The Swallows of Lunetto

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kingdom now is a study in the radical act of self-care after recovering from a lifetime spent fighting mental illness. Navigating its way through Appalachia and beyond, these poems fight for their ability to be heard, to be known and to be understood within the context of someone who is trying their best. Cawley's first full-length poetry collection explores the relationship between mind and body, and how they often times separate from each other in times of trauma and despair

Leonardo is full of guilt and confusion when the war ends, and the novel asks questions about how people get caught up in the dangerous ideas of political extremes.

What had been missing in those previous manuscripts, I now see, was the voice, the inevitable music and thrust of the narrative. Suddenly—and as often happens in life, inexplicably—that voice announced itself to me, and I began writing. The difference, of course, was that now I was listening; I was letting the story have its way with me. I replied, ‘about 100 times’, and she looked at me like I was crazy. I said ‘well, I was just making sure everything was right’.

So I set out to make something else. And I did. There were months of research, plotting, scribbling, pulling the car to the side of the road on the way to the grocery to jot down a sentence, a line, an idea. And yet, once again, something was missing. I had a completed manuscript of what might otherwise have been a third novel, but I knew, in the end, I had nothing. Ross McCleary is from Edinburgh in Scotland. He says he has stories and poems published widely in print and online. He says he has had a pamphlet published by Spacecraft Press. He says he is one of the organisers of spoken word night Inky Fingers. He says he is the editor of podcast journal Lies, Dreaming. He says he is working on 2 pieces loosely linked to this book. He says he was born 9 months after Jorge Luis Borges passed away. He says a lot of things and not all of them are lies.Joseph Fasano is an American poet, novelist, and songwriter. His books of poetry include The Crossing (Cider Press Review, 2018); Vincent (Cider Press Review, 2015); Inheritance (Cider Press Review, 2014); and Fugue for Other Hands (Cider Press Review, 2013), winner of the Cider Press Review Book Award. His novels include The Swallows of Lunetto (Maudlin House, 2022) and The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing (Platypus Press, 2020). His first album of original songs, The Wind that Knows the Way, was released in 2022. How do we live with our choices, grow through them and beyond them? How do we love those who have committed evil? How do we live with the legacy of our ancestor’s acts? Every city has a story. Behind the veil of tourism, New Orleans drips with hunger, sorcery, and secrets. One of those is Honey Island Swamp, a powerful nexus of magic outside the city limits. Its blue-green water can make you ageless and manifest carnivals out of thin air. Similar to the River Styx, it serves as the gateway between the realms of the living, dead, and in-between. And because of this power, it becomes both a haven and a battlefield for witches, humans, and other magical beings. Seyed Morteza Hamidzadeh transports the reader to another part of the world in his poetry book, ‘Exile Me.’ ….We are given an extremely personal, honest, and strong collection of poems that present vignettes of struggle, brutality, and war. Hamidzadeh not only gives us that strong, raw voice we desire, but an eloquent one, too…” – Zach Benard, author of 'The Lost Islander.'

Cawley's debut chapbook "depression is a thunderstorm and i am a scared dog" is a journey of resiliency, perseverance and subjectivity to one's fallacies. Through lyricism and descriptiveness, Cawley battles her PTSD through her interactions with others, and questions them as well her observation of the situation. Alexandra Bianchi lives and works in Lunetto, a provincial village in Italy's Calabria region, which finds itself ravaged by war in the summer of 1945. Leonardo Gemetti, a young man from Lunetto, has been missing for nearly eight years, and all his village knows of him is that he has carried out an atrocity against the Italian partisans in Mussolini's fallen Republic of Salò. When Alexandra meets a masked figure in the streets of Lunetto, she cannot imagine what she will learn about history and her place in it. Italy, 1945: Alexandra Bianchi lives and works in Lunetto, a provincial village in Italy's Calabria region, which finds itself ravaged by war. Leonardo Gemetti, a young man from Lunetto, has been missing for nearly eight years, and all his village knows of him is that he has carried out an atrocity against the Italian partisans in Mussolini's fallen Republic of Salò. When Alexandra meets a masked figure in the streets of Lunetto, she cannot imagine what she will learn about history and her place in it. Joseph Fasano is the author of four books of poetry: The Crossing (Cider Press, 2018), Fugue for Other Hands (Cider Press, 2013), which won the 2011 Cider Press Review Book Award; Inheritance (Cider Press, 2014), which has been nominated for the James Laughlin Award; and Vincent (Cider Press, 2015). Fasano’s debut novel The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing was released in 2020 by Platypus Press to high critical acclaim. The trauma of war is intergenerational. The characters know that to be alive is to be broken, that there is no safety in the world. That life means living the questions, the questions that arise from our own selves.There is so much to plumb in this story of personal and national trauma. Fasano has indicated the novel arose from his struggles with his own heritage. And this adds another layer to the story. And yet we never have nothing. We always have what we have tried to do. Always. Somewhere in us, our lives and our works ripen in secret.