Bøker utgitt av Black Lawrence Press

The Bones Beneath captures what it means to be American, Southern, diasporan, what it means to belong and not to belong, and finding many ways home. It transports readers across place and time, focusing on race and racism, health and healing, Africa and America, and mysticism and incantations. The poems call us to remember the histories we are coaxed to forget and opens pathways to understand our shared humanity. You will not leave this work without being changed and without understanding how and why there is hope for us to be better.

Historically poets have explored no two themes more than love and grief because they are opposite sides of the same emotional coin that we will all experience in unique and often unexplainable ways. While other anthologies validate the necessity of the elegy, none examine the relationship between the body in grief and the body of the poem a poet crafts to recreate an individual, visceral experience of grief. By pairing contemporary poems with micro-essays, wherein each poet considers briefly the connection between their included poem(s) and their corresponding grief, In the Tempered Dark initiates a dialogue designed to engage teachers, students, readers, and writers. This collection doesn't instruct poets how to craft grief poems but illuminates the bond between bodies in grief and bodies of poems.In the Tempered Dark brings together contemporary work and voices that demonstrate the range of grief which feels urgent to twenty-first century poets from diverse backgrounds, at different stages in their careers, confronting assorted losses through various styles and forms. Poems coupled with micro-essays offer intimate and inside insights appealing to novices and veterans of all genres. This book will allow readers to identify with poets and poems to grieve and to heal, and it will also consider the relationship between poet and poem. Such an examination of content and form will show how poets manipulate craft, giving voice to what can seem unsayable, transcending elegy.

The linked stories in UNBEND THE RIVER are set along a forested stretch of land between Lake Erie and the upper Allegheny River in Western New York, places dense with rivers, hills, and forest. The characters, all of whom are tied to a modern knife manufacturing plant, illustrate all the ways love and longing shapeshift over the course of a long life. A host of elderly hockey players, Franciscan Friars, loser heroes, budding conmen, and unintentional historians are all wired to search for meaning. Each flash their creative genius when fighting off idleness, anger, and disappointment. They build nightmare hotrods and race school buses; train wild dogs, homing pigeons, and dancing horses; and fight wildfires and grasshopper swarms. They crash headlong into the chaos, confusion, and confluence of their homes, never losing their energy to seek out the essential miracles hidden all around them.

Adrian Van Young beckons readers further into the shifting borderlands of the Gothic and uncanny in his second collection, MIDNIGHT SELF. Space colonists menaced by a grotesque alien creature adapt a grim charter to ensure their survival. An exhausted new mother makes an uneasy discovery when her baby monitor's signal gets crossed with another. An heiress imprisoned in a labyrinth of her own making is forced into an obliterating confrontation with grief. A carnivorous car lot tube man terrorizes a gang of transphobic bullies. An army nurse discovers that war's terrors still hound her in new, chilling forms. Written in the tradition of Angela Carter, George Saunders and Mariana Enriquez, MIDNIGHT SELF explores the dissociation of being human and the humanity of being monstrous.