There was a time when countless young people in the Midwest, South, and Southwest went to dances and stage shows to hear a territory band play. Territory bands traveled from town to town, performing jazz and swing music, and Tulsa-based musician Ernie Fields (1904–97) led one of the best. In Going Back to T-Town, Ernie’s daughter, Carmen Fields, tells a story of success, disappointment, and perseverance extending from the early jazz era to the 1960s. This is an enlightening account of how this talented musician and businessman navigated the hurdles of racial segregation during the Jim Crow era.
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gulp/gasp by Serena Piccoli Moria Books, September 2022
Temporally composed between 2019-2022, punctuated with socio-political, cultural, and linguistic shifts, and wry wordplay, gulp\gasp navigates the complexities within Italy, the British Isles, Zanzibar, and Europe, journalistically drawing on interviews, reports, photographs, essays, and articles. Though formally witty, playful, and punningly provocative, each piece packs a hard punch; and as such, serves as a powerful tool for raising awareness. Piccoli is an Italian poet, artistic director, playwright, translator, teacher, and photographer. She is the co-founder and director (with Giorgia Monti) of the Poetry and Sister Arts International Festival (Forlì – Cesena, Italy).
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The Principles of Comedy Improv is an authoritative handbook for beginners and experts alike. More than just entertainment, improv’s tenets enable you to change every moment of your life. Your guide is Tom Blank, who crystallizes two decades of experience to convey improv in unparalleled scope, depth, and fun. Blank lives in Los Angeles and is senior instructor at the Groundlings Theatre & School, where he teaches improv and sketch comedy.
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Prayer Book for the New Heretic by Colin Pope NYQ Books, March 2023
At the intersection of religion, politics, and Americana, Colin Pope’s latest collection inquires what it means to believe while living through unbelievable times. These poems careen and rollick, imagining a world in which conspiracy theory and urban myth figure as acts of God. Here, the notion of “blind faith” is subjected to kaleidoscopic interrogation in a madcap, whirling, unabashedly entertaining pursuit of the limits of dogma. In Pope’s vision of belief, wayward children are plucked up by eagles, the moon landing is faked via the liberal use of shaving cream, and a men’s room wall is elected president. But beneath their roiling surface, these poems surge on their dauntless quest for some understanding of how we ended up here, now, fighting for our humanity.
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Part wunderkammer, part grimoire, Maggie Queeney’s In Kind is focused on survival. A chorus of personae, speaking into and through a variety of poetic forms, guide the reader through the aftermath of generations of domestic, gendered, and sexual violence, before designing a transformation and rebirth. These are poems of witness, self-creation, and reclamation.
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Gabriel Ebensperger’s debut graphic novel, Gay Giant, is a coming-of-age and coming-to-terms-with-oneself story, showing readers what it feels like to grow up queer in a heteronormative society in the 1990s. Filled with pop-cultural touchstones from Cher to Laurie Anderson, Jurassic Park to My Little Pony, Ebensperger navigates both the joy and pain of puberty surrounded by ignorance and homophobia, the anxiety of casual hookups, and pressure to be more macho. How do you love yourself if you’ve learned so well to hate yourself? For all who’ve ever felt bizarre, damaged, or strange, Ebensperger asserts that all is full of love, and that true acceptance must come from within. Ebensperger lives by the sea in Chile and works as an illustrator, a graphic designer, and an art director. His work has been featured in several Chilean and international publications.
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In the poem-essays that comprise A Duration, writing is a physical act where writing and lived experience support one another in bodies—animal, plant, mineral, and word bodies—that are injured and heal, that die and continue in new forms, playing new roles. Here, in his fifth book, Richard Meier transmutes years of daily practices of attention—be it to a line spoken by Lear’s Fool, a train to Kingston, or “red inside green stem below eight white petals in a spiral with space between them attached to the yellow center”—into mesmerizing trajectories through an always unfolding present. In the collapse of the border between writing and the body, A Duration, “play[s] both hearts with a heartbeat and kinship of place, time, mundanity in the continuous onrushing imagined joy.”
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There have been a number of recent books about being a female runner, including Lauren Fleshman’s Good for a Girl; Kara Goucher’s The Longest Race; Alison Mariella Désir’s Running While Black; and Des Linden’s Choosing to Run. Similarly, there have been several relatively recent books about the benefits of exercise (running, in particular) to help slow down the aging process, including Daniel Levitin’s Successful Aging and Daniel Lieberman’s Exercised. In her Older, Faster, Stronger: What Women Runners Can Teach Us All About Living Younger, Longer, Margaret Webb was on track to explore both areas almost a decade ago. Webb blends research and memoir in this work to delve into the ways running can keep people younger and healthier, especially how it benefits women.
