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

New Book :: 11

11 by Carlos Soto-Román book cover image

11 by Carlos Soto-Román
Ugly Duckling Presse, September 2023

The title of Carlos Soto-Román’s 11 evokes the “other” September 11: Chile’s September 11, 1973, when Augusto Pinochet led a military coup to oust the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and inaugurated a brutal 17-year dictatorship. Assembled from found material such as declassified documents, testimonies, interviews, and media files, 11 immerses readers in the State-sponsored terror during this period and the effects it would continue to have on Chile. The poetry in this book adopts the form of collage, erasure, and appropriation, the language emerging from censorship and suffocation as experienced under military rule. Soto-Román’s work asks us to understand the past through what has been covered up, to reflect on the spoken and unspoken pieces that interact to create a collective memory. How does censorship translate into another language when translation already involves so many degrees of selective removal? This collaborative version in English, taken on by eight translators, attempts to answer that question and provide a means to reflect on the relationship between writing, trauma, and politics.

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

New Book :: I am the dead, who, you take care of me

I am the dead, who, you take care of me by Anthony McCann book cover image

I am the dead, who, you take care of me by Anthony McCann
Wave Books, November 2023

The poems in Anthony McCann’s I am the dead, who, you take care of me are acutely aware of the ways in which language communes the living and the dead. Following the poet’s recent prose work on the historical and ecological conflicts of the American West, these poems are necrosocial biomes where the living play dead and the dead bite back. Here we find that the past is “a perfect copy of the land./ But with all the panic of the meat.” By situating himself among lyric poets such as Jack Spicer, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka, McCann reveals how poetry can be both an unnerving and enlivening sort of devotion. “I want life—but for the living” he writes. By turns playful, mournful, and darkly humorous, these works ultimately leave us emboldened in their wake.

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

Book Review :: Heating the Outdoors by Marie-Andrée Gill

Heating the Outdoors by Marie-Andrée Gill book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

Heating the Outdoors, an intimate lyric written by Marie-Andrée Gill and tenderly translated from the French by Kristen Renee Miller, is a “love story like all others.” As a result, the poems balance precariously between “simple happiness” and “storm damage.” More pointedly, Gill writes: “love is a virgin forest / then a clear cut.” The reader enters at the “clear cut,” then follows Gill through three phases of her love story as she experiences break-up, objectivity, and rebound. Throughout the collection, there is the feeling that Gill is “writing to survive” after “turbulent intimacy.” Despite the colonization of her heart, there is “something” in her that “keeps a lamp on”; something beseeches “where do I even begin to switch off my hopes”? It may be hope that prevents acceptance and leads to the repetition of “old dramas” and “sex bombs reigniting” once again. The poems do not provide an easy answer, but they do reflect how the constant battle for a woman’s sanity and autonomy inside a love relationship is analogous to skating on thin ice. In Heating the Outdoors, Gill determines that the woman not “end up in an asylum,” but instead “seeking [her] place somewhere out on the trail” in the boreal forest. “Outside is the only answer I found inside,” she writes. Turning toward a new intimate, nature’s “aspen,” “elk,” “bright paths of snowflakes,” Gill, an Ilnu and Québécoise woman, begins to “feel worthy of its / voice” and her own.

Heating the Outdoors by Marie-Andrée Gill translated by Kristen Renee Miller. Book*hug Press, March 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear. More at https://jamimacarty.com/

New Book :: DEGREES OF ROMANCE

DEGREES OF ROMANCE by Peter Krumbach book cover image

DEGREES OF ROMANCE by Peter Krumbach
Elixir Press, January 2023

DEGREES OF ROMANCE by Peter Krumbach won the 2022 Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Award. As contest judge Candice Reffe describes the book, these dazzling prose poems are a portal into “a realm where some great secret is to be divulged, the gate to what’s been sought but never found briefly ajar.” Enter. Details of ordinary life—the scraping of a spoon, the “fat blue mailbox bolted to a sidewalk”—shimmer like auras the poet reads in the world around us. Part observation, part divination, the poems send messages in invisible ink that appear when you tip them to the sun, the dispatch you’ve been waiting for.

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

Book Review :: The Alta Vista Improvements by rob mclennan

rob mclennan image

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

There must be an angst category in poetry called urban angst poetry when you realize you live in a city but have been feeling and acting like you are in the countryside. Maybe that’s not the case, here, exactly. More like pandemic angst, which the entire planet can relate to. rob mclennan’s Alta Vista Improvements is a place where such a realization occurs and is one of above/ground press’ unique pamphlets churned out in Canada. Here are a few lines in the titular poem in Section 5, which I loved reading:

[. . . ] this through-line
of patchwork housing, outcrop. A craft

of optimism, ignorance. The internet
equally bears each alphabet.

This is delicious writing! mclennan highlights the loss of the family goldfish through multiple fish, multiple losses; something is wrong in the picture of domesticity. What is it? We don’t exactly find out, yet travel the off-road territory with mclennan and enjoy every moment. In “Summer, pandemic,” as he waits for us in the car, his loyalty goes above and beyond to the complicated:

[. . . ] I perch in precooked car
awaiting our cat, in his follow up appointment
to recent dental extraction [. . . ]

Will life get itself all sorted out? In The Alta Vista Improvements, we sit and ponder (and hope) in all the wreckage.

The Alta Vista Improvements by rob mclennan. above/ground press, February 2023.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).

