Prolific Press Has Published Patron Saints by Daniel Riddle Rodriguez

JOHNSTOWN, Pa. - Aug. 30, 2018 - PRLog -- Prolific Press Inc. has published Patron Saints by Daniel Riddle Rodriguez via the Prolific Press International Chapbook Series, a venue designed to launch smaller collections of poetry and fiction.

About the book: Spanning a period from the mid-nineties to the early aughts, the linked stories in Patron Saints feature a cast of recurring characters who are irresistibly, undeniably real. A young girl comes-of-age in a town full of hunters, wolf pits, and traps. An ex-con makes a home between rocks and hard places while trying to please both his boss and his probation officer. A prostitute snaps a heel, and her pimp, a self-described "soul poacher," feels compelled to take action. Patron Saints explores the symbiotic relationship between dominant and submissive personalities: lost children and their surrogates, hustlers and hoes, hunters and their human prey—characters consumed by ambition and wracked with guilt. This is a world of lapsed Catholics and burnouts. Beauty queens and bulimics. Like sheep, they were sent into a world of wolves by God, and they haven't forgiven him since.

About the poet: Daniel Riddle Rodriguez is a full-time student and father from San Lorenzo, California, where he lives with his wife and son. He is the author of Low Village (CutBank 2016) and Low Village: Rules of the Game (Nomadic Press 2016). Previous publications include Fourteen Hills, Eleven Eleven, MonkeyBicycle, Juked, Literary Orphans, Gulf Stream Magazine, Glassworks, Mid-American Review, Word Riot, Prairie Schooner, The Penn Review, and others. Moonlighting as a performance poet, he represented the Oakland Slam Team at National Poetry Slam 2014.

What are others saying about this book?

"Daniel Riddle Rodriguez's work is the best kind of fiction: visceral, devastating, hilarious, and full of heart. His stories douse you with ice water and then wrap you in a towel, whispering, I'm sorry, shhh, into your hair. Rodriguez is a compelling new voice in fiction, and fiction is innumerably better for it." --Ruth Madievsky, author of Emergency Brake (Tavern Books 2016)

"Daniel Riddle Rodriguez's stories thrum with electric, dense sentences you'll stop and read again out of awe and delight. But they're not pretty for pretty's sake; they build to bursts of heartbreak as his village of desperate and downtrodden, mordant and wise, characters hustle to survive. Searing, dark, and astonishingly new...ugly-pretty at its finest." -- Kara Vernor, author of Because I Wanted to Write You a Pop Song (Split Lip Press 2016)

"Daniel Riddle Rodriguez maps uncharted territory. These are streets you've never seen, characters you've never met, captured in a musical vernacular bristling with energy. Rodriguez neither judges nor glamorizes the world he describes so vividly. He turns an unflinching gaze on the bonds between human beings invisible in mainstream American fiction: this is a book like no other. Don't miss the debut of this electrifying new talent." --Jacqueline Doyle, author of The Missing Girl (Black Lawrence Press 2017)

"Daniel Riddle Rodriguez is a genuine talent off to a fabulous start." --Stephen D. Gutierrez, author of The Mexican Man in His Backyard (Roan Press 2014) and winner of the American Book Award

Copies are available at the Prolific Press Bookstore: https://prolificpress.com/bookstore/chapbook-series-c-14/...