A Short History of Anger by Joy Manesiotis Parlor Press, February 2023
Both a book-length poetic hybrid and a live performance, A Short History of Anger takes as its source material the Destruction of Smyrna, the Turkish army’s genocide of Smyrna’s Greek citizens in 1922, and the resulting population exchange. Used as a blueprint for state-sponsored ethnic cleansing and forced migration, The Destruction of Smyrna is an event about which the world has remained strangely silent. Governed by its musical, ritualistic construction and lament structure, A Short History of Anger attempts to excavate the legacy of genocide and displacement that has resonated from The Destruction. It is meant to be deeply affective, rather than narrative, and move in the way historical occurrences pass into the present and live through subsequent generations. A Short History of Anger combines prose and poetry, essay and verse, persona and chorus; built with many voices, layers and fractures, it employs a modern-day Greek Chorus.
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Staying Right Here by Usman Hameedi Button Poetry, April 2023
Usman Hameedi’s debut collection, Staying Right Here, is a journey in finding home. Hameedi invites readers to bear witness to vignettes of joy and hardship as he navigates finding his place in America. From an ode to Bodegas, an autobiography of his eyebrows, and elegies for lost friends, Hameedi’s thematic metaphors for family, wellness, and American biases weave a literary tapestry. Reading Usman’s work is like drinking a warm chai while watching the sunset in Brooklyn, or coming home to an aromatic Biryani. Hameedi writes with an unmistakably unique voice that is not afraid of who he is.
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Marc Vincenz’s The Pearl Diver of Irunmani charts the paths of consciousness on an aquatic journey into the heart of mind and matter. What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to be alive preparing for death? What animates the soul moments before death? In this collection, Marc Vincenz trans-navigates the oceans of consciousness that contain all the elements of life and death. . . and rebirth. In a language that is spare and ghostly, the narrator embarks upon finding that pearl of knowledge embedded in the heart of meaning.
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Between Twilight by Connie Post NYQ Books, February 2023
In Between Twilight, Post delves deep into the difficult journeys of everyday life and intersects those with the difficult maps of the past. There are “atrocities in the body” and many ways a person can falter, fall or rise from “the hue of an unseen self.” Post explores the necessary truths, the ones we can no longer hide, the ones we’ve held on to, for too long. In these poems, the reader will more fully understand Faulkner’s “the past is never the past in never past, it’s not even dead.” The poet infuses elements of evolution, illness, astronomy, humanity, internal travels inside our bodies, and travels back in time “before shadows understood their first for light.” Post’s poems will seep into our subconscious and help us see how a room can be “dark and iridescent all at once.”
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In this memoir, The Longest Race, Kara Goucher, with Mary Pilson, tells the story of how she became a world-class runner, focusing on her time at the Nike Oregon Project. Goucher talks about the mental abuse she endured as a woman, especially the intense scrutiny of her weight and appearance, but also her pregnancy. She was in the program during the doping scandals of the early part of the century, which later led her to testify against her former coach and teammates. She endured sexual harassment and assault on several occasions. Throughout all of this mental and sexual abuse, she was trying to be one of the best runners in America and the world. Goucher’s memoir reveals the realities of what has happened at the top of various sports throughout the past few decades, especially the ways people in power have abused and ignored women. As Pilson writes in the introduction, “If you’ve ever bought a shirt or pair of shoes with a swoosh, you need to know this story. If you’ve ever tuned in to watch an Olympic final, a World Series, a Super Bowl, or any other professional sporting event, you need to know this story.” Even non-runners need to know this story.
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/.
Before After by Owen McLeod Saturnalia Books, March 2023
From action figures to alcoholism, mental illness to mortality, devotion to divorce, Before After interrogates yet celebrates the paradoxes of living in a world both beautiful and brutal—a world, according to these poems, in which Jesus texts random emojis from the cross, people suddenly sprout wings, human hearts are replaced by Platonic machines, and caskets are shrunk down to serve as symbolic trinkets. Along this journey through the real and surreal, the works of great poets—Hopkins, Plath, Lowell, and more—are lovingly subverted in the search for novel meanings that match this world. Written by a self-taught and award-winning poet, Before After challenges, with wit and compassion, our distinctions between thinking and feeling, sacred and profane, wellness and madness, before and after.
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Far From New York State by Matthew Johnson NYQ Books, March 2023
Matthew Johnson’s second poetry volume constructs a space where the rural communities of Upstate, the suburban living of the Lower Hudson Valley, and the metropolitan landscapes of the City are woven together in a mosaic snapshot. A collection of poems where the historical and cultural traditions of New York State meet, the reader is acquainted not only with seminal figures across the cultural channels of literature, music, and sports, such as Washington Irving, Paul Robeson, and the ’86 Mets, but to the author himself. Tender, playful, and meditative, Johnson presents stories that he has lived, and shares others that have been passed down through familial storytelling around the kitchen table and cookout barbecue pit.
