Category: Blue Sketch Press Books

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Atravesando: An Asterix Anthology, edited by Angie Cruz and Oindrila Mukherjee

Atravesando: An Asterix Anthology, edited by Angie Cruz and Oindrila Mukherjee

Atravesando: An Aster(ix) Anthology features nineteen writers, both established and emerging, whose fiction and poetry embraces the themes of breaking through and crossing over. The writers hail from all over the country, many of whom inhabit liminal spaces, embodying Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands where the “borders” are often indistinguishable and the characters live in multiple worlds simultaneously. The stories and poems challenge and reveal to us what we trade when we love or are made to love, when we move or are forced to move and how it feels when we experience an unexpected loss. Characters dream of lottery tickets, driving a car, being truly loved; rubber plants, suitcases and misbehaving men are ripped apart; Roosters, husbands and children die. The daughters of Bible-thumping and manipulative mothers, as well as stubborn and ambitious fathers, these women struggle and succeed to carve a space of their own. This book is a true cornucopia of humor, tragedy and sensuality, featuring some of the most compelling and electrifying female protagonists.

Edited by acclaimed writers Angie Cruz and Oindrila Mukherjee, the collection is an essential read. At a time when borders both, psychic and physical, are being threatened and questioned, this anthology reimagines female narratives and the challenges faced by women today.

The paperback volume is available for sale in our online store and at select bookstores.
The PDF edition is only available on our online store.

Praise for Aster(ix) Journal

Asterix: Take literary XX chromosomes, overlap them, and turn a few degrees towards the Global South. This is writing from the solar plexus at its best, a six-pointed star that marks the spot where art, literature and criticism meet social justice.

Nelly Rosario

Aster(ix) Journal is a rare bird in today’s literary magazine scene-diversity is presented as the norm, not the exception. And it is not announced, it is demonstrated.”

Ashley Hutson, The Review Review


More information is available at Aster(ix) Journal.

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The Swallows by Adriana E. Ramirez

The Swallows by Adriana E. Ramirez.

Adriana E. Ramirez takes on ex-boyfriends, the complex conversations between dogs and birds, as well as the scars of Junior High in The Swallows. Her poetry is about migration, about the ways, like swallows, circumstances and weather can drive a person quite South. As much as it is about birds, the collection is always about hunger, desire, and wanting to be swallowed whole. The language is electric, and the mood soars smoothly–bumps handled with precision.

The Swallows 2nd edition contains three additional poems and a stunning new cover. It is available for sale in our online store and at select bookstores.

Praise for Adriana E. Ramirez

Adri’s poems hit like a laser-guided freight train: with unmistakable force, but never without precise control. And while unafraid to explore the depths of the most fragile parts in all of us, Adri does not drag her audience unwillingly to those dark places – she offers her hand as if to say ‘Come along with me. Whatever this ride is, we’ll be in it together.’

William James, poet/punk/sadboy

Ever stood at the lip of the ocean, arms spread wide, feeling the wind of a coming storm flowing at you and all around you? That feeling of being present in front of power and the raw ability to change the world at will? Then you are either at the edge of the world, or hearing Adriana perform her poetry. Either way, remember this moment that you felt plugged into everything.

Ryk McIntyre, Stand-up Poet

Adri is a force of nature and her words will surround you. Reading her work on paper is one thing, but you should see her live to get the full experience. And you need the full experience.

Evelyn Pryce, Author of A Man Above Reproach

Adri is Adri. Whether as professor or “the girl with the fuck,” you will always get from Adri the intelligence, passion, and conviction that an Adri must contain, otherwise we would have to call it something else. If you are not afraid to regard yourself and others honestly, you will relish every second with her, and what she has to teach you will not be easily forgotten.

Lori Beth Jones,Director,Pittsburgh Poetry Collective


Adriana E. Ramírez is a 2015 PEN/Fusion award-winning nonfiction writer, storyteller, digital maker, and performance poet based in Pittsburgh. More information on her can be found at aeramirez.com.

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The Rocking Chair by Bradley J. Fest

TheRockingChairEPUB-coverBradley J. Fest’s debut work, The Rocking Chair, is a long poem that emerges from the detritus of contemporaneity, absorbing and accumulating whatever it can from the networked chaos of the overmediated present. Assembled from science fiction and the western, critical theory and hardcore, videogames and phenomenology, footnotes and simulation, diabolism and hyperarchivalism (etc.), this work yawps through diverse material and discursive registers. Working from the footnote and endnote as primary formal constraints, Fest invents a poetry in conversation with the Man with No Name as much as John Ashbery, Alain Badiou, Stephen Hawking, or The Blood Brothers. The poems abuse textuality through misplaced rigor and confused genre archetypalism, across sections and subsections of lyric reflection and play, in order to discover vibrant and vital materialitites. As humorous as it is deeply serious—declaring the task of “making anxiety fun”—The Rocking Chair seeks to articulate an imaginary commensurate with life in the twenty-first century by enacting a poetics of assemblage and emergence.

The paperback volume is available for sale in our online store and at select bookstores.

Bradley J. Fest teaches literature as a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh. At present he is working on The Nuclear Archive: American Literature Before and After the Bomb, a book investigating the relationship between nuclear and information technology in twentieth and twenty-first century American literature. His poems have appeared in After Happy Hour Review, BathHouse, Flywheel, PELT, Open Thread, Spork, 2River View, and elsewhere. He has published articles in boundary 2, Critical Quarterly, and Studies in the Novel; and his essays have appeared in David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing” (2014) and The Silence of Fallout (2013). He blogs at The Hyperarchival Parallax.

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No Body Home by Amy David

Blue Sketch Press is happy to announce the forthcoming publication of Amy David‘s No Body Home.

front-coverIn her debut full-length collection, Amy David writes with both humor and alacrity about the experience of moving through the world as a woman. Spanning topics from awkward bar-flirting to familial relationships, from aging to sexual violence, No Body Home rubs sugar into the wounds.

The paperback volume is available for sale online and at select bookstores.

Amy David has represented Chicago four times at the National Poetry Slam, most recently on the semi-finalist 2013 Mental Graffiti Team. Her work has appeared in journals including Word Riot, Foundling Review, Super Arrow, Full of Crow, The Bakery, and Shit Creek Review. Her poems have also been anthologized in Alight: The Best Loved Poems of WoWPS 2014 and We Will Be Shelter. She is terrified of topiary.