THIS ENDLESS ROAD is the second short story collection by Michael Overa. The collection travels. It winds about on roads that have nothing but the horizon in sight. From the title story, Overa writes, The overnight Greyhound from San Antonio is a piss smelling thing crowded with the boredom of the thousands who have worn the seats threadbare over the years. Rita has been unable to sleep, and by the time the bus stops in a nowhere town somewhere in New Mexico, she drags herself from a precarious half-sleep. She’s starving and the only thing open ...

Riding atop grief's didactic waves, Rancourt skillfully writes in a variety of poetic forms that support the intimate melding of shared experience as healer, elder, and human being. Prose, lyric, ballad, couplets, and haiku inspired - Rancourt continues to push the boundaries of trauma. Songs of Archilochus is an odyssey of soul recovery over great distances, time, and place: a migration from moral injury to a momentary place of peace. It takes courage to age with grace. It takes courage to sing the songs that we have been given - but sing we must for ...

Sandy Coomer’s, 'Rivers Within Us', is a collection of poems that allows readers to reevaluate and question the way in which they move through life on a daily basis. What does it mean to live and die? What should we expect in life? How can dreams come true and, still, we are faced with disappointment? This movement is portrayed in settings that are saturated with images of nature and, in particular, the river; symbolic of the life force that carries us all.  Coomer further creates movement and illustrates mastery over her craft through purposeful ...

NIGHT HAG speaks of femininity through the eternal mouth of Lilith, the first woman.  Subterfuge stained cloth gusset lined with cotton traces of lace grace the front face and flowers so many flowers purple and pink concealed by the flow no- the flood of an unexpected collapse of uterine lining early or late its timing had slipped off the calendar gone unnoticed now the search for supplies begins the furtive quest the bleeding heroine's journey to escape the attentions of every major and minor player in this ...

"Girl," my mama had said to me the minute she entered my hospital room, "on the highway of life, you're always traveling left of center." Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories  details the experiences of characters in life situations for which they are emotionally or mentally unprepared. Unable or unwilling to seize control over their lives, they allow fate to dictate the path they take, while their methods of coping range from the passive and the aggressive to humorous and hopeful. In each of these eighteen stories, the characters' ...

Amy Shimshon-Santo's EVEN THE MILKY WAY IS UNDOCUMENTED is a testament to the lost, the loved, the courageous. Each poem is the past and the future. Each page turns for those built by families that span political borders -- families that see borders as nothing more than lines drawn by an invisible hand that's long forgotten that we belong to the earth and not the other way around.

A story of human connection across the ethnic aisle, The Distance of Mercy centers on Nicolette, who is haunted by her mother’s death in postwar Vienna and betrays her father by accepting money from her grandmother, a former Nazi supporter, to study the violin in Chicago in the late 60s. Nicolette is hired to work with Tillie, an African-American widow who lost her husband in the war. Through many barriers, an unexpected friendship develops. While Nicolette’s length of stay in America is brief, the impact of her arrival and the decision she ...

Drew Nemec may not want to be back home in the suburbs of Flint, Michigan, but home is where even the best of us wind up when we’re heartbroken and drifting after graduating college.          In the late 90s, a solid economy and relative peace gave twentysomethings the luxury of being underemployed, overeducated underachievers. Bob’s Bar in Downtown Flint is populated with just such a crowd, proto-hipsters who fancy themselves urban pioneers. They’re the types who believe they save their post-industrialized ...

Song for My Baby and Other Stories is best described as a work with great variety.  What begins with the sudden demise of a father on a hunting trip transforms into a collection that deals with mental illness, hitting bottom, and an appreciation for those who stick around in the worst of times. Bremicker takes readers for a ride with no degree of certainty: From a high stakes golf game to pay off a son’s cocaine debt, a dating service that results in twelve dates in twelve months, a kidney transplant, a heart attack, a relapse on alcohol, to ...

Brook the Divide is the result of the poet’s creative meddling in the life of Vincent van Gogh. Her speaker is fascinated not only with Van Gogh’s art, but she is also enamored with him as a man, and a human. In her imaginary friendship, she discovers how difficult it can be to “brook the divide” between everyday life and the creative life.