New Book :: The Engineers

The Engineers: Poems by Katy Lederer book cover image

The Engineers: Poems by Katy Lederer
Saturnalia Books, October 2023

In her long-anticipated fourth collection, The Engineers, Katy Lederer draws on the newfangled languages of reproductive technology, genetic engineering, and global warming to ask the age-old questions: What is “the self”? What is “the other”? And how to reproduce “one’s self”? In poems that are both lyrical and playfully autobiographical, Lederer imagines form as a kind of genetics, synthesizing lines out of a rigorous constraint. Things can go wrong. The body—or poem—malfunctions, evacuating crucial parts of itself (miscarriage), or growing too aggressively or quickly (cancer). The body—or poem—attacks or even eats itself (autoimmune dysfunction; autophagy). Written almost entirely in the choral “we,” the poems move among the perspectives of the bewildered parent, the unborn child, and the inscrutable God who looks down upon the human world.

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

New Book :: Ascent of the Mothers

Ascent of the Mothers by Noelle Kocot book cover image

Ascent of the Mothers by Noelle Kocot
Wave Books, November 2023

Ascent of the Mothers, Noelle Kocot’s ninth collection, is a sagacious testament to the ways in which poetry can shape personhood. “I am nothing” they write, “Or else I have made myself / Too big for words.” The scope of this book is marked by Kocot’s psychic journey punctuated by a near-fatal car crash, which elicited a new understanding of their spirituality and gender nonconforming identity. Generous, self-aware, and resilient, Ascent of the Mothers is a treasure to behold and be shared.

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

Sponsored :: New Book :: 2024… Your Year of More

cover of 2024... Your Year of More by Noah William Smith

2024… Your Year of More by Noah William Smith

Self-published, October 2023

2024… Your Year of More is your go-to book to set goals and mindfully invest your efforts. It appeals to adults of all ages, nationalities, and backgrounds who wish to improve their lives. Its pages are packed with something special for everyone.

The pages contain practical ideas from A to Z, thought-provoking questions, and self-reflective exercises that inspire you to live your best life.

The book is an ideal companion during your moments of solitude. You can read it in the early morning before the rest of the world wakes up or during the evenings after a long day. You may also find it enjoyable while writing in your journal or taking a lunch break.

Enthusiastic indie author Noah William Smith knows the blessings and challenges of intelligence, creativity, high sensitivity and being a minority, underdog and outsider. While his books are based on his experiences, they offer valuable insights without being prescriptive or offering advice.

The book’s authenticity and invaluable insights make it a compelling read that will remain relevant for many years!

Are you considering investing in yourself or searching for the perfect gift for someone special? Enjoy this life-changing book that you cannot afford to miss!

Sponsored :: New Book :: They Write Your Name on a Grain of Rice

cover of They Write Your Name on a Grain of Rice by Lori Jakiela

They Write Your Name on a Grain of Rice: On Cancer, Love, and Living Even So, Memoir by Lori Jakiela

Atticus Books, October 2023

They Write Your Name on a Grain of Rice—the latest book from award-winning Pittsburgh author Lori Jakiela—is much more than a cancer memoir. It’s a pause between polarities. Cancer is almost an afterthought. Inspired by Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, it celebrates the tiny moments that make up a time capsule of a life.

A weirdly funny book about mortality, Rice is also about family, genetics, nature vs. nurture, the Rust Belt, EPA clean-up zones, emotional support peacocks, box turtles, Emily Dickinson, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Andy Warhol(a), and so much more. A fresh voice aligned with the work of classic stream-of-consciousness writers like Richard Brautigan and Virginia Woolf, Jakiela explores the way a mind works—complete with leaps and spirals—while reflecting on a life thoroughly lived against a dire breast cancer diagnosis.

Half new and selected essays, half spiraling memoir, Rice is experimental in both voice and form, and offers a fresh approach to age-old questions about life, love, mortality, and the fine art of living, even so.

Book Review :: A Sky of Paper Stars by Susie Yi

A Sky of Paper Stars by Susie Yi book cover image

A Sky of Paper Stars by Susie Yi is both satisfyingly predictable and enticingly surprising. The story centers on middle-schooler Yuna and her attempt to detach from her Korean identity and fit in among her American schoolmates. Not finding the acceptance she craves, Yuna wishes to return to Korea, a place she left when she was just a baby and visited infrequently.

Memories of her halmoni (grandmother) and the stories her mother tells her about growing up there make Yuna believe she would be better off living in Korea. She makes the dreaded wish to return as she folds her 1000th tiny origami star and blames herself when news comes of her halmoni’s death. Burdened with the guilt that she has brought this untimely end, Yuna’s hand seems to turn to paper. Yuna travels to the funeral in Korea where she meets family she cannot even remember and who share memories of their halmoni that Yuna has no part in, causing her to feel even more isolated. As the shame over her wish grows, the transformation of her body to paper begins to creep up her arm. The only remedy, Yuna decides, is to complete an unfinished jar of paper stars her grandmother began folding. Once she reaches 1000, Yuna believes her wish will be reversed, and her halmoni will be restored.

Flashbacks in the novel shift from full-color images to blue or sepia tones, while the remaining present-day images throughout use deep, rich hues and dark brown rather than black linework to create a warmer overall tonality to the story. There are beautifully rendered full bleed pages to represent dream/surreal/imagination (I could envision a whole wordless book of these works by Yi). It’s these more fantastical elements of the story that help connect three generations of women and set the final emotional tone of the novel. The ending is heartwarming and surprising, enticing the reader to close the book and start all over again.

A Sky of Paper Stars by Susi Yi. Roaring Book Press, September 2023.

Reviewer bio: NewPages.com Editor Denise Hill reviews books based on personal interest.

