In a book that’s fundamentally about intimacy, empathy and hunger feel like honest bedfellows. “Everyone wanted a piece of her,” Shapland admits, “Including me.”

“Shouting is easy, Mario, what is difficult is to be born into hearing,” coaches a director as Cardoso stumbles into his first big theater role and eventual stardom.

Smith’s voice is drenched with protest, no longer willing to conceive of a reality where black bodies are expected to comply and resist…

The past’s sweetness is distant while its horrors are disturbingly present, and Jodi McCarty stands straddled between them.

Donish juxtaposes continuous moments and memories with discrete, warring abstractions and fragments, exemplifying how poorly our remembered lives cohere with the lives we are leading in the “real” here and now.

SPEECH is a reckoning with the self and its relation to its present condition under the state.

“The fragmentary configuration of the book reflects the complicated, mysterious nature of life itself and the profound complexity of feeling that results from being human.”

“…thoughts collide and overlap haphazardly and demonstrate the difficulty of navigating the vast and contradictory timescales of the geological, historical, and personal. Olson’s thoughts and feelings about the deep past and the immediate present stack up on top of each other.”

Winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry, Skin Memory persuasively examines personal tragedy to provoke readers to question the interactions between nature and human invention.

Rodrigues Fowler’s story is compelling, not only because of her ability to tell an interesting tale, but because of the techniques she uses in her writing to approximate life as it is lived and processed.