Inspired by her mother and sister, Webb decides to become more serious about running, spending a year training for a World Masters half-marathon. Drawing on her background in journalism, she interviews experts on exercise science and some of the world record holders who are in the sixties, seventies, and beyond. She uses that information to shape her own training, certainly, but, more importantly, she wants readers to see how important it is to stay active as we age. She consistently references the growing body of research that shows how one can remain active well past the traditional retirement age and the multitude of benefits that activity can have, as she focuses on the quality of one’s life as much as the quality of that life.
Webb draws inspiration from the runners she interviews (often, fittingly, while running), but she also serves as an inspiration herself. She, like most of the runners she talks to, doesn’t feel they are extraordinary, though the one question she is unable to answer is what motivates some people to remain active, while others become more and more sedentary. Reading this book certainly serves to motivate, as Webb’s enthusiasm is infectious.
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. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
Elegiaca Americana: Poems by Claire Millikin Littoral Books, October 2022
Elegiaca Americana by Claire Millikin is a collection of deeply personal poetry that contains poems of childhood, youth, and adulthood, set mostly in the southern United States. It is a book about reckoning with grief, about the beauty and brutality of life in America, about living in exile in one’s own land. Millikin is the author of eleven collections of poetry. She is the co-editor of Enough! Poems of Resistance and Protest, winner of the 2021 Maine Literary Award. A feminist scholar and art historian, she teaches art history at the University of Maine and for the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts.
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In Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau, Ben Shattuck begins the first of his six walks on a whim, or, more accurately, as a coping mechanism to deal with nightmares stemming from the end of a relationship. It is unplanned, and it doesn’t go particularly well. By the end of the book, when he retraces a few stops from that walk, his life has changed quite dramatically. The book is both a meditation on Thoreau’s influence on Shattuck’s life and thought and a memoir detailing Shattuck’s development from that particularly difficult time in his life to a much brighter ending. As he writes near the end of the work, “…walking through the dark forest, you might eventually look up through the trees, see that the sky above is the same as the sky over the sunny pasture, that it is one canopy of light spread over your whole life’s landscape. Grief and joy are in the same life, but it’s only in the forest where you notice the shafts of sunlight spilling through.” Shattuck explores both grief and joy in his life and in Thoreau’s life, helping readers understand both emotions and both people more clearly.
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. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
In Leda, his thirty-first poetry collection, J.R. Solonche once again proves that he has not lost his wit, insight, playfulness, honesty, and empathy. William Carlos Williams once said that “if it ain’t a pleasure, it ain’t a poem.” So once again, pleasure after pleasure in the form of poem after poem in page after page here await the reader. An excerpt from “TREE WORK”:
The tree crew is trimming a large oak. Take off that one, the boss on the ground says. What for? It looks all right, says the trimmer in the cherry picker. I don’t like the looks of it. Take it off, says the boss on the ground. But the one above it on this side is really bad, says the trimmer in the cherry picker. No, no, that’s not a problem. Do what I said, says the boss on the ground. You’re wrong, boss. You’re making a mistake, says the trimmer in the cherry picker. Okay, okay, take ‘em both off, says the boss on the ground. You got it, boss, says the trimmer in the cherry picker. Jesus, why can’t all the world’s problems be solved so easily?
Timothy Donnelly’s fourth collection of poems, Chariot, ferries the reader toward an endless horizon of questioning that is both philosophical and deeply embodied. “How did we get here?” he asks in his title poem—one of several in conversation with French symbolist Odilon Redon—to which he responds, “Unclear, if it matters; what matters // is we stay—aloft in possible color.” With a similar sensibility to previous collections The Problem of the Many and The Cloud Corporation (winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award), Chariot deepens Donnelly’s inquiry into artistic histories, from Jean Cocteau to The Cocteau Twins, while celebrating the power of poetic imagination to transport us to new zones of meaning and textual bliss. The collection also marks an exciting shift in form for Donnelly, who confines these new poems to twenty lines each, so that to read Chariot is to look through a many-paned, future-facing window, refracting and reflecting, letting all the light in.
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In Disorientation, Elaine Hsieh Chou’s first novel, Ingrid Wang is in the eighth year of her doctoral work, and she is largely ignoring her dissertation on Xiao-Wen Chou, a canonical Chinese American poet. She is almost thirty, engaged to be married, and her department chair has hinted that she could take over his position if she can simply finish her degree. Her life appears to be going well, but Chou makes it clear in her novel that appearances are never what they seem. Ingrid makes a discovery that leads her into an existential crisis where she has to face her identity as a Taiwanese American in the very white Northeast, her engagement to Stephen—who translated a Japanese author’s autofiction, even though he doesn’t speak Japanese—and who she hopes to become. Chou satirizes a variety of topics in her novel—academia, identity politics, the far right, the debate over free speech and what some call cancel culture—and, at times, that satire can simultaneously feel too broad and too spot on; however, her notes at the end of the novel remind readers that everything in her work has too much basis in the world for us to ignore her critiques and questions.
Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou. Penguin, March 2022.
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. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
Jason Tandon’s This Far North practices a poetics of breathtaking quietude. These meditative, imagistic poems evoke a Zen-like “suchness” as Tandon writes about the natural world and the daily tasks with which we busy our lives. Readers looking to slow down, looking for a poetry that is seasonal and sapre, present and attentive, will find much to savor in this collection that makes ordinary moments numinous.
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Impossible People: A Completely Average Recovery Story by Julia Wertz rings it at just over 300 pages and hardcover, so there is no mistaking that this graphic memoir is going to be as weighty as it feels. Wertz has earned her publishing chops with five other collections and as a contributor to the The New York Times and The New Yorker, but both seasoned and entry-level readers of her work will feel welcomed here.
In this debut graphic memoir, What is Home, Mum?, Sabba Khan explores race, gender, and class in a compelling personal narrative creating a strong feminist message of self-reflection and empowerment. As a second-generation Pakistani immigrant living in East London, Khan paints a vivid snapshot of contemporary British Asian life and investigates the complex shifts experienced by different generations within immigrant communities. Khan is a visual artist, graphic novelist, and architectural designer. She is an advocate for increasing working-class black and brown representation in the arts and publishing as well as in architecture and construction. Her work is included in the Eisner award-winning graphic anthology Drawing Power.
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Between Paradise & Earth: Eve Poems edited by Nomi Stone & Luke Hankins Orison Books, April 2023
The recent and contemporary poems about the biblical figure Eve gathered in this anthology refuse given narratives. Here, poets of diverse backgrounds and traditions conjure a heterogeneous concert of Eves to reckon with desire, blame, power, gender, the body, race, politics, religion, knowledge, violence, and time. She becomes a door for dreaming of origins, for considering naming and language, for challenging assumptions and structures of power, and for examining the human condition. In these poems, Eve loves, grieves, rages, and proves a perennially relevant figure in our contemporary mythos.
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Deep Are These Distances Between Us: Poems by Susan Atefat-Peckham Edited with a Foreward by Darius Atefat-Peckham CavanKerry Press, May 2023
In Deep Are These Distances Between Us, Susan Atefat-Peckham troubles preconceptions of nationhood and fixed systems of power by bringing her reader into the home and offering twilit glimpses of boundless familial love and intimacy. Atefat-Peckham reaches for a network of care, the foundations of which are laid in these poems’ ability to imagine and access the multiplicities of the human experience. Evoking a rich Iranian-American landscape, these poems ultimately articulate a spirituality that has no spatial or temporal boundaries, one that travels effortlessly between life and death to arrive at a timeless poetics, a treatise on empathy we need now more than ever.
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Murmurations by Andrea Rinard EastOver Press, June 2023
In Murmurations, Andrea Rinard’s debut collection of twenty-six flash and micro fiction, readers are introduced to an eclectic array of women attempting to claim their own space and to find meaning in the extraordinary mundanity of moments large and small. Stark, spare, sometimes surreal but always illuminated with honesty, these stories are at once amusing and infuriating, comforting and heartbreaking, and always familiar. Rinard explores the art of literary distillation, packing whole worlds into few words. Sometimes ordinary, other times other-worldly, the myriad topics addressed by these small stories leave a big impression.
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Iggy Horse by Michael Earl Craig Wave Books, April 2023
The poems in Michael Earl Craig’s sixth book, Iggy Horse, resonate with an inscrutable logic that feels excitedly otherworldly and unsettlingly familiar, whether he be writing about the cadaver that Hans Holbein the Younger used as a model, Montana as the “Italy of God,” or the milking rituals in Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow. Not merely absurdist, Iggy Horse is a book that articulates the sadness and strangeness of American life with the poetic observations of true satire.
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Jim Finley—a recently retired English teacher living alone on the shifting edge of San Francisco—has been set, unwittingly, on the back porch of life. Trying to harmonize the voices in his head, he sits most days by his stack of “to-do” books until, one day, his daughter comes home with the worst news of her life. Everything changes. As his broken heart reengages, he steps back into a new world. He sees his ex-wife has launched into a larger life than the one they’d shared. He is surprised to find it easier to talk to his son’s immigrant girlfriend, or even the remains of a Russian saint, than to the young man he’s raised. He misconnects with Carol—his first date in decades—a woman he enjoys talking with but doesn’t quite hear. Set in the pre-tech calm before the turn of this century, Outer Sunset is a deeply felt story about the intimate place where long-lasting growth occurs in our lives; how we revise, or live without, our dreams; how to love the flaws of those closest to you and watch a child grow away into someone better than you’d imagined; and how to be shaken by beauty amidst unimaginable loss and remain standing.
