The town of Black Bear Creek is well past its glory days and ravaged by the mining industry on which its people depend. The characters in Joshua Cross’s debut story collection struggle to survive against rampant poverty while their drinking water is poisoned and the mountains around them are stripped away. Spanning decades, these are stories of life shattering injuries inflicted by working in the mines. Of men and women forced to be so hard they are frequently surprised by their own vulnerability. Despite the bleak backdrop, these are stories about how they find ways to love and hope and fight. Buy this book from our affiliate Bookshop.org.

In the nine stories of How Other People Make Love, Thisbe Nissen chronicles the lives and choices of people questioning the heteronormative institution of marriage. Concerning husbands and wives, lovers and leavers, Nissen’s stories explore our search for connection and all the ways we undercut it when we do find it. How Other People Make Love asserts that there aren’t right and wrong ways to love; there are only our very complicated and contradictory human hearts, minds, bodies, and desires—all searching for something, whether we know what that is or not. These are stories for anyone who has ever loved or been loved. Buy this book from our affiliate Bookshop.org.

In her debut full-length collection of poems, The Supposed Huntsman, Fowley creates spaces that blur the lines of gender, species, and self: “Every animal is deadly / even the shape-shifter.” Fowley uses incantatory anaphora to enact endless transformations, becoming by turns a motley, plume-lit teacher-creature and a bear longing, like a bro, for a maiden in a tree. Drawing inspiration from Brothers Grimm fairy tales and troubadour tradition, Fowley’s poems elate and interrogate, ever aware that “childhood is so intensely serious.” Buy this book from our affiliate Bookshop.org.