Poetry. "HEAVY PETTING is a hell of a sexy book. A sexy and generous book. A book where thighs are 'spread like warm apple butter,' where one eye is so close to another there is no sight, where we don't 'feel clean unless...burning,' where the not forgotten magic of the Mississippi River, 'giant but quiet' makes lovers fall asleep inside each other, where when it is 'too cold to sunbathe' the speaker writes letters to skin—the whole thing a kind of 'relationship porn.' Or maybe this book is feeling porn... So, let's do it. Let's live a burning life. Read this book. Be touched and burned and be happy about it. We don't feel clean until we are burning anyway."—Dorothea Lasky "If you wake up tomorrow early and Frank O'Hara is a Sony Walkman, Xanax is the new Surgeon General, and someone you're not sure you recognize as your beloved is writing his/her name on the inside of your lip, don't be alarmed, you're reading HEAVY PETTING by Gregory Sherl."—Matt Hart

Heavy Petting

Literature & Fiction

Sherl, Gregory

Poetry

YesYes Books

Poetry. "Nate Slawson's debut collection, PANIC ATTACK, USA, is a brass-knuckled love letter to a lost world. Meet the Cerberus of Slawson's vision: spinal cords &amp; grizzly bears, lost cities &amp; body bags, bloodstains of dreams &amp; birthday parties, yellowjackets &amp; rattlesnakes, vampires &amp; movie theaters, amens &amp; fuck-offs, Heather Locklear &amp; Superchunk, unidentifiable bodies of moonlight, midwestern topography &amp; tommy guns, teeth &amp; knee-caps, belt buckles &amp; wanderlust. And there is more &amp; more in the fine carousel of his brilliant wit &amp; tenderness. Finally, a voice emerges to translate the wildfire of loneliness and memory. Each of these poems is a muscle—reflexive &amp; close to the bone where America waits to be broken &amp; re-cast. I trust Nate Slawson's poems to name lightning."—Rachel Eliza Griffiths "Thank the poetry gods that there is someone like Nate Slawson in this otherwise neutered world. Thank the poetry gods that Nate Slawson writes with a hard-on. When I picture in my head what the speakers in these poems look like, this is what I come up with: a man naked on a pogo stick hopping down the street. This is a man, in other words, who lets everything hang out. This is a man who is not afraid or ashamed to tell it like is. Christ if I don't wish there were more people like this, and especially more poets like this."—from the foreword by Peter Markus

Panic Attack, USA

Slawson, Nate

Poetry. "Thomas Patrick Levy's poems evoke a darkly lit American otherworld filled with withering cornstalks, rusted tractors and pulsating shadows. The narrator of these poems is an amorphous Nowhere Man, one whose desperation and longing crystallize in passionate non sequiturs and moments of heartrending tenderness, often towards an equally shadowy female presence. Reading proliferation of ingenious sentences in I DON'T MIND IF YOU'RE FEELING ALONE is a singular experience that is as haunting as it is touching."—Ben Mirov "These pieces fold in on themselves, light but sharp and sensual too; sexy little papercuts from the inside of an origami box."—Amelia Gray

I Don't Mind if You're Feeling Alone

Levy, Thomas Patrick

Poetry. "Here is some sorcery, not necessarily explicable. Here is the invisible; Robert Ostrom traffics in it. The poems of THE YOUNGEST BUTCHER IN ILLIONOIS are some of the most gifted I've ever read. 'We are not safe,' he writes—but nor would we ever, for a moment (here) want to be. There's something oddly shy about the way these poems comport themselves, but the imagination is brazen with yearning. The authority of craft is bracing: the lines are sutured but there are no scars. The dark, passionate, miniature universe Ostrom has composed is seductive and whimsical. This is a new voice—edgy, stricken with attentiveness, soft-spoken, numinous. Take him at his word."—Lucie Brock-Broido

The Youngest Butcher in Illinois

Ostrom, Robert

Poetry. Music. Edited by KMA Sullivan and Rob MacDonald. FREQUENCIES, VOLUME ONE: A CHAPBOOK AND MUSIC ANTHLOGY is three writers and three bands. Nine downloadable music files from Sharon Van Etten, Here We Go Magic, and Outlands. Three chapbooks (160 pages total!) from Bob Hicok (Speaking American), Molly Gaudry (Lost July), and Phillip B. Williams (Burn).

Frequencies, Volume One: A Chapbook and Music Anthology

Hicok, Bob

Williams, Phillip B.

