fall 2019 catalog

Contents

A Fortune For Your Disaster...... 2

A Key to Treehouse Living...... 4

Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl...... 6

Divide Me by Zero...... 8

Bitter Orange...... 10

Wyoming...... 12

Feed...... 14

Contact and Distribution Information...... 16 “[R]iveting and poetic . . . Abdurraqib’s gift is his ability to flip from a wide angle to a zoom with ease. He is a five-tool writer.”

—The Washington Post

“Funny, painful, precise, desperate, and loving . . . Not a day has sounded the same since I read him.”

—GREIL MARCUS, Village Voice

IT IS MAYBE TIME TO ADMIT THAT MICHAEL JORDAN DEFINITELY PUSHED OFF that one time in the ’98 NBA finals& in praise of one man’s hand on the waist of another’s & in praise of the ways we guide our ships to the shore of some brief & gilded mercy I touch my fingers to the hips of this vast & immovable grief & push once more & who is to say really how much weight was behind Jordan’s palm on that night in Utah & on that same night one year earlier the paramedics pulled my drowning mother from the sheets where she slept & they said it must have felt like a whole hand was pushing down on her lungs & I spent the whole summer holding my breath in bed until the small black spots danced on the ceiling & I am sorry that there is no way to describe this that is not about agony or that is not about someone being torn from the perch of their comfort & on the same night a year before my mother died Jordan wept on the floor of the United Center locker room after winning another title because it was father’s day& his father went to sleep on the side of a road in ’93 & woke up a ghost & there is no moment worth falling to our knees & galloping towards like the one that sings our dead into the architecture & so yes for a moment in 1998 Michael Jordan made what space he could on the path between him & his father’s small & breathing grace

& so yes, there is an ocean between us the length of my arm & I have built nothing for you that can survive it

& from here I am close enough to be seen but not close enough to be cherished & from here, I can see every possible ending before we even touch. POETRY From the New York Times bestselling author of Go Ahead in the Rain, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, and The A Fortune For Crown Ain’t Worth Much, A Fortune For Your Disaster breaks and rebuilds, Your Disaster poems by HANIF ABDURRAQIB dazzles as it cries out.

n his much-anticipated follow-up to The I Crown Ain’t Worth Much, poet, essayist, music critic, and New York Times bestselling author Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew. It’s a book about a mother’s death, and finally admitting that Michael Jordan pushed off in the ’98 finals. It’s about forgiveness, and how none of the author’s black friends wanted to listen to “Don’t Stop Believin’.” It’s about wrestling with histories, personal and shared, and how black people can write about flowers at a time like this. Abdurraqib writes across different tones and registers, with humor and sadness, and uses touchstones from the world outside—from Marvin Gaye to Nikola Tesla to his neighbor’s dogs—to create a mirror, inside of which every angle presents a new possibility.

SEPTEMBER

1 $15.95 · Trade Paper · 7 /2" x 9" ISBN: 978-1-947793-43-9 · eBook: 978-1-947793-52-1 HANIF ABDURRAQIB Rights: World English is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His first PROMOTION & PUBLICITY poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, • High-profile print and broadcast interview was named a finalist campaign for the Eric Hoffer Book • Massive galley mailing to chains and indies Award and was nominated for a Hurston/Wright • Targeted influencer campaign Legacy Award. His collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was named a best book of 2017 • National author tour by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, and Pitchfork, among others. His most recent book is Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest.

5 FICTION An Indies Introduce Pick, Indie Next Pick, and Amazon Best Book of the A Key to Treehouse Month, A Key to Treehouse Living will introduce you to a modern Huck Finn—an Living unforgettable voice that will stay with a novel by ELLIOT REED you long after you finish the final page.

