In The Art of Touch: Prose and Poetry from the Pandemic and Beyond, the unique voices of thirty-nine of some of the most creative thinkers of our times have been brought together to consider the profound impact of one of our five main senses: touch.Psychologists, healers, massage therapists, academics, creative writers, and others reflect on or tell personal stories about what it means to be able to touch or experience touch, or to have to go without it—as so many did and ...

Short fiction, character studies, dark humor and a poetic language twist. Meg's collection is startling, engaging and entertaining.MEg Tuite's writing has appeared in numerous journals including Epiphany, JMWW, Prick of the Spindle, Monkeybicycle, and Boston Literary Magazine. She has been nominated several l times for the Pushcart Prize. She is author of Domestic Apparition (San Francisco Bay Press, 2011), Disparate Pathos (Monkey Puzzle Press, 2012), and Bound By Blue (Sententia B...

A love affair blooms between two officers in the impartially worded pages of a police blotter."Officers Weep" is a story from Daniel Orozco's critically acclaimed collection Orientation, which leads the reader through the hidden lives and moral philosophies of bridge painters, men housebound by obesity, office temps, and warehouse workers. He reveals the secret pleasures of late-night supermarket trips for cookie binges, exceptional data entry, and an exiled dictator's occ...

A young bridge painter is awakened from the hum of daily routine by a face-to-face encounter with a woman in free fall."The Bridge" is a story from Daniel Orozco's critically acclaimed collection Orientation, which leads the reader through the hidden lives and moral philosophies of bridge painters, men housebound by obesity, office temps, and warehouse workers. He reveals the secret pleasures of late-night supermarket trips for cookie binges, exceptional data entry, and an...

The first collection of poems and short stories by young writer, Kate Greenlee. Thirteen poems and two short stories make up a varied selection of styles and subjects; from the supernatural to the political, Greenlee deals with themes around feminism and femininity, mathematics, body image and violence in the modern world. ‘Ghosts in the Attic’ is a short selection of crafted works, a well-fitting debut.

Richard Damon is a painter suffering for his art. Now it’s time to make someone else do the suffering.

“Witty, wild and relentlessly noir.”“Elegant but brutal.”“Almost every character is sickeningly hateful, cowardly and ultra-manipulative.”Imagine another person controlling everything you do. Imagine wasting away in a job you hate with no chance of promotion. Imagine feeling like no one in the world respects you. Now imagine you could change all that in an instant, but it meant risk. Would you have the guts to do it...

A love affair chronicled--from obsession to heartbreak, foolhardiness to faith. In Love Outlandish, Barry Dempster undoes all the clichés that have barnacled our love lives and, with the zest and courage typical of his work, explores their torrents and eddies afresh. As in his previous books, Dempster responds to D.H. Lawrence's plea that we should discover and articulate what the heart really wants rather than some idealized version of it. Thoughtful, passionate, full of humour and self-a...

The least important man was a boy in the 1970s. He remembers clubhouses, plastic soldiers, swimming lessons, rocket launches, a grandfather’s letters from World War I. Those days are long gone, however: now the least important man is grown up. He lives in the city. He suffers endless rush hours, he dreams of other places, he drinks cheap coffee and crosses streets and sees explosions on the TV news. But through it all he’s still thinking about that old life, and wondering what it meant, an...

Crane, Virgil and Dan leave the city to go to their suburban childhood home of New Hebron and mourn the death of their friend Drexel who died in a suspicious accident. One other friend is absent at the funeral and the young men go looking for him and find him. His name is Benjamin and he was the rich kid when they grew up. His lips also happen to be stained blue from an accident in high school that connects the beginning and the end. An unresolved grudge haunts the characters and now so do...

Poetry kills the beautiful people. The Fat Kid , Paul Vermeersch's second full-length collection of poetry, chronicles a childhood troubled by obesity, poor body image, and low self-esteem. The media's perfect faces, societal expectations, family concerns, and primitive socialization rituals collide with the already horrendous physical and emotional tribulations of adolescence to drive Calvin Little over the edge. He'll stop at nothing to become beautiful and weightless, but he must concea...

What if loaves of bread could talk to you, and you could hear them? What if you could hear the story of all inanimate objects? What would you do with that power? Would you try to save the world, or would you just try to save yourself?A short story about strangers, ESP, and the curious sense of connection and wonder.