Slight Return Poetry by Rebecca Wolff Wave Books, October 2022
In her new collection, renowned publisher and poet Rebecca Wolff voyages in the myopia of American consumer consciousness—erotic regard, spiritual FOMO, gentrification, branding—without destination. Labyrinthine in their paradoxical musings and incisive in their witty recriminations, these poems grapple with the hubris and dysmorphia of the soul. Wolff is a poet that is unafraid to be a querent, not only of sages (“I only hang out with people / who are psychic / anything else is a / waste of precious / continuity”) but of language itself (“How else is one to know how to proceed / How is one to make a motion against— / electric word life”) In Slight Return, the journey is infinite and elusive—aspiring in the best way toward a point of diminishing returns and withholding any promise of a comfortable landing.
Chibundu Onuzo’s novel Sankofa follows Anna Graham—a middle-aged British woman who goes to Bamana, a fictional African country, to find her father—as she tries to understand her mixed-race heritage. Raised by her single white mother, Anna always struggled with her identity, as she knew almost nothing of her Bamanian father. Anna lived a sheltered life with a husband (from whom she is now separated because of his recent affair) who took care of everything for her, so he and their daughter are surprised when she travels to Bamana alone. I have two minor complaints: first, the ending is a bit too neatly tied together in terms of Anna’s understanding of her identity; second, some plot developments similarly seemed too easy to predict, though Anna’s naivete prevents her from seeing what has happened. However, Anna’s grappling with her identity is a useful metaphor for a postcolonial Africa still coming to terms with the multiple strands of cultural history that make the countries what they have become. The novel serves as a healthy reminder to Americans and Europeans that African countries’ histories are more complex than they seem to those on the outside.
Sankofa by Chibundu Onuzo. Catapult, October 2021.
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/.
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In her chapbook Time/Tempo: The Idea of Breath, Laura Cesarco Eglin gives her poetic attention to a “tension of simultaneity,” tracking temporal interruptions, disruptions, and variations, and how those time-based movements affect breath within a particular life that withstands a cancer diagnosis and recovery, illnesses and deaths of beloved family members, and “knowing languages” by undertaking writing and translation. These are poems that want “to keep track of leaving”: the departures of words on breaths and “the hours that come and those that stay, those that leave.” Time unfolds “no matter what.” Yet, there is the recognition that “nothing is lost.” That acknowledgment makes room for inquiry: “What is left of me after I’ve left a place, after it has left me.” One response to that query might be: These poems! The impressions and residues left with this reader—“a scar / of what’s no longer.”
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 are forthcoming.
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The Displaced Fiction by Rodrigo Ribera d’Ebre Arte Público Press, June 2022
Mikey and Lurch are worlds apart, even if they’re from the same Mexican neighborhood in West Los Angeles. Mikey just graduated from UCLA and is determined to get out. Lurch, the leader of the Culver City gang, loves the hood—its projects, beat-up apartments, and crackheads—more than his own life. They hook up with a doctor, who is from the same area. He put himself through medical school selling dope and now is back, running a clinic across from the Mar Vista Gardens housing project. All three notice changes. Suddenly there are outsiders everywhere: white people with beards, wearing V-neck sweaters and plaid shirts, running in jogging outfits or riding bikes with helmets, oblivious to the gangbangers. They’re artists, students, developers and entrepreneurs; a plague, pushing people out of their homes. Old people on fixed incomes start getting evicted or foreclosed on and the residents of the projects are being relocated, but some of the locals aren’t going to sit by without a fight. Soon they are fortifying the housing projects and stockpiling assault weapons! This absorbing novel follows a group of people who are determined to save their homes and neighborhood from gentrification, even if it means turning to violence.
New from Livingston Press! Aftershock by George H. Wolfe is a novel about GI’s returning from WWII to about-face and enter colleges under the GI Bill. Zero to Ten: Nursing on the Floor by Patricia Taylor is a story collection about nursing, its joys, frustrations, and heartbreak. See flyer for more details or visit website.
Deadline: August 31, 2022 The Off the Grid Poetry Prize recognizes the work of older poets, highlighting important contemporary voices in American poetry. Each year a winner is awarded $1,000 and publication. Contest runs through August 31, 2022. Garrett Hongo will judge. Find full guidelines here or view flyer for more information.
Recently I found a poem that gave me rare permission to admit how much love I feel, even in the face of cynical, worldly evidence I should just close up my heart until I die. Alex Dimitrov’s poem “Love”, first published in The American Poetry Review and then reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2021 guest edited by Tracy K. Smith, spills and sprawls with nine double-spaced pages of sentences, each one beginning with “I love.” It’s a list poem, predictable in structure—“I love looking at someone without need or panic.”—yet sensual: “I love statues in a downpour.” With these declaratives, I adored how I entered effortlessly into the rhythms and curvatures of the poem.
But more than the syntactical ease, it required no intellectual or political bracing. How often do we encounter text that cools, that refreshes? Dimitrov skips comfortably through the narrator’s life, covering various topics—literature, relationship, time: “I love that a day on Venus lasts longer than a year.” and “I love the blue hours between three and five when Plath wrote Ariel.” This poem possesses a wide lens trained on the interior of the heart, the exterior. With a clear emotional bravery, “Love” unabashedly just admits, through a repeated subject and verb, the truth.
