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Lynn Schmeidler

Amid heightened restrictions about what women can and cannot do with their bodies, Lynn Schmeidler’s debut short story collection, Half-Lives, is a humane, absurd, and timely collection of narratives centering on women’s bodies and psyches. Playful and experimental, these sixteen stories explore girlhood, sexuality, motherhood, identity, and aging in a world where structures of societal norms, narrative, gender, and sometimes even physics do not apply. The protagonists grapple with the roles they choose and with those that are thrust upon them as they navigate their ever-evolving emotional lives. A woman lists her vagina on Airbnb, Sleeping Beauty is a yoga teacher who lies in state on the dais of her mother’s studio, and a museum intern writes a confession of her affair in the form of a hijacked museum audio guide.

Autumn House Press

Autumn House Press Rising Writer Prize

Half-Lives

Liza Katz Duncan

Liza Katz Duncan’s debut collection is a poignant exploration of the unpredictable shifts that shape our lives. Given considers the notions of home and family and how to survive the changes and losses associated with both. Duncan conjures her home, the New Jersey Shore, in clear and unsentimental lines: “Call of the grackle, / whine of the turkey vulture. Blighted clams, // raw and red in their half-shells.” Duncan’s poems also explore the devastation brought to this place and its community by Superstorm Sandy and the continued impacts of climate change. Interwoven into this thread is the narrator’s miscarriage; the parallels between the desecrated landscape and the personal catastrophe further contribute to the layers of tenderness in this collection, as Duncan urges us to remember and to witness. Despite tragedy and loss, Given is imbued with persistent, dogged hope, showing how survival persists among the wreckage, and from this debris is a path toward healing our grief.

Given

John Belk

In this stunning debut, John Belk uses the spectacle of wrestling to stare deeply into American culture and masculinity, parsing the intersecting threads of patriarchy and gender, and unpacking identity formation and performance. As Belk pries into toxic masculinities, he leaves space also for tenderness, queerness, and resistance to normative structures, opening the potential for love and admiration. Populated by classic and contemporary wrestlers like André the Giant, Hulk Hogan, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, Ricky Steamboat, Bruno Sammartino, Marcus “Buff” Bagwell, and more, this book is ultimately about the constant deconstruction and reconstruction of our identities that smudge fiction and reality. Like wrestlers in their operatic and winding storylines, we learn how to project and inhabit identities while growing into and fighting against the scripts we write for ourselves and those that are imposed on us. In The Gardens of Our Childhoods, the distance between spectacle and reality blurs.

Gardens of Our Childhoods

Diego Gerard Morrison

Set in a vaguely dystopian, yet also realistic, Mexico City—endless traffic jams, relentless clouds of pollution, economic hardships, and the ever-present threat of drug cartels, Myth of Pterygium, the debut novella by Diego Gerard Morrison is the story of a struggling poet contending with vision loss, poverty, and what it means to be an arms dealer in Mexico City.

The unnamed narrator of the book, at times referred to as Arthur—in part because of the growing similarity of his life with Arthur Rimbaud’s—struggles with the dissonance of leading an artistic life while providing for his family. A failed, penniless poet with a child on the way, he is forced to take a job in his family’s weapons dealing enterprise, which he soon discovers is connected to the corrupt Mexican armed forces and drug cartels, who are responsible for the increasing death toll in the country. All the while, the narrator struggles with a growing condition in his right eye, a pterygium, that is slowly taking over his vision, blurring the events of his life, including his wife’s complicated pregnancy, extortions by the drug cartels, and his own relationship to his writing.

Myth of Pterygium

Dennis James Sweeney

In hybrid narrative prose poems, In the Antarctic Circle follows two characters as they weave a life among the frigid, white landscape of the southern continent. This is not the Antarctic of polar expeditions or scientific discovery. This is the Antarctica of domestic disharmony, of love amid loneliness, where two people encounter themselves at the end of the world. Harpoons, escape plans, seal meat, and endless ice populate this world of distant Antarctic coordinates. Where pages are intentionally left blank, something new emerges: the fullness of emptiness, the frightening textures of snow on a continent that is filled to the brim with it. https://youtu.be/-Ex3D27wt-0. Thanks to Poetry Daily for featuring Dennis.

In the Antarctic Circle

Eric Tran

In The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer, Eric Tran contends with the aftermath of a close friend’s suicide while he simultaneously explores the complexities of being a gay man of color. At the intersection of queerness, loss, and desire, Tran uses current events, such as the Pulse nightclub tragedy, pop culture references, and comic book allusions to create a unique and textured poetry debut. He employs an unexpected pairing of prayer and fantasy allowing readers to imagine a world of queer joy and explore how grief can feel otherworldly.

Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer

S. Brook Corfman

Often, the fact of being an individual can seem wildly at odds with the experience of containing multitudes. In Luxury, Blue Lace, S. Brook Corfman takes the reader through this complicated experience of selfhood and its multitudes, exploring the many overlapping identities a single person can contain. Corfman’s poems conjure a host of identities and selves both living and dead, gesturing towards the complex way memory and loss can inhabit us. Formed by experience, history, and the strictures of gender, the poems dwell on the challenges of fully knowing and understanding the diverse parts of a subject. While they seek out a full form for the individual, they also relish the complex multiplicity of the identities that arise through self-exploration and self-knowledge.

Luxury, Blue Lace

Cameron Barnett

Cameron Barnett’s poetry collection, The Drowning Boy’s Guide to Water, explores the complexity of race and the body for a black man in today’s America.

Autumn House Press Rising Writer Prize - serían

Autumn House Press Rising Writer Prize - serían

Autumn House Press Rising Writer Prize bækurnar í röð

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