Key to Treehouse Living is the adventure of AWilliam Tyce, a boy without parents, who grows up near a river in the rural Midwest. In a glossary-style list, he imparts his particular wisdom on subjects ranging from ASPHALT PATHS, BETTA FISH, and MULLET to MORTAL BETRAYAL, NIHILISM, and REVELATION. His improbable quest— to create a reference volume specific to his existence—takes him on a journey down the river by raft (see MYSTICAL VISION, see NAVIGATING BIG RIVERS BY NIGHT). He seeks to discover how his mother died (see ABSENCE) and find reasons for his father’s disappearance (see UNCERTAINTY, see VANITY). But as he goes about defining his changing world, all kinds of extraordinary and wonderful things happen to him. Unlocking an earnest, clear-eyed way of thinking that might change your own, A Key to SEPTEMBER Treehouse Living is a story about keeping your own 3 $15.95 · Trade Paper · 5" x 7 /4" record straight and living life by a different code. Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-947793-04-0 Trade paper ISBN: 978-1-947793-59-0 eBook: 978-1-947793-10-1 Rights: North America

PROMOTION & PUBLICITY ELLIOT REED received his MFA from the University of • Paperback roundup attention Florida in Gainesville and • Social media influencer campaign currently lives in Spokane, Washington.

6 praise for a key to treehouse living

“William sets off down river in a Huck Finn-esque journey that takes him physically and emotionally through mystical and awe-inspiring spaces. . . . giving a book about existential darkness an undeniable sense of beauty and wonder.” —shelf awareness, STARRED REVIEW • “Crisp and lyrical, emotionally assured, delightfully inventive. Reed has made a marvelous debut.” —kirkus • “Dark yet uplifting . . . This novel’s true joy may be the wonder it radiates about a world as beautiful as it is cruel. See ‘OVERCOME BY EMOTION.’” —booklist • “Inventive, illuminating . . . Reed offers an impressionistic and profound exploration of self and consciousness.”— publishers weekly • “A Key to Treehouse Living—it’s terrific, funny, poignant and just weird enough, tran- scends that great form. I ate it up.” —jess walter • “A Key to Treehouse Living scrambles up all the customary codes of the novel to piece together, at last, the moving story of a lost boy search- ing out his place in the world. What appears as all indexed coda turns out to be a well-told tale and, more vitally for me, the accumulation of enormous incidental pleasures.”—joshua ferris • “Disorienting, weirdly wise, indescribably transparent, impossibly recognizable. Fun, too.” —joy williams • “Huckleberry Finn advanced out of antebellum doldrums into the poetic modern perverse, with the same charm. Subtle, daring, brilliant.” —padgett powell • “A Key to Tree- house Living’s precocious autodidact manages his abandonment at the world’s hands by remember- ing that courage might be the ability to not think too long about the worst that could happen. A moving and funny and impressive debut.” —jim shepard • “Powered in part by longing and a need to make odd associations add up, this very appealing novel employs jelly beans and gypsies, tree forts and rafts, and a character known as El Hondero to trace the odd conjuring that this narra- tor brings us in on. A memorable debut.” —amy hempel • “A beautiful book. William Tyce is a narrator as compelling as Mark Haddon’s Christopher John Francis Boone and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Oskar Schell.” —gavriel savit • “An unforgettable character and a spellbinding story that both breaks your heart in small ways and then re-assembles it, over and over. It’s a novel unlike anything else, and its impact lingers after the final page.” — molly parent, POINT REYES BOOKS • “Refreshing and illuminat- ing and necessary in these troubled times—a novel that you’ll find yourself coming back to if only to feel grounded and human again.” —javier ramirez, THE BOOK TABLE • “A Key to Treehouse Living is revelatory, a literary lighthouse that forges new routes of understanding. A roadmap so that we might understand, in clearer terms, how to transverse our terrifying, wonderful world.” —rachel kaplan, AVID BOOKSHOP

7 PRAISE FOR THINGS WE DIDN’T TALK ABOUT WHEN I WAS A GIRL

“In Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, Jeannie Vanasco has done something extraordinary. She explodes rape culture at the level of language, shows us how we are trapped and how we might make ourselves free. This is a brilliant book, an astonishingly fierce inquiry into the places language won’t go.” —EMILY GEMINDER, Dead Girls

“With matchless grit and a vibrant mind, Jeannie Vanasco performs an absorbing autopsy on a friend- ship that ended in rape. Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl cuts through the silence of deep betrayal, gives contour to the aching space between forgiveness and absolution, and offers a living testament to the endless wreckage of sexual assault.” —AMY JO BURNS, Cinderland

“Unflinching in her honesty and approach, Vanasco interrogates boundaries further shaping and re- shaping memoir as we know it. Wickedly clever and powerful, Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was A Girl is a necessary book.” —KRYSTAL A. SITAL, Secrets We Kept: Three Women of Trinidad

