Empowered: A Woman Faculty of Color’s Guide to Teaching and Thriving by Chavella T. Pittman The University of Oklahoma Press, September 2025
Experience and research show that women faculty of color are among the most overworked, unfairly criticized, and least rewarded individuals in higher education, often thwarted in achieving the fundamental goals of an academic career despite consistently delivering on the field’s highest promise — preparing students to contribute meaningfully to the world. In Empowered, Chavella T. Pittman offers these highly effective yet underappreciated scholars expert guidance, encouragement, and practical strategies drawn from decades of experience, showing them how to be unapologetically authentic in their teaching, advocate for their classroom excellence, practice self-compassion, and reclaim joy in their work. Through research-based tools for navigating intersectional race and gender tensions, exercises to withstand toxic dynamics, and methods to resist silencing and amplify their voices, Pittman equips women faculty of color to meet the outsized challenges they face in academia and to fully realize the careers, contributions, and lives they have long deserved.
In her third collection, all one in the end—/water, Soham Patel draws inspiration from Lorine Niedecker’s “Paean to Place” to explore how poetry can offer grounding and community amid the disorientation of capitalism and technology. Patel’s poems are lyrical sites where we think together about where we live and how we care for it and each other, highlighting her interest in communities that “make inclusion an initiative.”
Patel crafts her poems from multiple perspectives — reader, writer, friend, sibling, and vegan with a “vata constitution” — to argue for honesty about human motivation. By referencing the vata dosha’s link to wind and ether, she clarifies her aim: to increase awareness of how “need breeds greed” and to inspire conversations that challenge how we see the world — and even “change our gaze.”
Patel shows how time shapes perspective through two poetic devices: the running title and the contrapuntal form. The running title acts as the poem’s first line and spills into the text, creating an uninterrupted flow. This compression accelerates time and pulls the reader into the poem’s immediacy. It also subverts the title’s traditional role as a separate identifier. This device encourages consideration of how we “assemble” and what we “sublimate.” The contrapuntal form expands and slows time by inviting the poem to be read in more than one way — across both columns, down one before winding to the other, or each independently. The form encourages exploration of “origins of place” and “redrawn borders.” These devices help Patel show, through poetics, how “to displace small things in order to destroy a larger trouble.”
Patel’s poetry offers art and community as strategies for confronting global “atrocities” and shared accountability. Rather than simply identifying the flaws in capitalism’s “market value” model or settler colonialism’s “stolen/zoned/purchased” and mined approach, her poetry deliberately avoids condescension or reiterating what is already known. Instead, she takes responsibility and presents alternatives — companionship, community, and “building a poetry” above the highwater mark. In all one in the end—/water, Soham Patel offers refuge.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (University of Nevada Press, 2025), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Macarty’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024), 2025 finalist for the bpNichol Award. To learn more about Macarty’s writing, editing, and teaching, visit her author website.
Jennifer Bowering Delisle’s latest poetry collection, Stock, uses search engines and stock photographs as prompts to craft persona, erasure, found, and list poems that critique the staged, clichéd narratives embedded in corporate and domestic imagery. Through a conceptual approach and an “engineered” engagement, the poet seeks to expose the manipulative and biased undercurrents of stock images.
The collection is divided into five sections, addressing themes surrounding motherhood, family, holidays, job searches, and the corporate world. Delisle’s focus on the “composition” of images, searches, and poems drives the collection’s central critique. By using search-engine language to construct poems, she highlights how supposedly neutral visual and textual data are shaped by preconceived narratives. “[Search]” poems such as “Writer” and “Craft” are most revealing, offering glimpses of the poet behind the mask and reinforcing the book’s argument about authenticity’s difficulty amid digital artifice. Most poems inhabit invented personae — especially women in domestic or corporate roles — demonstrating how voices are “encumbered” by superficiality, cliché, and external judgment. At times, the use of persona risks insensitivity, potentially perpetuating the very objectification and reduction it seeks to expose. As the poet writes: “Just who is it / you mean to save?”
Describing these poems as ekphrastic reveals another tension in the project’s logic. Critiquing stock images by elevating them to art draws attention to the complexities and gambles of such an approach. The poems consistently hold up a mirror to societal conventions and ills. However, the absence of alternatives or solutions leaves the impact of this critique in question — does it provoke change, foster awareness, or risk reinforcing issues it seeks to highlight?
Though rich in sociopolitical commentary — particularly on gender roles — the writing sometimes lacks the emotional sympathy that might complicate its critique. Addressing what critique achieves or fails to achieve could deepen the collection’s exploration of artistic responsibility and engagement with the systems it interrogates. Still, Stock is a timely reflection on media, representation, and the aesthetics of contemporary life.
Stock by Jennifer Bowering Delisle. Coach House Books, September 2025.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (University of Nevada Press, 2025), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Macarty’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024), 2025 finalist for the bpNichol Award. To learn more about Macarty’s writing, editing, and teaching, visit her author website.
A Spoonie’s Guide to Self-Acceptance by Kelly Esparza Bottlecap Press, November 2025
How do you live life to the fullest when you’re diagnosed with a chronic illness in your twenties? In this grief-inspired poetry chapbook, Kelly Esparza chronicles her experience with living with a chronic illness by cycling through what it means to grieve over a diagnosis and find self-acceptance in a completely life-altering experience.
From debilitating fatigue to joint pain that makes one feel elderly, how does one cope over the loss of what used to be? Kelly strives to show the difficulties of living with a chronic illness, but as with all her poetry, she also finds the beauty and the hope to keep moving on and make the most of what she lives with on a daily basis. Her life may have changed, but she has come out stronger than ever.
Kelly Esparza (she/her) is a chronically ill writer and freelance editor who holds BAs in English and Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. She is also the editor-in-chief of FLARE Magazine, a literary journal that publishes literature and art about chronic illnesses, disabilities, and mental health. Find out more on her website: kellyesparza.wordpress.com.
Endangered Youth — Taiwan, Hong Kong, Ukraine is a powerful collection of short/micro fiction that captures the struggles of young generations fighting for dignity, autonomy, cultural identity, and freedom of speech. Through vivid storytelling and deeply human narratives, Anderson-Wu brings to life the voices of those resisting oppression, navigating political turmoil, and striving to preserve their heritage in the face of adversity. This collection is a testament to the resilience of people in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Ukraine, where battles for self-determination and democratic values continue to shape their futures.
C. J. Anderson-Wu (吳介禎) is a Taiwanese writer who has published two collections about Taiwan’s military dictatorship (1949–1987), known as the White Terror: Impossible to Swallow (2017) and The Surveillance (2020).
New releases from Livingston Press. Check out our deep cuts for backstock! View our flyer for new releases and visit our website for our current catalog.
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The Colorado Authors League (CAL) supports and promotes its community of published writers while connecting with and adding value to the reading world. Formed in 1931, authors become members to: keep up with changes in the craft of writing, publishing, and marketing, gain greater visibility for their writing, join a group of like-minded people who love writing. View our flyer to see new releases by members this November and learn more at our website.
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When James Penha moved to Indonesia more than thirty years ago, he fell in love with its archipelago, its people, and its folk tales. But most of the tales, especially when passed on to him orally by natives, were as fragmentary as an Aesop fable. Penha wanted to ask why a wizard would do this or why a goddess would choose that, but the storyteller had no way of knowing. When Penha did dare to be impolite enough to raise such queries, he would usually be told to “believe it or not. It’s up to you.”
Penha took on the challenge and rewrote and published Indonesian legends with the logic and sometimes the sensibilities and sexualities of contemporary fiction without sacrificing the magic and fantasy and exoticism of the originals.
What Penha, as a gay male, missed in the project were LGBTQIA+ characters and plots. And so he set about queerly adapting tales from around the world. They — as well as Penha’s own original speculative stories — comprise Queer As Folk Tales.
The title reveals the collection’s target audience, of course, but the author says he is pretty sure even straight readers will enjoy the narratives and the characters.
In Blade Work, winner of Parlor Press’s New Measure Poetry Prize, Lily Brown writes into palpable presence the space between “Goodbye” and “The Possible.” She achieves this by setting her poems on the “blurred brink” — between dream and waking life, body and realm, memory and the future. The poems flow without sections, enhancing continuity and allowing consciousness to shift and overlap. Through the “aperture” of time, Brown transforms “recollection” into an artistic “estimation of the present.”
Descartes once asked, “How can I know that I am not now dreaming?” This question echoes throughout Blade Work. As Brown similarly explores the reliability of sensory experience and the nature of the external world, she draws attention to the distinction between “what’s in or in front of you,” questioning the very essence of reality.
