Oct 24

Michele McDannold interviews Roadside Press author Karl Koweski

first published at The Literary Underground’s IN CONVERSATION

I’ve known Karl Koweski, aka The Polish Hammer, since the early 2000s. I was first introduced to his writing through his column “Observations of a Dumb Polack” at Brian Fugett’s Zygote in my Coffee. Karl’s provocative, self-deprecating humor and big heart have kept me happily reading his work through Roadside Press and his column at The Literary Underground, “The Polish Hammer Poetry Corner,” in which he never shares any poetry whatsoever. We need a break sometimes, don’t we? Here, we talk about his roots in “the Region,” writing… and, since we’re all getting older—the places and people that have stayed with him.

MM: You describe yourself as a “displaced Region Rat.” What did growing up in the Region give you as a writer?

KK: It gave me everything. The Region, specifically, the Northside of Hammond, Indiana, the hometown of Jean Shepherd perhaps the greatest purveyor of observational humor who ever lived, where I came of age. I was lucky enough that my parents didn’t question my absences, growing up. I guess they figured the worst that could happen was that I’d just never come home again, and they made their peace with that. I grew up fairly poor, but so did all the other neighborhood kids. The economic downturn of the late seventies hit Hammond exceptionally hard.  And their parents didn’t want them inside any more than my folks did. So we’d run the streets, pick-up football games at Pulaski Park or homerun derbies at Hermit’s Park. I was forced to be a social creature. And if I wasn’t throwing crab apples at cars, or sniping eighteen-wheelers with BB guns, I was at the library reading whatever I could get my hands on. There were so many places that felt unique to me that I don’t think I would have experienced growing up anywhere else. You had Lake Michigan down the street, water stretching out to the horizon. Chicago a little further away. There was St. Casimir Church where I learned to steal wine and dodge handsy priests, catering to my spiritual needs. The esoteric bookstore run by a psychic who managed to guess wrong about every fucking thing that applied to my future. Goldblatt’s flea market where you could buy cheap paperbacks and Chinese stars, aiding in my desire to become the most literate ninja in the region. There was the dregs of the once mighty Sin Strip along State Street. Hammond didn’t have a town drunk. It had an army of town drunks. All of them shuffling shirtless from one corner bar to the next. There was the most isolated, pathetic adult bookstore in the entire northwest nestled off state line behind the cigarette stand among a thatch of mostly abandoned buildings. All this filtered into my mind mixed just right and poured out of my pen. I’m still trying to capture the emotional resonance of growing up in The Region during that time frame. I think it’s going to take me at least two more books to get it all down.

 

MM: What do you miss about the region now that you live in Alabama? What do you see more clearly from a distance?

KK: First and foremost, I miss my brothers. I have three younger brothers who live in The Region. We’ve all stayed exceptionally close (or, for me, as close as you can possibly be when you live sixty hundred and sixty-six miles away). They are three of the best people I know. I only get to see them once a year if I’m lucky. But, then, we all work long hours at our respective jobs and wouldn’t be able to run the streets together half as much as we’d want. I miss them, though. I also miss the food, something I manage to work into any conversation I have about Hammond. Living in rural Alabama, you just can’t get the simple delicacies I used to take for granted when I lived back home. Arnie’s hot dogs is at the top of the list. I must have eaten ten thousand Arnies chili cheese dogs with a side of cheese fries. Usually washed down with a Pepsi half full of Malibu Rum pour from the pocket pint. Monster gyros from Munster Gyros. Zel’s roast beef sammiches. Giant shrimp from Bob’s Shrimp on Calumet. Greek style pizza from Larry’s Pizza on Gostlin. Good, greasy pizza encrusted with their secret blend of herbs. Show me a Greek diner and I will be there with a fistful of cash. The Mexican short order cooks at those Greek diners cook their asses off. If you’re hungry in rural Alabama, unless you like smoked pork, you can fuck right off. And I guess that’s for the best. If I still lived in the Region, I’d be buried in Holy Cross Cemetery, right now. Congestive heart failure, or a ruptured pancreas and shriveled liver with such easy access to Okocim, the greatest beer brewed in the dumbest fucking country not run by Trump. I miss living in such close proximity to Chicago. I miss the corner bars. I miss my honorary Koweski brothers and the sense we were always a step away from creating the sort of mischief that would become legend in every watering hole between Scarlet’s Lounge and Mister Joe’s Tap. Two bars that seemed integral to my social life thirty years ago. Jesus, you know, it’s not only the geography but the moment in time I miss. I wrote an entire novel commemorating it. I also miss the frame of mind I possessed which allowed me to enjoy that place and time to the fullest extent. It seems its all behind me, now.

