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New Book :: Spirit Matters

Spirit Matters with Clay Red Exits Distant Others poetry by Gordon Henry book cover image

Spirit Matters: White Clay, Red Exits, Distant Others
Poetry by Gordon Henry
Holy Cow! Press, June 2022

Spirit Matters by Gordon Henry offers readers a view into shadow spheres, of creative memory, reinvention of storied characters and place. These serve as reminders of how poetry might turn longing back to the very sound that memory makes as a means to honor the imaginative lives of people and place. Spirit Matters is a collection of poetry informed by irretrievable letters of loss, love, and trauma, forged by musing on imagined relatives – living, dead, yet to be – shaped by the spirit of places we can never return to without understanding the living power of memory, story, and song. Gordon Henry is an enrolled member/citizen of the White Earth Anishinaabe Nation in Minnesota. He is also a Professor in the English Department at Michigan State University, where he teaches American Indian Literature and Creative Writing. He serves as Senior Editor of the American Indian Studies Series at Michigan State University Press.

New Book :: Drowning in Light

Drowning in Light poetry by Taylor Steele book cover image

Drowning in Light
Poetry by Taylor Steele
Platypus Press, March 2022

The poems in Taylor Steele’s Drowning in Light traverse the daily—the sickness, the loneliness, and the hope that yawns from within. There are continuous trails of light peeking through, hands grasping, fingers trailing—a notion of persistence, always. Taylor Steele is a queer, Black, NYC-born-and-based writer, performer, and photographer. Her poetry has been featured on Huffington Post, Brooklyn Poets, Button Poetry, and is a 2016 Pushcart Nominee. A triple-Taurus, she believes in the power of art to change, shape, and heal.

New Book :: Real Rhyming Poems

Real Rhyming Poems by J. M. Allen book cover image

Real Rhyming Poems
Poetry by J. M. Allen
Kelsay Books, April 2022

Rhymers unite! Real Rhyming Poems by J. M. Allen is a chapbook of exclusively rhyming poems, which is quite uncommon, so the reader is in for a rare treat with this book. Twenty of the thirty poems in this collection had been accepted individually in thirteen different publications. The poem “Genes” won first place in a 2021 contest, and the poem “Ten Hours of Sleep” was picked up by Associated Press (immediately after it was published in a Minnesota newspaper). The author is a parent and included some poems regarding teenagers in this collection of humorous and serious poems. If you haven’t read good rhyming poems in a while, here is your chance! J. M. Allen is an electrical engineer and parent, who enjoys writing rhyming poems. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and has been a longtime resident of Rochester, Minnesota.

New Book :: BABE

BABE poetry by Dorothy Chan book cover image

BABE
Poetry by Dorothy Chan
Diode Editions, December 2021

BABE is about owning the room. It’s about physical touch. It’s about dancing (actually, grinding) on a heart-shaped bed and starring as the leading lady of the film (no matter how risqué it gets). At the core of this collection, the Chinese American speaker questions the conventions around her, dating back to her origin story as a Hong Kongnese child who would get up to stretch in the middle of Cantonese class. As an adult, she questions her fate since the family fortune teller screwed her over with a lazy fortune, yet got her brother’s completely spot-on. She triple sonnets her way through confrontations of queerphobia in her family, the trauma from a past relationship with a significantly older man, and the constant male gaze. She pays homage to the first girls who ever loved her in this analysis of sexuality, queerness, popular culture, and resilience. She’s baby forever. Dorothy Chan (she/they) is the author of Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, 2019), Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold (Spork Press, 2018), and Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017). Chan is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Editor Emeritus of Hobart, Book Reviews Co-Editor of Pleiades, and Co-Founder and Editor in Chief of Honey Literary Inc., a 501(c)(3) literary arts organization. Visit their website at dorothypoetry.com