Within the poems, the speaker frequently awakens from dreams, questioning whether the experiences were “nightmares or reveries, / losses or gifts.” The nature of this inquiry evokes trauma and “grief untwisted.” “These are dark works,” the poet admits, but leaves the reader to ponder what “casts shadows.” The poems gain strength from their ambiguity which underscores the idea that genuine understanding often lies in discerning the “half crafted, / half arranged’ connections that shape our beliefs.
Combined, this ambiguity and quest for the present propel Brown’s approach to craft. In her search for a poetic “valve that lets another consciousness arrive,” Brown’s lines serve as instruments of both excision and concision. Each carefully crafted line is as precise as a knife, an oar, or a pen in motion — distinct acts that mirror the collection’s central tension between a “freezing past” and an uncertain future. Combined with her “jagged” diction and verbs that “judder,” these elements of craft and theme work together to define Lily Brown’s voice “against memory’s airy commerce—” in order to “stay true” to her own “cracked intuition.” After the backstory is “cut / mercifully,” these poems thrumming, winging.
Blade Work by Lily Brown. Parlor Press, January 2025.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.
Sandra Marchetti’s baseball poetry from Aisle 228 (Texas A&M University Press, 2023), “slides / from view” as her third collection, Diorama, “assembles.” Across three sections, Diorama features occasion-driven poems dedicated to loved ones, poetic influences, and the natural world.
Marchetti’s poems skillfully incorporate both overt and subtle metrics, end rhyme, alliteration, and assonance. Most of her poems are short, seldom exceeding a single page, and feature concise lines that are broken for sonic or semantic effect. Primarily observational, the poems use imagery as the foundational element to “hold and release” the reader’s attention.
The poet seems more focused on capturing specific moments and freezing them in time than existing within their flow. Sometimes, this snapshot-capturing approach, combined with the poet’s frequent use of the indicative mood, weakens the poems’ potential for deeper resonance and emotional connection with the reader.
As they accumulate, the subject-object observations create a layered remove within the poems, leaving the reader unsure of how the speaker feels about this distance. This ambiguity may hint at ambivalence. At the very least, it indicates that the poet is willing to describe the experience of distance, but not necessarily attempt to bridge it within herself, her environment, or the relationships represented in the poems. This creates a fascinating “lucid unease” and unsettling effect.
But then in poems such as “Feather,” “Witness,” and “All that I can tell from here,” Marchetti immerses the reader in a multi-sensory experience, evoking emotions through the symbolism of a feather “off the wing,” the “inevitable / disappearance” of a snake, and pins on a map that show “you and I / span 3,000 miles.” Here, the power of Marchetti’s well-executed and felt description “fades… this distance” between poet and the objects of her observation or desire. By the last poem, “A Swim at Europe Bay Beach in July, Deserted,” even though “the ants [are] eating our cherries / at the shoreline,” we are swimming together — language, observation, feeling, and humanity tuned in poetic balance.
Diorama by Sandra Marchetti. Stephen F. Austin University Press, May 2025.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.
Angela Flournoy’s first novel, The Turner House, gathered together a family to make sense of a life lived in a particular place and understand how to move forward. Flournoy takes a similar approach in her second novel, The Wilderness, though this work focuses on friendship more than family. Nakia, Desiree, Monique, and January are trying to craft lives and careers as young Black women in America. They each spend time in their particular wilderness, but they all have each other to rely upon when they are at their lowest points.
Lest this description sound saccharine and sentimental, Flournoy is too good of a writer to ever let the novel stray into that territory. Instead, she presents each woman’s struggles as real and true to life, and the friends help them survive, but not unscathed, as they all carry scars. January marries a man she knows she shouldn’t, solely because she’s pregnant and it’s the most convenient choice. Desiree is estranged from her sister after growing up without both parents — one leaves and one dies. Monique believes she’s not as successful as the others until she goes viral and becomes an influencer, losing part of her self in the process. Nakia wonders if she should be accomplishing more with her life than running a restaurant, while trying to find love as a Queer Black woman.
The last quarter of the book shifts the focus slightly. The politics that were simmering under the surface throughout — the novel takes place from 2008 to 2027 — become the focal point of the novel, as the United States becomes an even more dangerous place for minorities and those who work for justice. Climate change is worsening, economic gaps are widening, and the police is becoming more militarized and technological especially during the 2020 protests over the killing of George Floyd. These developments lead to the women’s living lives they wouldn’t have chosen or imagined. While they still support one another, their world values them less and less, leading to a wilderness they may not survive.
The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy. Mariner Books, September 2025.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
Evan Osnos’s collection of essays began as articles in The New Yorker, where Osnos has worked for seventeen years. He’s organized these ten essays into three sections: The Rewards (How to Spend It), The Mechanics (How to Keep It), and The Perils (How to Lose It). All three sections offer their own rewards, depending on what the reader is most interested in.
In the first section, Osnos explores the problem that the ultrarich have, two problems actually: how to spend the vast sums of money they have and how to use those purchases to show people just how much money they have. As the title reveals, yachts are a solution to both problems in the first essay, “The Floating World.” These yachts, though, are not what most of us think of, as there are now categories ranging from superyacht (more than ninety-eight feet) to gigayachet (more than two hundred and ninety-five feet), costing more than two hundred and fifty million dollars (and topping four hundred feet). What truly distinguishes the ultrarich here, though, is the service on the yachts. Given that the law only allows them to carry twelve passengers, even in such a large space, amenities and crew (who don’t count as people) take up the rest of the space, providing each passenger with numerous staff to ensure they have a luxurious time.
In The Mechanics, Osnos delves into trusts; social media and democracy; the move of country-club Republicans to Trump supporters; and how politicians and commentators, such as Tucker Carlson, attack the elite while belonging to the ultrarich. The three essays in The Perils center around fraud, primarily. The first two essays — “Land of Make-Believe” and “Patriot Games” — both portray people who pretended to be richer and more connected than they were to obtain wealth and power, only to lose it all in the end. The final essay, “The Big House,” discusses people who have been convicted of white-collar crime and how they adjust to life after prison.
The collection gives a varied look at those who have more money than most readers can even imagine, which can lead to shock and dismay, as well as anger and outrage. Osnos doesn’t seem to want to stoke any particular emotion in his readers. He’s content to present the stories as clearly and factually as he can, then let the reader decide how to react.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
In Certain Shelter, Abbie Kiefer sensitively examines how personal and communal loss shape identity, focusing on a woman balancing responsibilities to her children and aging parents. The collection is a tribute to her late mother and reflects on the fading industries in Gardiner, Maine. Kiefer explores transitions from being cared for to caring for others and the granting of autonomy to her sons, alongside pivotal moments in her hometown, such as “My Friend Tells Me About the Last Day at the Bass Shoe Factory.”
As Kiefer examines the “human weight” of loss, weaving together her grief with the collective “sorrow” of her community, she is always “tender / toward relics—” She reveals vulnerability as she “Gently / attests to the nature / of contrast—” Her skill lies in expressing the entwined grief and joy of life, especially after loss. In “I’m So Tired,” she writes: “I had a mother and I miss her and I have joy / and the garden.”
Continuing her exploration of shared experience, Kiefer’s poems celebrate Yankee heritage and are “concerned with the ordinary” people whose labor and artisanry are often unnoticed and underappreciated. “In Praise of Minor,” Kiefer salutes minor poets “faithful to work that will meet / with quiet,” suggesting kinship with notable yet underrecognized Maine poet Edward Arlington Robinson. If Robinson, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, is considered a minor poet, it invites reflection on the value of all voices in poetry. Kiefer highlights this idea in her six-section prose poem, “A Brief History of E. A. Robinson and the Train Station in Gardiner, Maine.” This poem addresses things that “falter against change” — the town that loses the paper mill and train station, residents who “abide in spareness,” and Robinson himself, who moved away from Gardiner. “But in his poems, he returns and returns.”
Ultimately, parts “hymn” and “wild shards,” Abbie Kiefer’s narrative-lyric poems will endure because “Ground that shakes / can also shelter.” And that’s the truth of this beautiful, tender-hearted debut.
Certain Shelter by Abbie Kiefer. June Road Press, October 2024.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.
The poems of Raye Hendrix’s What Good is Heaven are rooted in the farmlands and mountains of North Alabama. They portray the complexities of southern agrarian life, foregrounding both its religious fervor and violent undertones. We experience the bloodletting and the beauty of this place and people through a transgressive character who makes sense of the idyllic vision of pastoral life and the heavy burden of religious oppression.
