Community Bookstore
Here Free State Review offers links to books published by our contributors.
The Good Girl Is Always a Ghost
by Anne Champion
Black Lawrence Press, 2018
“A woman’s smile / can be a muzzle.” With shocking dexterity, Anne Champion invokes the voices of her foremothers. Like Florence Nightingale, we must become “everything.” Like Sylvia Plath, we should aspire to be “the most terrible thing” until the good girl/bad girl binary collapses, until we are whole. Champion’s poems urge us to wake up, to check our pulses, that the “good girl” has already died—and this is the book that buries her.
—Brandi George, author of Gog
Pugilistic
by George Guida
WordTech Editions, 2015
George Guida is the author of eight books, including The Pope Stories and Other Tales of Troubled Times, four collections of poems–the forthcoming Pugilistic and The Sleeping Gulf, along with New York and Other Lovers and Low Italian–and the novel Letters from Suburbia. His work has appeared in many journals and anthologies. He teaches English and creative writing at New York City College of Technology, and serves as Poetry Editor of 2 Bridges Review.
Nerve Chorus
by Willa Carroll
The Word Works, 2018
Nerve Chorus sings out of wreckage. This first book dives deep into family, society, and self to interrogate the inequalities of gender, class, and race, along with brutalities of war, gun violence, and greed. Its revelations take nerve to reveal, from a young girl’s survival of violation, to a father’s fatal asbestos exposure.
“With rigor and dark wit, Carroll conjures the exhilarating terror of moving through one’s life with nothing but ‘flesh holding / back disaster.'”
—Tracy K. Smith