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.
The stories in My Haunted Home by Victoria Hood delve in startling ways into the lives of the obsessed, the grieving, and the truly haunted. Winner of FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, Hood conjures a shifting range of narrators through an unstable range of worlds where mothers might be dead, girls compulsively shove peanuts inside their ears, agoraphobia traps people inside their houses, and cats won’t eat your soup. In “The Teeth, the Way I Smile,” a daughter who looks like her dead mother manifests grief both in her house and her body. In “Smelly Smelly,” a woman slowly comes to realize her boyfriend has been dead for weeks. In “You, Your Fault,” Hood explores the unfolding love of two women who love every part of each other—including the parts that fixate on arson and murder. In this debut story collection, Hood probes the worlds of what can be haunted, unpacking the ways in which hauntings can be manifested in physical forms, mentally harvested and lived through, and even a change in what is haunting.
Wings & Other Things Fiction by Chauna Craig Press 53, September 2022
Wings & Other Things by Chauna Craig is a book of migrations. Its characters flutter and flap, take off and land, then take off again as they seek the places they belong. These are characters caught in transition: a widow searching for a past self on an “Impossible Blue” coast, lovers explaining to the police and themselves why they’re hiding in a Nebraska cornfield. a teacher struggling to be understood on a flight from Chengdu, a stranded artist riding with a stranger on a highway haunted y the ghost of a woman who never made it home. Each story is a transformation as Craig turns railroad tracks into an “infinite number line” and a lightning bolt into a “tentacle of the unseen.” A plastic fork becomes a parable of fragility, and a “scrap moon” is an image of what is lost and what yet remains.
The Illusion of Simple by Charles Forrest Jones begins in a dry Kansas riverbed where a troop of young girls finds a human hand. This discovery leads Billy Spire, the tough and broken sheriff of Ewing County, to investigate and confront the depths of his community and of himself: the racism, the dying economy, the lies and truths of friendship, grievances of the past and present, and even his own injured marriage. But like any town where people still breathe, there is also love and hope and the possibility of redemption. To flyover folks, Ewing County appears nothing more than a handful of empty streets amid crop circles and the meandering, depleted Arkansas River. But the truth of this place—the interwoven lives and stories—is anything but simple. Charles Forrest Jones is former director of the Kansas University Public Management Center and believes that “public policy is rooted in the human condition, there is a place for the articulate, compelling, even beautiful.”
Refugee Poetry by Pamela Uschuck Red Hen Press, Spring 2022
Refugee deals with political refugees, refugees from racism, from domestic violence, from environmental destruction and cancer—and their stories of cruelty and courage, hardship, and hope to overcome the most daunting of circumstances. This collection confronts and explores xenophobia, sexism, gun violence, domestic violence, corporate greed, environmental destruction and political tyranny. An ovarian cancer survivor, Pamela also writes about her own courageous confrontation with death.
“With tenderness, expansive compassion, and profound gifts of radiant description, Pamela Uschuk considers so many ways people may be estranged and lost in this precious, difficult world. With brave ferocity, her poems in Refugee navigate new vision and reconnection, so desperately longed for right now and always.”
Benefit Street by Adria Bernardi is set in an unnamed provincial capital of an unnamed country and tells of a wide circle of friends—teachers, lawyers, missionaries, doctors, artisans—in a time of gathering and dispersal. It tells the story of mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, colleagues, and neighbors, as war to the East threatens and constitutional rights are daily eroded by an increasingly authoritarian regime. The ideals of youth, freedom, and coexistence are severely tested with the shocking revelation that the charismatic leader of their group has sexually abused the women under his care. The limits of reconciliation are tested as Şiva makes an arduous journey into the mountains to meet an estranged mother with a genius for weaving complex rugs.
