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Discover news from independent publishers and university presses including new titles, events, and more.

New Book :: Sita in Exile

Sita in Exile by Rashi Rohatgi book cover image

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.

New Book :: Dreamer: Poems in Culture

Dreamer: Poems in Culture by Alan Botsford book cover image

Dreamer: Poems in Culture by Alan Botsford
Cyberwit.net, January 2023

Dreamer: Poems in Culture, a companion volume with Possessions: Poems in American Poetry, features poems spoken in the voices of 170 contemporary cultural figures east and west, high and low, among them Lady Gaga, Clint Eastwood, Toni Morrison, Saul Williams, John Berger, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Roger Federer, Joan Baez, Bong Joon Ho, Tom Hanks, Bill Maher, Jerry Seinfeld, Bob Dylan, Dave Chappelle, Rihanna, Claire Danes, Diane Seuss, Ocean Vuong, Pico Iyer, George Clooney, Angela Carter, Wendy C. Oritz, Maggie Nelson, Cheryl Strayed, Patti Smith, Julian Assange, Barack Obama, Marilynne Robinson, Camille Paglia, Laura Kipnis, Oprah Winfrey, Mary Gaitskill, Rachel Cusk, Kendrick Lamar, Yuval Noah Harari, and Lewis Hyde, to name a few. It is also an attempt to lay bare the workings of the shadow economy rooted in vernacular energies, exploring how our rational thought process is linked to our dream life.

New Book :: Chasing Giants

Chasing Giants: In Search of the World's Largest Freshwater Fish by Zeb Hogan and Stefan Lovgren book cover image

Chasing Giants: In Search of the World’s Largest Freshwater Fish by Zeb Hogan and Stefan Lovgren
University of Nevada Press, April 2023

Seeking to answer the question Which of the giant freshwater species is the largest? motivates Zeb Hogan to understand the various species he studies. The megafish’s numbers are dwindling, and the majority of them face extinction. He teams up with award-winning journalist Stefan Lovgren to tell, for the first time, the remarkable and troubling story of the world’s largest freshwater fish. It is a story that stretches across the globe, chronicling a race against the clock to find and protect these ancient leviathans before they disappear forever. Chasing Giants combines science, adventure, and wonder to provide insights into the key role the massive fish of our lakes and rivers play in our past, present, and future.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Hope for the Worst

Hope for the Worst by Kate Brandt book cover image

Hope for the Worst by Kate Brandt
Vine Leaves Press, March 2023

Ellie is twenty-four years old, stuck in a dead-end job, and questioning the meaning of life when she meets the much older Calvin. It’s as if her deepest wish has been granted. Star of the Buddhist teaching circuit in New York’s Greenwich Village, his wisdom is exactly what she’s been seeking. When she becomes the center of his attention, it’s almost pure bliss…until it becomes clear that Calvin expects sex as part of the bargain. At first reluctant, Ellie gradually falls ever more deeply in love, until Calvin is all she can think about. Calvin’s lectures stress the Buddhist concept of non-attachment, but that doesn’t salve her wounds when he abandons her. Suddenly alone, Ellie must find a way to heal from her loss, but not before devotion to her teacher takes her halfway across the world to Tibet, and puts her life in real danger. Hope for the Worst asks just how far someone will go for love.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: The Grand Promise

The Grand Promise by Rebekah Anderson book cover image

The Grand Promise by Rebekah Anderson
Empty Bowl Press, June 2022

The Grand Promise by Rebekah Anderson takes readers back to the 1930s New Deal public works program. An Eastern Washington town is uprooted and a family grapples with personal and financial dilemmas. A father resists inevitable change and enters into a fierce conflict with his son. The historic construction of the Grand Coulee Dam, a massive project destined to bring prosperity to the Pacific Northwest, will also destroy the family’s home and their town, but it will change the lives of their community and the lives of indigenous people who have sustained themselves on the Columbia River for generations. The Grand Promise is a work of literary fiction loosely based on Anderson’s family history.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Sinners on Fox Street

Sinners on Fox Street: A Novella and Stories by Yolanda Gallardo book cover image

Sinners on Fox Street: A Novella and Stories by Yolanda Gallardo
Arte Público Press, November 2022

In this poignant and often humorous account of growing up in the Bronx in the 1950s, Yolanda Gallardo’s mischievous young character vividly recalls her childhood as the neighborhood changed from Jewish to Latino. She and her siblings swam in the East River, despite the rats and garbage; watched police beat up local kids; and got involved in gangs, like the Royals and Young Sinners. Their family was financially impoverished, but there were many happy times as they watched their parents dance to “hick Spanish records,” helped their mom cook pasteles and learned to dance the mambo and cha-cha.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: adjacent islands

adjacent islands by Nicole Cecilia Delgado book cover image

adjacent islands by Nicole Cecilia Delgado
Translated by Urayoán Noel
Ugly Duckling Presse, December 2022

Nicole Cecilia Delgado’s poetry in adjacent islands is intimate yet poised toward the radically communitarian, both in the people and histories evoked and in the collaborative and unabashedly political orientation of her editorial and publishing work. adjacent islands / islas adyacentes is a bilingual edition of her artist books amoná (2013) and subtropical dry (2016), both based on camping trips to islands in the Puerto Rican archipelago: the uninhabited Mona to the west of the main island and the municipality of Vieques to the east (Amoná and Bieké in the reconstructed indigenous Taíno language). Challenging the insularist logic that has historically defined Puerto Rican national imaginaries, on these adjacent islands, people and nature connect in unexpected ways, as Delgado documents the art of survival under military occupation, extractivism, and the surveillance state. Part of a larger corpus of what Delgado calls “camping books,” adjacent islands / islas adjacentes seeks to translate the intemperie (open sky) of the camping trip onto the confines of the page. Delgado follows the late Ulises Carrión in enacting a networked book art where “communication is still inter-subjective, but it occurs in a concrete, real, physical space—the page.” Call it book art as counterarchive.

