Posted on

Join Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, Author of The Bear Who Ate the Stars at AWP 2018!

About The Bear Who Ate the Stars

by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach
Split Lip Press
Purchase

"There's a wonderful range to Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach's poems, rendered all the more remarkable by their consistent depth and polish. These poems feel meticulously crafted, despite a certain primal, sometimes sensual quality often falsely seen as antithetical to intellectual poetry. These poems smell of stars and campfires, a deeper sense of story, a mythological thread running, river-like, all the way back to the dawn of time." -Poet Michael Meyerhofer (Blue Collar Eulogies, Damnatio Memoriae)

The Bear Who Ate the Stars, winner of the 2014 Split Lip Uppercut Chapbook Awards, is a collection of poems that bite like sharpened nails and enlighten with historical, spiritual and political accounts. Purchase The Bear Who Ate the Stars.

About Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania where her research focuses on contemporary American poetry related to the Holocaust. Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, The Missouri Review Online, and Narrative Magazine, among others. She has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf and TENT Conferences as well as the Auschwitz Jewish Center. Julia is the author of The Bear Who Ate the Stars, winner of Split Lip Magazine's 2014 Uppercut Chapbook Award. She is also Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine.

Posted on

Join Raegen Pietrucha, Author of An Animal I Can’t Name at AWP 2018!

About An Animal I Can’t Name

by Raegen Pietrucha
Two of Cups Press
Purchase Book

“Raegen Pietrucha’s devastatingly moving chapbook, An Animal I Can’t Name, is a collection of well-crafted and language-rich poems. … Pietrucha’s work is graphic and gorgeous without falling over the cliff of sentimentality.”

—Lori Desrosiers, publisher of Naugatuck River Review and author of The Philosopher’s Daughter, Inner Sky, Three Vanities, and Sometimes I Hear the Clock Speak

“The artistry of this collection goes well beyond theme. The control about childhood recollected in adulthood is remarkable.”

—Nettie Farris, author of Communion, Fat Crayons, and The Wendy Bird Poems

An Animal I Can’t Name is a narrative in poems that details a young woman’s survival of sexual and psychological abuse. This feminist, survivor-centric work seeks to empower readers through its unabashed examination of modern-day family life, religion, labels, and the implications of each. Purchase Book

About Raegen Pietrucha

Raegen Pietrucha writes, edits, and consults on professional and creative bases. Her poetry chapbook, An Animal I Can’t Name, took first place in the 2015 Two of Cups Press’ competition. While pursuing her MFA at Bowling Green State University, she served on the staff of Mid-American Review literary magazine. As communications director for UNLV’s Division of Research and Economic Development, she serves as editor-in-chief of Innovation magazine. She has more than a hundred professional bylines. Contact her at raegenmp.wordpress.com.

Posted on

Join David Atkinson, Author of Apocalypse All the Time at AWP 2018!

About Apocalypse All the Time

by David Atkinson
Literary Wanderlust
Purchase

[Apocalypse All the Time] combines absurdism, science fiction, and sly commentary on our current neuroses induced by the twenty-four news cycle, to create something reminiscent of Orwell, Kafka, and Swift, while being entirely its own animal. – Joseph Hirsch, author of The Bastard’s Grimoire and other novels

Apocalypse All the Time holds utterly true to its title. This is a world where apocalypses are not singular impending events but habitual, regular, ordinary, even mere annoyances. Indeed, the narrator ruminates, “An apocalypse wasn’t a significant event if it was apocalypse all the time.” This is a funny, clever, and entirely endearing book, a hilarious take on the existential status of existing as a human in a post-post(-post-post?) apocalyptic world, but it’s also heartbreakingly real and honest. Magnifying back to the real world in which the apocalypse has probably already happened, it is within the pages of these book that we learn to find love in spite of disintegration and ruin, we learn to become in spite of uncertainty, and we learn to live in spite of the hope for death.
– Janice Lee, Author of Damnation & The Sky Isn’t Blue

Apocalypse All the Time is a wandering journey to armageddon, again and again and again. There’s a decidely Kafkaesque bent to the story, and Marshall at times feels like a post-apocalyptic Hamlet. To be, or not to be – that IS the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the floods and fires of a daily doomsday or to take arms against the Apocalypse Amelioration Agency and end them. Ay, there’s the rub. And one hell of a book.
– Eirik Gumeny, author of the Exponential Apocalypse series

I cannot decide if Apocalypse All The Time is Groundhog’s Day for the seriously cracked or The Day After for the absurdist lit set. What I do know, is that while David S. Atkinson may very well be deranged, his work is funny and weird and wholly touching. I also know that we are all the better for having it in our lives.
– Ben Tanzer, author of Be Cool and SEX AND DEATH
Ben Tanzer

David S. Atkinson has written a wittily satirical look at our culture’s obsession with destruction, a provocative and humorous foray into the recesses of human nature that delights in the surreal vicissitudes of annihilation. The only regretful part about this apocalyptic ride is that it has to end.
– Peter Tieryas, author of United States of Japan and Bald New World

Apocalypse All the Time is post-post-apocalypticism. The apocalypse happens on a weekly (if not daily) basis and Marshall is sick of it. Life is constantly in peril, constantly disrupted, but nothing significant every really happens as a result. It’s always handled. Marshall wants out; he wants it all to end. In short, the book explores what about the end times holds such fascination for humanity and what impact such a fascination has on the way we live our lives.

Purchase Book

About David S. Atkinson

David S. Atkinson is the author of Apocalypse All the Time, Not Quite so Stories, The Garden of Good and Evil Pancakes, and Bones Buried in the Dirt. He is a Staff Reader for Digging Through The Fat and his writing appears in Literary Orphans, The Airgonaut, Connotation Press, and others. His writing website is http://davidsatkinsonwriting.com/.