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Whatever’s Forbidden the Wise by Anthony Madrid Canarium Books, April 2023
In Anthony Madrid’s fourth book, Whatever’s Forbidden the Wise, the poet appraises this world “full of ancient things whose shapes and colors have changed,” as his singular, unforgettable and voice resonates in ghazals, rubai, ditties, and “gnomic stanzas.” A polymath and iconoclast, Madrid knows the names of the stars and turns their light into astonishing music.
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Tess Gunty’s debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch, is so weird and wild, with characters that can strike readers as so unlikable, I’m worried people won’t stick with it, which they definitely should, if for no other reason than her astonishing comparisons. Gunty’s title refers to a public housing unit where several of the main characters live, but it also refers to people whom society has put in a small cage, specifically people society has damaged in some way. For example, Blandine (originally Tiffany) has grown up in the foster care system and ends up living with three boys who have come up in similar circumstances, all of whom suffer from a lack of meaningful relationships. Moses and his mother—a woman who became famous as a child star on a TV sitcom—also have no real relationship, leaving Moses adrift as an adult, taking petty vengeance on those who hurt him. The novel sounds dark, and it is, overall, but not in a gratuitous manner. Instead, Gunty spends most of the book setting up the darkness—not just the characters’ immediate conditions, but also the realities of climate change and urban development—only to reveal a select few moments of light, just enough to remind readers of what is still good in the world and what can continue to be good, if only they work to make it so.
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/.
Whether crisp and understated or capacious and kinetic, the poems in Lee Upton’s seventh collection are lyrically dexterous and reverberant. Shrewd, formally ambitious, excavating cultural myths and contradictions, these poems allow the ordinary and the supernatural to inhabit one another. The poems are often attentive to suffering: torture as it persists through centuries, the extinction of species, and the agonies of illness, grief, and the blasting of innocence are meditated upon. At the same time, in this book of mysteries, the cultivation of the redemptive energy of wit, in favor of the sensual and tender, performs as a means to resist violence.
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Rattle Poetry Chapbook Prize Winner, The Fight Journal by John W. Evans is a heartsick elegy for a failed marriage. Written in couplets that mirror the back-and-forth of two parties alternately warring with each other and struggling to hold a family together, Evans explores the depths of longing, bitterness, resignation, and hope that humanize the struggle to live and parent during and after divorce. As much a story of resolve as it is vulnerability, The Fight Journal is a bittersweet account of the complexities of connection, the power of sympathy, and the many forms that love takes in lives that continue. This chapbook currently comes free with all spring-issue subscriptions to Rattle poetry magazine. Subscribers receive four issues of Rattle and four chapbooks for $25. See their website for more information.
Two extraordinary North American poets have come together in this shared book of poetry that exemplifies the depth to which the natural world and our place in it is perceived. Whether it’s Silvia Scheibli’s ability to connect with a Latin American culture that has been so influential on her own work, or Patty Dickson Pieczka’s wanderings through the dream-like reality of her ever-deepening world, these are all poems from poets who have not only earned their words but lived them as well.
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pH of Au by Vanessa Couto Johnson Parlor Press, January 2023
Through chemistry, alchemy, citizenship, and social connections, the speaker of pH of Au navigates location and displacement, physical and otherwise. A Brazilian, a Texan, a granddaughter, a periodically long-distance partner—through her various identities, some properties of gold manifest.
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The Mare by Seth Christian Martel is a graphic novel that takes readers on a paranormal adventure with Indigo, a post-senior-year teen whose next steps are uncertain due to her rocky home life. As with any good YA story, Indigo has a best friend who is both a sidekick and a guide. Kasia is the steady rock with a summer internship and plans to go to medical school, a foil to Indigo’s widowed and now divorced alcoholic father whose need for caretaking causes Indigo to lose her job. All of these could be contributors to Indigo’s strange nightmares in which she is possessed by some ethereal being. Concern for Indigo’s health due to lack of sleep leads the two teens to explore remedies for her nightmares, or a “Mare” as they learn from a book – “the spirit of someone wronged that saps its victim’s energy at night.”
The images throughout are black and white with graywash and bold outlines that add a sense of 3-D. Blue enters as highlights in Indigo’s hair and as she transitions into her sleep-induced possessions. The full blue hue wash with white electric scribbles creates the eerie effect of paranormal embodiment. The pacing drives readers through several well-connected layers of development: teen summers, angst over outfits, indie band concerts, and crushes, but also the mystery of The Mare and Indigo’s finally coming to solve it.
My only criticism is that I wished the story was longer and more developed. There were details left unexplored that would have helped connect readers more to the main characters and repulsed us from others. The psychopathology related to The Mare is present but also underdeveloped, especially for as serious a topic as it is in our society.
This could also certainly leave room for a sequel or series. There were enough dropped clues and lesser-developed content to make The Mare a solid premier to connect with subsequent storylines, and Indigo is endearing enough to create a following.
