Most are blind street years—quiet enough, and the only traffic in your ear is someone watering a balcony hibiscus three stories up—and you read a page or two and send a manuscript away. This year I could not let go of them. I clutched and clutched and read and admired so much of the many who stood up and said, “with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.”
Poetry:
Alexa Doran, Exit Interview
Julie Benesh, Synchronicities
T. R. Poulson, At Starvation Falls
Dan Pomerantz, Picnic, Snow
Izzy Ferguson, All the Things I don’t Recall but Can’t Forget
Non-Fiction:
Christopher Buckley, Imperfect Contrition, memoir
Michael Klein, Happiness Ruined Everything, essays
J. E. Robinson, Notes from a Janitor’s Closet: the Wellness Essays
Heather Rounds, I Prefer the Praying Mantis, hybrid memoir
Fiction:
Martha Stallman, Some Obscene Heaven, stories
Lara Tupper, At the Center, novel
Chapbooks:
Lauren Crawford, Horsecamp
Ariana den Bleyker, Wintering
Alexander Shalom Joseph and Ashley Howell Bunn, Living / Amends
