Feb 26
The Enemy Sleeps by David A. Romero (El Martillo Press) David A. Romero’s The Enemy Sleeps is a suburban California thriller with the pulse of social realism and the teeth of a morality tale. Set in the fictional city of Harper, the novel unfolds like a slow camera pan across a quiet cul-de-sac—until the camera …
Feb 19
Zirconium Ash by Jimmy Vega What Books Press Zirconium Ash reads like a book written from inside the burn—after the ignition, after the damage, when the speaker is still warm with impact and fallout. Jimmy Vega’s poems move through freeway sprawl, bodily collapse, and spiritual exhaustion with a voice that is jagged but lucid, streetwise …
Feb 13
Quiet Underpinnings by Aleathia Drehmer (Roadside Press) Aleathia Drehmer’s Quiet Underpinnings is a collection deeply attentive to how life accumulates—through seasons, through grief, through the small, human gestures that tether us to one another and to the land. These poems are rooted in lived experience, where ecological awareness, love, and loss are inseparable, and where …
Feb 05
Tell Them Goodbye by E. R. Sanchez (Fried Potato Press) Tell Them Goodbye is a brutal, tender, and deeply human coming-of-age novel that refuses to romanticize migration while still honoring the hope that makes it inevitable. Through the voice of Sino, a Mexican teenage boy fleeing violence, poverty, and inherited silence, E. R. Sanchez delivers …
Jan 15
Letters That Breathe Fire by Margaret Randall, New Village Press Letters That Breathe Fire is not merely a book of correspondence; it is a living archive of how literature once moved through the world—slowly, stubbornly, and with moral urgency. Drawn from the letter sections of El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn, one of the …
Jan 09
A Matter of Taste: Poems of Hunger and Thirst by Deborah Ketai Citizens for Decent Literature Press 2026, Winner of the Brian Fugett Memorial Prize Deborah Ketai’s A Matter of Taste is a collection obsessed—in the most productive sense—with appetite: for food, for sex, for meaning, for language, for life itself. Hunger is not merely …
Jan 01
The Scary Parts by Allan MacDonell (Punk Hostage Press) The Scary Parts is a compact, sharp-edged book about fear—not the cinematic kind, but the quiet, professional, social, and existential varieties that accrue as life narrows its options. Allan MacDonell approaches fear the way a seasoned essayist and fiction writer would: circling it, baiting it with …
Dec 12
The People Are Like Wolves to Me by William Taylor Jr. William Taylor Jr.’s The People Are Like Wolves to Me (Roadside Press) is a book steeped in the wreckage and radiance of contemporary life—an unvarnished, booze-stained hymn to the broken, the searching, and the almost-resigned. The collection reads like a long walk through San …
Dec 01
McDannold, Michele (2025). Collected Poems 2005-2025 (Poetry Collection) Roadside Press 279p. $20.00 (Paperback) Michele McDannold’s Collected Poems 2005–2025 is a bruising, beautiful chronicle of two decades lived on the raw nerve of experience. The voice here is equal parts survivor, witness, and outlaw philosopher—one who has been scorched by the world’s indifference yet still refuses …
Nov 24
The Long Road to Self: Kathleen Florence’s Prayers With a Side of Cash In Prayers With a Side of Cash: Poems While Driving Across America (MoonTide Press, 2025), Kathleen Florence reinvents the road poem for a restless new century. The journey begins in New York and ends in Los Angeles, but the true destination is …