The Mare by Seth Christian Martel. graphic mundi, March 2023.
Reviewer bio: Denise Hill is Editor of NewPages.com and reviews books she chooses based on her own personal interests.
The Exhausted Dream by Joshua Edwards Marfa Books, March 2023
Also known as A Monthly Account of the Year Leading Up to the End of the World, by AGONISTES, Prophet and Fulfiller, this is Joshua Edwards’ longish poem in iambic pentameter about Love, Television, Philosophy, Prophecy, and the transience of Worlds. It’s also about the swiftness of iambic time, as the reader’s experience of the book’s nominal subjects is secondary to their experience of time as structured in this way. Sitcoms, French restaurants, favorite museums, incense, Atlas, and Caspar David Friedrich are all grains of sand in this small, though finely shaped hourglass.
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Failures of the Poets by Anthony Robinson Canarium Books, April 2023
After more than 20 years of publishing poems in magazines and chapbook, Anthony Robinson has brought together an incredible collection for his long-awaited first full-length book, Failures of the Poets. Full of beauty, heartbreak, humor, pain, absurdity, sorrow, friendship, and love, as well as bridges, family, lakes, God, feathers, and food, this is a book brimming over with thinking and with things, as Robinson’s intense attention collides with the world. “All winter we waited / For the sun and now he’s here but will / He make it through another year?”
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Taking its name from a line in Rilke’s second Duino Elegy, “For our own heart always exceeds us,” at its core, this is a book about new love and underlying illness. A lyric pursuit of our existence among the natural world, these poems keep in mind that existence is transient. They straddle reality lines, often stepping over into dream spaces or pushing against a linear world. But they are solidly of this world, its ground and various bodies of water, where a boy can become a field and a girl can drown in the rivers of her own body. At once intimate—“I would know you in someone else’s life, someone else’s storm cellar”—and expansive—“We rape the landscape / we can see, start with what covers the light”—Osowski is a poet of language, of notice, and of inquiry. Rilke writes, “Wasn’t love and departure placed so gently on shoulders that it seemed to be made of a different substance than in our world?” Exceeds Us is interested in that substance and the notion that our lives are not singular. These poems exceed the pair at their center, they exceed the one life we’re granted, and they are not bound to the laws of our earth. “Prove how weather is not a god and I’ll believe in you.”
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Fittingly, I read Saving Time by Jenny Odell during my Spring Break and during the shift to Daylight Savings Time. The latter exemplifies Odell’s critique of time as a construct, especially one that portrays time as a series of boxes to fill. She sees such approaches to time as problematic in two ways: 1) they help create the idea that there is an inexorable future coming; 2) they reinforce systems of control. Odell draws from a variety of subjects—apocalyptic language, incarceration, productivity, climate change, and geography, for example—to reveal how those in power use time to reinforce hierarchies, often based on race, ability, or gender, but especially socioeconomics. Odell questions the assumptions embedded in such systems, such as whether one person’s hour is actually equal to another person’s, an idea that seems to be logically true, but that Odell shows to be nothing but another construct. During my Spring Break, Odell might be pleased to see, I’m not using my time productively, at least not as typical Western societies see productivity. Instead, I’m engaging in creativity for its own sake, including writing this review. Her book isn’t self-help or time management, so readers shouldn’t expect tips for living, but they should expect Odell to help them see time—and, thus, the world—differently.
Saving Time by Jenny Odell. Random House, March 2023.
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/.
The London Revolution 1640–1643: Class Struggles in 17th Century England chronicles England’s history through the revolution in 1641–1642, which toppled the feudal political system, and its aftermath. It explores how the growing capitalist economy fundamentally conflicted with decaying feudal society, causing tensions and dislocations that affected all social classes in the early modern period. In contrast with most other works, this book posits that the fundamental driving force of the revolution was the militant Puritan movement supported by the class of petty-bourgeois artisan craftworkers, instead of the moderate gentry in the House of Commons. This is a peer-reviewed publication.
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General Release from the Beginning of the World by Donna Spruijt-Metz Parlor Press, January 2023
In General Release from the Beginning of the World, Donna Spruijt-Metz attempts to reconcile the death of the father, the lies of the mother, a hidden half-sister, and the love for a daughter – with the impossible desire to banish the past from the present. She examines shifting relationships with the holy, referred to in the book only as ‘YOU.’ She asks: “Do YOU hear / a whisper / in YOUR // constant night / -and then listen?” She breaks her own heart to touch yours.
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Explorers Kristen and Ville Jokinen met and fell in love while scuba diving in Vietnam. Ville then left his native Finland to join Kristen in Oregon and together they embarked on a life-changing two-year cycling adventure covering 18,000 miles from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Ushuaia, Argentina. Despite never having cycled further than around the block, they persevered unrelenting, punishing rain and wind, altitude sickness, dog attacks, bike accidents, and countless flat tires to cycle between the ends of the earth. Kristen and Ville believe that kindness connects us to our shared humanity. They held babies, attended quinceañeras, drank pulque, played soccer, and visited schools. People in Mexico, Central America, and South America invited them into their hearts and homes, allowed them to camp in their fields and farms, and acted as personal tour guides. Kristen and Ville are love on wheels, and who doesn’t need a little more love in their lives?