Hendrix’s moody poems draw from the Southern Gothic tradition and stand out for their use of “sparkling dark” oxymorons: “unowned and belonging,” faithful and forbidden, and “violence / cloaked in an oath of care.” As Hendrix writes the tensions and aberrations of southern life, they neither judge the contradictions nor express melancholy. These are not poems of guilt and capitulation. They are clear-eyed and delivered by someone who has known who they are from a young age and is not afraid to express their will: “The first time I was reborn // I told my mother I wanted / to love a woman.”
Hendrix uses the narrative-lyric mode to tell their queer coming-of-age story within their “Southern stoic” family who “worked the earth” and attended church. Through the poems, we learn that Hendrix survived the Bible and the belt, a grandmother who “pushed my head through the drywall / for being a little dyke,” and conversion therapy. But these poems do not succumb to shame or revenge. Instead, they muck in reality’s fallibility and mercy.
The poems reflect on past formative events, reaching us after a period of reflection. While this may diminish some of their emotional charge, it allows for a more significant poetic quality: understatement. The poems are not dramatic but, like the poet’s people, stoic. Both spare and sparing, the poems are written by someone already free. Hendrix has the power and wields it to create a meticulously crafted, visceral, and vibrant debut.
What Good is Heaven by Raye Hendrix. Texas Review Press: The University Press of San Houston State University, September 2024.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.
Jen Jabaily-Blackburn’s debut poetry collection, Girl in a Bear Suit, delves into the intricacies of womanhood, victimhood, and the power dynamics ingrained in both mythology and society.
Chosen by Christopher Citro as the winner of the 23rd Annual Elixir Press Poetry Award, this collection draws on the haunting tale of Callisto from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The poems link transformations to violence, gender, power, punishment, or escape.
Jabaily-Blackburn engages in a modern discussion about the cautionary tales that have historically ensnared girls and women. These warnings, often laced with control and fear, aim to restrict female freedom and autonomy. She examines the circumstances that lead women and girls to become hyper-aware of their surroundings and barraged by warnings — “Do not wear! Do not consume! / Do not go!” Each poem is a “space” where Callisto and other female voices emerge “poised / to speak,” ready to assert their existence.
In a world that often views femininity through a lens of caution and threat, Jabaily-Blackburn highlights the longing for agency. Lines such as “Myths have always made / witches of us / when we refused to bend” underscore the collection’s incisive critique of patriarchal structures and the urgent need for redefining narratives.
The poet’s sharp wit, natural humor, and inventive style propel readers through a whirlwind of emotion, capturing the journey from silence to the liberation of voice. Vivid phrases like “a flip book of Excitement sprinting / spine to edge” capture the exhilarating process of reclaiming one’s story despite societal constraints.
Girl in a Bear Suit compels us to rethink the stories we inherit and share, reshaping our perspective on the female experience. By amplifying the often-muted voices of women and girls, Jen Jabaily-Blackburn enriches our understanding of the complex narratives around gender and survival today. This striking debut is essential to the conversation.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.
The Payback, Kashana Cauley’s second novel is a combination of social satire and a heist novel, with a hefty dose of dark comedy. Jada begins the novel working at a clothing store in the mall, having lost her job as a costume designer in the film industry over what she refers to as the Incident in the early part of the work. However, she is unable to keep that job due to her penchant for theft that she has been unable to overcome. She ends up living with Lanae and hanging out with Audrey, both of whom work in the same store, after the debt police take everything she owns, which wasn’t much to begin with.
The debt police play an important role in the novel, as they find people who still owe on their student loans and encourage them to pay, largely by beating them up or, as in Jada’s case, beating her up and taking what she owns, even though those possessions will barely affect their overall debt burden. This aspect of the novel is Cauley’s sharpest satire, as the victims are exclusively Black women, who are the most likely to have significant student load debt. Bystanders either ignore the beatings or even heap verbal abuse on the women. Jada, Audrey, and Lanae all commiserate about their situation, talking about the promises schools and society made that led them to take out loans for higher education.
They end up making a plan to try to erase all of the government student loan debt by uploading a virus to their servers, then breaking in to remove the hard drive that serves as a backup. Given that the novel is clearly comic, one can expect everything to work out, one way or another, but the core of the novel is the satire of a society that vilifies people for taking on debt, while also saying that the only way to succeed is through a college degree.
The Payback by Kashana Cauley. Atria Books, July 2025.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
Gabrielle Oliveira’s latest book, Now We Are Here, delves into the lives of 16 newly-arrived immigrant families from Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras and covers their first three years in the US, 2018-2021. All of these families – 30 kids under 18 and 24 parents – experienced weeks-to-month-long separations after requesting asylum at the border. Although all of the people profiled were eventually reunited and allowed to settle in the country, the long-term damage of their often-traumatic journey – and the subsequent rupture caused by their incarceration – is evident, especially in the children Oliveira introduces.
Indeed, hundreds of hours of interviews reveal that the children desperately wanted to talk to their teachers and peers about what they’d been through since leaving their homelands. Unfortunately, this was discouraged. Instead, Oliveira tracks how the kids’ attempts to talk about their experiences were repeatedly shut down by teachers in what Oliveira calls “the pedagogy of silence.”
“Children often encountered adults who stifled their narratives, changed the subject, or decided that this type of political knowledge could be dangerous or complicated to discuss in the classroom…Educators were not actively seeking to hurt or ignore children. More than anything, teachers wanted their students to feel supported in the present moment and understand that they were now safe.”
But the kids knew better and expressed a deep longing to share their fears and worries with other newcomers. For their part, most parents also wanted to avoid rehashing the past, suppressing discussion of past atrocities in favor of adjusting to new realities. At the same time, most simultaneously questioned their decision to migrate and wondered if uprooting their families had been a mistake.
Now We Are Here is an intensely moving book. And while it barely touches the surface of the current administration’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies, it is nonetheless essential reading for educators and those working with Central American immigrants.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
In Abbreviate, Sarah Fawn Montgomery skillfully examines the myriad ways girls are conditioned to “shrink smaller” so boys can “get bigger.” Through interconnected lyric micro-essays, she reflects on how small, often overlooked or downplayed experiences accumulate into a multilayered life-narrative of diminishment that demonstrates what girls face in various environments, including homes, schools, literature, and video games. Montgomery sensitively and candidly addresses domestic violence, casual intimidation, and sexual assault, revealing the double standards and dismissive attitudes that permeate these spaces.
Starting from middle school and continuing to college, Montgomery illustrates the pervasive nature of misogyny, particularly within educational settings. Both male and female authority figures perpetuate pressures to conform and perform that lead girls to harm themselves, as they struggle with unrealistic standards for their bodies. The title essay places this theme in sharp relief.
In “Abbreviate,” Montgomery uses the situation of female students sharing the same name — “we Sarahs are too many” — to illustrate how girls are forced to adapt for the convenience of their teachers: “When our names are … replaced with a letter, we become small like our bodies, a period at the end to signal that the decision is not ours.”
Despite the awful predicament of this “endless cycle,” some essays celebrate the “small miracles” of female friendship: A refuge where girls can “tend to what haunted” and “heal hurts no one would see or believe.” The saving support of aunts, sisters, and friends helps shift their focus from looking down to “up at the stars.”
By speaking out to “constellate our collective hurts,” girls can escape oppression and reclaim their stories as “someone seen … someone believed.” As Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s essays navigate the patriarchal landscape particular to American culture, a woman emerges with “Strength newly summoned,” understanding herself and her place in the world. Abbreviate is a necessary and resonant book.
Abbreviate by Sarah Fawn Montgomery. Small Harbor Publishing, May 2025.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.
We’re excited to share two big updates from Livingston Press!
🖥️ New Website + Book Sale
Our new website is now live—featuring a fresh design and easier navigation. To celebrate, we’re offering many titles at 50% off for a limited time. Whether you’re a longtime fan or new to our catalog, now’s the perfect time to explore our diverse range of literary fiction, poetry, and more.
We’re also thrilled to announce our Fall 2025 lineup, featuring five exciting new titles from a range of voices and styles:
Shelter Me: A Novel by Darin Dean A powerful story set against a stormy emotional landscape.
The Journal of Dwayne Holt by Lisa Wieland A lyrical, abstract exploration of memory and identity.
Puns Puns Guns by Charles Ghigna A witty, minimalist collection from a master of wordplay.
One Hundred Pearls by Barry Michael Cole A character-driven narrative with a unique visual flair.
Penguin Noir by Nicole Davis & Cheryl Gross A genre-bending illustrated tale featuring a noir-style penguin.
All titles are available through Ingram, Asterism, and direct from our website.