“Jeannie Vanasco’s rigorous and nuanced investigation of crime, trauma, secrets, and the telling of our stories applies an agile mind and penetrating insight to the enforced silences that surround rape and its aftermath.” —LISA LOCASCIO, Open Me

“In a moment where morality is so often rendered in flat, simplistic terms, Vanasco refuses to take the easy way out: she is generous yet exacting, fair yet relentless. Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl is a searching, brilliant book and Jeannie Vanasco is a formidable talent.” —DANIEL GUMBINER, The Boatbuilder

“Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl explores the common experience of rape with uncom- mon nuance and intense tenderness. In the process, the book also unexpectedly becomes a warm celebration of female friendship. Vanasco reveals the boundaries of your thoughts and feelings. Then she takes you beyond.” —YZ CHIN, Though I Get Home

“Vanasco’s wildly courageous decision to confront her rapist, question him, meet with him, and then invite her readers into her processing of that experience is, frankly, stunning. This is a book I’ll teach and reread well into the future, grateful that fewer and fewer girls will grow up without the opportu- nity to talk about these things.” —ANGELA PELSTER, Limber

8 NONFICTION “Jeannie Vanasco has written exactly the book we need right now. I wish everyone in this country would read it.” Things We Didn’t —MELISSA FEBOS, Abandon Me Talk About When I

eannie Vanasco has had the same nightmare Was a Girl Jsince she was a teenager. She startles awake, a memoir by JEANNIE VANASCO saying his name. It is always about him: one of her closest high school friends, a boy named Mark. A boy who raped her. When her nightmares worsen, Jeannie decides—after fourteen years of silence—to reach out to Mark. He agrees to talk on the record and meet in person. “It’s the least I can do,” he says. Jeannie details her friendship with Mark before and after the assault, asking the brave and urgent question: Is it possible for a good person to commit a terrible act? Jeannie interviews Mark, exploring how rape has impacted his life as well as her own. She examines the language surrounding sexual assault and pushes against its confines, contributing to and deepening the #MeToo discussion. Exacting and courageous, Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl is part memoir, part true crime record, and part testament to the strength of female friendships—a recounting and reckoning that will inspire us to ask harder questions and interrogate our biases. Jeannie Vanasco examines and dismantles long-held myths of victimhood, discovering grace and OCTOBER 1 1 power in this genre-bending investigation into $24.95 · Hardcover · 5 /2" x 8 /2" the trauma of sexual violence. ISBN: 978-1-947793-45-3 · eBook: 978-1-947793-54-5 Rights: World JEANNIE VANASCO is the author of the memoir The Glass Eye (Tin House PROMOTION & PUBLICITY Books, 2017). Her work has • High-profile radio spots, including NPR appeared in The Believer, the New York Times • Academic outreach, including Freshman Modern Love, Tin House, Reads and elsewhere. She lives • National feature coverage in Baltimore and is an assistant professor at Towson • National tour University. Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl is her second book. • Prime-time TV push 9 FICTION

Divide Me by Zero s a young girl, Katya Geller learned from her mother that math was the answer to a novel by LARA VAPNYAR A everything. Now, at forty, she finds this wisdom tested: she has lost the love of her life, she is in the middle of a divorce, and has just found out that her mother is dying. Half-mad with grief, Katya turns to the unfinished notes for her mother’s last textbook, hoping to find guidance in mathematical concepts. With humor, intelligence, and unfailing honesty, Katya traces back her life’s journey: her childhood in Soviet Russia, her parents’ great love, the death of her father, her mother’s career as a renowned mathematician, and their immigration to the United States. She is, by turns, an adrift newlywed, an ESL teacher in an office occupied by witches and mediums, a restless wife, an accomplished writer, a flailing mother of two, a grieving daughter, and, all the while, a woman in love haunted by a question: how to parse the wild, unfathomable passion she feels through the cool logic of mathematics? Award-winning author Lara Vapnyar delivers an unabashedly frank, and darkly comic tale of coming-of-age in middle age. Divide Me OCTOBER by Zero is almost unclassifiable—a stylistically

