It Falls Gently All Around and Other Stories by Ramona Reeves
Happiness and connection prove fickle in this debut collection of eleven linked stories introducing Babbie and Donnie. She is a thrice-divorced former call girl, and he is a sobriety-challenged trucker turned yogi. Along with their community of exes, in-laws, and coworkers, Babbie and Donnie share a longing to reforge their lives, a task easier said than done in Mobile, Alabama, which bears its own share of tainted history....
Linney Stepp by Diane Gilliam
“In Linney Stepp, acclaimed poet Diane Gilliam gives us the story of a girl who breaks free from the force-field of her family to become herself. When we meet Linney, she is about to be traded for her distant cousin Robbie so that he can help her dad on the farm and she can help his mother keep an eye on Aunt Hesty, who is prone to wandering and revelations. Both young people chafe at being swapped like tools. But before this rich and...
lithopaedion by Carrie Nassif
Carrie Nassif’s visionary and cutting-edge collection explores the heat and blood, magic, grief and ecstasy of motherhood, particularly how this rite of passage and change of status transforms who we are from the inside out. As she writes in one poem, “a child emerges from the vapor first/ and everything else collapses to become its mother.” Her tilting imagery and daring rhymes take us into a wider view of how language and life can...
My Heart is the Tempest by Sacha Rosel
Inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest and including direct citations from the play, My Heart is The Tempest is a dark reimagining of witch Sycorax, here portrayed as a 12-year old olive-skinned, black-haired human girl trapped in a land of cruel insect-like creatures loathing everything deviating from their personal truth and deemed a threat to their infallible world ̶ including her. After unconsciously awakening her...
Face by Marcia Meier
“My AROHO Story,” by Marcia Meier I met Saddle Road Press Publisher Ruth Thompson at AROHO in 2011 (as well as seven other women who have become very close friends), and Ruth has been on my writing journey of this memoir for all these years, encouraging and offering critical feedback. AROHO changed my life in many ways, not the least by bringing Ruth and these other dear women into my life. Until this covid year, we have...
to cleave by Barbara Rockman
to cleave, University of New Mexico Press, 2019, is a collection of poems that searches for and lays bare the mythic moments one finds even in the most ordinary life. Rockman explores themes of aging; relationship to our bodies; marriage: and the surprises, griefs and joys of motherhood. Each section urges readers to view their daily lives with renewed curiosity and wonder. Purchase In Rockman’s book there is natural observation,...
Five Sextillion Atoms by Jayne Benjulian
In a single drop of water there are five sextillion atoms, yet Earth in relation to the rest of the universe is infinitely smaller still by comparison. Jayne Benjulian takes this astonishing fact for the title of her first collection of poetry and aptly so, for these poems hold vast reaches of perception, loss, personal and family history, all with admirable compression. Among the stories these poems tell, one is the making of a poet....
Big and Bad by Anna Scotti
Buy from Amazon Gritty and realistic enough to appeal to adults as well as to savvy middle school and high school readers, Big and Bad touches on real issues that affect real kids: poverty, alcoholism, racism, urban violence, homelessness, and, even, animal abuse and dogfighting. [ezcol_2third_end] “ Big and Bad is an achingly bittersweet and pure novella about the hurt and wonder, the pain and joy of life. I often read...
H & G by Anna Maria Hong
H & G, by Anna Maria Hong, was the winner of the 2014 Clarissa Dalloway Book Prize, ENTROPY Magazine’s Best of 2018: Best Fiction Books, and Finalist 2019 Vermont Book Award. Purchase I will always be deeply grateful to all the amazing women who run AROHO and their integral support of idiosyncratic writing by women writers. I never would have anticipated the life of this book in its first year of publication. I know that AROHO’s...
Miraculum Monstrum by Kathline Carr
“Miraculum Monstrum by Kathline Carr is a remarkably inventive, audacious debut collection that unfolds as poems, stories, fragments, drawings, paintings, mixed media pieces, and quotes to document and illustrate the life of Tristia Vogel, a visual artist who transforms dramatically and traumatically into a bird, and becomes an unintentional prophet. . . . This book is a unique and brilliant contribution to contemporary dystopic...