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While The Optimist Shelters in Place by Kimberly Ann Priest isn’t so brand new, we continue to help spotlight titles that may have been overlooked during the pandemic years, which is no irony intended on this particular title. Priest is the author of several other collections: Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress 2021), finalist for the American Best Book Award, as well as the chapbooks Parrot Flower (Glass 2021), Still Life (PANK 2020), and White Goat Black Sheep (Finishing Line Press 2018). Each poem in this newest book plays on the title, starting with “The Optimist,” which adds a weighted perspective as they reflect on the poet’s time during the shutdown. There are some humorous titles that I’m sure many readers will relate to, such as “The Optimist Takes a Personality Test,” “…Spends a Lot of Time on Pinterest,” “…Tries a New Recipe for BBQ Chicken,” “…Doesn’t Wash Her Hair,” but also some that will draw the reader in with their more allusive considerations, “…Imagines What It Would be Like if Her Daughter Were Actually Dead,” “…Remembers What is Needed to Feel Essential,” and the great closing poem, “…Sleeps Through the Night.” Priest is an associate poetry editor for the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry and Assistant Professor at Michigan State University. Find her work at kimberlyannpriest.com.
In Wanting: Women Writing About Desire, Margot Kahn and Kelly McMasters have collected a wide range of essays from a diverse group of writers, reflecting the various ways women think and write about desire. Some are related to sexual desire, the most obvious interpretation of the subtitle, including Dr. Keyanah B. Nurse’s essay on polyamory and Amy Gall’s experiences with dildoes. However, the collection has a wider range than that narrow reading of the word. Larissa Pham begins the book by discussing her desire for more time, while Michelle Wildgen follows that essay with one on appetite, not just wanting to discover new foods, but wishing she could rediscover the desire she had when so many foods were new to her. Jennifer De Leon uses an SUV to explore her feelings of alienation as the child of immigrants, while Aracelis Girmay delves into racism and language, hoping to help her children find the gaps in the latter to fight against the former. As Lisa Taddeo writes in her essay, “Splitting the World Open”: “Finally, as a gender we are speaking about what we don’t want. But, perhaps more than ever, we are not speaking of what we do want. Because when and if we do, we’re abused for it.” Kahn and McMasters have given these thirty-three women a space for talking about what they want, providing readers with voices that demand to be heard.
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. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
Windows That Open Inward: Images of Chile White Pine Press, April 2023
With poems by Pablo Neruda and photographs by Milton Rogovin, Windows That Open Inward is a mosaic of visual images fused with words that create a compelling image of Chile. Rogovin, a well-known photographer, journeyed to Chile in 1967. At Neruda’s suggestion, he went to the island of Chiloe, in the south. Rogovin’s visit was most fruitful. He came away with some extraordinary photographs, capturing the stark beauty of Chiloe and the unromantic life of its people. His portraits depict individuals and families and the tools and elements of their existence. There is a symbiotic relationship between Rogovin and Neruda, a common interest in and respect for the ordinary. Editor Dennis Maloney has selected a diverse cross-section of Neruda’s poems to complement the photographs. White Pine Press is reissuing this classic to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the press.
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A rust belt city in decline retains the solace of romance, which often proves to be an empty promise or even a curse. In The Bridge on Beer River, a novel-in-stories set in Reagan-era Binghamton, New York, characters scramble for subsistence while hoping for love and a better life. View flyer and visit website for more information.
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In her latest book, New Life, Lambda Award–winning poet Ana Božičević writes, “For my birthday I want a cake / revealing the color of my soul.” Never saccharine, these poems are by turns cheeky and heartfelt, grounded and wistful, and above all—surprising. New Life is a book that is Dantesque in its ability to commune with the dead without becoming fixed in the past. Instead, the poems here have a distinct sense of nonlinear time, where each line feels like an ancient bone discovered, only to be reassembled into a chimera of another self. In this way, Božičević continually greets herself as a stranger, reminding us that in some respects every poem is a love poem.
