What Books Press

Coming this October from What Books Press: Skeletal Lights from Afar, my debut collection of flash fiction / prose poems / in-betweens published over the years in Caketrain, Denver Quarterly, NOON, Quick Fiction, and other literary venues still here or departed. Many thanks to the authors below for the advance praise, as well as WBP for giving this a home after a long, lonely time out there.

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In Skeletal Lights from Afar, Forrest Roth's language forms murmurations, each pulsing with interiorities of struggling narrators whose experiences unfold into one another, reflecting infinite impossibilities of a life lived in service of and service to. Roth asks us to think about our relationship to art, duty, the environment, love, strangers, music, and the frailty of human certainty. There are rumbles of Marcus' The Age of Wire and String and Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground echoing with each strike of Roth's approach; it is as if the work exists in three spheres, the experience of the past, the relevance of the present, and the narrative methodology of a time not yet seen. Skeletal Lights from Afar is a bold artistic vision, one you may not be able to put down until you've read it to completion and begun again. — Duncan Barlow, author of A Dog Between Us

Dear Reader, you will never have read anything quite like the luminous Skeletal Lights from Afar, I can promise you that. Within these pieces, you are on a journey through startlingly fresh and exciting territory, which leads you through the natural world, the intellectual world, the small town, and the small room. Within these pieces there is humor and artfulness, but more than that even there is an examination of what it means to feel alone and observational in an ever crowded world. A master of voice, Roth's words become a ghost voice implanted in your psyche which remains long after you reach the end, offering you birds and flesh and bone. Indeed, they offer you the cycle of life, children climbing into bed between their parents to reclaim that shining moment of safety that is so fleeting to the last breath that awaits us all. — Myfanwy Collins, author of Echolocation

Reading this new book by Forrest Roth, I kept thinking, "Here is an original voice." Not exactly microfictions or prose poems, they blur those distinctions with meditation and observation and intellect, yet retain movement enough to sustain the tension of story. Forrest Roth has produced an accessible, yet challenging collection that will find an audience. — Gary Fincke, author of The Corridors of Longing

Each of these magnificently strange pieces is a world in itself. Together they create a shimmering matrix of expression, insistent as a dream that won’t let go. — Dawn Raffel, author of The Strange Case of Dr. Couney