Book Review :: Wellness by Nathan Hill

Wellness by Nathan Hill book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

In Wellness, Nathan Hill has written a novel that is of its time, while still being timeless. In exploring the particularly American obsession with wellness and improvement, what he is really excavating is the power and peril of stories. His second novel follows Jack and Elizabeth, a couple who fell in love at first sight in 1993, and who are negotiating their marriage after just over two decades of being together. They tell themselves stories about their marriage, as well as their childhoods, hoping to make sense of their lives. Hill weaves minor characters’ stories in, as well: Jack’s father becomes obsessed with conspiracy theories; Elizabeth’s friend Brandie hosts a group that believes one can manifest happiness by speaking it into the universe; and Kate and Kyle, a couple who find meaning through polyamory and a critique of monogamy. While Hill satirizes each of these characters—and more, especially the postmodern cultural conversation in academia in the 1990s, one of the most humorous sections of the novel—he also understands why they (and we) need stories at all. When Elizabeth seems ready to turn to nihilism, wondering if anything is real, her mentor tells her, “Believe what you believe, my dear, but believe gently. Believe compassionately. Believe with curiosity. Believe with humility. And don’t trust the arrogance of certainty.” That’s good advice for our divided country and world, now and anytime anyone might pick up this novel.

Wellness by Nathan Hill. Alfred A. Knopf, September 2023.

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

New Book :: The Best American Newspaper Narratives

The Best American Newspaper Narratives, Volume 10, Edited by Gayle Reaves, University of North Texas Press book cover image

The Best American Newspaper Narratives, Volume 10
Edited by Gayle Reaves
University of North Texas Press, September 2023

This anthology collects the ten winners of the 2022 Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest at UNT’s Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference. First place winner: Jason Fagone, “The Jessica Simulation: Love and Loss in the Age of A.I.,” about one man’s attempt to still communicate with his dead fiancée (San Francisco Chronicle). Second place: Jenna Russell, Penelope Overton, and David Abel, “The Lobster Trap” (The Boston Globe and Portland Press Herald). Third place: Jada Yuan, “Discovering Dr. Wu” (The Washington Post). Runners-up include works by Lane DeGregory, Christopher Goffard, Evan Allen, Mark Johnson, Annie Gowen, Peter Jamison, and Douglas Perry.

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

New Book :: The JAB Anthology

The JAB Anthology edited by Johanna Drucker & Brad Freeman book cover image

The JAB Anthology edited by Johanna Drucker & Brad Freeman
University of Iowa Press, October 2023

The Journal of Artists’ Books: Selections from the Journal of Artists’ Books, 1994–2020 contains some of the best critical writing on artists’ books produced in the last quarter of a century. Driven by the editorial vision of artist Brad Freeman, JAB began as a provocative pamphlet and expanded to become a significant journal documenting artists’ books from multiple perspectives. The JAB Anthology contains contributions by many renowned figures in the field including Anne Moeglin-Delcroix, Janet Zweig, Monica Carroll, Adam Dickerson, Alisa Scudamore, Mary Jo Pauly, April Sheridan, Doro Boehme, Gerrit Jan de Rook, Océane Delleaux, Brandon Graham, Jérôme Dupeyrat, Ward Tietz, Paulo Silveira, Philip Cabau, Leszek Brogowski, Lyn Ashby, Tim Mosely, Debra Parr, Pedro Moura, Levi Sherman, Catarina Figueiredo Cardoso, Isabel Baraona, and the editors.

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

Book Review :: A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen by Erin Noteboom

A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen by Erin Noteboom book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

In A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen, Erin Noteboom positions readers on the fine line between the “sting and sweetness” of “lives in depth and distance.” This is a poet interested in demarcations and definitions, where memory meets metaphor, perspective meets specifics, and recombination implies structure. The poet repeatedly flips a coin, showing readers one side, then the other, revealing the enigma where one concept begins and another ends. Within the poems, the mysteriously undefinable is proximal to the scientifically discoverable. Wilhelm Röntgen, who developed X-rays, and Marie Curie, who discovered radium and polonium, are among the scientists Noteboom’s poems present to readers. The poems, like these scientists, are focused on the interplay between light, shadow, and darkness that permits new, profound, and various forms of seeing, as “the eye is lighthouse.” Such a quest for “the sensation of light” and the “struggle for another label” inevitably has a cost. “For such a cost, there must be benefit / that is the equation of science,” writes Noteboom, who determines as a writer, “I want to use my life up / like a pencil. I want to eat stone and leave behind / the shell of a word I live inside, / something open.” Noteboom’s poetry examines “the cost / of the beauty. The beauty of the cost.” The poems mark readers with their exploration of science’s brilliance, life’s radiance, and what it is “to write at the end of the world.”

A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen by Erin Noteboom. Brick Books, April 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear. More at https://jamimacarty.com/

New Book :: Interior Landscape

Interior Landscape by Mirta Rosenberg book cover image

Interior Landscape by Mirta Rosenberg
Translated by Yaki Setton and Sergio Waisman
Ugly Duckling Presse, September 2023

Mirta Rosenberg (1951-2019) is a key poet of the ’80s generation in Argentina. In Interior Landscape, Rosenberg explores questions of life and death, of changes experienced in one’s body through time and the resulting changes in perspective. These poems contemplate the dislocation of the self, posing questions about the relationship between subjectivity, perception, the body, and memory. Rosenberg’s voice is at once autobiographical and critical, displaying the interior landscapes of its experience as well as the complex ways that language forms a fundamental part of that experience. Originally published in Spanish in Argentina in 2012, Interior Landscape is the first book-length translation of Rosenberg’s poetry to be published in English.

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

New Book :: Tinted Trails

cover of literary magazine Tint Journal's anthology Tinted Trails: Exploring Writers in English as a Second Language

Tinted Trails: Exploring Writings in English as a Second Language edited by Lisa Schantl, Filippo Bagnasco, Andrea Farber, and Chiara Meitz
Tint Journal, November 2023

Literary magazine Tint Journal celebrates its five-year anniversary with the release of Tinted Trails, the first ever printed anthology entirely dedicated to those who write in English as a second language (ESL). This collection offers both authors and readers the chance to meet via the medium of the English language, in a whirl of perspectives, sensibilities, and idiolects.