Eleanor Catton’s title, Birman Wood, should immediately make the reader think of Shakespeare’s Macbeth; however, Catton isn’t writing a contemporary retelling. That said, Catton’s characters have ambition and are willing to do what they need to do to achieve those ambitions, but the characters are more nuanced than in a typical tragedy. Mira has created Birnam Wood, a collective that legally (and not) plants crops in undeveloped areas, but is struggling to stay afloat and might suffer because of Mira’s ego. She meets Robert Lemoine—an American billionaire who has created the persona of a doomsday prepper to purchase land in New Zealand for which he has other, even-less-savory plans—and he agrees to help Mira fund a development on the land he has not quite purchased. Tony used to be a member of Birnam Wood, but he has been teaching overseas for the past several years and now wants a career in investigative journalism, so he sees a career-propelling story in Lemoine’s plans. Shelley has been working with Mira since Tony left, but she’s now considering leaving Birnam Wood, tired of Mira and of living on the margins. While the clearest tragedy in the novel is climate change—the moving of woods, in a different sense—there will be others, and, as in a Shakespearean drama, perhaps nobody is innocent.
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, March 2023.
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/.
Rooted in the classical tradition of the Chinese “reversible” poem, 回 / Return is engaged in the act of looking back—toward an imagined homeland and a childhood of suburban longing, through migratory passages, departures, and etymologies, and into the various holes and voids that appear in the telling and retelling of history. The poems ask: What is feeling? What is melancholy? Can language translate either? A former Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Emily Lee Luan is the author of I Watch the Boughs, selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. She lives in New York City.
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Down to the Bone: A Leukemia Story by Catherine Pioli, trans. J.T. Mahany graphic mundi, December 2022
When Catherine is diagnosed with acute leukemia, a deadly form of cancer that attacks the immune system, her life is turned upside down. Young and previously healthy, she now finds herself catapulted into the world of the seriously ill—constantly testing and waiting for results, undergoing endless medical treatments, learning to accept a changing body, communicating with a medical team, and relying on the support of her partner, family, and friends. A professional illustrator, Catherine decides to tell the story of her disease in this graphic novel, and she does so with great sincerity, humor, and rare lucidity. We accompany her through the waiting, the doubts, the fears, and the tears—but also the laughter, the love, and the strong will to live.
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In Springtime, Sarah Blake’s epic poem of survival, we follow a nameless main character lost in the woods. There, they discover the world anew, negotiating their place among the trees and the rain and the animals. Something brought them to the woods that nearly killed them, and they’re not sure they want to live through this experience either. But the world surprises them again and again with beauty and intrigue. They come to meet a pregnant horse, a curious mouse, and a dead bird, who is set on haunting them all. Blake examines what makes us human when removed from the human world, what identity means where it is a useless thing, and how loss shapes us. In a stunning setting and with ominous dreams, In Springtime will take you into a magical world without using any magic at all—just the strangeness of the woods. Includes an art portfolio by Nicky Arscott.
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The Mare by Seth Christian Martel graphic mundi, March 2023
Everyone else may be enjoying the summer, but Indigo’s life isn’t going so well. Her dad’s marriage just ended in a very public divorce, and now he’s drinking again. Indy barely graduated from high school, she just lost her job, and she doesn’t know what to do with her life. The stress is causing her nightmarish sleep paralysis—or so she thinks. Indy confides in her best friend, Kasia, who blames “The Mare” for her troubles—the spirit of someone wronged that saps its victim’s energy at night. It sounds crazy to Indy, but is it? Steeped in the nostalgia of lazy summers and mixtapes, concert tickets, and coffee, The Mare is a story about friends, family, and finding one’s way—with a touch of the supernatural and a powerful, surprising twist.
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& there’s you still thrill hour of the world to love by Aby Kaupang Parlor Press, February 2023
Aby Kaupang’s & there’s you still thrill hour of the world to love invokes life’s relentless suffusion of “&,” forging a conjunctive body in which an inevitable landscape of contemporary crisis, suicide, disability, failed promises & the quotidian accrue. In the Sisyphean challenge of day after day, how does one helm stone? Through the page’s shattered frame, & in formally audacious exchanges, Kaupang risks recombinatory possibilities arising not as recovery, per se, but as endurance, awe, & possibly joy. Inflorescence is cyclic, turns towards fodder, feeds the day, recedes. The poems are beautifully complemented by images of James Sullivan’s sculptures, one of which adorns the book’s cover.
