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About Puzzle Pieces

by Bernard Grant
Paper Nautilus Press
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PRAISE

Like the identities he addresses in each of his essays, Bernard Grant’s Puzzle Pieces is full of shifts and movement. Whether he’s looking at gender, race, class, or ability, Grant uses language in an honest and fierce way to engage with the intricacies of his life. This, in turn, reveals the complexities of what it means to be alive. With impressive precision, Grant’s writing does more than tell a story, but creates a powerful experience that becomes a part of the reader’s life.

– Chelsey Clammer, author of BodyHome

Puzzle Pieces by Bernard Grant is as intimate in voice as it is oceanic in scope. The work thrives in paradox with short-form essays that speak to what is timeless and what is current in the same breath. How is it possible to plumb the human heart, the physical body, and the cultural landscape in a single, slender volume? I don't know how, but I know this writer has done it, with linguistic grace and emotional authenticity.

– Julie Marie Wade, author of Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures and When I Was Straight: Poems

Reader, beware. The stories in Bernard Grant’s Puzzle Pieces start quietly enough, but they come at you fast, loaded for bear, to make “visible the threat of mortality” that hangs over everything we do. Grant is a master of understated suspense: the sentence, like the scene, is often terse, fragmented—the sliver of image, the shard of action—each word, every breath calibrated to deliver a piece of the picture of what it is to live in this mortal coil, haunted with pain and the strategies we adopt to delay or defeat it, if only temporarily. We see precisely how “it’s hard to be a black kid in a white subculture,” we wonder whether “loneliness is a condition not an affliction.” Through birth and death and back again, a quiet dignity emerges from these spare stories, true grit layered with unassuming grace.

– Kevin Craft, Editor of Poetry Northwest

Puzzle Pieces, winner of The Paper Nautilus Debut Series Chapbook Award, is a collection of micro lyric essays that follows the narrator through his observations about the body and health–his own and those around him. Purchase Puzzle Pieces.

About Bernard Grant

Bernard Grant is a doctoral student at the University of Cincinnati, where he is a Yates Fellow. He's also received residency and fellowship support from The Anderson Center, the Jack Straw Cultural Center, Vermont Studio Center, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and Mineral School. He's the author of two prose chapbooks, Puzzle Pieces (Paper Nautilus Press) and Fly Back at Me (Publications), and his stories and essays have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, New Delta Review, and The Chicago Tribune Printers Row, among others. He currently serves as associate essays editor at The Nervous Breakdown.

About Bomb

by Ashley Inguanta
Ampersand Books
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"You will feel chills throughout your entire body. Read this book." — Francesca Lia Block

"Ashley Inguanta's Bomb explodes across the page, rendering to rubble what we think we understand about love, loss, and the self. Calling out to the ghost of Amelia Earhart and other "unbearable angels" of the American West, Inguanta guides us through the devastation with a voice that is both deeply vulnerable and wildly free. What else is there to say? I loved this book." – Monica Wendel

"Ashley Inguanta’s new collection of poems Bomb is an evocative meditation on the force of love’s explosive nature. Inguanta uses precise line and form to reveal a reverent, embodied experience with gorgeously layered images and metaphors to remind the reader of love’s familiar tendency to immolate. She maps the terrain of her poetry with cities, buildings, roads, and regions. Love is cartography as well as prayer and a lament. It is destructive, transformative, creative, anguished, passionate, quiet, and still. The lover and the beloved are often voiced as women, but not always. This collection is Inguanta’s heart. Bomb is so beautiful." — April Bradley

"To open this book is to enter the yearning of an uncommon angel, one who envisions the extraordinary in the ordinary, who sees how loss opens to love, how the natural world infuses cities with magic. Geese, coyotes, and roses share the space with glittering human-made lights. At once, though you may see the “Shutter, pressed” and “Life, suspended,” there is the movement of scattering seeds, the earth turning beneath those stars. When the world drops us, it catches us again. This poet navigates a landscape of tangible mirage and dreams in which letting go and merging become one and the same. There is so much light here, in everything, mapping a way for us through ache." — Darlin' Neal

Bomb, Ashley Inguanta's third collection, begins with two humans, and they both love each other deeply: One is attaching a bomb to the other, and they both experience this building/creation as intimacy, as care. Later, we find out what the bomb is made of. These lovers, their world explodes. They learn about themselves and about each other. And eventually, the bomb creates something expansive, something excruciating, something necessary, something exquisite. Purchase Bomb.

About Ashley Inguanta

Ashley Inguanta is a Florida-based writer and artist who is driven by landscape, place. She the author of three collections: The Way Home (Dancing Girl Press, 2013), For the Woman Alone (Ampersand Books, 2014), and Bomb (Ampersand Books, 2016). Ashley served as the Art Director of SmokeLong Quarterly for the past 5 years. You can purchase her artwork at her online store, Echo and Dime: https://society6.com/echoanddime