A new anthology of wicked, subversive young women poets

Poetry. Lara Glenum was raised in the gothic South, studied at the University of Chicago and the University of Virgina, and now teaches at the University of Georgia. In this entirely unheimlich debut, she enters the stage of American poetry like a Fritz Lang glamor-girl-cum-anatomical-model. Glenum recovers the political intensity and daring of the Surrealist project. "The extraordinary precision of these poems is so stunning, we can't help but feel blinded by their visions: sock-monkeys, dollhouses, and "a circus made of meat" vibrate between the playful and the brutal so deftly, each line is a perfect shard of some fantastic planet, gloriously and sadly like our own. As in Blake's apocalyptic images, the sky rolls itself up like a scroll--brilliant in its colors and infinite in its scope. Glorious!"--D.A. Powell.

Poetry. Get minky in the momodrome with Lara Glenum's second book, MAXIMUM GAGA. In scenic Catatonia, the Normopath snoozles, the Cherubim applaud, King Minus lies face-down, the Visual Mercenaries burst in, Icky and his school-boy minions race past, and the Queen Naked Mole Rat climbs inside the miraculating machine. Reworking the tabloid maximalism of Jacobean drama, this book investigates the politics of aesthetics and prosthetics, gender and power. With original cover art by Swedish artist Mia Makila. Lara Glenum's first book, THE HOUNDS OF NO, is also available from SPD.

Poetry. "If a girl, a virus, a horned animal, milkweed, an exchange of cash for dirty looks, the near-rhyme of greed to death, the names of all brutes, and a shroud in which was wrapped the erect ascendant all met in an ovum and, lodged deep in the earth's core, fused into a supernova. If, from that long ago time until this very moment--perhaps even into the future--that supernova were listening in on us, her grave canal located such that she were overexposed to US American politicovangelizing, all at once began to speak: this is what she says." --Danielle Pafunda

"Don't expect sense from these poems, in which grief, politics, literary theory, and sexuality interweave. But do expect language surprise and beautiful metaphors. . . . When [Akilah] Oliver presents her experiences in metaphor-rich language, the reader feels what she feels: incredible loss, infinite pain."--Library Journal "An extraordinary gift for everyone."--Alice Notley Written for her son, Oluchi McDonald (1982-2003), Akilah Oliver's poems incorporate prose, theory, and lyric performance into a powerful testimony of loss and longing. In their journey through the borderlands of sorrow, they grapple with violence, find expression in chants, and, like the graffiti she analyzes, become a place of public and artistic memorial. "If memory is the act of bearing witness," she writes, "then the dream is a friend driving us somewhere." Akilah Oliver is the author of the she said dialogues, recipient of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she currently lives in Brooklyn and curates the Monday Night Reading Series at the Poetry Project.

Karyna MyGlynn takes readers on tour through the half-haunted house of the contemporary American psyche with wit, whimsy, and candid confession. Disappointing lovers surface in the bedroom; in the bathroom, "the drained tub ticks with mollusks & lobsters;" revenge fantasies and death lurk in the basement where they rightly belong. With lush imagery and au courant asides, Hothouse surprises and delights. Karyna McGlynn is the author of I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl and three chapbooks. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Translation at Oberlin College.

Poetry. Drama. "Father lend me your megabone / & I'll lend u my shotgun mouth." A radiant brew of emoticon opera, fairytale fan-fiction, and chat-room flame war, POP CORPSE! follows a heroine mermaid on her devoutly disarming search for "realness." Along the way, Glenum dismantles pieties of both the left and the right, proposing new models of configuring text, voice, body and species-hood for those who swim in the increasingly fetid waters of the 21st century.

A new poetic century demands a new set of approaches. This Companion shows that American poetry of the twenty-first century, while having important continuities with the poetry of the previous century, takes place in new modes and contexts that require new critical paradigms. Offering a comprehensive introduction to studying the poetry of the new century, this collection highlights the new, multiple centers of gravity that characterize American poetry today. Essays on African American, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous poetries respond to the centrality of issues of race and indigeneity in contemporary American discourse. Other essays explore poetry and feminism, poetry and disability, and queer poetics. The environment, capitalism, and war emerge as poetic preoccupations, alongside a range of styles from spoken word to the avant-garde, and an examination of poetry's place in the creative writing era.

Between the thorns of the Brothers Grimm and the labyrinthine chambers of Angela Carter, Emily Corwin's first full-length collection of poems is red of tooth, claw, and lipstick. Within this vivid cycle of fabulism and erotica, of witches and absent princes, metamorphosis and dreamscapes, Corwin's work is a grimoire, a map for the territories of the unconscious. Love and madness conspire, and the modern kisses sleeping memories awake...

Finland-Swedish writer Monika Fagerholm is one of the most important contemporary Nordic authors. Her experimental, puzzling and daring novels, such as Underbara kvinnor vid vatten (1994) and Den amerikanska flickan (2004), have attracted much critical attention. She has won several literary awards, including the Nordic prize from the Swedish Academy in 2016; her works have travelled across national and cultural borders as they have now been translated in USA, Europe, Eastern Europe and Russia. Fagerholm’s wild and visionary depictions of girlhood have long had an impact on the Nordic literary landscape; currently, she has many literary followers among young female writers and readers in Finland and Sweden. Novel Districts. Critical Readings of Monika Fagerholm is the first major study of Fagerholm’s works. In this edited volume, literary scholars explore the central themes and features that permeate Fagerholm’s works and introduce novel ways to understand and interpret her writings. The book begins with an introduction to her life, letters and the minority literature context of her writing and briefly describes the scholarship on Fagerholm’s works. After that, Finnish and Swedish scholars and experts on Fagerholm scrutinize her oeuvre in the light of up-to-date literary theory. The insights, theories and concepts of gender, feminist and girlhood studies as well as narratology, poststructuralism, posthumanism and reception studies are tested in close readings of Fagerholm’s works published between 1990 and 2012. Thus, the volume enhances and deepens the understanding of Fagerholm’s fiction and invites the attention of readers not yet familiar with her work. The articles demonstrate the multitude of ways in which literary and cultural conventions can be innovatively re-employed within 20th and 21th century literature to reveal new perspectives on contemporary Finnish and Nordic literature and ongoing cultural and social developments.