 PORTLAND, OR; September 27, 2022-- The Year of the Monster explores American culture as commodity and comorbidity. From black holes and animal extinctions to death row trauma porn and the redacted scripts of Hollywood abuses: these sixteen stories subvert traditional notions of justice, challenge vulnerable characters to survive in transgressive spaces. Mixing traditional prose with screenplay and script-hybrid, and certainly not without hope, The Year of the Monster encourages close examination of how American media and our complicity in its marriage of violence and culture perpetuate the human and environmental crises.
Praise for Tara Stillions Whitehead “If you mix a cocktail of Octavia Butler, Mary Robison, and early Jayne Anne Phillips, you might get something approaching Tara Stillions Whitehead’s style. Yet her style is highly original and all her own: shape-shifting and subtle. Her language packs real power. The stories in The Year of the Monster deal with love and unlove, math and physics, deception, truth, and loss – – both personal and cultural. As they navigate life’s obstacles – both spiritual and societal -- her characters show resilience and stamina even when darkness looms. “God and Laundry” is one of the best short stories I’ve read in years. But read them all, every story – from cover to cover. The entire collection sparkles.” —Larry Fondation, Martyrs and Holymen “With a deftness and economy of language that calls to mind Etgar Keret, and a tender veil of grit and glamor reminiscent of the late Eve Babitz, Tara Stillions Whitehead’s The Year of the Monster is cinematic, and captivating. In sixteen stories, ranging from a jarring back-and-forth between movie execs, and an intimate, sultry portrayal of a community ripped apart and renewed by a tornado, Stillions Whitehead’s writing demonstrates an unending capacity for humanity, the kind that is necessary right now. It has to be said: The Year of the Monster is officially required reading.” —Shannon Wolf, Green Card Girl "The stories in The Year of the Monster are tender, truthful, fiery and finely wrought. Tara Stillions Whitehead has built a collection that leaves little doubt as to her range and mastery as a storyteller. This book could be studied at the level of language alone as her sentences are both elegant and exacting. The people who inhabit these stories have been through some things and there are no easy answers, but let this book serve as a short course in self-acceptance, grit, honesty, and survival. I'm in awe of Whitehead's intelligence and heart, fully on display in these pages. I know she has many more books ahead of her. I can't wait to read every one of them." —Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works “Not all black holes are the size of suns or weigh as much as a galaxy” writes Tara Stillions Whitehead in the title story of her potent, hypnotic hybrid collection The Year of The Monster, “Some are small, microscopic, atomic-sized holes.” Freckle-sized black hole on the inner thigh, deleted scene, trauma, alienation, addiction, grief–such invisible centers of gravity litter the landscapes of these stories, drawing their narrators toward transgressions and obliterations, to which they are simultaneously attracted and repelled. But they, and we, are repelled even more forcefully by the casual brutality of Hollywood plotlines, American dreams, the casualties of apocalypse and empire. In language of glitter and grit, paralyzing twilights, and prismatic undertows, Stillions Whitehead resists resolution, expanding the narrative universe, defying both genre and gravity. What survives a black hole? The answer isn’t an end but an action: just turn the page and surrender to the irresistible pull of the next utterly absorbing story.” —Erin Rodini, And if the Woods Carry You “The Year of the Monster by Tara Stillions Whitehead is a must read! Stillions Whitehead writes with beautiful, razor-sharp language about the lingering darkness shadowed by the glitz of Hollywood. Whitehead takes us beyond the spotlights, the gossip, and the fandom to capture photographically and emotionally the people behind the scenes. In this vision of Los Angeles, we see the dreamers, the schemers, and the day workers who are fighting for their lives. The prose is fierce with each line an escalation, and an opportunity to see the world washed in sepia tones given a full-color blush on the big screen. Stillions Whitehead is a star, and this book shines brilliantly due to her ability to put the reader into odd, but meaningful moments of suspension as we're caught up in the lives of these unique characters. These stories will break you into pieces, and then soothe you back together. A Triumph.” —Tommy Dean, Hollows About Tara Stillions Whitehead Tara Stillions Whitehead is a filmmaker and multi-genre writer living in Central Pennsylvania. Graduate of University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television Production and San Diego State University’s Creative Writing MFA Program, her writing and films work to subvert the toxic cultural narratives endorsed by popular media and the institutions that profit from stigmatizing and disadvantaging marginalized and historically oppressed groups. Her writing was included in the 2021 Wigleaf Top 50 and has been nominated for various awards, including Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, AWP Intro Journal Awards, and the Pushcart Prize. A former DGA assistant director for television, she is currently Assistant Professor of Film, Video, and Digital Media Production at Messiah University, where she serves as production faculty for narrative filmmaking. Her hybrid chapbook/concept album, Blood Histories, was published by Galileo Press in 2021. About Unsolicited Press Unsolicited Press strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning authors. Unsolicited Press based out of Portland, Oregon and focuses on the works of the unsung and underrepresented. As a womxn-owned, all-volunteer small publisher that doesn’t worry about profits as much as championing exceptional literature, we have the privilege of partnering with authors skirting the fringes of the lit world. We’ve worked with emerging and award-winning authors such as Shann Ray, Amy Shimshon-Santo, Brook Bhagat, Kris Amos, and John W. Bateman. Learn more at unsolicitedpress.com. Find us on twitter and Instagram, @unsolicitedp. The Year of the Monster is available on September 27, 2022 as a paperback (202 p.; 978-1-956692-33-4) and e-book (all major retailers). Retailers, schools, and libraries can order copies through Ingram. The author is open to speaking with the media, holding readings, and engaging in other author opportunities. ### Press only, Unsolicited Press 619.354.8005 marketing@unsolicitedpress.com For artist interviews, readings, and podcasts: Tara Stillions Whitehead  PORTLAND, OR; September 20, 2022--“I Still Go to Bed with Water” sets its readers loose and untended, like the wild critters from a menagerie of collected memories. One day cooped up, the next fending for themselves in oddness. But oddness and strange intimacy is the resting temperature of this collection. Each poem is a type of pit stop – from childhood solitude to foreign corners and over to heartbreak – where we glimpse from the road what once was and how it becomes something entirely different in the rearview. Embracing humor and gratitude – and even Burt Lancaster – the language here is at turns cryptic, precise, sometimes German, and other times nodding to the flowers of the Romantics. “I Still Go to Bed with Water” is an ode to the resounding perfection of imperfect memory.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR MELANIE SEVCENKO “Melanie Sevcenko is a luminous poet. Her work is deft and revealing, gorgeous with texture. I Still Go To Bed With Water is deeply moving, both tender and dark, soft as silk and jagged as broken glass.”--Victoria Gosling, author of Before the Ruins ABOUT MELANIE SEVCENKO Melanie Sevcenko is a poet, radio producer, and recovering bohemian. She moved to Portland, Oregon by way of Berlin, Germany, where she lived for almost a decade and hustled as a film critic and reporter for various outlets. Her poems have appeared in Permafrost Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, Verse Daily, Black Heart Magazine, apt, The Fourth River, and more. She is quite proud of the title of her poetry chapbook, We Slept in Body Bags, Just in Case, which was published in 2013 by Finishing Line Press. She’s also an Irish and Canadian citizen and is probably a distant relative of Ukrainian writer Taras Shevchenko. These days, Melanie works in public radio and podcasting and has contributed to NPR, The Guardian, and Marketplace, amongst others. In her off-time, she can be found lighting bonfires in backyards or buried under her 16-pound orange tabby. ABOUT UNSOLICITED PRESS Unsolicited Press strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning authors. Unsolicited Press based out of Portland, Oregon and focuses on the works of the unsung and underrepresented. As a womxn-owned, all-volunteer small publisher that doesn’t worry about profits as much as championing exceptional literature, we have the privilege of partnering with authors skirting the fringes of the lit world. We’ve worked with emerging and award-winning authors such as Shann Ray, Amy Shimshon-Santo, Brook Bhagat, Kris Amos, and John W. Bateman. Learn more at unsolicitedpress.com. Find us on twitter and Instagram, @unsolicitedp. I STILL GO TO BED WITH WATER is available on September 20, 2022 as a paperback (130 p.; 978-1-956692-32-7), e-book, and audiobook. Retailers and libraries can order copies through Ingram.  PORTLAND, OR; September 6, 2022-- Scapegoat, by T.K. Lee, is his second collection of poetry, and in it, Lee continues deepening his artistic voice by centering the same unnamed narrator, introduced in his first collection, in more intimate and recognizable moments of vulnerability: Having Love and Having Loved. Far from what one might call love poetry, Lee effectively teases out the traditional tropes in this second collection, branching into experimental forms, at times. Yet, even in his playful and innovative approaches, he doesn’t allow his subject to grow maudlin or overly sentimental, The poems in Scapegoat thematically ebb and flow, catching and releasing the reader along with the narrator, as he struggles to learn the hardest truth of natural law: That to fully live, one must finally leave…whether that may mean a job, a home, or a marriage. Which he does, in each case, and fails, each time, and like the prodigal son, he gives in and returns to his childhood home, resigned at last to wait it out, until something becomes familiar again. But Fate is waiting for him there, to make sure he doesn’t miss the bigger lesson: That giving in is not the same as giving up.