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Most people would think Keria D’Amato’s story is only for runners, as she is one of the elite female runners competing today. However, her new book goes beyond providing inspiration for those who run, as it’s a story about finding joy in what one loves, whether that’s running or any other vocation or avocation one might have.
D’Amato’s story seems counterintuitive. She was a strong runner when she was younger, but she struggled with injuries in her twenties, leading her to leave competitive running. She went about creating a life, as she started a business, got married, and had children. However, in her thirties, when many competitive runners are ending their careers, she accidentally began hers again. She was feeling overwhelmed by raising two children, often by herself, as her husband was in the military and was deployed for long periods of time, so she went for a run, not even making it three minutes.
However, during that short run, she began to find herself again, so she went back out again and again, slowly building back up in mileage and speed, while also gaining confidence and happiness. She began entering races and winning them, or at least exceeding her expectations, until she started running times that put her into the elite status where she now resides. Along the way, she finds community and joy, which are more important to her than any records she sets or races she wins. That’s what keeps her coming back to running, and it’s what she wants to impart to her readers more than any running advice one could imagine.
Don’t Call It a Comeback by Keira D’Amato, with Evelyn Spence. St. Martin’s Press, September 2025.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
Though published a couple of years ago now, Quinn Slobodian’s exploration of economic zones that ignore — and even suppress — democratic freedoms is as relevant today as when it was published. In fact, she uses a quote from Stephen Moore, one of President Trump’s chief economic advisors during his first term in office, in which he says, “Capitalism is a lot more important than democracy. I’m not even a big believer in democracy.” That theme runs throughout Slobodian’s book, as he delves into eleven different areas (though the final one is actually virtual) where people have formed economic zones that put capitalism well above democracy.
Slobodian begins in Hong Kong, which serves as the template for many of the areas that follow, including Singapore, Liechtenstein, Somalia, Dubai, and Silicon Valley. In each case, a person or people connect with leaders of those areas to try to establish zones where the rules and laws of democracy cease to exist, especially workers’ rights. They typically develop quickly and become safe havens for billionaires to invest or hide their money or for companies to produce products without safety or workplace guidelines. While they have short-term success, they often don’t last.
Lest people think a book on economic zones is beyond the comprehension of the lay reader, let me assure them that Slobodian’s clear prose and explanations help anybody with a basic understanding of capitalism and democracy understand what a particular group of thinkers are trying to do. Once readers understand, most will be aghast at the ways in which capitalism often trumps democracy, even in countries that purport to value democratic values above all else. For that reason alone, this book is as much of today as any others being written.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
Writer-parent-college professor-activist Madeline Lane-McKinley’s latest book, Solidarity with Children, is at its most powerful when delineating the many ways the world ignores the needs of young people: allowing them to be unhoused and go hungry, deporting them and their caretakers, incarcerating their loved ones, subjecting them to the school-to-prison pipeline as well as the brutalities of war, and often disbelieving their accounts of abuse and neglect. Moreover, top-down, test-driven schooling overlooks their strengths and proclivities, and instead prioritizes rote learning over creativity. Add in racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, climate change, and rising authoritarianism, and it’s clear that the kids politicians describe as “our future” are in dire straits.
Solidarity with Children is a plea for change. But while the account nods to differing conceptions of childhood in different eras, its overarching argument — that adults and children must be allies and collaborators in remaking the world — the book does not adequately address the fact that adults, whether they are biologically connected to the children in their lives and communities or not, need to play a decisive role in educating and guiding them from childhood into adulthood.
Of course, children should be listened to, taken seriously, and respected, but relationships between adults and kids nonetheless require the establishment of boundaries and the loud and sometimes forceful use of the word ‘No.’ They also require trust. Still, in dreaming big, Solidarity with Children projects ways for adults and children to work together to promote liberatory education, healthier families, and open communications. It’s a robust conversation starter.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
Mary Newell’s ENTWINE is a reverent exploration of the “intermix of life” and “Verdant worlds” surrounding her home in the Hudson Highlands. Similar to Thoreau’s Walden, Newell’s collection is an “anthropocentric lament,” advocating for living deliberately and attentively within one’s environment.
With a lyrical and contemplative voice, Newell “summons” readers to wander through pollinator gardens and woodlands around her home. Weaving description and devotion, she aims to “tangle” the human experience with the lives of trees, plants, and animals so all are “respiring together.” Her “alert” poems “throb” with imagery that honors the relationships she forges with her natural neighbors: birch, salvia, red-tailed hawks, and ruby-throated hummingbirds.
Instead of making assumptions, Newell respectfully asks: “Totem oak, may I call you kin, care for your wounds?” Of course, the tree does not answer. But that is not the point. Much like a spiritual seeker conversing with the divine, the poet poses poignant questions about her connectedness to the world around her and accepts “adjacency, … / an honorable relation, no harm, some help.”
The collection’s use of “nuzzled wording” and hyphenated language effectively illustrates the concept of a shared “dwelling-spot.” The poet employs various forms to express her “lifepulse.” These include botanical acrostics, left-justified columns, and prose poems. Most of all, it is the lyric “Dispersals,” which scatters words across the pages like the flowers Newell describes, that enacts the wild, exuberant spirit of nature itself.
Ultimately, ENTWINE is a “heart proximal” almanac, celebrating the intertwined “luminous” existence of all life. Mary Newell’s writing embodies a desire for “one-to-one acknowledgment.” She invites readers to cultivate their own “tone-shape harmonies” with the environment and reflect on the marvel of coexistence: “Let rock be rock and water be water, / as each yields to the other.”
ENTWINE by Mary Newell. BlazeVOX [books], January 2025.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
Irene Cooper’s even my dreams are over the constant state of anxiety draws inspiration from Leonora Carrington, adopting the attitude of a surrealist and revolutionary to explore realms of the psyche and tensions between form and content, humor and critique, identity and the socio-political landscape.
The collection consists of six sections, each framed by a psychological term that guides the exploration of its subjects. The first section, “shadows, or structured observation,” presents twelve concrete poems that bolster or subvert the relationship between form and content. Cooper is “deliberate” in her “contraindications.” With “sardonicism as a / brand of humor,” Cooper also critiques institutional structures that perpetuate “senators who abandon,” “abuse of power,” and “misogyny.”
As the collection transitions into exploring “personal unconscious” and the Jewish diaspora, Cooper shares portraits of “great aunt helen,” “aunt chickee’s / ellis / island / ankles,” and a “soldier | medic.” The soldier’s “story” takes form in a “sonnet tiara,” Cooper’s feminist response to a “sonnet crown.”
The third section, focusing on the “collective unconscious,” follows this turn toward shared identity, observing diverse characters — a female driver in an accident, an “irish citizen,” a “toothy love man” on the street, airplane passenger “leo,” and a bartender — “jambed tight against” the poet’s consciousness.
After exploring the collective, the section on “attachment theory” shifts to themes of poetry and sexuality, utilizing the cinquain form and text boxes to probe creative forces. The fifth section, “the strange situation test,” features poems that consider the risks associated with speech and resistance “tendered against the winded heart.” Lastly, “death, or the visual cliff” invites contemplation of “eco-logic” and “uncrushed / species,” challenging readers to consider what “posterity measures.”
Writing her way “in the darkness / if not through it,” Irene Cooper explores the familial, psychological, and structural forces that shape our lives and the interconnectedness of our stories in a world where anxiety lingers like a shadow.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
There’s no way to read Claire Lombardo’s second novel without having the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” running through one’s head, and it’s clear she means for the reader to do so. The reader follows Julia through three significant periods in her life — her childhood, especially her teenage years; the first years with her son, Ben; Ben’s marriage to Sunny — though the novel doesn’t move chronologically through her life. Julia is wondering, as David Byrne sang, “Well, how did I get here?” The reader not only asks that question, but also where and how Julia will end up.
While I was disappointed with the answer to those questions, as the ending felt too pat, too untrue to the messiness of life, Lombardo crafts Julia’s life — as well as the lives of those around her — so clearly that I cared about the answer throughout most of the novel. Julia and Mark’s marriage seems in danger of ending not once, but several times; Julia has a strained relationship with her mother, for good reasons; Julia is surprised (and not in a positive manner) by Ben’s announcement that he and Sunny are having a child and getting married; Julia struggles in dealing with her teenage daughter, Alma, who is dealing with the college admissions process.
The novel is clear-eyed about the problems in all of those relationships, in addition to some others, which is where the characters live and breathe. Life is found in the struggles, as well as the moments of joy, especially in the quotidian nature of life, which is, as the title reminds readers, the “same as it ever was.” I enjoyed spending time with these characters, not because they were perfect, but because they felt real. And that’s a good way to let the days go by, at least once in a lifetime.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
In order to write the book, Patton Miranda spent years at one facility in the Network, International High School (IHS) in New York City, as a participant-observer. She also interviewed dozens of IHS students, staff, teachers, administrators, parents, and alumni. The result is a comprehensive ethnography of an innovative, collaborative, and politically and socially engaged program.
