Books published by Driftwood Press

" 'On Earth, a fish barricades her den / and emerges male two months later, / melon-head worthy of brawling and teeth, ' announces one of the brilliant sectioned poems central to Lily-livered. 'On Mars, the sunset is blue. / She asks me about this second life / of red dirt, burnt skin. What do you enjoy // about being a man?' Although framed by a series of 'transiversaries, ' to describe this collection in diaristic terms would not do justice to the overlay of questions raised around gender, beauty, diet, desire, violence, medication and self-medication. An interest in refrain and cyclical structures anchors us, pleasingly counterbalanced against enjambment and an adventuresome sense of the line; we welcome cultural cameos from Shakespeare, HBO, and indie rock. This is a stunning read that showcases a sophisticated, exciting approach to contemporary poetics." -Sandra Beasley, Count the Waves"Lily-livered is a beautifully braided catalog of ways to live and not die. Wren Hanks writes on friendship, hunger, touch, transformation, and the inheritance of a trait for which the chapbook is named. 'Imagine it happened in a barn, a meat cellar.' These poems unfurl as an array of forms, forms of life, with sensuous patterns and particulars. With 'stubble the possible field, ' Hanks breathes lines that combine ribaldry, romance, and refrain into stunning, surprising images and interconnections. This is a smart, moving collection that you will love reading alone or with friends. 'The ground is safe.' "-Oliver Baez Bendorf, Advantages of Being Evergreen

"Magnolia Canopy Otherworld explores the places that hold the muddied and forested histories of women. Sensory and sensual, Erin Carlyle's poems portray an elemental girlhood, and the fragility and publicness of a body, even in the woods. These poems are full of dangerous baptisms, teeth and hooks, gothic flora and their attendant ghosts. Carlyle's style is lush and lovely, but always tugging with its dark undertow until we feel our own animal selves rise out at the end, gasping and human again."-Traci Brimhall, author of our lady of the ruins"Erin Carlyle's Magnolia Canopy Otherworld is a book of precise, gemlike images, where beneath the duende-soaked landscape of rivers, rabbits, trailers, and woodlots, the evidence of patriarchal damage lurks like an undertow. As an act of resistance, Carlyle sets before us the world we have been taught to ignore and says look: the roadkill, the small child wandering alone, the desolation of addiction, the woman-as-object. Wherever the poet casts her eye, the ghosts of violence, family, adolescence, and loss materialize and their visitations are traced with an urgent lyricism that is both gritty and graceful. Open these pages and watch as Erin Carlyle calls forward the drowned girls in their matching white dresses. Be ready for her to interrupt your life with poem after stunning poem in this haunting and arresting debut."-F. Daniel Rzicznek, author of Settlers"In this haunting and visceral collection, Carlyle guides us on an imaginative and transformative journey through Southern girlhood in which girls are ghosts, girls are animals, girls are daughters and lost friends, girls struggle to be more than just bodies. A riveting, smart, and unforgettable debut."-Rebecca Morgan Frank, author of Little Murders Everywhere

"Train-sounds, dew-sounds, sounds from the hair, prayerful sounds and python sounds, fish market then mooncake sounds, sounds of falling into water, sounds of rising from fire-these are the sounds of Village of Knives, a collection that speaks through how much, how closely and imaginatively it listens. The poems here listen to immigrant life and dream, to gendered expectation and subversion, to desire, to the body's surging, briny rhythms. This is a poet who understands the power of paring away the noise to zero in on the music: 'How we turned off all the lights in the house / & fell to our knees / just to hear the sound of bone.'"- Chen Chen, author of When I Grow Up I Want to be a List of Further Possibilities "Fierce and full of teeth, these poems are living creatures that will eat you alive. Helli Fang crafts each surprising image with care and incisiveness, pr obing the past and its living lineage of violence, migration, and love. Village of Knives is razor-sharp and lyrical,full of language that is both divine and bodily, grief-ridden and ecstatic. These poems give us a new and necessary vocabulary for displacement, diasporic desire, and daughterhood. Fang reminds us that language is a weapon and a refuge, a site of resistance and memory and regeneration. Her words reach for the light beyond loss."-K-Ming Chang, author of Past Lives, Future Bodies

Featured in our first bi-annual issue is the 2018 Adrift Short Story Contest winning story "Terminal Velocity" by Claire Agnes, which was selected by guest judge David Jauss. Our second featured story, Shane Page's "Her Noble Face," features a former pugilist and his fighting dog. This issue's poetry dives headlong into the complexity of life's extremes; chronic illness, prison sentences, the threat of drowning, and more are laid bare in poems bursting with equal parts honesty and vivid imagination. J. Collings, Jason Hart, and Cindy House round out the issue with stand-out comics.

The featured short story, "Curse of Ham," precedes a lengthy interview on socio-politics and the risks of writing from a racist's perspective. The poems in this issue dazzle with investigations of place and body; exoplanets, birthing scars, bulldozed buildings, mermaid scales, and more fill poems begging to be touched and explored. The issue wraps with a poem-comic examining the clash of nature and machines.--Our eighteenth issue features work from the talented minds of Nicholas Nakai Garcia, Daniel Kuriakose, Kiyoko Reidy, Michael Webber, Maggie Blake Bailey, Haikki Huotari, Ahja Fox, Natalya Sukhonos, Erin Carlyle, LeeAnn Olivier, Elizabeth Kerlikowski, Betsy Johnson- Miller, Richard Vyse, Ray Nayler, and Cesar Sebastian Diaz .The managing editors are James McNulty and Jerrod Schwarz. Rick Krizman is the guest fiction editor. Megan Nemise Hall is the poetry editor. Sally Franckowiak is the cover designer. Cover by Richard Vyse.