The Potential of Radio and Rain by Myna Chang
“These are vividly realized, beautifully nuanced stories, so sensory that I swear I could taste the dust scuffed up by a passing car, feel the sweet ache of cold well water in my throat. I can’t remember when I’ve been this excited by a chapbook, can’t remember the last time I came to the end only to turn back to the beginning to savor these stories all over again.”
— Sarah Freligh, author of Sad Math
Myna Chang writes about poverty and isolation, youth and mortality, rooting her stories in the unforgiving landscape of the shortgrass prairie. Her work has been selected for Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton), Best Small Fictions, and CRAFT, among others. She has won the Lascaux Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the New Millennium Writings Award in Flash Fiction. Though she was born and raised in the Oklahoma panhandle, she now lives in Maryland with her husband, teenage son, and a spoiled German Shepherd. Find her online at MynaChang.com.
Men with the Throats of Birds by Jordan Escobar
“In the poems of Men with the Throats of Birds we enter the consciousness of the hardscrabble outdoors workers whose bodies suffer into a philosophy of special knowing. I don’t know another poet whose work is more convincingly imbued with the loam and rock of earth. Threnodic, musical, intimate, mysterious, and accessible, Escobar has produced one of the truly distinguished books of the year.”
— Kevin Clark, author of The Consecrations and Self-Portrait with Expletives
Jordan Escobar is a writer in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. He is a 2022 Djanikian Scholar in Poetry and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. His work can be found in Zone 3, Willow Springs, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. He currently divides his time teaching at Emerson College and Babson College.
Heart of the Lonesome Galaxy by Kate Lucas
“In the human sphere, we are addicted to stories, which is to say to the notion that cause and effect exist and function as expected and somehow make meaning or at least explanation. Kate Lucas’s luminous poems search high and low, but mostly very high indeed, across space and time, for story, explanation, meaning. They apply the rules of one realm to the actions of another in a kind of stubborn hope and persistence. They make metaphors into hard-won truths. These poems see clearly and care mightily.”
—Leslie Harrison, author of Displacement and The Book of Endings
Kate Lucas's poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Sundog Lit, The Pinch, Lumina, 111O, and elsewhere. Her full-length poetry manuscript, In This Light, was a finalist for the 2022 Milkweed Editions Ballard Spahr prize. A former assistant poetry editor for Water~Stone Review, Kate has received grants and fellowships from Dickinson House, Pine Needles of the Science Museum of Minnesota, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Loft Mentor Series. She lives in Minneapolis.