Book Review :: Magic Nation #1 by Ellen O’Grady

Magic Nation #1 by Ellen O'Grady book cover image

The title for Magic Nation #1 by Ellen O’Grady comes from her having misunderstood her mother, who said, “You sure have an imagination.” Instead, Ellen hears, “magic nation.” Indeed much more fitting for what she offers readers in this first installment of her ongoing graphic autobiography. Originally published on SOLRAD, Magic Nation recounts memories from O’Grady’s childhood of time spent meandering a wooded lot near her home. She sings lines from the Grizzly Adams television theme song, at times having him and his friend Nakoma join her as she goes wandering. She takes readers on an exploration of an abandoned pool and pool house, conjuring past lives lived in darkly shaded imagery, then back out into the brilliantly colored natural world. Her interactions with natural life are as delicate as her graphic style, using fine lines in a mixture of semi-realism and minimalism. Most striking are the unfinished lines that don’t complete figures and white spaces where she doesn’t take the watercolors right to the edge. This creates a kind of soft invitation for viewers to participate in completing the pictures, bringing their own imaginations into play. A beautiful and thoughtfully paced narrative and a welcome meditative escape to visit again and again.

Magic Nation #1 by Ellen O’Grady. Fieldmouse Press, September 2022.

Reviewer bio: Denise Hill is Editor of NewPages.com and reviews books she chooses based on her own personal interests.

New Book :: suddenly we

suddenly we by Evie Shockley book cover image

suddenly we by Evie Shockley
Wesleyan University Press, March 2023

In her new poetry collection, suddenly we, Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes toward openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious “we.” How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are, we are in relation to each other? Beginning with the visionary art of Black women like Alison Saar and Alma Thomas, Shockley’s poems draw and forge a widening constellation of connections that help make visible the interdependence of everyone and everything on Earth. Evie Shockley, poet and scholar, is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English at Rutgers University. A Lannan Literary Award-winner, she is the author of multiple books of poetry and a 2018 Pulitzer Prize finalist.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Canadian Policing

Canadian Policing: Why and How it Must Change by Kent Roach book cover image

Canadian Policing: Why and How it Must Change by Kent Roach
Delve Books, May 2022

Kent Roach’s Canadian Policing: Why and How It Must Change is a comprehensive and critical examination of Canadian policing from its colonial origins to its response to the February 2022 blockades and occupations. Police shootings in June 2020 should dispel any complacency that Canada does not face similar policing problems as the United States, and a vicious circle of overpolicing and underprotection plagues many intersecting disadvantaged groups. Multiple accountability measures — criminal investigations, Charter litigation, complaints, and discipline — have not improved Canadian policing. What is required is more active and proactive governance by the boards, councils, and ministers that are responsible for Canada’s police. Governance should respect law enforcement independence and discretion while rejecting overbroad claims of police operational independence and self-governance.

New Book :: Dioramas

Dioramas by Blair Austin book cover image

Dioramas by Blair Austin
Dzanc Books, March 2023

Winner of the Dzanc Prize for Fiction, Blair Austin’s debut Dioramas tells of a city far in the future, in a society that has come through a great upheaval. Retired lecturer Wiggins moves from window to window in a museum, intricately describing each scene. Whales gliding above a shipwreck and a lost cup and saucer. An animatronic forest twenty stories tall. Urban wolves in the light of an apartment building. A line of mosquitoes in uniforms and regalia honored as heroes of the last great war. Bit by bit, Wiggins unspools the secrets of his world—the conflict that brought it to the brink, and the great thinker, Michaux, who led the diorama revolution, himself now preserved under glass. In this hybrid novel—part essay, part prose poem, part travel narrative—Blair Austin brings readers to witness our own vanishing world, what we preserve and at what cost.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Crisis Inquiry

Crisis Inquiry by Tony Iantosca book cover image

Crisis Inquiry by Tony Iantosca
Ugly Ducking Presse, December 2022

Crisis Inquiry by Brooklyn writer and educator Tony Iantosca is a collection of poems in three parts that unsettles the lyric poem from within its constraints in ways that are both sardonic and searching. These poems probe the corners of a crisis of inquiry both intimate and general, inquiring into the registers, rhetorics, and scales of the various ongoing crises we live through daily. Iantosca’s third full-length collection of poetry, Crisis Inquiry stages satire and candor as alternating strides of the same figure, walking to and fro between you and me.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Book Review :: Successful Aging by Daniel Levitin

Successful Aging by Daniel Levitin book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Author of Successful Aging, Daniel Levitin is a neuroscientist and cognitive psychologist who brings both of his specialties to bear in this book. Levitin explores how people’s behaviors affect their brains and vice versa as they age, with the ultimate goal of helping people navigate their later years with a better quality of life, focusing on health over longevity. Levitin pored through thousands of articles to determine what the latest science says about aging, and he comes out of that reading quite optimistic. One of my few complaints about the book, in fact, is that he seems too optimistic about science’s answers, too trusting of continued progress. However, he encourages readers to stay involved in some sort of meaningful work; to continue to develop relationships; to get outside and exercise, no matter the difficulty, choices most of us could integrate into our lives, in order to have a more enjoyable and healthier life. My other complaint is that there are times when the science gets overwhelming for a lay reader, as I skimmed the jargon, wanting to get back to more of his summary conclusions from that science. Levitin provides readers with practical, research-based techniques for moving into one’s sixties, seventies, and beyond in the best mental and physical health possible.