1 1 original, genre-defying mix of classic Russian $24.95 · Hardcover· 5 /2" x 8 /2" ISBN: 978-1-947793-42-2 · eBook: 978-1-947793-51-4 novel, American self-help book, Soviet math Rights: World English textbook, sly writing manual, and, at its center, an intense romance that captures the most common misfortune of all, falling in love. PROMOTION & PUBLICITY

• Major library marketing campaign LARA VAPNYAR came to • Indie Next push the US from Russia in 1994. She is a recipient • National print interviews of the Guggenheim • Early galley giveaway for bloggers and Fellowship, and Goldberg influencers Prize for Jewish fiction. • Book club partnerships She is the author of There Are Jews in My House, Memoirs of a Muse, Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love, The Scent of Pine, and Still Here. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Harper’s, and Vogue. 10 “In her superb and poignant new novel, Lara Vapnyar writes about love and other difficulties with passion, wit, and probing intelligence. ”

— National Book Award Winner SIGRID NUNEZ, The Friend

An excerpt from DIVIDE ME BY ZERO

I sat down at my mother’s table, which also served as her desk, littered with medicine containers, grocery receipts, hospice papers, random medical equipment, various food items, and yellow flash cards with my mother’s notes for her new book. In Russia, she had been a famous author of math textbooks for children. She had published her last right before we emigrated, so this was going to be her first book in twenty years, and her first book written in English. She said that she had this sudden and stunning insight on how to make a math textbook that would guide you through life. My mother kept working on that book for as long as her mind was still functioning and for a time after it stopped. There were about twenty of these cards dispersed around the room. Some perfectly coherent, even brilliant, others showing both the inevitable deterioration of my mother’s mind and her desperate attempts to stave it off. One of the cards had fallen to the floor. I picked it up and put it back on the table. It said: “Divide me by zero.” Nothing else. No date. I wasn’t sure if my mother had written it in a state of confusion or if she had had some deeper meaning in mind. As a child I was fascinated by this concept. I kept asking my mother what would happen if you divided something by zero. She would say: “Nothing!” But I didn’t believe her. I thought of division as a physical action. You could take a piece of bread and divide it by two, and you would have two pieces. “Nothing” happened when you divided something by one; the piece would stay intact then. Dividing by zero must have a different outcome! I kept pushing buttons on my mother’s huge calculator, forcing it to divide something by zero again and again. It would beep and the screen would scream ERROR, as if guarding the answer from me, refusing to let me into this mystery. What was that mystery? I’d pester my mother. “Not all mysteries can be solved,” she told me once. “Certain things are simply beyond our grasp or understanding.”

Could the “Divide me by zero” card mean that she had finally been let in on that mystery?

