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NewPages Blog :: New Books

Discover new and forthcoming books from independent publishers and university presses on the NewPages Book Stand.

New Book :: Up North in Michigan

Up North in Michigan A Portrait of a Place in Four Seasons essays by Jerry Dennis book cover image

Up North in Michigan: A Portrait of Place in Four Seasons
Essays by Jerry Dennis
University of Michigan Press, September 2021

Up North in Michigan, the new collection from celebrated nature writer Jerry Dennis, captures its author’s lifelong journey to better know this place he calls home by exploring it in every season, in every kind of weather, on foot, on bicycle, in canoes and cars. The essays in this book are more than an homage to a particular region, its people, and its natural wonders. They are a reflection on the Up North that can only be experienced through your feet and fingertips, through your ears, mouth, and nose—the Up North that makes its way into your bones as surely as sand makes its way into wood grain. Up North in Michigan has been selected as a 2022 finalist and is up for gold in the Non-Fiction – Nature Category of the Midwest Book Awards.

New Book :: The Man with Wolves for Hands

The Man with Wolves for Hands, a novella by Juan Eugenio Ramirez book cover image

The Man with Wolves for Hands
Novella by Juan Eugenio Ramirez
Southeast Missouri State University Press, September 2022

With panting, slobbering wolves where his hands should be, The Man with Wolves for Hands builds shelves, attends an HR meeting, gets drunk in a kiddie pool with his friend The Cowboy, and stumbles into a bacchanalian wake, held in a forest clearing, for a deceased soldier. In The Man with Wolves for Hands, Metaphor folds into allegory, folds into psychological exploration, folds into a meditation on trauma and struggle. These vignettes about a man and his lupine hands explore what it means to be compassionate in a world where perception is tenuous and morality fluid. Elements of myth and folklore anachronistically color the narrative creating a story that winds itself through both the present and some distant, primordial past. Winner of the Nilsen Literary Prize for a First Novel.

New Book :: Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine

Big Gorgeous Time Machine by Nick Francis Potter book cover image

Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine
Graphics and Poetry by Nick Francis Potter
Driftwood Press, March 2022

This is a collection of experimental graphic works and comics poetry. It includes more traditionally-minded comics (with a lyrical bent) with abstract and conceptual works, including text-based comics and comics inspired by modernist abstractions. Taken together, the work finds kinship with contemporary avant-cartoonists like Warren Craghead, Aidan Koch, and Simon Moreton, while striking out toward something altogether new. Nick Francis Potter is a writer, cartoonist, and educator who holds an MFA from Brown University and a PhD in English from the University of Missouri, where he currently teaches writing and theory in the Digital Storytelling Program.

New Book :: Walking Uphill at Noon

Walking Uphill at Noon poetry by Jon Kelly Yenser book cover image

Walking Uphill at Noon
Poetry by Jon Kelly Yenser
University of New Mexico Press, March 2022

Walking Uphill at Noon showcases Yenser’s mastery of prosody and love of play. Including free verse as well as established and newly invented forms, Yenser’s collection is organized into four parts that each explore the author’s life and interests: part 1 focuses on neighborhood observations; part 2 delves into travel at home and abroad; part 3 consists of a “walking log” that muses on current events; and part 4 explores magic, mysteries, and sleights of hand. Ultimately, Yenser urges readers to consider that everyday situations can be made extraordinary if they keep their love of play and wonder close to their hearts. Jon Kelly Yenser is also the author of two chapbooks, Walter’s Yard and The Disambiguation of Katydids, and the poetry collection The News as Usual: Poems (UNM Press).

New Book :: Zero to Ten

Zero to Ten Nursing on the Floor stories by Patricia Taylor book cover image

Zero to Ten: Nursing on the Floor
Stories by Patricia Taylor
Livingston Press, July 2022

What’s your pain from zero to ten? How fast can you run on the floor, from zero to ten? How soon will you have burnout, from zero to ten? In this collection, Patricia “Tricia” Taylor takes over forty years of nursing experience in four southern states in the U.S. and weaves them into “mostly fictional” stories that move from joy to frustration to devastation. Taylor’s experiences included cancer nursing, hospice, med-surg, pediatrics, newborn nursery, and teaching psychiatric nursing in a nursing program for twenty years. Taylor then returned to med-surg, ER, quality control nursing, and finally psychiatric nursing, until her recent retirement. This collection highlights a career that was usually exhausting, sometimes tragic, frequently infuriating, occasionally funny, and consistently rewarding.

