“Bud Smith is one of the only writers I don’t mind hanging out with in real life. I’ve seen Bud Smith sober and I’ve seen Bud Smith drunk. He’s great either way.”
—Scott McClanahan, author of The Sarah Book
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“Scott Esposito is a true American cosmopolitan—full of ideas and void of pretensions. His way of seeing—inquisitive and gentle—his way of writing—honest and charismatic—are a life-line out of our self congratulatory provincialism.”
—Álvaro Enrigue, author of Sudden Death
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“I’ve never read a book like this in my life and I love that so much I could scream. Ella Longpre’s How to Keep You Alive is a genre bomb love letter to identity dissolution and reformation. I think I held my breath a few times when I felt lyric language kissing the fact of a body, meanings coming apart but then reassembling kind of like the dance that creation and destruction make. Or, more precisely, when we go to tell the story of our lives and our bodies we find that what can be storied can be destoried and restoried. That’s the beauty and terror of memory meeting body meeting language. This storymaking will undo you in the best way, and restory you toward a difference you didn’t know lived in you. We could use that right now. It could save our lives.”
—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan
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“Jared Joseph’s profoundly ambitious Drowsy. Drowsy Baby is simultaneously a mystical text, an autofiction driven by Nabokovian madness, the result of a termite artist eating his way through history, a no-holds-barred conceptual hoax, a personal genealogy. It is a book of fear and a book of defenses: from the violent and treasonous acts depicted in the pages, to the writing techniques of montage and erasure, the book is involved in a constant tugging between violence and protection, attack and defense.”
—Johannes Goransson, author of The Sugar Book
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“Choi recasts the familial legacy of war and displacement, but also of joy and triumph, into a private spiritual kingdom, where “even after the city is destroyed” he writes, “I will touch you on the surface of everything.” This is poetry as preservation, as an unrelinquished archive of ghosts, but mostly, it arrives, to our luck, as a testament of a self earned and re-earned, like how yellowness, caught in its own dizzying light, turns itself golden. This book is golden.”
“This book is so meticulous and so absorbing, I am in awe. It is declamation, reflection, proposal, documentation, blueprint. Gabrielle Civil is revealed as an artist perfectly poised to speak to how race, gender and sexuality enact embodied performativity. She writes and performs herself into history in ferociously intelligent and relentlessly personal ways. How the specificity of identity mixes with desire to confound, comfort or disrupt public space. As with so many things that I love, I want everyone to read this book.”
The essays and poems contained within this anthology are not only compelling but also harrowing stories of sexual assault. None of these pieces were easy to write–and were born out of traumatizing and terrible experiences. CCM believes in providing a safe space within the literary community where we can not only talk about painful experiences and issues but also necessary considering the current political climate.
“Living in San Francisco, I’ve known of Lorenz’s work for years, and now the secret is out. Here’s an artist whose palette holds the colors beauty and brutality, squalor and tenderness. Lucky for us, he mixes them into literary combinations we’ve never known before. One Way Down (Or Another) might be the best debut I’ve ever read!”
“Rathore’s writing is exhilarating; funny, daring, and deeply, deeply moving. This collection is one of the best I’ve read all year; it’s a book of rare ambition and scale.”