11 Praise for Bitter Orange “In her finely crafted psychological thrillerBitter Orange, the devilish novelist gives us a sunny, summery, open backdrop that nevertheless becomes a vise tightening around the throats of both the main character and the reader. . . . Freeing, reinvigorated, and compelling.” —NPR, AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR > “Bitter Orange combines the best of Atonement and The Little Stranger.” —ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY > “Page by page, Fuller enchants us with prose as thick as clotted cream, only for us to realize too late that she’s been ensnaring us at every turn.” —THE PARIS REVIEW > “Unsettling and eerie, Bitter Orange is an ideal October chiller.” —TIME > “English mansion? Check. Dazzling couple? Check. Yearning outsider? Now you have all the ingredients for a psychological powder keg, ready to explode during the summer of ’69.” —ELLE > “Clever, compelling, a rewarding slow burn.” —PAULA HAWKINS > “A rich, dark pressure cooker of a novel that simmers with slow heat and suppressed tension.” —RU TH WARE > “Claire Fuller is such an elegant writer and this book is incredibly atmos- pheric, vivid, and intriguing. I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn’t reading a forgotten clas- sic.” —EMMA HEALEY > “Like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Bitter Orange sings, enchants, haunts. If not for Claire Fuller’s stunning language and mastery of control, I’d have succumbed to the temptation to blaze through these pages just to see how the suspense resolves. A beautiful novel.” —DANIEL MAGARIEL > “Bitter Orange is a twisty, thorny, darkly atmospheric page turner about loneliness and belonging, a book that delves into its protagonist’s mind and heart even as she explores the secret-filled mansion at the novel’s center.” —GABRIEL TALLENT > “Bitter Orange is an enticing journey down the rabbit hole of destructive relationships . . . Fuller is a masterful storyteller! Loved this book and my seduction began at page one!” —STEPHANIE CROWE, Page & Palette > “Bitter Orange continues to show Claire Fuller’s deft hand at creat- ing unforgettable characters who are fully realized, and teasing in their slow reveal of information to the reader. The gently unspooling mystery of what, exactly, happened that fateful summer drew me deeply into the novel, and wouldn’t let go until I had finished reading.”— KATIE ORPHAN, The Last Bookstore > “Tense and acidic, Bitter Orange considers voyeurism and authenticity, guilt and want, as the tightly wound narrative spirals out of control. It’s the kind of book that will make you late for work, will compel you to cancel plans.” —ELIZABETH WILLIS, Avid Bookshop > “Bitter Orange is a lovely slow burn, each fevered turn of the page making the reader implicit in the drama being played in a decaying English country mansion during the summer of 1969.” —JAVIER RAMIREZ, The Book Table > “Bitter Orange represents the very best of literary mystery.” —JOANNE BERG, Mystery to Me > “Read this if you love Shirley Jack- son, Daphne du Maurier or Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger.” —ANMIRYAM BUDNER, Main Point Books > “Fuller is terrific at writing characters that we believe in, even when they lie to us outright; I bow to her clever talents of misdirection, wrapped in lovely language.” —MICHELLE DICKSON, Napa Bookmine > “I think Claire deserves a full shelf of her own. I loved the ten- sion between these characters, all morally compromised in some way, coming to this ramshackle estate and, for a brief while, all finding a little polish in the eyes of each other. But really they are all Bitter Oranges, beautiful on the outside, but dry and bitter on the inside.” —KARIN SCHOTT, Devaney, Doak and Garrett Booksellers

12 FICTION From the author of Our Endless Numbered Days and Swimming Lessons, Bitter Orange is a seductive Bitter Orange psychological portrait, a keyhole into a novel by CLAIRE FULLER the dangers of longing and how far a woman might go to escape her past.

rom the attic of Lyntons, a dilapidated F English country mansion, Frances Jellico sees them—Cara first: dark and beautiful, then Peter: striking and serious. The couple is spending the summer of 1969 in the rooms below hers while Frances is researching the architecture in the surrounding gardens. But she’s distracted. Beneath a floorboard in her bathroom, she finds a peephole that gives her access to her neighbors’ private lives. To Frances’s surprise, Cara and Peter are keen to get to know her. It is the first occasion in which she has had anybody to call a friend, and before long they are spending every day together: eating lavish dinners, drinking bottle after bottle of wine, and smoking cigarettes until the ash piles up on the crumbling furniture. Frances is dazzled. But as the hot summer rolls lazily on, it becomes clear that not everything is right between Cara and Peter. The stories that Cara OCTOBER tells don’t quite add up, and as Frances becomes $15.95 · Trade Paper · 5 1/ ” x 8 1/ ” increasingly entangled in the lives of the 2 2 Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-947793-15-6 glamorous, hedonistic couple, the boundaries Trade Paper ISBN: 978-1-947793-60-6 between truth and lies, right and wrong, begin to eBook ISBN: 978-1-947793-16-3 blur. Amid the decadence, a small crime brings Rights: US on a bigger one: a crime so terrible that it will brand their lives forever. PROMOTION & PUBLICITY CLAIRE FULLER was born in Oxfordshire, England • Paperback roundup attention in 1967. She has written two other novels, Our • Social media influencer campaign Endless Numbered Days, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize, and Swimming Lessons. She has an MA in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Winchester and lives in Hampshire with her husband and two children.