New Book :: Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful

Lost Hurt or in Transit Beautiful poetry by Rohan Chhetri book cover image

Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful
Poetry by Rohan Chhetri
Platypus Press, June 2022

Selected as the winner of The Kundiman Poetry Prize, Rohan Chhetri’s collection of poetry Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful is a travelogue of belonging. In parts a separation, a crossing of borders and landscapes, in others the sorrow and depths of home. But ultimately, this is the journey of weary travelers making ghosts of the night. Rohan Chhetri, a writer and translator, is the recipient of a 2021 PEN/Heim Grant for translation, and his poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Revue Europe, AGNI, and New England Review and have been translated into Kurdish, Greek and French.

New Book :: Adult Children Anthology

Adult Children Being One Having One and What Goes In Between anthology book cover image

Adult Children: Being One, Having One & What Goes In-Between
Nonfiction Edited by Heather Tosteson, Charles D. Brockett, Kerry Langan, and Michele Markarian
Wising Up Press, January 2022

What defines adulthood nowadays? Or ever? In particular, when do we see our own children as adults? When they are older than we were at the age we had them? When they have children of their own? Are fully self-supporting? What about the prematurely adult children some of us were or tried to be — where have they gone? And the lost and needy children in us? Are they still active? When our parents are failing, what is an adult-to-adult relationship then? When we have been completely dependent on someone — or fully responsible for them — is full parity ever possible? Desirable? In this Wising Up Anthology, fifty writers explore—with zest, angst, humor, humility, anger, and love—through stories, poems, memoirs, and creative non-fiction, our constantly changing and, hopefully, maturing relationships with those we raised and those who raised us.

New Book :: Spooks

Spooks by Stella Wong book cover image

Spooks
Poetry by Stella Wong
Saturnalia Books, March 2022

Winner of the Saturnalia Books Editor Prize, Stella Wong’s debut book of poems playfully subverts and willfully challenges any notions we might have about Asian Americanness and its niceties. While her previous chapbook stunned her admirers and adherents into an almost fawning incredulity, this outing eviscerates. More like getting struck with Chinese stars right between the eyes. TKO with a mean left hook to boot. And if you manage to get back up on your feet again, if your dare dance around in the haunted ring that American poetry is, be certain that this most un-model minority bard will teach you not to ever read the same way again.

New Book :: The Southernization of America

The Southernization of America: A Story of Democracy in the Balance Essays by Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker

The Southernization of America: A Story of Democracy in the Balance
Essays by Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker
NewSouth Books, February 2022

In 1974 John Egerton published his seminal work, The Americanization of Dixie. Pulitzer Prize-winning University of Southern Alabama Journalist-in-Residence Cynthia Tucker and Pulitzer Prize-winning commentator and University of Southern Alabama Writer in Residence Frye Gaillard carry Egerton’s thesis forward in The Southernization of America. They dive deeper, examining the morphing of the Southern strategy of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan into the Republican Party of today, the racial backlash against President Obama, family separation on our southern border, the rise of the Christian right, the white supremacist riots in Charlottesville, the death of George Floyd, and the attack on our nation’s capitol. They find hope in the South too, a legacy rooted in the civil rights years that might ultimately lead the nation on the path to redemption. Tucker and Gaillard bring a multiracial perspective and years of political reporting to bear on a critical moment in American history, a time of racial reckoning and democracy under siege.

New Book :: O

O by Niki Tulk book cover image

O
Poetry by Niki Tulk
Driftwood Press, July 2022

Chosen as one of three manuscripts for publication from their 2020 poetry collection reading, writer and performance artist Niki Tulk’s O explores the aftermath of sexual assault, unearthing myths, folklore, and profound truths about our collective history of violence, womanhood, and justice. Niki Tulk is an ex-pat Australian and experimental theatre-maker, improviser, writer, poet and author of Performing the Wound: Practicing a Feminist Theatre of Becoming (Routledge, 2022).

New Book :: Plans for Sentences

Plans for Sentences by Renee Gladman book cover image

Plans for Sentences
Poetry by Renee Gladman
Wave Books, May 2022

“These sentences—they—will begin having already been sentences somewhere else, and this will mark their afterlife, and this will be their debut.” So begins Renee Gladman’s latest interdisciplinary project, Plans for Sentences. Gladman’s book blurs the distinctions between text and image, recognizing that drawing can be a form of writing, and vice versa: a generative act in which the two practices not only inform each other but propel each other into futures. In this radical way, drawing and writing become part of a limitless loop of energy, unearthing fertile possibilities for the ways we think about poetry. If Gladman ascribes to any particular type of poetics, here in Plans for Sentences, readers are sure to find that it is robustly grounded in a poetics of infinite language.

Books Received May 2022

NewPages receives many wonderful titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these titles by clicking on the “New Books” tag under “Popular Topics.”