The book showcases fiction, nonfiction, and poetry previously published online on Tint Journal and a selection of so far unpublished texts from well-established translingual voices. The breadth and the possibilities of the English language are unlocked by the variety of cultural, geographical, and personal experiences of these writers, each adding a crucial contribution to the present and future development of multilingual literature. Topical introductions by Marjorie Agosín and Juhea Kim add weight and context to the collection, while the themed sections that bring together the various texts—Belonging, (lm)Migration, Upheaval, Identities—guide the reader through the peculiarities of this fundamental collection of ESL writings. A further layer is created through the artworks curated by Vanesa Erjavec and her own text illustrations.

With its origin in such a rich and diverse literary and cultural environment, Tinted Trails proudly joins the ever-growing landscape of global literature in English.

The anthology will be presented at a festival of the same name this November in Graz, Austria, and beyond where participants can experience the variety of ESL literature with authors from all over the globe, try translingual writing themselves at a workshop, and get involved in discussions about literature, art, and life in-between it all.

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

Book Review :: Excisions by Hilary Plum

Excisions by Hilary Plum book cover image

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

I’m attracted at once to the cover of Excisions by Hilary Plum. It is one of those famous tapestries from Medieval times, “The Unicorn Surrenders to a Maiden,” which is part of The Unicorn Tapestry series. That theme is theorized to represent Christ (with the unicorn being hunted) and the Crucifixion/Courtly Love. The titular long poem and section weaves in and out of the world of the Unicorn Tapestry and comes face-to-face with real-life situations and circumstances that Plum shows readers. The poet seems like the maiden, then like the wounded and dying unicorn, and then like the hound who has attacked the unicorn. Each line of Plum’s poems is precise and layers itself against the next line so that each creates a huge, whole image. These are such a mix of old and new, as in these lines from “If a gun disappears it reappears”:

…like
heaving stones no archeologist
schooled in empire
declines…

The images Plum creates are intriguing and captivating. I don’t know what to do with so many of them but to go back again and again to meditate and dream.

Excisions by Hilary Plum. Black Lawrence Press, October 2022.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).

New Book :: The Shining

The Shining by Dorothea Lasky book cover image

The Shining by Dorothea Lasky
Wave Books, October 2023

As labyrinthine as its namesake, Dorothea Lasky’s The Shining is an ekphrastic horror lyric that shapes an entirely unique feminist psychological landscape. Lasky guides readers through the familiar rooms of the Overlook Hotel, both realized and imagined, inhabiting characters and spaces that have been somewhat flattened in Stephen King’s novel or Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation. Ultimately, Lasky’s poems point to the ways in which language is always haunted—by past selves, poetic ancestors, and paradoxical histories.

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

Indie Bookstores Rock!

Photograph of the staff inside indie bookstore The Open Book located in Warrenton, Virginia

Indie bookstores are cozy nooks to enjoy with the onset of fall, and NewPages Guide to Independent Bookstores in the U.S. and Canada is a great resource for finding local independent bookstores both in your own area and as you travel. There is no better way to get to know a city than to check in with their local indie bookstore(s). For authors and publishers, our list is a great resource for finding sales outlets and reading venues to promote your books.

NewPages.com currently lists only brick-and-mortar stores (no online-only, pop-up, mobile, comics-only shops, or shops with books as a side business). We offer free enhanced listings in our Guide to Independent Bookstores to help booksellers connect with book lovers, so you can find a lot of info for many of the stores.

If we’re missing any stores you know about, drop us a quick note!

[Thanks to our friends at The Open Book in Warrenton, VA, for the lovely staff photo!]

Book Review :: Deep Are These Distances Between Us by Susan Atefat-Peckham

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

Deep Are These Distances Between Us: Poems by Susan Atefat-Peckham book cover image

In an act of personal yearning, Editor Darius Atefat-Peckham offers readers his mother’s voice from beyond. In Deep Are These Distances Between Us, Iranian-American poet Susan Atefat-Peckham (1970–2004) tenders a “shining, shimmering / space” for poems prescient, prophetic, compassionate, forgiving, and ecstatic, “her hands cupped like a bowl / filled with sunlight and water and pleading.” Atefat-Peckham pleads for “words louder than the silence between them” to offer comfort to our wounded world. The poems trace “[s]hadows / we are bound by”—the Iranian state’s gender-based oppression, the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, Islamophobia in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks—“to speak of / and hold, to carry” and resolve, “knees snapped to the earth,” in a devotional conversation with Persian mystics.

Despite the fact that Susan Atefat-Peckham died in a car accident when her son was three years old, her mind, advocacy, heart, and soul remain “bright, burning, / and alive” in her poetry. On a day when Narges Mohammadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while imprisoned for her advocacy of Iranian women’s rights and sixteen-year-old Armita Geravand was dragged unconscious from a train after being beaten for not wearing a hijab, Susan Atefat-Peckham’s poems remind us that “there is always an ear listening / in the silence.” The distances between Susan Atefat-Peckham and us may be great, yet hers is unmistakably a poetry for our perilous times. Susan Atefat-Peckham is “still / in the universe.” She lives on via her poetry, which provides readers with a “place of repeated / comfort where even scars will brighten.”

Deep Are These Distances Between Us by Susan Atefat-Peckham. CavanKerry Press, May 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear. More at https://jamimacarty.com/

New Books October 2023

drawing of a bear reading a book while sitting on a stack of books

Welcome to the end of October! Hard to believe it is here already, isn’t it? With the ending of October comes our monthly breakdown of all the wonderful new and forthcoming titles that NewPages has received during the month. You can view the full list here.

