The urge to create beauty and the beautiful haunts Happy Everything. Caitlin Cowan’s powerful celebration of feminine resilience. The materiality of marriage and divorce abound in the postnuptial ghost stories Cowan tells with no-nonsense. Midwestern frankness and the intimacy of an afterparty conversation in a corner booth. Happy Everything is a deranged wedding registry of various poetic forms which highlight the perverse tenacity of ancestral traumas and the paradoxes inherent to women’s relationships with men. These poems are a collage of traditions from a past that women are continually attempting to escape.

Caitlin Cowan lives on Michigan’s west coast. Her writing has appeared in Best New Poets, The Rumpus, New Ohio Review, Pleiades, Missouri Review, Southeast Review, Denver Quarterly, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Account, and elsewhere. She serves as Director of International Programs and Chair of Creative Writing for Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp in Twin Lake, Michigan.

Co-written by the founders of Spleen, an erotic poetry collective, Carmen Cornue and Donna Morton’s chapbook Forbidden Flowers ruminates on the human condition and its relationship to mortality, love, and sexual prowess, from the perspective of powerful, queer poets in a patriarchal world. With references to Charles Baudelaire, Frankenstein and Valley of the Dolls, Forbidden Flowers is an active dreamscape of literary and cinematic fantasies. Yet Cornue and Morton’s theater interacts with late stage capitalism, punctuated with world weary humor and American ennui. These poems are just a step away from death’s cliff, but always willing to risk another turn at the roulette wheel.

“These poets put all cards on the table with lusty organs, Vaseline, backseat gushing, and Jesus’ sucked toes. When you read Forbidden Flowers, you are in for a sexy, thought-provoking, and incredible time.” – Kevin Dublin, author of Eulogy and How to Fall in Love in San Diego

Donna Morton (she/they) writes poetry inspired by filmic landscapes, morbid literary cues, and the lifestyles of meandering flâneur and cloistered nun. Morton’s poetry has been published in The Shoutflower, Fauxmoir Lit Mag, Southword: New International Writing, Mad Gleam Press and Beyond the Screams podcast.

Kelly Lorraine Andrews is the author of five poetry chapbooks, most recently Sonnets in Which the Speaker Is on Display from Stranded Oak Press. Other chapbooks by Andrews include The Fear Archives, from Two of Cups Press, My Body Is a Poem I Can’t Stop Writing, Porkbelly Press, I Want To Eat So Many Kinds of Cake With You and Mule Skinner, both from Dancing Girl Press. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including [PANK], Ninth Letter, Prick of the Spindle, and Philadelphia Stories.

“Kelly Lorraine Andrews’ heartbreaking and buoyant sonnets gratify more than a therapy session or a rollercoaster ride through a pop-culture wonderland. Even as her work deftly problematizes the idea of ‘confessional poetry,’ her readers can still feel the speaker’s joys and struggles.” – Joanna Fuhrman, author of The Year of Yellow Butterflies