We Are Never As Beautiful As We Are Now

At Times both funny and heartbreaking, Adam Gallari’s debut collection, We Are Never as Beautiful as We Are Now, offers a series of nine emotionally rich and incisive stories that follow characters grappling with the unanswerable question “What next?” A sudden encounter conjures a failed relationship.

A minor league pitcher, in the twilight of a career that never was, tries to divine his future. A young man accompanies his veteran neighbor and father to a V.F.W. a few years after refusing to attend Annapolis. Stoicism and grit belie the vulnerability of people ultimately searching for someone or something to trust in. Though his literary forbearers may be Richard Ford and Ernest Hemingway, Adam Gallari re-examines the masculine with a deftness and a grace entirely his own.

Preacher’s Blues

Benjamin Lowenkron's poetry is dredged from the banks of the land falling into the sea, the skeletal hand of a bolt of lightening seeking, seeking, seeking. He brings to life the dark side of Mardis Gras, the beauty life can only have when it hangs by threads.

Preacher’s Blues is more than just a collection; it's the unfolding of a new mythology, of rust and and fire and death, of tent cities pitched on the banks of Bone River.

When You Say One Thing But Mean Your Mother

Who's the queen of kundalini bloopers, Emily Dickinson's attitude problem (that bitch) and California dreams? It's Melissa Broder, who will charm your pants off and show you a little tough love in this vivid, witty first collection of poems.

Each poem is artisan-crafted in controlled couplets, weighty triplets, tight syllabics and assonance that will take the top of your head off. But you won't have the time to absorb the academic monkeyshine--so absorbed you'll be on the flip side of Bat Mitzvah stress-syndrome, Aunt Sheila's in Taos, vampires in absentia, and brand names, brand names, brand names. From junkie fetishism to a housewife with a special "thing" for laundry, Broder does dark with magnetic charisma and enchanting humor.

Dodging Traffic

J. Bradley's original style has earned him over 40 publication credits in 2009 alone. His debut poetry collection is long overdue. Celebrated far and wide for raucous subject matter and cartoonish imagery, J. Bradley's poetry presents a world brighter, dirtier, and more fun - a child's world through adult eyes.

This collection is unapologetically fun, sweet, and profound, written for people, not poets.

Do Something! Do Something!
Do Something!

This debut novel from Joseph Riippi, an MFA student at the City College of New York, is "a work of great literary power." In this fragmented, nontraditional narrative, Riippi explores the aftermath of stories, rather than simply telling them: A Critic chanting Susan Sontag quotes in a mental institution, The Girl with the Starfish Tattoo searching for a home, an acoholic Playwright fleeing divorce and human shrapnel.

Do Something is the story of uncertainty in a new America, of three young people looking for definitiveness in an increasingly shaky and volatile homeland.

Under What Stars

Ryan Davidson's male protagonists are affable and messy as Charles Bukowski's, if only Bukowski left Los Angeles more often. From Hong Kong to Venice, Harlem to Belgrade, readers will be introduced to a string of love affairs: the Sarahs of many continents. In the vein of Tony Hoagland, Davidson's poems are tangential gestures that both tell a story and transcend the subject. The poems aren't just about the girls themselves, but where they fall in and out of place and time.