Search results for ""Coffee House Press""

"[Genoa] invites us to pass our minds down a new but ancient track, to become, ourselves, both fact and fiction, and to discover something true about the geography of time."-William Gass, The New York Times "Genoa is a spectacular confrontation with Melville's work, the journals of Columbus and molecular biology-all folded into a hallucinatory narrative about two brothers and their different paths through the American century."-Publishers Weekly "Much like his great-grandfather, Herman Melville, Paul Metcalf brings an extraordinary diversity of materials into the complex patterns of analogy and metaphor, to affect a common term altogether brilliant in its imagination."-Robert Creeley "A unique work of historical and literary imagination, eloquent and powerful. I know of nothing like it."-Howard Zinn First published in 1965, Genoa is Paul Metcalf's purging of the burden of his relationship to his great-grandfather Herman Melville. In his signature polyphonic style, a storm-tossed Indiana attic becomes the site of a reckoning with the life of Melville; with Columbus, and his myth; and between two brothers-one, an MD who refuses to practice; the other, an executed murderer. Genoa is a triumph, a novel without peer, that vibrates and sings a quintessentially American song. Paul Metcalf (1917-99) was an American writer and the great-grandson of Herman Melville. His three volume Collected Works were published by Coffee House Press in 1996.

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Incarcerated for his subversive connection to the old, living world, a prisoner makes the most of his isolation in this captivating allegorical tale about tyranny, conviction, and the enduring power of imagination. Upon setting out for a morning walk with his knobby stick in hand, a young man is arrested by a robot called the Plotinus and abandoned in a cell where one beam of sunlight beckons through an air duct. Rapping his knuckles against the vent to relay his tale of woe in code, he recalls his lost love and their group’s forbidden activities; his readings in philosophy and the sciences; and sweet memories of freedom’s small pleasures. As the captive confronts his increasingly dire circumstances with rigorous optimism, the appearance of fantastical visitors and miraculous objects in his cell further blurs the line between hallucination and dystopian reality. Told with uncanny warmth and intellectual brio, The Plotinus is Rikki Ducornet’s most unforgettable story yet.

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Seventeen stories traverse borderlines, mythic and real, in the lives of Filipino and Filipino American women and their ancestors. Moving from small Philippine villages of the past to the hurricane-beaten coast of near-future Florida, When the Hibiscus Falls examines the triumphs and sorrows that connect generations of women. Daughters, sisters, mothers, aunties, cousins, and lolas commune with their ancestors and their descendants, mourning what is lost when an older generation dies, celebrating what is gained when we safeguard their legacy for those who come after us. Featuring figures familiar from M. Evelina Galang’s other acclaimed and richly imagined novels and stories, When the Hibiscus Falls dwells within the complexity of family, community, and Filipino American identity. Each story is an offering, a bloom that unfurls its petals and holds space in the sun.

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Wry and witty poems from an avant-garde great, collected in one volume for the first time. The Collected Poems of Anselm Hollo gathers over five decades of the poet’s multifaceted work into one elegant volume. All of Hollo’s trademark humor, wisdom, and charm is on display here for students and fans of contemporary poetry. Warm, insightful, and delightfully observant, this comprehensive collection from the author of over forty books serves as a reminder that poetry isn’t just an aspiration or avocation, but a way of life.

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Over the course of one fateful day, Trisha Donahue begins to reclaim her courage and discovers secrets in a familiar place. A surprising, quietly dramatic adventure story infused with Ellen Cooney’s warm humor and wisdom. After years of skilled work and dedication, Trisha Donahue is denied a well-earned promotion by her company’s male executives, who give it instead to an underqualified man. Devastated, forty-four-year-old Trisha begins to reckon with the demands that exhaust her, the injustices that confront her, and the ways she has betrayed herself “just to fit in” with coworkers who resent and belittle her abilities. But at the Rose & Emerald—a unique rural restaurant Trisha has loved since childhood—her company’s annual Banquet Day sets in motion a surprising adventure, revealing unexpected allies, hidden passageways, and an interstellar secret. Encouraged by a vivid cast of characters, from sympathetic coworkers to the mysterious employees of the fabled Rose & Emerald, Trisha makes a decision that will change her professional and personal life forever. From acclaimed author Ellen Cooney, A Cowardly Woman No More is a lively, luminous novel about a wife, mom, and career woman who brings herself first nervously, then more and more bravely, through a monumental transformation.