The book introduces an array of instructors, many of whom are themselves immigrants, who are well-equipped with the skills necessary to work with newcomers. Their ability to empathize with their students is exemplary. Furthermore, Patton Miranda describes the faculty as willing to take risks, make mistakes, and constantly adapt the curriculum to meet evolving student needs. Collegiality and open communication, she reports, are woven into the school’s DNA.
Moreover, Sanctuary School details the ways that IHS, like other Network programs, is tailored to meet the individual political, legal, academic, and material needs of the diverse students who enroll. In addition, the faculty’s refusal to fast-track English-language acquisition or “teach to the test” means that the school sidesteps standardized evaluation and instead prioritizes experiential learning and students’ social and emotional well-being over grades and task completion. Similarly, IHS staff members are encouraged to work together and weigh in on all school governance decisions.
These factors make IHS and the Network schools covered by Sanctuary School both inspiring and impressive. It’s a wonderful, empowering read.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
Suffrage Song, Caitlin Cass’s Eisner-winning graphic history, delves into voting rights in the U.S., as her subtitle indicates. The reference to that past being haunted comes from two places. First, history has ignored many of the women in this book — effectively turning them into ghosts — and, second, the women most readers will have heard of made significant compromises in order to enable white women to get the right to vote.
The book highlights women (and a few men) most people are unfamiliar with, such as Mabel Ping-Hua Lee (a Chinese American woman who fought for the right to vote, even though she wasn’t allowed to be a citizen), Frances Watkins Harper (she essentially advocated for what we would now call intersectional feminism), and Sue White (best known for burning President Wilson in effigy at the White House Gates), to name a few. Cass resurrects these ghosts to remind readers of how wide and diverse the suffragist movement actually was.
However, she also points out the contradictions and hypocrisy of many of the leaders of the movement, as white women and men quite often turned their backs on those who worked with them in the abolitionist and suffragist movement, almost always over the question of race. Leaders such as Susan B. Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt were willing to trade away the pursuit of universal suffrage for the less ambitious goal of the right to vote for white women. Cass, though, also includes those activists who weren’t willing to make that trade, again reminding readers of the diversity of thought within the movement.
Cass ends with an epilogue that brings voting rights to the present day, pointing out that there are still a variety of approaches some politicians use to try to disenfranchise voters. She draws strength from the women of the past and is optimistic about the future, as she refuses to give into hopelessness, even as she knows there’s still work to be done. Some might view such an outlook as naïve, but her faith in historical progress thought continued activism might be what we need right now.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
Many people complain that books set in the LGBTQ+ community focus only on the suffering, a complaint that gets leveled at most books by and about minorities, actually. Eloghosa Osunde’s novel doesn’t take that approach at all. As Akin, a musician, says near the end of the book, “Sometimes everything is tall and scary. It’s valid, and true, and very difficult to live with, but fear doesn’t get to decide for us. We get the last say on what we think is worth the risk. I think love is. I think care is.” This novel is about love and care among a group of friends who make meaningful lives out of some difficult circumstances.
Osunde helpfully provides a cast of characters at the beginning of the novel, as each section focuses on different relationships, both romantic and familial (though the familial is often in connection to the romantic, as some parents are accepting, while others aren’t). There are at least six different romantic relationships, and Osunde often provides back stories for each of those characters, especially when they involve parents who shape their children, for good and ill. While Nigeria outlaws same-sex relationships, Osunde’s characters don’t concern themselves with laws, as they’re more focused on finding family, whether with their biological ones or their found ones.
The novel concludes with a party, primarily to celebrate Maro and Jekwe’s wedding, along with Akin’s album release, but there is a sad undertone, given that people will probably be going in different directions after it’s over. However, just before the novel concludes, Awele, a writer, makes notes for what could be the beginning of an essay, in which she writes about the people she has formed a community with: “You taught me that wounds are not the only things we can respond to.” These characters find themselves through dealing with some wounds, but they have mostly shaped themselves and one another through love and care, which is the real cause for celebration.
The titular boy from the sea in Garrett Carr’s first novel for adults literally arrives from the sea, washing up in half of a blue barrel on the shores of the fishing village of Donegal. The town embraces him, passing him from one family to another for a brief period of time, until Ambrose and Christine take him into their house. Their two-year-old son Declan makes it clear even then that he doesn’t accept Brendan — the name Ambrose and Christine give their new son — as his brother, an assertion he makes for the rest of his childhood.
Donegal becomes a character in and of itself, as Carr uses a first person plural narrator at times to show how the town is changing through Brendan’s life, changes that impact Ambrose and his family. In fact, Carr often uses the phrase “the season turned” before summing up changes in the village to reflect broader shifts outside of Brendan and his family’s life. When Brendan first arrives, Ambrose’s fishing helps them begin to move up economically, but Ambrose falls behind the shift to more industrial fishing, a shift that changes his interactions with his family and friends. Carr sets the novel in the 1970s and 1980s, a time when Ireland’s economy began contracting significantly, leading to many people leaving the country, a theme that comes up throughout the novel.
Both Brendan and Declan struggle to find their place in the village. Brendan has a period of success giving secular blessings to people during the economic downturn, while Declan discovers a talent for and joy in cooking that almost nobody notices or appreciates. Christine drifts away from her father and sister, who live next door, but reconnects with them, at times. Throughout the novel, the characters and town experience tragedies, but still find moments of joy and connection, much as we all do in life.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
In Where Heaven Sinks, María Esquinca delivers a searing collection of poems that traverse borders — both physical and emotional. Set against El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, these experimental works weave fragmented verses, striking imagery, and bold typography to confront the brutal realities of immigration and identity. Esquinca exposes injustice while celebrating resilience and hope. Her work is shaped by the intersection of cultures, histories, and experiences of the US-Mexico borderlands. Each poem is a tribute to those who have endured and a call to challenge oppressive systems. Where Heaven Sinks is a love letter, a memorial for the lost, and a testament to the transformative power of language.
In the artemisia, national winner of the 2022 Hillary Gravendyk Prize, poet and botanist William S. Barnes presents ecstatic love poems in the tradition of Sappho and Rumi. Like his predecessors, Barnes’s poems “sit in the light between” elegy and ode, expressing passionate love and desire. They honor the emotional experiences and “wild abundance” of mortal life, drawing “out from within” an upward reaching “sweetest song.”
In addition to lyric poetry, the domains of the artemisia are mythic, folkloric, and botanical. Artemisia refers to a hardy shrub known for its digestive benefits. In Greek mythology, Artemis is Apollo’s twin sister. She is the goddess of the moon and nature.
Barnes’s ode pays tribute to plants’ “brilliant canopies of leaves” and “chromatic range of green.” His elegy memorializes a “soulfriend.” Excerpts from her letters are interwoven with his lines to create a living dialogue. In these ways, the poems undulate between the “persistence” and “decay” of life: “I’m cut in two and all the leaves are coming out.”
Regardless of what “is nurtured,” whether “laughing or leaving,” every poem a “rising to meet” and “invite you in.” Barnes’s poems welcome us, hold our hands, and teach us. In “the veils (viola adunca),” the poet offers a plantsman’s “truth” as he describes the five-petaled dog violet:
“difficult to press. it is not possible to see the whole
without cutting. and this would make it something else. the listener must infer what cannot be said.”
While acknowledging the challenge of conveying the deepest human emotions and truths in language, Barnes makes space for the mystery in words and expression, naming “themselves again” for us. The “leaning into” poems of William S. Barnes’s second collection are “evanescent” in their language and in their representation of life’s “pathway” as it “bends into the hills, across the contour, rising.”
the artemisia by William S. Barnes. Inlandia Institute, April 2024.
The term “safekeep” has echoes of keeping something safe for somebody else, as if a person is holding onto something precious for that somebody. In Yael van der Wouden’s debut, Orange-Prize-winning novel, The Safekeep, it first appears that Isabel is keeping herself safe from the world, though it’s not exactly clear as to why. She has isolated herself in the house where their Dutch family moved during World War II. Their father had died, so their uncle helped them find this house outside Zwolle, to try to keep them safe. Isabel still lives there, more than a decade later, after her mother has died, and her two brothers live in the city.
