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.

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.”

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.  

“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.

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.

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.

Meghan Phillips' “Abstinence Only” is a flash-length collection of “bad sex education stories” set in a high school where anything but actual sex ed is taught. In this more than slightly tilted world, all female students are issued chastity belts and forced to wear fake pregnancy bellies, students are given “V-cards” that they must protect at all costs, and teachers and administrators take stranger and stranger measures, like using logic puzzles to assign punishments for sexual impropriety.

These stories highlight Phillips’ incredible talents as a writer of flash fiction. She cuts to the heart of the thing and lays bare something about the world and the strange experience of living in it without so much shining a spotlight as burning a quick, weird flare off to the side.

Originally produced in 2020 in a limited edition of 200. Bound with red staples. Four-color interior art and cover by Killian Czuba.

“Fat Dreams” by Nicole Steinberg showcases the literal and metaphorical ups and downs of weight loss and gain, and what it means to be a woman who comes from a lineage of size. It is an exploration of how the physical body collides with moments of monumental grief and unexpected joy, and how the body often doubles as identity in a culture that constantly portrays the overweight and obese as sick or less worthy of love.

Nicole Steinberg is the author of two books of poetry: Glass Actress (Furniture Press Books, 2017) and Getting Lucky (Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2013). Her chapbooks include Clever Little Gang, winner of the 4X4 Furniture Press Chapbook Award (2014), as well as two titles from dancing girl press: Undressing (2014) and Birds of Tokyo (2011). She is also the editor of an anthology, Forgotten Borough: Writers Come to Terms with Queens (SUNY Press, 2011). Her work has been featured or reviewed in the New York Times, Newsweek, Flavorwire, Bitch, and Hyperallergic. She lives in Philadelphia.

Originally produced in 2018 as a limited edition of 100. 32 pages. Custom flyleaf and pink staple binding.

“Sob Story: The History of Crying” by Allison Titus is an essayistic chronicle of crying. Ranging from depictions of weeping on ancient Syrian tablets to Rambo to crying workshops in contemporary Japan, Titus delivers a long poem about the exhibition of emotion that links all of us together. Titus’s sharp mind and eye for detail are on full display as she catalogues what crying is, how it works, how it feels, what it means to society, and what it means to us all personally.

Allison Titus is the author of two books of poetry: The sum of every lost ship (Cleveland State University, 2010) and The True Book of Animal Homes (Saturnalia Books, 2017); two chapbooks: Instructions from the Narwhal (winner of the 1st annual Boom Chapbook Contest, Bateau Press, 2007) and Topography of Tears (Artifact Press, 2017); and a novel: The Arsonist's Song Has Nothing to Do with Fire (Etruscan Press, 2014). She's the recipient of an NEA fellowship in poetry, and currently teaches in the low-res MFA program at New England College.

Originally produced in 2018 with letterpress cover on Khadi cotton paper. Hand-bound in an edition of 100.

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.

Originally released in 2016 in a limited edition of 100. Letterpressed by Friedrich Kerksieck/Small Fires Press, hand-sewn. Cover art by Emma Fick.

J. Robert Lennon’s “Mistranslations and Meeting Notes” is a wild fever dream of thematic resonances and workaday collisions. These prose poems skip stones across the ocean of what language means to us, both as speakers with intention and as listeners who are simply busy waiting for something to happen to us in life.

Finding the right thing to say is an impossible task, especially in academic staff meetings - the incubator for this blazing collection. Mr. Lennon’s work always brims with pithy observations, contextual nuances and well-aimed humor, and the prose poem form uplifts his style with fluid grace. Without a doubt, this clever and soulful collection will land upon one’s eye-level bookshelf, the one designated to cool and interesting finds worthy of sharing with friends and thoughtful re-reading.

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J. Robert Lennon is the author of two story collections, Pieces For The Left Hand and See You in Paradise, and eight novels, including Mailman, Familiar, and Broken River. Graywolf Press will publish a new novel and story collection in 2020.

When Marcia Trahan began watching true crime television, she did so in secret. She felt ashamed by her fascination with these violent stories, and how hungrily she consumed one gruesome tale after another. Only years later did she start to connect the dots between her true crime obsession and the series of invasive medical procedures that had left her feeling victimized and violated.

Can the body tell the difference between an attacker’s knife and a surgeon’s? This is the central question in MERCY, a question that leads Trahan to re-examine her body’s reaction to lifesaving medical treatment, the childhood experiences that first made her feel unsafe in her own skin, and the true crime genre’s most common tropes.

Part searingly honest memoir, part incisive cultural criticism, MERCY explores the appeal of true crime and the way so many of us live our whole lives bracing for an attack.