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Winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, Disequilibria: Meditations on Missingness is a hybrid memoir that recounts the 1982 disappearance of the author’s stepfather, James Edward Lewis, a pilot and Vietnam veteran. Recounting his family’s experiences in searching for answers, Lunday interrogates the broader cultural and conceptual responses to the phenomenon of missingness by connecting his stepfather’s case to other true-life disappearances as well as those portrayed in fiction, poetry, and film. In doing so Disequilibria explores the transience in modern life, considering the military-dependent experience, the corrosive effects of war, and the struggle to find closure and comfort as time goes by without answers.
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W. E. B. Du Bois Souls of Black Folk: A Graphic Interpretation by Paul Peart-Smith Rutgers University Press, April 2023
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” These were the prescient words of W. E. B. Du Bois’s influential 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk. The preeminent Black intellectual of his generation, Du Bois wrote about the trauma of seeing the Reconstruction era’s promise of racial equality cruelly dashed by the rise of white supremacist terror and Jim Crow laws. Yet he also argued for the value of African American cultural traditions and provided inspiration for countless civil rights leaders who followed him. Now artist Paul Peart-Smith offers the first graphic adaptation of Du Bois’s seminal work.
Peart-Smith’s graphic adaptation provides historical and cultural contexts that bring to life the world behind Du Bois’s words. Readers will get a deeper understanding of the cultural debates The Souls of Black Folk engaged in, with more background on figures like Booker T. Washington, the advocate of black economic uplift, and the Pan-Africanist minister Alexander Crummell. This new release vividly conveys the continuing legacy of The Souls of Black Folk, effectively updating it for the era of the 1619 Project and Black Lives Matter.
Some Days the Bird by Heather Bourbeau (HB) and Anne Casey (AC) is an epistolary exchange written between Northern California and Sydney, Australia in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. As Bourbeau puts it in “The letting,” the poem-letters track the “conjunction” of how “People have become numbers, corridors are morgues” with “the tenacious need of green to grow.” In “Coastal descent,” Casey adds her “changing / tableau” from Australia’s “megafires” and “wreckage.” There’s the feeling from these pandemic dispatches, from their different continents and opposite seasons, that the description of each poet’s physical and natural surroundings offers solace, connection, and awareness; a saving formula, as Bourbeau writes in “This is not an inauguration poem” against “heat and fire and fear.” Throughout the exchange, the poets look more carefully, more completely at flowers, insects, and animals, at the “never before noticed” (“Equinox,” HB).
A high point in the exchange came via the corresponding poems “Our Prime Minister stands by” (AC) and “Pause” (HB), where the poets confront “gendered violence” (AC) and “value” (HB). In her poem, Casey takes on “this country // long at war with / its women”; while Bourbeau notes “Next week will mark my menopause.” I hoped for more of this direct engagement “with things we have been taught / are not worth savoring, / hold no value” (“Pause,” HB), but the poems relegated these gender concerns to subtlety and foregrounded lockdown, exile from family, daughters’ relationships to fathers, and Mother Nature: “this messy line between accustomed / and detached” (“Richter’s scale,” HB). Regardless of what I hoped for, Some Days the Bird is Heather Bourbeau’s and Anne Casey’s “song / of survival” (“Days of wild weather,” AC), “their song of freedom” (“Season’s greetings,” AC) across a “relentless distance” (“Solstice,” HB).
Some Days the Bird by Heather Bourbeau and Anne Casey. Beltway Editions, 2022.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear. More at https://jamimacarty.com/
Icelight, Ranjit Hoskote’s eighth collection of poems, enacts the experience of standing at the edge—of a life, a landscape, a world assuming new contours or going up in flames. Yet, the protagonists of these poems also stand at the edge of epiphany. In the title poem, we meet the Neolithic cave-dweller who, dazzled by a shapeshifting nature, crafts the first icon. The ‘I’ of these poems is not a sovereign ‘I’. A questing, questioning voice, it locates itself in the web of life, in relation to the cosmos. In “Tacet,” the speaker asks: “What if I had / no skin / Of what / am I the barometer?” Long committed to the Japanese mono no aware aesthetic, Hoskote embraces talismans, premonitions, fossils: active residues from the previous lives of people and places. Icelight is a book about transitions and departures, eloquent in its acceptance of transience in the face of mortality.
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Born and raised in El Paso, Texas, Ray Gonzalez returns to Texas and nearby New Mexico to meditate on love, literature, loss, and la línea in Suggest Paradise. The collection offers readers some of the richest and most complex poems that embody the Southwest and the borderlands, including a poignant look at the massacre at the El Paso Walmart. A unique voice of the Southwest, Gonzalez brings his intellect and his well-honed craft to this work and offers readers a nuanced and powerful perspective on poetry and the Border.