Eli Cranor’s debut novel, Don’t Know Tough, published by Soho Crime, an imprint of Soho Press, is not your typical football novel. Rather, it depicts a brutal slice of life in rural Arkansas, where high school football is king and is all that matters. The protagonist, Billy Lowe, is the archetypal angry young man. An ignorant high school senior and star of the football team, Billy’s anger is compounded by his mother’s abusive boyfriend, who lives with them in their trailer in rural Arkansas. After being beaten by the boyfriend and hitting him back, Billy takes his anger out on a teammate during practice, injuring him. Then, his Mom’s abusive boyfriend is found murdered, and Billy becomes a suspect. From that point, the novel hurtles at breakneck speed to its surprising conclusion. I could not stop reading Don’t Cry Tough. Cranor’s writing is riveting, and his characterizations are perfect. Despite my initial impression of Billy as simple and stupid, as the book goes on, the author skillfully transforms him into a complex human being I actually cared for. As for the setting in rural Arkansas, I could picture the trailers, the woods, and the poverty-stricken homes where some of the characters live. The football scenes were quite well done, and rightly so as the author did play professional football. Despite the twists and turns, all the plot lines were brilliantly resolved. This is Eli Cranor’s first novel, and I already can’t wait for his follow-up.
Don’t Know Tough by Eli Cranor. Soho Crime, March 2022.
Reviewer bio: Ira Smith is a retired physician for whom reading has been a lifelong passion. Favorite genres are science fiction, noir, and history.
We Were Angry: A Novella & Stories Fiction by Jennifer S. Davis Press 53, August 2022
We Were Angry by Jennifer S. Davis, introduces readers to a group of friends in small-town Alabama whose lives are haunted by tragedies that reverberate across generations. In Davis’s world, Alabaman is more than a fictional setting. It’s a scene for interrogating power, pain, and what it means to live in – and to leave – the American South. In a linked collection of stories shot through with dark humor, Davis offers glimpses of a land of contradictions: dollar stores and golf courses, dive bars and country clubs, and long-forgotten communities flooded to make way for mansions where missing women are rumored to be buried. Transversing these red dirt roads are mothers and mourners, rebels and addicts, lovers, liars, prisoners, politicians, theme park enthusiasts, and collectors of rejected housepets. Winner of the 2021 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction.
Voices from the Other Side of Death Poetry by Ariel Dorfman Arte Público Press, June 2022
Voices from the Other Side of Death by Ariel Dorfman offers readers a series of poems written from the perspective of deceased historical figures to contemporary politicians and soldiers, warning about the need for reckoning and atonement. In one, Pablo Picasso speaks to Colin Powell, asking why his famous painting depicting the horror of war, Guernica, was covered when the secretary of state spoke about the invasion of Iraq at the United Nations. Others explore connections to loved ones, including “the love of my life, Angélica, the woman who helped me survive exile and tribulations and peopled my world with hope.” Dorfman writes about the passionate love the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan felt for his wife, which led to the construction of the Taj Mahal, and imagines conversations between William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes, who died within hours of each other. These poems share the most human of emotions and expose Dorfman’s vulnerability as he embarks on the last leg of his journey.
Shame by Grant Maierhofer is a daring exploration of the potential and limits of memory and self. Here we meet the author at various points within his life then, now, and in the future, as he investigates the sense of shame that haunts the course of his days. The real and unreal, fact and fiction, blur together in a Kaufmanesque sequence of overlapping narratives about who we really are, how we cope with regret, and the repetitions of our behavior. Through lists, fragments, recollections, and rants, the story of a son’s vexing grief for his father emerges. A sober addict trying to figure out how to navigate pleasure, diversion, and escape. A father trying to figure out marriage, children, maturity, and responsibility. A confused observer in a world constantly torn apart by media, politics, and aggression. A meditation on the nature of art, and art’s place in contemporary life.