Revisiting the Region after living in rural Alabama, what strikes me most is how close everything is to each other. I only had a sliver of yard growing up, but it seemed egregious compared to the other patches of yard. Every house is right on top of each other. You look out the window right into the front room window of your neighbor. Obviously, it never bothered me in my youth; I just accept things as the only way they could be. Now, I live on a twenty-three-acre spread with a mountain in my backyard and absolute peace, no one constantly walking the sidewalks outside my house, no roar of trains or diesel whine of eighteen wheelers. I suppose it’s why I’ve never gone back for anything more than an extended visit. I need my solitude.

 

MM: What first made you want to write about the people and places you knew?

KK: That’s where it all begins, right? Watching the people you know going about their business in places you know. I knew fairly early on I wanted to write with an eye toward publication. It’s one thing to write glorified journal entries. I knew I wanted to write stories, maybe not for the masses, but at least for like-minded people who might be interested in reading whatever poems or stories I set to paper. Reading is of absolute importance to anyone who wants to write seriously; sharpening one’s observational skills is a close number two. I wouldn’t call it a failure of imagination, I’m always most comfortable describing the streets I’ve walked, the areas I’ve visited and studied. Plot for me is nowhere near as important as character. If I create a compelling enough character, that character will lead me through the adventure simply by making the decisions I know the character will make. My writing has vastly improved in the last thirty years only because my understanding of the people around me has been refined through countless conversations and just listening. Everybody wants to tell you their story. Rather than tune out and say “that’s crazy” after every uncomfortable pause, I pay attention. I file shit in the back of my mind. Writing a weekly column helps in that I’m constantly recording the minutiae of everyday occurrences, maybe a little exaggerated. Not as much as one would hope. I want my stories to read like living, breathing reality. The best way to do that is to cleave as close to my everyday reality as I can.

 

MM: Your work can be brutally funny and unexpectedly tender. Is that how you see the world, or is it something you discovered on the page?

KK: “Brutally funny and unexpectedly tender” could be the title of my autobiography. For me and for my style of writing, the two must go hand in hand. Aggressive humor without pervasive empathy would make an asshole out of me. Pure tenderness without the bite of satire I feel would defang my writing, make a schmuck out of me, and reduce every word out of me to the schmaltziness of a dollar store Hallmark card. My entire life I’ve sought to strike a balance between the two. They’ve never been mutually exclusive, but it is a challenge not to go too far in either direction. A caustic wit comes far more naturally to me than emotional connection. Jokes come quicker than hugs. Though, as I age, I’m becoming increasingly comfortable with my vulnerable side. Understanding and embracing the foibles of my fellow man has become almost as rewarding as simply backhanding a fool and calling him a “jackass.”

 

MM: You collect pop culture ephemera. What’s an object, song, or TV show that can take you straight back to the Region?

KK: Collecting the pop culture ephemera I do is firmly rooted in childhood nostalgia, integrally tied, of course, to The Region of my youth. These tokens I’ve gathered are a form of mental time travel for me. I can look at the Hammerhead, mint on a twelve back Star Wars card, and I’m instantly transported back to the Goldblatt’s department store in the downtown Hammond of the late nineteen-seventies. I have vivid memories of stalking behind my mother and grandmother through the aisles of crap knowing if I just kept my mouth shut and my facial expressions schooled, I might get an action figure at the end of all this for being so well-behaved. I’d always turn down the Luke Skywalkers and the Han Solos for the creatures of Mos Eisley cantina, characters that might have had a few seconds of screen time. I loved the monsters. Still do.

My Ozzy Osbourne Randy Rhoads tribute album takes me back to being a twelve year-old metal head, going into Hegewisch Records out on Torrence Avenue in Calumet City and buying the album with my paper route money along with the Def Leppard T-shirt Joe Eliot wore in the Pour Some Sugar on Me video. This was back before you could tap a button on your phone and hear the entirety of the record. Every album purchased was a gamble. Goldblatts and Hegewisch Records are long gone. I can close my eyes and see both in minute detail. The band shirts hanging from the rafters of Hegewisch Records like the banners of tribes you wish you could be a part of. The first album I bought there was Iron Maiden’s Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. The last album purchased there not too long before I relocated to Alabama was Marilyn Manson’s Portrait of an American Family.