If you are a follower of our blog or a subscriber to our weekly newsletter, you can see several of the titles we received featured. For publishers or authors looking to be featured on our blog and social media, please visit our FAQ page.

Still haven’t gone through the complete list from September yet? No worries. You can access the archive online here.

New Book :: The Medieval Worlds of Neil Gaiman

The Medieval Worlds of Neil Gaiman: From Beowulf to Sleeping Beauty by Shiloh Carroll book cover image

The Medieval Worlds of Neil Gaiman: From Beowulf to Sleeping Beauty by Shiloh Carroll
University of Iowa Press, September 2023

Readers love to sink into Gaiman’s medieval worlds—but what makes them “medieval”? Shiloh Carroll offers an introduction to the idea of medievalism, how the literature and culture of the Middle Ages have been reinterpreted and repurposed over the centuries, and how the layers of interpretation have impacted Gaiman’s own use of medieval material. She examines influences from Norse mythology and Beowulf to medieval romances and fairy tales in order to expand readers’ understanding and appreciation of Gaiman’s work, as well as the rest of the medievalist films, TV shows, and books that are so popular today.

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

Book Review :: Intaglio Daughters by Laynie Browne

Intaglio Daughters by Laynie Browne book cover image

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

Okay, these are weird poems, weird-in-a-good-way weird because they excite the imagination. Browne has taken Lyn Hejinian’s [alert: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry] poems and added her own two cents to them. She has not embellished them but taken a title and then riffed on it. Each poem ends with the title (which are phrases, mostly) changed around. This adds to the meaning and feeling of what Hejinian has done. It stretches the sense of things, as in “Language is as blind as sheep”:

It begins with,

Imbroglio daughters, imbroglio mind…

concluding with,

…Language unkind and steep

This adds to what Hejinian has built, and while these poems can be seen as collaborative, they use the found material of titles and transform them into sparkling jewels of poems, turning them luxurious and dazzling.

I don’t mind combing through these with the weight of mystery that comes with the territory of oblique writing like Language Poets are famous for, and away from which many, many poets run. These are poems to run to, towards the playfully topsy-turvy.

Intaglio Daughters by Laynie Browne. Ornithopter Press, September 2023.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).

New Book :: Read Me

Read Me: Selected Works by Holly Melgard book cover image

Read Me: Selected Works by Holly Melgard
Ugly Duckling Presse, September 2023

Holly Melgard’s Read Me gathers the tools necessary to make sense of contemporary problems so ubiquitous they seem too big to name. Spanning a multiplicity of genres, media, and tonal registers, this book surveys Holly Melgard’s formally experimental poetic works produced between 2008 and 2023, including sound poems, essays on poetics, and books that exploit print on demand to, for example, counterfeit money. In often wildly comic turns of thought, Melgard’s work cleaves personal agency from automated defaults by mapping trauma and technocracy from the inside out. From critical talks to fictional monologues, the poet translates into language the unremarkable torments of neoliberalization in the digital age.

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

New Book :: The Book of Merlin

The Book of Merlin translated by Larry Beckett book cover image

The Book of Merlin translated by Larry Beckett
Livingston Press, October 2023

Larry Beckett’s The Book of Merlin is the first translation of Merlin of the Wild’s complete works. How can the writings of a 6th-century poet/prophet speak to us moderns? Page after page of battles and death answer that most succinctly. This is not the Merlin with a wand that you grew up with. Translator Larry Beckett’s poetry ranges from songs, Song to the Siren, to blank sonnets, Songs and Sonnets, to the epic American Cycle, including Paul Bunyan, Wyatt Earp, Amelia Earhart, and seven other book-length poems. His work Beat Poetry is a story of the poets and poetry of the fifties San Francisco renaissance. Beckett is currently working on a translation of Verlaine’s poetry.

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

Book Review :: The Glass City by Jen Knox

The Glass City by Jen Knox book cover image

Guest Post by Ashley Holloway

Originally published in 2017, Jen Knox’s revised edition of The Glass City is a brilliant collection of seventeen stories that fluidly combine seemingly unrelated themes together in unexpected ways. In this futuristic-yet-timely collection, Knox highlights society’s overwhelming sense of entitlement and narcissistic tendencies and their relationship to our changing climate. Each story is a mirror thrust in our faces, urging us to get over our love affair with ourselves, reminding us that “people didn’t need to further distinguish themselves from nature.” With buildings collapsing from exhaustion, virtual races run at home on treadmills, terrorist attacks, never-ending snowstorms, and characters with extra layers of toes from food contamination, Mother Nature acts as an omnipotent protagonist throughout, serving her primitive justice as a warning to society for the perils of continuing along the same trajectory. However, like the art of Kintsugi, Knox leaves us with the thought that what was once broken can indeed be salvaged and transformed into something beautiful.

The Glass City & Other Stories by Jen Knox. Press Americana, September 2023 (re-release).

Reviewer bio: Ashley Holloway teaches healthcare leadership at Bow Valley College in Calgary, AB. She writes in a variety of genres with work appearing across Canada and the US and has co-authored three books. Ashley is an editor for Unleash Press and her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

New Book :: Nadia

Nadia: A Novel by Christine Evans book cover image

Nadia: A Novel by Christine Evans
University of Iowa Press, September 2023

Nadia by Christine Evans moves between the competing perspectives of two survivors of the 1990s Balkan Wars who have escaped to London, only to discover that the war has followed them there. Nadia is a young refugee who just wants to forget the past—until Iggy starts temping at her London office. Afraid he may be a sniper from the war she fled, Nadia starts seeing threats everywhere, alongside unsettling visions of her lost girlfriend, Sanja. As her volatile connection with Iggy unravels, Nadia is forced to face the ethically shaky choices she made to escape the war, her survivor guilt, and her disavowed queer sexuality.

