Books published by Unsolicited Press

The poems in PAPER BIRDS do not require any background other than a certain maturity of experience, some acquaintance with poetry and its oddities, and a lively curiosity: "a splash that drew us quickly refolds itself/as the lake's plain surface over a depthless void..."As with a painting, a poem isn't a flash-frozen scene but a lively one in a reader's moment even if we can't see it so. What's there isn't waiting for us. It happens in our arrival, as our arrival: "like a team of synchronized swimmers whose legs and feet/then arms and hands form flower patterns/ briefly before a closing splash/it is flow we see and yet do not;" An unavoidable strangeness remains and must remain. The world isn't here for our pleasure nor our suffering, and poetry doesn't tell us why we have so much of the one and so little of the other, only that it is so. If it seems a particular poet is much too negative, consider the product of a thorough, open-handed negativity: "a shallow fluid 'I' walking its body from room to room/while its other face,/ strings of pulsing miracles commingled as a universe/streaming in an abyss/of virtual gaps between there-then and here-now,/watches, lives large, remembers..."

While the Kettle Boils is a collection of 150 micro-fiction.

Mayo begins his new collection with a brief tale and utterance made by an elephant trainer at a zoo: "It's said," Beasley says, "an elephant won't pass by a dead elephant without casting a branch or some dust on the body. A kind of homage, I suppose." In a variety of ways, the twelve stories that follow are tributes to characters who find themselves on the fringes, at the sides of roads. In "When the Moon Was Ours for the Taking," a man recalls a brief few days he found himself fishing with his NASA-physicist father who is otherwise preoccupied with the Space Race craze of the 1960s. In "A Mindfulness Becoming Less," an aging, out-of work Homer Lynch convinces himself he doesn't need the job and health care he needs. In "Vigil for Ammospiza nigréscens," a veteran of the Vietnam War searches for an extinct bird in the salt marshes of Florida, haunted by the North Vietnamese soldier he killed. In "Burn Barrel," Cole, a jobless college graduate, despairing that he can never pay his student loans, begins to burn all his university papers, in a strange effort to erase the debt. In these and other stories, Mayo's characters are people we think we know, in situations we think we understand-and then realize in flashes of truth we can see them-and ourselves-in new ways.

Laura Kiesel plumbs the depths of familial dysfunction, and the wretched inheritance of addiction, thoroughly and with impressive nuance in Swallowing the Stem of Adam's Apple, combining integrity and personal grit that's interwoven throughout her lyrical style. She writes beautifully about her fractured relationship with her mother, and the ripple effect it has had throughout the rest of her life. Her work is an unflinching examination of the erotic implications of romantic relationships and filled with visually exhilarating metaphors and analogies.Raised a Roman Catholic, Kiesel describes religious rituals and makes use of Christian symbols, while referencing Biblical figures and stories, in ways that are simultaneously subversive and familiar. Illness and death are common themes in her work, whom Kiesel often personifies and treats as old friends--more accurately, rivals or frenemies--competing for her time and attention and that of her loved ones. Instead of keeping them at arm's length, Kiesel embraces them and the macabre reminders her daily life offers her of her own and others' shared mortality and finiteness. Swallowing the Stem of Adam's Apple does not demur in its assessment of the self and society but instead navigates the trials and tribulations of the human condition with visceral astuteness.

BIOGRAPHY OF A BODY by Lizz Schumer is a lyrical meander through what it means to be a messy, flawed, imperfect human. In personal essays and snippets of verse, it probes the influence of religion on a person's psyche, how the legacy of traditional femininity work their way under the skin, and the many pitfalls of living in a female body.

Working Title investigates a spectrum of emotions: disillusionment, fatigue, anger, frustration, and indifference, and others through a series of poems that honor the Everyman. The speakers of the poems share the same face but not always the same uniform. They are workers from the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. What emerges is a painting illustrating the consequences of spending more time in an office than out in the world. The numbing nine-to-fives. The blinding blue light of computer screens. Working Title is a portrait of the mundane everyday of modern civilization in the western world.

A Contemporary Portrait of the Southwest is a love letter to the Southwest. The collection follows the journey of a man named John Whenn who, after accepting his position as an adjunct faculty member at Central Arizona Community College, investigates the Southwest and produces a politically charged collection of op-eds which describe in vivid and lurid detail the landscape, people, and history of the region.

The Animal Within is filled with poems that want to swim together, focusing on animal and human nature. A few are ekphrastic, based on photography by Jaimie Huycke and Dennis Liddell. Dive in and readers find a world where horses speak their minds, crawdaddies sing, and mermaids find love. Wolves howl "ahwoo at the full strawberry harvest moon in June," and birds do more than flap their wings, but rather create a voice for the oppressed. Humans step in, personas based off the author, and consider loss, depression, and love- inner-self mixed with creature habits- scratching down a lover's back or crying in a zoo. One persona connects with water, skinny-dipping her way into a galaxy reflection, "as quiet as you would expect it to be [she] sends a ripple through the moon." Hawaiian Goddesses tell their story about how the Yoni Crater came to be with a crash. Nature takes note and gets noticed, exploring transcendental and organic aspects. "The stream has no objection" as the poet takes liberty in playing with ideas of what it might be saying. A divine devotion to creatures large and small- flora and fauna finding a voice among calm and chaos, depending on the scene created. Each poem cups a piece of life- ideas not too far fetched- mundane and supernatural. With sounds all around, the author uses anaphora, alliteration, assonance, and other devices to give these animals and personas personality of their own. This chapbook implores readers to take a hiatus, step outside of themselves, and experience the animal within.

Andrew Brenza's Spool is a reckoning of our diminished natural world through the register of a disjointed, smeared, and unraveling poetics. Consisting of a series of breathless lyrical and concrete poems, Spool strives to represent both nature's beauty as well as the tragedy of its destruction, a destruction which is, ultimately, the destruction of ourselves. But the book does not descend entirely into despair, for the author's novel approaches to poetic expression suggest an alternative way that humanity might imagine its place in the world, a way that fundamentally incorporates and enacts humanity's vital connection to nature. It is through this alternative poetics that Brenza offers hope, albeit a difficult one, since it asks us not just to change the way we think about nature, but the way we think about and within language itself.

Built on stunning character development, plot, and unflinching emotion, Joseph Allen Costa delivers stunning prose perfect for the times. The settings, both personal and universal are not only tangible in the imagination, but the invite the reader in to experience stories from the heart.