13 FICTION A cross between Daniel Woodrell and Annie Proulx, Wyoming is about the Wyoming stubborn grip of inertia and whether a novel by JP GRITTON or not it is possible to live without accepting oneself.

t’s the tail end of the ’80s and Shelley Cooper I is in trouble. He’s broke, he’s been fired from his construction job, and his ex-wife has left him for their next door neighbor and a new life in Kansas City. The only opportunity on his horizon is fifty pounds of his brother’s high-grade marijuana, which needs to be driven from Colorado to Houston and exchanged for a lockbox full of cash. The delivery goes off without a hitch, but getting home with the money proves to be a different challenge altogether. Fueled by a grab bag of resentments and self punishment, Shelley becomes a case study in the question of whether it’s possible to live without accepting yourself, and the dope money is the key to a lock he might never find. JP Gritton’s portrait of a hapless aspirant at odds with himself and everyone around him is both tender and ruthless, and Wyoming considers the possibility of redemption in a NOVEMBER world that grants forgiveness grudgingly, if at all.

1 1 $15.95 · Trade Paper · 5 /2” x 8 /2” ISBN: 978-1-947793-44-6 · eBook: 978-1-947793-53-8 Rights: North America

PROMOTION & PUBLICITY

• Major print and broadcast campaign JP GRITTON received his MFA from the Johns • Extensive galley giveaway for bloggers and Hopkins University and is influencers currently a Cynthia Woods • Select author appearances Mitchell fellow at the University of Houston. His awards include a DIS- QUIET fellowship and the Donald Barthelme Prize in Fiction. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Greensboro Review, New Ohio Review, Southwest Review, Tin House and elsewhere.

14 “JP Gritton’s Wyoming is a taut, headlong novel about friendship, brotherhood, and bad deci- sions—what a man might do for a chance at a different life, and who he might be willing to hurt. Shelley Cooper is a blue-collar antihero, flawed but compelling, in the tradition of Daniel Woodrell or Donald Ray Pollock. When trouble beckons, he just can’t help himself, and you can’t help but root for him, even as he leaves a trail of wreckage in his wake.”

—JUSTIN ST. GERMAIN, Son of a Gun

“From its first assured sentence to its last,Wyoming marks the debut of a gifted storyteller. This is a compassionate novel, for all its violence and despair, an authentic, pitch-perfect portrait of an America too often caricatured or ignored. There are hard truths here, grit and cruelty, but JP Gritton’s fine prose is nuanced enough, generous enough, to keep his troubled narrator’s humanity, his beating heart, apparent at every turn.”

—ALICE MCDERMOTT

An excerpt from WYOMING

I’ll tell you what happened and you can go ahead and decide. This was about a year ago, around when the Big Thompson went up. That fire made everybody crazy. A billboard out toward Montgrand reads: HE IS RISEN. And I wasn’t ever the churchgoing type, but seeing fire wash down the mountain in a crazy-ass wave made me think twice about All That. Like maybe He’s already here, and maybe you can read Him in flame and flood. Day it started, my crew was working an addition for this guy Ronnie, lived up Left Hand Road. Now that was a job: big timber penning us in on all sides, keeping the sun off our backs. Around one in the afternoon, Ronnie would come a-prancing down the porch steps, big smile on his face. Then he’d get in his car and drive to town. Don’t know what he did for a living, but it didn’t look like he was working too hard. When Ronnie come back around five in the afternoon, we’d pack it in for the day. Sometimes he even brought us beer. He’d float downstairs, a case of Bud in his hand, grinning like jolly ole Saint Nick. He’d hand the beer out to everybody on the crew, that big smile on his face. Some kind of bonus, I guess. He always had a line of bullshit, like, Don’t you gentlemen get sore, working all day like this? And you’d laugh, cause you knew you had to. I didn’t mind Ronnie. It was just he wanted poke so bad you could smell it on him.

