Poetry - Percocet Summer
Inspired by a rainbow array of drug fiends and fiended-over druggies, Percocet Summer encompasses the rush of the solstice, odd obsessions, and other crushables (people and pills and moods). From Florida sweat to Georgia peach sweetness, NYC high-rollers to skidding-by wannabes, these 35+ illustrated poems cover all the shady crevices of a summer well-wasted. We’re talking the lows of eating disorders and intervention, to the throes of psychedelia and romance, then the in-betweens of internet celebrity and international/dimensional travel. Gas station syringes and cotton candy softness, rap-fast slang to gushy Valentine verses, cheeky loves to sophisticated manipulators.This collection blurs dirty realism and noir like a Lana Del Rey love song.
This is the first installment of the four-part series, Seasonal Dissociation: Poetry for Distancing Dates and Doses. Other titles include Cracked Leaves & Autumn Lines, Citrus Springs, and Aurora Shards of Winter.
Memoir - Modernist Dreams Brutalist Nightmares
Teenage dreams, ambitions and rebellion. Coming-of-age irony at its finest. Modernist Dreams Brutalist Nightmares is a searingly honest and brutally funny account of LG Thomson's experience of being part of the first generation to grow up in Scotland's most ambitious New Town. She was four when her family moved from their single-room tenement flat in Glasgow to a council house in Cumbernauld, a social experiment billed as The Town for Tomorrow. Told mainly in the 1970s, the book reflects upon a time when trousers were flared, sexism was the norm, and the beating of school children wasn't only condoned, it was industrialised. But with mass strike action, the three-day week, and the shift from the old imperial monetary system to decimalisation, it was also a time of great unrest and change. Set against the social landscape of the time is Thomson's personal story - the trauma of sexual abuse and coming to terms with being an outsider. Though the time and place are specific, the themes of Modernist Dreams Brutalist Nightmares are universal.
BF Jones (Poetry)
Poetry - Cpmpulsive Swim
Our city is an ocean. Every night one of our neighbors drowns in a crack on the sidewalk. Every night we call it hope to climb our way to the moon--just to panic when we can’t find an airplane or meteor to catch a ride home on. We spend days treading water with someone we love, hoping that a wave doesn’t rise and block our view of the sun. These 30+ illustrated poems exemplify that floating feeling of being between sobriety, society, and stillness.
Austin Davis is a poet and activist from Phoenix, AZ, who lives with OCD. He is the author of the chapbook Lotus & The Apocalypse and the founder of AZ Hugs For the Houseless.
“Like a Gen-Z John Donne…”
- Angele Ellis, Cultural Daily
“Davis holds in his hands an understanding for the diversity of emotion like it’s the fragile globe of a dandelion ready for wishes.”
- Caitie Young, The Poetry Question
Illustrated Poetry- The Edge of Nowhere
60+ illustrated poems told from under the buzz of a bar's strip lights. Whirlwind dates devoured by sewer rats. Grief that turns into vindictive triumph. Fights that leave bartenders and bystanders picking up the bloody shards. Addictions to parties and people that claw at your complexion and mental stability. Wallowing in wine and rumpled sheets, dirty flings and dead seasons.
Poetry features including J. Travis Grundon, Stephen J. Golds, and David Cranmer.
Novel - Girl of the Oil Sands
Blades, babes, and the harsh beauty of love & nature. A begrudgingly heterosexual heroine often finds herself in nefarious situations as "a gal just trying to make a buck." Fueled by love, drugs, and delusion, Iris carries the weight of a dream in her heart as she treks from Florida all the way to Canada, ever in search of a home.
Befriended by another Hell-raiser in her 20s, Iris has her worldview and life path torn apart as if rearranged by her own machete. With her sexuality, resolve, and sanity called into question, Iris battles mental illness, ill-meaning men, and the icy wilderness. Disavowing a life of debauchery is hardly easy, but it's a war worth fighting.
Half-Empty Doorways and Other Injuries
Poetry for the dead, the dying, and the ghosts. 45 illustrated poems collecting the best of Golds’ noir poetry from 2020 - 2022. Paper lanterns and petty crime. Whiskey bars and beach confessions. One-night stands and the childhoods that led to cheating, self-harm, and paranoia. From OCD and grief to benign inspirations like antiseptic cream and call-waiting, Stephen J. Golds examines life with a sigh only sometimes wistful. Before an urban Japanese backdrop, we ride w/ him amid subway delays and panic attacks, careening cars and horror movies.
"Stephen Golds writes Poetry, which is a hell of a lot more than what his more famous contemporaries ever seem to manage. It's honest-to-god poetry, as defined by Allan Ginsberg, the borderline-insane act of ‘making private words public.’ In this collection, he reveals himself to be a succinct and lyrical teller of truths, which itself has become a rare & controversial spectacle recently."
~Tony O’Neill, author of Sick City
Novel - Perras Malas
Loaded guns, lesbian love, inverted expectations, and lecherous mafia-types make this a novella not to forget.
Kika was a map of bruises. She was a cicatrix of vengeance, the scar of a wounded mind, the fetid and gangrenous lesion of a town's malevolent psyche. And she's come back to Carbon, Georgia, to find her missing sister.
