"‘Be yourself without exception’ is an order that rings thrilling to any reader, and is something that Fern Beattie achieves effortlessly in her writing. Fern writes with the kind of soft precision that has the reader lost in the poetry of life. Seven Women of Saturn is a beautiful book." - Charlie Brogan, Co-Founder of The Rally
Read More“Marcy Beller Paul’s Underneath Everything is a lyrical and haunting debut novel. The story of Mattie and Jolene digs right into the heart of a poisonous friendship between two teenage girls, and I found myself holding my breath during the book’s final pages.” — Jennifer Mathieu, author of The Truth About Alice
Read More“Gina Valenzuela has never known what it’s like to go without. Her father, Baron Sr., is the richest man in Los Angeles. The life of private jets, haute couture and a monolithic house in Brentwood filled with priceless art has insulated her from the severe draught that has befallen the city. While people in LA wait anxiously every day for their two hours of water service, the Valenzuelas drink and bathe in Perrier that comes from a gigantic cistern in the kitchen. Baron Sr. collects children like some women collect Birkin bags. The children are adopted from all over the world, deliberately chosen for their diversity in that clichéd way that can only be found in LA. Gina was plucked from Guatemala, but her mother and now Baron’s third ex wife, (now referred to by family members as “X3”,) always laments she wanted another boy who had the most beautiful eyes. Too bad he had a heart condition. Even the family portraits taken by Annie Liebowitz can’t hide the Valenzuela dysfunction. Gina knows she has to get out.”
Read More“Martin has an easy life in the utopia that is post-apocalyptic Paris. The hedonistic society, devoted to leisure and sex, leaves little room to complain. The Server, an artificial intelligence that governs the city, has walled off Paris from the barbaric outside world that reverted to the Bronze Age after a series of calamities. At the Apple Store, Martin is introduced to the hottest new release, Best Friend. The device, a translucent laurel wreath, is worn like a crown and can create a vivid three dimensional experience with any person, in any place, living or dead. With Best Friend engaged, Martin spots a beautiful young woman on the other side of the tracks in the Metro. He doesn’t have to imagine her touch, her lips, her smell. Best Friend has taken care of that, and the woman doesn’t even know it. Across the tracks, Martine is having her own fun. Through a glitch, Martin and Martine are united in their experience.”
Read More“Plague City shows you how literature might (must!) move forward in a chaotic world." - Jane L. Carman, author of Tangled In Motion
Read More"The effect of Yu-Han Chao’s prose is like that of a razor cut: straightforward, barely noticeable at first. Then the air hits, the sting begins, and then—oh, then!—comes the blood. She knows exactly when to begin and end a story, leaving the reader to absorb the impact of what has happened long after the final sentence. Her characters often leave others scarred by their actions, sometimes out of cruelty, but more often out of the casual egotism that comes with the city’s territory. These are stories that will stay with you for a long, long time." —Charlotte Holmes, author of The Grass Labyrinth
Read More"Brick by brick. Detail by detail. Word by word, Difalco uncovers worlds closed for the moment to most prize-list readers. Their loss. For, with such a skilled and sure literary hand as Difalco to guide, many of these lost souls would find their way into most readers' hearts." - Front & Centre
Read More“It is 1980. The buildings and storefronts at Barton Street and Sherman Avenue are dilapidated remnants of Hamilton's once-thriving steel industry. The corner is also the nexus of a violent street gang that has left citizens terrorized and police impotent. Mean Season chronicles the random beatings, arson, sexual assaults, and other unfathomable violence of that time in the city's history, as Bobby Sferazza, a smart, tough, football-playing University of Toronto student, returns home to take a summer job as a night-club bouncer. As he attempts to help his widowed mother with his wayward kid brother, his take-no-prisoners mind-set leaves him entangled in drugs and gangs, with his bright future caught in the crossfire.”
Read More“Salvatore Difalco’s fiction is a finely blended mix of toughness, street-smart insights and violence, along with flashes of tenderness and compassion. (His stories) are thoughtful, enigmatic ... drawing the reader in with sharp detail, poetic phrasing and recognizable characters. Though we’re dealing with thugs, prostitutes and crackheads, they are all folks you’ll feel uncomfortably at home with. That’s Difalco’s magic: scrape characters from the bottom of society’s bowl and reveal them in literary daylight as powerless dreamers, failed mothers, caged creatures.” - Matthew Firth, Front & Centre
Read More"Salvatore Difalco's stories are small miracles: fresh, literate, startling, and a bit off-kilter, like something seen in a dream or out of the corner of your eye." —Stephen Osborne, Geist
Read MoreFinishing Line Press, 2015.
Read More“This carefully curated selection from an entire body of work brings an undiscovered master to light. Invisible Histories navigates the totality and the niches of life in late 20th, early 21st century global and American life: relationships, growing up, sexuality, media, the powers-that-be, magic and the occult, bodies and death, secrets and codes, and, otherwise, the spiritual and the corporeal.”
Read More“These poems are devoid of any artificial and spurious emotion. The employment of concrete imagery in these poems is quite admirable. Instead of rhetorical style, the poet prefers the exact word. After reading these poems, it is evident that the poet’s style is quite lucid.”
Read More“The poems show strong inspiration and create a lyricism of striking appeal and power. The poems included in this poetry collection are full of impressive vigor. In these poems we admire the poet's delicate touch and the felicity of expression. The flowing ease of expression confirms the fact that the style of these poems has an impressive spontaneity.”
Read More“No doubt, while reading the poems in the poetry collection we are struck at once by the fact that the poems are full of great depth and simplicity. Due to melody of diction in these poems, the sound of the words and phrases lingers in the mind for a long time.”
Read More"Composed over a two-month period between his mother's decision to enter hospice and the burial of her ashes, Postlude to the End of is conceptually, simply a diary of mourning. Through its composition with exploded lines and fractured syntax, this collection interiorizes into a visual and verbal hyperventilation of emotion. While mourning the loss of a parent may be a familiar theme, rather than just elegize through descriptive and emotional language, this collection attempts to replicate the chaotic synaptic and physiological processes of coping with deep loss."
Read More“These are powerful poems of love, and loss and sex and regret, wrapped up in a tidal wave of confessional. Beattie’s close and honest portrayals of relationships real and imagined evoke Frank O’Hara’s busy city streets pressed with flesh. As she writes in her preface, throughout her days she “cannot separate myself from this desire” – and what a ride it takes us on. Her art of shutting up is one that takes instead to the written page, and in Beattie’s phrase, demands we become a ‘compulsory witness’.”
Read More“Fern Angel Beattie's second collection of poetry explores the spectrum of light and dark emotions love causes one to swing between.”
Read More“The beauty of Bolton’s poems does not come from avoiding the darker sides of life, but from putting it precisely at the center. With subtle precision, she embroiders a poetic world of a child’s fears, of abuse, and of broken trust—but also of the experience of healing and of divinity—that will reach for your heart to pull you in.”
—Eva Wissting, editor of Asymptote and Populär Poesi
Poet Judith Bowles gathers in this debut collection a harvest of observations on illuminated spaces, made so by the act of paying close attention.
Read More
