Love Letter to Biology 250, Chella Courington (Preview)

Cover detail, Love Letter to Biology 250 (Chella Courington), art by Jonathan Rountree

Love Letter to Biology 250 is a chapbook of micro fictions by Chella Courington. This manuscript pinged our nerd-brains when we first read it, flirting with obscure tidbits from Biology lectures—those things we remember because they’re strange—crafted into really tiny stories. It’ll be released on December 5th, and is currently available for pre-order via Wicked Little Heart. | $7

Excerpt from “Preferring a Clean Virgin:”

The male dark fishing spider climbs her Amazonian body, his legs under a third her size, her abdomen mountainous, fourteen times heavier than his, and he rocks her, side to side, his pedipalps engorged until the blood pushes too hard against arterial walls, curling him against her. Stuck to her, he’s consumed by her. The number and size of their offspring increased by his sacrifice.

What others are saying about Love Letter:

“This collection is a work of freshness that is always surprising and never disappointing. Courington manages to do fascinating things with common images and she gives those images new life in a pleasing and sometimes disturbing oblique sort of light. Her terse, intense, and honest stories are presented in an earthy narrative voice in language full of longing and desire. These stories are both playful and provocative and can leave a reader almost breathless at times. Combined, the stories make up witty but also quite serious and worthwhile explorations.” —Pamelyn Casto, editor of Flash Fiction Flash Newsletter

About the Author

Chella Courington is Professor of Creative Writing at Santa Barbara City College. Her prose and poetry have appeared in numerous journals including The Los Angeles Review, lo-ball magazine, Gargoyle, The Tusculum Review, and Danse Macabre. In 2011 Courington published Paper Covers Rock, a flipbook of lined poetry, Indigo Press; Girls & Women, a chapbook of prose poetry, Burning River; and Talking Did Not Come Easily to Diana, an e-book of linked microfiction, Musa Publishing. Her work has been honored by Camroc Press Review, The Collagist, Qarrtsiluni, and Main Street Rag, and nominated for Best of the Net and Best New Poets Anthologies.

That Reckless Sound by Colleen S. Harris-Keith

That Reckless Sound, Colleen S. Harris-Keith

That Reckless Sound investigates the complications of identity and relationship, the destructive next to the beautiful, the fragile touching the reckless, all bound up into one fluid experience. These poems peer through the eyes of historical & mythic (female) figures from Pandora to Magdalene, Bathsheba to Joséphine. | more at Wicked Little Heart’s shop

Below is an excerpt from the first poem, “The Way Youth Yields:”

There is nothing so faithless as
a girl left on her own among other
green and growing things. Brimming

with life, carelessly killing the field’s
flowering army so she can wear
ribbons of bluebells in her hair,

she has no need of forgiveness

Micro Chapbook Series

Colleen had our attention from the very first poem, and she kept it. We couldn’t say no to this or her other micro chapbook, Some Assembly Required, and so we accepted both for our inaugural micro chapbook series.

Open Edition Inkjet Cover

The cover is a photograph (Nicci’s) printed on Epson premium matte professional paper. The micro chapbooks is handbound & each is trimmed by hand. As they are handmade, no two are exactly alike. | open edition cover | $6

About the Poet

Colleen S. Harris-Keith works as a member of the library faculty at CSU Channel Islands. She holds various degrees, including BAs in Economics and International Relations, an MFA in Writing, an MS in Library Science, and will soon have her EdD in Learning & Leadership. She is the author of three books of poetry in addition to this chapbook, and is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee for her poetry and short fiction. When she’s not doing homework, you can find her daydreaming, writing, or doting on her husband Jed and basset hounds Otto and Igor.

Coming Soon: Threnody by Laura Madeline Wiseman

Coming Soon from Porkbelly Press

Threnody explores the figure of lady-death, an icon come to life in these poems about the death cart, the death kiss, and a narrative dance with death. This is a collection of linked micro fictions & vignettes. They read like prose poems, too, which is part of the beauty in them—these small works live in a liminal space, somehow between poetry and prose, but also an almost-dream state between life and death. Sometimes versus too. | pre-order

Laura Madeline Wiseman’s Threnody is one kickass, wailing dirge that has death driving shotgun, “more hold you than break you apart,” luminous, pulsating poetry that defies fear and denial. —Meg Tuite

If you’d like to hear Wiseman read one of her poems from the chap, you can follow the audio link: here. This is a contemporary dance with death, set in modern day. It’s also a bit of a ghost story about what might follow you home from el museo.

Below is the piece Laura’s reading in the audio file, an excerpt from the late-middle of Threnody:

Kissing Death

The lady of death gives me the kiss of death. I don’t know why. I was just standing in jeans and a ribbed tee, my belt hard and black, the metal clasp opening, warm in my hands. She appeared in my room, looked up at me from those dark sockets—her body all rib bone, clavicle, pelvis flair, hands and fingers as delicate as cages of dead birds. I didn’t want the kiss of death. We both stared at it for a while, crawling and scooting on the cement floor. I grabbed an empty coffee cup and trapped it, but when I knelt to slide a piece of paper beneath the edge, it was gone. I looked up at death, but she shrugged and reached into the space where her heart had been for another.

About the Author

Laura Madeline Wiseman is the author of more than a dozen books and chapbooks and the editor of Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013). Her recent books are American Galactic (Martian Lit Books, 2014), Some Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience (Lavender Ink, 2014), Queen of the Platform (Anaphora Literary Press, 2013), Sprung (San Francisco Bay Press, 2012), and the collaborative book Intimates and Fools (Les Femmes Folles Books, 2014) with artist Sally Deskins. She holds a doctorate from the University of Nebraska and has received an Academy of American Poets Award, a Mari Sandoz/Prairie Schooner Award, and the Wurlitzer Foundation Fellowship. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Margie, Mid-American Review, and Feminist Studies. www.lauramadelinewiseman.com

pre order

Wiseman’s chapbook is available for pre-order via Wicked Little Heart. Pre-orders ship first, hot off the press!

Give me the rope…

Give me the rope
that you tied around my finger, wild grapevine warped into a loop. Give
me your face, your hands cupping my breasts, your shoes filled with your mud
and feet. Give us your crooked back aching, your owl-lidded eyes, your breath
in our ears, our handplanes, our spindles, our hums, our ladles, and we will give you back
your money, your ring, your footprints in the corn, your tart apples picked
from your tree that make your mouth and tongue water.
your Ora

A sample of Sarah McCartt-Jackson‘s poetry from Vein of Stone (forthcoming this month). | pre-order

from “Waiting for Rebecca” (Bodies in Water)

Edie Carmichael sits on her back oak deck staring at the river, watching for the body. She has done this for three days, everyday since she heard about the drownings. The car had missed a curve on State Route 128 and broke through the guardrails to splash into the Great Miami River. It sank to the bottom.

She has heard on Eyewitness News that there were two people in the car. One man, one woman. She wonders if it was his wife or girlfriend or mistress.

from the short fiction section of P. Andrew Miller’s combo chapbook, Bodies in Water, released in February 2014. As of this writing, there are a few special limited edition copies remaining in the shop.

Bodies in Water, P. Andrew Miller (special edition cover)