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Our Beautiful Reward, ed. Catherine Rockwood Reckoning Press, March 2023
Our Beautiful Reward is a collection of works from Reckoning Press, a nonprofit, annual journal of creative writing on environmental justice. This special issue on bodily autonomy, edited by Catherine Rockwood, was anthologized on the occasion of the repeal of Roe v. Wade and features work by Mona Robles, Linda Cooper, Dana Vickerson, Leah Bobet, Laurel Nakanishi, Robert René Galván, Anna Orridge, Taylor Jones, Julian K. Jarboe, Dyani Sabin, Annabelle Cormack, Rimi B. Chatterjee, Taylor Jones, Amber Fox, Juliana Roth, Mari Ness, Riley Tao, Taylor Jones, M.C. Benner Dixon, and Marissa Lingen.
There will be a free virtual launch event for the publication featuring eight contributors. For more information and to RSVP, click here.
Our Share of the Night, Mariana Enriquez’s second novel, is a welcome addition to the emerging genre of Literary Horror. Well-defined lines have been drawn to distinguish “literary” fiction from horror, sci-fi, fantasy etc. Enriquez is becoming a name that is defying the pretensions of such categorization.
Our Share of the Night is a family history, primarily following Gaspar throughout his childhood and adolescence. His father, Juan – a medium for a Satanic cult – strives to help Gaspar avoid his fate of also becoming a medium. The story spans 37 years and has the backdrop of Videla’s military dictatorship, a theme common amongst contemporary Latin American writers.
Like with Hereditary and other recent Art House Horror films, a big part of the novel’s success can be attributed to its commitment to allegory, rather than simply using horror tropes for their shock value. The otherworldly forces, with their power to make people disappear, hold clear parallels with the military dictatorship in Argentina.
Enriquez is keen to explore the psychological effects of the narrative on her characters. A great deal of time is given to exploring the damage done to Gaspar through his involvement with the Occult. Gaspar also suffers real-world problems that are at times more psychologically devastating than the Occult horrors that fill the story.
These real-life problems are not sidelined; as it is put following a Satanic ritual, “we get hungry and we eat. . . we need to meet with the accountants. . . what happens is real, but so is life.”
Our Share of the Night by Mariana Enriquez; Illustrated by Pablo Gerardo Camacho; Translated by Megan McDowell. Hogarth Press, October 2022.
Reviewer bio: Colm McKenna is a second-hand bookseller based in Paris. He has published and self-published an array of short stories and articles, hoping to eventually release a collection of stories. He is mainly interested in the works of John Cowper Powys, Claude Houghton and a range of Latin American writers.
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 adjacent islands, Nicole Cecilia Delgado, Ugly Duckling Presse & there’s you still thrill hour of the world to love, Aby Kaupang, Parlor Press Before After, Owen McLeod, Saturnalia Books Between Twilight, Connie Post, NYQ Books The Book of John, Lindsey Royce, Press 53 Boy, Tracy Youngblom, CavanKerry Press Crisis Inquiry, Tony Iantosca, Ugly Duckling Presse The Day Every Day Is, Lee Upton, Saturnalia Books Dreamer: Poems in Culture, Alan Botsford, Cyberwit.net Ephemera, Sierra DeMulder, Button Poetry Exceeds Us, Leah Poole Osowski, Saturnalia Books The Exhausted Dream, Joshua Edwards, Marfa Book Company Exilium, Maria Negroni, Ugly Duckling Presse Failures of the Poet, Anthony Robinson, Canarium Books Far from New York State, Matthew Johnson, NYQ Books The Fight Journal, John W. Evans, Rattle Poetry
In the summer of 1962, a group of young Native American puppeteers travel in a converted school bus from the White Earth Reservation to the Century 21 Exposition, World’s Fair in Seattle, Washington. The five Natives, three young men and two young women, have endured abandonment, abuse, poverty, and find solace, humor, and courage with a mute puppeteer—a Native woman in her seventies who writes original dream songs, and creates hand puppets and ironic parleys that mock the ghosts of authority. Dummy Trout, the mute puppeteer, also figured in Vizenor’s previous books, Native Tributes and Satie on the Seine. The troupe attends a performance of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett and they create a puppet parley for Wovoka, the inspiration of the Native American Ghost Dance Religion.
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Holly Jackson’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder has a girl, and cold case, and a killer on the loose. All this in the small town of Fairview, where Pippa “Pip” Fitz Amobi lives. Years ago, Andie Bell was murdered by her boyfriend, Sal Singh, whose guilt drove him to suicide. But Pip doesn’t believe that’s the real story. This thrilling mystery is full of red herrings and revealed secrets, and no one is innocent. Jackson both sympathizes with and implicates characters, and takes advantage of readers’ assumptions to lead them away from the truth. Readers who love murder mysteries and strong female characters will be compelled to keep reading until every curiosity is satisfied.
Reviewer bio: Indigo Stephens is a violinist and a book lover. She enjoys reading books with strong female characters, especially sci-fi, murder mysteries, and Dystopian YA. Veronica Roth is one of her favorite authors, and one of her favorite series is A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder.