“LOVE” by Alex Dimitrov. Love and Other Poems, Copper Canyon Press, February 2021.
Reviewer bio: Maureen O’Brien is the author of the spiritual memoir What Was Lost: Seeking Refuge in the Psalms (Franciscan Media, 2021). Her next book, Gather the Fragments: Finding Everyday Miracles and Abundance is forthcoming from Franciscan Media (January 2023). She is a contributor to St. Anthony Messenger and the online site Pause+Pray. She has also published a novel, B-mother (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), and The Other Cradling, a chapbook of poems (Finishing Line Press). Find her on Instagram: maureen_obrien_writer
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“They resemble Eskimo Pies,” says George Bilgere of his air-conditioned neighbors in the title poem of his latest collection, Central Air, “or boxes of frozen peas.” Characteristically, he goes on to concede, “Not a bad life, I guess,” though admitting he’d miss the crickets “simmering / through summer, and the love / song of cicadas, burning / all night for each other, insect / ecstasies beyond our dreams.” This even-handedness typifies Bilgere’s approach, the poet awed by his good fortune on a pleasant summer evening (“Ripeness”) but also acknowledging the countless daily injustices suffered by others (“Summer Pass,” “For the Slip ‘N Slide”) as well as horrors on a global scale (“Chernobyl,” “Reichstag”). Bilgere delights in detail (“the stalled machinery” of a dead bee) as much as in the acoustics of language and the subtleties of line. Note the fatigue conveyed by the d’s in his description of a waitress’s voice (“tired, / frayed around the edges”) and the sudden, brightening weightlessness of the two-line stanza that follows:
But what she said hung sparkling in the air, so masterful…
The collection produces the same heartening effect, Bilgere’s work a balance of light and dark, the amusing and the profound.
Central Air by George Bilgere. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022.
Reviewer bio: James Scruton is the author of two full collections and five chapbooks of poetry as well as dozens of reviews, essays, and articles on poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.
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Pacific Light Poetry by David Mason Red Hen Press, August 2022
David Mason was born in Washington State, forty-odd degrees north latitude, and now lives on the Australian island of Tasmania, forty-odd degrees south latitude. That Pacific crossing is the work of a lifetime of devotion and change. The rich new poems of Pacific Light explore the implications of the light as well as peace and its opposing forces. What does it mean to be an immigrant and face the ultimate borders of our lives? How can we say the word home and mean it? These questions have obsessed Mason in his major narrative works, The Country I Remember and Ludlow, as well as his lyric and dramatic writing. Pacific Light is a culmination and a deepening of that work, a book of transformations, history and love, endurance and unfathomable beauty, by a poet “at the height of his powers.”
American Narratives Poetry by T.P. Bird Turning Point, November 2021
In this newest collection of poems, American Narratives, T.P. Bird offers the reader narratives of America that portray the grit of the street, the noise of the crowd, and the softness of the heart in a manner as large and capacious as a myth and a country. Bird is a retired industrial drafter/designer and minister now living in Lexington, Kentucky with his spouse. He has published widely in literary journals and is the author of two previous chapbooks, Mystery and Imperfections and Scenes and Speculations. Read sample poems here.
Not a Soul but Us: A Story in 84 Sonnets Poetry by Richard Smith Bauhan Publishing, April 2022
Not a Soul but Us: A Story in 84 Sonnets by Richard Smith is the winning collection of the 2021 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. In it, Smith tells the story of mid-fourteenth century Yorkshire, when the plague pandemic wipes out half the inhabitants of a remote village. Left behind is a twelve-year-old shepherd boy, who, with the help of his dog, survives near-starvation and a brutal winter and keeps his flock alive. In the months and years that follow, he struggles to reconnect with the life around him. Judge Meg Kearney said this of her selection, “A mastery of craft. Music. An undulating urgency of tone that leaves no doubt about the emotional impulse that drives the work. A voice that you trust, even when the syntax or the material is difficult. And that material needs to feel relevant, of substance, necessary. Not a Soul But Us is an achievement on every front.”
The ranting, mischievous, socially engaged verse of Lucebert, the great Dutch poet, painter, and anti-apartheid activist, dazzles (and dizzies) the reader with surrealistic images, quick tone shifts, puns, and jazzy philosophical musings. Published by Green Integer in a pocket-sized, bilingual edition, Volume 3 shows Lucebert, a well-known affiliate of experimental writing movements De Vijftigers and CoBrA, on top of his game. See this tercet from the brief, wry “communiqué”: “through logic people get ahead / shoot for kicks at rats wolves riffraff / god is a pet[.]” Or consider how “…always music makes music / rocking ejector-seat directed / at perilous fluffy down / sweet skirt that frowns / like an enjoying forehead”; images morph into more images, mimicking the consciousness that commits them to paper. Diane Butterman’s translations from the Dutch into English preserve (and transform) the poems’ spirits. In “…and tomorrow the whole world,” a poem full of sharp adjectives, the poet pokes fun at class privilege: “…from our snooty benefits we will if need be / weave a temporary bandage for the world[.]” Lucebert eschews proper punctuation, creating language-rivers, reminding us to be wary of the “…little butcher [who] planned to slaughter the whole nation.”
