When memory fails, what can take its place? Speculation, Brigitte Lewis suggests, other ways of knowing: myth, history, science. Imagination. The quicksilver of language itself. The result is a memoir about what it means to re-member a life. Hybrid in form and lyrical in style, Speculative Histories is driven by an authentic voice and a singular intelligence. This is a mind on the page, a story unfolding. To read it, is to fall in love with what writing can do. 

―Beth Alvarado

ISBN: 978195690706

In 1992, ten years after whaling was banned, a scientific expedition set off from Tahiti on a voyage around the Pacific to New Zealand, following the 'whale road.’ Deborah McCutchen joined the crew as a nanny for the two children of the captain and his wife. The Whale Road is a montage of snapshots, layered together in a colorful album of words. McCutchen strikes a fine balance between lyricism and musing on the one hand, and action and anecdote on the other. Humor enlivens the mundane: the nausea and cabin fever, dwindling supplies, brief island sojourns, and the work of photographing whales and collecting skin and excrement samples. Without being preachy, this book is a plea for the conservation of whales and other creatures, and a lament for human interference in nature. 

— Phillippa Jamieson, New Zealand Herald 

ISBN: 9781956907018

Memory, grief, and self-reflection mingle in debut author Garza’s account of the death of her sibling. The 52-year-old author recounts her experience with survivor’s guilt, dissociation, and spirituality, as she undertook a long journey to reconstruct her identity. Throughout, the author illustrates, in observant, poetic prose, the reverberating effects that grief can have on a life and the many ways that her family has coped with it. Garza draws on multiple outside sources, including the work of Rebecca Solnit, the words of Saint Teresa of Ávila, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, to explore how people understand and interact with death and how they ultimately learn to accept it as a constant companion. An achingly vulnerable, elegantly worded meditation on grief and recovery. ―Kirkus Review 

ISBN: 9781737513490

Exquisite and precise, Caroline Goodwin’s newest poetry collection, Old Snow, White Sun, traverses various terrains with grace and a commitment to astonishment. Here, Goodwin brilliantly gathers mothlight, herbal lore, psychedelia, heavy metal, and old charm to capture a world that is bountiful, magnificent, and impermanent...Ferocity and decaying bodies populate these poems, but also tenderness and rhythmic hope. Find in these poems a heron, a river, a hurricane, a floodgate, a levee, a story. “The one where the girl is strong enough. The one where she survives.” Where she dwells and how she rises.  —Aileen Cassinetto

ISBN: 9781737330783

Reading Maureen Seaton's poems has always been a kind of astral projection for me. Reading Undersea, I was flung loose from my body so many times, sailing across the Sunshine State on a cloud of sensuous imagery. In Seaton's rendering of this land we love, "Avocados/fall like big and little bombs," "egrets grow fat on curly fries," and "there is no line between water and sky." Come for the "gibbous moonlight," the "canny pelicans," a "speedboat full of gangsters." Stay for the long-won wisdom of the poet herself, who hearkens Blake's imperative to "see the world in a grain of sand"—literally and figuratively, too. Seaton is the glass and the salt, the sling and the shot, "the blue ineffable" that lingers beyond her most luminous feats of language. —Julie Marie Wade

ISBN: 9781737330707  

The poem of the natural world, like nature itself, is threatened by harsh forces: sentimentality, obviousness, easy identification. The difficulty in writing about nature only makes the achievement of Trapline that much more remarkable and provoking. Goodwin sees nature and ourselves as we are in all our manifestations, intertwined and inseparable.  ―Keith Ekiss 

ISBN: 9781737330738

 Under the Hours is a new-century work, a voicing of Cully's tidal sense of the temporal, her premonitory stillness, written by desert and sea-light, inscribing the endurance of loss, the necessity of vigilance. Her images are beautiful and precise, her sensibility profound.  ―Carolyn Forché

ISBN: 9781737330714

Barbara Cully's meditations in Back Apart range widely in subject and temperament: from ambushed troops in Afghanistan to the shorelines of her California youth, from Kristallnacht to our present ecological degradations. Driven by an unstable, seeking impulse, "the desire to look and to look away," the poems remain in flux, animated by a constant reckoning of self in history, in landscape, and especially among others.

―Boyer Rickel

ISBN:  9780578875903 

Dive into this “introspectacle” and weird world of the Curious! This anthology of eight plays offers readers irreverent and iconoclastic narratives by playwrights with a keen ear for the eccentricities and homespun quirks of language. The Curious Theater Branch offers an ensemble of diverse creators with plays ranging from experiments in form to character-driven stories exploring the absurdity of human nature and the banality of personal relationships. Curious Plays is a celebration of Chicago’s beloved Curious Theater Branch and The Rhinoceros Theater Festival, a mainstay of Chicago’s experimental theater. Curious Plays reflects the theater company it is: a team of creatives who put writing and originality first. With an introduction by playwright Barrie Cole and historical reference materials, the anthology showcases Curious’ 35-year history of making diverse, experimental theater while flagrantly flouting the ordinary.

ISBN: 9781956907025 

Like Brecht, she uses music, text, broad characters, very few props. Her people are curious and smart and very funny. They are always out on a limb, divulging something terribly embarrassing. In Magnus' stories, characters have unexplained encounters that are so lively and absurd that it takes a moment to realize they are in pain. There's just no rest for the lazy in these scripts. Here is the work of an artist as courageous as you'll ever experience. Here is the work of an artist, timeless and true. Relish it.   ―Achy Obejas 

ISBN: 9781737330721