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In Fighting Is Like a Wife, Eloisa Amezcua uses striking visual poems to reconstruct the love story—and the tragedy—of two-time world boxing champion “Schoolboy” Bobby Chacon and his first wife, Valorie Ginn. Bobby took to fighting the way a surfer takes to water: the waves and crests, the highs and the pummeling lows. Valorie, as girlfriend, then wife, then mother of their children, was proud of Bobby and how he found a way out of the harsh world they were born into. But the brain-sloshing blows, the women, and the alcohol began to take their toll, and soon Bobby couldn’t hear her anymore. With her fate affixed to Bobby’s, and Bobby’s to the ring, Valorie sought her own way out of this dilemma.Using haunting, visceral language to evoke the emotion of the fight, and incorporating direct quotations from sports commentators and Bobby himself, Fighting Is Like a Wife reveals how boxing, like love and poetry, can be brutal, vulnerable, and surprising.

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Finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Poetry Winner of the 2022 Emory Elliott Book Award Finalist for the 2023 Firecracker Award Finalist for the 2023 ASLE Creative Book Award Interweaving elegy, indictment, and hope into a love letter to California, Look at This Blue examines America’s genocidal past and present to warn of a future threatened by mass extinction and climate peril. Truths about what we have lost and have yet to lose permeate this book-length poem by American Book Award winner and Fulbright scholar Allison Adelle Hedge Coke. An assemblage of historical record and lyric fragments, these poems form a taxonomy of threatened lives—human, plant, and animal—in a century marked by climate emergency. Look at This Blue insists upon a reckoning with and redress of America’s continuing violence toward Earth and its peoples, as Hedge Coke’s cataloguing of loss crescendos into resistance.

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In Written after a Massacre, Daniel Borzutzky rages against the military industrial complex that profits from violence, against the unfair policing of certain kinds of bodies, against xenophobia passing for immigration policy. He grieves for the children in cages and the martyrs of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburg. But pulsing amid Borzutzky’s outrage over our era’s tragedies is a longing for something better: for generosity to triumph over stinginess and for peace to transform injustice.

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What was Takako Konishi really doing in North Dakota, and why did she end up dead? Did she get lost and freeze to death, as the police concluded, while searching for the fictional treasure buried in a snowbank at the end of the Coen Brothers’ film Fargo? Or was it something else that brought her there: unrequited love, ritual suicide, a meteor shower, a far-flung search for purpose? The seed of an obsession took root in struggling film student Jana Larson when she chanced upon a news bulletin about the case. Over the years and across continents, the material Jana gathered in her search for the real Takako outgrew multiple attempts at screenplays and became this remarkable, genre-bending essay that leans into the space between fact and fiction, life and death, author and subject, reality and delusion.

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For decades the suburbs have been where art happens despite: despite the conformity, the emptiness, the sameness. Time and again, the story is one of gems formed under pressure and that resentment of the suburbs is the key ingredient for creative transcendence. But what if, contrary to that, the suburb has actually been an incubator for distinctly American art, as positively and as surely as in any other cultural hothouse? Mixing personal experience, cultural reportage, and history while rejecting clichés and pieties and these essays stretch across the country in an effort to show that this uniquely American milieu deserves another look.

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As a child during the height of the Cold War, Steve Healey learns that his father is a spy for the CIA. Beneath the banality of everyday life—the suburbs of Washington, DC; school and play; his parents’ deteriorating marriage—assumed names, parallel lives, and myriad Cold War menaces linger. Drawing from CIA training manuals and pop culture references alike, Healey’s poetry is both intimate and claustrophobic. In these poems, the natural anxiety of childhood is compounded by the weight of both national and family secrets, and Healey draws deep parallels between the shaky foundations of truth in his past and the paranoia and obfuscation that envelops our nation’s present.