She has isolated herself from her brothers, as well, as she doesn’t approve of either of their lifestyles. Louis dates one woman after another, yet he is unwilling or unable to commit to any of them for very long. If he does get married, though, the house becomes his, as their Uncle Karel believes he should have it to raise a family. Hendrik is in a long-time relationship with Sebastian, a relationship that 1960s Dutch society doesn’t approve of, though it seems Isabel is also upset at Hendrik for leaving her and the house.
Louis begins dating Eva, whom Isabel clearly dislikes, but his work requires him to go out of town for several weeks, and Eva suggests that she could live with Isabel during this time. Their few weeks together change Isabel’s life, as Eva’s presence first presents her with a realization of who she has always been but could never admit to herself, then leads to an epiphany about the Netherlands and the world, which Isabel has long suppressed.
In this outstanding first novel, Yael van der Wouden raises questions about the ways in which people deny truths about themselves, but also about how people tamp down unpleasant truths about countries and the world. She also provides hope that, if one person can admit to realities they’ve suppressed, perhaps more of us can, as well.
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden. Avid Reader Press, May 2025.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
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Wild Dark Shore, Charlotte McConaghy’s newest novel, creates Shearwater, an island not far off the coast of Antarctica (based on Macquarie Island, she says in a note at the end), where a family of four lives in a lighthouse. There’s a seed vault there, which they’re supposed to load up and take on a ship which will arrive in six weeks, as the sea will soon engulf the island. While there’s no clear date as to when the novel takes place, the world outside seems to be even more ravaged by climate change than our current world, a reality that serves as the backdrop for everything that happens.
There are ghosts haunting this island, whether the death of the mother of the three children or the violent history of the island, as men used it as a place to hunt whales, club seals, and kill penguins, almost to extinction. The father, Dominic, is haunted by his wife’s death, and his children often overhear him talking to her. Fen, the daughter, is so frightened of something, she sleeps in a boathouse or on the shore of the sea. Raff, the oldest son, has a violent temper, which his father tries to channel into punching a makeshift boxing bag in the top of the lighthouse. The youngest son, Orly, is obsessed with the seeds and can list information and facts about many that most people have never heard of.
The family seems to be functioning, even after the researchers have left, until a woman washes onto the shore. Rowan’s appearance is mysterious, as there shouldn’t be any ship in the area, so the family tries to understand her while she asks questions about the situation there. The mysteries that underlie all five of these characters drive the tension in this novel, as they move from mistrust to building a type of family, which the truth threatens to undercut. In the same way that all of the characters in this novel must face the realities of their lives, McConaghy wants the readers to own up to the realities of climate change. In each case, characters and readers will need to change their approach to the world to have any chance of survival.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
Over the next 25 years, 5 billion kids worldwide will enroll in primary and secondary schools. These kids will need an education that meets 21st-century challenges, but most programs, Blumenthal and Pianta write, rely on a one-size-fits-all model that assumes that every child can learn the same material in the same top-down way. It isn’t true. “Learning should invite discovery, exploration, and risk-taking,” they write, and should be “personal, relational, and active.”
Retention suffers when this doesn’t happen. According to research and interviews conducted by the authors in more than 70 countries, when a student is academically disinterested, “one-third of the info presented to them is lost within 15 to 20 minutes; half is lost within the first hour, and three-quarters is lost within a day.” After a month, four-fifths is gone. Students may pass a test — hell, they may even get an A — but unless the coursework taps into their curiosity and allows them to investigate, probe, and connect with others, their engagement will likely be stifled and temporary.
But change is possible: Since today’s students are the first generation to be globally connected, Blumenthal and Pianta see endless potential for cross-cultural collaboration, with children, teens, and young adults working together to pursue scientific discoveries and find solutions to poverty, hunger, environmental calamity, and other pressing social issues. It’s an optimistic, if perhaps pie-in-the-sky, assessment.
The book does not tackle political repression, the massive influence of AI, the school privatization movement, or the necessity of teacher buy-in; nonetheless, Kids on Earth is a provocative conversation starter, relevant for everyone who wants to help kids develop the foundational skills they’ll need — including reading, writing, and basic arithmetic — to kickstart their creativity and stoke their passions.
As a roadmap for lifelong learning, the book serves as an antidote to staid scholarship. Provocative and likely to stir debate, the text asks important questions and offers bold suggestions for making education meaningful for future generations.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
In her collection of essays, I Want to Burn This Place Down, Maris Kreizman doesn’t hide her purpose, stating in the introduction that she has moved further to the political left, and each of these essays ties to that idea in some way. However, rather than writing ideological jeremiads, she uses her personal experiences and her reading of culture to show the problems with America’s move to the right and how a move to the left would be more humane and beneficial.
In “Copaganda and Me,” for example, she writes about the television shows and movies she and her brothers watched when she was younger: Miami Vice, CHiPs, and Police Academy. She excavates what that media taught them about the police and their relationship to the public, contrasting that portrayal with what her experiences in life, such as “stop-and-frisk” laws in New York and George Floyd’s murder, have shown her. Her two brothers become police officers, while she moves in the other direction, protesting police actions; she loves her brothers, but she’s unable to talk to them about politics.
Kreizman circles back to healthcare in several essays, such as the first essay “She’s Lost Control Again” and “I Found My Life Partner (and My Health Insurance) Because I Got Lucky.” In that first essay, she talks about her struggles with Type 1 Diabetes. While she spends significant time talking about trying to keep her blood glucose numbers where they should be, that leads her into an exploration of insulin costs and the ways the healthcare system fails people. In the latter essay, she focuses on healthcare more directly, arguing that nobody should have to rely on luck or marriage to have healthcare, an idea she complicates by pointing out that she’s reliant on her husband for it, taking away some of her freedom/independence.
The weaving of the personal and political works well to remind readers that those two are always cojoined, no matter what politicians argue. She shows readers again and again that policies affect people’s day-to-day real lives because they affect her real life, as they do all of ours. Such an approach is more convincing and more moving than another political screed, so one hopes readers will take note of the effects that political actions have on Kreizman and so many more.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
Black Silk and Other Poems: Creative Work of Ruth Mountaingrove Edited by Vincent Peloso & Sue Hilton Many Name Press, March 2025
Ruth Mountaingrove was a songwriter, musician and composer, artist and photographer, editor and publisher of WomanSpirit Magazine and The Blatant Image: A Magazine of Feminist Photography. Mountaingrove was also a playwright, Humboldt State University radio show producer, tech teacher, multimedia performer, and above all, a lifelong poet. This edited collection gathers poems from friends, family, and the University of Oregon archives, along with prints, photographs and art pieces. A passionate lesbian feminist, and a very creative artist and writer, Mountaingrove passed away in 2016 in Arcata, California, at the age of 93. With a generous grant from the Ink People in Arcata, California, this collection is a deserved tribute to this outstanding maverick working for women’s rights, equality, and freedom in all things through art, music, and writing.
In her fourth collection of poetry, If I Had Said Beauty, Tami Haaland honors “known and unknown” ancestors and searches for herself within “The lines leading to this body.” In “Prelude,” the first poem, we learn the poet’s heritage is “mostly Scandinavian, then / British, Irish, German.” Haaland is as interested in “the traits of women and men who / have made me” as she is in the “lines… deeper.”
Her investigation of her people’s “migrations, / and landings,” “their stories, their histories” is geographical, genealogical, “mitochondrial,” psychological, and spiritual. Throughout the collection, the poet poses age-old philosophical and evolutionary questions about who we are and who we “want to be.”
The unstructured sonnet, contrapuntal, palindrome, and prose poem “give form, proportion” to Haaland’s inquiry. Each form provides either a “flip side,” doubling possible inheritances, or a “line between here / and not here,” bordering possible legacies. These “deliberate pairings” of content and form substantiate the exploration of “my recessive/dominant other.”
“Double, double.” While Haaland’s meditative lyrics honor her position between “My mother, long dead,” and “my son / ahead,” she admits she’s “not content with reduction to a few generations.” Haaland’s “in a long / conversation about omens.” Her poems are populated by “ghosts,” “angels,” “shadows,” and, in a “desire” to “expand the circle,” various other beings, including dogs, flies, and trees. Each is as much a “part of the conversation” as the “watcher,” “protector,” “coward,” and “romantic” aspects of herself.
Instead of a fixed identity, Haaland views herself in a process of “becoming” that allows her to continually rethink her existence, which in turn allows her poems to reframe it. Death’s “eccentric shadow” coexists with beauty’s “brilliance on a hill / covered in blossoms, each / a cluster, a spear.” And in Haaland’s poems, each is “a glimpse of the infinite.”