Poetry
A Peculiar People, Steven Willis, Button Poetry
And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight, Lynn Xu, Wave Books
Anthropocene Lullaby, K. A. Hays, Carnegie Mellon University Press
Bassinet, Dan Rosenberg, Carnegie Mellon University Press
Bath, Jen Silverman, Driftwood Press
Behind the Tree Backs, Iman Mohammed, Ugly Duckling Presse
Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine, Nick Francis Potter, Driftwood Press
Copy, Dolores Dorantes, Wave Books
Green Regalia, Adam Tavel, Stephen F. Austen State University Press
Greyhound Americans, Moncho Ollin Alvarado
Harsh Realm: My 1990s, Daniel Nester, Indolent Books
Idle Fancies, Joseph Hart, Cyberwit.net
Indian Poems, Joseph Hart, Kelsay Books

Continue reading “Books Received May 2022”

New Book :: One Person Holds So Much Silence

One Person Holds So Much Silence by David Greenspan book cover image

One Person Holds So Much Silence
Poetry by David Greenspan
Driftwood Press, March 2022

Chosen as one of three manuscripts for publication from their 2020 poetry collection reading, Greenspan’s work explores the intersection of physical and emotional traumas and was selected for its “surprising, jaw-dropping language from poem to poem.” Simultaneously lush and bizarre, the poems culminate in a striking deep dive into the pain and experiences of existing within a body. From self-harm to suicidal ideation, Greenspan tackles these topics through writing brimming with original language and wrought empathy. David Greenspan is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Mississippi and earned an MFA in Poetry from UMass Amherst.

New Book :: The Bar at Twilight

The Bar at Twilight stories by Frederic Tuten book cover image

The Bar at Twilight
Stories by Frederic Tuten
Bellevue Literary Press, May 2022

In the fifteen stories contained in this collection, The Bar at Twilight, Frederic Tuten entertains questions of existential magnitude, pervasive yearning, and the creative impulse. A wealthy older woman reflects on her relationship with her drowned husband, a painter, as she awaits her own watery demise. An exhausted artist, feeling stuck, reads a book of criticism about allegory and symbolism before tossing her paintings out the window. Writing a book about the lives of artists he admires — Cezanne, Monet, Rousseau — a man imagines how each vignette could be a life lesson for his wife, the artist he perhaps admires the most. New York-based Frederic Tuten is the author of five novels, the memoir My Young Life, and two short story collections. Among other honors, Tuten has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Writing.

New Book :: Coining a Wishing Tower

Coining a Wishing Tower poetry by Ayesha Raees book cover image

Coining a Wishing Tower
Poetry by Ayesha Raees
Platypus Press, March 2022

Selected by Kaveh Akbar as winner of the 2020 Broken River Prize, Coining a Wishing Tower by Ayesha Raees is both story and song, a lyrical narrative that gathers and releases. There are moments of childlike wonder and of adult meditation — oftentimes one and the same. In fragments both real and unreal, this is a book of rituals, of history, of surrender. Ayesha Raees identifies herself as a hybrid creating hybrid poetry through hybrid forms. Raees currently serves as an Assistant Poetry Editor at Asian American Writers’ Workshop The Margins and has received fellowships from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Brooklyn Poets, and Kundiman. From Pakistan, she currently lives between Lahore and New York City.

New Book :: Greyhound Americans

Greyhound Americans by Moncho Ollin Alvarado book cover image

Greyhound Americans
Poetry by Moncho Ollin Alvarado
Saturnalia Books, March 2022

Winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, this collection is “dazzlingly queer, inclusive, celestial, with indigenous ancestral heart.” Through his verse, poet Moncho Alvarado confronts a family history of borderland politics by discovering a legacy of violence, grief, trauma, and survival through poems that have an unmistakable spirit, tenderness, intimacy, and humility. These poems’ persistent resilience creates a constellation of songs, food, flowers, family, community, and trans joy, that, by the end, wants you to feel loved, nourished, and wants you to remember to say, “I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive.”

New Book :: How We Disappear

How We Disappear by Tara Lynn Masih book cover image

How We Disappear
Novella & Stories by Tara Lynn Masih
Press 53, September 2022

In this collection, Masih offers readers transporting and compelling stories of those taken, those missing, and those neither here nor gone – runaways, exiles, wanderers, ghosts, even the elusive Dame Agatha Christie. From the remote Siberian taiga to the harsh American frontier, from rural Long Island to postwar Belgium. Masih’s characters are diverse in identity and circumstance, defying the burden of erasure by disappearing into or emerging from physical and emotional landscapes. Tara Lynn Masih is a National Jewish Book Award Finalist and winner of numerous other book awards. She is the author of My Real Name is Hanna and editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction.

