Adam Greenfield’s Circa is a dark comedy featuring Henry Colmes, a high school sophomore trying to find his place in school and life. In alternating chapters, it is also the story of Henry as a thirty-something cub reporter trying to track down an elusive cult leader to interview him for the man’s own obituary. Circa offers an examination of our collective desperation for meaningful context in which to place and rationalize the actions we take. At once heartfelt, tragic, and surreal, Circa looks at the pivotal moments in a person’s life that lead them to make the decisions they can never take back and, ultimately, never forget.

What forges the unique human personality? In Island in the City, Micah McCrary, taking his genetic inheritance as immutable, considers the role geography has played in shaping who he is. Place often leaves indelible marks which we carry with us. Each place has the power to form or revise our personhood. McCrary considers three places he has called home (Normal, Illinois; Chicago; and Prague) and reflects on how these surroundings have shaped him. His sharp-eyed, charming memoir-in-essays contemplates how aspects of his identity, such as being black, male, middle-class, queer, and American, have developed and been influenced by where he hangs his hat.

These poems balance between the harrowing and the beautiful, hovering at the precipice where women are both horseback riding heroines and battered mothers striving to protect their homes, their children, their identities. These poems are knives thrown with precision, fairytales rendered real through the grit and dirt of the natural world surrounding their imperfect speakers. Transformations abound in this collection, though not by any conventional fairytale means, as Shaindel Beers with her knife-sharp wit and even sharper intuition unveils the nuance within the nuance of any situation. These poems don’t just seek escape—they create their own worlds within the escape hatches and (re)build from there.

They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing includes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, as well as hybridized forms that push the boundaries of concepts like “genre” and “author.” Contributors include: Kelli Russell Agodon, Maureen Alsop, Kimberly Quiogue Andrews, Nin Andrews, Jennifer Atkinson, Mary Biddinger, CL Bledsoe, Mel Bosworth, John F. Buckley, Kai Carlson-Wee, Ben Clark, Michael Collins, Juliet Cook, Kristina Marie Darling, Justin Lawrence Daugherty, Natalie Diaz, Tyler Flynn Dorholt, Jacqueline Doyle, Denise Duhamel, Ross Gay, Jennifer Givhan, Peter Grandbois, Carol Guess, Rebecca Hazelton, Dana Levin, Ada Limon, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Martin Ott, Maureen Seaton, Faizan Syed, Jill Talbot, William Wadsworth, G C Waldrep, and more.