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In poems rich with sensuality and discord, Mukomolova explores her complex identity—Russian, Jewish, refugee, New Yorker, lesbian— through the Russian tale of Vasilyssa, a young girl left to fend for herself against the witch Baba Yaga. Heavy with family and fable, these poems are a beautiful articulation of difference under duress.

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Not Here is a flight plan for escape and a map for navigating home; a queer Vietnamese American body in confrontation with whiteness, trauma, family, and nostalgia; and a big beating heart of a book. Nguyen's poems ache with loneliness and desire and the giddy terrors of allowing yourself to hope for love, and revel in moments of connection achieved.

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In the outskirts of Buenos Aires in 1907, a doctor becomes involved in a misguided experiment that investigates the threshold between life and death. One hundred years later, a celebrated artist goes to extremes in search of aesthetic transformation, turning himself into an art object. How far are we willing to go, Larraquy asks, in pursuit of transcendence? The world of Comemadre is full of vulgarity, excess, and discomfort: strange ants that form almost perfect circles, missing body parts, obsessive love affairs, and man-eating plants. Darkly funny, smart, and engrossing, here the monstrous is not alien, but the consquence of our relentless pursuit of collective and personal progress.

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Winner of 2013 Wheatley Book Award in Poetry Finalist for 2013 William Carlos Williams Award Winner of 2014 Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry "Patricia Smith is writing some of the best poetry in America today. Ms Smith's new book, Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, is just beautiful--and like the America she embodies and represents--dangerously beautiful. Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah is a stunning and transcendent work of art, despite, and perhaps because of, its pain. This book shines." --Sapphire "One of the best poets around and has been for a long time." --Terrance Hayes "Smith's work is direct, colloquial, inclusive, adventuresome." --Gwendolyn Brooks In her newest collection, Patricia Smith explores the second wave of the Great Migration. Shifting from spoken word to free verse to traditional forms, she reveals "that soul beneath the vinyl." Patricia Smith is the author of five volumes of poetry, including Blood Dazzler, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, and Teahouse of the Almighty, a National Poetry Series selection. She lives in New Jersey.

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Dazzling and ambitious, this multivoiced fusion of prose, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy spins an epic tale of America’s struggle for civil rights as it played out in San Francisco near the end of the 1960s. As Karen Tei Yamashita’s motley cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs make their way through the history of the day, they become caught in a riptide of politics and passion, clashing ideologies, and personal turmoil.The tenth anniversary edition of this National Book Award finalist brings the joys and struggles of the I Hotel to a whole new generation of readers, historians, and activists.

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"Jenny is the future of nonfiction in America. What an absurdly arrogant statement to make. I make it anyway. Watch." —John D'Agata"Yes, Aristotle, there can be pleasure without 'complete and unified action with a beginning, middle, and end.' Jenny Boully has done it." —Mary Jo Bang"Jenny Boully is a deeply weird writer—in the best way." —Ander MonsonJenny Boully's essays are ripe with romance and sensual pleasures, drawing connections between the digression, reflection, imagination, and experience that characterizes falling in love as well as the life of a writer. Literary theory, philosophy, and linguistics rub up against memory, dreamscapes, and fancy, making the practice of writing a metaphor for the illusory nature of experience. Betwixt and Between is, in many ways, simply a book about how to live.Jenny Boully is the author of The Body: An Essay, The Book of Beginnings and Endings: Essays, not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, and other books. Born in Thailand, she grew up in Texas and holds a PhD in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She teaches creative writing and literature at Columbia College Chicago.

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Social Poetics documents the imaginative militancy and emergent solidarities of a new, insurgent working class poetry community rising up across the globe. Part autobiography, part literary criticism, part Marxist theory, Social Poetics presents a people’s history of the poetry workshop from the founding director of the Worker Writers School. Nowak illustrates not just what poetry means, but what it does to and for people outside traditional literary spaces, from taxi drivers to street vendors, and other workers of the world.