Bio: Jason Gordy Walker (he/him/his) has received scholarships for his poetry from The New York State Summer Writers Institute and Poetry by the Sea: A Global Conference. His book reviews and interviews have appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, NewPages, Subtropics, and the Dos Madres Press blog, among others.
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The Girl I Never Knew: Who Killed Melissa Witt? True Crime by LaDonna Humphrey Genius Book Publishing, April 2022
For over two decades, the identity of Melissa Witt’s killer has been hidden among the dense trees and thorny undergrowth rooted deeply in the uneven ground of a remote mountaintop in the Ozark National Forest. Determined to find answers, LaDonna Humphrey has spent the past seven years hunting for Melissa’s killer. Her investigation, both thrilling and unpredictable, has led her on a journey like no other, at times her own safety at risk from those who want this mystery to remain unsolved. LaDonna Humphrey is a writer, documentarian, investigative journalist, private investigator, and advocate for victims of crime. “I’m hopeful that the book will put some pressure on some of those people who know they are being looked at [as suspects] but have not been named publicly.” Visit the publisher’s website for links to radio and news media interviews with the author.
Blood Snow Poetry by dg nanouk okpik Wave Books, October 2022
American Book Award–winning poet dg okpik’s second collection of poems, Blood Snow, tells a continuum story of a homeland under erasure, in an ethos of erosion, in a multitude of encroaching methane, ice floe, and rising temperatures. Here, in a true Inupiaq voice, okpik’s relationship to language is an access point for understanding larger kinships between animals, peoples, traditions, histories, ancestries, and identities. Through an animist process of transfiguration into a shaman’s omniscient voice, we are greeted with a destabilizing grammar of selfhood. Okpik’s poems have a fraught relationship to her former home in Anchorage, Alaska, a place of unparalleled natural beauty and a traumatic site of devastation for Alaskan native nations and landscapes alike. In this way, okpik’s poetry speaks to the dualistic nature of reality and how one’s existence in the world simultaneously shapes and is shaped by its environs.
These Dark Skies: Reckoning with Identity, Violence, and Power from Abroad Essays by Arianne Zwartjes University of Iowa Press, June 2022
In These Dark Skies, Arianne Zwartjes interweaves the experience of living in the southern Netherlands—with her wife, who is Russian—and the unfolding of both the refugee crisis across Europe and the uptick in terrorist acts in France, Greece, Austria, Germany, and the Balkans. She probes her own subjectivity, as a white American, as a queer woman in a transcultural marriage, as a writer, and as a witness. The essays investigate and meditate on a broad array of related topics, including drone strikes, tear gas, and military intervention; the sugar trade, the Dutch blackface celebration of Zwarte Piet, and constructions of whiteness in Europe and the U.S.; and visual arts of Russian avant-garde painters, an Iraqi choreographer living in Belgium, and German choreographer Pina Bausch.
The latest book from Steve Timm, Rule of Composition, more than resembles jazz. Giant-of-the-art Cecil Taylor’s album with the Feel Trio, 2 Ts for a lovely T, forms the basis for Timm’s book’s division into “listens,” when the author wrote as an improvisational accompaniment to the 10-CD set. While Timm is 21st Century Wisconsin’s answer to Russian zaum poetry and Dadaist soundscapes, he also diffuses a hyper-inflationary poetics into the nonce words others might dash throughout lyric pieces or isolate in austere minimal poems, spinning out syntactic, phonetic and morphemic swerves — each of which he entrusts to readers’ decipherment. Lines blatz across pages from “Marry pensile attribles / join the scuchus suqologue” to “that’s myander enjourn?” so that “a lipe shangs in the bilence / zeroes aglitter.” Once clought in Timm’s whipnotic enburgonment, the mive glences bursht ignoblistervly. To call his work word-salad by no means disparages it; rather, it suggests a need to elevate the art of the farrago in the culinary imagination. For anyone tired of literature that tells you what or how to think, the book can be purchased online and in-person through Woodland Pattern Book Center and A Room of One’s Own.
Rule of Composition by Steve Timm. Bananaquit Press, 2022.
Reviewer bio: Nicholas Michael Ravnikar makes understanding look like overthinking. He’s currently disabled with mental illnesses. Married with two kids, he enjoys cooking, exercise and meditation. Stay in touch via social media and download free books at bio.fm/nicholasmichaelravnikar.
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Chronicles of a Luchador YA Fiction by Ray Villareal Arte Público Press, June 2022
Jesse Baron, the son of the American Championship Wrestling star known as the Angel of Death, is about to graduate from high school. His parents expect him to attend the University of Texas and study mechanical engineering, something he’s not interested in. The young man knows he would be a natural at professional wrestling, and with his father’s help, he might even reach the same level of fame and success. But the Angel of Death, retired from the ACW and running a wrestling promotion and school, refuses to train his son for fear he will choose sports entertainment over a college degree. Jesse decides that once he gets settled at UT, he’s going to look for another place to wrestle. To keep his father from finding out, he’ll promote himself as a masked luchador from Oaxaca, Mexico, named Máscara de la Muerte. When no one will hire him, Jesse reluctantly considers joining a lucha libre organization, even though he doesn’t speak Spanish. Will the fans and his fellow wrestlers see him as a luchador—or just a gringo with a mask?