I Got Mine: Confessions of a Midlist Writer is the memoir of John Nichols as seen through the lens of his writing. Everything that went into making him a writer and eventually found an outlet in his work—his education, family, wives, children, friends, enemies, politics, and place—is told from the point of view of his daily practice of writing. Beginning with his first novel, The Sterile Cuckoo, published in 1965 when he was just twenty-four, Nichols shares his highs and lows: his ambivalent relationship with money; his growing disenchantment with the hypocrisy of capitalism; and his love-hate relationship with Hollywood—including the years-long struggle of working with director Robert Redford on the film version of The Milagro Beanfield War, which was filmed around Truchas and featured many of Nichols’ northern New Mexico neighbors. I Got Mine captures Nichols’ lifelong engagement with progressive political causes, his passionate interest in and identification with ordinary people, and his deep connection to the land.
tender gravity Poetry by Marybeth Hollman Red Hen Press, August 2022
tender gravity is Marybeth Holleman’s collection of poetry that charts her quest for relationships to the more-than-human world, navigating her childhood in North Carolina to her life in Alaska, with deep time in remote land and seascapes. Always the focus is on what can be found by attention to the world beyond her own human skin, what can be found there as she negotiates loss — the loss of beloved places, wild beings, her younger brother. “do not think,” she says to her mother, “that i love a bear more than my brother. / think instead that i cannot distinguish / the variations in / the beat of a heart.” Inevitably, solace is found in the wild world: “step back toward that joy-sap rising, step back / into the only world that is.” In a narrative arc of seeking, falling, and finding, Holleman’s exquisitely attentive immersion offers clear reverberations of Mary Oliver, of Linda Hogan, of Walt Whitman. These poems of grief and celebration pulse in and out, reaching to the familiar moon and out to orphan stars of distant galaxies, then pull close to a small brown seabird and an on-the-knees view of a tiny bog plant.
That’s right! There’s only one week left to enter your full-length manuscripts to the 2022 New American Fiction Prize from New American Press. Manuscripts can be novels, novellas, collections of stories, etc. Weike Wang, author of Joan Is Okay (Random House 2022) is the final judge. Enter your manuscripts by June 15, 2022! See their ad in the NewPages Classifieds to learn more.
Anne Pitkin’s third book, But Still, Music spans her childhood as a privileged white child in the Jim Crow South to the period of her grown daughter’s death. The poems in this collection visit the disquieting contradictions of a southern childhood marked by honeysuckle and lightning bugs and the racist culture that was the air Pitkin breathed. A number of poems address the loss of her daughter. Still, in the end, as she says in the final poem. ‘‘Tide”: “There you’ve been, loves of my life. / There you’ve changed me, one by one. . . “
Winner of the 2021 Cowles Poetry Prize, Gold Hill Family Audio is Corrie Lynn White’s debut poetry collection. Her poetry has appeared in Oxford American, New Ohio Review, Best New Poets, Mid American Review, and Mississippi Review, among other publications. Originally from Gold Hill, North Carolina, she holds a BA from UNC Chapel Hill and an MFA from UNC Greensboro. She currently lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she works as a journalist and was named the 2021 Tennessee Arts Commission Fellow in Poetry.
Glorious Fiends Fiction by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam Underland Press, September 2022
When infamous hot mess vampire Roxanne resurrects her deceased best friends, she’s confronted by a dream-dwelling Guardian of the Underworld, who demands that she replace them in his afterlife with three equally nefarious creatures — or he’ll drag her there instead. Reunited with Medusa and Mx. Hyde, Roxanne and her macabre girl gang must become monster hunters themselves and fight for the future of their friendship. Gory, sexy, silly, touching — Glorious Fiends asks who the real monsters are and if the bonds that we think are solely human are really ours alone. This Hammer-inspired odyssey is a nostalgic trip through ‘80s horror tropes — with modern sensibilities.
Sheltered in Place Poetry by CJ Giroux Finishing Line Press, August 2022
Infused with images of the natural world, Sheltered in Place features a braid of three poetic sequences. The first focuses on a grown child’s relationship with an aging parent living in a memory ward; the second focuses on a parent marking the growth of a child from her birth through her teen years; the third sequence, which gives the collection its title, examines life in the early days of the pandemic when shutdowns were imposed. CJ Giroux is a professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University, has helped direct the school’s writing center, and serves on the editorial board of Dunes Review. His dissertation, which he completed at Wayne State University, focused on representations of trauma in 20th- and 21st-century American plays.