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To foil the context was to outrun the authority’s imagination. And to refuse all explanations of why what we felt was not real.To disarm the wolf every time at every gate. Unthread its learnedness and don the lonely pelt.The poems of Alt-Nature move in desert dreams and riverbeds. Here, geography forms the basis of feeling and connection in the American Southwest. Being and becoming along meridians of environmental degradation, globalized/ing militarism, and incarceration, Saretta Morgan thinks through the languages that instantiate violence alongside those which prepare the body for love.

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From the author of MyOTHER TONGUE comes a new collection of prose poetry exploring the intergenerational inheritance of gendered violence.Rosa Alcalá choreographs language to understand the body as it “gathers itself over time to become whole,” recovering the speaker’s intuition while unraveling memory to pinpoint the aches, anxieties, and lessons of a woman''s survival. Ruminating on daughterhood, mothering, and the body''s cumulative wisdom, YOU traces a jagged line through fears and joys both past and present.

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Eight authors’ works of personal nonfiction join with ten stories by Karen Tei Yamashita to illuminate the hidden histories of places large and small.Faced with a scant historical record, Karen Tei Yamashita turns to fiction to animate the secrets of Santa Cruz, the city she’s called home for nearly three decades. Her characters come alive through her signature witty humor and surreal premises, transcending the past and urging themselves into the present to illuminate a hidden geography of this California coastal city unseen in textbooks.Alongside these stories, eight nonfiction writers chart their own counternarratives of place through the greater United States. Diverging and converging in their scale and scope, from an unnamed lot on the bank of the Ohio River to the territory of Guam, their essays use language as an instrument of excavation, uncovering layers of hurt and desire concealed in the land.

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A meditation on in vitro fertilization that expands and complicates the stories we tell about pregnancy. Medical interventions become an exercise in patience, desire, and delirium in this intimate account of bodily transformation and disruption. In candid, graceful prose, Isabel Zapata gives voice to the strangeness and complexities of conception and motherhood that are rarely discussed publicly. Zapata frankly addresses the misogyny she experienced during fertility treatments, explores the force of grief in imagining possible futures, and confronts the societal expectations around maternity. In the tradition of Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors and Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness, In Vitro draws from diary and essay forms to create a new kind of literary companion and open up space for nuanced conversations about pregnancy.

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Search History oscillates between a wild cyberdog chase and lunch-date monologues as Eugene Lim deconstructs grieving and storytelling with uncanny juxtapositions and subversive satire. Frank Exit is dead—or is he? While eavesdropping on two women discussing a dog-sitting gig over lunch, a bereft friend comes to a shocking realization: Frank has been reincarnated as a dog! This epiphany launches a series of adventures—interlaced with digressions about AI-generated fiction, virtual reality, Asian American identity in the arts, and lost parents—as an unlikely cast of accomplices and enemies pursues the mysterious canine. In elliptical, propulsive prose, Search History plumbs the depths of personal and collective consciousness, questioning what we consume, how we grieve, and the stories we tell ourselves.

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Written over three seasons in a Vermont cabin, these poems act as a reflecting pool, casting back mortality, consciousness, and time in new, crystal-clear light.

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Winner of the 2018 US National Book Award for PoetryIntricate, intimate, difficult, and confrontational poems that push at the boundaries of selfhood, skin, culture, sexuality, and blood. Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful—the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us.

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Praise for Barbara Browning:“A provocative novel . . . that blurs the boundaries between life and performance, dance, art, and viral video.”—Slate“Deftly blending highbrow intellectual concerns with the informality of Facebook-era communiqués, Browning’s newest is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking.”—Publishers Weekly, starred reviewIn the midst of Occupy, Barbara Andersen begins spamming people indiscriminately with ukulele covers of sentimental songs. A series of inappropriate intimacies ensues, including an erotically charged correspondence and then collaboration with an extraordinarily gifted and troubled musician living in Germany.Barbara Browning teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University. She is the author of the novels The Correspondence Artist (winner of a Lambda Literary Award) and I’m Trying to Reach You (short-listed for The Believer Book Award). She also makes dances, poems, and ukulele cover tunes.

