Winner of the WTAW Alcove Chapbook Series Prize. In the bygone era of a decaying frontier, deer hunters Lemuel and Lars hitch up as backwoods companions. Each troubled by missing mothers and flinty fathers, they thwart attempts at intimacy, funneling these impulses into fantasies of violence and revenge. Occasioned by brief moments of sublimity, the two edge closer to a blizzard of repressed desire. Only the deer themselves might cede medicine for earthbound wounds. Borrowing sensibility from docupoetics, where lyricism works to comment on an archive, and drawing upon Theodore Roosevelt's "Daniel Boone's Move to Kentucky," Promiscuous Ruin is a rich, expansive and wholly original book, and Julian Mithra's voice is a treasure.