The Silk the Moths Ignore, Bronwen Tate’s debut and winner of Inlandia Institute’s 2019 Hillary Gravendyk Prize, is to be “read as choreography,” marking “what led to this.” In her poems, Tate makes legible what is illegible about rejection as it concerns motherhood and miscarriage—rejection by a newborn of a mother’s breast and by a woman’s body of a fetus. What are the roles of nature and will? These poems “rage at who names a body,” acknowledge that a man and a woman “carry risk unevenly,” and ultimately recognize “the present carries multiples.” Memory and recovery, balance and counterbalance are important to these poems whose forms toggle between lullaby-like short lyrics and Proustian prose poems. Brevity and extension, lines and sentences, meditative and narrative counterbalancing elements “speak a language no known mother tongued.” Tate is a poet willing to sit with the complexity of human connection: “we seek comfort and reject it.” Her poems “swim against / the waves, held by / what resists,” and, it seems in so doing the grief-currents they swim transform into a “less insistent presence.” Isn’t that what loss eventually becomes? The Silk the Moths Ignore is a collection of lyric ache that brims with “artifacts of hope.”
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 are forthcoming.
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Published initially in Argentina in 2013, The Murders of Moisés Ville has only now been made available in English with a wonderful translation by Robert Croll.
In 2009, Javier Sinay, an Argentinian author and journalist, received an interesting email from his father. It referred him to an article published in the late 1940s by his great grandfather, Mijl Hacohen Sinay, detailing the murders of Jews committed in one of the first Jewish colonies in Argentina, Moisés Ville. The history of this colony, long forgotten not just by Sinay’s immediate family but by the Jewish community as a whole, prompts him to investigate the crimes that occurred over a century ago, against the backdrop of hardship and violence that afflicted the settlers.
The Ultimate Havana: A Willie Cuesta Mystery Fiction by John Lantigua Arte Público Press, March 2022
Willie Cuesta, former Miami Police detective turned private investigator, is struggling to pay the bills when he receives a call from an old family friend. Cesar Mendoza is the blind, elderly owner of Tabacos El Ciego, a cigar store in Little Havana. Cesar is worried about Victoria Espada, a friend from the old days in Cuba. As a young woman, she was so beautiful that cigar makers competed to put her image on their boxes. She came from a long line of tobacco growers and married a man from an old, respected clan of cigar makers. The couple, who represented one of the great cigar dynasties of all time, fled the island after the revolution, but things didn’t go well. Ernesto Espada ultimately committed suicide, leaving his widow with two young children to raise. Now, her son, a less-than-successful cigar salesman, has gone missing, and the detective is tasked with finding him.
Hands of Years poetry collection by Riley Bounds chronicles a journey of faith undertaken with open eyes. While stylistically spare (“tall and slim as votive candles”), these poems reach deep, plumbing the seminal moments in the author’s spiritual life and illuminating the healing power of such moments. Death is described as a space where “life simply leaves, vagabond through zodiacal clouds and dust”; to his father, the poet writes, “Your heart was always a war drum, so stay and tithe your noise”; a child’s prayer is “proffered to Who he doesn’t know from the textless hymnal of his solar plexus, the liturgy of bone and marrow.” In the collection’s final piece, Bounds prays that he might one day “hold the hands of years and become the voice I sing, echoing up the wall of our netted souls, refracting each other’s given light.” The power of these poems lies in their meticulous imagery, their brutal honesty, and their bold confrontation with difficult truths. They alternately rattle and soothe, offering a glimpse of light after each forage into the darkness.
Hands of Years by Riley Bounds. Kelsay Press, October 2021.
Reviewer bio: Elizabeth Genovise is an MFA graduate from McNeese State University and the author of four short story collections, the most recent being Palindrome from the Texas Review Press (forthcoming September 2022). www.elizabethgenovisefiction.org/
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After practicing medicine for more than thirty years in the sweltering suburbs of Phoenix, Dr. Norah Waters is weighing her options, and early retirement is looking better and better. At age fifty-eight, she questions whether she still needs to deal with midnight calls, cranky patients, and the financial headaches that come with running a small clinic. Fighting burnout and workplace melodrama, Norah gives herself one final year to find the fulfillment and satisfaction she remembers from the early years of her once-cherished career. Supported by her steadfast dog, a misfit veterinarian, and a thoughtful radiologist, Norah wrestles through a surprising assortment of obstacles, sometimes amusing and sometimes dreadful, on her way to making a final decision about her future.
NewPages receives many wonderful titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these titles by clicking on the “New Books” tag under “Popular Topics.” If you are a publisher or author looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us!