About T.K. LEE T.K. LEE is an award-winning member of the Dramatists Guild of America, the Society for Stage Directors and Choreographers, and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, among others. In addition to poetry and drama, he has also crafted prize-winning short fiction and is core faculty in the nationally ranked MFA programs in Creative Writing as well as in Theatre Education, at the historic Mississippi University for Women, the nation’s first public academic institution for women, in Columbus, Mississippi. About Unsolicited Press Unsolicited Press strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning authors. Unsolicited Press based out of Portland, Oregon and focuses on the works of the unsung and underrepresented. As a womxn-owned, all-volunteer small publisher that doesn’t worry about profits as much as championing exceptional literature, we have the privilege of partnering with authors skirting the fringes of the lit world. We’ve worked with emerging and award-winning authors such as Shann Ray, Amy Shimshon-Santo, Brook Bhagat, Kris Amos, and John W. Bateman. Learn more at unsolicitedpress.com. Find us on twitter and Instagram, @unsolicitedp. Scapegoat is available on September 6, 2022 as a paperback (98p.; 978-1-956692-29-7) and e-book (all major retailers). Retailers, schools, and libraries can order copies through Ingram. The author is open to speaking with the media, holding readings, and engaging in other author opportunities. ### Press only, Unsolicited Press 619.354.8005 marketing@unsolicitedpress.com For artist interviews, readings, and podcasts: T.K. Lee  If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make?
Off the top of my head, Rainier Maria Rilke. He’s one of my favorite poets of all time, though I’m certainly aware of how strange this could get… maybe he’d offer advice to the tune of “Letters to a Young Poet”... but more likely I could practice my German and blow his mind with Impossible (fake meat) schnitzel. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? Hanif Abdurraqib is certainly up there on my list. A poet, essayist and cultural critic, his latest book “A Little Devil in America: Notes on Black Performance” took my breath away. It’s crushingly fervent, poignant, and essential. I think his prose is the closest anyone has ever gotten to conveying how it feels to live inside a movement or a song. What books are on your nightstand? I’ve got Adrienne Rich’s “The Dream of a Common Language,” TV writer Michael Schur’s book “How to Be Perfect,” which is basically a humorous and rudimentary guide to moral philosophy, and my e-reader is open to Joan Didion’s essay “Where the Kissing Never Stops” about Joan Biaz. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? From my memory I likely read all the books that were assigned, but I do remember skimming the whole way through “The Great Gatsby.” I felt it had little to do with what I was interested in or how I viewed life and the world around me at that time. And this line: “The more in tune with the times we were, the more we drank, and none of us contributed anything new” is brilliant, but I think is only found in that awful Baz Luhrmann remake. Go figure. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? Office supplies of all kinds. Or maybe the wine section at the Grocery Outlet. Does writing energize or exhaust you? It certainly does both. Similar to exercise, there’s the initial dread and exhaustion, just coming to terms with starting the process. But once you get going, and drain the muck from the taps, it feels incredibly rewarding to create something, no matter the volume… then onto the fun stuff, like getting out of your head and being with people. What is your writing Kryptonite? True crime podcasts and streaming content. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? I think I live in block form… and then only sometimes do I melt a little and the goods run off and onto the page. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? I suppose my first trip to Europe, solo, as a 24-year-old. I farmed in the Pyrenees, connected with relatives I’d never met before in Ireland, and eventually found my home in Berlin. I’m still mining those experiences for my writing. What does literary success look like to you? Not having to work a day job; acquiring a large stone house somewhere on the Mediterranean and hosting a writing residency for people of all backgrounds; cooking together and sipping wine in the heat of summer nights; thinking, sketching, scribbling into the next day.  PORTLAND, OR; August 30, 2022--A memoir in verse, Elisabeth Blair’s because God loves the wasp documents two and a half years she spent living in two abusive facilities for “troubled teens” during the late 1990s. The wilderness camp and emotional growth boarding school were modeled on the teachings and tenets of Synanon, a mid-20th-century cult.
Alternating between painful clarity and surreal metaphor, the poems grapple with the shock and disorientation of being taken away in the middle of the night by strangers; the bewilderment of navigating expectations in an environment of institutionalized bullying, shunning, and sleep deprivation; and the gravity of the adulthood that follows. Writing in the second person, Blair confronts the reader, withholding the potential relief of distance. Ripping through a patchwork of disturbing descriptions—of violent staff, isolated and terrified children, and decades of brutal nightmares—she cradles her fierce testimony in sonorous language and striking imagery. The book’s tight corralling of traumas takes aim at the notion that inducing fear, despair, and shipwrecked helplessness can rehabilitate a child—the catastrophic doctrine of “tough love.” Praise for Elisabeth Blair Elisabeth Blair writes as a survivor of a sadistic and dehumanizing facility for “troubled teens”—or perhaps the word is “camp.” It certainly reminds us of the other, more famous camps, gulags, and re-education centers we’re aware of. Because Blair is also a brilliant poet, she can take us into the perceptions of the shattered person or, in this case, child. The child understands only the contours of coercion: “the storm wants specific things.” In fact, she no longer identifies as human, and, at times, that seems like a good thing: “You tell them you’re a slice of grass where a shadow falls—/your greens seem burnt/but they’re not.//They don’t believe you.” Blair’s language is barbed, destabilizing, and very much alive. This is an important book. -- RAE ARMANTROUT About Elisabeth Blair Elisabeth Blair is a Montréal-based poet and editor with an extensive background in music and visual art. She has been artist-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Wildacres, and ACRE. Her publications include two chapbooks--We He She/It (Dancing Girl Press, 2016) and without saying (Ethel Press, 2020)—and poems in a variety of journals, including Harpur Palate, Feminist Studies, and Juked. This is her first book. About Unsolicited Press Unsolicited Press based out of Portland, Oregon and focuses on the works of the unsung and underrepresented. As a womxn-owned, all-volunteer small publisher that doesn’t worry about profits as much as championing exceptional literature, we have the privilege of partnering with authors skirting the fringes of the lit world. We’ve worked with emerging and award-winning authors such as Shann Ray, Amy Shimshon-Santo, Brook Bhagat, Kris Amos, and John W. Bateman. Learn more at unsolicitedpress.com. Find us on twitter and instagram. because God loves the wasp is available on August 30, 2022 as a paperback (78 p.; 978-1-956692-28-0) and e-book (all major retailers). The title is distributed to the trade by Ingram. The author is open to speaking with the media, holding readings, and engaging in other author opportunities. ### Press only, Unsolicited Press 619.354.8005 marketing@unsolicitedpress.com For artist interviews, readings, and podcasts: Elisabeth Blair Powerhouse Memoirist Andy Smart’s THE MORE YOU HATE, a Memoir-in-Essay Collection is Now Available8/16/2022
 PORTLAND, OR; August 16, 2022--THE MORE YOU HATE ME by Andy Smart is a memoir-in-essays collection that examines the author’s experience with his father’s suicide and the layered influence of the film Full Metal Jacket on both men. As Smart navigates the worlds of his past, present, and future, Kubrick's Vietnam war movie casts its long shadow over him; his is a story of what it means to live each day as a sequel to the last. This isn’t just a suicide memoir or a survivor’s victory lap, but a book about the hardest truths of being a son.
