Barrelhouse Books looks for engaging, dynamic works of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. We publish smart, insightful books, the kind of stuff your intelligent, non-reader friends will love as much as your MFA classmates.
If This Should Reach You in Time sounds the alarm of climate change and democratic collapse with tender lament and guarded hope from award-winning poet Justin Marks.
“There’s no way around / not being part / of the problem,” Marks writes in “Along for the Ride,” “The best case scenario / is long term disaster”.
In his fourth collection of poetry, Marks renders global threats as intimate and personal. As we turn inward, terror and sadness take hold. This is a book of crisis and dread, both human and spiritual.
Through these poems, we see what could be and what might have been. In the titular poem, Marks writes “…know / that we didn’t see / the disaster coming / That it wasn’t / imaginable, hadn’t / existed until, gradually / it was, and did / Or that we saw it / and refused to believe / Or saw it and thought / something or someone / else would save us.”
When Kristin Keane lost her mother, she was devastated by the thought of never spending time with her again. She found herself turning to narratives about alternate universes and time travel—everything from quantum physics to Quantum Leap—in search of ways to reconnect, to bring back what was lost, to conjure up a world in which her mother still existed.
This formally inventive memoir, written in the style of an encyclopedia, is the author’s attempt to both remember her mother and map her own grief. Keane puts thinkers like Einstein and Barthes in conversation with pop culture touchstones like Interstellar and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to explore what it means to lose someone, and what remains of a person—and your relationship with them—after they’re gone.
“I hold anger like my mother / wedged between shoulder and spine / where wings should have sprouted / but didn’t.” Whatever Love Means is a record of past lives, of people and places, of the ghosts that won't leave. Some parts are memorial, others are made up; all slipstream, still, around a stubborn heart that insists upon an on and on.
In her debut collection, Christine No offers the rare experience of watching a mind mine the body, the psyche, and the interwoven histories of family. These searching poems are equally full of wisdom and unanswerable questions. Brutally honest, tender, and fierce, No’s poems lay bare the pain of personal discovery, the hope of a future free of harm, and the struggle to survive.
Those who are familiar with Gina Myers's previous work will be pleased to see Some of the Times build from the same base of social consciousness while also pushing in new directions. Myers captures what it feels like to live in this era of late capitalism in a way that few other poets do. This is a book for those who suffer and endure and laugh about the suffering later.
Sales of Some of the Times support the Youth Art & Self-Empowerment Project in Philadelphia and the First Ward Community Center’s LACER (Literacy Arts Cultural Enrichment Recreation) program in Saginaw, Michigan.
YEAR 14
BY michael konik
“Consider this my suicide note. As I write these words by candlelight, in a location I cannot mention, I do not fear for my future. I understand that I have no future. My only fear is that what happened here will one day be forgotten.
“Let me tell you.”
The narrator of Year 14 was a young man when a revolution changed his homeland forever—a new regime, a new calendar, a new flag, a new anthem and new money. Thirteen years later he has a comfortable job as an editor for the state-sanctioned newspaper, a loving wife, and an unswerving belief in the benevolence of his country’s Caring Leaders. But when a new Information Gatherer is assigned to the newsroom—a peculiar man-child named Tup-Tup, the son of an important government minister—he’s forced to face the truth about his sacred homeland.
Year 14 is a comedy, a tragedy, and a cautionary tale. By turns frightening and absurdly funny, this timeless novel offers a hopeful, if hard-won, affirmation of humanity’s indomitable spirit.
Whatever Stasis. Whatever Stasis is Tonelli’s second collection of poetry, one that finds that “beautiful and worthy subjects / are everywhere / which is / out of reach.” Meditative, funny, at once searching and resigned, Tonelli shows us that “A poet / is the opposite / of god” in all the best slow and subtle ways.
Chris Tonelli works in the Libraries at NC State and co-owns So & So Books in Raleigh, NC, where he lives with his wife, Allison, and their two kids, Miles and Vera. He is a founding editor of the independent poetry press, Birds, LLC, and he curates the So & So Series and edits So & So Magazine. In addition to his first collection, The Trees Around (Birds, LLC), he is the author of five chapbooks.