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In a Friday Night Comics session for Sequential Artists Workshop, Will Betke-Brunswick explains that using birds as characters allows an “access point into emotional-heavy material,” and even though advised by a mentor “not to do birds,” Will says, “I feel connected to birds.” There is no doubt readers will also develop a connection, if not immediately, then over the course of topics covered in the graphic memoir A Pros and Cons List For Strong Feelings. These topics include Will’s mother being diagnosed with terminal cancer during Will’s sophomore year of college and going through treatments as well as Will’s coming out as genderqueer. There are flashbacks to Will’s youth, sharing thoughtfully tender and supportive moments, like when Will’s mother creates math problems for them to solve on the school bus to alleviate anxiety and when she writes a note for Will’s school when picture day rolls around to say it’s okay for them to wear a hat. It’s easy to sort Will’s family of characters, all represented as penguins, from other characters: buzzards, quails, parrots, toucans, and more. Betke-Brunswick uses line drawings with some fill, minimalist backgrounds, just two colors throughout, and varying framed and frameless compositions to express events, which include observational humor and situational poignancy. This is the kind of memoir that offers brief but deeply intimate and sometimes discomfortingly honest glimpses into someone’s life. In the same way Betke-Brunswick expresses feeling connected to birds, readers will develop their own connection to humanity through these feathered depictions.
Opening at the culmination of a disastrous trip to Puerto Rico, the first page of the graphic memoir Impossible People finds Julia standing stupefied in the middle of the jungle beside a rental Jeep she’s just crashed. From this moment, the story flashes back to the beginning of her five-year journey towards sobriety that includes group therapy sessions, relapses, an ill-fated relationship, terrible dates, and an unceremonious eviction from her New York City apartment. Far from the typical addiction narrative that follows an upward trajectory from rock bottom to rehab to recovery, Impossible People portrays the lesser-told but more common story: That the road to recovery is not always linear. With unflinching honesty, Wertz details the arduous, frustrating, and hilarious story of trying and failing and trying again.
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Seeing the There There: Visual Poems by David Alpaugh Word Galaxy Press, September 2023
In Seeing the There There, David Alpaugh intermixes his poetry with his visual artwork, realized in collaboration with artists and photographers worldwide. The result immerses the reader in surprises of sense and meaning. Alpaugh’s poetic musings and preoccupations range from the irreverent to the meditative and include people, society, culture, nature, and the universe—visible, theoretical, imagined. This is a unique book that engages the reader with written and visual treats at each turn of the page.
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NewPages receives many wonderful book titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these by clicking on “New Books” under the NewPages Blog or Books tab on the menu. If you are a publisher or author looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us!
Poetry 1/6 Volume 1: Remember This Day Forever, OneSixComics Abyss and Song, George Sarantaris, World Poetry Books Awaiting, Charisse Pearlinna Weston, Ugly Duckling Presse Bar of Rest, Sara Epstein, Kelsay Books Before Wisdom, Paul Verlaine, World Poetry Books Between Paradise & Earth: Eve Poems, ed. Nomi Stone & Luke Hankins, Orison Books Bone Wishing, Tara Flint Taylor, Slapering Hol Press The Book of Noah, Yoni Hammer-Kossoy, Grayson Books Deep Are These Distances Between Us, Susan Atefat-Peckham, CavanKerry Press Don’t Leave Me This Way, Eric Sneathen, Nightboat Books Dream of Xibalba, Stephanie Adams-Santos, Orison Books Embarrassed of the (W)hole, Ugly Duckling Presse Gay Poems for Red States, Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr., University Press of Kentucky How to Shoot a Tourist (With a Bow & Arrow) In a Hot-Air Balloon, Joseph D. Reich, Sagging Meniscus Press
perennial fashion presence falling by Fred Moten Wave Books, May 2023
Much like the poems found in The Feel Trio (Letter Machine 2014), which was a National Book Award finalist, and All That Beauty (Letter Machine, 2019), the poems here present Moten’s “shaped prose” on the page and the dizzying brilliance of both polyphonies and paronomasia. Within this collection, the poems hold an innate quantum curiosity about the infinitude of the present and the ways in which one could observe the history of the future. Poems beget poems, overflowing and flowering, urging deeper etymological investigations. In perennial fashion presence falling, Moten approaches the sublime, relishing that intermediary space of microtonal thought.
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In Daniel Galef’s Imaginary Sonnets, a cast of people and objects from mythology, history, the news, and the quotidian parades through a variety of imaginative scenarios. In dialogues, dramatic monologues, satires, lamentations, eulogies, and execrations, the sonnets adopt perspectives ranging from the familiar to the novel to the twisty and surprising. Characters include not only widely known figures such as Cassandra, Pandora, St. Augustine, Byron, and Doris Day, but also obscure ones such as Henrique of Melacca, Emmett Till’s father, John Taurek, and—more startling—a salmon, a snowflake, and a pair of parallel lines. Imaginary Sonnets entertains and entrances with every turn of the page.