My collection of Clive Barker signed first editions calls to mind trips to B. Dalton bookstore in River Oaks Mall when it was still outdoors. Weaveworld was the first Barker novel I read. The paperback cover art gripped my imagination. I was a horror junkie in my early teens, and Barker’s epic dark fantasies remain a safe space I can nestle my mind within.

My comic book collection harkens me back to Amazing Fantasy comic book shop in its original location before it moved onto Torrence a half block down from Hegewisch Records and across the street from Scarlet’s Lounge, my favorite bar back then. I remember pulling Amazing Spiderman #300, first full appearance of Venom, right off the new issue shelf. Six years later, once they began incorporating countercultural books into their inventory, I remember pulling the first of many Bukowski books I would buy from them. That would have been War All the Time.

Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.

THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning right here at The Literary Underground’s IN CONVERSATION.

Under Normal Conditions by Karl Koweski is available at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/normal/145

Abandoned by All Things by Karl Koweski is available at
https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/abandon/164

Thrift Store Jackets by Karl Koweski is available at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/thrift/181

Mister Joe’s Pirates (The Region Rats Trilogy, Volume 1) by Karl Koweski is available at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/pirates/PHGJOLRPFEHVPPXOWSLQ6CZK

Oct 15

Award Winning Author Dan Denton Publishes Fifth Book

Award Winning Author Dan Denton Publishes Fifth Book

Former UAW Chief Steward releases The Seven Stages of Middle-Class Life: An American Fable

Written by Midwestern writer Dan Denton, The Seven Stages of Middle-Class Life: An American Fable tells the story of a “lucky” 30-year union autoworker that makes a career on the assembly line.

Denton’s rich, entertaining plot allows its colorful protagonist to provide a rare bird’s eye view of blue collar, American factory life.

Known for his powerful prose, vivid imagery, and authentic working-class characters, Denton’s newest novel, published by Roadside Press, is easy to read and will cause you to lose track of time.

Denton is a former 10-year Toledo Jeep employee who worked on the Cherokee and Wrangler assembly lines and was elected as a chief union steward. He has lived in the Midwest, and worked in factories for most of his life, and that allows him to naturally set his story in some familiar places—a lake, a bowling alley, a break room next to the assembly line, a union meeting and a football game.

After reading an early review copy of The Seven Stages of Middle-Class Life: An American Fable, acclaimed Chicago writer, Westley Heine, author of the recently published coming of age tale, The Boys in Black, highlighted Denton’s working-class authenticity.

“I cannot think of a more relevant writer right now than Dan Denton,” Heine said. “With his background as a factory worker, a Union Steward, a man who has lived on the skids, and a true witness to the frontlines of the Rustbelt, he is in a unique position to comment on modern America and bridge the voice of the working class with the artistic intelligentsia.”

In another early review, local Toledo area colleague, Dr. Theresa Konwinski, author of the gritty, but riveting novel, Survivor’s Circle, emphasized the book’s dazzling imagery.

“Denton’s ability to describe simple things – a lake, a bowling alley, the clattering break bell at work, a sunset – will take your breath away.”

About his latest book, Denton said, “I haven’t seen any novels that have union autoworkers as main characters, but there should be. I’m excited to get this book out there, and I’m anxious to hear the reactions of my union brothers and sisters from around the country, especially the members of the United Auto Workers. I hope this is a book that does the working class proud, and one that provides teachers, professors, journalists, politicians, pastors, Popes, researchers and all library lovers a glimpse of blue-collar reality.”

The novel releases to all online booksellers Nov. 1st. Orders for signed copies are available at www.magicaljeep.com and copies will be available at an in-person reading and celebration that will take place at Gathering Volumes Bookstore, located at 196 E. South Boundary in Perrysburg, OH. The event is planned for the afternoon on Saturday December 12th, 2026. Light refreshments will be provided.

For more information about the book, for interview requests, or inquiries about electronic advanced reader or review copies, please contact Roadside Press editor Michele McDannold at roadsidepress01@gmail.com or Dan Denton at dandenton1978@gmail.com

Roadside Press, an independent Illinois publisher founded in 2022, has established itself as a leading small press that has published more than 70 books from a diverse group of writers from across the United States, Canada and the U.K. For more information about the company’s catalog and upcoming releases, please visit www.magicaljeep.com, and click “Roadside Press.”