Successful Aging by Daniel Levitin. Dutton, December 2020.

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/.

New Book :: The History Hotel

The History Hotel by Baron Wormser book cover image

The History Hotel by Baron Wormser
CavanKerry Press, March 2023

In The History Hotel, his eleventh poetry collection, Baron Wormser offers the range of subjects and imaginative approaches his readers have come to expect—from the life of a candle to the life of a Jewish Résistance fighter, from elegy to monologue, from a Godard film to the National Football League. The historical circumstances that touch, anneal, shatter, and buttress a life are paramount. The reality of consequences remains the ongoing, ineluctable drama. We all live in the ‘History Hotel’ where love and betrayal, hope and despair go hand in hand. Showing those entangled hands is the work of these poems.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Books Received February 2023

NewPages receives many wonderful titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these titles 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

Animal Afterlife, Jaya Stenquist, Airlie Press
Binded, H Warren, Red Hen Press
Border Line, Miriam Sagan, Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library
Cherubims, Edward Clarke, Kelsay Books
Come Closer, Laurie Blauner, The Bitter Oleander Press
Complete Poems 1965-2020, Michael Butterworth, Space Cowboy Books
Faith and Dreams for Zion, Shoshanah Weiss, Poetica Publishing
Field Guide to the Human Condition, Adrian S. Potter, CW Books
Ghost Apples, Katharine Coles, Red Hen Press
How Much?, Jerome Sala, NYQ Books

Continue reading “Books Received February 2023”

New Book :: The Rwanda Poems

The Rwanda Poems: Voices and Visions from the Genocide by Andrew Kaufman book cover image

The Rwanda Poems: Voices and Visions from the Genocide by Andrew Kaufman
NYQ Books, March 2023

The only book of poetry to date devoted to the Rwanda genocide and published in this country, this is a work of nonfictional poetry, a cousin in genre to the nonfictional novel. It is based not only on the poet’s observations and encounters during months spent in post-genocide Rwanda, but on his numerous extensive interviews with survivors, all of whom lost most if not all of their families, and with convicted genocide perpetrators, conducted in prisons. The result is a startling book of poems that by turns is unthinkably horrifying, heartbreaking, and enraging, yet which at times breaks unexpectedly into stunning revelatory moments of grace.

As a poetry of witness this book reveals what it is like to carry on with daily life in a society where nearly every adult male is either a genocide survivor or perpetrator, almost every woman either a survivor or the wife of a perpetrator, and where nearly every child at the time of the genocide witnessed multiple killings, often of immediate family members. Ranging from free verse to stanzaic forms, this book by an NEA-award-winning poet uses tools and methods of poetry to distill each of its many varied voices to its essence, allowing those who are heard in these poems to speak for themselves, often in juxtapositions that lend the book the structure and tension of a drama. Considered more broadly, The Rwanda Poems is a book about the extremities of evil that the human psyche is capable of enduring and inflicting, and the resulting psychic costs to survivors and perpetrators.

New Book :: North Country

North Country: A Pedagogical Almanac by Carolyn Dekker book cover image

North Country: A Pedagogical Almanac by Carolyn Dekker
Black Lawrence Press, February 2023

North Country: A Pedagogical Almanac by Carolyn Dekker is a memoir-in-essays about teaching and family life in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The book follows the cycle of seasons in this remote and beautiful place by the waters of Lake Superior during the years in which the author finds a place there. It’s also a look at higher education on the razor’s edge at a tiny and struggling liberal arts college. Above all, the memoir is about a life lived alongside books and what they might teach us about how to love, parent, mentor, and care for others.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Book Review :: Good for a Girl by Lauren Fleshman

Good for a Girl by Lauren Fleshman book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Lauren Fleshman, author of Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World and one of the top professional runners of her generation, never achieved the highest levels of success as she (at the time) and others defined it. She talks about her running career in her memoir, but her interests lay beyond training times and significant races, as she’s much more interested in why she and so many other female runners struggled to perform as well as they (and others) expected. She redefines success away from making the Olympic team to being able to run to one’s potential and still live a healthy life. While acknowledging her limited point of view and knowledge, she talks about the obstacles and struggles that come with being a female runner: unhealthy relationships with food and body image; coaches and trainers who treat females’ bodies as if they’re interchangeable with those of men; sponsors and marketers who objectify women or fail to take into account their different physical development. While she shares the clear events of misogyny and sexism, she also conveys the less-clear, more-frequent ways in which a patriarchal sport and society ignore women’s potential, hindering them from becoming the runners and people they could be.

Good for a Girl by Lauren Fleshman. Penguin, January 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/.

New Book :: Music for Ghosts

Music for Ghosts by Christopher Locke book cover image

Music for Ghosts by Christopher Locke
NYQ Books, May 2022

Christopher Locke’s new collection of poetry Music for Ghosts is a visceral testament to youth and hubris, erasure, and forgiveness. The heart of these poems straddles the space between the personal and the universally lived, where the past can shatter our best intentions at love, while the future holds us wanting at the precipice of joy. From his Pentecostal childhood to the blazing religion of punk rock, Locke caromed straight into the void of addiction, even as marriage and fatherhood hinted at something better. But in spite of loss, or maybe because of it, Locke remains steadfast in his quest to seek fearlessly and intentionally, reclaiming every light offered in hope’s name.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Boy

