SPRING 2020:
be/trouble
by bridgette bianca
POETRY / AFRICAN-AMERICAN
This is the Los Angeles not shown on television and movies: the everyday minituatea of Black Angeleno life. If you’re lucky enough to be a part of it then you know this heritage was handed from one generation to the next.
bridgette bianca moves beyond witness and holds us accountable in the harsh-tender way we do when we love someone, but love ourselves more. White and institutional nonsense, beware. This collection is essential to understanding what it means to be alive in the United States of America in 2019.
–Sara Borjas, Heart Like a Window Mouth Like a Cliff
The Depression
by Mathias Svalina & Jon Pack
POETRY / SHORT FICTION / PHOTOGRAPHY
A dream-like collaboration of fables and photographs, and a surreal and shifting deep-dive into clinical depression, THE DEPRESSION absurdly expresses the mind and life as we both know it and don’t.
I went on a state-sponsored summer exchange trip to Germany when I was 16. I arrived in Munich with 49 other kids from all across the US and was picked up by my very excited host family, who screamed like they won the lottery when they saw me. I was then spirited to their home for lunch, a short walk in a fragrant wood, introductions to the giant family dog Oskar, dinner with the punk older sister and her staring boyfriend, then back home to unpack and crawl into bed. I hardly slept on the flight and had never felt so tired nor so discombobulated, being newly arrived among kind and strange strangers. The floor seemed to undulate, my bones felt like they were made of acid. Everything shone with brilliant unfamiliarity. I was alive in a different way–more fragile, unnerved, a sense of absurdity like a veil over my face… And that’s what this book feels like in me. Hugs.
–Sueyeun Juliette Lee, author of No Comet, That Serpent in the Sky Means Noise