Living in a Red State Blues Poetry by M. Scott Douglass Paycock Press, April 2022
Living in a Red State Blues by M. Scott Douglass is a collection years in the making, having been hatched prior to the pandemic and developed throughout the subsequent years of shutdowns and election cycles. Afraid that publishers may have become “exhausted” with the topics covered in these works, Douglass had all but given up on it ever seeing the light of day in print. That was until a few publishers began requesting some of the works to include in their anthologies and literary journals. Thus, life was breathed back into the endeavor and is now available for readers, with such titled works as “Erasing a Color (from literature),” “Cone of Uncertainty,” “Diluting Red,” “Forgiving Red,” “Neoconservatives,” “Punishing Red,” “The Color of Fraud,” “Assessing the VRBO,” and “A Tinderbox of Unsuble Discourse.” M. Scott Douglass is Publisher and Managing Editor of Main Street Rag Publishing Company and general all-around badass.
An Earnest Blackness Nonfiction by Eugen Bacon Anti-Oedipus Press, August 2022
An Earnest Blackness is Eugen Bacon’s debut collection of personal essays offering critical perspectives on blackness, Afrofuturism, colonialism, historicity, and (mis)recognition as she explores the untapped possibilities of speculative fiction. Using a variety of analytic, narrative, and anecdotal techniques, Bacon shares her experiences as an African Australian woman, mother, and writer who occupies a liminal space that is “betwixt” worlds and genres. She also considers work by “other” writers—ranging from Roland Barthes and Jorge Luis Borges to Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Sheree Renée Thomas—in an effort to chart a path towards greater social and cultural truth. Literary, adventurous, and insightful, An Earnest Blackness excavates the world(s) that not only construct contemporary authorship but the fluid nature of identity itself.
Love Poems in the Apocalypse is the newest collection of poems from Dani Jeremiah Gabriel, author of Low Rent Prophet (Nomadic Press) and several other titles. Gabriel says their “response to the pandemic was to write these unbelievably gritty and hopeful love poems, and the book is made up largely of that writing.” With such titled works as “election thursday poem,” “wish list,” “everyday insurrection,” “the antidote for everything,” and “poem for my white transgender twelve year old son thinking of twelve year old Tamir Rice shot by police while playing,” Gabriel asserts the range of what can constitute a love poem. The former Poet Laureate of El Cerrito, California, Gabriel earned an MFA from Mills College and resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In Let’s Not Do That Again, Grant Ginder, himself a former political speech writer, has concocted an entertaining, immensely satisfying romp of a novel that definitively proves that just when you think things can’t get worse, you are very, very wrong. They most certainly can.
Tolstoy famously wrote, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The same can be said of dysfunctional families, and it applies in spades when that family is in politics. Introducing the Harrisons. Mom, a NY congresswoman who inherited her seat from her long-dead husband, is now running for US Senate. Add her two semi-adult children to the mix—Nick, a gay, adjunct at NYU who’s working on a musical based on the works of Joan Didion on the side—and Greta, who, though a Yale grad, is currently living in a hovel in Brooklyn and working part-time at the Apple store. Greta manages to hook-up with the wrong guy, Xavier, on an online gaming site. Xavier lures her to Paris. He, of course, turns out to be a neo-Nazi anarchist, and sparks (as well as champagne bottles) soon fly—literally and figuratively. The dysfunctional son is soon dispatched to Paris to rescue the dysfunctional daughter and, hopefully, save the floundering election in the process.
Call Me Fool Poetry by William Trowbridge Red Hen Press, September 2022
Call Me Fool by William Trowbridge is based on an archetype that runs from the beginnings of storytelling up to modern films (silent and sound), fiction, poetry, and stand-up comedy. He is combination schlemiel and shlimazel, alternately the spiller and the spilled-on. He is often the scapegoat, as St. Chrysostom put it, “he who gets slapped.” After blundering into hell with Lucifer and company, Trowbridge’s Fool is reincarnated in various historical times, with occasional unplanned visits back to the heavenly realm, operated as a mega-corporation by its Enron-style CEO.
