Writing

Alex Behr reading at Powell's Books, 2017

Grief Stick Poetry Chapbook

“Alex Behr’s GRIEF STICK is a beautiful and shattering real-life love story that cuts deep and true. A film of the same name will also come to life soon.” — Powell’s Staff Pick

Chapbook: 40 pp. 5.5X4.25”. High-quality cover and paper stock. Picture Frame Press. Dedicated to Christopher Hartman, Alex’s partner and fiancé, who died Oct. 6, 2020.

Limited copies available of first edition. Second edition now printed in appealing teal.

Up Up Books, Powell’s Books

Inaugural reading at Up Up Books, on Thur., Sept 5, 2024, 7 pm with Matthew Dickman and book designer Scott Cannon.

“Her poetry is ecstatic, tender, vulnerable, fierce, and wholly unique. When I think of Alex there’s not another writer she reminds me of. If I were to compare her work as a poet it would have to be a comparison to some sort of mix between the late, great, visual artist Carl Andre and the band Public Image Limited or a mash-up of Patti Smith and the band Minor Threat.” — Matthew Dickman

Planet Grim: Stories

ISBN: 978-0998409221
Distributor: Ingram

In twenty-eight stories that draw blood while making you laugh, Alex Behr’s debut collection Planet Grim is a vivid, unsettling portrait of the gritty fringes of San Francisco and Portland, where complicated characters long for connection just out of reach. Behr is an idiosyncratic, unpredictable prose stylist with an edge and willingness to cut to the bone that makes her writing truly original..

"Alex Behr's Planet Grim turned me inside out. No, really, these stories of eros and ids getting loose, inner contradictions and desires crashing into each other like marbles, brutal instances of violence up against a moment of tender beauty, the people and lovers and mothers and families in this book are carved from the guts of us. What sits dead center at this hybrid of self and other is, mercifully, an unbeaten heart." —Lidia Yuknavitch, Thrust
“Alex Behr’s imagination is wild, rigorous, and totally unique. I haven’t been able to decide if her stories are comedies intercut with horror or horror stories leavened by comedy, but when they’re this entertaining, who cares?” —Tom Bissell, Creative Types
“Alex Behr’s characters are conflicted, uncertain, and pained. What’s so compelling about her fiction is how she honors that conflictedness, explores the uncertainties, and examines the pain until it reveals itself as irreducibly human and therefore a kind of grace.” —Dan DeWeese, Soft Rock Classics
“In Alex Behr’s funny poignant stories the kids are sharp, fearless, and insatiable, the parents conflicted, lustful, and tough. The meaning of family and love is an epic game nobody can win or stop playing.” —Mary Rechner, Marrying Friends

PUBLICATIONS

Poetry

Grief Stick chapbook, Picture Frame Press

Sweet, Like Cookie and a Walrus, Buckman Journal (forthcoming)

Barbie’s Starlight Motor Home, Sold on Etsy, Painted Bride Quarterly

Month Three, Ghost City Review

Spectacles, Kithe

I of I, anthologized in Stranged Writing: A Literary Taxonomy, Gravity of the Thing, finalist for the 2022 INDIES Book of the Year Award for Anthologies

Pacify Her and About a Girl, Gravity of the Thing

Be Like the Baby; Be Like the Man, Submission Reading Series poetry chapbook