Fighting tooth and nail, wielding her trusty crowbar, Hell hath no fury like the violent storm Kika brings to Carbon. She'll tear through the town and its criminal underworld until she finds her sister.
Inspired by Virginie Despentes' Baise Moi, The Shit of God by Diamanda Galas, and Cynthia Pelayo's Into the Fire and All the Way Through, this is the story of violence inflicted on women, and the cold vengeance served to those responsible. Informed also by female revenge films such as Coffy, Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion, I Spit on Your Grave, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Perras Malas delivers several acts of vengeance to the evil men of Carbon.
Anthology #2 - Slut Vomit
Compensated cuddle bunnies, cross-dressing diplomats, garden boy-seducing GILFs. That's just the start of this subversive short story collection.
Take a ride on the wild side as Outcast Press explores the world of p!ss boys and pantie sellers, every echelon of erotic entertainer from scag-seeking street-walkers to doted-upon sugar babies. There're reverends who like it in the rear, classically trained dancers who take their talents to the LED-lighted pole, strippers and far scarier (or surprisingly helpful) johns, dungeon masters vs dragons of industry, and weapon-wielding pornographers.
Every shade of prostitution and fetishism finds a home here, as vividly represented as the LGBT spectrum.
Novel - Lotus & The Apocalypse
How would you feel if today was your last day on Earth?
LOTUS & THE APOCALYPSE is a poetry novella from Austin Davis about the final moments of life for one man, and his meditations on guilt, fear, loss, love, and addiction as he tries to figure out what the point of living was before it’s too late.
“LOTUS & THE APOCALYPSE contains 14 poems from the man who’s heart is tattooed to the street.”
- Sebastian Vice
Founder, Outcast Press
Novel - Crooked Smile
Henry Gallagher is going to die.
His liver is failing, and with each drink his chances of living past age thirty crumble around him. Over a chaotic two-year blur, he stumbles through inebriated nihilism strengthened with each self-destructive act, reveling in an unending parade of violence, blackouts, half-hearted AA meetings, psych ward stints, dangerous sexual encounters, suicidal behavior, and shattered relationships. Two events force Henry to look inward and face the disturbing truths left to fester for so many years, drenched in booze, but always staring up at him from the bottom of a whiskey bottle: during his darkest hour he receives an offer that threatens to change the trajectory of his life forever—and a mental diagnosis that, in Henry's mind, makes him more monster than man.
In his highly personal and confessional style, Jack Moody’s brutally honest and scathingly witty autobiographical debut novel follows the hero’s journey of a man hurtling into the depths of addiction, mental illness, and self-destruction, while wrestling with his survival instinct and self-awareness that his journey will—inevitably soon, with his shield or on it—come to an end.
Novel - Poser
Ambrose Ballard, failed Bay Area drug dealer, is at the end of his rope after running afoul of his wicked connection one too many times. His friend Bennie suggests he hide out at her sister’s guest house in Palo Alto, where posing as a Stanford grad student, Ambrose settles into upscale suburban life and finds himself falling for Jessica, a lonely housewife with the soul of an artist. Disruptor to this new existence is Jessica’s husband, Mike, a tech tycoon whose path crossed with Ambrose’s on a drug-fueled night at a club in The City. When Ambrose’s cover is blown, all hell breaks loose as secrets are spilled and lies shattered on a posh limestone patio deep in the heart of this picture-perfect, California dreamscape.
Ambrose picks up the pieces, having gone quickly from living on the streets to getting everything he ever wanted. When he feels it slipping away, however, he returns to crime, risking everything to avoid the pain and poverty of his past.
Poser, first novel in the Eucalyptus Lane series, offers a class-conscious, peeping-Tom gaze into Silicon Valley’s bedrooms and back-alleys, where dreams really do come true and unlikely, life-altering connections are made, for better—or worse.
Novel - The Recalcitrant Stuff of Life
The Recalcitrant Stuff of Life is a story about searching – for a friend; for forgiveness; for the truth.
Rosy is a broken man living a purgatory existence in Iquitos, Peru. Two of his oldest friends; Stanley Doucette and Ishy Lords; have pressing news from home. Never before have two individuals been as ill-equipped to navigate the Gringo Trail as Ishy and “The Deuce”, but this is precisely what they set out to do in an attempt to track Rosy down in one of the most inaccessible places on the planet.
Ambitious, gritty, and raucously entertaining, Sean McCallum’s debut novel takes readers from Toronto and New York to Lima, and then across the Andes, down the Amazon River, and into the darkness. Bristling with tragedy, regret, and a little ayahuasca, The Recalcitrant Stuff of Life screams into the void with electric lyrical urgency, reveling in what it means to be alive.
Anthology #1 - In Filth It Shall Be Found
There was a saying in medieval alchemy,
in sterquiliniis invenitur,
which roughly translates to “in filth, it will be found.”
Carl Jung (a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology) expounded on this later, explaining that what we most desire to find in our lives may be found in places we least want to explore.
These stories dive into the darker aspects of society, subjects we try desperately to hide, and new perspectives that will leave you enthralled.