Book Review :: Writer in a Life Vest by Iris Graville

Writer in a Life Vest by Irish Graville book cover image

Guest Post by Deborah Nedelman

Iris Graville, author of the award-winning memoir Hiking Naked, lives on an island in the Salish Sea and writes as a citizen of the planet. Writer in a Life Vest as a collection of essays is a journey of discovery and an education about a delicate ecosystem which supports some of the world’s most iconic creatures. The first Writer in Residence on the Washington State Ferries, Iris spent a year riding the interisland ferry through the San Juan Islands of the Salish Sea. Readers cycle with her as the ferry glides and rocks through the home of the endangered resident orcas (killer whales) and meet scientific experts who are devoting their knowledge and energies to saving these rare creatures. As we learn about riding this ferry — including witnessing a moveable ukulele jam, where players board the ferry at various ports, play together for a while and move on — Graville teaches us about the current state of the sea’s health and our connection to it. The multiple essay forms Graville employs keep readers off-kilter, as if standing on the deck of a rocking ship, yet they invite us to hang on and to look deeper. Like Graville, I live on an island in the Salish Sea, though not in the San Juans, and I swim in the sea year-round. It is my concern for the fragile state of this body of water, of the resident orcas, and of our planet that has led me to write this review. Graville’s collection belongs in the genre of books alerting us to the precarious state of our planet, but it stands out by pointing our gaze toward hopefulness and action.

Writer in a Life Vest by Iris Graville. Homebound Publications, March 2022.

Reviewer Bio: Deborah Nedelman, PhD, MFA is co-author of two non-fiction books: A Guide for Beginning Psychotherapists (Cambridge Press) and Still Sexy After All These Years (Perigee/Penguin). Her novel, What We Take for Truth (Adelaide Press, 2019) won the Sarton Women’s Book Award for Historical Fiction. Deborah is a manuscript coach and leads writing and watercolor painting workshops.

New Book :: Bath

Bath, poetry by Jen Silverman book cover image

Bath
Poetry by Jen Silverman
Driftwood Press, May 2022

Winner of the Driftwood Press 2021 Adrift Chapbook Contest, Silverman’s work was selected for its geographical and lyrical style, with poems that “communicate harrowing insights into the landscape of relationships.” Jen Silverman is a New York-based writer and playwright. She is the author of the debut novel We Play Ourselves and the story collection The Island Dwellers (Random House) which was longlisted for a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Jen also writes for TV and film.

New Book :: Voices in the Dead House

Voice in the Dead House a novel by Norman Lock book cover image

Voices in the Dead House
Novel by Norman Lock
Bellevue Literary Press, July 2022

Inspired by Whitman’s poem “The Wound-Dresser” and Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, the ninth stand-alone book in The American Novels series centers on the aftermath of the Union Army’s defeat at Fredericksburg in 1862 where Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott converge on Washington to nurse the sick, wounded, and dying. Whitman was a man of many contradictions: egocentric yet compassionate, impatient with religiosity yet moved by the spiritual in all humankind, bigoted yet soon to become known as the great poet of democracy. Alcott was an intense, intellectual, independent woman, an abolitionist and suffragist, who was compelled by financial circumstance to publish saccharine magazine stories yet would go on to write the enduring and beloved Little Women. As Lock captures the musicality of their unique voices and their encounters with luminaries ranging from Lincoln to battlefield photographer Mathew Brady to reformer Dorothea Dix, he deftly renders the war’s impact on their personal and artistic development.

New Book :: Green Regalia

Green Regalia poetry by Adam Tavel book cover image

Green Regalia
Poetry by Adam Tavel
Stephen F. Austin State University Press, April 2022

Written against the harrowing backdrop of climate change, Green Regalia explores our precarious ecological moment and increasingly fraught relationship with the natural world. In this collection, Adam Tavel chronicles the objectification of landscapes and the species within them, the cultural denial of the body’s transient nature, and the aftermath of an estranged father’s death. These poems of rot and renewal seek a wisdom free of domination, where both wonder and surrender may remind us of our place in the greater tapestry of life. Adam Tavel is the author of five books of poetry, including this collection and Sum Ledger (Measure Press, 2022).

Contest :: 1 Month to Enter Swan Scythe Press 2022 Poetry Chapbook Contest

Swan Scythe Press logo

That’s right! The deadline to enter Swan Scythe Press’ 2022 Poetry Chapbook Contest is only about a month away on June 15. This is a postmark deadline. The winner of the 2021 Poetry Chapbook Contest was Rae Gouirand for her manuscript Little Hour. The winner of this year’s contest will receive $200, publication, and 25 perfect-bound copies. Stop by the NewPages Classifieds for full details.

Book Review :: Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul

Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul book cover image

Guest Post by MG Noles

Have you ever had an imaginary friend? Someone with whom you could confide anything? A soulmate who loved you no matter what you said or did? Celia Paul’s extraordinary new book, Letters to Gwen John, adopts Gwen as just such an “imaginary” friend/soulmate and listener as she writes all her thoughts and feelings to the long-dead post-impressionist painter who lived in the latter 18th and early 19th centuries. Using a series of letters, Paul reveals her inner thoughts about life, art, men, freedom, and beauty. The book is part memoir and part art history, and it makes a beautiful read. Filled with imagination and insight, Paul examines the meaning of art and life. She shares her vision and makes you believe that communication is possible across space and time. As she puts it, “time is a strange substance.” And somehow, as you read this amazing book, you see Gwen John seated in a cozy room somewhere, like the one she paints in Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris, reading Celia Paul’s letters with a faint smile.

Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul. New York Review Books, April 2022.

Reviewer bio: MG Noles is a sometime essayist, reviewer, history buff.

New Book :: Up North in Michigan

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

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

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

New Book :: The Man with Wolves for Hands

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

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

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

New Book :: Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine

Big Gorgeous Time Machine by Nick Francis Potter book cover image

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

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

Book Review :: Spit by Daniel Lassell

Spit poetry by Daniel Lassell book cover image

Guest Post by Catherine Hayes

Daniel Lassell’s Spit harnesses the power of language to contemplate whether to embrace one’s own roots or to cast them off in favor of creating a new identity for a new life, and as such influences our sense of belonging. This conflict is one that Lassell grapples with for many years of his life, blending these two identities of past and future together to become “a city boy inside / the body of a country.” Part one recounts “sopping, hazy Kentucky” and when “a chicken costs 35 cents.” The natural world reigns supreme in this setting. The old barn on the land which “season by season… / have held their angle, onto the metal gate / leaned against a post pile for storage, / some form of pillar” soon gives way as “the field outside waits, / watching the barn’s leaning face / disappear” and nature has won against that which man has made. Yet the supremacy of nature does not last for long, nor does Lassell’s life in the country. The second and third parts make the progressive transition from “a hundred acres / into one” and by the final section, Lassell has completely immersed himself in the “concrete slabs” and “crumbling sidewalk squares” of the city. Yet his years on the farm never leave Lassell, for even in the city he recalls “hoisting bales up to a hay wagon” and “not waking during night / to car lights, sirens, hunger” and how, despite having “climbed from being / of dirt, rough fingernails,” his past will always be with him, no matter the distance or passage of time. Lassell’s poignant yet heart-warming story about what defines “home” presents a new meaning to the influence of upbringing and how sometimes home is not a physical place we return to but the memories we cherish that help guide us into the uncertainty of adulthood.

Spit by Daniel Lassell. Michigan State University Press, July 2021.

Reviewer bio: Catherine Hayes is a graduate student in English at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts and resides in the Boston area. She has previously published a nonfiction essay in an anthology with Wising Up Press. When she is not reading, writing, or reviewing she can be found exploring Boston, spending time with family and friends and looking for inspiration for her next story in the world around her. 

New Book :: Walking Uphill at Noon

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

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

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

New Book :: Zero to Ten

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

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

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

Book Review :: Bloodwarm by Taylor Byas

Bloodwarm poetry by Taylor Byas book cover image

Guest Post by Catherine Hayes 

Taylor Byas’s poetry collection Bloodwarm is an inspiring and modern commentary on what it means to be a Black woman living in a society where “I’m/seen as a threat” simply because of the color of her skin and sheds new light on the strong presence of racism within a variety of situations. The book opens with the inundation of Tweets surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement, capturing “rubber bullets / pinging a reporter and her crew as they run for cover” and “a police car plowing into a peaceful crowd” all while “white friends” will promise to “do better” before they “bullet into our inboxes and ask us to hand them the answers” about what they should do or say. From there, Byas examines other aspects of racism and the lack of representation of the Black community in the media by putting into perspective the archetype of the damsel in distress of a superhero film. Byas describes how the women who “look like Kirsten Dunst or Emma Stone” are “dainty enough to be rescued by a white hero” and any type of confrontation between the speaker and a white woman would lead to “there is an African-American woman threatening me” and “call the police.” Byas does not shy away from reflecting the struggles that the Black community faces, and what it means to “have to stand / between / invisible” simply to avoid unjust persecution based on skin color. Yet peace in the racial conflict is difficult to achieve because “this is / the standard / this denial / the / rebellion against / negotiations”. Byas does not shirk from the ugly truth of the impact racism has had on the Black community, and her openness in discussing these topics allows for the possibility to have more honest and fruitful conversations about how to create lasting and truly impactful change in society.

Bloodwarm by Taylor Byas. Variant Literature, July 2021.

Reviewer bio: Catherine Hayes is a graduate student in English at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts and resides in the Boston area. She has previously published a nonfiction essay in an anthology with Wising Up Press. When she is not reading, writing, or reviewing she can be found exploring Boston, spending time with family and friends and looking for inspiration for her next story in the world around her.

