Writing
Recent publications
Grief Stick limited edition poetry chapbook sold via this website and this fall at Up Up Books and Powell's
Where the One-Eyed Man Is King in Vol 1 Brooklyn
Swingers in Cleaver
Cold Plum Wine: two-story chapbook by Alex Behr and John McManus, sold at Up Up Books in Portland (Picture Frame Press)
Month Three in Ghost City Press
The Problem Was Starting in X-R-A-Y
I of I in Stranged Writing: A Literary Taxonomy
The Game of Stupid Poly in Vol 1 Brooklyn
A Nation of Bombs in Heavy Feather Review
Interview with poet Matthew Dickman in Maggot Brain #11
Smith-Corona, Treat podcast
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
Complete list of published poems, fiction, essays, and interviews
“You wanted to believe you’d lived through something. That the music wasn’t empty. That the muscles and blood and skin were put together for some reason beyond a pissing match between the bartender and one singer with a chipped tooth, now breathing heavy, having been punched in the stomach by a skinhead.” — “The Passenger”