Rooted in the Midwest but at home anywhere, Glenna Luschei has spent over fifty years writing and supporting other writers in the midst of adventures that have taken her around the globe. Now in her late eighties and as vibrant as ever, Luschei has crafted a collection that comprises a retrospective of her life: her youth during World War II; her adventures in New Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, and elsewhere; and her ongoing love affair with the arts. Luschei relives highs and lows through these poems and reminds readers to live life to the fullest as we never know if tomorrow will be our last day.
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After spending five years in LA working successfully as a screenwriter, the protagonist of this novel decides it’s time to return to his hometown, Santa Luz, New Mexico, to pen the novel he has always needed to write about the strained relationship with his father. He reconnects with old friends and meets new ones, and the parade of quirky characters—self-proclaimed artists, wealthy retirees, corrupt lawyers—distracts him from his project. There’s Helen, who hooks up with an unsavory character and winds up in jail—for murder. Sheryl can’t take her philandering husband anymore and drives her car off a mountaintop, killing herself and her children. And there’s Paul, who lives a double life as a happy family man, but who has a serious drug addiction. Against the backdrop of mystical mornings and beautiful mountains, the writer soon realizes things aren’t always what they seem in Santa Luz. The writer’s sympathies are with the working class, and his satirical gaze embraces the people who live in the shadows, those considered “misfits.” Jimmy Santiago Baca writes compellingly about artists and their responsibility to society.
Notes from the Passenger by Gillian Conoley is a collection written over the course of the last few years, as the author sought for ways to make room for joy amongst an upturned and unsteady quotidian. Written in response to climatic and societal catastrophe, war, increasing gun violence, plague, and the global spread of white supremacy and patriarchy, the sonically vivid and cinematic poems in Notes from the Passenger arrive like missives from a journey between the living and the dead. Gillian’s use of play, music, and humor offers us pleasure when we need it most, reminding us to turn our heads toward the light. Gillian Conoley is the author of nine collections. A long-time resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, she is currently Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at Sonoma State University where she edits VOLT.
A Thousand Ways to Pay Attention: A Memoir of Coming Home to My Neurodivergent Mind by Rebecca Schiller explores the several-year period when she untangled the threads of her health diagnoses and the background of the land she and her family recently purchased. Compared to my memoir intake, my nature reading is slim, but Schiller’s sumptuous sensorial descriptors of her small farm in the UK enmesh the reader in the landscape of its mucky, weather-beaten, seasonal wonders. Interwoven with this ecological narrative is the history of former owners of their two-acre property, including interpretive retellings of their experiences supported by primary documentation and literary device.
Schiller’s mental health is addressed through the first two-thirds of the book via her interactions with her children and spouse, foggy memory, clumsiness, and heightened anxiety and depression since moving to their farm. Her diagnosis, and understanding of her neurodivergence, encompass only the latter third of the book and thus feel rushed.
Part of the joy, and potential conundrum, of A Thousand Ways to Pay Attention is the sheer amount of content all wrapped in a book that contains too many gifts: first years on a small family farm, obtaining a health diagnosis, and researching and reinterpreting the history of the land around her.
Reviewer bio: Amanda Weir-Gertzog is a writer, gerontologist, and eater of too much milk chocolate. A caregiver and community volunteer, she also authors book reviews to compensate for her prodigious reading habits. Amanda lives in Durham, North Carolina with her partner, pets, and overflowing bookcases.
Latina Leadership Lessons: Fifty Latinas Speak edited by Delia García Arte Público Press, November 2022
The recipient of numerous awards and accolades, García gathers “Top Ten Leadership Lessons” from 50 high-achieving women. This “who’s who” of movers-and-shakers contains representatives from government, corporate and non-profit worlds. While each woman’s unique experiences and heritage are reflected in her advice, there are several recommendations that made many of the lists, such as the importance of believing in oneself, the need to mentor and be mentored, remembering one’s roots, embracing change and taking care of one’s physical and emotional needs.
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The Falling Crystal Palace by Carl Fuerst Planet Bizarro, February 2023
The residents of Sterling, Indiana don’t know who they are. They can’t recognize voices on the telephone. They can’t recognize faces in the mirror. When their name is called, they don’t respond. When they flip through family photo albums, it’s like looking at strangers. Sixty-one-year-old Tory Stebbins runs a one-person Identity Verification agency that can help. But, as the town implodes, so does her business. She has fewer clients, stiffer competition, and her methods have become mysteriously ineffective. Tory is broke, lonely, and—most alarmingly—she’s now suffering from the same problems she’s helped her clients with over the length of her career. Just when her situation seems beyond hope, Tory receives a cryptic message from Hoppy Bashford, her best friend who disappeared forty years earlier. Tory’s quest to rescue Hoppy leads her through the strange, shifting landscapes. With the help of her odd intern, her bitter business rival, and her astrophysicist ex-wife, Tory ultimately follows Hoppy’s trail to the Crystal Palace Resort. To locate her lost friend, escape from the resort, and find a cure for the identity-scrambling, reality-bending condition from which everyone in her world suffers, Tory must come to terms with who she is.
