Getting to Know the Stoveman, by April Alexis Hernandez

Prose, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Getting to Know the Stoveman is a collection of vignettes that delves into the idea that love is more than big gestures and rather finding its warmth in the small yet habitual acts of care given by the people around you. After learning her estranged uncle has passed away, Hernandez helps pack up his possessions and in the process she discovers that their similarities run deeper than the blood that they share.

Through her sincere yet offbeat tone, Hernandez’s memoir finds love in small actions and encapsulates a bigger story using focused and simplistic vignettes. Her writing, while being tied to specific moments in her life, draws on universal themes of love, loss, and death that all can relate to and connect with, in both their happiest and their darkest of times.

April Alexis Hernandez is a Portland, Oregon native who graduated summa cum laude from Portland State University in 2018 with a BFA in Creative Writing with a focus on Creative Nonfiction and a minor in English. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in The Wire’s Dream Magazine and her Pushcart Prize nominated poetry has been featured in Lucky Jefferson. She has had other poems appear in Snapdragon: A Journal of Art and Healing, Pile Press and Tiny Spoon. She currently resides in her hometown with her partner Gabriel Lakey, and if she is not working she can usually be found reading as many books as she can possibly consume and helping with Pile Press, of which she is the co-coordinator and submissions reader for. You can follow her on Instagram: @april.alexis.