Sep 24

Roadside Publisher Interview on Drinks with Tony

now live on all the streaming things.. ROADSIDE PRESS publisher MICHELE MCDANNOLD joins author Tony DuShane on the interview show DRINKS WITH TONY! long time fan, first time caller.

Tony DuShane is a ghostwriter and works in story development. He is the author of the semi-autobiographical novel Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk. He adapted the screenplay for director Eric Stoltz, and the film is now available on Amazon Prime.

His journalism and essays have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, Penthouse, The Believer, and other media outlets. DuShane has hosted the author interview show Drinks with Tony since 2002.

DuShane teaches screenwriting at UCLA Extension and is almost finished reading In Search of Lost Time.

Jul 26

Zack Kopp reviews COLLECTED POEMS 2005-2025 by Michele McDannold

first published at The Literary Underground’s IN CONVERSATION

Collected Poems 2005-2025
by Michele McDannold
Roadside Press
$20
Dec 6, 2025

Michele McDannold is one of the hardest-working women in the small press scene. She has established and continues maintenance of multiple imprints and websites. She’s driven across the Southwest and pacific Northwest distributing copies of books from the boot of her magical jeep like a postmodern book mobile. Her Collected Poems 2005–2025 consists of three separate collections—Stealing the Midnight from a Handful of Days (2014), Notes on the American Apocalypse (previously unpublished), By Plane, Train or Coincidence (2022) and a series of prose poems—is a healthy meal of hard-won insights rendered lyrically.

your ass has puckered
puckered            so tight
you’ve just ingested your best whitie-tighties
cotton for air,
as the sweat comes pouring once
comes pouring forever
at night and forever. (105)

Her words are hard. The pain’s not easy. But that part of the meal is balanced by a reassuring wise-cracking compassion. The author writes with a squint, scanning the ground for remaining sprouts of live energy in the microwaved terrain, avoiding embellishment via metaphor or flights of abstract variations, eschewing the obfuscation in clear favor of the gritty facts of meaning. This vow is stated perhaps most explicitly in a poem called “I’m such an asshole” on page 40:

not in the kitchen
not on my way
out the door
not upon waking
goddammit
will I think of you

i will not write
any more
sickening
gay rainbowing
it up poems
only assholes do that

and more pedantically in one called “nothing to lose (or freedom)” on page 80:

the party is over/the beatniks are dead or dying/the outlaws are a joke/the wild west is tamed, my friends/rail against that which seeks to defeat you/every day/every hour/right now/get in your car/go/don’t kill the first thing that gets in your way/kill em all/kill em all/kill em all,/motherfuckers (80)

A mosaic of rough commentary from the bars and coffeehouses and clubs she’s worked in provides incidental background accompaniment to its central melody of dogged persistence in the face of disillusionment. All the cheap sex and lunacy and institutionalized poverty alongside the carefully arranged synchronicities of barrooms and coffee joints is counterbalanced by a strengthy devotion to the muse of making, a feeling known to every maker. It gives testimony to the amount of poetry available in the unexamined minutiae of experience.

Get your signed copy of Collected Poems 2005-2025 at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/mcdannold/JMDD4CUBDLEFXOYFSLSBIILG

Zack Kopp is co-creator of the monthly Coffeehouse for Social Medicine at Mutiny Information Café in Denver. All his books are available at Amazon. Find more of his writing (fact and fiction) at www.campelasticity.com

Jun 20

Westley Heine reviews The Book of the Dirty Poet

first published at The Rusty Truck

The Book of the Dirty Poet: by
the Dirty Poet
206 pages
Roadside Press

available for pre-order at magicaljeep.com

They say cleanliness is next to Godliness. If only things were that simple. In my experience, you get closer to the truth when you get down in the dirt. If you really get your nose in the soil, the fertile fertilizer of everyday life, then you see the light. It’s elemental. Not just hot air. Not watered down or burning away. Plant your two feet firmly on the Earth, and you will see the nature of things. The Dirty Poet does just that.

This volume is pocket size, a parody of a personal Bible, complete with gothic font on the cover. As I sat in the park reading this, pedestrians assumed I was reading the Good Book. Then they’d look over their shoulder at me when I burst out laughing at one of the anecdotes. This is a good book.

