Books & Projects
The Heretic's Guide to Homecoming
Book Two: Practice
"All good theory stands up to the test of practice."
Freshly-risen from the underworld of his insecurities, Ronoah Genoveffa Elizzi-denna Pilanovani is halfway through his journey to the fabled Pilgrim State. But the world this side of the Iphigene Sea is not an easy one: violence and subterfuge litter the way forward, and something meaner stalks the edges of Ronoah’s certainty, something that threatens to turn the very reason for his pilgrimage to dust.
To survive, he will have to be clever and kind in equal measure. To ask for help from the acrobats and queens-to-be and foreigners’ gods that cross his path. To confront that beguiling, bewildering companion he travels with, the one whose secrets are so vast and unforgivable. He will have to draw on every story he knows in order to make it to the Pilgrim State with his soft heart intact—and then make it home again.
Mythic and multilayered, the final installment of the Heretic’s Guide to Homecoming duology is a love letter to losing and regaining faith in the ways you move through the world.
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"This is one of the top books of 2022, hands down. Hells, it’s one of the top books of the decade."
—Every Book a Doorway (review)
The Heretic's Guide to Homecoming
Book One: Theory
“Life is transformation. You change or you die.”
Ashamed of his past and overwhelmed by his future, Ronoah Genoveffa Elizzi-denna Pilanovani feels too small for his own name. After a graceless exit from his homeland in the Acharrioni desert, his anxiety has sabotaged every attempt at redemption. Asides from a fiery devotion to his godling, the one piece of home he brought with him, he has nothing.
That is, until he meets Reilin. Beguiling, bewildering Reilin, who whisks Ronoah up into a cross-continental pilgrimage to the most sacred place on the planet. The people they encounter on the way—children of the sea, a priestess and her band of storytellers, the lonely ghosts of monsters—are grim and whimsical in equal measure. Each has their part to play in rewriting Ronoah’s personal narrative.
One part fantasy travelogue, one part emotional underworld journey, The Heretic’s Guide to Homecoming is a sumptuous, slow-burning story about stories and the way they shape our lives.
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"This is the sort of indie work that traditional publishers should be salivating over but would never have the courage to publish."
—Brandon Crilly, Shepherd recommendation
hortus animarum:
a new herbal for the queer heart
Poems
Co-winner of Frog Hollow Press' 2021 Chapbook Contest!
hortus animarum, Sienna Tristen's debut chapbook, is an exploration of humankind's intense yet non-romantic relationships and the language (or lack thereof) we have to describe them. With the queerplatonic term "zucchini" as a jumping-off point, other botanical specimens are invoked to depict the flavour and texture of relationship dynamics marked by fruitfulness, nurturance, sacrifice, death & decay, and more besides. Each prose poem exists simultaneously as a love letter to the flower, fruit, or succulent for which it is named, and also as a stretch of the linguistic imagination, an attempt to grasp the fullness of human love and mutual witness.
Tristen has created a contemplative garden between these pages, a space where readers can ponder both their intimate connections to the natural world and also the building of a vocabulary to (re)define their human bonds.
Limited edition; contact to order!