Yiyun Li’s memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow, is a meditation on the suicide of her youngest son, James, who died at the age of nineteen. That death took place a bit over six years after the suicide of her older son, Vincent. This book is not an attempt to explain why James made the same decision as his older brother or to come to any sort of understanding of what Li and/or her husband could have done differently. Li is clear that speculation doesn’t do her or her husband or her sons any good at all. Instead, as the title of one of her chapters says, “Children Die, and Parents Go on Living.” One of the threads that runs through this book is the idea that she must take life as she finds it, not as it might have been.
One of the other main ideas is that of the abyss, which is where Li and her husband now find themselves. She reflects on the idea of grief and how some people view it as something one gets through, an idea that seems to repulse Li. She sees it as an insult to the dead if, at some point, she were to believe she has gotten through grief, dusted herself off, and gone back to life. Instead, she believes that she now lives in the abyss and will always live there, that the grief is simply a part of her life and that she will always shape herself around.
It might strike readers as odd, then, that Li talks about how she behaved after her son’s death, as she had a piano lesson days after receiving the news, in addition to her continuing her work writing a novel and teaching. If someone didn’t know her well, if they were only looking at the outside, it would seem her son’s death hadn’t affected her. However, as Li uses her title to remind readers, her way of dealing with grief is to continue doing what she loves and what makes her who she should be, just as nature will continue to grow, whatever happens in the world.
Li’s approach to grief is not one that some readers will share, which is all the more reason for them to read her book. We can never understand how others sustain themselves when such tragedy strikes their lives, but works such as Li’s provide an insight into at least one person’s way of processing such suffering. Reading such a work should provide us with more empathy not only for Li, but for ourselves and others, especially when we deal with grief and loss in ways others might not understand.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
The Queer Allies Bible: The Ultimate Guide to Being an Empowering LGBTQIA+ Ally by NV Gay Ig Publishing, March 2025
While the United States Federal Government continues to add to its growing list of banned/flagged words, including “gay,” “gender identity,” “hate speech,” “LGBTQ,” there are counter efforts to document and respectfully make space for the lives other work to erase. The Queer Allies Bible: The Ultimate Guide to Being an Empowering LGBTQIA+ Ally by author NV Gay offers a means to continue fighting for inclusivity in discussions surrounding gender and sexual identities.
Emphasis is placed on three main pillars: learning and understanding, being respectful, and advocating. The author uses various techniques to educate readers on all aspects of the LGBTQIA+ community, as well as provide personal narratives to help bring the material to life. There are chapters explaining how to apply the techniques of allyship, such as conversation starters, responding to anti-LGBTQIA+ remarks, supporting the coming out process, religion and the LGBTQIA+ community, creating inclusive spaces, and more.
Whether these conversations are happening in workplaces, legislatures, social media platforms, communities, schools, churches, and more; many are taking place without the voices of those within the community. The Queer Allies Bible, cuts through all the noise and provides a much needed guide for how to be an effective affirming ally.
American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten takes on authoritarians, autocrats, oligarchs, and fascists — terms she uses interchangeably — in Why Fascists Fear Teachers. The book is a fierce denunciation of the political movement working to destroy democracy, undermine trade unions, subvert multiculturalism, and decimate public education. It’s also a clear and passionate argument in support of teachers and public schools. “We cannot create a truly democratic, inclusive nation committed to opportunity for all without public schools,” she writes. “Fascists fight against public education because they want to control our minds, control our ideas, and control the future. And what do teachers do? They teach. It’s that simple.”
Conversely, Weingarten writes, fascists support banning books, limiting the free exchange of ideas, and narrowing curricular offerings, all while simultaneously championing white, male, Christian supremacy. Moreover, the Trump administration has made privatizing education through universal vouchers and charter schools an explicit goal —shifts that the AFT and other unions have lambasted as wasteful of taxpayer money and often hurtful to students.
The dichotomy Weingarten presents could not be clearer, with teachers on one side and fascists on the other.
Weingarten draws on history, from ancient societies to the regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, and Pinochet, to expose the manifold harms caused by authoritarian rule. She also outlines the looming danger of fascist governance here in the U.S. and zeroes in on the harm caused by DOGE and Executive Orders outlawing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
Weingarten sugar-coats nothing; nonetheless, the book is not all doom and gloom. Multiple examples of teachers working with community residents to meet the needs of unhoused, hungry, and disabled students showcase teachers’ largely unheralded and inspiring work. Moreover, Weingarten is optimistic that we can derail the Trump agenda if we organize in the streets, in our union halls, and at the ballot box.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent. https://www.eleanorjbader.com/
If you’re looking to fill out your final lazy days of beach reads and hammock chillin’, check out our monthly round-up of New Books. Each month we post the new and forthcoming titles NewPages selects from small, independent, university, and alternative presses as well as author-published titles and recent reviews.
If you are a follower of our blog or a subscriber to our weekly newsletter, you can see several of the titles we received featured. For publishers or authors looking to be featured on our blog and social media, please visit our FAQ page.
Atavists, Lydia Millet’s latest collection of short stories, continues her preoccupation with the climate crisis, the backdrop (or centerpiece) to most of her recent writing. In these interlocking stories, she follows one family and various people connected to them, giving each character one story titled with something ended in -ist, such as “artist,” “mixologist,” or “optimist.” The “atavist” in the title raises the question of whether Millet means to imply that the characters are rediscovering some genetic characteristic after several generations of absence (perhaps a concern with the climate crisis) or are organisms that have characteristics of a more primitive type of that organism (ignoring the climate crisis, as generations of people have done). Or both, of course.
One of the main characters concerned with the climate crisis is Nick, who has attended Stanford to earn a degree in scriptwriting and who has moved back home to live with his parents and sister while he writes his first screenplay. Through various stories, it becomes clear that he is unable to write his fantasy screenplay, and he’s losing interest in LARPing (Live Action Role Playing), which causes him to lose his girlfriend, Chaya. He doesn’t see the point in most of what people do, given that there’s little chance of a foreseeable future. He does, however, find another girlfriend, Liza, who is taking a gap year from college. When her parents suggest volunteering, she finds purpose in helping residents of an assisted living facility understand their technology, which then morphs into helping them simply manage life.
Millet also shows characters who are not quite who they seem, sometimes through a clear contrast between the title of their story and how they behave, but also sometimes through their use or misuse of technology. For example, “Pastoralist” reveals the main character, Les, to be a predatory user of women, finding those he believe will be insecure because of their weight, then staying with them for no more than a few months until he gets bored and moves on to what he would describe as another sheep that needs to be sheared.
In the final story, “Optimist,” Millet makes it clear that she’s not one when it comes to people’s acknowledging the reality of the environmental destruction they have already caused and that only continues to worsen. She does portray characters who care, though, both about the environment and one another, even if they don’t always know what to do with those emotions, which helps elevate these stories beyond simply drawing attention to the climate crisis to a portrayal of our day-to-day lives.
Atavists by Lydia Millet. W.W. Norton, April 2025.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
Although ten years have passed, Rhett Littlefield has always blamed himself for his father abandoning him and his family. When the troubled fourteen-year-old gets kicked out of school for his latest run-in with the vice principal, his frazzled single mother sends him to the hollers of Eastern Kentucky to stay with his Uncle Theo, a man of few words who leads an isolated existence with his loyal dog, Chekhov.
Resigned to make the best of his situation while still longing for the day when Mama will allow him to return home, Rhett settles into his new life. Rhett barely remembers his uncle, but he’s determined to get to know him. As he does, Rhett discovers that he and Uncle Theo share a connection to the past, one that has altered both of their lives, a past that will soon come calling.
The Thing About My Uncle is an engaging and heartwarming coming-of-age story that explores the cost of family secrets, the strength of family bonds, and the importance of reconciling the two in order to move forward.
With acrimonious relations going back almost 50 years, it can be easy to forget that the United States and Iran were once close allies. After a CIA-backed military coup granted shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi authoritarian powers in 1953, U.S. presidents and policymakers deemed Iran a source of Middle East stability for a quarter century and growing demand for oil during the 1970s made Iran’s elite rich. By the end of that decade, a dying shah’s admittance to American exile for cancer treatment triggered a diplomatic hostage crisis and the end of the special relationship.
“Collapse on the magnitude of that which occurred in Imperial Iran in the 1970s simply cannot be attributable to the actions of one king,” Scott Anderson writes in his new book, King of Kings, explaining that the incompetence or corruption of many actors played a role in the Iranian Revolution. Anderson provides a compelling narrative relying on previous research, documentation, and his own interviews with inside sources like Americans employed in Iran at the time and the shah’s now octogenarian widow, Farah, still living in American exile.