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

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

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

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

New Book :: Adult Children Anthology

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

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

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

New Book :: Spooks

Spooks by Stella Wong book cover image

Spooks
Poetry by Stella Wong
Saturnalia Books, March 2022

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

Book Review :: The Ache and The Wing by Sunni Brown Wilkinson

The Ache and the Wing by Sunni Brown Wilkinson book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

In the chapbook The Ache and The Wing by Sunni Brown Wilkinson, the poet wonders “just what I can seize” while a “homeless shelter bearing some saint’s name / fills up every night.” Welcome to the rodeo of life: a “father plays evangelical AM in the garden… to keep the deer away,” a friend pours gasoline on a “noisy cricket… outside her window” and “the baby arrives but he is dead already.” Humans and animals are “desperate / for life” in towns named “Why” where “none of my questions / were answered: Why / did our son (apple-cheeked, blue-eyed, / four days shy / of due) / have to die?” Wilkinson’s poems explore “hidden bonds” and how not to lose one’s mind when the world is burning. These are poems with “the end of the world” in them. With “much sad truth to say” about “bodies that break, that bear each other, / that hold one another in dark places.” [Readers can download this e-book for free from the publisher’s website link below.]

The Ache and The Wing by Sunni Brown Wilkinson. Sundress Publications, 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.

Book Review :: April at the Ruins by Lawrence Raab

April at the Ruins poetry by Lawrence Raab book cover image

Guest Post by James Scruton

Depending on the reader, the title of Lawrence Raab’s tenth poetry collection, April at the Ruins, might evoke “the cruelest month” of Eliot’s The Waste Land or a postcard from a Henry James character on The Grand Tour. There are glimmers of each here — mixtures of memory and desire as well as travels both real and metaphorical. But more often we find Raab meditating on love and loss (and much besides) with his characteristic sense of gratitude, entire lives suggested by a precise detail or turn of phrase:

… and as they crossed
the street she took his hand,
just as if everything
they hadn’t told each other
had never happened.
(“One of the Ways We Talk to Each Other”)

In “Little Ritual,” stones collected and then forgotten beside a lake become metaphysical emblems, the “zigzags of blue” in a “shiver of quartz” reminding the speaker “that some day everything / I love must be set aside, / or given away, or lost.” Amid the ruin we’ve made or witnessed of this world, Raab nonetheless celebrates an April of the spirit. “Nothing is beyond repair,” he writes. “How can there be a beautiful ending / without many beautiful mistakes?”

April at the Ruins by Lawrence Raab. Tupelo Press, 2022.

Reviewre bio: James Scruton is the author of two full collections and five chapbooks of poetry, most recently The Rules (Green Linden Press, 2019). He has received the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry magazine, among other honors.

New Book :: The Southernization of America

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

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

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

New Book :: O

O by Niki Tulk book cover image

O
Poetry by Niki Tulk
Driftwood Press, July 2022

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

Contest :: June 15 Deadline to Enter 2022 New American Fiction Prize

2022 New American Fiction Prize

New American Press has announced the 2022 New American Fiction Prize with a deadline of June 15. Weike Wang, author of Joan is Okay, will act as final judge. All full-length fiction manuscripts are welcome. Winner receives publication contract including $1,500, 25 copies, and promotional support. View their ad in the NewPages Classifieds to learn more.

New Book :: Plans for Sentences

Plans for Sentences by Renee Gladman book cover image

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

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

Book Review :: On the Verge of Something Bright and Good by Derek Pollard

On the Verge of Something Bright and Good by Derek Pollard book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

On the Verge of Something Bright and Good by Derek Pollard is a collection of poems “not elegiac” but of “another kind of seeing that involves letting go.” That requires “a dream we hold to,” where “orange and quick” fish are held as “dear / … as headstones,” and a guiding question is: “How to love in the midst of tumult?” These poems are too humble and intelligent to answer conclusively. But slant. From a squad car that runs over a squirrel to a child whacked for dropping ice cream, these poems acknowledge the range of “advent, accident, / celebration” in our lives together where either “we take up arms” — “The war / Is a war we all fight, and is near” — or we open our arms to “our / Life together / Quiet / Aimless / And full.” There is love in these poems. Love of life and others. And, love of language: a “ricocheting” “hallelujah” “Heaven” of sound and meaning unabashedly riots throughout — “What care for shame? In any of this?” Lovingly the poems share with the tender reader “the holy / Moment this moment.” Reading this book, “To be sitting / Here, the two of us”: “It felt good. And sad, of course. But mostly just good.”

