Literary and Visual Arts anthology

In his sophomore collection of poems, Donny Winter takes readers on a perilous adventure through a futuristic and dystopian world. His experimental free verse poems use science fiction, natural, and pop cultural images to metaphorically illustrate his experiences as a gay man navigating the different obstacles society presents after coming out. These poems create a cyberpunk inspired, symbolic world centered around the cyborg, Solus Arcane, who seeks to understand their existence free of oppressive forces and strives to unlearn the programming given to them by their oppressive creator. Together, our bodies are welded and soldered by the forces of those seeking to silence, erase, or oppress. Feats of Alchemy acts as a circuit board connecting us with pathways toward a self-sovereignty beyond artifice.

David A. Estringel's first published book Indelible Fingerprints from Alien Buddha Press contains prose and verse that are reflective of the significant parts of David's life that have not only shaped him but left permanent marks (both good and bad). This published work contains 40 pieces of poetry and short fiction that have been previously published and reprinted in over 43 literary magazines and journals in the United States and abroad. Indelible Fingerprints offers 37 pieces of verse, ranging from free-verse to prose poetry to haiku, of various influences (Classical to dirty realism), as well as 3 short stories that encompass oeuvres of kitchen sink realism, speculative fiction, and the surreal.

This Someone I Call Stranger, by James Diaz, is absolutely transcendent. Diaz's evocative and courageous writing conjures up cinematic imagery with heartbreaking vulnerability and unpretentious strength. Reading his poetry, I could feel myself leaning in, yearning alongside him for such things as the affirmation of love, beauty, and release in the face of brokenness, loss, and pain. Diaz's poems will make you feel deeply. His poems will make you want to write, even if you're not a writer. His poems will make you look at your world through a new lens, see and feel things through a bigger, perhaps broken, yet wide-open heart. Kym Tuvim In our era of irony, disposability, and impatience, the poems of This Someone I Call Stranger, James Diaz's debut collection, reverberate with rare authenticity and lyrical pain. Threading through a past of blind forests and dark basements, empty cupboards, dirty needles, hospital floors, and bad men who won't die, this book is a necessary example of duende for the twenty-first century. These poems will arrest you. They have hungry souls, and they ache without breaking. They will hang in your brain and settle in your bones, and they will also move you forward, bravely, toward uncertain light. Jessie Janeshek Authentic, unafraid, and unassuming, James Diaz's This Someone I Call Stranger is a personal yet dynamic landscape of the darker parts of the soul, which somehow remains "impossibly alive" no matter how far from home one has strayed. The poems are equal parts vulnerable and strong, a breathing example of how those qualities are inextricable, how there is something about the darkness that cannot put out the light, how there is something about the light that gains its brightness from the shadows. Diaz writes as if no one outside is listening, which is to say, as if these poems are not poems at all but whispered murmurs from one aspect of the self to another, and we the readers just happen to be lucky enough to catch these glimpses of humanity in its most raw essence: determined yet mysterious, messy yet transcendent. Sarah Certa

How to Walk with Steve is a memoir of a boy's connection with his autistic brother in a family defined by alcoholism, art, and death in a decaying Midwestern city. With exposed-nerve scenes, Robert Fromberg immerses us in an early childhood made relentlessly unpredictable by autism and addiction; teenage years alone in 1970s New York City; and young adulthood as guardian of his brother after the death of their parents.

This beautiful book by Scott Ferry is filled with ghostly plainsongs sung between fathers and daughters and sons (and who isn't one of these) as they evolve toward and eventually away from one another. There is an urgency here to harvest-before it's too late-that love particular to parents that rewrites itself in the palimpsest of a child. This is a book about sacred relationships and the power of tenderness. The poems in These Hands of Myrrh are ricochets from the front line born out of courage in the face of mortality. They have traveled through hard-earned wisdom to get to us. And as readers we can be thankful they arrived. -Gary Lemons, author of The Snake Quartet This collection immerses you gently, gradually, into a world where the mundane and the miraculous live side by side. Ferry shows us life and death, both the big moments (the birth of his son, the death of a neighbor, confronting alcoholism), as well as the small (gardening, a flight of birds, cleaning the fish tank). Before you know it, you are down in the underworld with him. Somehow, reality has shifted: ghosts communicate through streetlights. Trees have auras. The relationships between fathers and sons takes on a mythic quality. These poems are sharp, incisive, yet lyrical, often funny. Like all spiritual journeys, this book feels sometimes elemental and sometimes frightening, but always ends on a note of hope. -Lauren Scharhag, author of Languages, First and Last Don't let Scott Ferry's poems fool you and don't fail to let them captivate you. Their seemingly fragile beauty belies the tensile strength of a healer. They illustrate with precision the perspective of one who faces life and death on a daily basis, not losing either his grief over the inevitability of the former or the wonder and fleeting joy of the latter. Author Christopher Moore writes that children see magic because they never stop seeking it. Neither does Ferry. He illustrates a stippled landscape with flashes of gentle humor and softly graded shadows-repeated small touches, expertly placed, telling in the thought and affect they provoke in the reader. These poems linger long after reading them-for good reason. -Jonathan Yungkans, author of Beneath a Glazed Shadow

WIFE AND WAR: THE MEMOIR is Amalie Flynn's story of 9/11, of being just blocks away and witnessing the terror attack, of running in the dust and debris as the Twin Towers collapsed behind her, and of how, in the years that followed 9/11, she became intertwined with the war on terror that began on that day. She became a military wife. She and her husband survived his 15 month deployment to Afghanistan. And then they endured the aftermath of war when war followed her husband home, occupied their house and their marriage, and created battlefields they did not expect. But WIFE AND WAR: THE MEMOIR is more than just Flynn's story. In a time when war spreads itself across the globe, WIFE AND WAR: THE MEMOIR is our story.