Lisa Wells

Winner of the 2025 Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry selected by Pulitzer Prize recipient Diane Seuss, The Fire Passage is a lyric descent in the epic tradition, traveling unto realms unmoored by extreme weather and mysterious illness before resurfacing to the light of a world remade. Recording her experience of a health crisis amid continuous natural disaster, poet Lisa Wells recontextualizes biblically scaled plagues as the entropic catastrophes of our late-stage capitalist society. "I was sick, plainly. / I had my symptoms." Confronted with the disbelief and "skeptical pity" of medical professionals, Wells brilliantly illuminates the psychological exile of illness where patients, "turned out by the body," find themselves on "malignancy's forced pilgrimage." The passage she travels is a gauntlet of flame, a path guarded by gatekeepers who acted "as if the wound were in her] mind." ("And it was. But it was elsewhere, too.") This book serves as the answer to a query posed by bad-faith actors and the insightful dream-self alike: "so the wound is a window?" These pages convey grim comfort and radical optimism at once, reminding, "Friend, we die, but do not die alone." They insist on an affirmative practice of responding to rhetorical questions, building solidarity among the weary who call out, ensuring that they--that we--are not alone with silence. "It comes for all? // It comes for all." Despite its frank acknowledgment of fire's lethal nature, the fortifying poetics of this book never preclude the possibility of resurrection or lose their focus on rebuilding a better world from the ashes of this one. "Do not shrink from That Which / razed the scab, will / fertilize the disturbance," Wells commands us. She entreats us to measure up to a corrective future. "Already its great wave breaks / against the mangroves. // Let us go / and greet it."

You know what they say about fake fairy godmothers, it's all sunshine and stilettos, until they take it upon themselves to find you a billionaire spouse. Isabella P. Chance used to be invisible. Then she tripped into the limelight of high school humiliation. Thank her lucky heels, she has a fake fairy godmother. Now, ten-years later, Isabella is one Louboutin step away from redemption. And nothing will defeat her, not even a broody corporate hotshot with a black heart and a fist full of you're-fired slips. Fixer, Chandler Roman, is a man to be feared. Tell that to the beauty who schooled him this morning on taxi etiquette then charmed him with chatter about running late for her first day at the fashion magazine Naked Runway. The same corporation he'd been hired to reorganize. A gentleman would have warned her of his plans to fire her new boss and, regrettably, the woman's newest hire. His cab mate. Isabella hadn't made it this far to have her comeback moment unraveled by the Grinch of Manhattan's Corporate World without landing one thump to his chiseled jaw. And while Chandler was willing to allow her to take her best shot, he was not prepared for the follow-up heart punch. Can these two opposites find a way to strut down life's naked runway together? Vogueish is a grumpy billionaire standalone book in the Naked Runway hot romantic comedy series. If you like flawed fashionistas and flirty fun, then you'll love Lisa Wells' laugh-out-loud romances. Read Vogueish and step upon the runway of romance today.

Goat yoga guruish, Luna Parker, longs to punch her hunky neighbor, Mitch Johnson, in the nose. Not that she would. The law frowns upon that when you're on probation and an ex-felon. Not to mention Karma has been all up in her business ever since she took refuge in the cranky small town of Rocky Mountain Springs. To be fair, the town isn't cranky with everyone...just her. It seems the residents are all disgustingly loyal to their local pot guy. Get on his bad side, and you're shunned. And considering she no longer has buckets of money to instantly attract friends, she's having to make them the old fashion way...one Namaste at a time. Who knew moving to a town with a dispensary would be so full of lows. Dispensary owner, Mitch Johnson, had a rotten childhood. As soon as he was free of that life, he carefully crafted a plan that would mean never being homeless again. One box away from completing it, Bad Luck Luna blew into his town and blew up his blueprint. He's investigated all his options for repairing the laminated document, and the results are in. If she stays, he can't tick off that final box. One of them must leave. Lucky for him, no one in Rocky Mountain Springs wants it to be their pot guy. Full-length grumpy/sunshine small town romance with laugh-out-loud sexy goodness.

