Enjoy their work in the Lost & Found issue, and seek out their full-length collections:
From Christian Anton Gerard, Holdfast
“As a poet and a partner and a parent, I love and need so much of this book. In Holdfast, Christian Anton Gerard builds the poem as a place with walls for cornering and facing the humbling questions and connections of our lived truth. As Gerard writes in ‘Ars Poetica,’ one of the many wonderful poems here, ‘What’s carried in my chest’s never my choosing,// so the stories I tell are always the same,/ why my prayers keep begging for words// to let me re-write my own endings, or// at least imagine the possibility, a sunrise/ on the horizon I can’t see in the dark.’ By lyrical turns, allegorical inquiry, and experiments in direct address, it’s as if Richard Hugo were remixed according to a contemporary need for musing and naming the forces that threaten a family—perhaps the most mystifying and unrelenting of those forces, as Gerard reminds us, being the self.”
—Geffrey Davis, Author of Revising the Storm (BOA Editions, 2014) and the 2018 James Laughlin Award Winner Night Angler (BOA Editions, forthcoming 2019)
Read more about Holdfast here or hear an interview here.
CHRISTIAN ANTON GERARD is the author of Holdfast (C&R Press, Fall 2017) and Wilmot Here, Collect for Stella (WordTech Press, 2014). He’s received Pushcart Prize nominations and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference scholarships. Gerard is an assistant professor of English, Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith.
From John Brandon, Further Joy:
In eleven expertly crafted stories, John Brandon gives us a stunning assortment of men and women at the edge of possibility—gamblers and psychics, wanderers and priests, all of them on the verge of finding out what they can get away with, and what they can’t. Ranging from haunted deserts to alligator-filled swamps, these are stories of foul luck and strange visitations, delivered with deadpan humor by an unforgettable voice.
“John Brandon is a great young writer who can—and probably will—do just about anything.” —San Francisco Chronicle
News! Arkansas, one of Brandon’s novels, is being made into a movie starring Vince Vaughn, Liam Hemsworth, and John Malkovich.
JOHN BRANDON is the author of the novels Arkansas, Citrus County, and A Million Heavens, and the story collection Further Joy. He lives in Minnesota and teaches at Hamline University.
