In Cranial Fracking, Frazier has gathered his insights on the most urgent issues of today. From climate change (what did Al Gore say at his colloquium on the rising temperatures in Hell?) to the state of culture (what do you do when you’re afflicted with Loss of Funding?) to Texas (what should we do with Texas?), he has all the answers. Or, at the very least, a lot of questions.
We are living through an unprecedented, revolutionary era. Across the country, people have lost loved ones, livelihoods, homes, and their own lives to Covid-19. In the midst of the pandemic, historic protests erupted in the summer of 2020 over the constant brutality against Black Americans. Galvanizing and lyrical, There's a Revolution Outside, My Love, edited by Tracy K. Smith and John Freeman, captures and gives voice to all of the roiling sentiments of the moment in an anthology for the ages.
A collection of whimsical, baroque, ribald, and heartbreaking fables that take the gloom and melancholy of our political moment and find subversive solace by overturning the protocols of tale-telling. The adventures in The Cheerful Scapegoat cross a comedy of manners with a Sadean orgy, and language has its own desires: figures of speech carry an erotic charge that straddles slapstick and vertigo. These stories take the tchotchkes of queer culture—codes and signifiers—scrambles them together, and blows them up into an improbable soufflé.
At once an album of tales, a portrait gallery, a soundscape, and hymnbook, Heard-Hoard encompasses a chorus of voices shot through with (mostly human) histories and mysteries, their “old appetites as chronic as tides.” Recognized for his “wildly original” poetry and his “uncanny and unparalleled ability to blend lyric and narrative,” Atsuro Riley gives us a profound evocation of lives and loss and lore.
In his second collection Luc Sante pays homage to Patti Smith, Rene Ricard, and Georges Simenon; traces the history of tabloids; surveys the landscape that gave birth to the Beastie Boys; explores the back alleys of vernacular photography; sounds a threnody for the forgotten dead of New York City. Autobiography is the glue that holds the collection together: every item carries deep personal significance, and most are rooted in Sante’s experience growing up in NYC’s Lower East Side in the fertile 1970s and '80s. As he traces his deep engagement with music, his experience of the city, his progression as an artist and observer, and his love life and ambitions, memoir flows into essay, fiction into critical writing, and humor into poetry. The collection shows Sante at his most lyrical, impassioned, and imaginative, a writer for whom every assignment brings the challenge of inventing a new form.
The second novel in The Comet Cycle, a grippingly original sci-fi series in which a passing comet has caused irreversible change to the growth of fungi, spawning a dangerous, invasive species in the Pacific Northwest that threatens to control the lives of humans and animals alike.
The illuminated medieval manuscripts known as Books of Hours have been used to guide contemplation and prayer for centuries, with their intricate designs and exquisite coloring. Devotional poet and priest Spencer Reece has revived the tradition with a collection of vibrant watercolors inspired by his life journeys and reflections on faith. The evocative images and accompanying texts in All the Beauty Still Left are sure to provoke contemplation and reflection for readers of all faiths.
Taking inspiration from medieval sea charts—portulans—these poems bring a fresh variation to the ancient metaphor of life as a journey. Portulans guided mariners from port to port weaving paths at the threshold of the open sea. Similarly, the course of these poems navigates familiar mysteries and perennial questions through times of unbelief, asking whether consciousness is anchored in the transcendent, and if the universe can be accounted for by physics alone.
David Talbot and Margaret Talbot illuminate “America’s second revolutionary generation” in this gripping history of the political landscape of the 1960s and 70s, one of the most dynamic eras of the twentieth century, brought to life through seven defining radical moments that offer vibrant parallels and lessons for today.