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

Book Review :: What Just Happened by Richard Hell and Christopher Wool

What Just Happened by Richard Hell book cover image

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

Really, what just happened when I read this book of poems, scribble scrabble drawings, photographs of crows, essays, and a memoir/list? Do I finally realize why my friend Robert Christie (who was a musician) was so enamored by Richard Hell? Probably. Coming across this writer reminds me of all the things I loved about Robert and his wife, Denise, what is direct and plainspoken, what is unusual and gifted.

Hell references Bill Knott in poems, and this can tickle the funny bone in a way that is curioser and curiouser. We do get a sublime glimpse into Hell’s music life and see that it cannot be separated from his writing. Even his essays are sprinkled with pure poetic reverie, “For instance, Roy Orbison hummed like chauffeured teal.” (“Falling Asleep”) My goodness! This is genius territory, beware!

My favorite poem is “Poets,” as I have just never read what poets do and what poetry is expressed so profoundly:

what poets hope to have
their writing do is somehow
trick into being
all that time forgot

Forgetting you, we are certainly not, Richard Hell.

What Just Happened by Richard Hell with images by Christopher Wool. Winter Editions, June 2023.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).

October 2023 eLitPak :: Madville Halloween Sale – Award Winning Spooky Titles

Screenshot of Madville Publishing's flyer for their 2023 Halloween Sale
click image to open flyer

Halloween 20% off Sale with Coupon. Scan the code to get a discount on select spooky titles when you order direct from the website. No Evil Is Wide was honored as a distinguished favorite in the 2022 Big Book Awards. We include both editions in this Halloween Bundle. Also see the new GRAPHIC NOVEL version. All our spooky books are literary in nature but written for a grown-up audience. They make great Halloween treats for the adult readers in your life. View flyer for more information.

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Book Review :: Flare, Corona by Jeannine Hall Gailey

Flare, Corona by Jeannine Hall Gailey book cover image

Guest post by Jami Macarty

The coronae that flare in Flare, Corona, by Jeannine Hall Gailey, allude to solar explosions, coronavirus infections, cancer scare symptoms, and multiple sclerosis diagnosis. Put another way, the poems deal with exposure and contamination; after all, we “can only hold death at bay for so long.” Preoccupied with calamity, “downed planes, traffic accidents and plain old bad luck,” our narrator is “a person who looks for the dark side” and “can’t stop writing the apocalypse story over and over.” At least she has, and the poems benefit from, a sense of humor, dark though it may be. The collection reads like a survivor’s how-to manual for scenarios like a “zombie apocalypse” and “what to do when you get the diagnosis you may not survive.” Neither comedy nor gravity matter when the “truth is, there is no final secret, there is no formula to save us” from whatever “sudden instability” will cause our demise. Despite life’s supervillains and death’s close calls, Jeannine Hall Gailey is “dancing in the flames, arms raised high,” rejoicing in the “part of us radiant.”

Flare, Corona by Jeannine Hall Gailey. Boa Editions, Ltd., May 2023

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear. More at https://jamimacarty.com/

New Book :: Fierce Elegy

Fierce Elegy by Peter Gizzi book cover image

Fierce Elegy by Peter Gizzi
Wesleyan University Press, August 2023

Peter Gizzi has said that “the elegy is a mode that can transform a broken heart in a fierce world into a fierce heart in a broken world.” For Gizzi, ferocity can be reimagined as vulnerability, bravery, and discovery, a braiding of emotional and otherworldly depth, “a holding open.” In Gizzi’s voice joy and sorrow make a complex ecosystem. In their quest for a lyric reality, these poems remind us that elegy is lament but also—as it has been for centuries—a work of love.

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

New Book :: Bjarki, Not Bjarki

Bjarki Not Bjarki by Matthew J. C. Clark book cover image

Bjarki, Not Bjarki: On Floorboards, Love, and Irreconcilable Differences by Matthew J. C. Clark
University of Iowa Press, January 2024

In Bjarki, Not Bjarki, Clark wants nothing less than to understand everything, to make the world a better place, for you and him to love each other, and to be okay. He desires all of this sincerely, desperately even, and at the same time, he proceeds with a light heart, playfully, with humor and awe. As Clark reports on the people and processes that transform the forest into your floor, he also ruminates on gift cards, crab rangoon, and Jean Claude Van Damme. He considers North American colonization, masculinity, the definition of disgusting, his own uncertain certainty. When the boards beneath our feet are so unstable, always expanding and cupping and contracting, how can we make sense of the world? What does it mean to know another person and to connect with them, especially in an increasingly polarized America?

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

New Book :: Furniture Music

Furniture Music by Gail Scott book cover image

Furniture Music by Gail Scott
Wave Books, October 2023

In Furniture Music, Montreal luminary Gail Scott chronicles her years in Lower Manhattan during the Obama era, in a community of poets at the junction between formally radical and political art. Immersing herself in a New York topography that includes St. Mark’s Poetry Project and the Bowery Poetry Club, Scott writes from a ‘Northern’ awareness that is both immediate and inquisitive, from Obama’s election to Occupy Wall Street and Hurricane Sandy. Here, readers are situated in conversations around citizenship, gender performance, class, race, feminism, and what it means to write now. Scott’s project is polyvocal, also resonating with the voices of a host of earlier writers and philosophers, notably, Gertrude Stein, Viktor Shklovsky, Walter Benjamin. The result is a staggering work of insight and hope during a critical time in American politics and art.

