Description
by James Daniels (Greensboro, NC)
Selma is a community that, despite its pain, holds a depth of spirit that deserves love and care, a place where redemption is sought through the resilience of its people. God-Damned Eden speaks to the tension within a place that is both deeply flawed and deeply loved. Like the fallen earth in scripture, Selma is marked by human shortcomings and struggles, yet it remains beloved, resilient, and layered with beauty. This Eden-like quality isn’t pristine; it’s a paradise that bears scars—a place both blessed and “damned” by the realities of history and hardship. Yet, within those imperfections lies the work of restoration, an ongoing call to see and honor the beauty that persists.
by Pam Durban (Chapel Hill, NC)
From its genesis in a box of staples containing 5,000 staples and the thought, “My God, how can I ever use 5,000 staples in the time left to me on this earth?”, Pam Durban’s Solving for X gathers flashes of color in a moment where the world is darkening. In flash essays that are new and startling for this writer of fiction, Durban fully leverages the form’s ability to evoke brief encounters with mortality, love, and time. A door opens, a light shines, something speaks, and you listen.
The Heretic’s Bestiary (Inch #61)
by L. Danzis (Candler, NC)
Part meditation, part vivisection via personal essay, The Heretic’s Bestiary (Inch #61) grapples with questions of queer identity, faith, and what it means to be “unnatural” in a naturally miraculous world. This book is for casual scientists, birdwatchers and gardeners and stargazers and museum-goers. This book is for God’s eyes only. This book is a light for anyone in the closet. This book is for people who put too much faith in bizarre dreams. If you’ve read this far, this book is for you.
by Marianne Gingher (Greensboro, NC)
A bride on her honeymoon eats her husband; a young boy’s dreams materialize to save him from bullies; a daughter recalls a family vacation that felt more like a kidnapping; a feral cat identifies with an unruly girl whose father attempts to isolate and tame her. In Shiny Girl (Inch #60), relationships evolve or devolve, as quickly as a match struck and blown out, and love mostly remains aspirational: as trial, magic trick, prison, or the fairy tale one wants to believe. The stories that happen to both humans and animals are arranged chronologically (youth to old age), focusing on characters who, though often self-sabotaging, are ultimately insightful and resilient. Whatever their impediments and diminished circumstances, these characters find ways to persist and bloom, sometimes through insight and pluck, sometimes because of the fairy tales they tell themselves or attempt to live.
When God Was a Child (Inch #56)
by Annie Woodford (Deep Gap, NC)
The poems in When God Was a Child (Inch #56) by poet Annie Woodford explore the rural and mysterious allure of the Appalachian and Piedmont regions of Virginia and North Carolina. Throughout this collection, the beauty and pain of those geographies intersect with the speaker’s personal history as well as broader cultural histories. The landscape and all that inhabit it—the verdant plant life and animals, too—come alive in themselves and in community with each other, all in survival of difficult times, with the fraught and fragile pain and persistence of familial love. As Tayari Jones put it, these poems engage with how “our real human hearts intersect forces that are so much bigger and older than we are.” In the cadence and spirit of fellow North Carolinian poet A.R. Ammon’s work, Woodford’s collection is deeply lyrical and strikingly precise; these are poems that linger.
Even As They Curse Us (Inch #52)
by Grace MacNair (Fairview, NC)
From North Carolinian poet Grace MacNair, the poems in Even As They Curse Us combine historical research, clinical expertise, and personal experience to examine biopolitical power and reproductive historical context. Each piece moves within and beyond grief to examine history and challenge what poems—and bodies—can be and what they can hold. MacNair’s background as a poet and a healthcare professional, as well as her studies in women’s contemporary and historical experiences, inform this fierce, insightful collection: challenging readers to engage with history, medicine, and the inextricably powerful and dangerous realities of inhabiting reproductive bodies, Even As They Curse Us will move readers to imagine more expansive possibilities for care and justice.
The Wall Where You Leave Me (Inch #51)
by Martina Litty (Laurinburg, NC)
The Wall Where You Leave Me (Inch #51) from North Carolinian poet Martina Litty is a collection of compact, breathless poems that ask: what does it mean, that we are meant to live alone? What does it mean, that to accept love means to invite grief? Poems range from ekphrastic pieces to golden shovels and ghazals, as the speaker navigates her Southern pastoral surroundings while grappling with sexuality, loneliness, risk, loss, and love.
by Sophia Stid (Wilmington, NC)
In lyric sections meant to evoke the experience of wandering through a museum, Whistler’s Mother (Inch # 48) takes a closer, deeper look at the subject of one of the most iconic paintings from the nineteenth century, reckoning with legacies of racism, misogyny, industry, imperialism, and place. The titular portrait, or Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1, by James McNeill Whistler has come to symbolize a specific Victorian ideal of motherhood and domesticity. Written on location in Wilmington, North Carolina, where Whistler’s mother was from, this micro-chapbook asks: How do we responsibly engage with historical memory? What do our places know that we do not? How do we live with grief, both individual and collective?
In the Gem Mine Capital of the World (Inch #43)
by Rose McLarney (Franklin, NC)
Franklin, a small town in Western North Carolina where rubies and sapphires have been mined for generations, has earned the moniker “The Gem Capital of the World.” In her stirring short collection, In the Gem Mine Capital of the World, Rose McLarney delicately unearths the true meaning of the mines, of their gems and their histories.
Sing Me a Lesser Wound (Inch #42)
by Junious Ward (Charlotte, NC)
At times rhapsodic, at times elegaic, Junious Ward’s Sing Me a Lesser Wound parses Southern masculinity and interrogates the concept of home as a place we have to leave—and sometimes spend the rest of our lives looking for.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.