Poetry
American Narratives, T.P. Bird, Turning Point Book of the Cold, Antonio Gamoneda, World Poetry Books Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic and Artistic Collaboration, 2005-2020 Buy a Ticket, Judith R. Robinson, Word Poetry Cold Fire, Veronica Zondek, World Poetry Books Coming To, J.R. Solonche, David Robert Books Flutter Kick, Anna V.Q. Ross, Red Hen Press Gold Hill Family Audio, Corrie Lynn White, Southeast Missouri State University Hechizo, Mark Statman, Lavendar Ink Hers, Maria Laina, World Poetry Books I Dreamed I was Emily Dickinson’s Boyfriend, Ron Koertge, Red Hen Press Living in a Red State Blues, M. Scott Douglass, Paycock Press The Lowly Negro, James Smith, Revolutionary Books Love Poems in the Apocalypse, Dani Gabriel, Main Street Rag Publishing Love’s Universe, Nin Carey Tassi, Cherry Grove Collections Lynchings: Postcards from America, Lester Graves Lennon, WordTech Editions The Ones with Difficult Names, David Brendan Hopes, Kelsay Books Oxblood, Nicole Caruso Garcia, Able Muse Press Salem Revisited, Charles K. Carter, WordTech Editions Sheltered in Place, CJ Giroux, Finishing Line Press A Woman Somehow Dead, Amy Locklin, David Robert Books
Talking to Strangers: Poetry of Everyday Life Poetry by Peter Neil Carroll Turning Point, January 2022
In this newest collection, Talking to Strangers: Poetry of Everyday Life, Peter Neil Carroll employs a multiplicity of voices to ensure that no one is, truly, a stranger. Carroll is the author of several previous collections, including Fracking Dakota, Riverborne: A Mississippi Requiem and A Child Turns Back to Wave: Poetry of Lost Places, which won the Prize Americana in 2012. Other books include the memoir Keeping Time. His poems have appeared in many journals. He has taught creative writing at the University of San Francisco, taught history and American Studies at Stanford and Berkeley, and hosted “Booktalk” on Pacifica Radio. Read sample poems here.
Having read Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Random House, 2018), I reread Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (Random House, 1970), which I’d devoured after the Kent State shootings sparked riots nationwide. “Events were transpiring too rapidly for the adaptive powers of the human psyche.” Hold on! That’s from the Introduction to the Romantic Period in the Norton Anthology of English Literature (1962), reflecting the despair felt as England’s agricultural way of life was ripped asunder by the Industrial Revolution. Compare Toffler: “The normal institutions of industrial society can no longer” [endure the] “rising rate of change in the world,” which “disturbs our inner equilibrium, altering the very way in which we experience life.” Toffler quotes Daniel P. Moynihan (1927-2003), then chief White House advisor on urban affairs, who says the United States “exhibits the qualities of an individual going through a nervous breakdown.”
Toffler (1928-2016) witnessed the Vietnam War, Watergate, the 14.5 percent inflation of the ’80s, AIDS, the Gulf War, dot.com bubble, 9/11, the internet, Afghan War, social media, etc. In passing, Future Shock mentions “alterations in climate.” But Toffler missed Donald Trump, COVID, and January 6th. Where would he begin, if still alive, to update a new edition of Future Shock?
Reviewer bio: Professor Emeritus of English at Ohio Northern University, Claude Clayton Smith is the author of eight books and co-editor/translator of four. For details visit: claudeclaytonsmith.wordpress.com.
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In Clamor, Hocine Tandjaoui’s debut English-language poetic memoir presented in the text’s original French and English translations, the Algerian author tries to make sense of surviving the aggregation: “Life war songs death.” Death and war came early in Tandjaoui’s life: His mother was killed during childbirth by “raging septicemia,” and he was “not even five years old when the war broke,” “not yet seven years old when [he felt] the blast of the bomb.” Tandjaoui was born in 1949 in French-occupied (1830 – 1962) Algeria “that transformed some of the humans that occupied it into half-gods, whereas the others were reduced to subjects without rights.” Outside Tandjaoui’s window, “a musical bath” of warfare’s bullets and bombs “playing simultaneously” to the tortured, pained conversations of colonial society and jazz, blues, and classical music—the “loud speakers were in fierce competition, pushing to the max, projecting a sonorous magma into the surroundings.” Clamor offers Anglophone readers “this setting in which a person comes first to life, then to consciousness”—adult reflections and reminiscences of the sounds of Tandjaoui’s childhood, complete with a discography (Piaf, Simone, Joplin, Holiday, etc.) that was a “resonance chamber” for his grief. Hocine Tandjaoui’s Clamor: “between celebration and weeping, an ululation made of love, despair, and tenderness.”
Clamor by Hocine Tandjaoui; translated by Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio. Litmus Press, April 2021.
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 are forthcoming.
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Hechizo Poetry by Mark Statman Lavender Ink, January 2022
An hechizo is a spell, an incantation that attempts to effect change in the world via language. Mark Statman’s Hechizo is woven through a world of personal demons, past and present, a world facing a pandemic and social, political, and environmental dissolution. These incantations take aim at the world from the smallest lizard that crawls into view to overarching political structures. It’s a register not seen in his work before—of foreboding, the forbidden, concluding in tentative, possible joy.