On the Verge of Something Bright and Good by Derek Pollard. Barrow Street Press, 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.

Books Received May 2022

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

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

Continue reading “Books Received May 2022”

New Book :: One Person Holds So Much Silence

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

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

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

New Book :: The Bar at Twilight

The Bar at Twilight stories by Frederic Tuten book cover image

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

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

New Book :: Coining a Wishing Tower

Coining a Wishing Tower poetry by Ayesha Raees book cover image

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

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

New Book :: Greyhound Americans

Greyhound Americans by Moncho Ollin Alvarado book cover image

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

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

New Book :: How We Disappear

How We Disappear by Tara Lynn Masih book cover image

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

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

Book Review :: How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Sequoia Nagamatsu’s novel, How High We Go in the Dark, doesn’t have a plot per se, as it reads more like an interconnected collection of short stories than it does a novel. A character’s wife from one chapter will show up in a later chapter as a friend to the girlfriend of another character, a minor characters in one chapter becomes the focus of a later chapter or vice versa. What the characters do have in common is a tenuous existence, as Earth has become less and less habitable. Throughout much of the book, a pandemic is ravaging the world, killing people by mutating their organ cells, causing hearts to behave like livers or brains to change into lungs. Even after that tragedy becomes more controllable, there is still environmental disaster, as wildfires rage constantly, the Arctic is quickly melting, and sea levels rise by feet, not by inches. What Nagamatsu is most interested in exploring, however, is how people avoid one another, even in the midst of suffering, and how they might still be able to connect to one another. Though technology — perhaps even space travel — could save people’s lives, only true connection has a chance of healing their souls.

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu. William Morrow, 2022,

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

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

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

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

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

Contest :: 2022 Autumn House Prizes in Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction

Autumn House Press logo

Deadline: May 31, 2022
The 2022 Autumn House Press Prizes in Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction are open! Winners of each prize receive publication of their full-length manuscripts. Each winner also receives a $1,000 honorarium and a $1,500 travel/publicity grant to promote the book. The submission period closes on May 31 (Eastern Time). Please submit online, through our online submission manager. The reading fee is $30 (we will waive the submission fee for those undergoing financial hardship or living with limited means). Submission should be previously unpublished. Simultaneous submissions permitted. The judges for the 2022 prizes are Carl Phillips (poetry), Venita Blackburn (fiction), and Lia Purpura (nonfiction).

New Book :: Tribar

Tribar by Andra Rotaru book cover image

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

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

New Book :: They Don’t Want Her There

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

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

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

New Book :: A Song by the Aegean Sea

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

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

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

New Book :: Copy

Copy by Dolores Dorantes translated by Robin Myers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contest :: 2022 North Street Book Prize for Self-Published Books

North Street Book Prize logo 2022

Deadline: June 30, 2022
Now in its eighth year, the North Street Book Prize is sponsored by Winning Writers. Self-published books in seven categories can win up to $8,000 plus additional benefits. Submit online or by mail. Winning Writers is a partner member of the Alliance of Independent Authors, and this contest is recommended by Reedsy. Entry fee: $70 per book. Free gifts from our co-sponsors for everyone who enters. winningwriters.com/northnp22

Contest :: Submit to the 2022 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry

The Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry 2022 Flyer screenshot
click image to open PDF

Deadline: June 15, 2022
Lynx House Press seeks submissions of full-length poetry manuscripts for the annual Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry. The winner will receive $2,000 and publication. Entries must be at least 48 pages in length. The fee for submitting is $28. Previous judges include James Tate, Yusef Komunyakaa, Dorianne Laux, Dara Wier, Melissa Kwasny, and Robert Wrigley.

New Book :: Harsh Realm: My 1990s

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

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

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

New Book :: Women and Print Culture

Women and Print Culture book cover image

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

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

New Book :: The Fact of Memory

The Fact of Memory essays by Aaron Angello book cover image

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

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

New Book :: Migrations: Poem, 1976-2020

Migrations Poem 1976-2020 by Gloria Gervitz book cover image

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

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

New Book :: Palm-Lined with Potience

Palm Lined with Potience poetry by Besie Allen book cover image

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

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

New Book :: A Peculiar People

A Peculiar People poetry by Steven Willis book cover image

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

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

New Book :: Receta

Receta by Mario José Pagán Morales book cover image

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

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