Boy by Tracy Youngblom book cover image

Boy by Tracy Youngblom
CavanKerry Press, February 2023

Boy brings readers Tracy Youngblom’s second full-length collection of poetry. The death of a youngest sibling as a child, an alcoholic and distant father, a grief-stricken family, a tentative faith: these are the building blocks of the narrative of Boy, a sequence of poems that explores how death and loss color memory and influence the ways family members relate to each other and to their shared history.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Hood Vacations

Hood Vacations by Michal 'MJ' Jones book cover image

Hood Vacations by Michal ‘MJ’ Jones
Black Lawrence Press, January 2023

Michal “MJ” Jones’ debut poetry collection Hood Vacations is a rhythmic & quiet rumbling – an unflinching recollection of Blackness, queerness, gender, and violence through lenses of family lineage and confessional narrative. A nostalgia for an unreachable home permeates these poems: “We were mighty beautiful once, in golden dust.” The speaker of Hood Vacations tells of magic: of praying mantises, bathtub octopuses, Black ghosts, and bringing back “rainbow soap colors.” It is a book of passing – as, through, and on. Hop on in.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: A Promise Kept

A Promise Kept: The Muscogee (Creek) Nation and McGirt v. Oklahoma by Robert J. Miller and Robbie Ethridge book cover image

A Promise Kept: The Muscogee (Creek) Nation and McGirt v. Oklahoma by Robert J. Miller and Robbie Ethridge
The University of Oklahoma Press, January 2023

“At the end of the Trail of Tears there was a promise,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the decision issued on July 9, 2020, in the case of McGirt v. Oklahoma. And that promise, made in treaties between the United States and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation more than 150 years earlier, would finally be kept. With the Court’s ruling, the full extent of the Muscogee (Creek) Reservation was reaffirmed—meaning that 3.25 million acres of land in Oklahoma, including part of the city of Tulsa, were recognized once again as “Indian Country” as defined by federal law. A Promise Kept explores the circumstances and implications of McGirt v. Oklahoma, likely the most significant Indian law case in well over 100 years. Combining legal analysis and historical context, this book gives an in-depth, accessible account of how the case unfolded and what it might mean for Oklahomans, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, and other tribes throughout the United States.

Book Review :: All Men Glad and Wise by Laura C. Stevenson

All Men Glad and Wise by Laura C. Stevenson book cover image

Guest Post by Laureen Mathon

Reminiscent of Downtown Abbey, this mystery takes place in 1919 on an English estate owned by Sir Thomas. The fourteen-year-old narrator is Harry, the son of Sir Thomas’s groom. When Harry finds a murdered man, he decides he must help to solve the murder and that will help him become “somebody.” This coming-of-age story as well as a murder mystery offers many surprises around Harry’s life along the way.

Readers follow Harry’s adventures in trying to solve the murder while he experiences many of the societal changes of the time—motor cars vs. horses, class distinctions, and gender roles. Expectedly, Harry is gifted with horses, but it is clear the author knows horses well too. By the end of the book, I felt I knew each of the horses and their distinct personalities, making this a great read for horse lovers.

At the front of the novel, the author provides a map of the farms and estates, as well as a cast of characters. There were times when the references to locations or characters got confusing, so I found these additions helpful.

The bumps in the road Harry encounters kept me turning the pages until it was all tied up with a satisfying ending. Could there be a sequel to find out more about Harry as an adult? I hope so!

All Men Glad and Wise by Laura C. Stevenson. Rootstock Publishing, April 2022.

Reviewer bio: Laureen Mathon is a retired insurance professional, avid reader, and former library trustee who looks forward to having this extra time to read and pursue new projects.

New Book :: A Plucked Zither

A Plucked Zither by Phuong T. Vuong book cover image

A Plucked Zither by Phuong T. Vuong
Red Hen Press, June 2023

A Plucked Zither by Phuong Vuong explores what happens to language and thus emotions and relationships under conditions of migration, specifically refugee migration from Vietnam and its aftermath. Crisscrossing between making a home in the US and a home in Vietnam, the speaker tries nonlinear, multilingual voice(s) that demonstrate the disparate nature of memory and the operation of other ways of knowing. Efforts to speak reflect the severing created by historical forces of war and imperialism, while speaking makes connection possible and remains tied to that very history. Vuong leans on the anti-war Vietnamese singer and songwriter, Trịnh Công Sơn, for a poetic lineage on grief, longing, and justice. Rather than being sunken with loss, the speaker(s) move with it, leaping across gaps.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Pink Noise

Pink Noise by Kevin Holden book cover image

Pink Noise by Kevin Holden
Nightboat Books, April 2023

Kevin Holden’s Pink Noise orbits in spaces of memory, longing, violence, solidarity, the ecological, and the mystical. Experimental in its forms and lexicon, in poems ranging widely in style and scale, it moves through layers of musical intensity as it reworks the visual space of the page to generate sensations of presence and revelation. Simultaneously lucid and syntactically disjunctive, these poems are queer and radical not only in their content but in their grammar.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: The Taco Boat

The Taco Boat by Al Ortolani book cover image

The Taco Boat by Al Ortolani
NYQ Books, October 2022

Al Ortolani’s most recent collection of poems, The Taco Boat, focuses not just on the people of the American Midwest, but on the connection to the humor and pragmatism of working men and women. His poems are vignettes from the fields of Kansas, the hills of the Ozarks, and the streets of Kansas City. They are about good dogs and crazy cats. His people are family and strangers alike. Both are seen with an empathetic eye. They share an attachment to the joys and exasperations of being human, struggling to understand, to thrive. The poems in The Taco Boat step back from the day-to-day with an acceptance of the life its characters have been tossed into. The images are frequently taken from the natural world, but just as often are from the mechanic’s garage, the fast-food restaurant, the baseball diamond, the assisted living cafeteria. The poems in The Taco Boat are about the relationships people build, dismantle, and build again.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Book Review :: Jane Austen’s Little Book of Wisdom by Andrea Kirk Assaf

