New & Noteworthy Books

See full list of noteworthy books by category below

Posted on March 27, 2008

Apparition Wren

Poems by Maureen Alsop

Main Street Rag Books, March 2008

ISBN: 9781599480909

Paperback: 90 pp; $14

This title was selected for publication after finishing as a finalist in the 2007 MSR Poetry Book Award contest. "The poems in Apparition Wren are sometimes sensual, sexual, almost rawly empathic to the loneliness and suffering of the characters she writes about (look at "Mud Pie Underworld," "Butcher's Wife"); sometimes Alsop's poems are less narrative, and still beautifully candid and strange." —Jean Valentine

 

Clear All the Rest of the Way

New and Selected Poems: 1987-2007

Poems by Warren Woessner

Backwaters Press, March 2008

ISBN: 0979393442

Paperback: 92pp; $16

Warren Woessner is a poet, an attorney, and a chemist. His poetry has appeared in many literary reviews, environmental journals, and anthologies, including Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The Nation, and Appalachia. He has received individual poetry fellowships from the NEA and the Wisconsin Arts Board.

 

The Death of a Poem

and Other Paragraphs

Poems by Justin Courter

Main Street Rag Books, March 2008

ISBN: 9781599481043

Paperback: 80 pp; $14

This title was selected for publication after finishing as a finalist in the 2007 MSR Poetry Book Award contest. "A consumer devours himself, a junk-food addict eats from garbage cans, a titmouse lives in a woman's bra: there is a demented literal-mindedness to these funny, fast-paced prose poems that turns the world inside out and reveals every smidgen of its goofy, delicious splendor." —David Kirby//

 

Do the Math

Poems by Emily Galvin

Tupelo Press, April 2008

ISBN: 9781932195160

Paperback: 79pp; $16.95

"Galvin delights in the extraordinarily rich arithmetic of her novel poetic forms, making full use of the interplay between their crystalline and organic nature. She takes her forms from some of the most elegant and fundamental constructions in basic arithmetic, the Fibonacci Sequence 1,1, 2,3,5,8,13, 21…  as described in a great treatise written in the 13th century; of the Euclidean Algorithm as described in Book VII of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry;  and some of her forms depend simply upon the sequence of prime numbers ..." —Barry Mazur

 

Silk & Sting

Poems by Collette Anderson Gill

Finishing Line Press, 2008

ISBN: 1599242400

Paperback: 27pp; $12

This is Gill's first collection of poems. She has had poems appear in The Texas Review, Southwestern American Literature, The Texas Creative Writer's Newsletter, and Houston Poetry Anthology, 2005.//

 

The Translator's Diary

Poems by Jon Pineda

New Issues Poetry & Prose, March 2008

ISBN: 1930974752

Paperback: 57pp; $14

"Grappling with loss, memory, and absence as palpable presence, Jon Pineda laments the ways "what is whole is momentary" while finding solace in images." —Claudia Emerson

 

The Virgin Formica

Poems by Sharon Mesmer

Hanging Loose Press, 2008

ISBN: 9781931236911

Paperback: 91pp; $16

Sharon Mesmer’s other poetry collections include Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books, 2008), Vertigo Seeks Affinities (Belladonna Books, 2006), Half Angel, Half Lunch (Hard Press, 1998) and Crossing Second Avenue (ABJ Books, Japan, 1997).She is a two-time New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in poetry.//

 

Oh Baby

Flash Fiction, Prose Poems by Kim Chinquee

Ravenna Press, 2008

ISBN: 9780979192180

Paperback: 88pp; $13.95

A wonderful debut collection of prose poems and flash fictions, short short stories of beautiful precisions and understated passions. While the bricks with which Chinquee constructs her fictions—failed or failing relationships, childhood friendships, the intricacies of family life—are not uncommon, the architecture she creates with them is rare indeed: stories now full of light, now somber, now opening the reader’s eyes to an utterly new space.

 

The Human Mind

Short Prose by Angela Woodward

Ravenna, 2007

ISBN: 9780979192166

Paperback: 50pp; $12.95

These stories brim with ideas, with firm outward gazes upon the story's world and a bracing intellect involved beyond the self. Historical figures such as Edgar Allan Poe, William James and Robert Hooke people them, but so do a man made of smoke, an orphaned woman who sews hats and handbags, and the alchemist Dr. Crafft, who bottles starlight.

 

The Secret of Me

A Novel in Poems

YA Fiction by Meg Kearney

Persea, 2008

ISBN: 0892553367

Paperback: 144pp; $12

This novel in verse follows 14-year-old Lizzie through a year in which, despite her loving family, a circle of good friends, and a potential first boyfriend, she is plagued with a personal secret. She desperately wants to find out the story behind her adoption and her own identity, and while her parents and brother and sister (also adopted) are sympathetic, they discourage her from pursuing it. The lack of information leads her to worry obsessively and she frequently finds herself in her broken place where she wonders if being adopted makes her less of a person and if she can ever share her secret with others.//

 

The Year She Disappeared

A Novel by Ann Harleman

University of Texas Press, March 2008

ISBN: 9780292717473

Hardcover: 320pp; $24.95

Nan and her four-year-old granddaughter Jane are taking their first airplane trip together, flying from Seattle to the East Coast. But this is no ordinary excursion. Nan is abducting Jane. Nan's own daughter, Alex, believes Jane's father has been sexually abusing her, and she's asked Nan to take her away, to hide her. But when she and Jane arrive in Providence, Rhode Island, things begin to go wrong. The old friend whom Nan expected to stay with has vanished. Her son-in-law is on her trail. And Alex disappears. "I'm too old for this!" Nan thinks, in furious, self-pitying despair. She wasn't a good wife; she wasn't a good mother. Now she's stranded in a strange city, without friends or money or even her own identity, in sole charge of a very unhappy little girl. When her new life offers new friends, new work, and even a new lover, she must decide whom to trust.

 

New Britain Diary, 1954:

An Anthropologist's Journal

Nonfiction by Daris R. Swindler

Ravenna, May 2007

ISBN: 0979192110

Paperback: 150pp; $18.95

Daris Swindler's six-month daily journal, written while on expedition to Melanesia from the University of Pennsylvania with Dr. Ward Goodenough and Dr. Ann Chowning fifty-three years ago, is human and captivating and shows us yet another time that is gone forever. Generously illustrated with photos from the trip the account takes us through unexpected adventures and routine data collection, all with a touch that is accessible and entertaining, and introduces us to a generous, independent people living in a natural setting and learning to adapt to modern life.//

 

Voices Rising

Stories from the Katrina Narrative Project

Edited by Rebecca Antoine
University of New Orleans, March 2008
ISBN: 0972814337
Paperback: 250pp; $12.95

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast and nearly toppled the historic city of New Orleans. As the storm cleared, residents watched water and chaos overtake their city, while political and legal systems proved unprepared and insufficient. The University of New Orleans served as a base for rescue and sustained tremendous damage to its Lakefront campus, but, in October 2005, the university reopened online and asked students to submit interviews and accounts of citizens' experiences during Hurricane Katrina. Hundreds of manuscripts, interviews, and transcripts were collected from students and other residents who were willing to share their personal stories of the disaster. UNO compiled all of the submissions and created The Katrina Narrative Project, which is currently housed at the University of New Orleans Library. Voices Rising is a sampling of this greater collection. Transcending the images and headlines portrayed in the media, these are the true accounts of trauma and survival told by the people who endured them.

 

New & Noteworthy Books

Page updated: March 27, 2008