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summonings
Poetry by Raena Shirali
Black Lawrence Press, October 2022

Indebted to the docupoetics tradition, Raena Shirali’s summonings investigates the ongoing practice of witch (“daayan”) hunting in India. Winner of The Hudson Prize, these poems interrogate the political implications and shortcomings of writing Subaltern personae while acknowledging the author’s Westernized positionality. Continuing to explore multi-national and intersectional concerns around identity raised in her debut collection, Shirali asks how first- and second-generation immigrants reconcile the self with the lineages that shape it, wondering aloud about those lineages’ relationships to misogyny and violence. These poems explore how antiquated and existing norms surrounding female mysticism in India and America inform each culture’s treatment of women. As Jericho Brown wrote of Shirali’s poetics in GILT, her “comment on culture, on identity, on justice is her comment on poetry.” summonings offers a commentary on power and patriarchy, on authorial privilege and the shifting role of witness, and ultimately, on an ethical poetics, grounded in the inevitable failure to embody the Other.

Without Saints
Essays by Christopher Locke
Black Lawrence Press, October 2022

Runner-up for the Monadnock Essay Collection Prize, Without Saints by Christopher Locke is a journey to rediscover hope between the ruins: Poet Christopher Locke was baptized by Pentecostals, absolved by punk rock, and nearly consumed by narcotics. Like the propulsive Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, Without Saints is a brief, muscular ride into the heart of American desolation, and the love one finds waiting for them instead. Christopher Locke was born in New Hampshire and received his MFA from Goddard College. His poems, fiction, criticism, and essays have appeared in numerous publications, and he is the recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Award and the 2018 Black River Chapbook Award. He now lives in the Adirondacks where he teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at North Country Community College.

News of the Air
Fiction by Jill Stukenberg
Black Lawrence Press, September 2022

News of the Air by Jill Stukenberg was selected as the winner of the annual Black Lawrence Press Big Moose Prize (Dec 1 – Jan 31). In this novel, Allie Krane is heavily pregnant when she and her husband flee urban life after a rash of eco-terrorism breaks out in their city. They reinvent themselves as the proprietors of a northwoods fishing resort, where they live in relative peace for nearly two decades. That is, until two strange children arrive by canoe. Like the small ecological disasters lapping yearly at their shore, the problems of the modern world may finally have found Allie, her husband, and their troubled cypher of a teenage daughter. This eco-novel of a family, told from three points of view, explores how we remake our lives once we open our hearts to all the news we’ve chosen to ignore.

Live Caught
Fiction by R. Cathey Daniels
Black Lawrence Press, April 2022

Live Caught by R. Cathey Daniels is the story of Lenny, who finds himself out of options. He’s lost his arm to his abusive older brothers and lost his bearing within his family. Desperate to escape and determined not to lose hope, Lenny steals a skiff and attempts to ride the Carolina rivers from his family’s farm deep in the western North Carolina mountains all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. When a storm sinks his boat, he is suddenly in the hands of a profanity-slinging priest, whose illegal drug operation provides food and wages for the local parish. Snared within a power struggle between a crooked cop and the priest, Lenny must once again rely on the thinnest shred of hope in his attempt to escape.