Fiction. The surface of FLUORIDE is inhabited by bizarre misanthropes, fumbling humans, and radical subversives, but in its basement live characters that only want something just out of reach: popularity, the perfect family, a full head of hair, restitution, a glimpse into the future to cope with the present. Chad Meadows' engaging debut collection brims in absurd and hilarious situations that are deeply sad and sympathetic. His dystopic, ultra-capitalistic worlds don't seem so far off from our own, and his protagonists--yearning for connection with a father, lover, friend, or the past--can be found in any of us. This is a book that will remind you that even the strangest of us is human, and our world is crumbling around us. "In his wonderful debut collection, FLUORIDE, Chad Meadows gives us worlds inhabited by bizarre misanthropes, fumbling idiots, and radical subversives. These stories dramatize enough absurd and hilarious situations to last a lifetime. At the same time, these seem like people we know in their yearning for direction and connection. Indeed, this book reminds us that even the strangest among us is human."--Jeffery Renard Allen "When I first saw Chad Meadows' FLUORIDE I thought, 'What a cute way to spell Florida--sounds French!' But don't fret, friends--this book has zilch to do with that Hell Hole, and everything to do with Good Times. If it's a 'Doom Loop' you want, well, take a knee, because this bad mamma jamma has four of them. Kicked out of your community college explosives course? Class is in session, Poindexter, courtesy of 'How To Make A Bomb.' In summary, Chad's merchandise contains 275 pages. Do the math!"--Thomas Mundt "The stories in FLUORIDE are zany, dark tales of celebrity worship, internet addiction, and wild metaphysical quests. This is the land of the absurd, populated by baffled seekers and adventurers full of vision and persistence. Chad Meadows is a hilarious, maverick writer."--René Steinke

Fluoride: Stories

Literature & Fiction

Meadows, Chad

Short Stories & Anthologies

Tolsun Books

Literary Nonfiction. Art. BLOOD IN THE ASPHALT: PRAYERS FROM THE HIGHWAY chronicles a lifetime spent as a tow truck driver on the lonely highways of the American Southwest. Jesse Sensibar explores reinvention and resurrection through his photographs and his linked collection of short stories, mourning and celebrating loss, gratefulness, and forgiveness. A shrine to the Virgin Mary and a crude cross honoring a dog are portrayed with equal brevity in the photographs, while narrations skip through time and recall hitchhikers, old friends, drunks, car accident victims, junkies, and fitness trainers. Winding through Arizona, California, and Mexico, Jesse Sensibar contemplates his need to record roadside shrines, grieve the numerous former lives one person can live, and succumb to the pull of a highway that gives and a highway that takes away. In this disappearing American West, the ghosts and saints of the highway keep watch over the weary travelers compelled to document and remember.

Blood in the Asphalt: Prayers from the Highway

Arts & Photography

Sensibar, Jesse

Photography & Video

Fiction. IF ONE OF US SHOULD DIE, I'LL MOVE TO PARIS is very much like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get. The range of flavors is startling. The first three stories alone range from Redneck weddings, Korean cooking theory, Innocent porn, co-option of preachers, hair problems and overly sensitive therapists with problem roosters. From there, we move to eating disorders, Jewish jokes, Catholic problems, Chateau Belushi, drug problems, Greyhound bus rides, bombing in New Haven, screenwriting, syndication, and the place in Hell where advertising executives reside. It's a wild ride, and a richly textured one and not one of these stories can be described in a single sentence.

If One of Us Should Die, I'll Move to Paris

French, Brandon

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Memoir. A daughter's book, a book that exposes the unwitting hurt parents can inflict on their children, it makes sense that many pieces here are inspired by fairy tales. Imagine Red Riding Hood, a woman in her late twenties or early thirties now, or Gretel, also grown. This is just the kind of tale they would tell, these daughters with absent mothers and fathers who have experienced loss and betrayal. Just to set the record straight. Just to tell it like it really was, to make sure we hear their voice, their side of the story.

Animal You'll Surely Become: Extended Edition

Hailer, Brittany

Essays & Correspondence

Poetry. Haunted and haunting, Colin Pope's bracing poems limn, with armorless and spectacular candor, what it means to be left behind and shaken to the core by a lover's upending illness and suicide. In these risk-taking pages, this new and necessary poet becomes a steely bard, a wide-awake chronicler, and an intrepid philosopher of the word farewell. This brave, go-for-broke first book has a razor-keen beauty and empathy so precise, so powerful and arresting that it's already clear that WHY I DIDN'T GO TO YOUR FUNERAL deserves its rightful place beside the finest literature of grief and mourning.

