Includes short stories, 2 comic strips, incomplete works, and scenes from a short film.

Butcher is a book about love & loss -- about being unapologetic and transparent in grief. Natasha finds an unexpected solace in the kitchen after losing her best friend and brother, Marcus. Here, using the cuts of the cow as a metaphor Miller, explores addiction, family & tragedy. Butcher takes the body of a cow and cleaves it into 5 parts: envisioning the cuts as relationship with family members and social forces. Her Mother the rib, her Brother the brisket, her queerness as the tongue and cheek.. Butcher is raw and tender. It’s a book that tells the story of a woman who redefined success after losing the most valuable thing to her.

The Butcher Shop first appeared in 1926. Despite big overseas sales it was banned in New Zealand and later Australia for being disgusting, indecent and communistic &– in other words for promoting revolutionary ideas about women and for a bold portrayal of the brutality of farm life. On one level, the novel is a fast-paced account of how passion and jealousy destroy the lives of a rich and cultured farming family; on another it is a fierce polemic for the freedom of women, which in its frankness was years ahead of its time.

Claire St.Claire's life is strange but predictable.Every night she works as a bartender and disc jockey at the Butcher Shop, a mobile, invitation-only rave operating out of abandoned warehouses and unrented commercial properties in and around downtown Denver.Each morning, once the Shoppers have slipped away, Claire returns to Dwight, her red and white Mustang, to catch a few hours of sleep, and dreams about a new life in Seattle.When her ex-boyfriend is found murdered after a night she can't remember, Claire must prove she didn't kill him. Unless, of course, she did. This was, perhaps, not the best night to start drinking again...

A whistling butcher is probably not anything particularly abnormal, she told herself. After all there are plenty of singing butchers, butchers who tell you jokes, butchers who tell you their life stories. But this one, with his little striped apron and his long legs in very short shorts, big feet with footy socks, blue singlet under the apron to match the blue denim shorts, the muscular arms and legs shining, hairless, olive skinned.

Acclaimed singer-songwriter Rodney DeCroo's second poetry collection, Next Door to the Butcher Shop, explores the permeability of memory and uncovers heart-wrenching beauty from shadowy grit. How quickly age descends on us. Our memories are maps to places that don't exist. I was an emperor on a green lawn wearing a white sheet and a paper crown. The birds sang my praises from the hedges and the trees DeCroo unsentimentally recounts moments suffused with grief, longing and loss, and offers a refreshingly unfiltered view of one's self. I'd stand for days along the edges of expressway to sing off-key into the screams of semi-trailers and cars until I stood within a cocoon of silence and flashing shadows In a deft combination of lyrical and visceral imagery, Next Door to the Butcher Shop offers a rare, sharp, first-hand perspective of life around the edges, with dark comedy dispersed throughout.