A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye by V. Penelope Pelizzon

Published by Pitt Poetry Series in Jan. 2024

Written over a decade while the author lived on four continents, A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye maps the cultural legacies we cherish against those we reject. Playful and wrenching by turns, with lines inflected by the spoken music of their Arabic, Oshiwambo, Xhosa, and Italian contexts, these profound poems explore a life where displacement is the norm. From choosing not to have children to wrestling with a left-hand stick shift in Johannesburg traffic to braising a camel loin for friends in Damascus, V. Penelope Pelizzon’s poems transport us into unexpected depths of feeling with language that is scintillant, luxurious, and wise.

Horse Show by Jess Bowers

Published by the Santa Fe Writer's Project, April 2024

From the tale of Lady, the mare who read a Duke University psychologist's mind, to television palomino Mr. Ed's hypnotic hold over Wilbur Post, the thirteen tales in Horse Show explore how humans have used, abused, and spectacularized their equine companions throughout American history. Wrestling with themes of obsolescence, grief, and nostalgia, Bowers guides us through her museum of equine esoterica with arresting imagery, unflinching intensity, and dark humor.

Your Dazzling Death by Cass Donish

Published by Penguin Random House, September 2024

WINNER OF THE AUDRE LORDE AWARD FOR LESBIAN POETRY • Written in the devastating aftermath of a partner’s suicide, this unprecedented collection is a restorative memorial act, an exploration of queer time, and a powerful expression of nonbinary and trans love in the wake of traumatic loss.

“suddenly a brilliant red-tailed star / flew across the sky, a sun reversing time, / I crossed one world to another / I stood with her in the other world”

In Your Dazzling Death, Cass Donish courageously summons the poems to witness their own state of “obliteration,” widowed by suicide and isolated as a global pandemic is unfolding. Elegizing their partner, the poet Kelly Caldwell, they insist that the intimate, ongoing conversation with a beloved mysteriously continues after loss.

With searing vulnerability and profound perceptiveness, Donish finds a fierce new aesthetic for the disorientation of grief. “Let me paint this / entire country / the colors of your face,” they write, unearthing the wild and shifting scale of mourning. Donish affirms the beauty of their lover’s trans becoming, recalling when they “sounded out / your new potential names / until we found those syllables / that tasted, you said, like honey.” In the sequence “Kelly in Violet,” the centerpiece of this collection, the shattering experience emerges in conversation with the work of Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio, whose words appear in ghostly traces.

Your Dazzling Death ritualizes the work of grief and subverts linear time, asserting that the future will forever be informed by a monumental love that is still alive, not only in the past, but in an imagined space of timelessness where love and grief are inevitably intertwined.

Groom by Austin Segrest

Published by Unbound Edition Press, April 2025

In Groom, Austin Segrest confronts the intricate architecture of memory and power, examining how formative relationships shape and alter us. Through a masterful sequence that moves between past and present, these poems map the complicated territory where mentorship blurs into manipulation, where desire tangles with control. With striking clarity and remarkable formal precision, Segrest explores how we process and survive what shapes us, transforming a difficult personal history into art that reveals that “someone has heard.” 

The Hopefuls by Elizabeth Oness

Published by Cornerstone Press, May 2025

​​From award-winning writer Elizabeth Oness comes a new collection of rapturous and compelling stories about ordinary people and their joys, slights, families, and failures. The Hopefuls shimmers with characters destined to keep desiring, searching, and living . . . and finding themselves again and again.
 

A Preponderance of Starry Beings by Samantha Edmonds

Published by Northwestern University Press, June 15, 2025

Blending fairy tale and science fiction with the otherworldliness of adolescence, A Preponderance of Starry Beings is a collection for anyone preoccupied with looking skyward. These stories probe the experience of coming of age on the outskirts of the universe, whether that be a small Midwestern town or a distant galaxy, and of weighing earthly obligations against the vast promises of space. 

In a sleepy Ohio neighborhood, two girls seek refuge from their homophobic schoolmates in an antiques shop filled with Star Trek memorabilia. On a generation spaceship, children revolt against their parents’ plans to colonize a distant world. Deep in the Florida Everglades, seven sisters must protect their otherworldly mythology when two men arrive to fix the family automobile.

