"Here in Maggie Smith’s first book we encounter a voice that is spare, confident, and precise. Her images click into place, and the movement of each poem is deft, muscular, taut. These are poems we tr
The poems in The Last Mojito were written between 2000 and 2004. The six distinct sections of the book?the ingredients of the infamous mojito (mint, sugar, lime, rum, ice, and club soda)?were chosen,
"If this is the book of the body, its lineaments are those of not only erotic but spiritual desire. Here friends and lovers, mothers and children, intermingle as in the morning light and shadow of a f
Sholeh Wolpé’s poems are political, satirical, and unflinching in the face of war, tyranny and loss. Talismanic and alchemical, they attempt to transmute experience into the magic of the imagined. But
Much of our current media makes us feel powerless and unconscious. These commentaries are designed to make us conscious and aware of the power we have to build humane national and international politi
For what does the spirit yearn? To know God. Maurya Simon’s wonderful new book, Ghost Orchid, throws fresh light on that traditional question and answer in poems full of the sensuous language of the “
A versatile and probing novelist, Mazza is at her clarion best in this riveting improvisation on the lost world chronicled in her memoir, Indigenous: Growing Up Californian (2003). Ronnie works in the
“Visitations, hallucinations and redemptions figure large in the emotional events of the lives of the characters in Mark Blickley’s new short fiction collection, Sacred Misfits, where we witness souls
Chris Abani's Dog Woman is a mesmerizing, haunting, and sometimes subversive exploration of the personal and cultural politics of disempowerment and power. In these heart rousing and lyrically complex
Stew Albert is an almost-nice Jewish boy who grew up in Brooklyn between World War II and the Cold War. Many of us remember hiding under desks during practice nuclear attacks, but Stew remembers the b
As a writer of drama and short fiction, Edwards’ first collection of poetry is influenced by the character sketches of her earlier prose works, while maintaining a strong sense of lyricism. Like her i
This new and necessary book—a collection of author profiles, literary journalism and speculative pieces about the Southland's writing and publishing scene—aims to capture the Southern California of he
In Rebel: A Personal History of the 1960s,Tom Hayden, a seminal figure in the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s, documents a period in U.S. history of major social and political change.
"The masterful wedding of the narrative and the lyric in these poems (whose subject is the maturation of a sensibility, the coming-of-age of a young Englishwoman—the power of her ties to family, husba
“Each of these marvelous poems engages as instantly as a photograph: you read two or three words and you’re on the scene, recoiling in horror as Trotsky is murdered or twisting uncomfortably as your d
In the series Seeds of Truth Petra Eiko has written an inspiring story about the connection between the body and the mind. Petra Eiko's books are available individually in eight parts: Is, Wisdom, Vis
The author and her husband, noted activist Abbie Hoffman, share the letters they exchanged in 1974 and 1975 while Abbie was in hiding to avoid imprisonment.
This selection and its somewhat haphazard direction of how so many of us interact romantically—on the surface—is a gentle reminder that be it fate, chance, or will, we appear destined to carry out our
Spontaneous combustion occurs when Bill, a forty-year-old barista and a failed poet, meets James, a disabled factory worker and a daddy hunk, at an OctoBear Dance.For six months they share weekends of
Unapologetically sensual and forthright, Bell explores desire, loss, faith, doubt, tenderness, and violence; and sex as experience, metaphor, and magnifying lens for relationships. Bright Stain may or
In Kim Dower’s fourth collection, Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave, death has never felt so alive! Alluring titles to haunting last lines, the poems in Dower’s fourth collection so
Inspired by a brother’s high school science project—a perpetual motion machine that could save the world— The Perpetual Motion Machine is a memoir in essays that attempts to save a sibling by depictin
Percival Everett’s The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, VA, 1843, Annotated From the Library of John C. Calhoun, is poetry within the harsh confines of a mock historical document—a
Snake—the Hunger Sutras is the third book in the Snake Quartet. By now snake has carried the lost voices—from the smallest single celled whisper to the bellow of more complex creatures as she wanders
Days before Sarah Cannon's thirty-third birthday, she receives a frightening phone call from her husband’s arborist colleague: Matt, her spouse of seven years and father to their two small children, h
In April 2013, just five months after being named the first Poet Laureate of Los Angeles, Eloise had a brain injury resulting in Wernicke’s aphasia—a breakdown in the symbol system of language. Poetry
Red Channel in the Rupture is a gathering place for the troubling abuses of the past. Looking through the lens of the present moment, Thomas shows us the open palm necessary to embrace change, as she
Losing Beck is the story of Jennie Silver, who is trying to get over a man who was greatly influenced by the renowned Hungarian emigré novelist Avigdor Element. Spanning a hundred years of history fro
Ben Shippers doesn’t have much use for school, friends, or pretty much anyone except his smartass siser, but he does harbor a secret passion: Trash Mountain, the central feature of the noxious landfil
When Anne Edelstein was forty-two, her mother, a capable swimmer in good health, drowned while snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef. Caring for two small children of her own, Anne suddenly found herse
Now that we’ve pretty much ruined planet Earth—no big secret—science tells us the human race could be doomed. Well, not all science, but some of it, enough to have sparked a lively interest in setting
In Elise Paschen’s prize-winning poetry collection, Infidelities, Richard Wilbur wrote that the poems “. . . draw upon a dream life which can deeply tincture the waking world.” In her third poetry boo
An astonishing debut, how to get over is part instruction manual, part prayer, part testimony. It attempts to solve the reader’s problems (by telling them how to get over), while simultaneously creati
In June the Labyrinth, Cynthia Hogue’s ninth collection of poems, is a book-length serial poem in four untitled sections, which together tell a mythic story that is part pilgrimage, part elegy. Its ce
The 2015 Red Hen Press Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award winner, chosen by Carl Phillips.An arresting whisper of a debut, As Burning Leaves is a record of what remains. It moves through the visible world
Winner of the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry PrizeRuth Irupé Sanabria’s second collection of poetry, Beasts Behave In Foreign Land examines the internal landscape of a family confronting the psychologi
"Author's Note: I caught a ride to Oaxaca just in time for Dâia los Muertos. The afternoon after I arrived I was sitting in a small cafâe an outdoor table in the shade drinking freshly squeezed orange
The original Traveler's Vade Mecum, published in 1853, contained thousands of telegrams. Ross chose telegrams as titles for poems solicited from dozens of poets, including Bollingen Prize winner Frank
The Los Angeles Review was established in 2003. For each issue we ask a number of editors to contribute so that a wide variety of literary voices rather than the vision of one editor. We believe that
In Lessons from Summer Camp, Jim Tilley takes a fifty-year retrospective look at a ten-year period during his childhood and adolescence to discover what summer camp was really about. In both a wistful
