Abounding with Gaia’s green energy, Home Planet News 27  is fueled with the power of poetry by Christopher Buckley, Nathan D. Horowitz, Brooke Marshall, John Martino, John McKernan, Ricardo Moran, William Pruitt, J.R. Solonche, Dudley Stone, & Watt Worris; fiction by Alaina Hammond, John Holman, & Donald Mangum; comics by Susan Kaplan; & artwork by Alexander Limarev. Many thanks to all!

In keeping our piece of the world green, we’re returning to our roots, which is to say that Home Planet once again features comics as was true in the past millennium during the ink & paper era. We happily kick-start the comic revival with an excerpt from Susan Kaplan’s delightfully bizarre “No Fanfare.”  Check it out!

Half Inch Press, the little press that can & does & will, is giddy as Godzilla at happy hour with full-on cartwheeling, backflipping, somersaulting excitement to announce the release of 4 brand spanking spectacularly new books:

Alaina Hammond’s debut collection, Tutor in Juvenile and Other Stories, is smart, quirky, fresh and fun. Blending drama and humor, Hammond straddles the line between multiple genres—at times sci-fi and light horror, at times slice-of-life and philosophy-as-fiction—with a delightful flair for storytelling. This is short fiction at its best.

No larger or smaller than life, the characters in Happiness Quotient are awash in the details of ordinary circumstance. Variously aware of their plights, they somehow discover mystery amid the mundane, redemption in the routine, or grace in the quotidian. Donald Mangum’s stories have appeared in Confrontation, Indiana Review, Mississippi Review, The New Yorker and other literary magazines. Half Inch Press is proud to present this exquisite collection.

John Martino’s second collection, Enemy Lines, redraws the boundaries of modern poetry, ruthlessly weaponizing the medium to vandalize the cultural landscape, strip it for parts, and reassemble the fragments into a series of unapologetic poems that read like glitched transmissions from a rogue signal gone deliberately haywire. In an era of socio-political fracturing and retreat into extreme tribalism, this collection refuses to capitulate, declaring itself “a band / of one” that takes neither sides nor prisoners. For the reader who dares to cross it, Enemy Lines offers a divisive, irreverent, confrontational encounter, but one that ultimately yields “a premortem / afterbirth inbetween / delight.”

And just in time for the holidays—

John McKernan’s poems have appeared in many magazines, such as The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and Paris Review, yet some of his finest, most intricate, and sophisticated poems are the ones he wrote to celebrate Christmas. Each year, instead of mailing a traditional card, McKernan would send one of his original “cards” to family, friends, and colleagues to extend Christmas cheer. Zero Outside: 40 Christmas Poems represents a collection of forty of these rare, sumptuous, surprising poems that celebrate Christmas and convey in his own unconventional way his deep spiritual aspirations and beliefs.

Of course, all Half Inch Press books make wonderful gifts for the literati on your list, including yourself, throughout the year.

Here’s hoping you enjoy your visit to Home Planet. Feel free to stay as long as you like, whenever you like, & as always–

Many thanks!

Matt