New Book :: Plan B: A Poet’s Survivors Manual

Plan B a Poet's Survival Manual by Sandy McIntosh book cover image

Plan B: A Poet’s Survivors Manual
Memoir by Sandy McIntosh
Marsh Hawk Press, June 2022

If you’re a poet, how are you going to survive if you can’t get a teaching job? McIntosh offers the answer: You need a Plan B if you want to put food on the table, wear shoes without holes in the soles, and stop living with roommates before you turn sixty. Taking readers through his own experiences in the world of commercial writing and publishing, McIntosh asserts that it is possible to have a successful career as a poet while holding down day jobs that make us better writers. Sandy McIntosh is publisher of Marsh Hawk Press. He has published fifteen collections of poetry and prose as well as three award-winning computer software programs.

New Book :: Tribar

Tribar by Andra Rotaru book cover image

Tribar
Poetry by Andra Rotaru
Translated by Anca Roncea
Saturnalia Books, March 2022

Winner of the Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize, translated from Romanian by Anca Roncea, Tribar starts from the geometrical concept of an impossible triangle whose three sides do not connect but still exist in the form of a triangle, creating a direction for movement. Andra Rotaru’s poetic work has developed from some of her encounters with modern dance choreography: her poems simultaneously mimic and track the body in motion. Her “connections” become joints or articulated bones that work together to carry the body along. This translation recreates this embodiment in English by focusing on the minute details of movement and sound in Andra’s language and on the “kinetic air” of Romanian.

New Book :: They Don’t Want Her There

They Don't Want Her There by Carolyn Chalmers book cover image

They Don’t Want Her There: Fighting Sexual and Racial Harassment in the American University
Nonfiction by Carolyn Chalmers
University of Iowa Press, April 2022

Decades before the #MeToo movement, Chinese American professor Jean Jew M.D. brought a lawsuit against the University of Iowa, alleging a sexually hostile work environment within the university’s College of Medicine. As Jew gained accolades and advanced through the ranks at Iowa, she was met with increasingly vicious attacks on her character by her white male colleagues. After years of demoralizing sexual, racial, and ethnic discrimination, finding herself without any higher-up departmental support, and noting her professional progression beginning to suffer by the hands of hate, Jean Jew decided to fight back. Carolyn Chalmers was her lawyer. This book tells the inside story of pioneering litigation unfolding during the eight years of a university investigation, a watershed federal trial, and a state court jury trial.

New Book :: A Song by the Aegean Sea

A Song by the Aegean Sea poetry by Mohamed Metwalli book cover image


A Song by the Aegean Sea
Poetry by Mohamed Metwalli
Translated by Gretchen McCullough
Egret Chapbooks, 2022

From the Introduction: “Mohamed Metwalli was recognized as a poet in the Arab world at a young age in 1992, when he won the prestigious Yousef el-Khal prize by Riad El-Rayyes Books in Lebanon for his poetry collection, Once Upon a Time. He was only twenty-two. The Yousef El-Khal prize was a highly coveted award for the best first collection for poets in the Arabic-speaking world. Once, with a mischievous grin on his face, he told me how he rolled up at the ceremony in Beirut, clad in jeans and sneakers to pick up the prize – it was his first trip out of Egypt. A little over fifty now, he has published four collections of poetry. . . This book celebrates the underbelly of the city: the gypsies selling flowers, the roving musicians, the mussel-sellers, and the protesters. The elements of the city’s coastline are merged with the characters in an impressionistic, yet surreal canvas from a stranger’s point of view. The Traveler, i.e., the poet, or the singer of the Aegean song yearns to become part of the scene. Through this yearning, the poetry becomes lyrical.” – Gretchen McCullough

New Book :: Copy

Copy by Dolores Dorantes translated by Robin Myers

Copy
Poetry by Dolores Dorantes
Translated by Robin Myers
Wave Books, April 2022

“Without the copying process,” the poet Dolores Dorantes has said, “there would be no life, no reality.” Through deconstructed dictionary entries and powerfully syncopated, recursive texts, Copy is a prose poem sequence that insinuates an experience of violent removal: a person’s disappearance from a country, from normal life, and forcible reintegration into a new social and existential configuration. This displaced, dispossessed voice explores what it means to be extracted, subtracted, abstracted out of being—and returned into it. Meditative, urgent, and alive, Copy asserts itself as an invocation, both intensely personal and insistently communal, of the right to refuge, and it enacts a powerful homage to the human capacity for creation and metamorphosis. In this way, this book points to the wound of being extricated, serving as both a suture and a salve.

New Book :: And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight

And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight book cover image

And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight
Poetry by Lynn Xu
Wave Books, April 2022

Part protest against reality, part metaphysical reckoning, part internationale for the world-historical surrealist insurgency, and part arte povera for the wretched of the earth, this book-length poem by Lynn Xu holds fast to our fragile utopias. Under the auspice of birth and the contingency of this beginning, time opens: Ecstatic, melancholy, and defiant, the voices of the poem flicker between life and death, gorgeous and gruesome, visionary and intimate. Born in Shanghai, China, Lynn Xu is the author of the full-length collection Debts & Lessons (Omnidawn, 2013) and the chapbooks June (Corollary Press, 2006) and Tournesol (Compline, 2021). She has performed cross-disciplinary works at the Guggenheim Museum, The Renaissance Society, Rising Tide Projects, and 300 S. Kelly Street. She teaches at Columbia University, coedits Canarium Books, and lives with her family in New York City and Marfa, Texas.

