Red Hen Press – serie

In her stunning ninth collection of poetry, In June the Labyrinth, Cynthia Hogue tells a deeply personal lyric of love andloss through a mythic story. This book-length serial poem follows Elle, a dying woman, as she travels a trans-historical, trans-geographical terrain on a quest to investigate the labyrinth not only as myth and symbol, but something akin to the “labyrinth of the broken heart.” At the heart of Elle’s individual story is the earnest female pilgrim’s journey, full of disappointment but also hard-won wisdom and courage—inspired by Hogue’s own composited experience with loss, in particular the death of her mother. Rooted in the idea of the labyrinth as a symbol for life, as in the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe that Hogue would visit the summer of her mother’s death, these poems above all distill, fracture, recompose, and tell only partially—literally in parts but also in loving detail—the story of a life.

“The poems in Elise Paschen’s Bestiary explore domestic preoccupations set against the backdrop of the wild-heartedness, real and imagined, of the animal world,” praises the poet Jason Shinder. In this modern-day Bestiary, or “Book of Beasts,” the line between animal and human is thinly-drawn – the daughter of a Celtic king, through love, is transformed from beast to human; lovers take flight as moon and owl; manatees transform, before the explorers’ eyes, into mermaids. This dynamic runs throughout the collection: taking flight, hovering between air and earth, plunging, and then resurfacing from water. The poems create a constant engagement between what tethers us to our daily lives – marriage, motherhood, raising a family, the loss of parents in old age – and the desire for other worlds. Exploring notions of transformation, these poems cross thresholds between animal and human, between death and life. Award-winning poet, Elise Paschen, creates in her third and most complex poetry collection, work which is elegant and passionate, preternaturally still and reckless all at once. Paschen displays a variety of form and nuance – from ghazals to long-lined free verse poems. Writing out of a distinct Western literary tradition, but tapping into her Native American (Osage) roots, Paschen celebrates the mythic, the unusual, the magical glimpsed in the everyday.

Acclaimed for combining the accessible and profound, Kim Dower's poetry has been described by The Los Angeles Times as "Sensual and evocative . . . seamlessly combining humor and heartache," and by O Magazine as "unexpected and sublime." Her third collection, Last Train to the Missing Planet, rockets forward in this trajectory, taking us on a journey to places we've often visited but never seen. Buy a ticket and hop aboard: experience love, longing, and passion tipped sideways; irreverent, touching, and disarmingly sexy as illuminated by an original and brilliant light. Lose yourself in the unexplored sensations of the ordinary in this engaging year of moments, both comforting and terrifying—and always extraordinary.

Welcome to the peculiar and headlong world of Brian DoyleÆs fiction, where the odd is happening all the time, reported upon by characters of every sort and stripe. Swirling voices and skeins of story, laughter and rage, ferocious attention to detail and sweeping nuttiness, tears and chortling—these stories will remind readers of the late giant David Foster Wallace, in their straightforward accounts of anything-but-straightforward events; of modern short story pioneer Raymond Carver, a bit, in their blunt, unadorned dialogue; and of Julia Whitty, a bit, in their willingness to believe what is happening, even if it absolutely shouldnÆt be.Funny, piercing, unique, memorable, this is a collection of stories readers will find nearly impossible to forget:... The barber who shaves the heads of the thugs in Bin LadenÆs cave tells cheerful stories of life with the preening video-obsessed leader, who has a bald spot shaped just like Iceland.... A husband gathers all of his wifeÆs previous boyfriends for a long day on a winery-touring bus.... A teenage boy drives off into the sunset with his troubled sisterÆs small daughters…and the loser husband locked in the trunk of the car.... The late Joseph Kennedy pours out his heart to a golf-course bartender moments before the stroke that silenced him forever.… A man digging in his garden finds a brand-new baby boy, still alive, and has a chat with the teenage neighbor girl whose son it is.... A man born on a Greyhound bus eventually buys the entire Greyhound Bus Company and revolutionizes Western civilization.... A mountainous bishop dies and the counting of the various keys to his house turns… tense.... A man discovers his wife having an affair, takes up running to grapple with his emotions, and discovers everyone else on the road is a cuckold too.And many others.

The Los Angeles Review is a literary journal of divergent literature with a West Coast emphasis. Established in 2003, LAR publishes both the stories of Los Angeles, endlessly varied, and those that grow outside our world of smog and glitter. LAR seeks voices with something wild in them, voices that know what it means to be alive, to be fallible, to be human.Issue 24 features work from Catherine Pierce, Lory Bedikian, Clea Bierman, and more.The Los Angeles Review Masthead Publisher: Tobi HarperEditor: Kate GaleManaging Editor: McKenna ThemmAssistant Managing Editor: Dulce ArteagaFiction Editors: K. K. Fox and Hananah ZaheerFlash Fiction Editor: Sophia IhlefeldPoetry Editors: Blas Falconer and Vandana KhannaNonfiction Editor: Marco WilkinsonTranslation Editors: Francesca Bell and Linda Murphy MarshallBook Review Editors: Deirdre Collins and Tansica SunkamaneevongseProduction Editor: Rebeccah Sanhueza