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Knockout Beauty and Other Afflictions: Stories by Mariana Rubin Crowsnest Books, January 2023
Insightful, and often wickedly funny, Marina Rubin’s Knockout Beauty and Other Afflictions is a collection of stories of desire, damage, and human meandering. The profound, “Man in a Fedora,” examines the depths and reality of friendship; In “Smorgas,” a woman’s relentless quest to have it all hurls her into a passionate and intricate relationship with two men who happen to be best friends; “Who to Call in Case of Emergency” is a unique take on the #MeToo movement, and “You Can Live with This Nose” is a conversation about plastic surgery overheard at an LGBTQ synagogue. Knockout Beauty and Other Afflictions is filled with drama, irony, humor, and unforgettable characters.
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Sebastian Barry’s latest novel, Old God’s Time, explores the ripple effects of trauma that stems from the violence and abuse Irish priests inflicted on children. Barry doesn’t portray the traumatic events directly, but readers should know there are a number of references to such events, as well as others related to harm to children. The person suffering the most—or at least the one who has endured through the suffering—is Tom Kettle, a retired police officer. He is enjoying his retirement until his former supervisor sends two officers to talk to him about a case related to a priest whom Kettle knows has abused many children, a case Kettle worked on earlier in his career, only to see it covered up by church and police authorities. Barry uses a third-person close narration, as much of the novel takes place in Kettle’s thoughts, which are more important than his and other characters’ actions. Kettle has to relive his past to come to grips with who he is now and what he and others have done. Though the book is dark and heavy, the language is lovely, filled with music and imagery that helps carry the reader through the awful realities Barry portrays, almost—but only almost—letting the reader forget about the suffering Kettle and so many others have endured.
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. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
When Did We Stop Being Cute?: Poems by Martin Wiley CavanKerry Press, April 2023
Martin Wiley grew up confronting and embracing a world as mixed and confused as he was, surrounded by beautiful words one minute and screamed at with hate the next. Set to a soundtrack of ’80s hits, When Did I Stop Being Cute?, a novel in poetic form, tells the story of a young man dealing with the challenges of being mixed-race, growing up, facing the police, and confronting himself. It is a time of change, for himself and the world around him, as he seeks to “remember / just when I stopped / being cute.” A longtime activist, spoken-word artist, and slam poet, Wiley earned his MFA from Rutgers University-Camden, where he was a Rutgers University Fellow. He is now the Adult Learning Lead Instructor for Project HOME, a nonprofit focused on ending homelessness and poverty within Philadelphia, and an adjunct professor at Rosemont College.
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Wolf Trees: Poems by Katie Hartsock Able Muse Press, September 2023
The forestry term wolf tree for a large specimen with spreading branches—“prominent and self-isolating,” just as “[b]eing a good diabetic is lonely work”—is a central conceit in Katie Hartsock’s second full-length collection, Wolf Trees. Hartsock muses on classical and modern figures (such as Hermes, Thetis, John the Baptist, Wyatt Earp, Dervla Murphy, Jane Jacobs), family, motherhood, the wolf and coywolf, glucose tablets, and the lot of the diabetic “in a body that would have perished years / ago” if not for medical advances. Through loss and hope, trials and triumphs, and the challenges and blessings of life and living, Katie Hartsock’s Wolf Trees uplifts the spirit.
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Have you ever tried to talk to anyone about the Holocaust? Have you ever had someone try to talk to you about the Holocaust? It’s harder than you think. Most people start with comments like, “How could anyone let that happen?” Or “Why didn’t anyone know about it at the time?” Or, more simply, “I don’t understand it.”
New Voices: Contemporary Writers Confronting the Holocaust, edited by Howard Debs and Matthew Silverman, is a good place to start that conversation. The volume is a compilation of poetry, fiction, and essays by contemporary writers who are confronting that horrific past by responding to photographs which are unfamiliar to most of us: A photo from the 1930s of a small Jewish boy with his teddy bear; a photo of Karel Ancerl, conductor of the Prague Radio Symphony in 1944; and others. And readers can take these modern responses in small doses, one poem at a time, one piece of flash fiction at a time. Probably a necessary approach for this kind of topic. Literature, history, and the depths of the human soul come together here — a must-read for anyone who clings to hopes that we can avoid atrocities like The Holocaust in the future.
Reviewer bio: Kate Flannery is an Editor-at-Large for The Journal of Radical Wonder. She lives in a small college town where she also practices law. Her essays, poetry, and fiction have been published in Pure Slush, Chiron Review, Shark Reef, and Ekphrastic Review as well as other literary journals.