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

New Book :: The Book

The Book by Mary Ruefle book cover image

The Book by Mary Ruefle
Wave Books, September 2023

Following the acclaimed Dunce, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, comes Mary Ruefle’s latest prose publication The Book. With the same curiosity found in Madness, Rack, and Honey and My Private Property, Ruefle’s prose here feels both omniscient and especially intimate. “It seems I believe in a bygone world though I no longer live there,” she writes. “Will I continue to read about all that is dusty?” In the spirit of friendship, Ruefle generously invites us to query ourselves as readers and thinkers in a world that will eventually endure without us.

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

New Book :: mahogany

mahogany by Erica Lewis book cover image

mahogany by Erica Lewis
Wesleyan University Press, September 2023

mahogany takes its name from the dark wood prized for its durability, workability, and elegant look, and from the Diana Ross movie, whose theme song asks if what lies ahead is what you really want. This book is the third in a trilogy, and like the first two books, it is steeped in pop music. Each poem here takes its title from a line of a Diana Ross and The Supremes song, as well as songs from Diana Ross’ solo career. Short lines flow down the page like postmodern psalms, connecting dailyness to timelessness, merging the historical and the beloved through reverence for family, music, and the life we actually live. mahogany is a lament for the passing of time and unimaginable loss, and at the same time, it models the daily search for joy and the deep shine that can arise from the darkest times.

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

Sponsored :: New Book :: If It Comes to That

cover of If It Comes to That, Poems by Marc Frazier

If It Comes to That, Poems by Marc Frazier

Kelsay Books, September 2023

If It Comes to That is a collection that thoughtfully considers the human condition. The poet shares deep reflections on the creative spirit, on the archetypes that encapsulate our behaviors, and on our relationship with the natural world. One can’t help but see the connections that emerge while reading these poems—there are big questions of how we’re connected to the people who inspire us and the ways in which we’re tied to the past. However, these poems are also filled with the people who we touch simply and softly, hand to hand, finding a way through uncertain times.
—Aaron Lelito, Founder, Editor-in-Chief, Wild Roof Journal

New Book :: No Use Pretending

No Use Pretending by Thomas A. Dodson book cover image

No Use Pretending: Stories by Thomas A. Dodson
Iowa Short Fiction Award
University of Iowa Press, October 2023

The stories in No Use Pretending by Thomas A. Dodson encompass diverse genres, from ecologically informed realism to a Kafkaesque fairy tale, from fabulist “weird fiction” to an episode from The Odyssey that becomes a meditation on what distinguishes human beings from animals. These stories invite the reader to reconsider moral and ideological certainties, to take a fresh look at such issues as fracking and drone warfare. In one story, a petroleum engineer discovers that one of his wastewater wells may be causing earthquakes, and in another, the pilot of an Air Force drone seeks to reconcile his conflicting roles as protector and executioner, husband and soldier. The scientist and the serviceman are both presented with problems that have no easy or obvious solutions, situations that force them to confront the messy, compromising complexity of being human.

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

New Book :: The Adorable Knife

The Adorable Knife by Jessica Prudy book cover image

The Adorable Knife: Poems by Jessica Purdy
Grey Book Press, August 2023

The Adorable Knife by Jessica Purdy is an intriguing poetry chapbook that explores the miniature crime scene creations of artist Frances Glessner Lee. In Purdy’s own words, “the poems are named after each ‘Nutshell,’ which are meticulously crafted crime scene dioramas meant to help police officers hone their observation skills. It is my intention to honor Frances Glessner Lee’s own attention to detail in crafting these, as well as to imagine possible ‘solutions’ by giving voice to the stories told in the crime scenes. In some of the poems, the speaker is the victim, and in some, the speaker could be the perpetrator. In still others, it is the poet’s voice speaking.” The chapbook, at the onset, quotes Frances Glessner Lee, “The investigator must bear in mind that he has a twofold responsibility—to clear the innocent as well as to expose the guilty. He is seeking only the facts—the Truth in a Nutshell.” (Contributed by Karen Poppy)

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

Sponsored :: New Book :: An Abundance of Caution

cover of An Abundance of Caution, a book by George Witte

An Abundance of Caution, Poetry by George Witte

Unbound Edition Press, May 2023

Distinguished by expert attention to image and phrase, line and sentence, rhythm and tone, George Witte’s An Abundance of Caution proves much more than a showcase of virtuoso technique. Witte’s formal skill lends voice and body to the crucial work of finding grace in a time marked by environmental crisis, global pandemic, and personal loss. His poems gain their depth and dimension from attentiveness to the lives of others, the details of the natural world, and the often-bewildering ways we live now. In lines both formal and free, these poems answer uncertainty with clarity, imagination, and compassion.

“The poet’s incredible attention to image, rhythm, and insistence upon the exact right word creates an incantatory sense of era-encapsulating collection of stylish, deftly composed poems.”–Kirkus Reviews

“These elegantly constructed poems about “each livid day” are definitely worth listening to.”–Ron Charles, The Washington Post Book Club Newsletter

“Visionary is what I would call the quality that enables these poems to know realities that exceed comprehension …”–H. L. Hix

“Witte’s poems find their way in, taking up residence in the mind and heart.”–David Yezzi

New Book :: Maximum Speed

Maximum Speed by Kevin Clouther book cover image

Maximum Speed: Stories by Kevin Clouther
Cornerstone Press, November 2023

Like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Kevin Clouther’s Maximum Speed moves across time and point of view to dramatize youth’s aftershocks. The unifying presence in the lives of three characters is Billy, an apprentice drug dealer in South Florida. His improbable appearance twenty years after his death reconnects Nick, Andrea, and Jim with each other and with the shared secret of their past.