In The Sustain Pedal, Carol Jennings continues the poetic journey she began in The Dead Spirits at the Piano. Her poems create a connection with the composers she listens to and plays on the piano-Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Mendelssohn-as well as with the natural world she loves and mourns for what is being lost. Retreating glaciers, volcanoes, coral reefs, viruses, the outer edge of the solar system-her poetic craft evokes both what we cannot control and what we must learn to control to survive. Read sample poems here.
This wonderful debut collection of poetry, Acreage, written by the visual artist Stephanie Garon, is a product of artistic accumulation where a self-conscious regard for the materiality of words is a characteristic of her poems. Many are finely sculpted pieces like, “Undercurrent,” mimicking the movement of oak leaves caught in an eddy. Repetition of the phrase, “how long can they stay under,” becomes a current pulling down both leaves and poet, and with panic, we realize all may stay “un/der.” Embodiment of a slow-motion disappearance is also a central theme in “Musée des Beaux Arts,” after WH Auden’s poem—where instead of Icarus, the central emptiness in Garon’s poem is represented by the “emptied / stamen” and the carcasses “of eight // stale petals curled.” This carnage, caused by a human hand (“Fingernail-pierced / stems / scattered”), also compromises the poet (“I / too / collapse”), and as we contemplate the artist’s imminent absence, we are left to wonder who will make the marks that cultivate meaning? There is no answer, but Garon gives us a sense in the final poem, “Feral,” that we are nearing the end of something (the Anthropocene) and may all become, like the poet, a “ravaged memory of acreage.”
Acreage by Stephanie Garon. akinoga press, December 2021.
Reviewer bio: Christine Scanlon is a Brooklyn-based poet with a collection of poems, A Hat on the Bed (Barrow Street Press), and work published in such journals as Adjacent Pineapple, Dream Pop Press, Flag + Void, and La Vague. She is a graduate of the New School MFA program.
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Yazoo Clay Stories by Schuyler Dickson Livingston Press, August 2022
Co-winner of the Tartt First Fiction Award, Yazoo Clay is a collection of character-driven deep south stories from writer and regenerative farmer Schuyler Dickson. Experimental, humorous, and thought-provoking, this is a book “about the collapsing floor of living.” Dickson earned a BA in Southern Studies from Ole Miss and his MFA in Creative Writing from Northwestern. Readers can find an excerpt from the book here: “Happy Birthday.”
All Is Leaf: Essays and Transformations Nonfiction by John T. Price University of Iowa Press, June 2022
All Is Leaf: Essays and Transformations by John T. Price draws inspiration and urgency from the storied Goethe Oak tree at Buchenwald concentration camp—and from the leaf as a symbol of all change, growth, and renewal—and explores a multitude of dramatic transformations, in his life and in the fragile world beyond: “the how of the organism—that keeps your humanity alive.” Price employs an array of forms and voices, whether penning a break-up letter to America or a literary rock-n-roll road song dedicated to prairie scientists, or giving pregame pep talks to his son’s losing football team. Here, too, are moving portrayals of his father’s last effort as a small-town lawyer to defend the rights of abused women, and his own efforts as a writing teacher to honor the personal stories of his students.
In Morgan (A Lyric), winner of the 2020 Gold Line Press Nonfiction Chapbook Competition, Boyer Rickel, a most open and ethical writer, writes out of “a sensation so precise” what it means to love—beyond shame or humiliation, in expansive and humble ways—not as “the hero,” but as “the hero’s sidekick.” Were this chapbook a musical composition, the minor scale “branching patterns of sound” referring to the relationship between men and their mothers, the luxury of who gets to age, the 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona, writing and reading poetry, and listening to music—the harmonic and cacophonic backdrop of lives at the center of a love song. A love story—between one who lives openly as a gay man and one who is more secretive in his choices, one in middle age and healthy, and one in his thirties, living with the complications of cystic fibrosis. The major scale “branching” the complexities of personality (“there might be many Morgans”), relationship (“separate states of extremity”), and eroticism (“denial begets desire”); the trappings of love and illness; the primary and secondary gains of caretaking—“a trade of need for need.” This is elegiac writing that “remove[s] us (readers) from time” as love and death do, but perhaps more than centering on death, this writing exalts lover and beloved—“To touch a boundary, to feel a limit”—leaving as much love on the page as possible.
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 are forthcoming.
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Almost: My Life in Theater Memoir by Roselee Blooston Apprentice House Press, September 2022
Almost: My Life in the Theater tells the story of Roselee Blooston’s decades-long struggle to fulfill her early promise by becoming a professional actress, taking her to far-flung locales from Europe to Texas to New York City. Along the way, she encounters several Oscar winners and nominees—including Meryl Streep, Greer Garson, and Olympia Dukakis—who each had a profound effect on her self-image and trajectory, though no one had more influence than her mother, a visual artist, whose life served as both cautionary tale and beacon. Blooston can lay claim to trailblazer status as a solo performer, but she asks herself and the reader to deeply consider the true meaning of success and the value of a creative life. Her calling, commitment, and longing for recognition will resonate with anyone who has followed a passion, been thwarted in the attempt, and then successfully and happily reinvented themselves. Apprentice House is an entirely student-managed book publisher with students at Loyola University Maryland responsible for every aspect of the publishing process, from acquisitions to design and publication of every book. Learn more here.
