Books

Works of creative writing published with acclaimed independent presses.

Home Movie, Nowhere

Madsen creates a reality where the reader is the director of a world that can sometimes appear to be a dream but perhaps is a life forgotten. Memories layered with rich scenery in an unforgiving landscape clash in the most hurtful of ways. What feels like a small distance between self and land is deceiving. Madsen invites us so far inside we'll never want to leave. -Hillary Leftwich

The Boneyard, the Birth Manual, a Burial: Investigations into the Heartland

This utterly stunning debut, as its title tells us, is part manual, part investigation. Into the Heartland, into “our dark hearts.”  It is “a book of occasions”: part documentary, part allegory—both at once—in which “dream-installments” coincide with real documents, the silence of sleepy farmland with the immiserated bodies and voices that work it. You will find yourself here in “the faraway” you can’t get away from, “the bygone” that never really goes. Being in this book’s grasp is like a memory both inescapable and just out of reach, a gruesome scene you want to unsee and yet cannot look away from. This book throws into brutal and beautiful relief what it looks like to survive a lack, an unremitted absence, the cost of what we are not paid, into which we are born and have to bear. -Jane Gregory