Jul 16
{f}ragile Nests by Pella Felton from Roadside Press Pella Felton’s {f}ragile Nests is a poetry collection haunted by archives: the archives of memory, performance, gender, family, religion, friendship, loss, and the body itself. Throughout these poems, Felton returns repeatedly to a central question: what remains when the stories we inherit no longer contain us? The …
Jul 09
Todos Somos Sagrados /All Are Sacred by Rey M. Rodríguez from El Martillo Press Rey M. Rodríguez’s All Are Sacred is a bi-lingual poetry collection rooted in Boyle Heights, but its ambitions extend far beyond place. The poems function as acts of witness, memorial, and gratitude, chronicling the work of Proyecto Pastoral and the women …
Jul 02
Dope and Vodka and Cigarettes, and Not Shaving Her Legs by Dave Newman from Roadside Press Dave Newman’s Dope and Vodka and Cigarettes, and Not Shaving Her Legs is a devastating, funny, and deeply humane novel about addiction, poverty, family loyalty, and the complicated ways love survives inside dysfunction. Told through a series of short, …
Jun 25
Shake Hands with the Man in My Hand by Daryl Gussin from There’s Only Peace in Death Press Daryl Gussin’s Shake Hands with the Man in My Hand (There’s Only Peace in Death Press) is a collection that thrives on contradiction: sincerity and irony, intimacy and estrangement, humor and dread. The attached poems reveal a …
Jun 18
Dealer by Iván Salinas from There’s Only Peace in Death Press Dealer by Iván Salinas, published by There’s Only Peace in Death Press, reads less like a collection and more like a live wire — erratic, charged, and impossible to hold without feeling the current. What emerges across these poems is not just a poetics …
Jun 12
The Things You Can’t Remember Become the Things You Can’t Forget by Lori Jakiela (Roadside Press) Lori Jakiela’s The Things You Can’t Remember Become the Things You Can’t Forget is subtitled “an object/memoir in verse,” but that description hardly captures the ambitious emotional and intellectual terrain this remarkable collection traverses. Beginning with a tarnished silver …
May 25
California Roadkill2 by GenX Core from Mystic Boxing Commission GenX Core’s California Roadkill2, the follow up to California Roadkill from the same publisher in 2022, is not a comfortable book, nor does it pretend to be. It operates in a raw, unstable register — emotionally, stylistically, and philosophically –rooted in what the novel repeatedly names …
May 11
Roadside Assistance: A Roadside Press Reader edited by Dan Denton & Michele McDannold There’s something refreshingly unvarnished about Roadside Assistance: A Roadside Press Reader — a book that refuses polish in favor of presence. As the publisher’s note makes clear, this is not a curated “best of,” but a living cross-section of a small press …
May 04
Pots of sun by Moe Shapiro from xPress of San Francisco Moe Shapiro’s collection Pots of sun from xPress of San Francisco reads like a restless map of consciousness—part road journal, part spiritual interrogation, part wry, self-aware performance. Taken together, the poems you’ve provided suggest a poet working in the long shadow of Beat lineage …
Apr 23
Things to Say When You Have Nothing to Say by Kerry Trautman (Roadside Press) Kerry Trautman’s Things to Say When You Have Nothing to Say is a collection that quietly dismantles its own title. These poems are anything but empty — they teem with observation, sensory immediacy, and a restless, searching intelligence that turns the …