Jane Austen's Little Book of Wisdom by Andrea Kirk Assaf book cover image

For Austen fans and lovers of wise words, Jane Austen’s Little Book of Wisdom: Words on Love, Life, Society, and Literature compiled by Andrea Kirk Assaf, provides a genuine treasure trove. While “little,” this is a chonky volume: 4.25 x 5 inches and a full inch thick with 400 pages. Still, it is perfectly weighted for tossing in a bag without getting lost, and this is definitely one to take along. The book is divided into eight themed sections: Love & Longing; Friendship; Home & Society; On Being a Woman; Life, Death, and Spirituality; The Arts, Intellect, and Literature; Good Manners, Virtue, and Vice; A Philosophy of Life. Each page houses only one quote, making this the perfect “prompt” book for writing, mantra, and meditation. More than I anticipated, and much to my delight, in addition to quotes from Austen’s novels, there are also many entries culled from “her prayers, poems, and amusing, self-deprecating personal letters, most of which were addressed to her best friend and sister, Cassandra.” At the close of the volume are thirty-two blank pages for readers to pen their own favorites or reflections or ‘overheard gems,’ making this a perfect companion only in want of a pen to be complete. Assaf has curated a wonderful collection here, her other works encompassing popes and saints, precisely in line with the reverence Austen deserves.

Jane Austen’s Little Book of Wisdom by Andrea Kirk Assaf. Hampton Road Publishing, March 1, 2023.

Reviewer bio: Denise Hill is Editor of NewPages.com and reviews books she chooses based on her own personal interests.

New Book :: Only and Ever This

Only and Ever This by J. A. Tyler book cover image

Only and Ever This by J. A. Tyler
Dzanc Books, February 2023

In J. A. Tyler’s newest novel, Only and Ever This, a mother clings to twin sons, desperate to keep them from becoming their father, a pirate forever sailing away. In this rain-soaked township, she will attempt to mummify them, piece by piece, to stop them from growing up, a hope founded in magic and immortality. Meanwhile, their father obsesses the seas with his own belief in ever-lasting life, learning too late that his heart belongs on shore.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín

Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín by Oisín Breen book cover image

Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín by Oisín Breen
Downingield Press, November 2023

Music, language, and the relationship between love, loss, meaning, and identity shape this second collection from Irish poet Oisín Breen. Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín is a collection of two of the longer-form works Breen favors alongside a series of shorter naturalistic pieces that take common subjects, from the rearing of ducklings to young lust, then subvert them by employing an atypical gaze. Of the two longer pieces, the title work, “Lilies,” infuses the ancient Irish myth, Tochmarc Etine, into a contemporary story of motherloss, aging, and sexual awakening. The second, “Ana Rua,” is an avant-garde incantation of love. Characterized by unusual and wide use of language and form, Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín is available through Beir Bua Press.

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Book Review :: Stay True by Hua Hsu

Stay True by Hua Hsu book cover image

Guest Post by Taylor Murphy

Stay True by Hua Hsu is a poignant memoir about growing up, friendship, loss, identity, and the Asian-American experience. Hsu, a New Yorker staff writer, reflects on his time as an undergrad at Berkeley and his unlikely friend Ken.

An Abercrombie-wearing frat boy, Ken’s Japanese American upbringing emboldens him while Hsu is quieted by his immigrant Tawainese childhood. For example, Ken refuses to remove his shoes upon entering the house and directly calls out a casting director by asking why there weren’t more Asian-Americans on MTV. Meanwhile, Hsu rejects anything mainstream; he opts to stay in on Friday nights instead of partying and listens to intentionally curated music. Ken lives loudly and “wanted to see himself in the world” whereas Hsu contemplates how “Ken noticed that I never really went out. More important, he noticed that I hoped to be noticed for this.” Ultimately, Ken’s foil forces Hsu to examine his identity while learning how to loosen up and experience life more fully.

When Ken is senselessly murdered, Hsu turns to writing as a means to cope with the loss of a valued friend. His mother believes Hsu and his friends “had to find a way to get on with our lives.”

Stay True is the result of years of reflection about the ways an ordinary friendship shapes our life long after the friend is gone.

Stay True by Hua Hsu. Doubleday, September 2022

Reviewer bio: Taylor Murphy is a sales manager by day and an English graduate student by night. When she’s not juggling work and school, you can find her snuggled up with her adorable pug and a good book, spending time by the sea, or catching a Boston Celtics game. Her twitter handle is @tayfran and is an amalgamation of the aforementioned things she loves most.

New Book :: Binded

Binded by H Warren book cover image

Binded by H Warren
Boreal Books, July 2023

In urgent vulnerability, Heather A Warren’s debut collection, Binded, discloses their reality of living nonbinary in the rural context of Alaska – “I sew myself together / again and again.” With breasts bound by compression, these poems explore the space that binds the body into itself, stuck in unrelenting forces of binary politics and violence. Each poem is a stitching and restitching of the self—an examination of trans-survival. This is a courageous collection—an anthem of Queer resilience and a reminder of the healing powers of community care.

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Book Review :: Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra

Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra book cover image

Guest Post by Colm McKenna

Alejandro Zambra’s most recent novel, Chilean Poet, follows budding poet Gonzalo through his adolescence, followed by a fortuitous meeting with his first love Carla, and the family they start together with her six-year-old son Vincente.