New Book :: Harsh Realm: My 1990s

Harsh Realm: My 1990s poetry by Daniel Nester book cover image

Harsh Realm: My 1990s
Poetry by Daniel Nester
Indolent Books, May 2022

This collection of poems centers on the decade of fax machines and grunge through the lens of a speaker coming to terms with young adulthood and trying to make their way as a writer in New York City. In other words, the 90s are having a moment. In his foreword to the collection, Matthew Lippman writes, “this book is a conduit to that time and space vortex of love. Nester, with these poems, folds that piece of paper in half, sticks that pencil through, and fires up the rocket ship and there we are, immediately, in that wormhole, cavorting with cultural icons the likes of Vince Neil, Gary Coleman, U2, Mazzy Star, Sugar Ray, Live, David Lee Roth, De La Soul, Smashing Pumpkins, Sleater-Kinney, Dr. Octagon, even KISS. Even the title is a reflection on the era, coming from the infamous Megan Jasper interview in which she made up “grunge speak,” with “harsh realm” being fake grunge-speak for “bummer.”

New Book :: Women and Print Culture

Women and Print Culture book cover image

Women and Print Culture
Essays edited by Donna M. Kabalen Vanek and María Teresa Mijares Cervantes
Arte Público Press, November 2021

This collection of ten essays, based on the examination of publications from the US-Mexico region between 1850-1950, explores the role of women in print culture. Leading to a better understanding of women in the history of Mexican border life, the essays are organized in three thematic groupings: “Exploring the Archives: Women and Written Culture in Northeastern Mexico during the Late Nineteenth Century,” “The Cultural History of Women and Print Culture” and “A Transcultural View of Women and their Role as Activists in Northern Mexico and Texas.”

New Book :: The Fact of Memory

The Fact of Memory essays by Aaron Angello book cover image

The Fact of Memory: 114 Ruminations and Fabrications
Essays by Aaron Angello
Rose Metal Press, April 2022

In this genre-defying collection of short prose pieces, Aaron Angello explores the subtleties of recollection, imagination, and the connections, both momentary and long-lasting, between oneself and others. Each piece riffs on a word from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29; over the course of 114 days, Angello woke early, meditated upon a single word from the sonnet, and wrote. The results are sometimes funny, sometimes profound, and sometimes heartbreaking, accumulating into a map of a mind at work, a Gen X coming-of-age of sorts, seamlessly invoking the likes of The Golden Girls, Spinoza, Rick Springfield, and Rimbaud.

New Book :: Migrations: Poem, 1976-2020

Migrations Poem 1976-2020 by Gloria Gervitz book cover image

Migrations: Poem, 1976-2020
By Gloria Gervitz
Translated by Mark Schafer
New York Review Books, November 2021

The story of Gervitz’s poem is an epic in itself. Migraciones began as “Shajarit,” a fifteen-page poem, which Gervitz began writing in 1976 and published three years later. So began the poem that would grow over the next forty-one years as a tree incorporates its rings, or a river is fed by its tributaries. Gloria Gervitz’s book is an epic journey in free verse through the individual and collective memories of Jewish women emigrants from Eastern Europe, a conversation that ranges across two thousand years of poetry, a bridge that spans the oracles of ancient Greece and the markets of modern Mexico, a prayer that blends the Jewish and Catholic liturgies, a Mexican woman’s reclamation through poetry of her own voice and erotic power.

New Book :: Palm-Lined with Potience

Palm Lined with Potience poetry by Besie Allen book cover image

Palm-Lined with Potience
Poetry by Basie Allen
Ugly Duckling Presse, March 2022

Palm-Lined with Potience is New York City poet and visual artist Basie Allen’s debut collection of poems. Basie’s work is by turns political and lyrical, charting both physical and emotional landscapes, making maps of paintings and paintings of maps. While rooted in Pro-Black theory, art, and precise description, Basie makes space in the ekphrastic for the eerie and abstract. The poems in this collection search for nodes of truth in a tumultuous sea of fractured facts.

New Book :: A Peculiar People

A Peculiar People poetry by Steven Willis book cover image

A Peculiar People
Poetry by Steven Willis
Button Poetry, May 2022

In A Peculiar People, poet Steven Willis creates an entire microcosm crafted within a cast of characters, showcasing their struggles, identities, and underlying emotions. Willis champions the art of storytelling: weaving pop-culture and screenwriting elements to allow the reader to view this social commentary with a fresh lens. This collection examines the author’s life experience; the pain of being Black and facing systemic racism.

