EXCERPT

PREFERRING A CLEAN VIRGIN

The male dark fishing spider climbs her Amazonian body, his legs under a third her size, her abdomen mountainous, fourteen times heavier than his, and he rocks her, side to side, his pedipalps engorged until the blood pushes too hard against arterial walls, curling him against her. Stuck to her, he’s consumed by her. The number and size of their offspring increased by his sacrifice.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chella Courington is Professor of Creative Writing at Santa Barbara City College. Her prose and poetry have appeared in numerous journals including The Los Angeles Review, lo-ball magazine, Gargoyle, The Tusculum Review, and Danse Macabre. In 2011 Courington published Paper Covers Rock, a flipbook of lined poetry, Indigo Press; Girls & Women, a chapbook of prose poetry, Burning River; and Talking Did Not Come Easily to Diana, an e-book of linked microfiction, Musa Publishing. Her work has been honored by Camroc Press Review, The Collagist, Qarrtsiluni, and Main Street Rag, and nominated for Best of the Net and Best New Poets Anthologies.

ABOUT THE COVER

The cover is printed on matte paper, each trimmed and bound by hand, finished with a hand-cut title flag typed (old school!) on kraft brown paper. The artwork, “Jelly Flyby,” is watercolor+ink on paper (9 x 12 inches) by Jonathan Rountree, one of our in-house artists.

Jonathan Rountree (BFA Studio Art, Northern Kentucky University) is an aspiring world-traveler seeking to explore the intricacies of this realm armed with clay, camera, canvas, and paper.

PRAISE

“This collection is a work of freshness that is always surprising and never disappointing. Courington manages to do fascinating things with common images and she gives those images new life in a pleasing and sometimes disturbing oblique sort of light. Her terse, intense, and honest stories are presented in an earthy narrative voice in language full of longing and desire. These stories are both playful and provocative and can leave a reader almost breathless at times. Combined, the stories make up witty but also quite serious and worthwhile explorations.” —Pamelyn Casto, editor of Flash Fiction Flash Newsletter

“Like a scientist in her laboratory, Chella Courington is careful and precise as she dissects the specimens before her. But Courington’s prose, like her eye, is enveloping, passionate yet also crystalline, hard and clean and clear, rewarding the discerning reader with these multifaceted gems.” —Robin Lippincott, author of In the Meantime