PRAISE FOR ANDY SMART “Family violence is the subject of many memoirs but I’ve not seen a book examine the nuance and indeterminacy of gun culture as it slips between the walls of the house next door. Smart’s narrative unfolds against the back drops of Hollywood and the NRA—America’s twin churches—where death is advertised in bright colors. At home the darkness streams down. This is a must read. I’ll wager you can’t put it down.” —Stephen Kuusisto author of Planet of the Blind About Andy Smart Andy Smart earned his MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Solstice Creative Writing Program at Lasell University, where he was a Michael Steinberg Fellow. Andy’s essays have appeared in Salamander, Sleet Magazine, and Moon City Review as well the anthologies Show Me All Your Scars (In Fact Books) and Come Shining: Essays and Poems on Writing in a Dark Time (Kelson Books). His poetry has appeared in Lily Poetry Review, The American Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. Andy was a 2019 Pushcart Prize nominee. His first chapbook of hybrid poetry, Blue Horse Suite, is available from Kattywompus Press. This is his first book. Andy lives in Missouri and online at www.AndySmartWrites.com. About Unsolicited Press Unsolicited Press was founded in 2012 and is based in Portland, OR. The press strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning authors. Learn more at www.unsolicitedpress.com. The publisher can be followed on Instagram and Twitter: @unsolicitedp The More You Hate Me is available on August 16, 2022 as a paperback (244 p.; 978-1-956692-27-3) and e-book (all major retailers). The title is distributed to the trade by Ingram. The author is open to speaking with the media, holding readings, and engaging in other author opportunities. ### Press only, Unsolicited Press 619.354.8005 marketing@unsolicitedpress.com For artist interviews, readings, and podcasts: Andy Smart  PORTLAND, OR; August 9, 2022— Dark Roux is the story of a family simmering on the verge of burning to ruin. The delicate nature of this sauce depicts how Cajun culture survives Americanization along parade routes and swamps in South Louisiana. The Mouton family approaches Mardi Gras 1999 expecting traditional joy and release. But teenage struggles with sexual orientation and independence, the ambiguity of young love complicated by the racism of the South, motherhood leaving little room to love one’s self (even when two non-family women are waiting to help), and blind ambition as a way to deal with the past, all plague the family. The lines tying them together become taut, threatening to fail and toss them into the hurricane of the future.
There is a green oak they all stay moored to. Auguste Chenevert buoys the family with unconditional love and moonshine, holding their bonds with sturdy hands and a sturdier heart, as their two hundred forty-four year old culture comes ashore to a complicated modern world. Each family member shares their experience of Cajun culture, and Auguste, through four separate points of view. Their lives cross like untethered boats on a tiny crawfish pond. Only one thing could bring them all together to decide how each will each carry their culture, and their family, into the 21st century: the death of Auguste Chenevert. About Toby LeBlanc Toby LeBlanc is a mental health therapist in Austin, TX. Writing is a way his own tales can have life alongside the countless stories of courage and strength of his clients. While he and his family sleep under the Texas stars, he will always say he's from Louisiana. He enjoys wearing period-specific pirate costumes and fishing. His dream is to one day do both at the same time. About Unsolicited Press Unsolicited Press strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning authors. Unsolicited Press based out of Portland, Oregon and focuses on the works of the unsung and underrepresented. As a womxn-owned, all-volunteer small publisher that doesn’t worry about profits as much as championing exceptional literature, we have the privilege of partnering with authors skirting the fringes of the lit world. We’ve worked with emerging and award-winning authors such as Shann Ray, Amy Shimshon-Santo, Brook Bhagat, Kris Amos, and John W. Bateman. Learn more at unsolicitedpress.com. Find us on twitter and Instagram, @unsolicitedp. DARK ROUX is available on August 9, 2022 as a paperback (326 p.; 978-1-956692-26-6) and e-book (all major retailers). The title is distributed to the trade by Ingram. The author is open to speaking with the media, holding readings, and engaging in other author opportunities. ### Press only, Unsolicited Press 619.354.8005 marketing@unsolicitedpress.com For artist interviews, readings, and podcasts: Toby LeBlanc 夢ポップ折り紙 Dream Pop Origami: A Permutational Memoir About Hapa Identity is Imaginative and a Powerful Essay Collection About Being True to Oneself  PORTLAND, OR; July 26, 2022-- Dream Pop Origami is a beautiful, ambitious, interactive, and engrossing lyrical memoir about mixed-race identity, love, travel, AAPI masculinities, and personal metamorphosis. This experimental work of creative nonfiction examines, celebrates, and complicates what it means to be Asian & white, Nisei & hapa, Midwestern & Californian, Buddhist & American at the same time. In this stunning collection of choose-your-own-essays and autobiographical lists, multiracial identity is a counterpoint of memory, language, reflection, and imagination intersecting and interweaving into a coherent tapestry of text, emotion, and voice.
ADVANCE PRAISE “Jackson Bliss paints with words. He is the Kendrick Lamar of the literary world.” —Regina King, Emmy-award-winning actress & director “Jackson Bliss seems to have dispatched Dream Pop Origami from a future where technically adventurous nonfiction blends so perfectly with vulnerable self-discovery that it’s impossible to imagine the two functioning without each other. By intricately folding his experiences into delicate hybrid forms, Bliss has made a memoir about how to nurture the different worlds that occupy a self that is beautiful, fascinating, heartbreaking, essential.” —John D’Agata, author of A New History of an Essay "Jackson Bliss has written a book I dreamed about my whole life. From the moment I got obsessed with Choose Your Own Adventures as a young child to my obsession with Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch in college, I always wanted a larger canon of alternate reality storytelling. Jackson not only delivers this but also gives the device the occasion of a moving memoir about identity. Dream Pop Origami is not just a book—it's a whole immersive creative experience and the good news is once you put it down you can dare yourself another go through its seemingly endless labyrinths. The more attempts I made, the more I understood why this fragmented self-portrait required the rearranging of so many mosaic tiles. Throughout it all, Jackson's story of what it means to be hapa in our world is not lost—this book is not a compromise of style and substance but a triumph of their collaboration into something definitely brilliant." —Porochista Khakpour, author of Brown Album: Essays on Exile & Identity “The crackling sound you hear is me feverishly and compulsively turning the pages of Jackson Bliss’ utterly original, genre defying riff on autobiography, memory, language and detail. It might also be Bliss himself, verbally folding and unfolding his story the way one shapes and reshapes a single piece of origami paper into any animal or object. I’m equally sure this is a magic book and that the spells all work. From an exploration of video games to Tibetan higher planes, Bliss expresses the varied ways in which the second sight of his hapa artist self animates the landscape, while taking readers on a journey through unabashed emotion, memory and a life lived with intensity and great feeling. This book is incredible.” —Marie Mutsuki Mockett, author of American Harvest “Bliss masterfully captures the kaleidoscopic gymnastics of his multicultural (hapa) identity, inviting the reader into humorous, heartbreaking, and insightful moments strung along a choose your own adventure. Punctuated with quizzes, lists, and charts, Dream Pop Origami seems to invoke the innovations of Ben Marcus and Karen Tei Yamashita, but these deep dives into self, race, and pop culture are a 100% Bliss.” —Sequoia Nagamatsu, author of How High We Go in the Dark and Where We Go When All We Were is Gone “Take a life and fold it in half then fold that half into another half; keep going until there is nothing left. Make it into something beautiful, dreamed, imagined; it can be any vision you want, that is, until it's time to take it apart, to examine just how such a self was constructed. You'll never be the same dreamer again. Jackson Bliss nonetheless exposes the creases, the wearing away of self and soul, the deterioration of appearances and the texture of the fragile nature of the idealized self against the reality into which we are constructed. Do you want to do this? he seems to ask, allowing us to spy or avert our eyes. If life is an adventure, what does it mean when you have to unfold, uncrease, unravel, destroy your life in order to live it? With candor and honesty, Bliss investigates how plans go awry, how following the pattern never leads to the perfection we seek. It is only through undoing, revisiting, and shredding our scraps that lead one to oneself. Dream Pop Origami is a beautifully made star. See for yourself.” —Jenny Boully, author of Betwixt & Between: Essays on the Writing Life and The Body: An Essay “Empty of permanence and interlinked with infinite beings in a net of belonging, Jackson Bliss imagines the world of in-between places. In Dream Pop Origami, ceaseless migrations and reincarnations actualize playful transformation tales just like the samadhi of freedom folds across any and all barriers. A memoir of renga-like linked verse, a song of becoming and love.” —Duncan Ryuken Williams, author of American Sutra and Hapa Japan “By turns sly, sorrowful, pensive, and forthright, Dream Pop Origami makes us rethink the possibilities of nonfiction writing, and of how we name and shape our identities.” —Beth (Bich Minh) Nguyen, author of Stealing Buddha’s Dinner “At the risk of sounding trite, this book is just so much fun! But, like, for real—fun is just a diversion tactic for Dream Pop Origami’s honest profundity and Jackson Bliss’s expert storytelling. Each adventure is delivered in its most perfect form, ready for your interactive pleasure: To feel the complicated pleasure of nostalgia, go to chapter 22. To feel the adolescent pleasure of a game, go to chapter 28. To feel the naughty pleasure of reading Jackson Bliss’s prose, go to chapter 35. To fulfill satisfaction, read this book.” —Lily Hoang, author of A Bestiary ABOUT JACKON BLISS Jackson Bliss is the winner of the 2020 Noemi Press Award in Prose and the mixed-race/hapa author of Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments (Noemi Press, 2021), Amnesia of June Bugs (7.13 Books, 2022), and the speculative fiction hypertext, Dukkha, My Love (2017). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Ploughshares, Guernica, Antioch Review, ZYZZYVA, Longreads, TriQuarterly, Columbia Journal, Kenyon Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Witness, Fiction, Santa Monica Review, Boston Review, Juked, Quarterly West, Arts & Letters, Joyland, Huffington Post UK, The Daily Dot, and Multiethnic Literature in the US, among others. He is the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bowling Green State University and lives in LA with his wife and their two fashionably dressed dogs. Follow him on Twitter and IG: @jacksonbliss. ABOUT UNSOLICITED PRESS Unsolicited Press strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning authors. Unsolicited Press based out of Portland, Oregon and focuses on the works of the unsung and underrepresented. As a womxn-owned, all-volunteer small publisher that doesn’t worry about profits as much as championing exceptional literature, we have the privilege of partnering with authors skirting the fringes of the lit world. We’ve worked with emerging and award-winning authors such as Shann Ray, Amy Shimshon-Santo, Brook Bhagat, Kris Amos, and John W. Bateman. Learn more at unsolicitedpress.com. Find us on twitter and Instagram, @unsolicitedp. DREAM POP ORIGAMI is available on July 26, 2022 as a paperback (312 p.; 978-1-956692-74-7), e-book, and audiobook. An interactive website is also available (dreampoporigami.com). Retailers and libraries can order copies through Ingram.  PORTLAND, OR; July 19, 2022-- Unsolicited Press is proud to be bring you another exceptional poetry collection, LOWERCASE GOD, by Mark Fleckenstein. Fleckenstein's pen is not a sword, but a paintbrush, skillfully painting poetic gems on every page. LAST PHOTOGRAPH OF MY DAYS AS AN IDEALIST You urge me, after so many years of silence, to send you details about my occupations, about this "wonderful" world in which, you say, I am lucky enough to live and move and have my being. I might answer that I am a man without occupation, and that this world is not in the least wonderful. —E.M. Cioran, “Letter To A Faraway Friend” How far I have come to wish to come home. This morning, the first in twenty-three exiled years, the white noise of commerce eclipsed my only dream of childhood: the dull boots and swollen faces of bodies hang- ing from streetlamps. Your letters and wishes for my life here arrive whitened by a belief in this country like a trinket of light perfect and invisible. What has not changed and what has are identical. 28 years earlier, Chinese tanks and soldiers rolled over students. Here whole families sleep on sewer grates and barter for whatever one might spare. Yesterday, a pigeon appeared on my desk and pecked at your letters. My cat caught it in mid-flight. The argument of its wings surprised him into letting it go. About Mark Fleckenstein
Mark Fleckenstein was born in Chicago, and grew up in Ohio, Michigan, Connecticut, North Carolina, and New Hampshire, and presently lives in Massachusetts. He graduated from University of North Carolina in Charlotte with a B.A. in English, Vermont College of Fine Arts and received an MFA in Writing. He became very involved in the poetry community in and around Boston, for over 30 years. He was an assistant editor for (BLuR), the Boston Literary Review, founder/coordinator of two bi-weekly poetry reading series in Boston and a workshop leader, He’s given poetry readings with famous poets (Charles Simic, Linda Gregg, Mark Doty, Mark Cox and Carl Phillips) and not so famous poets. He is also a painter. He has two amazing daughters and a large, eccentric, long-haired black cat named Ariadne. About Unsolicited Press Unsolicited Press was founded in 2012 and is based in Portland, OR. The press strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning authors. Learn more at www.unsolicitedpress.com. The publisher can be followed on Instagram and Twitter: @unsolicitedp LOWERCASE GOD is available on July 19, 2022 as a paperback (64p.; 978-1-956692-24-2) and e-book (all major retailers). The title is distributed to the trade by Ingram. The author is open to speaking with the media, holding readings, and engaging in other author opportunities. ### Press only, Unsolicited Press 619.354.8005 marketing@unsolicitedpress.com For artist interviews, readings, and podcasts:  PORTLAND, OR; July 19, 2022-- FRUITCAKE is a collection of poems that follows a persona through various jobs as an Administrative Judge and civil servant, the adoption of her son and her relationship through the years with her parents and in particular, her father, who worked as a macaroon baker.
While the subject matter varies throughout the collection, the thread of the narrative voice is wry, humorous and sharp. About Lisa Badner Lisa Badner Lisa Badner is the author of the forthcoming book of poems, FRUITCAKE. Lisa’s writing has appeared in Rattle, the New Ohio Review, TriQuarterly, Mudlark, The Satirist, PANK, Fourteen Hills, the Mom Egg Review, Ping Pong, New World Writing, Mohave River Review, #TheSideshow and others. She received a Pushcart (2018) Special Mention. She is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and Brooklyn Law School and coordinates the tutorial program at the Writers Studio. She lives in Brooklyn with her teenager and her chihuahua. About Unsolicited Press Unsolicited Press strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning authors. Unsolicited Press based out of Portland, Oregon and focuses on the works of the unsung and underrepresented. As a womxn-owned, all-volunteer small publisher that doesn’t worry about profits as much as championing exceptional literature, we have the privilege of partnering with authors skirting the fringes of the lit world. We’ve worked with emerging and award-winning authors such as Shann Ray, Amy Shimshon-Santo, Brook Bhagat, Kris Amos, and John W. Bateman. Learn more at unsolicitedpress.com. Find us on twitter and Instagram, @unsolicitedp. FRUITCAKE is available on July 19, 2022 as a paperback (74 p.; 978-1-956692-23-5) and e-book (all major retailers). Retailers, schools, and libraries can order copies through Ingram. The author is open to speaking with the media, holding readings, and engaging in other author opportunities. ### Press only, Unsolicited Press 619.354.8005 marketing@unsolicitedpress.com For artist interviews, readings, and podcasts: Lisa Badner  PORTLAND, OR; July 12, 2022-- The stories in The Guide to Being a Dictator’s Mistress are meant to capture a reader’s imagination and take the familiar, and unfamiliar, and provide for an enjoyable reading experience. In the title story and the companion story The Guide to Being a Dictator’s Body Double, characters who are caught in the orbit of those ruling with an iron fist have to find ways to survive. In In Character, a man finds himself in trouble after trying to translate the Batman we all know from the comic books and the movies to real life. And in the last story Alphabetica: The Other Side of Love, the slow disintegration of a marriage is laid bare as a couple comes to the realization that getting married was the easy part. As a range of normal, and somewhat normal, characters navigate familiar worlds, often with a slight twist, the stories aim to engage the full range of human emotion in a thought provoking, and unique, fashion.
About Cedrick Mendoza-Tolentino Cedrick Mendoza-Tolentino was a 2014 Emerging Writer's Fellow at the Center for Fiction in New York City. He graduated with honors in the Undergraduate Creative Writing Program at Columbia University. He has had work published in Liars' League New York, Akashic - Mondays are Murder, Gargoyle Magazine, Joyland, Slow Trains and Plain Spoke. His chapbook Alphabetica: The Other Side of Love was published by Corgi Snorkel Press. About Unsolicited Press Unsolicited Press, based out of Portland, Oregon, strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning and emerging authors such as Shann Ray, Amy Shimshon-Santo, Brook Bhagat, Kris Amos, and John W. Bateman. We believe in championing the books of the unsung and underrepresented. As a womxn-owned, all-volunteer small publisher, we focus on exceptional writing, not profits. We have the privilege of partnering with authors skirting the fringes of the lit world. Learn more at unsolicitedpress.com. Find us on Twitter and Instagram: @unsolicitedp. The Guide to Being a Dictator's Mistress is available as a paperback (178 p.; 978-1-956692-22-8) and e-book (all major retailers). The title is distributed to the trade by Ingram. The author is open to speaking with the media, holding readings, and engaging in other author opportunities. ### Press only, Unsolicited Press 619.354.8005 marketing@unsolicitedpress.com For artist interviews, readings, and podcasts: Cedrick Mendoza-Tolentino  PORTLAND, OR; JUNE 28, 2022--Rook is based on the true story of Al Nussbaum. To his unsuspecting wife, Lolly, Al is a loving, chess playing, family man. To J. Edgar Hoover, he is the most cunning fugitive alive. Al is the mastermind behind a string of east coast robberies that has stumped law enforcement. After his partner, one-eyed Bobby Wilcoxson, kills a bank guard and wounds a New York City patrolman, Al is identified as one of the robbers and lands on top of the FBI’s most wanted list. He is forced to flee his hometown of Buffalo, New York as the FBI closes in and Lolly learns of her husband’s secret life. One million wanted posters are printed and The Reader’s Digest offers a ten-thousand-dollar reward for Al’s capture. While Al assumes another identity and attempts to elude the police, Lolly is left alone to care for their infant daughter and adjust to her new life as ‘The Bank Robber’s Wife’. Friends, family, and federal agents all pressure Lolly to betray Al. While Lolly struggles at home financially, with unrelenting FBI agents, and her conscious, Al and Bobby continue to rob banks, even as Bobby grows more mentally unstable and dangerous. Al has only two goals: avoid capture and steal enough money to start a new life with his family. Returning to gather his wife and baby is suicidal, but as Al said, he’d only stick his neck in the Buffalo noose for Lolly.