Inside are reflections, slices of life, and the resolve of a world weary traveler. Topics range from love, work, sex, music, drink, fatherhood, money, culture, America, human nature. There are short three line poems like perfectly timed jokes, like Haikus sighing in the American vernacular.

The best stories are from his work in healthcare. The Dirty Poet is a nurse on the frontlines of America, of the pandemic, and seasoned in situations of life and death. He’s probably more of a hero than he lets on. But those who know death understand there’s no use in bragging. An angel with a rye sense of humor, he brings the gospel of no nonsense.

____

Spit

kids don’t believe what they’re taught
they reject everything
as they should
because everything is wrong
there’s no justice
except random justice
so they spit out this world
until you can’t spit anymore
then you have to swallow
and that’s what you’re made of
See, philosophy and humor all in a single flash.

____

Because of his honesty, when all is said and done, he may be the Dirty Poet, but his conscience is clean.

—Westley Heine is the author of Busking Blues, Street Corner Spirits, and Cloud Watching in the Inferno with Roadside Press.

Jun 10

Alan Catlin reviews THE PEOPLE ARE LIKE WOLVES TO ME by William Taylor Jr.

first published in Misfit Magazine, Alan Catlin, ed.

William Taylor Jr., The People Are Like Wolves to Me, Roadside Press, roadsidefam.com distributed by Magical Jeep, also available on Amazon, 2025, 85 pages, $17.

If his poetry is to be taken literally, and there is no reason not to take him at his word, Taylor is a melancholy man. He prefers his own company to that of mass gatherings. Taylor feels a kindship with a few old drunks in a dive bar who are lost in the last days of their drinking themselves to death than he is in other public places where people, or worse, tourists, gather to gawk at the locals in their natural habitat. In a way these poems feel like a Jack Lodonesque, or Orwellian Down and Out descriptive testimony of life in the tenderloin district of San Francisco. Taylor isn’t abjectly poor, as are the people in London and Orwell’s books, but there is a boat load of loneliness and solitude for people failing to make human connections. There is also a sense of the absurd, a kind of quiet wry humor in Taylor’s observations. A recurring image is that of the “famous poet” whose self-assurance and blind allegiance to the wonderfulness of himself, only partially obscures the facile personality of someone whose ego is greater than his accomplishments. We don’t know exactly who this famous poet is but we know exactly what he is, a phony, the worst kind of phony, and he could be anyone.

Another recurring personality is the beautiful blonde bartender who feels vacuous in a way that only a woman who is as beautiful as she is, and knows it, can be. She is still young enough to have a heart and a curious mind, but ultimately, feels as if she is falling victim to her beauty and isn’t motivated to do anything about it. It’s so much easier to go with the flow than become a fully developed person.

An encounter with a woman causes hm to re-evaluate his opinion of Janis Joplin and he finds, despite himself, a certain kinship he previously paid no attention to. It isn’t life changing but it is amusing. Ultimately Taylor is not a depressive nor are his poems depressing. There is a thin red line between depression and loneliness/sadness and Taylor treads it carefully with a keen eye.  There are broken hearts and lost loves, major disappointments along the way, but you don’t have to let your setbacks define or break you. Taylor certainly does not. The most emblematic poem for me in The People Are Like Wolves to Me is “In Search of It.” Having already established that the human condition appears to be all about people perceiving others having what they are looking for the sum up his feelings of life,

The people have failed me,
the government has failed me
I have failed myself.

All of which is commonplace,

but I’ve grown bitter with hope
forever tricking me
into mucking through it all
just to reach the next rotten thing.

Yet here I am in search of it
(from In Search of It)

Taylor has decided to stick around because he loves the sound of the rain, the feeling the warmth of the sun. He calls himself the Walt Whitman of End Times and he might well be.

Jun 10

Alan Catlin reviews Roadside Assistance: A Roadside Press Reader

first published in Misfit Magazine, Alan Catlin, editor

Roadside Assistance: A Roadside Press Reader,
roadsidefam.com, available on Amazon, 2026, 198 pages, $20, https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/roadside/SO7LETPOXJR5T4LEQK36FBRE

This weighty collection is not a best of the press’s books so much as a selection of the work of 48 poets and writers of fiction all of whom had a book printed by the press from 2022 to 2026. Rather than run a Go Fund Me for the press, co-editor Dan Denton helped Michele collect writing to produce this volume so that everyone is represented and the press is benefited.  I may be prejudiced, as I have published several books with the press, but I think there is a wealth of kickass work here that should appeal to just about any non-academic reader.