It’s a story about poetry and poets in Chile, where it is los sueños de los niños – a child’s dream – to become a poet. It’s also a commentary on family. Gonzalo delves into the Spanish for stepfather – padastro – and is upset by the negative connotations the -astro suffix carries. Though language fails us sometimes, Gonzalo develops a relationship with Vincente that is unrestricted by dictionary definitions.

Chilean Poet is realistic and experimental: Gonzalo and Carla separate, his relationship with Vincente fades. After the separation, the narrative follows Vincente through his teenage years, combating similar issues his father had dealt with. One of his lovers becomes the protagonist, before being abandoned by the narrator upon boarding her flight home. The storytelling is erratic, despite its traditional bildungsroman form. It correlates well with lived experience; years flash by in seconds, people come and go, dreams and expectations are rarely satisfied in full.

Zambra has crafted a glorious story, full of literary references and astute observations on family and growing up. Notice the missing article in the title; the story is about the idea of being a Chilean Poet; Gonzalo and Vincente just happen to instantiate the idea for a while.

Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell. Granta Books, Febrauary 2023.

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.

New Book :: Vistor

Visitor by Clint Margrave book cover image

Vistor by Clint Margrave
NYQ Books, October 2022

The poems in Clint Margrave’s Visitor, travel to distant lands and familiar ones, through museum doors and down the aisles of grocery stores, into the pages of books and along the shared walls of an apartment complex, far out in space and up close in the inner space of love and loss, life and death. Visitor is a collection that calls on readers to let it in. Clint Margrave is the author of several books of fiction and poetry, including Lying Bastard, Salute the Wreckage, and The Early Death of Men. His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Rattle, The Moth, Ambit, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others.

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New Book :: Keşke

Keşke by Jennifer A. Reimer book cover image

Keşke by Jennifer A. Reimer
Airlie Press, October 2022

Wistful memory, future longing, and nostalgia for unrealized possibilities, Jennifer Reimer’s Keşke joins the ancient and the modern to the intense lyric experience of self-discovery. Watery scenes rewrite Homeric myth with a feminist eye while verses unfold inner worlds with tangible sensuality. Experimental yet measured, Keşke is shaped by forgotten caves, ancient ruins, wave-battered ships, and the ragged angularity of the Mediterranean coast. Evoking desire for what is absent, Keşke traverses the slipping movement of time and attachment, hope and impossibility, with a clear eye and a passionate hunger for where and what we might have been.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: The Wild Hunt Divinations

The Wild Hunt Divinations by Trevor Ketner book cover image

The Wild Hunt Divinations: A Grimoire by Trevor Ketner
Wesleyan University Press, December 2022

Trevor Ketner’s The Wild Hunt Divinations: A Grimoire is a stunning second collection from this National Poetry Series winner. Comprised of 154 sonnets, each anagrammed line-by-line from Shakespeare’s sonnets, the book refracts these lines through the thematic lens of transness, queer desire, kink, and British paganism. The sonnets come together to form a grimoire that casts a trancelike and intense spell on the reader. Centered on love and desire in the English canon, this collection speaks to the ever-emerging and beautiful manifestations of queer love and desire. Relentless, excessive, wild, and tender, The Wild Hunt Divinations: A Grimoire sets itself to chanting from beginning to end.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: The Poetics of Wrongness

The Poetics of Wrongness by Rachel Zucker book cover image

The Poetics of Wrongness by Rachel Zucker
Wave Books, February 2023

In her first book of critical non-fiction, The Poetics of Wrongness, poet Rachel Zucker explores wrongness as a foundational orientation of opposition and provocation. Devastating in their revelations, yet hopeful in their commitment to perseverance, these lecture-essays of protest and reckoning resist the notion of being wrong as a stopping point on the road to being right, and insist on wrongness as an analytical lens and way of reading, writing, and living that might create openness, connection, humility, and engagement. Expanded from lectures presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series in 2016, Zucker’s deft dismantling of outdated paradigms of motherhood, aesthetics, feminism, poetics, and politics feel prescient in their urgent destabilization of post-war thinking. In her four essay-lectures (and an appendix of selected, earlier prose), Zucker calls Sharon Olds, Bernadette Mayer, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, Alice Notley, Natalie Diaz, Allen Ginsberg, Marina Abramović, and Audre Lorde—among others—into the conversation. This book marks a turning point in Zucker’s significant body of work, documenting her embrace of the multivocality of interview in her podcasting, and resisting the univocality of the lecture as a form of wrongness in and of itself.

New Book :: THIRDOUROBOROS

THIRDOUROBOROS by Richard Kostelanetz book cover image

THIRDOUROBOROS by Richard Kostelanetz
NYQ Books, September 2022

Richard Kostelanetz says in his preface to THIRDOUROBOROS, “When I first heard the epithet afterimage as an honorific among visual artists, I recognized it as analogous to the strongest lines in strictly verbal poetry.” In his third installment of this series, Kostelanetz visually lays out words in circles. And just like the ancient symbol, allows them to devour themselves as much as they create themselves as afterimages are embedded in the reader’s mind. The two preceding books in this series are OUROBOROS and SECONDOUROBOROS, also from NYQ Books.