15 Praise for JUNK “Tommy Pico’s books are contemporary epics. He writes poetry of rare brilliance, assured in form and forceful in its interrogation of myth and cultural expectations and self.” —WHIT- ING AWARD COMMITTEE • “Tommy Pico’s new collection, Junk, is nimble as jazz, intentionally unstable, a queer Beat novel in verse for the social media age.” —GREGORY COWLES, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW • “Junk is a true American odyssey, complete with a reluctant hero who defies all odds to survive. Repulsed by the trashi- ness of empire, the violence of occupation, this book nonetheless searches in earnest for real tenderness, a romance that isn’t corny. . . . This is poetry of the highest order, on the level of a pop song, with the crystalline visions of a seer. I consumed it greedily, repeatedly, and am for- ever changed because of it.” —JENNY ZHANG, Sour Heart • “Pico is the master of making the stone stony, of returning the sheer absurdity of being to everything, from grief to intimacy to dating apps to donuts. Junk insists on the urgency of the quotidian, of, to borrow a phrase from Pico, ‘vibrant inconsequence.’ It’s rare to read a book that makes living feel so alive.” —KAVEH AKBAR, Calling a Wolf a Wolf • “Tommy Pico’s complex and lush third collection, Junk, explodes, rewinds, meditates, and explodes again. It binges and purges—on class, identity, sex, politics, snacks, comfort, and fear. . . . Pico is a master of inclusion, of elevating the mun- dane to the sublime, of examining absurdity and grave seriousness with equal measure. This is an ambitious long poem, and Pico is uniquely qualified to both drag and celebrate modern day consumption and indulgence with graceful humor and grit.”—MORGAN PARKER, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé • “[Pico] weaves pop culture and slang throughout his deep-rooted criticisms of US history and culture, wooing readers into a comfortable, if brief, moment of familiarity (see: Janet Jackson lyrics) so that the swift pivot to violence and heart- ache hits like a gut punch.” —BUZZFEED • “Whiting Award winner Tommy Pico follows his cult favorites Nature Poem and IRL with a gloriously wide-ranging monologue on love and friendship, queer and indigenous identity, Janet Jackson and nacho cheese. Pico builds his own 21st-century poetics, junk and all—and as he writes, ‘It’s important / to value the Junk, Junk has the best stories.’” —NPR • “You could—and should—read all of Junk in one fever- ish sitting, and you’ll feel like it’s been injected right into your gut, where all good and weird things and feelings live and breed. . . . I just want you to read it. So go do that. You’ll thank me later.” —NYLON • “Imagine Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ littered with Morgan Parker’s pop cultural panache, and you’ll get Junk, Tommy Pico’s brazen third book, a long-form breakup poem at once hilarious and harrowing.”—O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE (EDITOR’S PICK) • “This third book in a trilogy (follow- ing Nature Poem and IRL) is a stream-of-consciousness riff on junk and all its mean- ings, continuing to explore Pico’s character Teebs in what could be a love poem or a break-up poem or both. . . . An ambitious and impressive work, using visceral language, that will appeal to a wide range of readers.”—LIBRARY JOURNAL, STARRED REVIEW

16 POETRY “Tommy Pico’s Feed is the poet’s most ambi- tious work yet. Part tour diary, part tracklist, part play, part by part Pico tops his epic run of books off with this gut-wrenching, gut- Feed busting, gutter mouth offering of a body in poems by TOMMY PICO lust, in isolation, in danger, in memory, in future and all the transits between. Feed is a feast of Pico’s signature intellect, humor, and linguistic demolition—all sharper than ever. No one corrals our day’s chaos like Pico, who serves it up to us as some of the wildest verse the world has ever seen. Bon appétit, bitches.”

—DANEZ SMITH, Don’t Call Us Dead

eed is the fourth book in the Teebs tetralogy. F It’s an epistolary recipe for the main character, a poem of nourishment, and a jaunty walk through New York’s High Line park, with the lines, stanzas, paragraphs, dialogue, and registers approximating the park’s cultivated gardens of wildness. Among its questions, Feed asks what’s the difference between being alone and being lonely? Can you ever really be friends with an ex? How do you make perfect mac & cheese? Feed is an ode of reconciliation to the wild inconsistencies of a northeast spring, a frustrating season of back-and-forth, of thaw NOVEMBER and blizzard, but with a faith that even amidst $15.95 · Trade Paper · 6" x 9" the mess, it knows where it’s going. ISBN: 978-1-947793-57-6 · eBook: 978-1-947793-58-3 Rights: World

TOMMY “TEEBS” PICO is the author of the books PROMOTION & PUBLICITY IRL, Nature Poem, and Junk. He’s been the recipi- • High-profile author interviews and excerpts ent of awards and fellow- • Targeted influencer campaign ships from the Whiting Foundation, the Lambda • Galley mailing to chains and indies Literary Foundation, the • National author tour Poetry Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Brooklyn Public Library. He co-curates the reading series Poets with Attitude, co-hosts the podcast Food 4 Thot, and is a contributing editor at Literary Hub. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Los Angeles, CA.

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