Books published by C&r Press

Paleotempestology, as no one would know, is the study of storms and the central theme rippled throughout Bertha Isabel Crombet's debut collection. Beginning, very literally, with a poem titled "Waiting for Hurricane Irma" in which she wishes for a "fresh disaster to eclipse [her] old one", she sets the precedent for the entire book, which goes on to explore emotional turbulence in it's myriad forms, including heartbreak, memory, and myth. Presented with both whimsy and wit, fear and candor, imagination and certainty, and all via the lens of a Cuban-American woman navigating the often funny and treacherous landscape of dating in the modern world, the poems churn and churn to reveal how both grief and hope can coexist.

Everyone knows you don't talk about the elephant in the room. But, what if you are the elephant in the room? White Boys from Hell files a report on the position of the straight white male in current American culture, a position fraught with contradiction and confusion. It does so without resort to the diction of the academy, or any lens applied in detachment, but, rather: from the inside out. In poems that address relations between men and women, men and other men, and men and the larger world, notions such as "masculinity," and "toxic masculinity" are considered by the voice of poetry, which, in Robert Pinsky's use of the phrase, means "something quite literal and practical." Granted, these are the poems of one person (elephant?) only, but the voice is compelling, the vision clear-eyed, rending, and urgent.

Pearson's debut introduced us to a master transmogrifier. In this surreal, follow-up collection he investigates the architectural implications of inheritance-how the human body houses the violence of its forebears. A Family Is a House is a blueprint, a guide to the logical structures and spaces we build in our minds: sometimes to keep our secrets in, sometimes to keep the horrors out. Pearson offers us an answer to the toughest question: what happens when our secrets are our horrors? We build, compartmentalize, and quarantine. We refract, reflect, demolish, and burn. This is a book about the oldest partition-that thin wall between the dark and the light. This is a book about bravery, about severing oneself from a lineage of abuse. When the hands that feed us also beat us, we must beat them back with the gifts we've been given. Through Pearson, we relearn that language can be weaponized into a kind of magic that saves us. - Brandon Rushton

In his debut collection Millennial Roost, poet Dustin Pearson interrogates the parameters of childhood abuse, drawing attention not only to the incessant ache of trauma, but to its daily reproduction, against which the language of growth is a restorative act. -Damian Caudill

The old gods only ask for forgiveness when watching from too far a distance. They guess and risk and let their furred ankles meet a finger's shaky tip. In our looking up and inward, we, too, construct a primeval forest populated by winding rows of tiger lilies imagined in a lover's nautical ear where shipwrecks line beaches made of nickel and iron. Here, hunger comprises both soil and canopy, and little escapes the hourglass's rough rim. The poems in this collection are meant for such appetites. Images do not just leap from line to line, they duck and burrow between pages, careful to reveal their earnestness only to those with mouths open wide. Banjo's Inside Coyote is a book of questions-those meant to remind us to stay longer in the mossy Inn and listen close to stories we should not soon forget. In every port, one barstool will host a long wagging tail. If we follow its swing to spine to throat to snout, we will notice teeth spread broad in a smile, in a welcome and warning. Answers are risky. They are propelled by lust and hope for beauty, by something like a winged raft too quick down a trickster's river. The poems in Kelli Allen's third full length collection ask us to curl our tongues past the lips we lick for salt, the ones we part when asking for longer here, in this place of pirate flags and slick bellies still hot under busy palms. These are poems for what we offer inside-out, for whomever might be waiting on the shore.

A young Gentile and Jewish woman grows into adulthood with an abusive mother and a womanizing father who met on broadway. The grandaughter of silent film start Helen Gardner, she discovers her own sexuality and empowerment, while navigating the uber wealthy and racist East Egg society.

When Mary and Ann agree to a surrogacy partnership everything goes awry. Ann, a pre-school teacher, is desperate for the children she physically can't have. Mary, a 50-year-old pagan jeweler, hopes to make amends for years of maternal neglect. Together, they plunge into the expensive, morally complex world of reproductive technology and an intimacy neither they, nor Ann's husband, Joel, is prepared for. Financially hard-pressed, Joel goes behind Ann's back and agrees to help Mary grow a marijuana crop in her attic. Ann struggles with the rigors and enforced togetherness of the reproductive regime. And Mary's delight in being a "bountiful earth mother" is offset by the physical ordeal of bearing multiple fetuses. The stakes escalate as the police start sniffing around the grow house, a pagan ritual goes tragically awry, and the pregnancy becomes more perilous, forcing Ann, Joel, and Mary to confront the potentially calamitous consequences of pursuing their deepest desires. Sharp and audacious, Made by Mary is a black comedy using magic realism to blow up myths about women, mothers, and motherhood, where even the most extreme situations are rendered with candor, intelligence, and empathy.