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Elegant and brutal, the stories in Kate Bernheimer's latest collection occupy a heightened landscape, where the familiar cedes to the grotesque and nonsense just as often devolves into terror. These are fairy tales out of time, renewing classic stories we think we know, like one of Bernheimer's girls, whose hands of steel turn to flowers, leaving her beautiful but alone. Kate Bernheimer is the author of the short story collection Horse, Flower, Bird and the editor of My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales and the journal Fairy Tale Review.

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Ron Padgett's title poem asks: "How long do you want to go on being the person you think you are? / How Long, a city in China." With the arrival of his first grandchild, Padgett becomes even more inspired to confront the eternal mysteries in poems with a wry, rueful honesty that comes only with experience, in his case sixty-eight years of it. I never thought, forty years ago, taping my poems into a notebook, that one day the tape would turn yellow, grow brittle, and fall off and that I'd find myself on hands and knees groaning as I picked the pieces up off the floor one by one Ron Padgett is a celebrated translator, memoirist, and "a thoroughly American poet, coming sideways out of Whitman, Williams, and New York Pop with a Tulsa twist" (Peter Gizzi). His poetry has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, The Oxford Book of American Poetry, and on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. He was also a guest on Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion in 2009. Padgett is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and his most recent books include How to Be Perfect; You Never Know, Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard; and If I Were You. Born in Oklahoma, he lives in New York City and Calais, Vermont.

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Part poetry collection, part soundscape, Village uses dark humor and keen observation to explore the roots of memory, grief, and estrangement. In propulsive and formally inventive verse, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs examines how trauma reshapes lineage, language, and choice, disrupting attempts at reconciliation across generations. Questioning who is deemed worthy of public memorialization, Diggs raises new monuments, tears down classist tropes, offers detailed instructions for her own international funeral celebrations, and makes visible the hidden labors of care and place. From corners in Harlem through North Carolina back roads, Diggs complicates the concept of “survivor,” getting to the truth of living in the dystopia of poverty.

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"Fiercely satirical. . . . Yamashita presents [an] intricate plot with mordant wit." —New York Times Book Review "A stunner. . . . An exquisite mystery novel. But this is a novel of dystopia and apocalypse; the mystery concerns the tragic flaws of human nature." —Library Journal (starred review) "Brilliant. . . . An ingenious interpretation of social woes." —Booklist (starred review) "Yamashita handles her eccentrics and the setting of their adventures with panache. David Foster Wallace meets Gabriel Garcia Marquez." —Publishers Weekly Irreverently juggling magical realism, film noir, hip hop, and chicanismo, Tropic of Orange takes place in a Los Angeles where the homeless, gangsters, infant organ entrepreneurs, and Hollywood collide on a stretch of the Harbor Freeway. Hemmed in by wildfires, it's a symphony conducted from an overpass, grandiose, comic, and as diverse as the city itself. Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Brazil-Maru, Tropic of Orange, Circle K Cycles, I Hotel, and Anime Wong, all published by Coffee House Press. I Hotel was selected as a finalist for the National Book Award and awarded the California Book Award, the American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award, and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award.

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"Immensely entertaining." —Newsday"Poignant and remarkable." —Philadelphia Inquirer"Warm, compassionate, engaging, and thought-provoking." —Washington Post"With a subtle ominousness, Yamashita sets up her hopeful, prideful characters—and, in the process, the entire genre of pioneer lit—for a fall." —Village Voice"A splendid multi-generational novel . . . rich in history and character." —San Francisco ChronicleParticularly insightful." —Library Journal"Informative and timely." —Kirkus"Yamashita's heightened sense of passion and absurdity, and respect for inevitability and personality, infuse this engrossing multigenerational immigrant saga with energy, affection, and humor." —Booklist"This enriching novel introduces Western readers to an unusual cultural experiment, and makes vivid a crucial chapter in Japanese assimilation into the West." —Publishers Weekly The story of an idealistic band of Japanese immigrants, who arrive in Brazil in 1925 to carve a utopia out of the jungle. The dream of creating a new world, the cost of idealism, the symbiotic tie between a people and the land they settle, and the changes demanded by a new generation, all collide in this multigenerational saga.Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Brazil-Maru, Tropic of Orange, Circle K Cycles, I Hotel, and Anime Wong, all published by Coffee House Press. I Hotel was selected as a finalist for the National Book Award and awarded the California Book Award, the American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award, and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award.