Heating and Cooling by Beth Ann Fennelly
Buy from Norton Watch the Trailer The 52 micro-memoirs in genre-defying Heating & Cooling offer bright glimpses–some as short as a sentence, some a paragraph or a page— into a richly lived life, combining the compression of poetry with the truth-telling of nonfiction into one heartfelt, celebratory book. Ranging from childhood recollections to quirky cultural observations, these micro-memoirs build on one another to arrive...
how to get over by t’ai freedom ford
“From the moment the poet declares that there’s a ‘plantation in them lungs,’ and sets the stage for a starkly ‘muscled music,’ you may as well let loose your rigid misconceptions about what poetry can do and steel yourself as it becomes the way your body moves from one exclamation to the other. Each of these lean and urgent poems, bulging with insistent energy and image, is a hallmark of t’ai freedom ford’s fierce...
Dreadful Wind & Rain by Diane Gilliam
Diane Gilliam was AROHO’s 6th Gift of Freedom winner. This stunning verse narrative is the first to be published of the three books Diane completed during the two years of the grant. This book is a river you will want to swim in. It is the hardest thing this holding open of everything with nothing —from “Some Things the Doorways Want to Tell Us” Buy on Amazon Synopsis So the story goes: Neglected and abused by her...
Blackbirds in the Pomegranate Tree: Stories from Ixcotel State Prison by Mary Ellen Sanger
Mary Ellen Sanger, who won the Orlando Prize for Poetry for her poem “Secrets of a Wooden Saint in a Church in Jalcomulco”, and who was a finalist for the 4th Gift of Freedom, has self-published a book of nonfiction. Read on for her AROHO story, and details about her book. When I returned to the US after my incarceration, I tried to write the stories I had lived with the women of Ixcotel, sitting in a cramped NYC apartment. The...
Breakfast with Allen Ginsberg, by Esther Cohen
Esther Cohen is on the AROHO Board of Directors, and has authored several books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Breakfast with Allen Ginsberg is her sixth book. Buy on Amazon 1 Allen Ginsberg or I Wanted to Be a Poet Part One When I moved to New York City in the ‘70s from Ansonia small factory town in Connecticut Allen G was who I wanted to meet Jean Boudin Good Beat Poet said Allen will see anyone if they’ll buy him breakfast...
SIX by Julie Marie Wade
SIX, winner of the 2014 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize. Judge: C.D. Wright Buy this Book Search for a Reading of SIX Near You “I call six times just to be sure you heard,” this speaker announces on the first page. These poems are also the six calls—calls to attention, calls to action, calls to account for something of our own. The speaker in SIX is insistent, scrupulous, and unflinching as she plumbs six essential aspects of...
Under the Harrow, by Flynn Berry
Flynn Berry, who won the Spring 2012 Orlando Creative Nonfiction Prize Winner for “Surfing,” will have her debut novel published June 2016 by Penguin. Here is her AROHO Story, and details about her book: I still remember exactly what the genre judge, Celeste Fremon, said about my story, and doubt I’ll ever forget it. It was the first time I’d been published or won a national prize. I read the message from Tracey...
Blood Sugar Canto by Ire’ne Lara Silva
“Being named the 2013 Fiction Genre Finalist for the Gift of Freedom Award validated me as a fiction writer and buoyed my belief that I could push forward with my projects and that they would find an audience.” —Ire’ne Lara Silva Buy on Amazon “Silva is a poet-curandera who “sings the body electric,” transforming suffering into song. She probes the ways that love, justice and...
Words Like Love by Tanaya Winder
Buy on Amazon How do we pronounce words like love? How do we believe in them, and how can we apply them to the missing, wounded and massacred: To the missing indigenous women in North America, to a wounded culture, a dying language and the open grave of a massacred history that we refuse to stare into? Tanaya Winder seeks to articulate this heartbreak in her debut collection of poetry, Words Like Love, poems that act as a...
River Electric with Light by Sarah Wetzel
River Electric with Light, winner of the 2012 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize. Judge: Tracy K. Smith Buy this Book “Sarah Wetzel’s River Electric with Light is a work in search of the sacred and the spiritually significant. Touching down in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Kabul, New York, and Rome, Wetzel’s poems, ranging from lyric meditations to discursive drama, weave themselves from her life as wife, lover, stepmother, and...
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Witness Nov 29, 2024
