“Gerald Fleming’s The Bastard and the Bishop is an awakening. Socially incisive and psychologically illuminating, it presents us with a full range of human passion and emotion. You didn’t know prose could sing, poetry could mean? Read The Bastard and the Bishop and see for yourself.”
—Pablo Medina, Author of The Cuban Comedy

“Fleming, a master of the prose poem, is never satisfied to sing the same song, and this adventuresome spirit pays dividends in these new prose poems. Constantly surprising and inventive, he offers stories within stories that effortlessly merge the personal and the archetypal, breathing new life into a genre that has increasingly, and often sadly, become predictable.
—Peter Johnson, Author of Truths, Falsehoods, and a Wee Bit of Honesty: A Short Primer on the Prose Poem, with Selected Letters from Russell Edson

“The crystalline vignettes in The Bastard and the Bishop let us drop into many hinted-at histories and subconscious motives. Fleming built these prose poems and their fragmented realities using small, collected phrases from a book he was gifted; those bits of language set him off toward mesmerizing perspectives. … [The Bastard and the Bishop]is a book of curiosities is a wonderland, a new way to journey through human interactions.”
—Lauren Camp, Author of Took House

“This magnificent work dwells in the struggle between death and dying. The poet is the one who balances this weird difficulty. She is the caregiver keeping both alive. Through nights where days of dying begin with tissues, toothpicks, cries, pillows, sheets; the caregiver’s offerings to the patient never quite work. The panic of hitting nightfall with its galloping horses, rodeos and racetracks, and the Southwest ranges try to stay as truthful to the mother as they are to the daughter transcribing them, until these darkest of lyrics lie in the realm of the divine.”
—Fanny Howe

“These sharp-tongued poems, often levitating on their own buoyant wit, are full of Jiwon Choi’s delightful ‘wickedness and dirty humor.’ Her work is propelled by New York immigrant energy, which of course makes it quintessentially American.”
—Terence Winch

“ ‘Buttering,’ bedazzling’ ‘shellacking,’ ‘kissing’ – in I Used to Be Korean, Jiwon Choi’s “present participles wrestle with the past tense, winning every match through sheer candor and vitality. The poet’s ‘rosebud power’ and honesty are dynamic, as is her grasp of history, family, identity, and eros. Out of keen attention, Choi makes poetry of butchery and blame and pockets empty but for lint. There’s something Sapphic—both scorching and tender—in a poem like ‘I Ate Your Heart Out,’ and something of Robert Frank’s vision in Choi’s fresh takes on, say, Texas (i.e., ‘America’). ‘Korea is far away’ from the Oyster Bar in Grand Central and many of the other sites mentioned in these poems, yet it (the mother) is ever present, whatever the poet is or ‘used to be.’ Choi is learned but never academic (she’s too nimble and street-smart to be academic), and I love her way of seeing and thinking. I Used to Be Korean (a riddle of a title) is a beautiful book.”
—Linda Norton

“Joanna Fuhrman is the herald of a new era. An era where we eat more grandma slices but drink fewer papaya drinks. An era where the past wears its dirty underwear to every gala. An era where we all bake cakes shaped like the world we want to become. I welcome that world, that new era, because it will include these poems as proof that the world we wanted was not only possible but already here, and wonderful.”

—Sharon Mesmer

“Joanna Fuhrman’s got her own funky brand of blended surrealism and fabulism going on in To a New Era. The poems in this tour de force offer funicular modes of language transport, making it a dizzying, dazzling joy to be a commuter on this collection (see ‘Adjunct Commuter’ poems). Sentience abounds; metamorphoses are in the poetry’s plasma. Formal poems emit a flirty, contemporary spirit of rebellion. Political poems are pissed, hilarious, iconoclastic, in debate with language’s complicated connotations, histories, and alternate histories. In To a New Era, Fuhrman toasts to the cyclones that blow through our days and our nights. This collection is one storm of words that will bowl you over!”
—Martine Bellen

Mary-Louise Parker has called Hagood’s work “profoundly unique and honest . . . somehow executed with an astonishing lack of ego. She will break your heart with her naked sincerity; a masterful, singular writer who sheds light with every page. ”

And Rachel Lyon, author of Self-Portrait with Boy, calls the novel a “rollicking feminist fantasy . . . irreverent, well-informed, dirty and smart, this novel is an absolute party.”