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New Book :: Animal Afterlife

Animal Afterlife by Jaya Stenquist book cover image

Animal Afterlife by Jaya Stenquist
Airlie Press, September 2022

The voices of near-extinct animals create troubled echoes in Jaya Stenquist’s debut collection, Animal Afterlife, winner of The Airlie Prize 2021. In fragmented reincarnations, these poems reach for the limits of humanity, the boundaries of species, and the laws of embodiment. Here, sensations become the mechanism for insight. With lithe lyric power, Stenquist builds a world of impossibilities, a language for the binturong, the eyeless spider, the siren of Canosa, and wild ponies of England; communications and intermingling with the human that can never be preserved, only imagined. As the Earth continues to change during its Sixth Great Extinction, Animal Afterlife creates an archive of spellbinding ghosts.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Book Review :: Nervous System by Lina Meruane

Nervous System by Lina Meruane book cover image

Guest Post by Colm McKenna

Lina Meruane’s novel Nervous System evokes the universal fear of illness and death on nearly every page. The story follows Ella through her struggles to finish a doctoral thesis funded entirely by her father’s savings. Her partner, El, is a forensic scientist, who is recovering from an explosion at a work site. After wishing sickness on herself – so she could concentrate solely on her thesis – Ella is suddenly overcome by an undiagnosable illness.

The story is presented in small fragments, often delving into seemingly innocuous memories, to brutal statistics about illness and the end of life on earth. These fragments match the tone of the half-formed anxious thoughts that fill the story. Death is treated as if its reality was becoming clear for the first time. There are lines that could have come from any textbook – “the heart was a muscle that could give out” – but in Nervous System, they lose their objectivity, inducing only fear. References to the ancients’ explanations of illness abound, reflecting the book’s treatment of these grim subjects; the fear and anxiety they evoke remain largely the same, despite technological advances.

Nervous System concerns itself with issues that are hard to accept, but there is solace to be found in hearing another voice confront the hard facts of life on our behalf.

Nervous System by Lina Meruane, translated by Megan McDowell. Atlantic Books, February 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.

New Book :: It’s About Time

It’s About Time by Barry Wallenstein
NYQ Books, February 2022

It's About Time by Barry Wallenstein book cover image

Barry Wallenstein’s poetry, from his first book in 1977 to now, addresses his awareness of time’s swift passing. The poems in It’s About Time continue this time-honored theme and its attendant thoughts and emotions. Now in his eighth decade, this theme is paramount. While time is explicitly central in the first and eighth sections, other sections speak of desire, music, current events, creatures of all sizes, and states of mind. Poems in each of the groups reflect the anxieties of our current period including references to the ongoing pandemic and quarantine, as well as overriding reflections on temporality. These poems also are full of appreciation and gratitude for life’s bounty. While avoiding the “personal” or autobiographical, Wallenstein’s emotional life is more apparent here than in his work of the past.

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New Book :: Under Sleep’s New Moon

Under Sleep's New Moon by Joseph Hutchison book cover image

Under Sleep’s New Moon: Rescued Poems 1970-1990 by Joseph Hutchison
NYQ Books, September 2021

The road a poet travels is often littered with unrealized fragments, half-realized drafts, and unfinished poems that found their ways into a magazine but never earned their way into a book. If a poet is lucky, a few such left-behinds might be “rescued,” released into their true form thanks to abilities that have ripened over many years of practice. In Under Sleep’s New Moon, Joseph Hutchison (Colorado Poet Laureate, 2014-2019) offers a range of such poems, all rescued from twenty years of writing between 1970-1990. The poems in this new/old collection are by turns personal and public, surreal and naturalistic, musical and plain-spoken. But all explore the liminal regions we live in every day, too often unconscious of what we’re finding there. What this poet found there he has lifted into new configurations, where at last the poems can speak for themselves.

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New Book :: Swallowing Stones

Swallowing Stones by Lisa St. John book cover image

Swallowing Stones by Lisa St. John
Kelsay Books, January 2023

Swallowing Stones is Lisa St. John’s debut book of poetry in which she explores the process of finding a space for grief and regaining joy. Free verse and formal poems collaborate with philosophy and art to tell the story of a widow’s discovery in finding her place in the world again. From “Stomping My Foot,” St. John begins, “I want to channel some of this horror into poetry.” And later, “Give me back the world / of Mexican beaches / and the two of us dancing / alone / late at night / before bed.” Poems that beckon, beg, promise, and deliver.

Lisa St. John lives in the Hudson Valley of upstate New York, where she calls the Catskill Mountains home. Her chapbook, Ponderings, was published by Finishing Line Press, and she has published her poetry in many journals and anthologies. Her poems have won several awards such as The Bermuda Triangle Prize and New Millenium Writing. Her essays and memoir excerpts have been published in magazines and nonfiction collections.

Book Review :: Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones

Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

In Easy Beauty: A Memoir, Chloé Cooper Jones shares that she was born with sacral agenesis, a congenital condition that affects her stature and the way she walks. While her memoir focuses on the physical pain she suffers, she is more interested in examining how others see her and how she sees herself. She travels to a variety of locations, often under the guise of doing research—as when she travels to Cambodia to explore why people visit monuments to horrific events—but really to think through her self-image, largely shaped by how others see her as different and lesser-than. Her son’s view of her complicates this search, as she doesn’t want to communicate her emotional discomfort at moving through the world to him (doctors had told her she was unable to get pregnant, so her having a child at all was not a development she expected). Throughout the work, she explores beauty and the myths that have accrued around it, whether that’s through classical art or watching Roger Federer play tennis. While her writing and travels help her develop an idea of beauty that includes her and her view of the world, ultimately her relationships help her find the beauty she already possesses.

Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones. Avid Reader Press, April 2022.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

New Book :: Field Guide to the Human Condition

Field Guide to the Human Condition by Adrian S. Potter book cover image

Field Guide to the Human Condition by Adrian S. Potter
CW Books, November 2022

In this newest poetry collection, In Field Guide to the Human Condition, Adrian S. Potter explores how one rebuilds oneself after grief, heartbreak, and challenges. He offers poems that focus on the setbacks and struggles that have the capacity to mold a person into a different version of themselves than the one they once knew. The poems are about grappling with histories, both personal and collective. Potter uses hallmarks from modern life – pop music, discrimination, shifting identities, and toxic relationships – to construct a hall of mirrors, in which each viewpoint reflects a different possibility. Sample poems are available to read on the publisher’s website.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: In the War Zone of the Heart

In the War Zone of the Heart Willie Cuesta Mystery Stories by John Lantigua book cover image

In the War Zone of the Heart: Willie Cuesta Mystery Stories by John Lantigua
Arte Público Press, September 2022

This collection of twelve stories featuring private investigator Willie Cuesta illuminates the histories and issues of the numerous Latin American communities that call Miami home—and how the past continues to haunt them. There’s a family concerned that their mother’s new fiancé isn’t the former Cuban political prisoner and hero he claims to be; a heavily tattooed Salvadoran gang member in hiding from the vicious former colleagues hunting him; a beautiful Haitian woman being stalked by a killer who uses voodoo to stoke her nightmares; and a wealthy American who made his fortune in Guatemala on the backs of its people and is now receiving death threats from his victims.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Black Women Writers at Work

Black Women Writers at Work ed Cladia Tate book cover image

Black Women Writers at Work ed Cladia Tate
Haymarket Books, January 2023

Long out of print, Black Women Writers at Work remains a vital contribution to Black literature. Through candid interviews with Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alexis De Veaux, Nikki Giovanni, Kristin Hunter, Gayl Jones, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Margret Walker, and Sherley Anne Williams, the book highlights the practices and critical linkages between the work and lived experiences of Black women writers whose work laid the foundation for many who have come after. Responding to questions about why and for whom they write, and how they perceive their responsibility to their work, to others, and to society, the featured playwrights, poets, novelists, and essayists provide a window into the connections between their lives and their art. Finally available for a new generation, this classic work has an urgent message for readers and writers today.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Taking the F Train

Taking the F Train by Linda Lerner book cover image

Taking the F Train by Linda Lerner
NYQ Books, October 2021

In Linda Lerner’s Taking the F Train, a New York City poet rides the F Train through the final years of the 20th century into the 21st; both gentrification and technology are rapidly transforming life as she has known it. Her old haunts – cafés, bookstores, diners, are being replaced by luxury co-ops. There are also losses due to illness and aging – those of others as well her own. And it’s not ok, she cries out! At the same time, for every push forward into the future, she’s witnessing an opposite push back into the past by the so-called leader of the free world. Nothing makes sense to her anymore. There’s only what can be salvaged by art…the act of creation.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Book Review :: Reward System by Jem Calder

Reward System by Jem Calder book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Jem Calder’s collection of interlocking short stories in Reward System follows a group of British Millennials, focusing on Julia and Nick, as they try to navigate relationships, technology, and jobs during the approaching pandemic. Calder renders his characters with sympathy and compassion, even when they make poor decisions, given the challenges they face. Julia and Nick (and their friends) live with roommates or their parents, move from one job to the next—sometimes by choice, sometimes not—and try to find ways to truly connect with those around them. Society exacerbates all of these problems, whether the structural oppression women (especially) push against or the technology that more often separates than connects (though not always). This focus on technology works especially well in the stories “Distraction from Sadness Is Not the Same Thing as Happiness” and “The Foreseeable.” In “Distraction” a female user of a dating app connects with and meets a male user (Calder uses no names), exploring the new dating landscape, for good and ill. “The Foreseeable” ends the collection, as Julia and Nick are both sheltering with their parents during the pandemic—one more enjoyably than the other—while talking via FaceTime. The connection keeps breaking in and out, a metaphor for all of the relationships in this collection.

Reward System by Jem Calder. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, July 2022.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

New Book :: Until All You See Is Sky

Until All You See Is Sky by George Choundas book cover image

Until All You See Is Sky by George Choundas
EastOver Press, February 2023

This collection of essays by George Choundas is a report from the front lines of a first-generation American life: growing up as the outsider, parenting without a clue, and persevering in plague times. Choundas’s award-winning writing has appeared in over 75 publications. His story collection, The Making Sense of Things (FC2), won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize. He is a former FBI agent who worked public corruption in the Bureau’s New York Office. His mother, born in Cuba, was a flyer at Macy’s Manhattan flagship until she saved enough to travel Europe for a year. His father, born in Greece, was a tanker captain who, aboard a passenger ship transporting him to his next command, met an engaging American tourist with a Cuban accent.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Tending Iowa’s Land

Tending Iowa's Land: Pathways to a Sustainable Future ed Cornelia F. Mutel book cover image

Tending Iowa’s Land: Pathways to a Sustainable Future ed Cornelia F. Mutel
University of Iowa Press, December 2022

In the last 200 years, Iowa’s prairies and other wildlands have been transformed into vast agricultural fields. This massive conversion has provided us with food, fiber, and fuel in abundance. But it has also robbed Iowa’s land of its native resilience and created the environmental problems that today challenge our everyday lives: polluted waters, increasing floods, loss and degradation of rich prairie topsoil, compromised natural systems, and now climate change. In a straightforward, friendly style, Iowa’s premier scientists and experts consider what has happened to our land and outline viable solutions that benefit agriculture as well as the state’s human and wild residents. Mutel is author of The Emerald Horizon: The History of Nature in Iowa (Iowa, 2008) and A Sugar Creek Chronicle: Observing Climate Change from a Midwestern Woodland (Iowa, 2016). She is the former senior science writer at IIHR–Hydroscience & Engineering at the University of Iowa College of Engineering and lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!