Aunt Rachel Says 13 Poems
Aunt Rachel Says 13 Poems is a declaration, an interrogation, an occasional hymn. The speaker, a working class woman in her fifties, directly addresses both her wife Susan and the reader in a series of ardent monologues. Over the course of this series, she applies a personal theology to questions of file transfer, domesticity, the environment, football, organized religion, bar culture, urbanism, composting, and the future. As it turns out, Aunt Rachel has a great deal to say.
Overfraught Productions 2019.
Esther Spellicy in the Main Game
Published by With/out Pretend in 2019 and illustrated by Frankfurt artist Tatjana Prenzel, this mini collection tracks Ess, a girl living in a prairie Bible college town, through three formative childhood experiences.
From WP editor Erin Klassen:
“These stories exist in a world that seems vacuum-sealed and entirely insular, a perfectly preserved diorama of everyday interactions, but don’t let yourself be fooled. They play freely with boundaries of any kind, made alive with the imagination of our young narrator and her acerbic kind of curiosity. With Derksen’s invitation, we are here to bear witness to extraordinary scenes, slyly parading as ordinary.”
Project Compass
Project Compass is a collaborative novel by Kristina Vyskocil, Matthew Stepanic, Robert Strong, and Lizzie Derksen, published by Monto Books in 2017.
Lizzie Derksen’s novella “Goose Egg” is included in full as the section titled “North”.
From the publisher:
“Project Compass is an experiment. A novel written from four different perspectives. Four people wake up on the morning of the longest day of the year, each in a different corner of the city. A mother estranged from her family, a student leapfrogging from online hookup to online hookup, an old man with a tenuous grasp on the truth, a young woman trying to put the pieces of her life back together. They traverse the city on paths that are not certain, ultimately being pulled towards the centre, towards a future even more uncertain.”
Also available from Audreys Books.