Fiction by…
Ali Pensky
Anne Baldo
Jonathan Berzer
Shane Combs
Zachary Holmes Spence
Zimuzo K. Okeke
Suchitra Sukumar
Kendall Teare
Karen Uhlmann
Sona Verdi

Poetry by…
Lauren Arienzale
Shannon Cates
Christopher Cokinos
Émilie Galindo
Vivian Kao
James King
Kale Hensley
Cassund Olivier
Kate Polak
Sarah Dickenson Snyder
Will Sharp

Nonfiction by…
Ronnie Ashline
Chris Bailey
Violet Piper
Kaylie Saidin

Art by…
Charles deVries
KJ Hannah Greenberg
Lee Johnson
Tim Lane
Nuala McEvoy
Michael Noonan
Paul Rabinowitz

Music by…
Joe Sikelianos & Kat White

A collaboration like no other, from The Hooghly Review in India and a former Press Pause contributor.

In the height of 2025, former contributor Francois Bereaud asked us to help him get this beautiful book into the physical world. And finally, we did.

Already in bookstores in San Diego, Murals is a collection of writing and murals from around the world, curated by Francois and loved by the many contributors in its pages.

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Do you have a book you want help bringing (lovingly) into the physical world? Reach out to info@presspausepress.org and ask about our Bookshepherding program.

Winner of the 2025 Beautiful Pause Prize (for poetry)

This book reveres the unraveling and regeneration of one poet’s resilience and hard-earned identity through the lens of feminine experience and mental illness.

Each poem endures the same affliction: a speaker whose reality is in a constant cycle of 

becoming 

and 

unbecoming.

This is Claire’s last summer. Pushing past her regrets and grief, she decides to travel to Italy to paint, to revel in the sun and wine and sea and colors before she ends her own life, on her own terms. A Handful of Earth follows terminally ill Claire as she reunites with a lover, reconnects with an old friend, and falls back in love with Italy, all while coming to terms with the relationship between body and environment and the damage that has been inflicted upon her by the same earth she loves so deeply. A Handful of Earth is a lyrical novel and eco-lament whose bright and rhythmic sweeping prose feels like sand slipping through your fingers, leaving you ready to start all over again.

With an introduction by author Jesse Curran and illustrations by Nina Martinez.

A beauty like no other.

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Tomorrow I’ll wake to a new world, to the old world. Tomorrow, if I’m lucky, I’ll wake. But not everyday. Soon I’ll do what I’ve come to do. It’s calling me.

To kill: to deprive of life in any manner, to destroy, to do away with, to extinguish. To overcome completely or with irresistible effect.

Wine, sunlight, song. Irresistible effect.

It’s calling me.