A poetry collection that questions the current construction of psychiatric treatment while speaking through lived experience and advocating for disability justice.
 
The poems of Brody Parrish Craig’s new collection upends narratives around current psychiatric treatment models to focus on the lived experience of survivors and to speak toward liberation, abolition, and disability justice. Titled after the author’s own medical records, The Patient Is an Unreliable Historian questions the prevailing narrative that the medical industry knows stories of disability and madness better than those who have lived them.
 
Craig uses lyricism to expose the intersection of madness and criminality in contemporary American culture, moving through institutions, community spaces, and loss of kin. Through the course of the collection, the speaker turns toward irreverence and interrogation, carves out their own freedom, and challenges the script of the patient, the mad, and the “criminal.” These poems deconstruct the “patient” to set the person free.
 

 A collection of dreamlike poetry, accompanied by ink drawings, reflecting on the experiences of living in an aging body.
 
With her latest collection, Maw Shein Win deftly braids together the pleasures, pains, and anxieties of living in an aging body, revealing how a mind can log thoughts and observations. Win employs new poetic forms to invite her readers into realms that are both deeply personal and universal, rendered with dreamlike imagery and surprising humor. Reflecting on our strange times and the atmospheric undercurrents of chaos and disintegration, Percussing the Thinking Jar is a hypnotic book and invites the reader into conversation with their own vulnerability and resilience. Throughout the book, sumi ink drawings by artist Mark Dutcher echo the rhythms of Win’s poetry.
 

A poem in conversation with literature and written during a durational performance.
 
Written in loose sonata form, Pink Waves is a poem of radiant elegy and quiet protest. Moving through the shifting surfaces of inarticulable loss, and along the edges of darkness and sadness, Pink Waves was completed in the presence of audience members over the course of a three-day durational performance. Sawako Nakayasu accrues lines written in conversation with Waveform by Amber DiPietro and Denise Leto, and micro-translations of syntax in the Black Dada Reader by Adam Pendleton, itself drawn from Ron Silliman’s Ketjak. Pink Waves holds an amalgamation of texts, constructing a shimmering haunting of tenderness, hunger, and detritus.
 

A collection from celebrated poet Martha Ronk considering the relationship between person, body, and place.
 
The Place One Is explores the intersection of person and place, the ways in which changes in the tangible world alter one’s vision, bodily posture, vocabulary, and concern for—to take one example—the dwindling water supply in California. The body’s position, its geometry, and the topography of the surrounding land become less and less recognizable as body and world blend together. Gravel giving way underfoot mirrors the way that words dissolve into mumbles, and the skeleton of a rusty car on the sand appears like one’s own skeleton. Ronk shows that disintegration here is disintegration there. These poems also wonder at interdependence, considering how lines intersect and continue to connect us to the sea—and to islands, lagoons, greenery, sky, and space. 
 
In the first part of the collection, the poems focus on a rural landscape, and in the second part, they consider the overly bright urban world of Los Angeles.