Dave Newman, Lori Jakiela, William Taylor, Scot Young, Dan Denton, Westly Heine, Jennifer Juneau, Belinda Subraman, Dan Provost, Francine Witte, Nathan Graziaono, editor McDannold and Denton plus many more.

May 29

Richard Modiano reviews ROADSIDE ASSISTANCE: A ROADSIDE PRESS READER

first published at The Literary Underground’s In Conversation

Roadside Assistance: A Roadside Press Reader

edited by Dan Denton & Michele McDannold

There’s something refreshingly unvarnished about Roadside Assistance: A Roadside Press Reader — a book that refuses polish in favor of presence. As the publisher’s note makes clear, this is not a curated “best of,” but a living cross-section of a small press built on instinct, community, and a commitment to voices shaped by lived experience rather than institutional expectations. That ethos permeates the anthology from first page to last.

What emerges across its 200+ pages is less a unified aesthetic than a shared temperature: raw, immediate, and often bruised. The collection gathers forty-eight writers, and while their styles diverge — lyric, narrative, confessional, surreal — the emotional register remains strikingly consistent. These are poems and prose pieces grounded in work, addiction, grief, sex, memory, and survival. Factories, bars, hospital rooms, and back roads recur not as symbols but as actual places where life is endured and occasionally illuminated .

One of the anthology’s strengths is its refusal to romanticize this terrain. Alan Catlin’s barroom poems, for instance, strip away any lingering myth of the dive as a site of camaraderie, revealing instead a space of decay and slow violence. Dan Denton’s prose on factory labor extends this realism into economic critique, exposing the machinery not only of production but of exploitation — temporary labor, bodily exhaustion, and the precarious dignity of work. These pieces don’t posture; they report from within.

At the same time, the anthology is not without lyric grace. Ignatius Valentine Aloysius and David Allen Sullivan open the book with a sequence that balances spiritual attention and personal wreckage, finding fleeting transcendence in mist, breath, and birdsong. Elsewhere, poets like Johnny Cordova and Aleathia Drehmer navigate memory and loss with a quieter, more meditative intensity. Their work suggests that even in a collection so rooted in grit, there remains space for stillness, for reflection, for something like reverence.

Humor, too, threads through the book, often as a defense mechanism. Todd Cirillo’s “Useful Poetry” wryly dismantles poetic pretension while reaffirming poetry’s strange utility — whether as emotional ballast or literal furniture shim. Pella {f}elton’s meta-poetic riffs push this further, mocking both the poet’s ego and the absurd economics of literary life. These moments prevent the anthology from collapsing under its own weight; they remind us that survival often includes laughter, however bitter.

The anthology resists the canonizing impulse; it privileges inclusion over refinement, community over gate keeping. What ultimately holds the book together is not style but conviction. As the editors note, each piece carries the sense that it “needed to exist.” That urgency is palpable. Whether in the stark brutality of addiction narratives, the tenderness of elegies, or the restless searching of spiritual poems, the writing is necessary rather than ornamental.

Roadside Assistance is, in this sense, an apt title. These are roadside voices –caught between destinations, stalled, moving again, telling their stories from the shoulder of experience. The anthology doesn’t promise resolution or coherence. Instead, it offers something more honest: a record of people writing because they must, because the alternative is silence.

And in a literary landscape often dominated by polish and pretense, that kind of necessity is not only refreshing, but vital.

Roadside Assistance: A Roadside Press Reader is available at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/roadside/SO7LETPOXJR5T4LEQK36FBRE

While a resident of New York City, Richard Modiano became active in the literary community connected to the Poetry Project where he came to know Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, William S. Burroughs and Ted Berrigan.  In 2001 he was a programmer at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, joined the Board of Trustees in 2006, and from 2010 to 2019, he served as Executive Director. The Huffington Post named him as one of 200 people doing the most to promote poetry in the United States. Modiano is the winner of the 2022 Joe Hill Prize for labor poetry and is a Pushcart Prize nominee.

