Punk-rock feminist poems exploring motherhood, pop culture, and resistance with a spirit of defiance, abundance, and irreverent joy.

A teenage girl saddles up to take on worldwide famine—and her own anorexia—in a “fast-paced, witty, and heart-breaking” fantasy adventure (Richelle Mead, #1 New York Times-bestselling author) Jackie Morse Kessler’s Riders of the Apocalypse series follows teens who are transformed into the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. In Hunger, Lisabeth Lewis has a black steed, a set of scales, and a new job: she’s been appointed Famine. How will an anorexic seventeen-year-old girl from the suburbs fare as one of the Four Horsemen? Traveling the world on her steed gives Lisa freedom from her troubles at home—her constant battle with hunger, and her struggle to hide it from the people who care about her. But being Famine forces her to go places where hunger is a painful part of everyday life, and to face the horrifying effects of her phenomenal power. Can Lisa find a way to harness that power—and the courage to fight her own inner demons? A wildly original approach to the issue of eating disorders, Hunger is about the struggle to find balance in a world of extremes and uses fantastic tropes to explore a difficult topic that touches the lives of many teens. “A great book . . . funny and sad, brilliant and tragic, and most of all, it speaks the truth. I adore it.”—Rachel Caine, New York Times-bestselling author “It was sheer genius to combine the eating disorder anorexia with the ultimate entity signifying lack of food, nourishment and all that that entails: famine.”—New York Journal of Books “The storytelling is both realistic and compassionate.”—School Library Journal, (starred review)

“A masterwork of enormous power.” —Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko The searing debut of “one of the most influential writers in American letters…Hunger is a masterpiece, a necessary haunting” (Justin Torres, author of We the Animals). A powerful exploration of the Asian American experience, Hunger weaves the forces of war and magic, food and desire, ghosts and family into poignant tales of love and loss. Celebrated author Lan Samantha Chang illuminates the lives of first-generation immigrants from China, culturally and emotionally uprooted from their homeland, who mistrust connection even as they hunger for attachment—and shows how their choices shape their children. The characters who inhabit this extraordinary collection, “a work of gorgeous, enduring prose” (Helen C. Wan, Washington Post), are caught between the burden of their past and the fragility of their unchartered future.

A rhythmic celebration of love and friendship comparing time together to such magical experiences as seeing a collection of castles beneath the sea.

Low Budget Movie weaves together the voices of two contemporary poets into a singular persona who sings about vintage guitars, movie props, Dunkin' Donuts, misogyny, the male gaze, low budget movies, and the unexpected glitter caught in the cracks of it all.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist: a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself. “I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.” In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,” Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she explores her past—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself. With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and power that have made her one of the most admired writers of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to learn to take care of yourself: how to feed your hungers for delicious and satisfying food, a smaller and safer body, and a body that can love and be loved—in a time when the bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.

"Beneath the obvious beauty of Lisa Dordal's poetry lies a subtle ferocity that threatens to undo the reader on every page of WATER LESSONS. 'Anyone can become / animal or a flicker of light' warns the speaker as she embarks on a journey of recovery: of the memories surrounding a mother's addiction and death; of a father's dementia, which softens him even as it steals him away; and of the speaker's own complicity in mid-century suburban oblivion, a complicity that makes both a mother's and a Black maid's miseries equally tragic. Dordal demands that we not only see the past, but that we step into its deceptively gentle tide, one that sweeps us back to the people, places, and eras that still haunt us. In these poems, no one is truly safe, no one is truly innocent, and no one is truly gone. WATER LESSONS teaches us that swimming against the current of remembrance is futile. We can only trust the water to hold us without drowning us, and to return us to some shore, even if where we land is not where we were first submerged."--Destiny O. Birdsong"WATER LESSONS provides one of the most profound encounters with the human psyche we've found on the page. If you remember flipping through vintage anatomy textbooks, the kind with transparent pages of organs and muscles and bones, then you might begin to understand how Lisa Dordal's poems work their magic--by clear and accurate layering of what is past pressed against what is present, the inner workings of the human condition are mapped with stunning veracity. At the core of this oscillation between here and there, then and now, is a mother's long-ago but still deeply felt death and a father's dementia--an ache that admits 'there is no such thing / as a half-life for grief,' a confluence of time that can no longer tell the difference between love or death... This book will leave you stunned and aching in its wake. What conjuring. What insight. What truth, unmarred and deeply examined." --Nickole Brown