BOOKS

By Susan Rukeyser

When her husband disappears and is presumed dead, 50-year-old Paula Winger leaves her comfortable East Coast life to buy the rundown Hi-Dez Motel, near Joshua Tree, California. Hoping for community and reinvention, things change radically when she falls in love with Sky, a woman, after a lifetime of men. Paula draws suspicion as, all around her, bodies turn up or go missing, but she’s busy reckoning with her identity at midlife, the ordinary traumas of girlhood, bodies, bigness, and sexual fluidity. Paula worries about her troubled adult niece, Gerry, and becomes determined to save her some time and trouble.The Worst Kind of Girl invites the reader into a conversation about love and life and art and the joy we feel when we finally recognize ourselves.

By Loria Mendoza

The Body Can Tolerate is a hauntingly intimate poetry collection that explores the body as both a witness and a vessel — a place where personal pain and generational trauma echo through every cell. Navigating the liminal space between past and present, memory and dissociation, these poems trace the fractured paths of inheritance, love, loss, and the quiet, aching work of survival. With language as scalpel and salve, the collection reckons with what we carry, what we bury, and what we dare to release. It’s a raw meditation on what it means to be haunted while still alive — and the radical act of healing that begins when we finally listen to the ghosts.

A Poetry Anthology

Red Light Lit’s debut poetry anthology explores love, relationships, sexuality, and gender—and the corporeal space they inhabit. Love Is the Drug & Other Dark Poems features the work of 33 poets and 8 artists, each revealing the raw spectrum of the human experience that is both familiar and intriguing, comforting and thrilling, startling and validating.

By Hollie Hardy

With sparkling, spell-like language, Lions Like Us guides us through love-haunted spaces where desire is alive in the wake of sorrow and loss. These poems are tidal and tender; they feel into tectonic cultural shifts while remaining close to the ‘emblems of dailiness’ that make life meaningful: a mint slipped in a mouth, sweat down the spine, one body leaning into the salt of another.

By Thea Matthews

An electrifying letter to family, country, and self, Unearth [The Flowers] is an essential collection, relentless in its journey through stages of grief and healing while celebrating life. Each poem is an anthem for resiliency, a testament to survival, a triumph over the stigmatized terror that pervades the everyday. Thea Matthews’s first full-length collection of poetry details a mind, body, and flower at the intersection of the personal and the political.

A Poetry Anthology

Red Light Lit’s debut poetry anthology explores love, relationships, sexuality, and gender—and the corporeal space they inhabit. Love Is the Drug & Other Dark Poems features the work of 33 poets and 8 artists, each revealing the raw spectrum of the human experience that is both familiar and intriguing, comforting and thrilling, startling and validating.