CREDO. I believe. No other statement is so full of intent and subversion and power. A Credo is a call to arms. It is a declaration. A Credo is the act of an individual pushing back against society, against established stigmas, taboos, values, and norms. A Credo provokes. It desires change. A Credo is an artist or community challenging dogma, and putting oneself on the frontline. A Credo is art at risk. A Credo can be a marker of revolution. A Credo, is thus, the most calculating and simple form of a manifesto. CREDO creates a bridge from the philosophical to the practical, presenting a triad of creative writing manifestos, essays on the craft of writing, and creative writing exercises. CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing is a raw look at what motivates authors today.

Meet Jane Dark-both the everywoman and the uberwoman-who tries "to ache more beautifully" as she suffers the indignities of a husband's infidelity and the "other wife." In a series of stunning prose poems entitled "Sad Film," Kristina Marie Darling sublimely describes the strains of a relationship without "even a cough to break the silence." This inventive writer re-imagines the cultural scripts of heartache and the relationship imperative white honoring the pain and chaos of betrayal as well as the violence for which we are capable. DARK HORSE is a masterful pastiche, repeating phraseology transforming and deepening its meaning from poem to poem. -Denise Duhamel

When their father is diagnosed with terminal cancer, the sisters cope with the loss in different ways. Recovering from divorce and the collapsing journalism industry, Shannon manages a bottom-feeder rag and considers having a child for her cousin and his lover, an Army veteran. After Paige is kicked out of her band, she becomes obsessed with a reclusive songwriter she wants to make famous against his will. Claire's family and career are threatened by her attraction to a new hire she supervises, an African American who ignites her passion for literature and the deeper questions it asks of her. But, when their family's uncovered secrets threaten all they've known, the sisters will have to choose between lives they've dreamed of and those they love.Inspired by Chekhov's Three Sisters with echoes of King Lear, While You Were Gone traces the journeys of three sisters growing up in and returning to a hometown that, like them, seems to reflect a new South. But beneath the surface changes are secrets that run as deep as the Tennessee River. While You Were Gone explores how three sisters living in the American South in the twenty-first century deal when their own dreams collide with their own misconceptions about family, race, gender, and the larger world.

Populated by a town full of quirky, yet recognizable citizens, and told through the voice of "the committee," Ivy vs Dogg: With a Cast of Thousands is a humorous and pointed account of a small town acting out both good and dubious intentions that hurdle the town to the point of breaking.Teenage Ivy Simmons has a longstanding rivalry with Jimmy, "Dogg," Doggins, high school tennis star, and hometown hero. Ivy lives in the "Pink Ghetto," a low income stucco apartment complex that has haunted her every effort to best Dogg. Their years of sparring comes to a head when the town of Mudlick's annual Jr. Mr. Mayor election is announced and Ivy becomes the first female ever to run. Mudlick's busybody leaders, known as "the committee," do not approve, especially when Ivy reveals an embarassing secret. "The committee," as it has since the town founding, inserts itself into all matters both personal and public, and they feel no compunction about ruining Ivy's candidacy on the grounds of the shame she's likely to bring to Mudlick. Despite a hesitancy on Dogg's part to compete against his childhood rival, the pair engage campaign events that escalate in absurdity. Between a gruesome topiary display set up by the town's most prominent (and reclusive) matriarch and the election, emotions run high, squeezing Ivy and Dogg from all sides and forcing them to make the most adult decision of their lives.

Martin Ott's first two poetry collections won the De Novo and Sandeen Prizes. In his third collection LESSONS IN CAMOUFLAGE, he continues to explore the theme of casting a light on hidden truths. The book spans his turmoil as a U.S. Army interrogator to conflicts personal in nature: divorce, death, and determination to uncover the mysteries of what makes life worth living.