About Stephen G. Eoannou Stephen G. Eoannou holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and an MA from Miami University. His short story collection, Muscle Cars, was published by the Santa Fe Writers Project. He has been awarded an Honor Certificate from The Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, and won the Best Short Screenplay Award at the 36th Starz Denver Film Festival. He lives and writes in his hometown of Buffalo, New York, the setting and inspiration for much of his work. Rook is his first novel. About Unsolicited Press Unsolicited Press was founded in 2012 and is based in Portland, OR. The press strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning authors. Learn more at www.unsolicitedpress.com. The publisher can be followed on Instagram and Twitter: @unsolicitedp ROOK is available on June 28, 2022 as a paperback (298 p.; 978-1-956692-04-4) and e-book (all major retailers). The title is distributed to the trade by Ingram. The author is open to speaking with the media, holding readings, and engaging in other author opportunities. ### Press only, Unsolicited Press 619.354.8005 marketing@unsolicitedpress.com For artist interviews, readings, and podcasts: Mindbuck Media jess@mindbuckmedia.com  PORTLAND, OR; June 21, 2022-- Summer solstice is here and at last we can crack the spine on Joy to celebrate. Joy is the new full-length collection of poetry by Francis Daulerio, author of If & When We Wake, Please Plant This Book, and With a Difference. Beginning with one pregnancy and ending with another, Joy examines the ways in which we keep ourselves alive and hold each other up. It covers the highs and lows of looking for happiness while living with depression and anxiety, frequently settling in the mundanity of normal life, hunting for beauty in the plain and celebrating each bit of it. While the title may suggest a lighthearted read, the book is more about the seeking than the finding, centering around the birth of Daulerio’s first child while coping with the loss of friend and collaborator, Scott Hutchison. Though painful at times, it is a life-affirming book that encourages readers to push through hardships to find their own sense of meaning. Somewhat of a departure from his earlier work, Joy sees Daulerio expanding the short bursts of imagery found in his first books into longer narratives laced with humor and optimism. As Bon Iver’s Sean Carey explains, “Daulerio’s relentless hope and love…is a much needed message in today’s world.” Joy is packed tight with fifty-four poems, some of which have previously appeared in magazines, but most of which are brand new. It also has a foreword by acclaimed author Maggie Smith (Good Bones, Keep Moving), and cover art by UK artist Helen Ahpornsiri. To celebrate the beauty that is embodied in Francis Daulerio's JOY, a book tour across the East Coast is taking place. Francis will be visiting Philadelphia, Boston, and Brooklyn. More can be learned here. PRAISE FOR FRANCIS DAULERIO “If there is a book you need to read because you’ve misplaced your joy over the last few years, this is it. In Joy, despite grief and struggles, Francis Daulerio celebrates what went right—the friend who climbs out through the downstairs window / of my house so not to disturb those gypsy wrens / who built their nest in the Valentine’s wreath on our front door, little white flowers / my wife calls starlight / bloom sideways, birds after rain—Yes! And many! Daulerio is my favorite kind of poet—an engaging storyteller who sees the world with a wink and a sideways smile, who keeps track of the moments we’ve forgotten. How lucky we are he wrote these extraordinary poems to remind us of what we’ve neglected to notice—the bees / sucking life into every clover flower / low enough for the mower blade to spare, tinny music of an ice cream truck, those fat gray clouds. Joy is full of heart and beauty, and is a book I didn’t want to end. And how could I? Daulerio’s poems compassionately bring us to a place where we ask ourselves—How do we become the people we’d love? How do we do better? This book is a gift to all and especially those of us who want to be delighted—this is truly a recommended addition to any bookcase.” ~ Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon Press 2021) "I often forget that poems can heal, poems can teach, and poems can breathe life into the way you see your world. In these pages, Francis Daulerio’s gratitude and celebration of life is palpable. The only thing to do after sitting with these poems is to go outside and sink your hands into the dirt and feel the earth’s quiet hum. Even while facing grief, fear, uncertainty, Daulerio’s relentless hope and love for his surroundings - his yard, his family, the power of nature - is a much needed message in today’s world." ~ Sean Carey (S. Carey / Bon Iver) "A beautiful collection, bursting with life and detail, which takes you to places old and new and, like the best poetry, teaches you something you didn't know you needed to know.” ~ Frank Turner  About Francis Daulerio Francis Daulerio is a poet and teacher from Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from Arcadia University in 2014 before releasing If & When We Wake (Unsolicited Press 2015) and Please Plant This Book (The Head & The Hand Press 2018), both with illustrations by Scottish artist, Scott Hutchison. Francis has also released All Is Not Lost, a collaborative vinyl EP of poetry-infused music to benefit the Tiny Changes charity organization, and With a Difference (Trident Boulder 2020), a split book of ‘covers’ with Philadelphia author Nick Gregorio. Francis is a mental health awareness advocate, and has performed across the United States and abroad to raise money for suicide prevention. He lives in the woods with his wife and children. He finds a good bit of joy there. About Unsolicited Press
Unsolicited Press, based out of Portland, Oregon, strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning and emerging authors such as Shann Ray, Amy Shimshon-Santo, Brook Bhagat, Kris Amos, and John W. Bateman. We believe in championing the books of the unsung and underrepresented. As a womxn-owned, all-volunteer small publisher, we focus on exceptional writing, not profits. We have the privilege of partnering with authors skirting the fringes of the lit world. Learn more at unsolicitedpress.com. Find us on Twitter and Instagram: @unsolicitedp. JOY is available as a paperback (132 p.; 978-1-956692-21-1) and e-book (all major retailers). The title is distributed to the trade by Ingram. The author is open to speaking with the media, holding readings, and engaging in other author opportunities. ### Press only, Unsolicited Press 619.354.8005 marketing@unsolicitedpress.com For artist interviews, readings, and podcasts: Francis Daulerio Minnesota Writer Matthew Cole Levine Delivers an Occult Masterpiece the Must Be on Your TBR List6/21/2022
 PORTLAND, OR; June 21, 2022— In the desolate woods of northern Wisconsin, there is a cabin. Inside the cabin is a figure of evil, a witch performing an unknown ritual. There is also a young boy, Ryan Amherst, who is part of this strange ceremony: a pattern of sacrifice and resurrection known only to the residents of the tiny town of Grange.
Nearby in the village, a man named Nathan Amherst - Ryan’s father - meets with a middleman named John Linden. Nathan asks when his side of the “contract” will be fulfilled. John can only assure Nathan that he will be compensated for his troubles. Meanwhile, in Milwaukee, a police officer named Ben Dmitrovich has a tense confrontation with his superiors. After beating a suspect in a domestic violence case, Ben is placed on a mandatory suspension - another in a long line of heinous police scandals. Ben, who is struggling to overcome his own personal demons, decides to retreat to his family’s cabin up north. By coincidence or a morbid twist of fate, he ends up in Grange and meets a woman named Maria Amherst - Nathan’s wife, who apparently died seven months ago. As he unlocks the mystery of Maria’s reappearance, Ben discovers a shocking pattern of child disappearances and strange resurrections. A young piano prodigy named Amy Dorian may be the town’s next victim, but Ben races to rescue her before it’s too late. Hurtling towards a cosmic judgment, Ben has a final shot at redemption or damnation. About Matthew Cole Levine Matthew Cole Levine is an author, film critic, and screenwriter based in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and grew up near Milwaukee, making him well-versed in a particular brand of Midwestern horror. He has written for the British Film Institute, Walker Art Center, and other publications, and continues to serve as Assistant Editor and Contributing Writer for the Barcelona-based Found Footage Magazine. Hollow is his first novel. About Unsolicited Press Unsolicited Press strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning authors. Unsolicited Press based out of Portland, Oregon and focuses on the works of the unsung and underrepresented. As a womxn-owned, all-volunteer small publisher that doesn’t worry about profits as much as championing exceptional literature, we have the privilege of partnering with authors skirting the fringes of the lit world. We’ve worked with emerging and award-winning authors such as Shann Ray, Amy Shimshon-Santo, Brook Bhagat, Kris Amos, and John W. Bateman. Learn more at unsolicitedpress.com. Find us on twitter and Instagram, @unsolicitedp. Hollow is available on June 21, 2022 as a paperback (304 p.; 978-1-956692-20-4) and e-book (all major retailers). Retailers, schools, and libraries can order copies through Ingram. The author is open to speaking with the media, holding readings, and engaging in other author opportunities. ### Press only, Unsolicited Press 619.354.8005 marketing@unsolicitedpress.com For artist interviews, readings, and podcasts: Matthew Cole Levine  PORTLAND, OR; June 14, 2022--In this moving, sophisticated, and often humorous novel, Gary M. Almeter artfully crafts a group portrait of several families using the finest of details in seemingly mundane encounters and everyday events.