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On a slab that's all Katrina left of her Mississippi home, Tiger tells her story, and it is as American as Horatio Alger, Schwab's Pharmacy, and a tent revival. She was a stripper, but is she now a performance artist and best-selling author, and it is really Barbara Walters she's narrating this tale to? We're too dazzled to know more than that this is about how a girl ends up in the backwash of decadence and sin and how out of the flotsam and jetsam she might construct a story of herself and the South to carry her to salvation. Serial killers, preachers, and prison flower-arranging classes. Bikers, bad boyfriends, and a stripper who performed as a Trans Am. Tiger has seen it all and as she sits on her slab, identifying anecdotes as they go by, we witness Selah Saterstrom at her greatest-funny, bawdy, and steeped in the landscape and all the devastation it has created and absorbed. Selah Saterstrom is the author of the novels The Pink Institution, The Meat and Spirit Plan, and Slab, all published by Coffee House Press. She is also the author of Tiger Goes to the Dogs, a limited edition letterpress project published by Nor By Press. Her prose, poetry, and interviews can be found in publications such as The Black Warrior Review, Postroad, Tarpaulin Sky, Fourteen Hills, and other places. She is the director of the PhD program in creative writing at the University of Denver and teaches and lectures throughout the United States.

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"Fluid and poetic as well as terrifying." —New York Times Book Review "Dazzling . . . a seamless mixture of magic realism, satire and futuristic fiction." —San Francisco Chronicle "Impressive . . . a flight of fancy through a dreamlike Brazil." —Village Voice "Surreal and misty, sweeping from one high-voltage scene to another." —LA Weekly "Amuses and frightens at the same time." —Newsday "Incisive and funny, this book yanks our chains and makes us see the absurdity that rules our world." —Booklist (starred review) "Expansive and ambitious . . . incredible and complicated." —Library Journal "This satiric morality play about the destruction of the Amazon rain forest unfolds with a diversity and fecundity equal to its setting. . . . Yamashita seems to have thrown into the pot everything she knows and most that she can imagine—all to good effect." —Publishers Weekly A Japanese man with a ball floating six inches in front of his head, an American CEO with three arms, and a Brazilian peasant who discovers the art of healing by tickling one's earlobe, rise to the heights of wealth and fame, before arriving at disasters—both personal and ecological—that destroy the rain forest and all the birds of Brazil. Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Brazil-Maru, Tropic of Orange, Circle K Cycles, I Hotel, and Anime Wong, all published by Coffee House Press. I Hotel was selected as a finalist for the National Book Award and awarded the California Book Award, the American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award, and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award.

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“Ron Padgett makes the most quiet and sensible of feelings a provocatively persistent wonder.”—Robert CreeleyRon Padgett has reenergized modern poetry with exuberant and tender love poems, with exceptionally lucid and touching elegies, and with imaginative and action-packed homages to American culture and visual art. He has paid tribute to Woody Woodpecker and the West, to friends and collaborators, to language and cowslips, to beautiful women and chocolate milk, to paintings and small-time criminals. His poems have always imparted a contagious sense of joy.In this new collection of poems, Padgett hasn’t forsaken his beloved Woody Woodpecker, but he has decided to heed the canary and sound the alarm. Here, he asks, “What makes us so mean?” And he really wants to know. Even as these poems cajole and question, as they call attention to what has been lost and what we still stand to lose, they continue to champion what makes sense and what has always been worth saving. “Humanity,” Padgett generously (and gently) reminds us, still “has to take it one step at a time.”

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Like nothing you’ve read before, this exhilarating narrative follows the storyline of Alban Berg’s famously unfinished opera Lulu and explores the history of the commedia, particularly the Pierrot figure from its first inception through its final manifestation as the English clown. Famous historical figures (like Jack the Ripper!) and artists from the late 19th and early 20th centuries also make appearances. Presented in a beautiful, yet affordable 1,500 copy limited edition featuring cover art by Gustav Klimt, original and treated film stills from award-winning filmmaker Bill Morrison, and illustrations from artist Abbot Stranahan, this book should reach beyond fans of avant-garde fiction and find an audience among film, opera, and theater buffs as well as book and art collectors.