Indebted to the docupoetics tradition, Raena Shirali’s summonings investigates the ongoing practice of witch (“daayan”) hunting in India. Winner of The Hudson Prize, these poems interrogate the political implications and shortcomings of writing Subaltern personae while acknowledging the author’s Westernized positionality. Continuing to explore multi-national and intersectional concerns around identity raised in her debut collection, Shirali asks how first- and second-generation immigrants reconcile the self with the lineages that shape it, wondering aloud about those lineages’ relationships to misogyny and violence. These poems explore how antiquated and existing norms surrounding female mysticism in India and America inform each culture’s treatment of women. As Jericho Brown wrote of Shirali’s poetics in GILT, her “comment on culture, on identity, on justice is her comment on poetry.” summonings offers a commentary on power and patriarchy, on authorial privilege and the shifting role of witness, and ultimately, on an ethical poetics, grounded in the inevitable failure to embody the Other.
Wise to the West Poetry by Wendy Videlock Able Muse Press, November 2022
In Wise to the West, Wendy Videlock embraces her Western terrain and surroundings—family, neighbor, barbershop, morning shower, coyote, badger, wolf, blackbird, hawk, canyon, mesa, mountain—with songs, odes, witticisms, lamentations. Along the way, she tilts toward the grand view of the world around—relaying turns of uncertainty or affirmation, history or the latest news, myths and the mystic—and gifting readers musings and meditations in her unique style full of quirks, wit, wisdom, and surprising turns. Wendy Videlock lives on the western slope of the Colorado Rockies with her husband and their assorted critters. Her work appears in Hudson Review, Oprah Magazine, Poetry, Dark Horse, the New York Times, Best American Poetry, and other venues.
If you need a beach read to get you through high summer, look no further than Razzmatazz, Christopher Moore’s follow-up to his hilarious page-turner Noir. (Make it a full vacation and read both novels.) This time out, our hero Sammy, his main squeeze Stilton (don’t call her “the Cheese”), and their unlikely roster of demi-monde pals must dodge both gangsters and cops to solve a double murder, locate a rich nob’s runaway daughter, and retrieve a mysterious relic before even more chaos ensues in late-1940’s San Francisco. In true noirish fashion, most of the action takes place in the wee small hours, when, as Sammy relates, the fog has “swallowed the city like a damp woolen crocodile.” Zany, with devious plotting and enough wise-cracking dialogue to fricassee a Maltese falcon, Razzmatazz is another healthy serving of Moore’s signature recipe: equal measures of screwball comedy, hard-boiled mystery, and X-Files-like otherworldliness. (Don’t skip the “Afterword and Author’s Note.”)
Razzmatazz by Christopher Moore. William Morrow, May 2022.
Reviewer bio: James Scruton is the author of two full collections and five chapbooks of poetry as well as dozens of reviews, essays, and articles on poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.
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Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists Poetry by Laynie Browne Wave Books, June 2022
Laynie Browne’s latest poetry collection, Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists playfully employs the list poem and delivers poems which evade genre and subvert the quotidian material of daily life. These poems consider elegy, absence and bewilderment while allowing associative logic to make poetic leaps in imagination and mood that belie convention. This book explores the myriad ways one could attempt to categorize a lived experience with its dizzying infinitudes by marking it in finite language and ultimately shows how poetry is an experiment for that translation. Browne’s collection considers language, time, and poetics in a way that is as electrifying as it is elusive. In homage to poet C.D. Wright, her title is inspired by Translations of the Gospel Back into Tongues.
Revolutionary Books is a new imprint of Artvoices Books, seeking to publish “Poets who embody the essence of the revolutionary: fearless, passionate and unwavering.” This, their debut title, The Lowly Negro by James Smith, is a written account of a poor, destitute, and uneducated inner-city Black male’s life and journey in the U.S., showing his ability to sustain and survive by weathering the lows as well as the highs. As an African American, he is both an invisible man and one who believes he is the sum of his experiences. The poems relate how Others believe his existence is an illusion of rehearsed lines, walking with his eyes closed, hoping for the best. The Lowly Negro is a singular voice representing countless men and women from disenfranchised and marginalized communities. The forgotten and neglected of society who only have the written word as their protest find a voice in this collection. Author James Smith is an American poet who comments, “I write for catharsis: my weapon of choice. I am a black man who has survived Hell on Earth in search of forgiveness, enlightenment and sanity.” Poem samples and a companion film by Jameson Stokes can be found here.
Love’s Universe: New & Selected Poems Poetry by Nina Carey Tassi Cherry Grove Collections, April 2022
Nina Carey Tassi’s intimate poems in Love’s Universe explore the myriad ways that love finds a home in human hearts, from searing first desire through the oceanic depths of marriage and family to soul-piercing faith and the uplifting joys of nature and one’s country; not least is the unexpected miracle of suffering, all suggesting that love indeed animates the universe. Read sample poems here.
