writes a poem / about lakes. It's different than / any other poem about lakes." WHALE IN THE WOODS is brazen, sorrowful, ecstatic, and astonished, and Morningsnow a voice like no other in contemporary poetry. Winner of Rescue Press's 2011 Black Box Poetry Prize, selected by Sabrina Orah Mark. "Here is a study of a world where God is a fossil, and the woods is a fossil, and the father is a fossil, and the lake is a fossil, and the sun is a fossil, and the poet is a fossil, and being alive is a fossil, and being dead is a fossil, and day is a fossil, and hello is a fossil, and goodbye is a fossil. Morningsnow digs so gorgeously. Her kindness is a gigantic mercy. She will trace you back."—Sabrina Orah Mark

Whale in the Woods

Morningsnow, Blueberry Elizabeth

Poetry. Like an army of flowering stones, Philip Sorenson's OF EMBODIES evolves fixed positions into organic movement and marches straight into your open heart. These poems are the body and the text; the temple and a subject of discovery—their urgency manifesting itself in vanishing memory, actively decomposing letters, and what kind of material might survive you. These poems are interested in evidence, exact specimens, and wild living inquiry. Here there are indications of the inner workings of the earth, upsets, burials, blood, membranes, mouths, and "tongues learning to penetrate a word with the body to lean in and whisper but meaning is a fleeing." OF EMBODIES was the Editor's Choice pick for Rescue Press's 2011 Black Box Poetry Prize.

Of Embodies

Sorenson, Philip

Fiction. Do we call TOUGHLAHOMA the satire we all deserve, a monstrously true fable of the late days of capitalism? We could say, for instance, that TOUGHLAHOMA crosses Vico's early sociological theories with Hobbes's and Locke's conflicting notions of the state of nature to tell the story of one civilization's failed attempts to become civilized. Or we could say that TOUGHLAHOMA is simply a first account of the Toughlahomans and what they did and do: Jesus went to the End and back before inventing Uglahoma. Ishmael kicked ass and said taglines all over Roughlahoma. Good Dad mostly stayed put. The rest of them hang around the Community Center chewing their Necro Wafers and just being themselves—bicepsual, troublesexual, and martially artistic—in case they ever get to have a war. Let's call TOUGHLAHOMA a history, a scripture, a goddamn dithyramb, and a public relations campaign all in one. "In the post-apocalyptic, Mad Max world of literature, Christian TeBordo is the guy with the shotgun."—Amelia Gray  "A non-stop rush of luscious language and ingeniously twisted story logic told from another dimension, perhaps the fifth or sixth."—David Ohle

Toughlahoma

TeBordo, Christian

Humor & Satire

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