Fertility: 40 Years of Change by Maureen McTeer Delve Books, May 2022
In Fertility: 40 Years of Change, lawyer and author Maureen McTeer explores key medical, research, and legal developments in assisted human reproduction since the birth of the first IVF baby in 1978. With keen insight, she analyses how Canada has responded to the many legal and societal opportunities this foundational reproductive technology has created, such as new types of human relationships; the treatment of infertility; human embryo research; and the revolutionary possibilities for society raised by the combination of reproductive and genetic technologies, as we create, manipulate, and alter human life in the laboratory.
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Marry Me a Little by Rob Kirby Graphic Mundi, February 2023
In Marry Me a Little, Rob Kirby recounts his experience of marrying his longtime partner, John, just after same-sex marriage was legalized in Minnesota in 2013, and two years before the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges made same-sex marriage the law of the land. This is a personal story—about Rob’s ambivalence (if not antipathy) toward the institution of marriage, his loving relationship with John, and the life that they share together—set against the historical and political backdrop of shifting attitudes toward LGBTQ+ rights and marriage. With humor, candor, and a near-whimsical drawing style, Rob relates how he and John navigated this changing landscape, how they planned and celebrated their wedding, and how the LGBTQ+ community is now facing the very real possibility of setbacks to marriage equality.
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In her collection of essays, Bright Unbearable Reality, Anna Badkhen—a former war correspondent, now essayist—forces us to examine the reality of migration despite the desire to look away. As her title implies, she compels readers to see the true causes of the massive amounts of people—one in seven worldwide, she says—who relocate due to climate change or suffering related to new weather patterns and natural disasters. I had planned to write that those people are forced to relocate, but that would be a false passive, a sentence construction Badkhen points out that ignores the true action and actor in order to make ideas more palatable. Badkhen doesn’t allow the reader this comfort, as she continually highlights the systemic problems that those in the wealthier countries cause, while at the same time, those countries deny entry to those whom they have displaced. In her essay, “Ways of Seeing,” she points out that there is the surface reality that most of us who have the privilege of reading her book know and the reality of those whose lives enable us to have that privilege; the difference, to use one of her images, between the restaurants and hotels that line Waikiki and the hotel workers striking for a living wage.
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/.
The Sins of Mortality by Marilyn Fox and Nancye McCrary EastOver Press, February 2023
The Sins of Sweet Mortality is a collection of poems by Marilyn Fox and illuminative paintings by Nancye McCrary. In this unique collaborative project with full-color images throughout, Fox and McCrary combine poetry with painting — juxtaposing voice and image, wonder and sensation — to create literary and visual work that is impassioned, thought-provoking, disturbing, and healing. Endlessly suggestive, consistently evocative, this work entices the reader into a deep dive to discover what’s beyond the surface.
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Exilium by María Negroni Translated by Michelle Gil-Montero Ugly Duckling Presse, December 2022
As Juan Gelman once wrote, “exile has no form but leaves a trace.” In Exilium, Argentine poet María Negroni sketches precisely such a trace, in a poetic form that approaches opposite extremes of material immediacy and evanescence. On an imaginative terrain that sweeps the Greco-Roman, the “long night” of Argentina’s last dictatorship, and the crisis of displaced migrants today, Negroni locates the exile within poetry itself. In this poetics of exile, the poem shines in its utopian desire to write the “unwritten words,” revealing language at its most estranged, most wanting.
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The poems in Testament by Luke Hankins bear witness to traumas—cultural, personal, and spiritual—as well as moments of revelatory transport. While the catalyzing tragedies and dilemmas are never out of mind, these nuanced poems maintain faith in the act of speaking as a pathway through despair and toward transformation. Hankins is the author of two poetry collections and a collection of essays. He is the founder and editor of Orison Books, a non-profit literary press focused on the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives.
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Sita in Exile by Rashi Rohatgi 2022 Novella Prize selected by Misha Rai Miami University Press, May 2023
When Indian American Sita moves to the Norwegian Arctic, she finds a warm welcome from Mona, a local surfer from a refugee family who sees her as someone with whom she can be herself. But Sita’s not sure how to reciprocate, for as she begins to discover impossible fruits in the forest, she grows more unsure of who she is: a happy wife, when her husband seems impatient with her inability to assimilate? A good mother, when she can’t fathom what her baby wants? A pet-killer, when she was just acting on instinct? A terrible person, for leaving behind her grieving father and her best friend Bhoomija, a brown feminist artist struggling to get by during the pandemic? Or someone even worse, as she finds herself drawn to Mona’s partner, Morten, who owns the only land on which she feels whole? When Bhoomija asks her to return home, Sita must take stock not only of the life she’s made in the far north with Mona, but also of the self she’s held back, lying in wait for forgiveness, and choose which version to make real. Drawing upon Hindu mythology, Sita in Exile is a lyrical exploration of migrant sisterhood and brown motherhood in today’s Europe.
