Books published by Autumn House Press

"Poems considering self, masculinity, and culture through the spectacle of professional wrestling. In this stunning debut, John Belk looks at the world of professional wrestling to excavate the real within the artificial and explore the projections we create, run from, and delight in. In The Gardens of Our Childhoods, the distance between spectacle and reality blurs. Belk uses the spectacle of wrestling to stare deeply into American culture and masculinity, parsing the intersecting threads of patriarchy and gender, and unpacking identity formation and performance. As Belk pries into toxic masculinities, he leaves space also for tenderness, queerness, and resistance to normative structures, opening the potential for love and admiration. Populated by classic and contemporary wrestlers like Andrâe the Giant, Hulk Hogan, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, Ricky Steamboat, Bruno Sammartino, Marcus "Buff" Bagwell, and more, this book is ultimately about the constant deconstruction and reconstruction of our identities that smudge fiction and reality. Like wrestlers in their operatic and winding storylines, we learn how to project and inhabit identities while growing into and fighting against the scripts we write for ourselves and those that are imposed on us. The Gardens of Our Childhoods is the winner of Autumn House Press's Rising Writer Prize in Poetry."--

The story of a failed poet struggling with vision loss, personal crises, and what it means to be an arms dealer in a quasi-dystopian Mexico City.   This debut novel is set in a vaguely dystopian, yet also realistic, Mexico City‿endless traffic jams, relentless clouds of pollution, economic hardships, and the ever-present threat of drug cartels. The unnamed narrator of the novel, at times referred to as Arthur‿in part because of the growing similarity of his life with Arthur Rimbaud‿s‿struggles with the dissonance of leading an artistic life while providing for his family. A failed, penniless poet with a child on the way, he is forced to take a job in his family‿s weapons dealing enterprise, which he soon discovers is connected to the corrupt Mexican armed forces and drug cartels, who are responsible for the increasing death toll in the country. All the while, the narrator struggles with a growing condition in his right eye, a pterygium, that is slowly taking over his vision, blurring the events of his life, including his wife‿s complicated pregnancy, extortions by the drug cartels, and his own relationship to his writing. As the narrator gradually finds his life spiraling out of control, the novel moves quickly to a startling conclusion. Myth of Pterygium is the winner of the 2021 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in Fiction, selected by Maryse Meijer.   Â