Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach's The Bear Who Ate the Stars, winner of the 2014 Split Lip Uppercut Chapbook Awards, is a collection of poems that bite like sharpened nails and enlighten with historical, spiritual and political accounts. In the words of poet Michael Meyerhofer (Blue Collar Eulogies, Damnatio Memoriae), "There's a wonderful range to Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach's poems, rendered all the more remarkable by their consistent depth and polish. These poems feel meticulously crafted, despite a certain primal, sometimes sensual quality often falsely seen as antithetical to intellectual poetry. These poems smell of stars and campfires, a deeper sense of story, a mythological thread running, river-like, all the way back to the dawn of time."

The Bear Who Ate the Stars

Literature & Fiction

Dasbach, Julia Kolchinsky

Poetry

Split/Lip Press

In the follow-up to his critically lauded debut An End To All Things, Jared Yates Sexton presents twenty-three new stories that pick up where his first book left off. Whether they're set in a sweat-saturated sparring ring, the backroom of a gas station speakeasy, or in the kitchen of the house down the street, these are glimpses into an America that too-often goes unseen. Witness here the untold tales of the losers and the should've-beens, the dreamers and the hustlers, all of them just spoiling for their turn at glory or the inevitable one-two punch that puts them down for good.

The Hook and The Haymaker

Sexton, Jared Yates

Short Stories & Anthologies

Inspired by America's most prominent hallmark of modern pop culture, The Simpsons, poet Tom C. Hunley shares his narratives––autobiographical or allegorical––by channeling the eccentric personas of residents in the animated sitcom's town, Springfield, and trusting their voices to speak on his behalf, resulting in true poetic entertainment. As author Denise Du Vernay states in the collection's introduction, "Tom's interaction with The Simpsons doesn't follow sitcom or even cartoon rules. He doesn't have to. Tom follows a mysterious set of rules, completely unknown to those of us without a poet's sensibilities." That is the sentiment that defines Hunley as an artist. He is a poet who has a firm grip on poetic formalism (the "rules"), but, as is the case with any true artist––perhaps a guitarist for the sake of a metaphoric example––Hunley knows when it's time to part from his Eddie Van Halen trickery in exchange for what resonates with those who are unfamiliar with the "rules," "theories, and "doctrines" of art: gritty power chords strummed in the manners of Kurt Cobain or Johnny Ramone. While capable of boggling a reader's mind with poetics only a limited audience bothers to appreciate these days, Hunley has taken to The Simpsons in order to depart the shoebox diorama boundaries most readers and writers of verse wallow in, and instead reach out to those of us who want to feel aroused by humor and drama rather than feel disoriented by, for example, accounts of lucid dreaming juxtaposed with archaic Polish folklore found in the nationalistic opera of Stanislaw Moniuszko. In short, Hunley wants poetry back on the map as an element of pop culture rather than vaulted property of academia and patrons of Sotheby's auction house. The State That Springfield Is In may very well be the poetry collection to materialize his bold objective.

The State That Springfield Is In

Hunley, Tom C.

Arts & Photography

Katie Schmid's forget me/hit me/let me drink great quantities of clear, evil liquor was the winner of Split Lip Press's 2015 Turnbuckle Chapbook contest. A collection of poems that is a stunning, longing/love/loss letter to the Midwest.

forget me hit me let me drink great quantities of clear, evil liquor

Schmid, Katie

Narcissism. Sexism. Consumerism and technological fetishism. The cult of media and the rot of war. In his third collection of stories, Jared Yates Sexton turns his eye to the ravages of the American Disease with twenty-five of his wildest and most experimental pieces. Told in raving mad prose fit for these savage times, Sexton skewers every sacred cow in an attempt to diagnose the sickness of Now.

I Am the Oil of the Engine of the World

The characters in this collection of 21 short fictions hum with restlessness. They pine for lost loves and pop music romances, Hollywood heartthrobs, and sunnier towns. They flee from failed relationships and looming violence, adulthood and other deaths. Written with dark humor and incisive, voice-driven prose, Kara Vernor's stories will stick in your head like a song.

Because I Wanted to Write You a Pop Song: Stories

Vernor, Kara

Literary

Through flashbacks, photographs, confessions and letters, we discover our narrator--as queer sex store worker, suicide survivor, isolated lover, immigrant’s daughter, deliberate alcoholic and artistic failure. She cycles through images, obsessions and memories, as she tries to glue together the unhinged parts of herself, both in the physical world and the one in her mind. She recalls Sloan, the girlfriend-who-got-away; Mischa, her heartbroken best friend and co-conspirator; and her elusive older brother whose absence continues to shape her life. With razor-sharp imagery, the fractured story of our narrator comes to life: A young woman at an emotional crossroads embarking on a journey to her future. Or is she falling into her past? In New York’s City’s bars, bedrooms, and elsewhere, Jaroniec evokes the lives of queer underground angels, their deep friendships, their passions and their struggles.

Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover

Jaroniec, Mila

WINNER OF THE 2016 TURNBUCKLE CHAPBOOK CONTEST I Once Met You But You Were Dead is a hybrid chapbook of fiction and nonfiction that juxtaposes girlhood, womanhood, and cultural gender politics with war and violence.

I Once Met You But You Were Dead

Sindu, SJ

What is love if not an invention-not just human instinct but artful construction? The women who people The Invention of Love, Sara Schaff's second story collection, long to conceive of themselves as artists, as lovers, as good sisters and daughters-while contending with financial insecurity and the reality of twenty-first century womanhood. A college student finds her voice as an artist through a tiny lie. A woman grieves her mother's death by shopping for houses she can't afford and will never live in. Against the backdrop of the 2016 election, a copywriter contends with misogyny in the workplace by using that very misogyny against her incompetent male boss. Nostalgic for the women they were or might have been-or still might yet become-their stories illuminate the moments where everything changes-even when what changes is how we must see our futures.

The Invention of Love

Schaff, Sara

In this hybrid work of prose and poetry, Samantha Edmonds tells the story of an artist-the first in space-sent by NASA to the International Space Station on a mission to make the stars accessible to those left on the ground. Nimbly pairing themes of queerness, religious guilt, and an uneasy search for belonging with scientific theories about multiverses, universal consciousness, and habitability on other planets, The Space Poet stands at the edges of human reach, out in the black where nothing can live, and dares to imagine a home.

The Space Poet

Edmonds, Samantha

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Books by Split/Lip Press