A Preponderance of Starry Beings invites us into a mundane and whimsical world of night islands, small towns, and faith lost and found, where a safe landing matters less than taking the leap.

Red Rabbit Ghost by Jen Julian

Published by Hachette Book Group, July 22, 2025

An impulsive young outcast confronts his small town’s dark secrets in this atmospheric and haunting debut horror novel from brilliant new voice Jen Julian.
 
The town of Blacknot is not what it appears, and a place on its desolate edge known only as The Night House is calling… 

What remains of Jesse’s mother can fit inside an old jerky tin. Photos, postcards, a single, worn-out bracelet. But nothing that can explain why she was found dead eighteen years earlier on the bank of a river, her infant son left wailing by her side. When Jesse starts to receive anonymous messages promising him answers, he returns home to the regressive town of Blacknot, North Carolina so that his lifelong obsession can finally be laid to rest. 
  
But Jesse’s investigation is stirring up trouble with the locals, including his well-armed ex-boyfriend and the mysterious daughter of a local businessman, each with their own inscrutable agendas. They will soon find that this backwater town holds a power more volatile than any of them could have imagined, and that the answers they seek might be better left buried.

Fun City Heist by Michael Kardos

Published by Severn House, Dec 2, 2025

Washed-up drummer Mo Melnick’s fifteen minutes of fame with the one-hit-wonder band “Sunshine Apocalypse” ended years ago. These days, he’s resigned to a dim future of renting out beach chairs and kicking sand. That is, until his childhood best friend—and former bandmate—Johnny Clay appears in Mo’s little beach paradise with an offer. He wants to reunite the band for one final show. The venue? FUN CITY, an all-cash amusement park where Sunshine Apocalypse got their start. Mo isn’t interested, especially when his ex-girlfriend drops off their teenage daughter Janice for a surprise summer stay. But then Mo finds out that Johnny is dying. He’s got Lou Gherig’s disease. And Mo realizes he can’t deprive his old friend of one last chance to make things right—to repair their friendship, and their band. To kick off the mortal coil by doing the only thing that ever made Johnny happy: giving an audience the ride of their lives.   

That is, until Mo learns the truth: Johnny plans to rob Fun City.

The “final show” was pretense all along. Johnny has been planning this heist since they were kids, working at Fun City part-time while nursing their fledgling musical ambitions. Mo knows the plan is crazy. He knows it has more holes than a golf course. But four middle-aged has-beens with nothing to lose have got one last chance to make something of their lives. And deep down, Mo knew he would never be happy renting out beach chairs until his sandy grave. Plus, his daughter Janice thinks robbing a theme park is a really cool idea, and, ironically, crime may be Mo’s one chance to connect with the daughter he’s never known. Mo will have to balance all that and more as his bungling rat-pack takes on the FUN CITY HEIST.

Necronauts by Ryan Habermeyer

Published by Stillhouse Press, March 2026

Welcome to Calypsee, Utah: a small fundamentalist town at the edge of nowhere whose patron saint is Ronald Reagan and the pledge of allegiance ends with In Armageddon We Trust. Among the misfits, perverts, and prophets lives an orphaned boy with a cosmonaut helmet—or maybe it’s just an old fishbowl—surgically grafted onto his head who watches too many campy 1950s sci-fi films and, believing he is an alien, builds a catapult in the desert as part of his quest to launch himself into outer space and reunite with the mothership. By turns philosophical and whimsical, savage and sentimental, this panoramic novel-in-flash-fictions of a grotesque American West is at once an intimate exploration of fathers and sons as well as a social satire of 1980s Americana—where the addictive paranoia of religious fanaticism and naïve scientific obsession blur into a botched fever dream interrogating the increasingly blurred lines between facts, fictions, and folklores in the faith-obsessed American psyche

Sifting the Feminine: Essays on a Woman's Body by Ashley Anderson

Published by University of Georgia Press, Spring 2026

Description forthcoming