Part autobiography, part play, part fictive dream as long poem, Awaiting begins by detaching phrases and motifs from two seemingly disparate plays (Lorraine Hansberry’s What Use are Flowers? and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot) and entangling them into centos or poetic remixes. Through the incorporation of these entanglements, original poetry, and a surreal landscape, what develops is a new work blurring the sightlines of narrative space by way of the spiral, by way of the fragment and the self-reflective slip of the fold into and out of itself.
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Written in short vignettes of narrative that make it difficult to put down, John West’s Lessons and Carols: A Meditation on Recovery is a thoughtful and poetic memoir, beautifully written and rife with striking imagery. West vulnerably and honestly engages with his own life story. As he does, he explores the joys and pains of new parenthood, the agony of addiction, the contradictions of faith and atheism, and so much more, all in the form of a traditional Anglican Christmas service. Devastating emotion is packed into vignettes making up a single page or even just a few sentences. It’s not all dour rumination, though—West’s narrative voice includes sly and sometimes self-deprecating bits of humor.
The cast of characters rises to unwieldy numbers by the end; it grows difficult to keep track of who everyone is, especially people in addiction recovery with West, all christened with just a single letter (N, for instance). But this does not detract from the beauty of West’s writing, messaging, and storytelling. Anyone interested in narratives about faith, atheism, queerness, mental illness, and profound questions will find more than one thing to treasure in these pages.
Reviewer bio: Jack Bylund teaches and studies English literature and fiction at Utah State University. He loves contemporary lit, Panda Express, and books about the end of the world.
At the heart of Brother Poem is a sequence addressed to a fictional brother. Through these fragments, Will Harris attempts to reckon with the past while mourning what never existed. The text moves, cloud-like, through states of consciousness, beings and geographies, to create a moving portrait of contemporary anxieties around language and the need to communicate. With pronominal shifts, broken dialogisms, and obsessive feedback loops, it reflects on the fictions we tell ourselves, and in our attempts to live up to the demands of others.
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Dream of Xibalba: A Poem by Stephanie Adams-Santos Orison Books, May 2023
Dream of Xibalba, Stephanie Adams-Santos’s incantatory long poem, draws the reader into a dreamworld where the barrier between life and death grows porous, populated by ancestors and spirits. The influence of such poets as Cecilia Vicuña, Federico García Lorca, and Yvan Goll is evident here, yet Adams-Santos’s voice and vision are entirely her own. Dream of Xibalba is a unique, epic work of cultural and spiritual significance.
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Preacher is not a preacher, though death’s vicissitudes clamor around him in a disturbingly ecclesiastic manner. When he finds a pit bull puppy by the side of the road and gets a job at a boxing manufacturer, he declares his luck changed. One small-town cop has doubts: “It ain’t your luck needs changing, but the folks you meet.” And so it stands, as the sun and moon revolve in their tango—or is it a waltz?—and whisper to one another. Forever Director of Livingston Press, Joe Taylor’s seventh novel, with previous works revealing his mastery in a variety of forms, from comic novels-in-verse to a multiple view-point murder mystery/love story and more. Readers are always in for something new and different when reading Taylor’s work.
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The Loved Ones: Essays to Bury the Dead by Madison Davis Dzanc Books, June 2023
The Loved Ones: Essays to Bury the Dead by Madison Davis, Winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize, explores the deaths of four family members across three generations: an inexplicable double murder, a fatal car accident, a long illness, and a conscripted solider killed in action. Piece by piece, each essay explores the death a loved one in a collage of vignettes: the loss, the aftermath, the funerals, and the rituals used to say goodbye to the body. As the investigation deepens, Davis lines up other forms of death—capital punishment and murder; medically-assisted suicide and “natural” death from disease; military conscription and “freak accident”—to see what comes to the surface.
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Containing History: How Cold War History Explains US-Russia Relations by Stephen P. Friot The University of Oklahoma Press, June 2023
Cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural in its scope, Containing History employs the tools and insights of history, political science, and international relations to explain how twenty-first-century public attitudes in Russia are the product of a thousand years of history, including searing experiences in the twentieth century that have no counterparts in U.S. history. At the same time, Friot explores how—in ways incomprehensible to Russians—U.S. politics are driven by American society’s ethnic and religious diversity and by the robust political competition that often, for better or worse, puts international issues to work in the service of domestic political gain. Looking at history, culture, and politics in both the United States and Russia, Friot shows how the forty-five years of the Cold War and the seventy years of the Soviet era have shaped both the Russia we know in the twenty-first century and American attitudes toward Russia—in ways that drive social and political behavior, with profound consequences for the post–Cold War world.