It’s 1982 and Gloria Winegar, a Brown University librarian, discovers that there aren’t many drawbacks to having an affair with JFK, Jr., a Brown senior. When she learns she’s pregnant with his baby, she tells no one but her best friend who shepherds through childbirth. They leave the baby, a son, on the steps of a convent. The novel chronicles the next few decades of both Gloria and her son, who gets adopted by the most normal family in Massachusetts. How he learns who he is; how he discovers his mother; and what they each should or must do with their new knowledge is masterfully and beautifully written in a story that is a little bit espionage novel; a little bit bildungsroman; and a little bit historical fiction; all culminating in a beautiful literary sketch of a family. The book imagines the pre-public life of JFK Jr. and examines how much we know about him, and people in general, is illusory. It is the story of identity, pedigree, blue collar versus Ivy League sensibilities, celebrity, authenticity, family, and self-care. It’s about how small things evolve into big things. It is a novel about nature versus nurture. It is a modern telling story of Arthurian legend and the mythic doomed (and triumphant) heroes who populate our world. About the Author Gary M. Almeter is a writer and attorney who lives in Baltimore, Maryland with his wife, three children, and two dogs, Dave and Mixly. He is the author of the memoir The Emperor of Ice-Cream (Unsolicited Press 2019). About Unsolicited Press Unsolicited Press was founded in 2012 and is based in Portland, OR. The press strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning authors. Learn more at www.unsolicitedpress.com. The publisher can be followed on Instagram and Twitter: @unsolicitedp Kissing the Roadkill Back to Life by Gary M. Almeter is available on June 14, 2022 as a paperback (282 p.;978-1-956692-18-1). The book will be distributed to the trade by Ingram. An e-book version is also available and an audiobook is in the works. The author is open to speaking with the media, holding readings, and engaging in other opportunities.  Join us for a literary reading with Jason Graff and Matthew Cole Levine at 5:30 PM Pacific time. The event is virtual and can be joined by clicking on the event via our Events Calendar. About Jason GraffThe author of numerous published short stories as well as the novella In the Service of the Boyar (Strange Fictions Press, 2016), Jason Graff loves both reading and producing writing that has a strong, clear voice and conveys a deep connection to the characters. In high school, his passion for the written word was well and truly ignited when he took a sucker punch for writing his crush a poem. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Bowling Green State University and later, his MFA in Creative Writing at Goddard College. The intense nature of that program allowed him to be mentored by a diverse group of talented writers which included: Sarah Schulman, Richard Panek, Darcey Steinke, and Rachel Pollack. Jason currently lives in Richardson, Texas with his wife, son, and their cat. He is currently working on a science fiction novel about the beginning of the end of the universe and another about a romancing con-man. You can follow him on Twitter at @JasonGraff1 , on Facebook at Author Jason Graff and/or visit his website: www.jasongraff.wordpress.com. About Matthew Cole LevineMatthew Cole Levine is an author, film critic, and screenwriter based in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and grew up near Milwaukee, making him well-versed in a particular brand of Midwestern horror. He has written for the British Film Institute, Walker Art Center, and other publications, and continues to serve as Assistant Editor and Contributing Writer for the Barcelona-based Found Footage Magazine. Hollow is his first novel.  PORTLAND, OR; June 7, 2022--Glitched collabs from Andrew Brenza and Kristine Snodgrass find a neon outlet in the merging of vispo and digital alteration. This striking book features color-saturated work that enlivens the structural bombast inherent in Snodgrass and Brenza’s stark visual poetry. What is glitched is not superceded nor muted, rather transformed in a true collaborative spirit.
About the Authors Kristine Snodgrass is the author most recently of American Apparell from AlienBuddha Press, Rather, from Contagion Press (2020) and the chapbook, These Burning Fields (Hysterical Books 2019). Kristine’s asemic and vispo work has been published in Utsanga (Italy), Slow Forward, Brave New Word, and Talking About Strawberries. Kristine has collaborated with many poets and artists and is always looking for new projects. Most recent collaborations with Collin J. Rae, BEAST, can be found at kristinesnodgrass.com. Andrew Brenza’s recent chapbooks include Geometric Mantra (above/ground press), Poems in C (Viktlösheten Press), and Waterlight (Simulacrum Press). He is also the author of four collections of visual poetry, Automatic Souls (Timglaset), Gossamer Lid (Trembling Pillow Press), Alphabeticon & Other Poems (RedFoxPress), and Spool (Unsolicited Press). His newest book, Smear, was just released from BlazeVOX Books. About Unsolicited Press Unsolicited Press was founded in 2012 and is based in Portland, OR. The press strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning authors. Learn more at www.unsolicitedpress.com. The publisher can be followed on Instagram and Twitter: @unsolicitedp NEON GALAX by Andrew Brenza and Kristine Snodgrass is available on June 7, 2022 as a paperback (52 p.; 978-1-956692-17-4). Exclusive copies will be made available to the first 100 readers, after which, the book will be distributed to the trade by Ingram. The authors are open to speaking with the media, holding readings, and engaging in other opportunities. ### Press only, Unsolicited Press marketing@unsolicitedpress.com For artist interviews, readings, and podcasts: Andrew Brenza Kristine Snodgrass  PORTLAND, OR; May 31, 2022--The Criteria explores unconventional, and at times highly problematic, motherhood. The characters struggle with impossible choices that often lead to heartbreaking behaviors. In the titular story, the main character takes on the burden of breastfeeding infants whose mothers have fallen in while at the same time struggling with the fate of her own infant. Another story imagines a scenario in which the mother/child bond is prohibited, and drastic measures taken to ensure its prevention. The characters are asked to suffer many tragedies, as well as to embrace hope in the most unlikely places.
Praise for Kami Westhoff Poetic and corporeal, The Criteria is a collection steeped in brutality and resilience. Westhoff’s prose is as deeply unsettling as it is starkly beautiful—these stories are complex, haunting, and lush. --Kimberly King Parsons The Criteria is about the complicated work of caring (and sometimes failing to care)—for mothers, for children, for the planet--and the book is itself an act of care. Kami Westhoff welcomes her reader with generosity into quiet, secret spaces of love, longing, pain and, ultimately, connection. —Ramona Ausubel, author of Awayland and Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty The world of Kami Westhoff’s stories is skewed from ours - more visceral, brutal, harder - but also oddly quieter. That the women and children and men there survive what they do is, I guess, a testament to their resilience. But whatever it is, it’s a warning to us to rein in our easy violence, to try to remember love. --Rebecca Brown, author of You Tell the Stories You Need to Believe About Kami Westhoff Kami Westhoff lives in the Pacific Northwest where she teaches creative writing at Western Washington University. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks: Sleepwalker, winner of the Minerva Rising Dare to Be Contest; Your Body a Bullet, co-written with Elizabeth Vignali; and Cloud-bound, forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. Her poetry and prose has been published in journals including Booth, Carve, Hippocampus, Fugue, Passages North, Redivider, Waxwing and West Branch. About Unsolicited Press Unsolicited Press based out of Portland, Oregon and focuses on the works of the unsung and underrepresented. As a womxn-owned, all-volunteer small publisher that doesn’t worry about profits as much as championing exceptional literature, we have the privilege of partnering with authors skirting the fringes of the lit world. We’ve worked with emerging and award-winning authors such as Shann Ray, Amy Shimshon-Santo, Brook Bhagat, Kris Amos, and John W. Bateman. Learn more at unsolicitedpress.com. Find us on twitter and instagram. The Criteria is available on May 31, 2022 as a paperback (180 p.; 978-1-956692-16-7) and e-book (all major retailers). The title is distributed to the trade by Ingram. The author is open to speaking with the media, holding readings, and engaging in other author opportunities.  PORTLAND, OR; May 26, 2022--Eva Matson was born in 1900 to a rural family in Dorset, England. It was the Victorian age. An age when women needed to use actions to have their voices heard. An age of ancient plumbing, gas lighting, and where unmentionables were never mentioned.
