There are ghosts in the room. Every room. They’re in the eaves in the attic, the crawlspaces in the basement, the living room, the kitchen, the den.

The Kissing of Kissing is a bodymind-in-motion. With Kissing, Emerson, a nonspeaking autistic artist and poet, inaugurates Milkweed’s Multiverse series, which will center neuroqueer orientations in relation to writing (and) the world.

“The Internet is not your friend—you shouldn’t let it tend to you so soon.“

In the seven stories in Because We Were Christian Girls, Virgie Townsend’s young characters walk the tightrope of faith above the pit of eternal damnation: millennial popular culture. Through their eyes, Townsend blurs the lines between church and the secular world and casts doubt on the very existence of hell.

Thunderhead features lyrical narrative poetry that reveals the darker side of Emily Rose Cole’s upbringing and present-day struggle to reconcile trauma. This trauma stems largely from a verbally abusive mother, now deceased. Cole employs persona poems as well, forming striking parallels between her past and the lives of imaginary heroines, most notably Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz.

A former writing professor of mine calls the novella “the perfect form.” It requires the concision and pacing of a short story but is long and deep enough to draw the reader into its world and hold them there. As it happens, Kevin Lichty understands the challenges and rewards of the form, the sitting or two in which the reader lives inside a narrator’s life, rather than the weeks or months it might take to invest in a longer work.