Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara
2020 Florida Book Award in Poetry, Gold Medal In his debut collection, William Fargason inspects the pain of memory alongside the pain of the physical body. Fargason takes language to its limits to demonstrate how grief is given a voice. His speaker confronts illness, grapples with grief, and heals after loss in its most crushing forms. These poems attempt to make sense of trauma in a time of belligerent fathers and unacceptable answers. Fargason necessarily confronts toxic masculinity while navigating spiritual and emotional vulnerability.
Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara
2020 Florida Book Award in Poetry, Gold Medal In his debut collection, William Fargason inspects the pain of memory alongside the pain of the physical body. Fargason takes language to its limits to demonstrate how grief is given a voice. His speaker confronts illness, grapples with grief, and heals after loss in its most crushing forms. These poems attempt to make sense of trauma in a time of belligerent fathers and unacceptable answers. Fargason necessarily confronts toxic masculinity while navigating spiritual and emotional vulnerability.
Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara
In his debut collection, William Fargason inspects the pain of memory alongside the pain of the physical body. Fargason takes language to its limits to demonstrate how grief is given a voice. His speaker confronts illness, grapples with grief, and heals after loss in its most crushing forms. These poems attempt to make sense of trauma in a time of belligerent fathers and unacceptable answers. Fargason necessarily confronts toxic masculinity while navigating spiritual and emotional vulnerability.
The Last Unkillable Thing
""What will be possible / when I'm no longer sorry?" asks the speaker of THE LAST UNKILLABLE THING after the sudden death of a parent. "What do lost daughters burst into?" In this debut collection by Emily Pittinos, the speaker is tasked with relearning the ways of loneliness, family, sex, and wilderness as a person who feels thoroughly and abruptly without. Shaped by both concision and unfolding sequences, THE LAST UNKILLABLE THING is a journey across landscapes of mourning where "in [the] periphery, every shadow / is a new dead thing." The light of these poems takes on the tint of grief, and through that light the speaker reexamines what remains: her changed self, her desire, the midwestern flora, the unyielding snow. Interior and exterior ecologies blur until loss becomes a place of its own, and the only inevitability. "Doesn't it hurt," Pittinos writes, "to be human. I'm so human, I could die.""--
Children in Tactical Gear
Children in Tactical Gear offers a brilliant feed of stark incantations and unsparing satire. Set in distinctly American landscapes, including toy weapon assembly lines and the compounds of the super rich, and voiced by imperiled children, failed adults, and even a smart home speaker, this collection demonstrates the unsettling force of a surreal imagination under duress.