Books in the ACRE (CHUP) series

The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons imagines a human mission to Mars, a consequence of Earth's devastation from climate change and natural disaster. As humans begin to colonize the planet, history inevitably repeats itself. Dystopian and ecopoetic, this collection of poetry examines the impulse and danger of the colonial mindset, and the ways that gendered violence and ecological destruction, body and land, are linked. "This time we'll form more carefully," one voice hopes in "Ecopoiesis: The Terraforming." "We've started on empty / plains. We'll vaccinate. We'll make the new deal fair." But the new planet becomes a canvas on which the trespasses of the American Frontier are rehearsed and remade. Featuring a multiplicity of narratives and voices, this book presents the reader with sonnet crowns, application forms, and large-scale landscape poems that seem to float across the field of the page. With these unusual forms, Rogers also reminds us of previous exploitations on our own planet: industrial pollution in rural China, Marco Polo's racist accounts of the Batak people in Indonesia, and natural disasters that result in displaced refugees. Striking, thought-provoking, and necessary, The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons offers a new parable for our modern times.

"Follows Juan Gutéirrez, a self-employed single father, as he navigates a tumultuous year of inescapable change. His daughter, Stella, is on the verge of moving away to college; his lover, Jared, is pressing him for commitment; and his favorite watering hole--a ramshackle dive presided over by Bob the Bartender--is transforming into a karaoke hotspot. The story is set in a neighborhood that is also changing, gentrification inciting the ire of the established community. Upon the unexpected death of one of the bar's regulars, Juan is sent reeling, and a series of upheavals follow as he both seeks and spurns intimacy, pondering the legacy of distant parents and a failed marriage and grappling with his sexuality--all the while cycling and dating, drinking at Nicks Lounge, and parenting a determined and defiant child-become-woman. When his incarcerated father dies and Stella reveals she's pregnant, Juan is forced to examine the emotional bonds that both hold and hinder him, to reassess his ideas of commitment, of friendship, of love. His encounters with various characters--his mother, his ex-wife, a middle-aged punker, an aspiring acupuncturist, a dapper veteran--lead Juan to the realization that he himself must change to thrive. This is a story of making family and making mistakes, of rending and of mending. As a Latinx queer father with a mixed-race daughter, Juan exemplifies the ways identity connects and divides us"--