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Son is real. Son was saved from a life he cannot remember. Son is a human in a mythical world of ghosts. This is what Father tells him. Son has lived his entire life inside the mansion. He is a good child. He reads, practices piano, studies, and watches ghosts tend the farmland through a window in the attic. When Father decides it is time for Son to venture outside, Son’s desire to please Father overpowers his fear, and he must contend with questions he never wanted to face. What are the relentlessly grinning ghosts hiding? Has a ghost taken control of Father? What answers or horrors lie in the forest? And who will stop the mysterious encroaching shadows? Nghiem Tran’s debut inverts the haunted house tale, shaping it into a moving exploration of loss, coming of age in a collapsing world, and the battle between isolation and assimilation.

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A meditation on southwestern terrains, intergenerational queer dynamics, and surveilled brown artists that crosses physical and conceptual borders. Part butch memoir, part ekphrastic travel diary, part queer family tree, Raquel Gutiérrez’s debut essay collection, Brown Neon, gleans insight from the sediment of land and relationships. For Gutiérrez, terrain is essential to understanding that no story, no matter how personal, is separate from the space where it unfolds. Whether contemplating the value of adobe as both vernacular architecture and commodified art object, highlighting the feminist wounding and transphobic apparitions haunting the multigenerational lesbian social fabric, or recalling a failed romance, Gutiérrez traverses complex questions of gender, class, identity, and citizenship with curiosity and nuance.

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Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior: HOMES. Moheb Soliman traces the coast of the Great Lakes with postmodern poems, exploring the natural world, the experience of belonging, and the formation of identity along borders. Moheb Soliman’s HOMES maps the shoreline of the Great Lakes from the rocky North Shore of Minnesota to the Thousand Islands of eastern Ontario. This poetic travelogue offers an intimate perspective on an immigrant experience as Soliman drives his Corolla past exquisite vistas and abandoned mines, through tourist towns and midwestern suburbs, seeking to inhabit an entire region as home. Against the backdrop of environmental destruction and a history of colonial oppression, the vitality of Soliman’s language brings a bold ecopoetic lens to bear on the relationship between transience and belonging in the world’s largest, most porous borderland.

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In A Complex Sentence, Marjorie Welish builds immersive intertextual environments as she questions the canon of modernist poetry and the ways we talk about poetics. In her sixth collection with Coffee House, Welish continues to explore rhetorical practices such as diagramming, inscription, and quotation, to call our attention to literary acts—from finding the right desk to getting lost at logic gates—yet all the while following the mental circuitry of dismantling and re-assembling a poetic language. Expertly manipulating the space of the page, her poems dissolve the boundaries between visual art and the written word. With her signature precision, musicality, and structural rigor, Welish turns the lyric poem into a critical instrument with which to think about the writer’s calling, through the specifics of language and literature.

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Autostraddle's “Books Relevant to Your Queer and Feminist Interests in 2020” and Latin Post's “Must Read Books by Latin Authors in 2020”In elegiac and fervent poetry, Lara Mimosa Montes writes across the thresholds of fracture, trauma, violence, and identity.Thresholes is both a doorway and an absence, a roadmap and a remembering. In this almanac of place and memory, Lara Mimosa Montes writes of her family’s past, returning to the Bronx of the 70s and 80s and the artistry that flourished there. What is the threshold between now and then, and how can the poet be the bridge between the two?

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In these buoyant and inventive stories, Karen Tei Yamashita transfers classic tales across boundaries and questions what an inheritance—familial, cultural, emotional, artistic—really means. In a California of the sixties and seventies, characters examine the contents of deceased relatives' freezers, tape-record high school locker-room chatter, or collect a community's gossip while cleaning the teeth of its inhabitants. Mr. Darcy is the captain of the football team, Mansfield Park materializes in a suburb of L.A., bake sales replace ballroom dances, and station wagons, not horse-drawn carriages, are the preferred mode of transit. The stories of traversing class, race, and gender leap into our modern world with and humor.

