New & Noteworthy Books

Appetite

Poetry by Aaron Smith

University of Pittsburgh Press, December 2012

ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-6219-9

Paperback: 64pp; $15.95

Appetite is a book that explores our American mythologies, particularly masculinity and film. Aaron Smith investigates our fascinations with the body, gender, and entertainment in poems that are critically observant, darkly funny, darkly angry, and sometimes heartbreaking. Whether he is cataloging shirtless men in films and bad television, lyricizing the anxieties of childhood, or redrawing the lines of cultural membership, Appetite attacks its subjects with wit, candor, and compassionate intensity. Aaron Smith is the author of Blue on Blue Ground, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Men in Groups. His work has appeared in a number of literary magazines, including Ploughshares and Prairie Schooner. He is assistant professor of English at West Virginia Wesleyan College.

Black Tulips

Poetry by Jose Maria Hinojosa

Translated from the Spanish by Mark Statman

University of New Orleans Press, September 2012

ISBN-13: 978-1608010882

Paperback: 192pp; $18.95

Black Tulips is a selection from the poetry of José María Hinojosa, the first English translation of a well-known poet of Spain’s famed Generation of ‘27, which included García Lorca, Dalí, Buñuel, Alberti, Aleixandre and Hernandez. His surrealist poetry contrasted with his right wing politics, causing him to break with the group during the Spanish Republic. He was assassinated by Republican sympathizers in 1936 and his writing disappeared from Spanish culture until the end of the 20th century.

Captive

Poetry by Martin Ott

C & R Press, October 2012

ISBN-13: 978-1-936196-10-4

Paperback: 80pp; $14.95

Martin Ott, a former U.S. Army interrogator, puts the world and his personal life beneath an inquisitor’s bright light in a debut collection of poetry that has been featured in magazines such as Connecticut Review, Harvard Review, Hotel Amerika, New Letters, Notre Dame Review and Prairie Schooner. He is the co-author, with John F. Buckley, of Poet’s Guide to America (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2012).

Consonant Sounds for Fish Songs

Fiction by Traci Chee

Aqueous Books, August 2012

ISBN-13: 978-0-9847399-6-7

Paperback: 208pp; $14

Consonant Sounds for Fish Songs is a collection of 17 short stories that explore the border between what you know and what you can’t explain. These characters inhabit a world where turning into a fish is the only sensible solution to loneliness and the search for God is conducted through amplifiers and tape decks. Drawing on the traditions of Borges and Calvino, this collection portrays real-world problems that manifest in bizarre ways.

Dark Times Filled with Light

The Selected Work of Juan Gelman

Poetry by Juan Gelman

Translated from the Spanish by Hardie St. Martin

Open Letter, November 2012

ISBN-13: 978-1-934-824-68-9

Paperback: 192pp; $14.95

As Juan Gelman’s name begins appearing with regularity on lists predicting Noble-Laureate-deserving poets, his work has also begun to appear in English. But only now are the most stunning translations of Gelman’s poetry being published, and in one substantial volume. Dark Times Filled with Light traces the evolution of a gifted lyrical poet’s encounter with the political, when the poet’s son and daughter-in-law become “disappeared” by the Argentinian government, and the poet must write from both a literal and metaphysical exile. In this posthumously realized labor of love by the legendary translator Hardie St. Martin, Gelman’s staggering biography, and the poetics he developed to articulate and survive it, are unforgettably translated into beautiful and accessible poems that, taken together, weave a fragile but healing transformation.

Matters of Record

Chapbook by Megan Roberts

Finishing Line Press, 2012

ISBN-13: 978-1-62229-078-9

Chapbook: 28pp; $12

Megan Roberts’s first chapbook, Matters of Record, takes readers into the crimes and punishments of female murderers. The voices in these 19 poems are those of victims, juries, witnesses, and the murderers themselves. Roberts’s fiction and poetry have appeared in The Raleigh Quarterly, Albatross, and Smokelong Quarterly, among others. She was recently awarded N.C. State’s Academy of American Poets Prize.

Pink Thunder

Poetry by Michael Zapruder

Black Ocean, December 2012

ISBN-13: 978-0-9844752-6-1

Hardcover: 64pp; $24.95

With contributions from 23 poets, 3 engineers, and over 30 musicians, Pink Thunder presents a musical and lyrical experiment by award-winning songwriter/composer Michael Zapruder, to see what happens when poems are sung instead of spoken. Potent with weird, funny, and singular possibilities, Pink Thunder’s playful and startling songs take their form entirely from the shape of the poems from which they are made. The result is a collection of musical readings both compelling and surprising. This full-color hardcover book contains an artist’s statement by Michael Zapruder with an introduction by Scott Pinkmountain and comes with a CD containing 22 tracks. Pink Thunder also features photographs from the recording sessions and the Wave Poetry Bus Tour and hand-lettered versions of the poems illuminated by Arrington de Dionyso.

Plainsight

Chapbook by Justin Runge

New Michigan Press, December 2012

ISBN-13: 978-1-934832-38-7

Chapbook: 52pp; $9

The sparse poems in Plainsight travel through areas that the world forgets, places where “Propane tanks / slender as war- / heads sit next / to corrugated / steel everything.” Justine Runge’s collection captures the bleak, the forgotten, the dying, with crisp precision. Born in Omaha, Runge currently lives in Lawrence, Kansas, and serves as the poetry editor of Parcel. His poems have appeared in DIAGRAM, Linebreak, The Journal, and elsewhere.