Why I Didn't Go to Your Funeral

Self-Help

Pope, Colin

Death & Grief

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Poetry. Hybrid Genre. "To call Sarah Adleman's memoir profound and beautiful would be a grossly inadequate attempt to describe a brilliant, deeply moving yet unflinchingly unsentimental exploration of grief I could never in my life have begun to imagine, at least not until now: a blended-genre collage of historical, scientific, autobiographical and deeply spiritual nonfiction, poetry and prose poetry, including the poetry written by Adleman's wise, remarkable mother. This memoir asks some of the most difficult questions anyone can ask: How is acceptance and forgiveness even possible in the face of unspeakable cruelty and violence? How is it possible even to describe, much less to find the right metaphors for, unspeakable pain and grief? Yet through her most profound struggles, Adleman finds a way, taking us on long journeys by train, across snowy landscapes, even to sweat lodges and Tibet, making a deep dive into such a complex array of extended metaphors that she can finally bring herself, and us, to a kind of understanding and acceptance. Before now, I could not have imagined a more courageous, life-changing memoir than this, yet here it is, a loving tribute to Adleman's long-grieving father and lost mother."--Lex Williford

The Lampblack Blue of Memory: My Mother Echoes

Adleman, Sarah Abigail

Parenting & Relationships

Fiction. Short Stories. SOME PLACES WORTH LEAVING is a collection of short stories about women and girls and their attempts at escaping various emotional, physical, and spiritual predicaments. From creative and sometimes disturbing coping mechanisms to revenge fantasies, bad habits and magic spells, the characters in these stories provide an invitation into the dark side of what it is like to be female and the lengths women will go to survive in the world.

Some Places Worth Leaving

Burlison, Dani

Poetry. Photography. Jia Oak Baker's stunning photographs of Flesh Cactus, a discarded punk-rock-skateboard-video-prop-mask, and Shawnte Orion's sardonic, pop culture-infused poetry make the strange world of GRAVITY & SPECTACLE. It is a slanted ode to Phoenix and its surrounding deserts, both gorgeous and absurd, stoic and wry, gravitational and spectacular, a "love letter to the fireplace" of a hometown seen through the lens and the pens of two of its inhabitants.

Gravity & Spectacle

Orion, Shawnte

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. OUR LADY OF PERPETUAL DEGENERACY asserts the possibilities for queer/trans sexualities and genders in Catholic saints. These speakers navigate a world of mingling divine and mundane as saints leave their lives in heaven behind and haunt an earthly narrator. Saints act here as figures between human and supernatural--bringing into question other binaries and structures like gender, memory, and family. The collection searches for a new kind of communion of saints and a new, often erotic and sometimes tender, kind of prayer. "Robin Gow's first full-length collection is full of verve, sass, mystery, and wonder. In OUR LADY OF PERPETUAL DEGENERACY, Gow has made a family of queer angels and reclaimed saints in poems that are as finely crafted as they are magical and sincere. 'There were no holy orders for women / or queers, so we made Poems, thrived hidden.' Indeed we did and Gow's book is proof of the thriving. Thank the Holy Queer Mystery for these poems (and for all of our queer and trans lives)--like 'hammers in / the flower vases. they bloom.'"--TC Tolbert "Robin Gow's brilliant poems navigate the liminal world between religious figures and what remains to be figured out, between the real and the sexual and the realignment of expectations. An outspoken curator of sound and meaning, Gow is an accomplished spinner of metaphor, of emphasis, of surprise. OUR LADY OF PERPETUAL DEGENERACY is the debut full collection from a visionary poet who wields craft with surgical precision, and leaves all of us questioning what we know, and what we recalled we once believed."--Jacqueline Jones LaMon

Our Lady of Perpetual Degeneracy

Gow, Robin

Poetry

Literary Nonfiction. Art. BLOOD IN THE ASPHALT, PRAYERS FROM THE HIGHWAY: NOIR EDITION chronicles a lifetime spent as a tow truck driver on the lonely highways of the American Southwest. Jesse Sensibar explores reinvention and resurrection through his photographs and his linked collection of short stories, mourning and celebrating loss, gratefulness, and forgiveness. A shrine to the Virgin Mary and a crude cross honoring a dog are portrayed with equal brevity in the photographs, while narrations skip through time and recall hitchhikers, old friends, drunks, car accident victims, junkies, and fitness trainers. Winding through Arizona, California, and Mexico, Jesse Sensibar contemplates his need to record roadside shrines, grieve the numerous former lives one person can live, and succumb to the pull of a highway that gives and a highway that takes away. In this disappearing American West, the ghosts and saints of the highway keep watch over the weary travelers compelled to document and remember. "We are so often moving at breakneck speed, and this book is that rare thing: a quiet, commanding voice saying stop. Stop, and notice. You'll never get it right if you try to explain."--Carolyn Guinzio "Sensibar's narratives of highways and the memorials he finds on them are as deeply rooted in narrative as crosses dug into the banks on the side of the road and yet as lyrical as the angels Sensibar hopes touchdown upon the remains of what the highway took away. This book will make you feel like driving the open road makes you feel: melancholy, heartbroken, happy, and free."--Nicole Walker

Blood in the Asphalt, Prayers from the Highway: Noir Edition

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