A poetry collection contorting the idea of home away from being a site of comfort and nourishment by coaxing the reader to think about domesticity in knotty new ways Domestirexia goes beyond the entanglement of "domestic" and "anorexia” exploring a behind-closed-doors sensuality, borne in the concept of making home. Home can be a space of both resistance and discomfort that one desires or takes pleasure in enjoying. Rote notions of home and the domestic are reimagined in these poems as estranging, excessive, and populated by unknowable characters. Exploring themes of family, sacrifice, disease, death, money, cooking, romance, sex, art, and the visceral qualities of the everyday, the poems twist themselves into binds for the reader to undo or surrender to. Quarantined at her in-law’s house during Covid, Novak wrote these poems while watching The Great British Baking Show, reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, skimming Grimm Brothers fairy tales, and babysitting an infant. These are poems about wanting to misbehave. Light voyeurism at home, with gin and cake.

Cult poet and musician Mike Doughty makes his print debut with Slanky, a black-comic stroll through the demimonde of pop culture and modern urban life. Doughty's poems are at once absurdest and matter-of-fact; the images he conjures are thrown into high relief through cutting wordplay. In a series of prose poems about showbiz, he re imagines Cookie Monster as a burned-out suicide, and cheesy talk-show host Joe Franklin as a cross-dressing witness to the apocalypse. And in "For Charlotte, Unlisted" he wrenchingly tracks the elusive memory of a faded romance.

“This book takes me right back to the Carnage Years―yours, too―sacrificed to love. If only I, you, had possessed Elaine Kahn’s wisdom and wit. These poems are lacerating, coy, bloody, and so true I wanted to memorize lines from them.” ―Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room and The Flamethrowers Romance or The End takes up the tools of romantic narrative in order to perform the rupture between self and story that occurs at the onset of trauma. Using known and pathologized literary arcs, Elaine Kahn unspools the fundamental instability of truth, love, and language to create an experiential portrait of narrative’s power to both disfigure and restore. ROMANCE or THE END This is a book about love. And it is a book about lies. Love can be a lie, but it is also always true. This is a book about truth. This is a book about story. There is no such thing as a true story and so there are no stories in this book. Without a story, there is separation. This is a book about separation. Everything is a story. Even the truth. There is nothing truer in this world than the lie of love.

"Meaningful Work by JoAnna Novak is a short story collection that examines desire amid the rote work of jobs and obligations in formally experimental fictions where characters defy boundaries and mores"--

The year is 1999, and thirteen-year-old Elliot is a self-appointed “diet coach” who teaches her classmates how to survive on one stick of gum a day to get heroin-chic, Kate Moss thin. Elliot is obsessed with her best friend and former “client” Lisa, who is fresh out of inpatient treatment and dating a nineteen-year-old drug dealer. Meanwhile, Elliot’s mother Anna, a capricious poetry professor, has a drug addiction and eating disorder of her own. When Lisa transfers her fixation from food to sex with her boyfriend, Elliot’s fragile grip on reality begins to falter, at the same that time that Anna’s fascination with the object of her own blind lust, the student who relinquishes his cocaine to her during office hours begins to consume her. I Must Have You is the story of what happens one three-day weekend in an explosion of desire, hunger, and lost innocence. JoAnna Novak’s kaleidoscope of 1990s America, filled with vibrant imagery from riot grrl graffiti to Michael Jordan posters, offers a vision of the complexities of womanhood and the culture that keeps the modern girl sick. I Must Have You is a provocative debut of rare honesty from a daring new voice. Similar to the works of Miranda July, Novak’s novel will appeal to a new generation of readers who hunger for raw female protagonists.

Bottoms Up: Writing About Sex is a collection of writing about desire. The stories are not straight up sexual narrations, but pieces, poems and stories that examine the concept and manifestation of desire itself. Rather than describing the physical acts of sex, the book examines the impetus, experiences, thoughts and feelings that drive desire. Contributors include Eileen Myles, Michelle Tea, Red Jordan Arobateau, Lori Selke, Victoria Brownworth, Robert Gluck and Patrick Califia. The stories in the collection are varied: an examination of iconoclastic sexuality(musing on what it would be like to both fuck James Dean and fuck like James Dean), the zenith of desire residing in the sweat-darkened leather pants of Lenny Kaye after a Patti Smith Group show, genderqueer cruising, the connection between sex and loss. The book is not explicitly "gay", but it is explicitly queer. The stories often break down normal conceptions of gender, eliminating categories such as homo- and heterosexual.

Therapists, like moms, only mean to help. Or do they? Readers can judge for themselves with Hal Sirowitz's second collection of funny and razor-sharp poems about Hal's search for love, understanding, and a little past-life regression. Hal's first collection, is called "Mother Said".