Through wars, through extreme shifts in public attitude, especially towards the roles of women, Eva experienced many changes in society and extreme changes in living conditions. Eva was a somewhat unconventional woman who drove an ambulance at fifteen. She found her calling as a nurse at an early age. It was this open-minded blend of characteristics that would stand her in good stead for her life to come. A life that included, yes, a beauty contest. It was a life filled with questions and unexpected answers. A life of joys and sadness. Of exhilaration and darkness as Eva hit London with all its risks and pitfalls, relationships, disease, and decisions—turning points in her life. Some of which she might have regretted, but some she wouldn't change for the world. This is a story of strength, of bumps in the road, of family with all its foibles, of the values of longevity in friendship, and of deep love. About S.B. Borgersen S.B. Borgersen is a British/Canadian author, of middle England and Hebridean ancestry, whose favoured genres are flash and micro fiction, and poetry. Her books, Fishermen’s Fingers, While the Kettle Boils, and Of Daisies and Dead Violins are published by Unsolicited Press. Since 2000 her writing has won prizes, been mentioned in Hansard and published internationally in literary journals and anthologies (print and online). The list of publications is extensive and can be found at www.sueborgersen.com About Unsolicited Press Unsolicited Press was founded in 2012 and is based in Portland, OR. The press strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning authors. Learn more at www.unsolicitedpress.com. The publisher can be followed on Instagram and Twitter: @unsolicitedp EVA MATSON is available on May 26, 2022 as an ebook and can be downloaded from all major eboko retailers as well as requested from your local library. Find retailers here: https://books2read.com/u/4ElpDM Unsolicited Press Publishes Pushcart Prize Nominee Emily Paige Wilson’s Poetry Collection Jalubí5/24/2022
 PORTLAND, OR; May 24, 2022—In what ways does lineage resemble language, and are there aspects of both which will always feel untranslatable? With Prague as a backdrop, Jalubí explores this question as it attempts to balance on the fraught fulcrum point of what in the speaker’s family history has been accurately preserved and what has been turned into myth by way of intentional and accidental misrepresentations. Set in the shadow of witches, dragons, and a great-grandmother’s ghost, this collection suggests history itself is a haunting.
Like a persistent spirit, history refuses to cast itself in the sepia-toned filter of nostalgia: it’s instead the gold leaf which gilds theaters in Prague; the glinting burgundy of the city’s garnets fashioned into heirloom earrings; the gray of castles and cathedrals; canola fields fawn and flaxen in a small farming village near the Slovakian border. Amidst the colors and customs of Prague, the speaker shares the struggle of trying to understand and be understood across languages. Translation in these poems is both play and performance, invitation and isolation. Framed in sections which mark various arrivals and departures, the collection posits whether a person can ever truly inhabit a place with any degree of fixedness or whether one’s identity must always remain in flux. Through these arrivals and departures, Jalubí chronicles the search for a family’s small farming village of origin and ultimately becomes a search for the self. As the speaker writes in the collection’s closing lines, “Being one person in this lineage is no more/than being one letter of a language:/written yet unaware of words.” Praise for Emily Paige Wilson In this book a keen ear for sound and a powerful love of language combine to create intelligent, lyrical poems that live vibrantly in the borders between nationalities and relationships where understanding truly happens. The result is a lively, rich and deeply felt debut of arrivals and departures that honor Wilson’s family and heritage, as well as language itself. I am duly impressed. —Mark Cox, Author of Readiness and Sorrow Bread, New and Selected Poems: 1984-2015 What is translation? Wilson would answer: alchemy, a snare, to have and halve, or “the space the rain takes as it falls.” Here, language is scrutinized against a blue light. Every facet is up for examination in Jalubí—linguistics, sound, ancestry—and the turning and layering is part method, part spell. This book is a vessel—Wilson, a force of wind. These poems will put a river in your mouth. —Leah Poole Osowski, Author of Hover Over Her and Exceeds Us About Emily Paige Wilson Emily Paige Wilson is the author of Jalubí (Unsolicited Press, 2022) and two chapbooks: Hypochondria, Least Powerful of the Greek Gods (Glass Poetry Press, 2020) and I'll Build Us a Home (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Her work has been nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. About Unsolicited Press Unsolicited Press was founded in 2012 and is based in Portland, OR. The press strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning authors. Learn more at www.unsolicitedpress.com. The publisher can be followed on Instagram and Twitter: @unsolicitedp Jalubí is available on May 24, 2022 as a paperback (104 p.; 978-1-956692-15-0) and e-book (all major retailers). The title is distributed to the trade by Ingram. The author is open to speaking with the media, holding readings, and engaging in other author opportunities. ### Press only, Unsolicited Press 619.354.8005 marketing@unsolicitedpress.com For artist interviews, readings, and podcasts: Emily Paige Wilson epw7427@gmail.com  PORTLAND, OR; May 17, 2022— Hunting Geese by Sarah Rau Peterson is a short story collection that features characters as multi-layered as Montana herself. The unnamed protagonist in Hunting Geese grapples with life choices and his just out-of-reach family while positioned on the banks of the frigid Yellowstone River awaiting the descent of geese. She Would Have and The Needing Place addresses the dynamics of a complicated father-daughter relationship told from each perspective while skirting the issues of generational gaps and aging. Wednesday’s Child’s narrator wonders what she, as a mother, did to push her daughter away, and Chickens is about, well, it’s about chickens.
From the Book HE’S PARKED ON THE RIVERBANK to get away from the wife, holding his thermos mug and staring out at the decoys. The sky has gone pink, and he’s waiting for the geese to drop for their nightly visit. The shotgun’s loaded but the safety’s on and he can keep it on the seat next to him since Dog died. He sips his coffee-with-brandy, but it’s lukewarm despite the thermos and the bitter taste gives him heartburn. The radio won’t stop blaring talking head commentary about the upcoming presidential election—Jesus, it’s still over a year away—and he wishes he could get a sports show, maybe some rock and roll out here instead. His hands ache from the cold, his old hands that have set hundreds, thousands of decoys into frozen riverbanks, lakeshores crusted with ice, waiting, waiting. He thinks of Freezeout Lake, so cold that winter—what, damn near forty years now—he remembers it was too cold to wait for the birds outside even though the first few were already scoping out his decoys. Scattered cars and pickups around the shorelines puffing clouds from the mufflers. He knew, too, that every one of those vehicles were tuned into the same AM station out of Calgary as he was, and nobody stopped listening even when the geese came down, and all at once the horns and flashing headlights, noise that all but drowned out the sound of the startled birds lifting off and out of range, but they all whooped and hollered, all the hunters like young boys, because they believed in miracles, yes they did, when the Ruskies lost that hockey game. The wife, a few years back he had told her about that cold night in ’80, after they made that movie and everyone was talking about it again, and he teared up and then downright cried over how nobody pulled in any geese that night, but they were all brothers who emerged from warm vehicles to chant USA! USA! together into the frigid air. She wasn’t really listening, he could tell, but he got downright pissed off when she told him she didn’t remember it. Didn’t remember it! Didn’t remember the call? Al Michaels? Beating the freaking USSR, the Red Army guys? Her face was blank, and she’d said—she actually said—that she didn’t follow football. He chuckles to himself, now. That had been a hell of a conversation. He warms his hands against the heater vent, rubs them together, arthritic knuckle against arthritic knuckle. About Sarah Rau Peterson Sarah Rau Peterson is a first-generation Montanan. She lives with her husband and two children near Miles City, where she divides her time between the family’s cattle ranch, her middle school history classroom, and her children’s activities. She publishes occasionally in The Montana Quarterly. About Unsolicited Press Unsolicited Press strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning authors. Unsolicited Press based out of Portland, Oregon and focuses on the works of the unsung and underrepresented. As a womxn-owned, all-volunteer small publisher that doesn’t worry about profits as much as championing exceptional literature, we have the privilege of partnering with authors skirting the fringes of the lit world. We’ve worked with emerging and award-winning authors such as Shann Ray, Amy Shimshon-Santo, Brook Bhagat, Kris Amos, and John W. Bateman. Learn more at unsolicitedpress.com. Find us on twitter and Instagram, @unsolicitedp. HUNTING GEESE is available on May 17, 2022 as a paperback (66 p.; 978-1-956692-19-8) and e-book (all major retailers). The title is distributed to the trade by Ingram. The author is open to speaking with the media, holding readings, and engaging in other author opportunities. ### Press only, Unsolicited Press 619.354.8005 marketing@unsolicitedpress.com For artist interviews, readings, and podcasts: Sarah Rau Peterson  PORTLAND, OR; May 10, 2022--Against a backdrop of newsfeeds and hints of eco-doom, #TheNewCrusades centers on a series of letters to an uncertain deity hovering above and within a particular American madness. These poems are fractured little diaries seeking a wholeness; they track the ways we move back and forth between larger social-political selves and inner-personal selves.