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Rise above the River: Poems by Kelly Rowe Able Muse Press, May 2023
In Kelly Rowe’s Rise above the River, we find a sister powerless to redress her brother’s fall from grace after the trauma of his childhood sexual abuse by a female authority figure. Rise above the River interrogates in a quest for answer, meaning, reason, justice, and mercy—along the way, exploring the conceit of the fallen angel with ekphrases on artwork such as Alexandre Cabanel’s L’ange déchu and Hugo Simberg’s The Wounded Angel. This powerful and emotionally charged collection is the winner of the 2021 Able Muse Book Award.
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The Boxer of Quirnial: Poems by John Barr Red Hen Press, June 2023
All animals struggle to survive. In John Barr’s The Boxer of Quirinal poems, the success of the heron hunting, the albatross breeding, and the inchworm spinning give proof of life. But for us, that struggle includes the eternal presence of war. Does the fall of Rome, the Battle of Shiloh, the Normandy Landings – and today’s wars – give proof of life or only of the struggle? Poet John Barr grew up in a rural township outside Chicago. An honors graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School, he served on Navy destroyers for five years, including three tours to Vietnam. His poems have appeared in the New York Times,Poetry, and Flaunt Magazine among many periodicals and anthologies. He was president of the Poetry Foundation and publisher of Poetry magazine for its first decade. The Boxer of Quirinal is his tenth to be published over the past thirty years.
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In Lynn Levin’s expert hands, House Parties, a collection of twenty beautifully crafted short stories, the mundane actions of daily life are upended and enter the realm of myth. Family relationships, work relationships, and love in its many forms are woven into a narrative laced with pop culture, literary references, wisdom, and wry humor. On a hike in Yosemite, a young man caring for his ailing mother encourages his friends to seek an elusive waterfall and encounters a raven who leads the way. In a nod to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and turning the Jewish myth of the Golem on its head, a woman yearning for companionship fashions a meatloaf into a living being. Students rebel against their professors. A young woman perfects the art of grifting, while a millennial couple seeks to rekindle their love in a new housing development. On a remote beach in Puerto Rico, an awkward teenager encounters a band of monkeys. The natural world permeates the collection and illuminates the mysteries that exist just beyond our grasp. For Levin and her rich tapestry of characters, that very mystery offers and delivers the opportunity for transcendence.
House Parties by Lynn Levin. Spuyten Duyvill Press, May 2023.
Reviewer bio: Joy E. Stocke is the author of numerous books and articles. She has edited and published works of fiction for more than 30 years.
A Pros and Cons List for Strong Feelings: A Graphic Memoir by Will Betke-Brunswick Tin House Books, November 2022
During Will Betke-Brunswick’s sophomore year of college, their beloved mother, Elizabeth, is diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. They only have ten more months together, which Will documents in evocative two-color illustrations. But as we follow Will and their mom through chemo and hospital visits, their time together is buoyed by laughter, jigsaw puzzles, modern art, and vegan BLTs. In a delightful twist, Will portrays their family as penguins, and their friends are cast as a menagerie of birds. In between therapy and bedside chats, they navigate uniquely human challenges, as Will prepares for math exams, comes out as genderqueer, and negotiates familial tension.
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The Third Renunciation: Poems by Matthew E. Henry NYQ Books, June 2023
Heeding St. John Cassian’s call, the poems in Matthew E. Henry’s The Third Renunciation reject classic depictions of divinity and religious dogma to see God more fully. Each begins with a proposition (e.g. “Say God is the music we strain to hear,” “Say prayer is just a fire alarm,” “Say faith can become like lackluster sex,” “Say unarmed Black men herald His return”), or an explanation for a Biblical story (e.g. “maybe Jesus was having an off day,” “Say Jonah was right and grace is wasted,” “Say angels aren’t always trustworthy.”). Henry’s poetry offers answers to the myriad whys at the center of faith and doubt, gives voice to the notion that both singing and screaming are authentic responses to suffering, and argues that “grace is a Twinkie or a cockroach— / something that never goes bad, can survive / anything the cold world throws… / despite all our best efforts to quell it.”
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Girl Country: Stories by Jacqueline Vogtman Dzanc Books, May 2023
Girl Country: Stories by Jacqueline Vogtman is Winner of the Dzanc Shorty Story Collection Prize with stories that feature a near-future farmer battling environmental crises who takes in a mysterious girl he finds on the roadside. A bus driver navigates through treacherous weather and memories of her tragic past as she races to save children from the end of the world. A woman keeps giving birth to children from different time periods. And a woman struggles with her young daughter mysteriously transforming into something wild and unruly, confronting themes of motherhood and family. Girl Country ranges from medieval Belgium to the near future of the American Midwest, populated by mothers and monsters, mermaids and milkmaids, nuns and bus drivers—women in every walk of life, but particularly working-class women, navigating the intersection of the mundane and the magical.
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