The Ocotillo Review Volume 7.1

Over 60 poets and writers explore The Alternative Family.

$19.95

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Winner of the 2022 Acacia Fiction Prize

The Geography of First Kisses by Karin Cecile Davidson

In The Geography of First Kisses, one finds portrayals of quiet elegance reminiscent of early-20th-century art films. The fourteen ethereal stories are tethered to the bays and backwaters of southern Louisiana, the fields of Iowa and Oklahoma, the pine woods of Florida, places where girls and women seek love and belonging, and instead discover relationships as complicated, bewildering, even sorrowful. A New Orleans girl spends a year collecting boyfriends and all the while considers the reach of her misadventures; a newlywed couple travels to Tulsa in search of a horse gone missing, perhaps more in search of themselves; a new mother is faced with understanding the miracles and mysteries of faith when her baby disappears; a young daughter travels to Tallahassee with her mother, trying to unravel the meaning of love crossed with abandonment. Saturated with poetic illusion and powered with prose of a dark, pulsating circuitry, the collection combines joy, heartache, and tenacity in a manner sorely missed in today’s super-structured literature.

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Not Yet a Jedi by Partridge Boswell

Winner of the 2022 Saguaro Poetry Prize

Partridge Boswell’s Not Yet a Jedi rockets through the late 20^th century and into the present with its diction in hyperdrive, fusing whimsy to seriousness, blunt statement to syntactic complexity. These tautly constructed poems evoke the aspirations, fresh-cut grass smell, and low-level depression that characterize cookie-cutter suburbia—and the ways the adults who grew up there cling to a played-out, optimistic vision of the American Dream despite themselves. Poems span a range of emotional registers, but even in their pensive moments, they are so kinetic that their full force can only be appreciated if you read them while popping wheelies on your BMX or grooving under the splattering light of a disco ball, where the melancholy will still find you, as “your black-lit heart blooms luminous in the blue dark.”

– Wendy Barnes, contest judge

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Mysteries of the Universe by Roger Hart

Runner Up – 2022 Acacia Fiction Prize

Roger Hart writes with savvy, grace, and abiding tenderness about people in love and in trouble. He’s an enchanter casting his spell with impeccable sentences and exquisite details. He knows that characters only truly exist when they interact and entangle with other characters. What ingenuity on these pages, what nerve, and what an exhilarating collection of stories Mysteries of the Universe is. And in this universe, future events can influence the present, characters pop in and out of existence, and premonitions upstage reason. I have a feeling that you’ll read this collection in one sitting and that you’ll start reading the stories slowly, as I did, so they will not end. This book is a revelation. And now I’m going to read it again.

John Dufresne, No Regrets, Coyote

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The Flowers of Nonchalance by Dan Smart

The title of Dan Smart’s The Flowers of Nonchalance suggests that what grows from easeful moments can blossom beautifully. As Smart writes: “With so much out of reach / Now, I reach / For simplicity.” Smart makes the ordinary extraordinary in this fabulous collection, situating himself in dialogue with his poetic forebears, including Frost, Merwin, Issa, and others. And as readers we are grateful that such a perceptive poet is “here now / to say it.

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The Ocotillo Review Volume 6.2 (Summer 2022)

This issue is our final “themed” issue!

Over 35 internationally acclaimed literary artists share their journeys and consequences of wrong turns. Be amazed. Be shocked. Be entertained.

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2023 Texas Poetry Calendar

available in limited quantities.  $14.95

The iconic planner / notebook / calendar

Texas’ most prolific and talented poets share their impressions of the geography, culture. and literature of the Lone Star State.

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NOW AVAILABLE! 

The most enlightening poetry collection of 2022.

This book may well change your life. It will definitely alter your outlook.

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The Ocotillo Review Volume 6.1

A spiritual experience to release you from the doldrums of social isolation. 43 poets and writers, previews of upcoming releases, wining entries from the “J. Darling” and “CB Himes” contests. Something for everyone in 170 pages of moving literary art for your enjoyment.

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$13.95

Now available in hardcover and paperback

BACKSTAGE ACCESS

The Celebrity Portraits of Larry Crawford