Gaudry, Molly

History & Criticism

Poetry. "The title of Melnick's stunning book is a microcosm of the poems within—the uncertainty of 'if I should say' followed by the defiance of 'I have hope.' Her poems follow moments of unmooredness ('I am best / when I dabble in consciousness and a soundly / spinning room') with blinding insight ('You wouldn't know happy if it kissed you on the mouth')—tiptoeing followed by a kick to the head. On the melancholy-go-round of these poems, there's a swan-seat for sadness but also a tiger called Beauty and a horse called Hope. The unexpected music and syntax of Melnick's work will make you want to ride/read it again and again."—Matthea Harvey "Lynn Melnick's poems are a series of swift kicks knocking over whatever a lot of Boys think it's like to be a Girl. They're also the bruises afterward. IF I SHOULD SAY I HAVE HOPE teems with very small and much larger devastations, crackling throughout with fierceness and stealth and wry intelligence. 'There's some kind of crazy on the way,' she says. Those of us who've seen that crazy coming need this book. Those of us who haven't need it more."—Mark Bibbins "Lynn Melnick's poems in IF I SHOULD SAY I HAVE HOPE recall the raw power of Anne Sexton and read like Lynchian dreams. The voice of these poems proves consistent and potent, steeping the book in weather and worry, in impulse and flesh, sometimes in blood. Most of the poems in IF I SHOULD SAY I HAVE HOPE are formal in structure and tone, built mostly in couplets, sometimes tercets and quatrains, and all demand recognition of truth, of human details we might rather deny. If I should say I have hope, the speaker suggests, I need to say all of these things first. She confesses, 'I'll wreck it if it's good.' Calling attention to our often-destructive tendencies, the poet admits fallibility and imperfection, while quietly offering refuge to a thing with feathers."—Melinda Wilson, Coldfront Magazine's Top 40 Poetry Books of 2012

If I Should Say I Have Hope

Melnick, Lynn

Poetry. "This is a book by a man who is sputtering gray zeppelin in what used to be sky, a man out of bicycle parts, who likes when trees sizzle and who knows that although there are no angels to speak of out here, the neighbors shout and call the cops for all the noise not there. This book is full of crazy, vital energy. Full of miraculous and mundane, full of coke bottles, subways, cotton swabs, wasps, sharp nipples, and voices from the great soup that Frank Stanford once tried to feed all hungry mouths of America. And, the poet who is the child, stands at the window, as night becomes morning. This too, is magic. Just pick up your feet and watch."—Ilya Kaminsky

Man Vs. Sky

Self-Help

Zeller, Corey

Death & Grief

Poetry. LGBT Studies. "Tanya Olson's BOYISHLY is a magic book. It casts a spell upon you. Olson uses language like Gertrude Stein does, building large monuments of sound into humming lattices, where a 'whale will do as a whale will do,' or where 'tree forms shapes for tiger' and 'tiger takes shape / under tree.' In this book, Olson writes poems to a future America from beyond the planetary gravestone, where there is only a 'boyish summer' and the 'boyish waters.' The voice says come back to me. I am not done with you. I was waiting for you all along."—Dorothea Lasky

Boyishly

Olson, Tanya

Poetry. "The debut of a fierce talent and vision."—Maggie Nelson "With its limitless invention, emotional force, and profound social relevance, American Barricade is a groundbreaking first book and stands to influence the aesthetic disposition of its author's generation."—Boston Review "Explosively and assiduously crafted."—C.D. Wright "A bold, ambitious, unforgettable debut from one of our most exciting young poets."—Timothy Donnelly

American Barricade

Schoonebeek, Danniel

Poetry. LGBT Studies. African American Studies. Winner, Lambda Literary Award, Gay Poetry 2015. Chosen by Don Share for Boston Globe's Best Poetry Books, 2014. 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Finalist, Norma Farber First Book Award, Poetry Society of America. "The poems of [INSERT] BOY have need of the body—desire it and lament its mortality—but over and again they assert Smith's seemingly religious belief that every sound the body makes, every word and wail, is only possible through connection to some other plane of existence. This is a lovely, voice-driven book, singing high notes sharp as a switchblade."—Jericho Brown "Danez Smith lays down the gauntlet for all of us to speak our deepest truths with more elegance, more ferocity, and almost more beauty than a reader can bear."—Gabrielle Calvocoressi

[insert] boy (Kate Tufts Discovery Award)

Smith, Danez

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