"Starting with the gorgeous cover photo, this anthology pleases the reader's senses on many levels: the shapes and figurative sounds of the 193 poems and short fiction contained here; their wisdom, insights, humor, pathos, and overall humanity; their compelling pace and relevance. Here are 95 diverse authors--distinguished and emerging, Poets Laureate, Pushcart Prize Nominees, award-winners, editors, professors, performance poets--raising their distinct voices in a book that spotlights the power and beauty of our writing community." --Thelma T. Reyna National Award-Winning Author Poet Laureate Emerita 2014-2016

An English-language anthology of 60 poets from Southern California, including 3 Poets Laureate and poets who have won multiple literary awards and other recognition for their work. The poems represent various styles, traditions, lengths, and topics. Poets are multiculturally, generationally, and ethnically diverse, including some first-generation Americans and a 94-year-old World War II veteran. Representing a cross-section of America, the poets here will make you laugh, weep, ponder, and gain new insights into the everyday as well as the heavenly.

"The voices in the Altadena Literary Review 2020 are diverse and beautiful as the flora and fauna of Tovaangar, the ancestral land of the Tongva people, which includes Los Angeles. In this collection are the poetry and prose of the people we see every day who also carry poems within their hearts...from people experiencing houselessness to the youth to your neighbor. We are grateful to bring voices of poets/writers in this book writing words, in addition to English, in the Tongva language, Nahuatl language, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Chinese. Within this diversity is the song of life, death, suffering, hope and joy reminding us how connected we are to each other and life on this planet and the universe." --Teresa Mei Chuc, Editor-in-Chief, Altadena Poet Laureate 2018 to 2020 "When Teresa and I started our journey as co-Altadena poets laureate in 2018, we had no idea of the opportunities and challenges our new titles would bring. Since then we have grown tremendously as poets, publishers and champions for the literary arts. The Altadena Literary Review 2020 represents the culmination of two years of our efforts to promote poetry and letters, and serves as a historical record of our vision to publish a literary journal that upholds excellence and reflects the diverse voices of not only the Altadena and Pasadena communities, but of greater Los Angeles. Thus, within these pages you will hear a chorus of multi-ethnic voices, as well as voices that represent members of the LGBTQ communities and different socio-economic groups, from those living in million dollar manors to those living in tents. You will hear their love songs and laments, their ditties, dirges, and dreams. By listening we hope you will not only develop a better understanding of the human condition, but a greater empathy and compassion for all of humankind." --Hazel Clayton Harrison, Editor, Altadena Poet Laureate 2018--2020

Slow Dance with Sasquatch is an invitation into a private ballroom, a banquet hall in the middle of the woods. Here, you will sit and feast and waltz with your monsters. Here, you will harvest imagination from loneliness and longing. Here, you will coax laughter from the beasts’ mouths. Here, the table is always fully loaded. Here, the cake is always warm, and no matter how much of it you eat, you will never stop being beautiful.

In the appropriately titled Mean, Colette LaBouff Atkinson’s speakers confront a series of cruel lovers, estranged ex-husbands and ex-ex-wives, neglectful parents, disrespectful children, menacing drunks, would-be rapists, well-meaning but ineffectual teachers, and that annoying kid in first grade who wouldn’t leave you alone. Managing to “say” what most of us would only think but never dare speak out loud, this stunning debut collection reveals that the horrors and cruelty we experience in everyday life can turn out to be very real indeed. But Atkinson does not merely rake her subjects across the coals: she deftly exposes, instead, how the world mirrors back to us our own meanness, lending it a truth and a history. In forty-three deadpan, often merciless prose poems that are masterpieces of the form, Mean lays bare the darkness within the narrator’s heart as well as in ours. "Colette Labouff Atkinson’s artful laconicism attains the force of a shout, without ever raising its voice. The intelligent, merciless narrative cool arrays a sad comedy, with an unemphatic but penetrating 'and then . . . and then': accounts of love pursued far more often than it is glimpsed or realized."—Robert Pinsky

This book consists of the work of twenty-three poets, living in Russia and abroad and writing during the period since 1975. It is the first dual-language anthology in many years.

Winner of the 2020 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize, Jessica Abughattas’s Strip is a captivating debut about desire and dispossession and that tireless poetic metaphor—the body. Audacious and clear-eyed, plainspoken and brassy, Abughattas’s poems are songs that break free from confinement as they span the globe from Hollywood to Palestine. “The mystery that Abughattas composes is always moving toward an impossible freeing of the self from its numerous frames. Yet frame by frame . . . she suspends our disbelief, catalogs those potentialities in an America always ready to shoot, direct, and produce the film of itself. Strip is ‘in love with possibility,’ ‘in praise of here I am, here I’ve been,’ USA style. Strip celebrates the body—its rise and fall, ebb and flow, in a carnival of parties—restlessly, shamelessly, searching for a way out.... Even as Abughattas claims that ‘I can’t believe sometimes I have a body,’ her poems teem with an awareness of the body’s unavoidable centrality in our lives—in how we view our lives, and how others view them; in how they progress, and how they end; in how they become meaningful, and how they are stripped of meaning. And no stripping escapes memory. Whether in terms of dispossession or sexuality, admiration or pity, Abughattas renders her treatment of the body with candor and poignancy. . . . The most startling moments in Abughattas’s poems, however, depend not on shocking or intimate details—but on the ‘I’ pulling away from the self, abandoning the ego, and gazing outward. She tries to see something else, to escape the body’s restraints.” —Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara, from the Preface