There Is News Along the Ohio River is a paean to careful attention and riverwalks. Beth Gilstrap locates the trauma and grief and gratitude of everyday life in the landscape and history of the Ohio River where it separates Louisville, Kentucky, and Jeffersonville, Indiana. This book offers readers the experience of taking a daily walk along the same path—on the surface, each day is much the same; yet if one looks closely enough, each day also holds new beauty, unexpected strangeness. Written in vignettes that exist somewhere between micro-essays and prose poems, Gilstrap explores personal loss and how it intersects with the world one inhabits: the flora and fauna and human-wrought damage at the space between the urban and the natural, the personal and the profound.

Beth Gilstrap (she/her) is a writer from Charlotte, North Carolina who likes to play with genre lines. She is the author of two story collections including Deadheading & Other Stories (2021), winner of the Red Hen Press Women's Prose Prize, and I Am Barbarella: Stories (2015) from Twelve Winters Press. She is also the author of the chapbook No Man's Wild Laura (2016) from Hyacinth Girl Press & EIC/publisher of the goth/punk zine Black Lily. Her essays, stories, and hybrids have appeared in Poets & Writers, Wigleaf, Craft, Bending Genres, and The Cincinnati Review, among others. She and her house full of critters currently call the Charleston-metro area home. As a neurodivergent human who lives with c-PTSD, she is quite vocal about ending the stigma surrounding mental illness.

"In Beth Gilstrap's There Is News Along the Ohio River, daily walks along the Ohio's 'borderland of metal, earth, and water' become essential acts of survival. The speaker at a brink, the country at a brink, the river reveals herself as mother, refuge, witness, and tether. This collection speaks to the 'pocket between rib and collarbone where so much trauma lives'; which is to say, it speaks vulnerability and tenderness from one who knows. I loved Gilstrap's genre-fluid lyric forms and was profoundly moved by her deep attention to place and psyche." — Violeta Garcia-Mendoza, author of SONGS FOR THE LAND-BOUND

"In There Is News Along the Ohio River, a series of short glimpses reveal the people and the place so deeply that every snippet feels like a novel. In orange sneakers and baked beans and yellow roses, tiny details become windows into the world. This is a tender and beautifully written work, and Gilstrap finds such kindness for humanity that the book feels like the guide we all need right now." — Chloe N. Clark, author of EVERY GALAXY A CIRCLE

"There is News Along the Ohio River is a mesmerizing collection about sore hearts, tangled minds, and the art of noticing the natural world. Dreamlike and haunting, these pieces invite us in with sharp details and astonish us with their turns, lingering long after the book is closed, shining with hard-fought truths." — Heather Bell Adams, author of MARANATHA ROAD