May 15

Current Disasters by Jen McConnell reviewed in Barrelhouse

first published in Barrelhouse mag https://www.barrelhousemag.com/blog/mcconnell-currentdisasters-waite

Reviewed by David Waite

Roadside Press / May 2025 / 100 pp

In Jen McConnell’s Current Disasters, the absurd looms just as large as dread or joy or understanding. The twenty stories, some medium-sized and some only a paragraph, often have a shattering absurdity, but equally often, they offer ridiculous and damn fun adventure. When, for example, the nameless narrator of “Not the Worst Day of Your Life but Definitely Not the Best” climbs into a cheap display coffin, it feels both natural and a stupid decision, compelled by restlessness. At other times, the irrational is a hard and fast rule of the universe but we get to see it in a new way. Who hasn’t experienced a piece of art that makes us want to babble, standing in the street? Who can’t relate to the silly, cloying names people give their dogs? Who doesn’t want to eat greasy quesadillas at midnight with someone you love, speaking without speaking because “eating together in silence is enough”?

Many of the stories are on a knife’s edge of excitement or anticipation or disaster, even when there’s a gentleness to the chaos. In “The Irrational Constant,” a teenager walks through the annoyances of two homes, the demands of school, and ill-fitting friends all while trying to memorize enough digits of pi to win a school contest. Who would ever want to be sixteen again? Imagine the mindset where someone would say, “I wished I could go to a math camp or bring myself to fail a class so I could be assigned summer school.” And pervading the story, there’s a fever-flush in her face that everyone can see. Uncertainty suffuses the piece and its ending, but the reader’s connection to McConnell’s character has been formed. And what do the irrational and the constant really mean here? The story lingers and pushes gently.

Other stories are focused micro-fiction, just as fully realized in their effect and emotion. In “All the Kids Are in Therapy” a jagged sense of realization and blame and lack of control spills out of the rambling voice of the narrator. As the single sentence continues, the reader starts to judge and forgive this person and also, frankly, get a little annoyed at them. There’s so much inside this person’s life to imagine. Revelation shows up too; it’s an entertaining story, and also a lesson in voice and intuition.

McConnell’s style and delivery are often bare-bones, and blessedly so. In one scene from “Worry, Incorporated,” a curious office worker at a seemingly bullshit job follows the owners’ granddaughter around. When the two women converse in a diner, one doesn’t need to know what the room looks like because the conversation offers all one could need and want, even if one doesn’t know whether to believe it—it’s the truth for one conversant but perhaps not for another. At a pseudo-scientific, vibe-oriented corporation where employees worry for their clients so the clients don’t have to, when this lone office worker finally asks questions, the answer is both a cipher and a riddle: “Because they pay us to worry, they believe it works. The more worries they unload onto us, the better they feel—like they’re getting their money’s worth. Whether we actually worry or not is irrelevant.” Then why has the office worker been doing the worrying in the first place? We believe what we believe, which is an echo of the story’s conundrum: what do we do to soothe ourselves, even if it might be nonsense?

I remember people, impressions, and sensations from McConnell’s first book, Welcome, Anybody, and those feelings and characters still pop up in my life. The personalities in Current Disasters are just as vivid: the one-armed actor, the “lucky” old-man newlywed, the sick man going home to face the past, the polar researcher who accepts her inner weird. At heart, they are all just regular people tasting some hard luck and grace and, in one case, the coldest damn place on Earth. They all add up to a big, colorful tapestry, sewn up with sharp needles and vivid images.

Overall, this is a collection of understanding without complete understanding, of seeing and half-believing. Crinkles of humor appear, as do hard, hard sentences that strike the reader dead for a moment, but she will always get back up and keep reading. Desperate people try to play it cool, and normal people are stricken by the sublimely odd. It’s the type of collection that makes a reader want to wander out in the street, burbling with the fever of discovery, desperate to tell anyone what he has felt.

David Waite serves as the Editorial Director of Clockhouse, the multi-genre literary journal created by graduates of the Goddard College MFAW program. As well, he teaches at Onondaga Community College in Syracuse, NY. His first book, The All-Night Diner Lights, was published in 2018 by Stone Hole Press of Vermont.

May 11

WITH HER HAIR ON FIRE by Christy Prahl reviewed in Calyx

“I am thankful for a poet who can thrust the worry, the guilt and too much caring out—and let in some sun, new air, some frank clarity through the sealed-up windows we use to protect ourselves. Be generous to yourself as a reader and add these poems into your day, your life, too.”—Ellen Stone

Read the full review here