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When Trisha Low moves west, her journey is motivated by the need to arrive “somewhere better”—someplace utopian, like revolution; or safe, like home; or even clarifying, like identity. Instead, she faces the end of her relationships, a family whose values she has difficulty sharing, and America’s casual racism, sexism, and homophobia. In this book-length essay, the problem of how to account for one's life comes to the fore—sliding unpredictably between memory, speculation, self-criticism, and art criticism, Low seeks answers that she knows she won't find. Attempting to reconcile her desires with her radical politics, she asks: do our quests to fulfill our deepest wishes propel us forward, or keep us trapped in the rubble of our deteriorating world?

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Art about glaciers, queer relationships, political anxiety, and the meaning of Blackness in open space—Borealis is a shapeshifting logbook of Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s experiences moving through the Alaskan outdoors. In Borealis, Aisha Sabatini Sloan observes shorelines, mountains, bald eagles, and Black fellow travelers while feeling menaced by the specter of nature writing. She considers the meaning of open spaces versus enclosed ones and maps out the web of queer relationships that connect her to this quaint Alaskan town. Triangulating the landscapes she moves through with glacial backdrops in the work of Black conceptual artists and writers, Sabatini Sloan complicates tropes of Alaska to suggest that the excitement, exploration, and possibility of myth-making can also be twinned by isolation, anxiety, and boredom. Borealis is the first book commissioned for the Spatial Species series, edited by Youmna Chlala and Ken Chen. The series investigates the ways we activate space through language. In the tradition of Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Spatial Species titles are pocket-sized editions, each keenly focused on place. Instead of tourist spots and public squares, we encounter unmarked, noncanonical spaces: edges, alleyways, diasporic traces. Such intimate journeying requires experiments in language and genre, moving travelogue, fiction, or memoir into something closer to eating, drinking, and dreaming.

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Lustrous, tender, and expansive, Gold Cure moves from boomtown gold mines and the mythical city of El Dorado to the fracking wells of the American interior, excavating buried histories, legacies of conquest, and the pursuit of shimmering ideals. Ted Mathys skewers police brutality on the ribs of a nursery rhyme and drives Petrarchan sonnets into shale fields deep under the prairies. In crystalline language rich with allegory and wordplay, Mathys has crafted a moving elegy for the Anthropocene.

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In the grand, narrative tradition of Gwendolyn Brooks and Edward Sanders, this riveting collection of poetic plays and photo-documentary poems exposes the human cost of corporate greed and gives voice to the growing crisis faced in communities across America. "The several long poems that make up this book build into each other with devastating force and understatement, breaking poetic boundaries, regenerating the rich tradition of working-class literature."-Adrienne Rich Mark Nowak is the author of the critically acclaimed debut book of poems Revenants, the editor of Xcp: Cross Cultural Poetics and the co-editor of Visit Teepee Town: Native Writings After the Detours. He grew up in Buffalo, New York and lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he is active in the labor movement.

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The “f**k” count is just over sixty. The images are screenshots. The metal is mostly nu. And the grant money’s gone. From the author of The Malevolent Volume and National Book Award–winning Indecency comes a gory new mutation in the shape of nonfiction and criticism. In 2019, Justin Phillip Reed’s romantic maiden voyage through the waters of American poetry and its communities ran aground in the barrens of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, when he found himself with two years of writing time on the horizon and no social context to keep him afloat. In anxiety and estrangement soon deepened by global pandemic, popular fascism, virtual being, intestinal distress, and the obscenity of his own privilege as a university pet, he retreated to the comforts of horror films with no intent but diversion. What happened instead was this reckless, unprecious, in-process reckoning. Backdropped by sprawling cemeteries, soundtracked by too much Type O Negative, and totally hung up on cameras, With Bloom Upon Them and Also with Blood is a chase and a trip where lyric essays, ekphrastic poetry, and lectures grapple with alienation, professional disillusionment, perversion, and internal contradiction under racial capitalism through playful and critical encounters with horror cinema and cultural iconography.

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