Barrelhouse poetry editor Dan Brady says of Whatever Stasis, “This is actually the kind of poetry I love best - spare, philosophical, a bit funny, meditative, questioning. I feel like I could read each of these poems at any time on any given day and they would ring true in my mind, somewhere down deep inside.”
tell me if you're lying
by sarah sweeney
Growing up in an eccentric North Carolina home, with aging-hippie parents whose marriage was forever crumbling around her, author Sarah Sweeney was primed for trouble. For drugs and boys. For learning about sexuality from Madonna videos and prank calling teachers and meeting celebrities—including a young Adrian Grenier. For a father’s supposed alien abduction. For escaping the South and even her own family.
Funny, exuberant, and often heartbreaking, Tell Me If You’re Lying examines the lies we’re told as children and the downright unbelievable—but true—stories that comprise Sweeney’s colorful coming-of-age.
daryl hall is my boyfriend
by erica lewis
What happens when you take something like a pop song and turn it in on itself, give it a different relevance or frame of reference, juxtapose the work against itself, against other pop music, bring it into the present, experience it in a different way?
This book is a new revising of the confessional. It's about having to grow up, about those feelings we want to get back to, the people we want to get back, the people we’ve had to let go. Humor, love, and responsibility.
Selected from among the nearly 400 manuscripts submitted to our open reading period, each poem in daryl hall is my boyfriendtakes its title from a line of a Hall & Oates song. The poems here are not “about” Hall and Oates songs or what they “mean,” but rather what is triggered when listening to or thinking about the music, those feelings, experiences, and memories, that specific nostalgia attached only to the sort of pop music Hall and Oates created.
You're Going to Miss Me When You're Bored
by Justin Marks
The poems in You’re Going To Miss Me When You’re Bored integrate the sublime and the mundane, the destined and the happenstance, the dire meaningfulness of the moment and the absurd lack of consequence in the infinity. In some, the trivial becomes transcendent and in others, the transcendent turns out to be a mirage. Justin Marks treats both moments with equity, qualifying epiphanies and salvaging disappointments.
Marks confesses to “not seeing what’s here / for amazement that it exists,” but for the reader, what’s here is exhilarating. Each poem feels like a realer version of a reality show, and everything buzzes with a sense of possibility or precariousness, “the ant [he’s] about / to flick from [his] foot” or the fact that he “saw a femur once.” What pervades this book is the feeling that, at any second, we too could see a femur.
Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck: Rejection Letters from the Eyeshot Outbox
by Lee Klein
Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck: Rejection Letters from the Eyeshot Outbox compiles a dozen years of disappointment transmitted via e-mail from a single editor to hundreds of writers around the world. Performative and funny one minute, respectful and constructive the next, these rejections both serve as entertaining writing tips (suitable for use in today’s more adventuresome creative writing classrooms) and suggest a skewed story about a boy and his seminal semi-literary website, Eyeshot.net, which Lee Klein founded in 1999.
What started as a lark—sending playful rejection notes to writers who’d submitted work for the site—over ten years took on a life of its own, becoming an outlet for Klein to meditate on his aesthetic preferences, the purpose of literature, and the space between the ideal and the real.
Philadelphia
by Gina Myers
Barrelhouse's first chapbook is "Philadelphia” by Gina Myers. This long poem is full of grit, hope, and pragmatic realism. What we love about Gina’s work is that it showcases a sharp, lyrical take on the world--from interactions at work to street harassment to the Black Lives Matter movement. The poem circles around the questions that lie at its center - What does it mean to navigate a new city? What does it mean to try to feel at home? When there are so many reasons to leave, why stay?
Gina is the author of A Model Year (2009) and Hold It Down (2013). Her essays and reviews have appeared in Fanzine, Frontier Psychiatrist, Coldfront Magazine, Philadelphia Review of Books, and other places. Originally from Saginaw, Michigan, Myers lives in Philadelphia. Selections from the poem “Philadelphia” appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and Bedfellows.
Letterpressed by Friedrich Kerksieck/Small Fires Press, hand-sewn. Cover art by Emma Fick.
Bring the Noise: The Best Pop Culture Essays from Barrelhouse
Over the past decade, readers have learned to count on Barrelhouse to publish inventive, irreverent essays by authors exploring the ways their lives have been shaped by their pop culture obsessions. Bring the Noise is a collection of the magazine’s greatest hits, plus five new pieces produced exclusively for this anthology. Inside, a roster of accomplished and respected authors grapples with a wide range of topics, including Thin Lizzy, dive bars, Barry Bonds, Bob Dylan’s beard, pro wrestling, The Hills, roller derby, Adrian Grenier, and Magnum, P.I.
Passionate, insightful, and funny, this collection is simultaneously a celebration and a critical dissection of the ways in which pop culture affects us all.
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