Ascension Fiction by Steve Tomasula University of Alabama Press/FC2, August 2022
Ascension by Steve Tomasula is a novel about the end of nature, or rather, the end of three “natures”: the time just before Darwin changed the natural world; the 1980s, just as the digital and genetic revolutions begin to replace “nature” with “environment”; and today, a time when we have the ability to manipulate nature at both the scale of the planet and at the genome. The narrative follows three different biologists on the brink of each of these cultural extinctions to explore how nature occupies our imaginations and how our imaginations bring the natural world, and our place in it, into existence.
Michelle de Kretser’s novel tells two stories, one narrated by Lyle, the other by Lili; which one you read first depends on which side of the book you begin with. Neither story has an intricate plot: Lili’s follows her year as a teacher at a high school in France, while Lyle’s tells about his experience in an Australia in the not-too-distant future. While the two narratives seemingly have nothing to do with one another, they are held together by the question of who or what the scary monsters are. Both main characters are not native Australians, having relocated from what sounds like a Southeast Asian country, Lili when she was younger and Lyle as an adult. These monsters could simply be those who look down on them for their racial and ethnic difference. De Krester explores that idea, but she has broader concerns. Lili struggles with the daily fears of being a woman in a patriarchal society; though nothing violent happens to her, she knows it could. Lyle’s skin is slowly changing to white, a representation of the sacrifices he’s made to assimilate, possibly becoming a monster himself. Ultimately, the systems of power that go unnoticed are the monsters underneath the proverbial beds of the main characters and perhaps the readers, as well.
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/.
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 BABE, Dorothy Chan, Diode Editions Best of the Sucks, ed. Mark Spitzer, MadHat Press Beyond the Time of Words, Marjorie Agosín, Sixteen Rivers Press Breaking Down Familiar, Donald Levering, Main Street Rag Publishing A Brilliant Loss, Eloise Klein Healy, Red Hen Press Call Me Fool, William Trowbridge, Red Hen Press Cance Voodoo, Melissa C. Johnson, Diode Editions Cannon Fodder, Jay Sizemore, Crow Hollow Books Coining a Wishing Tower, Ayesha Raees, Platypus Press The Convert’s Heart is Good to Eat, Melody S. Gee, Driftwood Press
There is only one month left to enter self-published books to the 8th annual North Street Book Prize from Winning Writers. Self-published books in seven categories can win up to $8,000 plus additional benefits. They are also offering free gifts from their co-sponsors to everyone who enters. Submit your own self-published title by June 30, 2022. See their ad in the NewPages Classifieds for full details.
Reverse Engineer Poetry by Kate Colby Ornithopter Press, October 2022
In Kate Colby’s ninth collection of poems, Reverse Engineer, she continues her excavation of the unknown, “the key to which breaks / the lock by breaking in it.” Operating at the junctures of perception and sensation, philosophy and grief, Reverse Engineer explores the deep recesses of human experience where conventional language doesn’t quite reach. Katy Colby has received awards and fellowships from the Poetry Society of America, Rhode Island State Council for the Arts, The Dodd Research Center at University of Connecticut, and Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room.
Every summer, SYNC gives participants two thematically paired audiobooks each week for sixteen weeks from May through August. Participants sign up for free and download the Sora student reading app. Anyone can actually sign up for the program, not just teens, but the titles are all geared toward teen readers 13+. The cool thing is that the books are “borrowed” and stay in the Sora app until you return them, with a loan time of 35,999 days. So, basically, the books are to keep unless someone purposefully returns them. The titles available each week are ONLY available to borrow for that week, so if you miss a week, then you miss out on those books. Right now, Week 6 is coming up, so there is still plenty of good audiobooking to be had. Visit SYNC via AudioFile and get started today – and spread the word to your teen readers and YA fans.
