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Sponsored :: New Book :: Knowing

cover of Knowing by Mark Cox

Knowing: Poems, Poetry by Mark Cox

Press 53, April 2024

Mark Cox pulls no punches in these poems about family, relationships, loss, regret, growing older and our human condition, generally. Sometimes wry, sometimes tender, always thought provoking, Knowing is the seventh volume of poetry from a lauded veteran poet who has been publishing prominently for almost 40 years.

Previous Praise for Mark Cox:

On Readiness

Thrilling prose poems from a cherished writer . . . . Cox gives lie to the common notion that prose poetry is too formless to count as real verse . . . . [He] is as careful with diction, rhythm, and even rhyme as one might be if they were writing strict alexandrines-and yet, his poems are as fluid and readable as Jack Kerouac’s novels.

Kirkus Reviews

On Sorrow Bread

Tony Hoagland has said Mark Cox is “a veteran of the deep water; there’s no one like him,” and Thomas Lux identified him as “one of the finest poets of his generation.” No one speaks more effectively of the vital and enduring syntaxes of common, even communal, life.

Richard Simpson

New Book :: Wings & Other Things

Wings and Other Things stories by Chauna Craig book cover image

Wings & Other Things
Fiction by Chauna Craig
Press 53, September 2022

Wings & Other Things by Chauna Craig is a book of migrations. Its characters flutter and flap, take off and land, then take off again as they seek the places they belong. These are characters caught in transition: a widow searching for a past self on an “Impossible Blue” coast, lovers explaining to the police and themselves why they’re hiding in a Nebraska cornfield. a teacher struggling to be understood on a flight from Chengdu, a stranded artist riding with a stranger on a highway haunted y the ghost of a woman who never made it home. Each story is a transformation as Craig turns railroad tracks into an “infinite number line” and a lightning bolt into a “tentacle of the unseen.” A plastic fork becomes a parable of fragility, and a “scrap moon” is an image of what is lost and what yet remains.

New Book :: We Were Angry

We Were Angry a novella and stories by Jennifer S. Davis book cover image

We Were Angry: A Novella & Stories
Fiction by Jennifer S. Davis
Press 53, August 2022

We Were Angry by Jennifer S. Davis, introduces readers to a group of friends in small-town Alabama whose lives are haunted by tragedies that reverberate across generations. In Davis’s world, Alabaman is more than a fictional setting. It’s a scene for interrogating power, pain, and what it means to live in – and to leave – the American South. In a linked collection of stories shot through with dark humor, Davis offers glimpses of a land of contradictions: dollar stores and golf courses, dive bars and country clubs, and long-forgotten communities flooded to make way for mansions where missing women are rumored to be buried. Transversing these red dirt roads are mothers and mourners, rebels and addicts, lovers, liars, prisoners, politicians, theme park enthusiasts, and collectors of rejected housepets. Winner of the 2021 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction.

New Book :: How We Disappear

How We Disappear by Tara Lynn Masih book cover image

How We Disappear
Novella & Stories by Tara Lynn Masih
Press 53, September 2022

In this collection, Masih offers readers transporting and compelling stories of those taken, those missing, and those neither here nor gone – runaways, exiles, wanderers, ghosts, even the elusive Dame Agatha Christie. From the remote Siberian taiga to the harsh American frontier, from rural Long Island to postwar Belgium. Masih’s characters are diverse in identity and circumstance, defying the burden of erasure by disappearing into or emerging from physical and emotional landscapes. Tara Lynn Masih is a National Jewish Book Award Finalist and winner of numerous other book awards. She is the author of My Real Name is Hanna and editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction.

Magazine Stand :: Prime Number Magazine – Issue 223

Prime Number Magazine logo

The April-June 2022 issue of Prime Number Magazine features winners of their free, monthly 53-Word Story Contest selected since the last issue. In each issue, PNM asks guest editors to select their favorite poems or stories from those submitted during our open submission period. Submissions are free and only accepted the first two months of each quarter. In this issue, guest editor Adrian Rice selected poetry from Rick Campbell, Stephen Gibson, Mercedes Lawry, and Emily Townsend. Guest editor Dennis McFadden selected short fiction by Jonh Fulton, Mary Taugher, and Treena Thibodeau. The publication also showcases four authors from their publisher, Press 53. This issue includes works by Ray Morrison, Sean Sexton, Jacinta V. White, and Rhonda Browning White.

Mr. Potato Head vs. Freud

Lessons on the Craft of Writing Fiction
Nonfiction by Clint McCown
Press 53, December 2021
ISBN: 978-1-950413-39-3
Paperback: 162pp; $17.95

“As its title should suggest, it’s impossible to read Clint McCown’s Mr. Potato Head vs. Freud without laughing. McCown’s wit makes this the rarest of books on the craft of fiction: one that is as entertaining as it is instructive. And boy, is it instructive. It’s quite simply the wisest, most succinct, and most comprehensive overview of the ins and outs of writing fiction that I’ve ever read. How I wish it had existed when I first started writing; it could have saved me years of trial and (mostly) error.” —David Jauss

2022 Press 53 Award for Poetry Winner

Congratulations to the winner and finalists of the Press 53 Award for Poetry.

Winner
The Italian Professor’s Wife by Ann Pedone

Finalists
We Are Children by Bill Ayres
Watts UpRise by Ron Dowell
The Bones Beneath by Sheila Smith McKoy
Splendor of Ignition by Robert Miltner
Passaic by Paula Neves
The Past Tense of Green by Alison Prine
The Ice Beneath the Earth by Brian Ascalon Roley

Tom Lombardo served as the only reader and judge for this contest, and Pedone’s manuscript was chosen from more than 380 entries. The Italian Professor’s Wife will be published by Press 53 in April 2022.