The news here is professed through protests, graffiti, broken mirrors, ambient radio, synchronized fires, and all-night newsfeeds--all of it projecting a cryptic and indefinable set of rules that churn about as permutations of some lost algorithm. They address a tamed violence held barely in check, examining masculinity and fatherhood and the undercurrents of suburban domesticity. In the end, they are a barrage of cries at breaking the boundary between you and I, questions rising into prayers that ask, are we closed or open systems? Can we really know each other at all? Praise for Bill Neumire "As Bill Neumire shows, to tell the truths about America requires a lyricism that is as wily as it is direct, as elegiac as it is exuberant. #TheNewCrusades is a reckoning about the coal-mouthed glow of the American heart and the darkness & us that characterizes the messy promise of our body politic. Well past Whitman’s earnest appraisal of who we were, Neumire instead sees the alarming contradictions of who we really are, made fruitful & rueful by our metastatic news and hungers. Brash and also tender, Neumire’s poems are the honest lullabies we need now to keep from sleep, to open our eyes, to wake up." --Rick Barot "#TheNewCrusades begins “Here I take the box of world…” and the book does just that. It’s a box, and a book, that foretells violence, questions masculinity, mourns the falling away of cities and nations and nature and people. Bill Neumire has an ear for the memorable phrase, an eye for the image that hurts. “Dear hashtagged american morning, / if you promise / everything’s fine I can stand in a pall of crabapple leaves / like an elephant feeling seismic signals,” he writes, not believing it for a second. But these poems believe: in the leaves and the elephant and the hashtagged morning, then undergo them all like a trial. The box of world is recognizably ours: we have all undergone it, but never so eloquently nor with such patient clarity as this book does." --Kathy Ossip About Bill Neumire Author of two chapbooks--Resonance of Kin (PuddingHouse 2013) and Between Worlds (Foothills 2013)—Bill Neumire’s first full-length book, Estrus, was a semi-finalist for the 42 Miles Press Award. He regularly reviews books of contemporary poetry for Vallum, and for Verdad where he works as poetry editor. About Unsolicited Press Unsolicited Press was founded in 2012 and is based in Portland, OR. The press strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning authors. Learn more at www.unsolicitedpress.com. The publisher can be followed on Instagram and Twitter: @unsolicitedp #TheNewCrusades is available on May 10, 2022 as a paperback (132 p.; 978-1-956692-14-3) and e-book (all major retailers). The title is distributed to the trade by Ingram. The author is open to speaking with the media, holding readings, and engaging in other author opportunities. ### Press only, Unsolicited Press 619.354.8005 marketing@unsolicitedpress.com  PORTLAND, OR; April 26, 2022 -- Less Than What You Once Were begins in a pivotal moment for the speaker—during the 2008 “Battle of N’Djamena” in Chad’s capital. This destabilizing experience—in which the speaker’s home is broken into—results in the family embarking on a months-long departure from the place, and the narrative begins to cycle through childhood memories, from the first night when Brown lands at N’Djamena’s airport as an eight-year-old boy to the failed attempt at bird hunting with a slingshot. These centering memories soon give way to stories of displacement as a young adult and, much later, a return to the country of his youth. This fragmented memoir, told in a similar, episodic style to Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, is both a coming-of-age story and also a story of exile, ending in a state of dislocated adulthood, the speaker longing for a return to a childhood home that can’t be accessed.
About Aaron Brown Born in Texas and raised in Chad, Aaron Brown is the author of the poetry collection, Acacia Road, winner of the 2016 Gerald Cable Book Award (Silverfish Review Press). He has been published in World Literature Today, Tupelo Quarterly, Waxwing, Cimarron Review, and Transition, among others, and he is a contributing editor for Windhover. Brown now lives in Texas, where he is an assistant professor of English and directs the writing center at LeTourneau University. He holds an MFA from the University of Maryland. About Unsolicited Press Unsolicited Press was founded in 2012 and is based in Portland, OR. The press strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning authors. Learn more at www.unsolicitedpress.com. The publisher can be followed on Instagram and Twitter: @unsolicitedp Less Than What You Once Were is available on April 26, 2022 as a paperback (130 p.; 978-1-956692-11-2) and e-book (all major retailers). The title is distributed to the trade by Ingram. The author is open to speaking with the media, holding readings, and engaging in other author opportunities.  PORTLAND, OR; March 1, 2022--First Drafts from the Brewery explores the ends, and beginnings, of relationships, the value of true-blue friends, and the delights of the seasons. Less a how-to guide to divorce, and more a long and lingering porch-chat complete with good beer or a strong whiskey, this collection embraces simplicity while staring down pain without flinching. But not to worry, there’s plenty of cats, puppies, and cozy blankets.
Praise for Rowe Carenen First Drafts from the Brewery is a book about repair, about what we do when the waters haven’t quite claimed us yet—that furtive in-the-meantime. “Grief,” our speaker says, “lives in my body.” But also in that body lies the psychic excavation of so many riches: confetti and PetSmart, Lemon Pledge and Elvis, resin. And in our grieving bodies we are kept such great company: land surveyors, Paul Simon, bad dates, grandparents, even famous writers. There lives inside these thoughtful and honest, observant poems invoking familiarity. I used to love a song that asked: “Where do you go when you’re lonely?” These poems answer that. You go everywhere, and with all your people, and with all your things. And you clink the festive glasses of curiosity and gratitude while you’re at it. --Mamie Morgan, author of EVERYONE I’VE DANCED WITH IS DEAD (Jackleg Press) About Rowe Carenen Rowe Carenen is a graduate of Salem College and the University of Southern Mississippi. When asked, she'd say that poetry has been her passion ever since she realized that words could convey more than just the facts. Her poems have appeared in various literary journals and magazines, including The Revenant Culture, GERM, Terrible Orange Review, the Running with Water anthology, and her first collection, In the Meantime, was published by Neverland Publishing in 2014. She lives in Greenville, South Carolina, with her cat Minerva Jane and dog Neville Jameson. About Unsolicited Press Unsolicited Press was founded in 2012 and is based in Portland, OR. The press strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning authors. Learn more at www.unsolicitedpress.com. The publisher can be followed on Instagram and Twitter: @unsolicitedp First Drafts from the Brewery is available on April 19, 2022 as a paperback (88p.; 978-1-956692-12-9) and e-book (all major retailers). The title is distributed to the trade by Ingram. The author is open to speaking with the media, holding readings, and engaging in other author opportunities. North Carolina Poet Maureen Sherbondy Releases 11th Poetry Collection: LINES IN OPPOSITION4/12/2022
 PORTLAND, OR; April 12, 2022--Poet Maureen Sherbondy has had enough. Her eleventh collection, Lines in Opposition, explores our need to set limits in times of conflict and confusion. These poems of defiance range from the artistic to the political to the familial, from Basho to Godot, Gretel to Ashbery, the Rockettes to Bubble Yum. At times wry and whimsical, at other times acutely serious, Sherbondy's poems testify to the importance of knowing when and how to draw the line.
About Maureen Sherbondy Maureen Sherbondy’s poems have appeared in Prelude, Calyx, European Judaism, The Oakland Review, and other journals. She has won the Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Contest, the North Carolina Poet Laureate prize, and many other awards. Her most recent poetry books are Dancing with Dali, The Art of Departure, and Eulogy for an Imperfect Man. Sherbondy teaches English at Alamance Community College in Graham, North Carolina. About Unsolicited Press Unsolicited Press was founded in 2012 and is based in Portland, OR. The press strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning authors. Learn more at www.unsolicitedpress.com. The publisher can be followed on Instagram and Twitter: @unsolicitedp LINES IN OPPOSITION is available on April 12, 2022 as a paperback (106 p.; 978-1-956692-10-5) and e-book (all major retailers). The title is distributed to the trade by Ingram. The author is open to speaking with the media, holding readings, and engaging in other author opportunities. |
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