New Book :: Receta

Receta by Mario José Pagán Morales book cover image

Receta
Poetry by Mario José Pagán Morales
great weather for MEDIA, April 2022

In this debut poetry collection, Mario José Pagán Morales explores the journeying of mind, spirit, and body to and from Puerto Rico and New York City. Boricua and part of a proud tradition of Nuyorican poets before and around him, Pagán balances a generous heart with striking and visceral imagery. The line breaks and movement between English and Spanglish are reflective of the poems’ settings: the constant journeying of mind, spirit, and body to and from Guayanilla and Ponce, Puerto Rico, Philadelphia, and New York City. The Bronx. History amplifies the colonizer, but Morales invokes voices from the sites of struggle. Here, even the abandoned buildings and trash heaps speak of lives that matter(ed).

New Book :: This Long Winter

This Long Winter poetry by Joyce Sutphen book cover image

This Long Winter
Poetry by Joyce Sutphen
Carnegie Mellon University Press, February 2022

This Long Winter contains meditations on life in the rural world: reflections on hard work, aging, and the ravages of time — erasures that Sutphen attempts to ameliorate with her careful attention to language. These poems move us from delight in precise description to wisdom and solace in the things of this world. These modern metaphysical poems are rooted in a love that calls to the things of this world (to steal a line from Richard Wilbur). Noticing its details, the snowflakes, clementines, the lilies, the cardinal’s call, is the key for this momentary stay against time that comes at us in a rush. The many mirror images in these poems of the poet in a window looking out but simultaneously reflecting back point to the complexity and hard, loving work of really living in the world.

New Book :: Somewhere, a Woman Lowers the Hem of Her Skirt

Somewhere, a Woman Lowers the Hem of Her Skirt by Laurie Rachkus Uttich book cover image

Somewhere, a Woman Lowers the Hem of Her Skirt
Poetry by Laurie Rachkus Uttich
Riot in Your Throat Press, May 2022

This collection of poems takes the reader on a journey through life as a woman breaking free from the constraints of a quiet, midwestern life, to fighting battles for equality, to raising boys in a harsh society, to teaching students and making connections in an unjust world. Uttich teaches at the University of Central Florida and also leads creative writing workshops at a men’s maximum-security correctional facility, bringing her collective experience to offer readers poems about hope and happiness and heartache and finding your way home.

New Book :: Henry Hamlet’s Heart

Henry Hamlet's Heart by Rhiannon Wilde book cover image

Henry Hamlet’s Heart
YA Fiction by Rhiannon Wilde
Charlesbridge, October 2022

Henry Hamlet doesn’t know what he wants after school ends. It’s his last semester of high school, and all he’s sure of is his uncanny ability to make situations awkward. Luckily, he can always hide behind his enigmatic best friend, Len. They’ve been friends since forever, but Len is mysterious and Henry is clumsy, and Len is a heartthrob and Henry is a neurotic mess. Somehow it’s always worked. That is, until Henry falls in love. Hard. How do you date your best friend? Rhiannon Wilde’s first novel invites readers to explore this passionate story of growing up, letting go, and learning how to love.

New Book :: Ready, Set, Oh

Ready Set Oh by Diane Josefowicz book cover image

Ready, Set, Oh
Fiction by Diane Josefowicz
Flexible Press, May 2022

Diane Josefowicz’s debut novel, Ready, Set, Oh, is set against the upheavals of the Sixties and chronicles the struggles of a man who has just lost his draft deferment, a young pregnant woman with fragile mental health, and a UFO-chasing astronomer, each hostages in their own way to their families and to history. A portion of the proceeds from Ready, Set, Oh goes to the National Network to End Domestic Violence, a social change organization dedicated to creating a social, political, and economic environment in which violence against women no longer exists.

New Book :: Anthropocene Lullaby

Anthropocene Lullaby poetry by K. A. Hays book cover image

Anthropocene Lullaby
Poetry by K. A. Hays
Carnegie Mellon University Press, February 2022

The poems of Anthropocene Lullaby move from the micro to the macro, from dragonflies to galaxies, from the intersecting forces of climate change, capitalism, and digital technologies to intersecting anxieties of selfhood and motherhood. These lyric and prose poems track change: underway and inevitable, personal and impersonal, generative and apocalyptic. The title poem sets in motion some of the collection’s concerns:

Continue reading “New Book :: Anthropocene Lullaby”

New Book :: My Identity as a Stereotypical Side Character

My Identity as a Stereotypical Side Character poetry by Marcus Campbell book cover image

My Identity as a Stereotypical Side Character
Poetry by Marcus Campbell
Brick Cave Media, February 2022

My Identity as a Stereotypical Side Character is a complex interlocking of the personal, communal, and societal that reflects the challenges of growing up as a mixed-race minority in the new millennium. Campbell spares no subject, be it family, others, or even himself in this powerful collection of poetry that deals with mental health, race, and addiction.

