AN IMPRINT OF WHAT BOOKS PRESS, LOS ANGELES
Artwork by Gronk
Artwork by Gronk
Praise for Crime Wave“Guns, spies, noir. Love, The Other Woman, serial killers. CRIME WAVE is brilliant with an inimitable voice, a master class in style. Here, there is gravity as much as levity. I laughed then gasped at the lyric virtuosity. Suzanne Lummis is a treasure. This extraordinary book is a prize.”
—Lee Herrick, author of Scar and Flower, California Poet Laureate “In CRIME WAVE, the dead speak with wised-up fury and the kind of courage that refuses cultural disregard. Lummis’s feminist noir aesthetic has never been fiercer or more poignant… CRIME WAVE rejects despair. It’s as searing as it is hopeful.” —Dorothy Barresi, author of What We Did While We Made More Guns Press and ReviewsCRIME WAVE included in LitHub's 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025
"Nameless in Hell" featured in Portside SUZANNE LUMMIS was born in San Francisco—actually Oakland, but only by mistake—experienced what would become her earliest memories in Palermo, Sicily, spent her childhood in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, just off the two-lane highway now called Donner Pass, went to High School in Berkely—Berkeley in the 60s—studied at Fresno State College, as it was called then, and UC Berkeley. She spent a year in London, in the basement flat of 55A Redcliff Gardens, Earls Court Road, then returned to Fresno for the opportunity to study with Philip Levine, which, thanks to Fresno champions such as Christopher Buckley, resulted in her becoming identified with the “Fresno Poets.” (However, as a small child, she’d identified first with the Mafia, then the agents who went after them, and then with the freezing Donner Party. Fresno seemed a long ways away.) She lived in San Francisco again, then moved to Los Angeles, where she has resided in East Hollywood and Northeast Los Angeles. She co-founded and directed The Los Angeles Poetry Festival, which produced several 30-event, city-wide festivals between 1989 and 2011, culminating with Night and the City: Noir in poetry, fiction and film. She is the editor of The Pacific Coast Poetry Series, an imprint of Beyond Baroque books. The press’s inaugural publication Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond was named one of the ten best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times. She edited the ambitious national anthology Poetry Goes to the Movies, published Spring, 2025. Poetry.LA produces her YouTube series exploring themes connecting film noir and like-minded poetry, They Write by Night. Her defining essay, “The Poem Noir: Too Dark to Be Depressed,” appeared first in a now-retired journal, Malpais Review, and again in a special noir-focused issue of the Katmandu and-beyond journal, Pratik, which she guest edited. She taught for many years
through the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. This is her fourth collection. |
An imprint of What Books Press, Los Angeles
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GIANT CLAW is a small press located in Los Angeles, California. We are an imprint of What Books Press. Both presses are run by the Glass Table Collective, a diverse group of artists and writers.
In keeping with the original vision of What Books Press, GIANT CLAW will be publishing unique works of literary merit. In addition, GIANT CLAW will seek out and publish ground-breaking books of rigorous intellectual imagination and accomplishment. Submit to Giant Claw via the What Books Press Submittable page. Click here to see if submissions are open. For all other inquiries, please contact publisher Gail Wronsky at [email protected] or (310) 663-2130. |