Curbstone Press – förlag

Undoing traditional psychiatric narratives in this innovative and bold first collection

Drawing from queer, trans, disabled, and Mad poetic traditions, Differential Diagnosis introduces a deeply entangled transMad approach, investigating ways of knowing, loving, and living not legible to the normative eye. This collection challenges the architecture of institutional psychiatry and its popular "wellness" analogues, offering instead a counternarrative of forced institutionalization, disorderly embodiment, and transMad self-determination.

At once jarring and joyful, Differential Diagnosis interrogates psychiatric power and locates capacities for disabled and/or transMad resistance in the oblique, the speculative, and the "nonsensical." Cavar's inventive full-length debut defamiliarizes cis, sane, abled existence through linguistic play and speculative imagery, offering Madness not only as poetic content, but also as craft technique and, ultimately, as a new way of being in the normative world.

Exploring queerness, belonging, and the meaning of home through the lens of a Filipino American

How does a queer brown body move through the American panorama? In Amphibian, Joseph O. Legaspi explores the metaphor of "amphibious living"—adapting, surviving, and flourishing in varying geographies—as it pertains to immigrants and to queerness. These poems draw on the natural world to illuminate personal experiences and, in turn, closely examine cultural, environmental, and societal constructs and concerns.

Legaspi searches in nature for evidence of the validity of his own existence, determined to declare his belonging. Dwelling in landscape as a guide into the interior, Amphibian journeys not only between earth, water, and air, but also into the past, cataloging an immigrant's departures, arrivals, and returns to native soil. This moving collection is at every turn liberating, fraught, and altered.

A poignant and graceful story collection about the clash and harmony of finding one's place in an adult world that feels "other"

Brown Girls, Grown Up shines a light on the nuances of modern womanhood with grace, honesty, and charm. The stories in Qadeer's debut collection delve into the subtleties and blatant struggles of navigating shifting identities as one matures, into the joys and challenges of intimacy and aging, and into the changing tides of motherhood. Middle-aged Amira takes radical action after meeting a new friend who lulls her into feeling safe and accepted; Hanna enrolls her biracial children in a local Sunday school after worrying they have no real connection to her Muslim heritage; betrayals and secrets come to light when a group of college friends reunite to take stock and compare achievements. Filled with humor and heartache, this collection offers a fresh and profoundly relatable perspective on the lifelong search for belonging in a world shaped by tradition, modernity, and individual ambition.

A coming-of-age tale of a young Dominican American boy facing a grave loss and a feathered phantom

Between the looming buildings of Brooklyn, a young Dominican American boy only ever called mijo by his family has just lost his father to brain cancer. In the wake of his grief, he begins to see his deceased father take the form of a pigeon and ghost, acting as protector and advisor in moments of duress and confusion. Determined to find out the truth behind his father's appearances, he sets out on the streets of Brooklyn with his outspoken friend Naño, and in the hills of the Dominican Republic with his cousin Matias, in search of answers, only to discover more ghostly apparitions and inexplicable occurrences. In a world of lost things and in-betweens, the grief-stricken son must choose whether he can bear to let go of his father or accept the consequences of what we let haunt us.

Journeying through the emotional migrations of women living in the in-between

In Hilal Isler's gripping debut story collection, Har Mar, women in the early twenty-first century navigate the complex spaces between countries, families, languages, and selves. Isler's characters are all on the verge of something—success, rebellion, revelation—and they want to disappear as much as they want to be seen. Moving back and forth between Turkey and the United States, these stories trace migrations both physical and emotional: a nanny plots to flee the wealthy family she cares for in the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul; in Har Mar, a quiet mall tucked in the suburbs of Minneapolis; a bookseller escapes her grief in a complicated relationship with a wig retailer; an actress is hired by a famous American novelist to portray her at public events.

The women in Har Mar don't always make sound decisions, and they're not trying to be heroes. But they are reaching—imperfectly, but fiercely—for connection, truth, and home. With moving prose and a deep sense of longing, this collection explores what it means to grow up in the margins, to live in translation, and to build a life at the edge of belonging.

Poetically delving into the spectacle and incredulity of a real-life religious controversy

In the early 1990s, a small town in the Philippines became the epicenter of religious controversy when a teenager claimed to be visited by the Virgin Mary. News of these visions, broadcast over national media, would prompt over a million to flock to the town, hoping to catch a glimpse of the teenager and witness inexplicable events: a statue of the Virgin weeping blood, the sun dancing and throbbing into various fantastic colors, or a bevy of doves appearing overhead during Mass.

Miracle Fever, chronicling the life of this town, is a poetry sequence revolving around these apparitions. Documentary in its scrutiny and distortion of real-life events, novelistic in its plot trajectory, and lyric in its imagistic intensity, Miracle Fever offers a fabulist model of reality, built through poems delivered in the form of dramaticules, timelines, and photo captions. These fugitive presences, bearing out and unsettling the complex ethics of representation that the sequence cleaves to, foreground the element of spectacle surrounding the apparitions and bring new light to the ever-shifting antecedents bound by shared history.

Passionately demonstrating the dormant trauma of political violence and the redemption waiting beyond it

From El Salvador's lush countryside to the streets of Oakland, California, a young mother wrestles with the intersecting forces of memory, history, and language in order to chart a new path for herself and her growing family. Fleeing political unrest and civil war violence in El Salvador, fourteen-year-old Claudia Castro Luna arrived in the United States with her family in 1981. Two decades later, holding her two-year-old and pregnant with her second child, she survives a public shooting by hiding behind shrubs in front of her house in Oakland. This event unleashes disorienting and traumatic memories, plunging her into a journey of discovery as she grapples with PTSD, recovers family stories, and begins to make sense of all that was torn asunder within her by the experiences of war and emigration. Beauty, longing, fear, and joy entwine in this powerful story of love, self-determination, and the search for home.