New Book :: What Passes Here for Mountains

What Passes Here for Mountains poetry by Matt Morton book cover image

What Passes Here for Mountains
Poetry by Matt Morton
Carnegie Mellon University Press, February 2022

These poems are a kaleidoscopic journey across locales ranging from the West Texas desert to the bustling streets of Rome, from the social realm of festivity and ritual to the privacy of the imagination. Along the way, the search for meaning and stability within a world in constant flux is enlivened by a surrealist vitality. Cezanne and Shakespeare’s Caliban commingle with indie rock musicians and Humpy-Dumpty. A mystical encounter with an Edward Hopper painting butts heads with the mundanity of waking again to one’s morning routine. Poems of wry self-deprecation are juxtaposed with quiet meditations on memory, grief, and the relationship between the self and the cosmos.

New Book :: So, Stranger

So Stranger poetry by Topaz Winters book cover image

So, Stranger
Poetry by Topaz Winters
Button Poetry, May 2022

Winner of the Button Poetry Short Form Contest, Topaz Winters’ third poetry collection spans three countries and three generations. In a series of ars poeticas, Winters questions the boundary between the things we inherit and those we owe, stands at the grave of the American dream, and unspools the enormous grace and guilt of being loved.

New Book :: The J Girls: A Reality Show

The J Girls A Reality Show by Rochelle Hurt book cover image

The J Girls: A Reality Show
Mixed Genre by Rochelle Hurt
Indiana University Press, March 2022

Winner of the 2021 Blue Light Books Prize, Rochelle Hurt’s The J Girls: A Reality Show is a tribute to the grit and glitter of millennial girlhood and a testament to its dangers and traumas. Ignoring the optimistic advice of elders, Jocelyn, Jodie, Jennifer, Jacqui, Joelle – five working-class teens in the Rust Belt – band together in their embrace of bad behavior and poor taste as they navigate sexuality and identity with loud-mouthed joy and clear-eyed cynicism. Hurt’s genre-bending mix of poetry, fiction, and screenplay brings the girls to life with campy performances of monologues, soap opera clips, mock interviews, talk shows, commercials, and even burlesque. Vulgar, rhapsodic language serves as costume and shield, allowing the J Girls to script their own images and project glowing, outsized versions of themselves into the safe space of the TV screen.

New Book :: Out Beyond the Land

Out Beyond the Land poetry by Kimberly Burwick book cover image

Out Beyond the Land
Poetry by Kimberly Burwick
Carnegie Mellon University Press, February 2022

Out Beyond the Land refracts the subtle moments in nature where what is seen and unseen twists and loops back, gently nudging the speaker to question how knowledge is formed and memorialized. Using the Latin’s “A priori” and “A posteriori” as a starting point, these lyrics work to form a kind of double helix in which the strands of empirical knowledge and intuitive knowledge twist and become one. In the silence that follows, the speaker comes to terms with both her attachment to nature’s permanence and nature’s solid independence from our attachment.

New Book :: Plainchant

Plainchant by Eamon Grennan book cover image

Plainchant
Poetry by Emon Grennan
Red Hen Press, June 2022

Grennan’s new collection shows again his powers of close, patient, plainspoken observation. Whether his gaze falls on the dash of a hare, dive of a gannet, heavy stillness of a rain-flecked cow, the song of a lark, or the scurry of an ant across a page of Celan, the poem that emerges is a celebration of the momentary fact, how a particular detail can, when sufficiently attended to, glow with the truth of its own unrepeatable self. Set mostly in the landscape of coastal Connemara, these poems can also bring to vivid life a painting by Bonnard, a family walk, a childhood memory, a chance encounter, a man scything a field, or a brief probing of the work of Beckett.

New Book :: Bassinet

Bassinet poetry by Dan Rosenberg book cover image


Bassinet
Poetry by Dan Rosenberg
Carnegie Mellon University Press, February 2022

Dan Rosenberg’s third collection moves from loss into parenthood, exploring the roles of husband and father: their limits, their possibilities, and how they intersect with the wider world. Grounded in the familial, these poems wrestle with the political and the ecological, with heritage and hope, reimagining the breadth of home and what it means for one man to raise another to love it.

New Book :: You’ve Got Something Coming

You've Got Something Coming by Jonathan Starke book cover image

You’ve Got Something Coming
Fiction by Jonathan Starke
Black Heron Press, April 2020

A title you may have missed at the start of the pandemic, You’ve Got Something Coming is worth a throwback look. This breakthrough debut novel is about a down-and-outer and his small daughter and his attempt to give them a better life. Trucks, an aging boxer with only thirty dollars, breaks his deaf daughter, Claudia, out of a children’s home in Wisconsin one night during the dead of winter. He gives her used hearing aids, and they begin hitchhiking to Nevada. Claudia is a winsome, feisty little girl who tries to hold her father to account, and Trucks loves her unconditionally. Claudia’s mother, an addict, has disappeared and is likely dead.

