An unnamed narrator attends an elite but perennially freezing private girls’ school in New York City during the 1960’s. At first almost invisible, she evolves from seven-year-old witness to fifteen-year-old actor as she navigates a Halloween party, observes a classmate’s sudden hair growth, and encounters two eccentric teachers. Zombies, fetal pigs, Shakespeare, and cigarettes make appearances in this linked set of flash fiction stories which weave in and out of magical realism and affirm the possibility of survival even under the most peculiar conditions.
The Warbler School Chronicles by Stephanie Barbé Hammer is available now.
Each of the 32 poems in Here to Be Remade owes its vocabulary to a separate book of poems taken from the writer’s bookshelf—usually the first and last lines in that collection. The author set herself the challenge of creating a coherent poem from these word sets without borrowing lines or phrases from the collection from which the words were taken.
The poems are condensed and diverse, reflecting the mind of a poet as collage artist. Paintings, also created by the author, are interspersed among the poems.
In What We Leave Behind, Peter Wortsman’s fourth book of cut-ups, he lets the words run wild, in some cases, as in French poet Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrames (1918), letting words break ranks and dance on the page; in other cases, coupling word and image; and finally, succumbing to the lure of the visual in collages in which words play a subordinate role or disappear altogether. If, as this book’s first poem maintains, “we know each other from what we leave behind,” Wortsman writes, “I will hope these cut-up words and images bestir a smile or two on the face of the reader and perhaps a knowing nod.”
What We Leave Behind by Peter Wortsman is available now.
What began as countless daily texts from Brutus to make Stevo laugh at work soon evolved into their final collaborative venture. The pair’s original scheme, Stevo working at a fortune cookie factory swapping standard fortunes for Brutus’ quotes, failed when he was fired for refusing to wear a hair net. They quickly moved on to plan B, a page-a-day calendar, and Stevo began illustrating Brutus’ texts. That project was paused when Brutus passed in 2023, then restarted when Kevin Ausmus selected the strongest entries for a chapbook. The final product, The Gospel According To Bombastus, explores topics from biology to theology with wit, wisdom, and weirdness.