Welcome to the first issue of Alternating Current Press' annual "Poiesis Review" that contains fiction and creative nonfiction right alongside the poetry you've always loved. We've expanded the journal to contain prose, and now this beast of a journal sits pretty at 200 pages of writing by some of the best writers in the independent press today. There are lots of literary journals out there, so why take a chance on this one? Because, after 20 years in the small press, "Poiesis Review" is one of the only literary journals in existence that features a blend of today's up-and-coming promising...

As Faulkner's voice portrayed the South and Breece D'J Pancake's represented Appalachia, Eric Shonkwiler captures the Midwest, with this collection of novellas and short stories that peels back the edges of rural existence to expose the heart of it. Through parental neglect, rebellious sons and daughters, drug-addled war veterans, backwoods zombies, injured firemen, car thieves, witch doctors, and Navajo ghosts, Shonkwiler brings you a disregarded world you can no longer ignore-one thriving with the mundane, the bruised, the unheard. Here is the voice of the rest of us, spoken only the way...

A Room in Dodge City follows a nameless drifter into an American heart of darkness. In this nightmarish version of the historic Dodge City, mythic beasts crawl out of the woodwork; bizarre rituals are enacted; and death is never the end. Equal parts humor and horror-show, David Leo Rice's novel combines the mundaneness of modern life-motels, strip malls, temp jobs-with something stranger, darker, and more eternal. Told through linked vignettes that read like metaphoric fairytales gone wrong, Dodge City consumes the reader just as it slowly consumes the drifter, leaving all to wonder whether...