Runner-up for the Monadnock Essay Collection Prize, Without Saints by Christopher Locke is a journey to rediscover hope between the ruins: Poet Christopher Locke was baptized by Pentecostals, absolved by punk rock, and nearly consumed by narcotics. Like the propulsive Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, Without Saints is a brief, muscular ride into the heart of American desolation, and the love one finds waiting for them instead. Christopher Locke was born in New Hampshire and received his MFA from Goddard College. His poems, fiction, criticism, and essays have appeared in numerous publications, and he is the recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Award and the 2018 Black River Chapbook Award. He now lives in the Adirondacks where he teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at North Country Community College.
American Dude Ranch: A Touch of the Cowboy and the Thrill of the West Nonfiction by Lynn Downey The University of Oklahoma Press, March 2022
Viewers of films and television shows might imagine the dude ranch as something not quite legitimate, a place where city dwellers pretend to be cowboys in amusingly inauthentic fashion. But the tradition of the dude ranch, America’s original western vacation, is much more interesting and deeply connected with the culture and history of the American West. In American Dude Ranch, Lynn Downey opens new perspectives on this buckaroo getaway, with all its implications for deciphering the American imagination. The book is 246 pages with 32 black and white illustrations.
Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina Poetry by Dara Barrois/Dixon Wave Books, June 2022
With the same tender honesty found in all of Dara Barrois/Dixon’s (formerly Dara Wier) poetry, the poems in Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina are curious about the world we inhabit and the worlds we create. Barrois/Dixon brings profound attention to the things we love—be they animals, books, skyscapes, movies, poems, or other human beings—and to the stories that shape our worlds. Here, with emotional exactitude, is a collection of poems that is unafraid to express “love humor despair loving kindness love humor empathy/humor joy sympathy love kindness courage.”
All the Rivers Flow Into the Sea and Other Stories Fiction by Khanh Ha EastOver Press, June 2022
From Vietnam to America, Khanh Ha’s All the Rivers Flow Into the Sea is a story collection that brings readers a unique sense of love and passion alongside tragedy and darker themes of peril. The titular story features a love affair between an unlikely duo pushing against barely surmountable cultural barriers. In “The Yin-Yang Market,” magical realism and the beauty of innocence abound in deep dark places, teeming with life and danger. “A Mute Girl’s Yarn” tells a magical coming-of-age story like sketches in a child’s fairy book. Bringing together the damned, the unfit, the brave who succumb to the call of fate, All the Rivers Flow Into the Sea is a great journey where redemption and human goodness arise out of violence and beauty to become part of an essential mercy. All the Rivers Flow into the Sea was selected as a winner of the 2021 EastOver Prize for Fiction.
Madville publishing is pleased to announce our summer reading list! Our authors worry at questions of family, home, and belonging in this amazing quartet of books. All available now for order or preorder:
New summer titles from Livingston Press at the University of West Alabama include a novel about GI’s returning from WWII to about-face and enter colleges under the GI Bill. A story collection about nursing, its joys, frustrations, and heartbreak. See flyer for more details or visit website.
Winning Writers will award a grand prize of $8,000 in its eighth annual North Street competition, and $16,750 in all. The top eight winners will enjoy additional benefits from our co-sponsors BookBaby and Carolyn Howard-Johnson. Gifts for everyone who enters. Submit books published in any year and on any self-publishing platform. $70 entry fee. Enter online or by mail by June 30. Learn more at our website and view flyer for full details.
Oxblood Poetry by Nicole Caruso-Garcia Able Muse Press, October 2022
Oxblood, Nicole Caruso Garcia’s debut poetry collection, testifies unflinchingly about the short- and long-term effects of a college student’s rape by her fiancé. As the poet engages with this serious topic, her arsenal includes wit, wordplay, and even humor. The diverse structures of traditional received forms—the sonnet, the sestina, various French repeating forms, the Afghan landay, blues tercets—form interesting contrasts with free verse poems in this collection. Oxblood was a finalist for the 2022 Able Muse Book Award.
Broadsided Press Anthology Fifteen Years of Poetic and Artistic Collaboration, 2005-2020 Provincetown Arts Press, April 2022
Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic and Artistic Collaborations, 2005-2020 is an anthology that celebrates Broadsided Press’s mission of “putting literature and art on the streets.” I have always loved the work of this organization, and since its founding, Broadsided has released one beautifully designed, original, letter-sized collaboration of poetry and art (a broadside) each month: a unique collaboration between a visual artist and a writer that is a work of art in itself. These were available for free download each month so that “vectors” could print them and post them with many taking pictures and sharing these on the site. Now, for the first time, more than fifty broadsides selected from over 300 published the past 15 years are presented in a first-ever book form alongside the interviews with artists and poets who collaborated to create them and photographs of the work in public spaces.
That’s right! If you missed the June 15 deadline for the 2022 New American Fiction Prize, you’re in luck! New American Press has announced they have extended the deadline to July 1. This year’s final judge is WEIKE WANG. Winner receives $1,500, publication, and 25 copies. Swing by their ad in the NewPages Classifieds for more information.
That’s right. You now have until July 15 to enter poetry manuscripts of at least 48 pages to the 2022 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry from Lynx House Press. $28 fee to enter. Winner receives $2,000 and book publication. Stop by the NewPages Classifieds for more information.