Though a hostile government prevents a truly clear view of the event, King of Kings succeeds in giving Western readers a picture of a revolution that’s had great consequences for both the Middle East and the West to this day. It may not be light reading, but those looking for a better understanding of how modern Iran came to be will certainly benefit.
Reviewer bio: Aiden Hunt is a writer, editor, and literary critic based in the Philadelphia, PA suburbs. He is the creator and editor of the Philly Chapbook Review, and his critical work has appeared in Fugue, The Rumpus, Jacket2, and The Adroit Journal, among other venues.
When Janet Kintner graduated from law school in 1968, she was rejected by employers who told her point-blank that they did not – and would not – hire a woman. This, despite the fact that she had passed the bar exam in Arizona and California and had graduated at the top of her class. While she eventually secured a much-loved position with the Legal Aid Society in San Diego, Kintner never forgot the sexist banter she heard or the demeaning comments directed at her by male attorneys and courthouse staff. But she refused to quit.
A subsequent job with the City Attorney’s office gave her the opportunity to prosecute exploitative businesses, and she developed a niche in the then-developing field of consumer law. Her work drew notice and, in 1976, Democratic Governor Jerry Brown appointed her to the bench. At the time of her swearing in, Kintner was 31 years old and seven months pregnant. Two years later, a contested election to maintain the seat forced her to face two male adversaries, one of whom hurled a near-constant barrage of personal insults at her. Her account of the successful campaign – when she was again pregnant – and of juggling a toddler and a demanding judgeship, is both humorous and harrowing.
Kintner worked as a judge for a total of 47 years before retiring, and her look back, A Judge’s Tale, is important. Nonetheless, while she offers a stark denunciation of sexist behavior, she seems wholly disconnected from the many feminist campaigns waged by law students and attorneys to win equity and respect. Likewise, she alludes to unspecified marital discord, but offers few clues about why she waited three decades to call it quits. They’re disappointing omissions. Still, A Judge’s Tale is an inspiring book, detailing one woman’s quest for recognition and power. It’s a worthwhile memoir.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent. https://www.eleanorjbader.com/
“Loss is a sentry,” writes Kimberly Blaeser in Ancient Light. In her sixth collection of poems, the Anishinaabe poet, photographer, scholar, and activist stands “in the shadow of old losses,” watching over the human and ecological wreckage caused by some of the most devastating social issues of our time, including the epidemic of violence against Indigenous Women, the “hidden graves” at Native American boarding schools, the unrepatriated Ancestors who “wait” on museum “shelves in numbered boxes,” the disruptions to daily life, work, and family during the COVID-19 pandemic, “Politics / a super spreader,” and extractive environmental practices like “clearcutting” and “copper mines.”
Blaeser fills her narrative, lyric, and visual poems “with left behind,” with “an abundance we make / of the broken.” Each poem is a “vessel of fire,” carrying the “torch of language” to pay homage to Ancestors and praise legacies of “kinship” with all beings and land. Through poems, photographs, and drawings, Blaeser offers Indigenous stories and lifeways as a means of hope and resilience: “Let us mask / ourselves in hope — all broken of these histories.”
In stunning contrast to “this legacy” of trauma, Blaeser offers a series of ten poems, scattered throughout the collection, entitled “The Way We Love Something Small.” Each of these poems offers “a writ consolation” and “a mended silence.” By connecting to the “sweet notes” of other beings such as “spring peepers,” “newborn mice,” an “egret heronry,” and “Vowel sounds from the land” — “each oldest song / survivance.”
Throughout Ancient Light, Kimberly Blaeser artfully balances speaking “ill of the living” and blessing “the hollowed out sorrows.” Emerging from the despair of “these histories” and “lost futures,” Blaeser’s ceremonial poems use words to “transfigure” this “memory-tangle,” this pain-tangle into an “ancient ballad of continuance.” Ancient Light is a compassionate, wise, and necessary book.
Ancient Light by Kimberly Blaeser. University of Arizona Press, January 2024.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.
When award-winning professor and writer Ashley Farmer (Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era) discovered that there were no full-length biographies of influential Black nationalist Audley Moore (1898-1996), she set out to rectify the omission. The result, Queen Mother, charts Moore’s ascent as a community leader, first as a follower and supporter of Marcus Garvey, then as a leader in the US Communist Party, and finally as an advocate of reparations to the Black community for the sin of slavery and the continuing damage wrought by racism and white supremacy. It’s a powerful, insightful, and evocative look at a woman who eschewed feminism but made sure that her voice was heard by the men who led the movements she championed.
For most of her life, Moore was a revered speaker, writer, and activist, and spent decades working to galvanize support for the establishment of a separate Black nation within the US. She was also outspoken in her opposition to the integrationist efforts of those, like Martin Luther King Jr., who believed racial equality was both preferable and possible. Moore vehemently disagreed, and her efforts brought her into contact with the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X, as well as leaders of numerous newly independent African Nations.
Dubbed Queen Mother, she hobnobbed with controversial figures including dictator Idi Amin and Louis Farrakhan, and spoke out in favor of polygamy. Thrice married and the mother of one son, she nonetheless made “the movement” her priority. While readers may question this and other choices made by Moore, Queen Mother is a brilliant look at one woman’s passionate quest for social justice, peace, and racial equity. It’s a beautifully drawn and provocative portrait of a fascinating activist and leader.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
In The Real Ethereal, Katie Naughton explores the complex interplay of human experiences within temporal, economic, and artistic constraints, emphasizing the processes of “making and / unmaking.” The collection is organized into four distinct sections, each unfolding from a “weighted center / stretching extending.”
The opening section, “day book,” presents a speaker positioned “between / occupant and occupy,” wrestling with the dichotomy of what “takes me” versus what “I take.” Through a single expansive poem, Naughton explores the continuum of daily existence in a city, reflecting on the “proximity” of life through the lens of a window. The imagery the poet conjures encapsulates a world fraught with constructs both built and “torn down,” confronting the viewer with urgent realities, including “waste mass” and microplastics. The speaker sorts “waste carefully,” grappling with the moral implications of what choices to make “when something’s / really / wrong.”
The anxiety surrounding time and economic pressures continues in the second section, “hour song.” This part consists of six poems, each composed of two to four fourteen-line sections. While the sonnet multiplies, the focus shifts from day to hour, “where time passes / like in dreams suspended and waiting.” Here, the intensity of attention grows, encapsulating the notion that daily rhythms and poetry are overshadowed by “the choirs of history.”
In “the question of address,” the third section, nine epistles reflect on personal loss and nostalgia in relationships. As time unfolds elegiacally, the speaker considers familial bonds and the haunting presence of absence — “What was your voice? / Was mine?”
The final section, “the real ethereal,” raises profound questions about the act of recording amidst the failures and chaos of existence. In her thought-provoking and somatosensory debut, Katie Naughton concludes that “the only mark of unendingness we have / the refusal to stop” making.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.
Cursed Daughters, Oyinkan Braithwaite’s highly anticipated second novel [following 2018’s My Sister, The Serial Killer], brings readers into the middle-to-upper-class community of Lagos, Nigeria, and its adjacent suburbs and tells a complicated story that questions the role of fate in determining how our lives unfold.
The story centers on the economically comfortable Falodin family, whose older generation believes that the household’s women are plagued by a long-standing curse that prohibits them from forming lasting heterosexual relationships. For cousins Ebun and Monife, both of whom consider themselves modern and well-educated, the idea that they can be punished for the sins of past generations seems preposterous. At the same time, their intellectual skepticism runs head-on into tradition, and when Monife unexpectedly dies at age 25, her death leaves 21-year-old Ebun scrambling to make sense of what has happened.
Her difficulties are made worse by the premature birth of her daughter, Eniiye, on the day of Monife’s burial. Moreover, her emotional upheaval is exacerbated by the fact that Eniiye looks shockingly similar to Monife, a reality that has neighbors, family, and friends dubbing the child a reincarnation. This not only leaves Ebun reeling but puts tremendous pressure on the child who wants little more than to be herself.
It’s a soap opera, for sure, but Braithwaite is a spectacular writer who manages to make this a compelling and satisfying intergenerational drama. Although some of what transpires is predictable, the deft handling of Eniiye’s coming of age and her subsequent pursuit of romance is touching and emotionally resonant. Cursed Daughters is told in the alternating voices of Ebun, Eniiye, and Monife and moves back and forth between several decades. But as the puzzle pieces come into frame, secrets, silences, and superstitions are parsed and upended. The end result is that Eniiye does what her foremothers could not and emerges as an autonomous, bold, and independent woman. It’s a transition to cheer.
Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite. Doubleday, November 2025.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