"An essential document of our time." --Charles D'Ambrosio, author of Loitering In search of answers and action, the award-winning poet and essayist Lisa Wells brings us Believers, introducing trailblazers and outliers from across the globe who have found radically new ways to live and reconnect to the Earth in the face of climate change We find ourselves at the end of the world. How, then, shall we live? Like most of us, Lisa Wells has spent years overwhelmed by increasingly urgent news of climate change on an apocalyptic scale. She did not need to be convinced of the stakes, but she could not find practical answers. She embarked on a pilgrimage, seeking wisdom and paths to action from outliers and visionaries, pragmatists and iconoclasts. Believers tracks through the lives of these people who are dedicated to repairing the earth and seemingly undaunted by the task ahead. Wells meets an itinerant gardener and misanthrope leading a group of nomadic activists in rewilding the American desert. She finds a group of environmentalist Christians practicing "watershed discipleship" in New Mexico and another group in Philadelphia turning the tools of violence into tools of farming--guns into ploughshares. She watches the world's greatest tracker teach others how to read a trail, and visits botanists who are restoring land overrun by invasive species and destructive humans. She talks with survivors of catastrophic wildfires in California as they try to rebuild in ways that acknowledge the fires will come again. Through empathic, critical portraits, Wells shows that these trailblazers are not so far beyond the rest of us. They have had the same realization, have accepted that we are living through a global catastrophe, but are trying to answer the next question: How do you make a life at the end of the world? Through this miraculous commingling of acceptance and activism, this focus on seeing clearly and moving forward, Wells is able to take the devastating news facing us all, every day, and inject a possibility of real hope. Believers demands transformation. It will change how you think about your own actions, about how you can still make an impact, and about how we might yet reckon with our inheritance.

*The Manhattan Knitters' Club invites you to apply to join them for their Friday night gatherings. If approved, and that's a big IF, you agree to bring the following to each meeting: tiara, bottle of wine, and knitting supplies.* By day, Wendy Travis is a stone-cold-accurate proofreader of contracts for individuals whose deeds bend toward the peculiar. By night, she's the out-of-date fashionista president of the Manhattan Knitters' Club. The club's motto: What happens at knit club stays at knit club When the new upstairs neighbor interrupts her sleep with his nocturnal shenanigans, she's suddenly not so accurate in her job. With the backup of her knitting friends, she confronts Mr. Can't Keep It In His Pants. Land developer, Jackson Adler, is in the wrong place at the...right time. When a posse of tiara-wearing, needle-wielding misfits-including one very animated, very sexy, and slightly tipsy woman-mistake him for the tenant of Apartment 5C, he doesn't correct their error. Instead, he suggests a quid pro quo agreement. He'll pipe down if Wendy agrees to buy him at an upcoming bachelor-auction...on his dime of course. Wendy counters wither her own quid pro quo offer because she intends to find out if those late-night moans and squeals of pleasure are fake-or stone-cold accurate responses. Conventional? No. Worthwhile? Time will tell.

"If you want to learn how to write humor, get this book " - NY Times Bestselling Author Darynda JonesTHE COMPLETEHUMOR GUIDEFOR NOVELISTSLearning how to add humor to your stories isn't a bumfuzzle science. After all, humor is a result of imagination, and we fiction authors are imaginative. Of course, mastering the skill of witty will require you to ever-so-slightly DEVELOP a sense of humor. You can't stay unfunny and still write funny. That's not how this works. Once you've learned the nine things that cause laughter, and the dozen comedic tools best suited to create that kind of humor in your story, you'll then learn how to translate your new knowledge onto the pages of your books. Plus, on those days your funny bone needs a little extra kick in the derri re, you'll have oodles of examples of how I used the laugh-inducing tips and tricks in my own award-winning contemporary and paranormal romantic comedies. Warning: This book may cause you to forever see the world through a haze of hilarity.

Proceeding from Hélène Cixous’s charge to “kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing,” The Fix forges that woman’s reckoning with her violent past, with her sexuality, and with a future unmoored from the trappings of domestic life. These poems of lyric beauty and unflinching candor negotiate the terrain of contradictory desire—often to darkly comedic effect. In encounters with strangers in dive bars and on highway shoulders, and through ekphrastic engagement with visionaries like William Blake, José Clemente Orozco, and the Talking Heads, this book seeks the real beneath the dissembling surface. Here, nothing is fixed, but grace arrives by diving into the complicated past in order to find a way to live, now.