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New Book :: Conscious Designs

Conscious Designs novella by Nathanial White book cover image

Conscious Designs
Novella by Nathanial White
Miami University Press, May 2022

Nathanial White’s speculative fiction explores the human psyche, physical disability, culture, technology, and consumerism. In this new work, Eugene, a wealthy paraplegic, must decide whether to preserve his consciousness forever in a digital utopia or suffer the pain tormenting his existence. Yet the more he learns about digital replication, the more deeply he understands personhood, empathy, and the value of suffering.

New Book :: Question from Outer Space

Questions from Outer Space by Diane Thiel book cover image

Question from Outer Space
Poetry by Diane Thiel
Red Hen Press, May 2022

The newest collection of works by Diane Thiel explores fresh and often humorous perspectives that capture the surreal quality of our swiftly changing lives on this planet. The poems travel through questions on many fronts, challenging assumptions and locating unique angles of perception. These poems reflect a deep engagement with the natural world, a questioning of our built systems, the expansive wilderness of parenting, and the complexities of navigating outer and inner space.

New Book :: Behind the Tree Backs

Behind the Tree Backs poetry by Iman Mohammed translated by Jennifer Hayashida book cover image

Behind the Tree Backs
Poetry by Iman Mohammed
Translated by Jennifer Hayashida
Ugly Duckling Presse, March 2022

Behind the Tree Backs investigates a poetics of remembrance through senses that hover just below and just above the skin. The text excavates war and displacement through a constellation of animate memories carved out of deep pleasure as well as brutality, the ancient and the institutional, the everyday and the geopolitical. The book insists on a poetics that recall through vibrating auratic fields, violence, love, and sexuality; these sensations tremble and cohere in a musical and tightly composed lyric.

New Book :: Chambers of the Heart

Chambers of the Heart speculative fiction by B. Morris Allen book cover image

Chambers of the Heart
Speculative Fiction by B. Morris Allen
Plant Based Press, April 2022

What happens when an Oregon-based biochemist turned activist turned lawyer turned foreign aid consultant starts penning speculative fiction? In the case of B. Morris Allen, it’s a new collection of stories featuring a heart that’s a building, a dog that’s a program, a woman who’s sinking irretrievably – stories about love, loss, and movement. Allen is also the author of the dark fantasy novel Susurrus and editor of Metaphorosis, a weekly online magazine of “beautifully written” speculative fiction.

New Book :: Over the Moon…Gone: The Vanishing Act of Bess Houdini

Over the Moon…Gone: The Vanishing Act of Bess Houdini Poetry by Jan Zlotnik Schmidt book cover image

Over the Moon…Gone: The Vanishing Act of Bess Houdini
Poetry by Jan Zlotnik Schmidt
Palooka Press, December 2021

SUNY New Paltz Distinguished Teaching Professor Emerita Jan Zlotnik Schmidt’s poetry chapbook Over the Moon…Gone: The Vanishing Act of Bess Houdini brings new light to the complicated life of Bess Houdini and gives voice to this stunning and admirable woman. The collection opens with the biography of Bess Houdini, a class magician in her own right, but sidelined as her husband’s helpmate as his career took the limelight. Following his unexpected death, Bess Houdini attempted many times to restart her career, as well as to connect with her dead husband through séance. In her author’s note, Schmidt explains her research approach to studying the Houdinis and her creation of Bess Houdini’s “state of mind, perspective, and experience” through her poems as “an expansion of the biographical fact.” She further explains, “It is my hope that these poems bring Bess from the margins to the center of the narrative of the great Houdini. For Bess shouldn’t be relegated to being another invisible woman standing in the shadow of the great artist or genius. This volume gives Bess Houdini the space and chance to speak.” It behooves us all to read and breathe life into this effort.

New Book :: The End of Horses

The End of Horses poetry by Margo Taft Stever book cover image

The End of Horses
Poetry by Margo Taft Stever
Broadstone Books, April 2022

In the title poem from this new collection from Margo Taft Stever, she writes “from the end / of the time zone” where “nothing survived / after the horses were slaughtered,” a catastrophe for which no one knows whom to blame, but “The generals / and engineers pucker / and snore on the veranda.” Stever thus offers up a fable of man-made ecological disaster that is in every sense the work of a mature writer, one who has lived long and witnessed much, and who has mastered her craft, here placed in the service of the environment. She devotes much concern to animals – including a discourse on beavers – but her primary subject is humans, and her purpose is to provide readers with cautionary tales on the necessity of ethical living.