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

New Book :: Hated for the Gods

Hated for the Gods by Sean Patrick Mulroy book cover image

Hated for the Gods by Sean Patrick Mulroy
Button Poetry, October 2023

Plaintive and joyous, sexy and ferocious—often all at once—Hated for the Gods is as much a call to action as it is a work of literature. Gorgeously rendered and skillfully constructed both to educate and inspire, Sean Patrick Mulroy’s poetry weaves together stories from his coming of age in the American South of the 1990s with the broader history of gay men in America. The result is a politically radical text that will leave you shocked with all you didn’t know about the history of queer people, and surprised by what you already knew but never could articulate. Winner of the 2020 Button Poetry Prize.

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

Book Review :: Because I love you, I became war by Eileen R. Tabios

Because I love you, I become war Poems & Uncollected Poetics Prose by Eileen R. Tabios book cover image

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

The Glass Fire in Napa Valley, 2020 seems to have been a turning point for the extremely prolific poet, editor, novelist, and activist writer Eileen R. Tabios. She and her husband experienced the fire and subsequent evacuation, which was successful, except that part of her life’s work was lost. She lost whole archive entries; material that belonged inside protected library buildings in official archives and not in an outbuilding that burned. This book makes real the fact that Tabios felt strongly compelled, passionate, and driven to collect some of her rescued writings and preserve them in book form. She tackles this project with love of what she finds among the remains of her work and is saying that love is the war she is raging against loss. While published archives can be boring to read because we don’t have the original pamphlet, magazine, or lecture to enjoy, Tabios’ inventive poems are delightful. More than half of the book is a compilation of “Uncollected Poetics Prose” that expand the meaning of archive, leading readers to dream along within them. What is so magical about this collection is that we are not left hanging and lost in the dense material of this ambitious project; we are shown abundance and astounding imagination in what remains. This project is love.

Because I love you, I become war: Poems & Uncollected Poetics Prose by Eileen R. Tabios. Marsh Hawk Press, May 2023.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson is a National Poetry Series finalist, Jovanovich Prize winner, and former Ragdale resident who lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in her book of poems, Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021). https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/susan_kay_anderson

Sponsored :: New Book :: Graveyard Dogs

cover of Jason Brightwell's poetry collection Graveyard Dogs

Graveyard Dogs, Poetry by Jason Brightwell

Kelsay Books, August 2023

Graveyard Dogs is a graceful descent into the dimension of loss and grief. We witness life reduced to dirt and gravestones. We see love pushed into the shadows with nowhere to go. Jason Brightwell is a masterful shepherd whose poems guide us through the many facets of death. There is beauty and elegance in mourning and on every page in this book. He shows us that life prevails through tar, rust, and blood. We remain—the ones that are left behind—still of stars and still of purpose.

New Book :: Dirt Songs

Dirt Songs by Kari Gunter-Seymour book cover image

Dirt Songs by Kari Gunter-Seymour
EastOver Press, February 2024

Ohio Poet Laureate Kari Gunter-Seymour’s poems in Dirt Songs are full-throated, raw, deceptively simple, and rippling with candor, providing readers an insider’s lens into the larger questions surrounding the many aspects of Appalachian culture, including identity, the impact of poverty, generational afflictions, and the brunt of mainstream America’s skewed regard for the region. Throughout the book there is an overarching determination to endure, to be the last truth teller left standing, arm raised in solidarity with the land and its people. Dirt Songs does what journalists and mainstream media have failed to do: provide a uniquely intimate look at landscape and family generated from within Appalachia, recognizing that one story cannot accurately represent a region or its people.

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

Sponsored :: New Book :: Michikusa House

cover of Emily Grandy's award-winning novel Michikusa House

Michikusa House, Novel by Emily Grandy

Homebound Publications, September 2023

Winner of the Landmark Prize for Fiction

Winona Heeley spent the last year of recovery from eating disorders in rural Japan, at Michikusa House, alongside one other full-time resident: Jun Nakashima. Like Winona, Jun was a recovering addict and college dropout. While they bonded over rituals of growing their own food and preparing meals, they changed each other’s lives by reconstructing long-held beliefs about shame, identity, and renewal.

But after Winona returns to her Midwest hometown, Jun vanishes.

Two years pass and Winona, seeking revival through gardening, accepts a job as a groundskeeper at a local cemetery…and begins searching for Jun Nakashima once more.

Book Review :: Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe

Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Christina Sharpe has written an incisive and insightful book about what it means to be Black in America today. Though the 248 notes that make up the book are brief, they dig deeply into the realities of white supremacy as a central tenant of American culture. Sharpe draws on a wide variety of contemporary and historical writers, artists, and thinkers, ranging from some most readers would be familiar with—such as Toni Morrison and Frederick Douglass—to a number who will be new to those same readers. Her 248 notes include 208 footnotes, in fact, as she steps into the long and deep river of Black thought and art. Sharpe structures her book around the various meanings of the word note, whether as a verb meaning to notice or a noun in the musical sense. She’s interested in definitions and words in general, as one of the longest sections of the book is what she refers to as “preliminary entries toward a dictionary of untranslatable blackness.” Given her investment in the tradition of Black thought, she calls on other thinkers to help her provide definitions for “unbuilding,” “spectacle,” “property,” and a number of other terms. All of her notes—like a piece of music—combine to create a composition that is more than its individual parts, one that celebrates Black culture and history, while reminding readers of the White supremacist reality that Black tradition has been and currently is being forged within and against.

Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

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

New Book :: Strip Mall

Strip Mall by Matthew Thomas Meade book cover image

Strip Mall: Stories by Matthew Thomas Meade
Tailwinds Press, November 2024

Matthew Thomas Meade’s stories in Strip Mall are about a surreal future as much as they are about our absurd present. A young lawyer moonlights as an ersatz psychic; a woman struggles with the caregiver burden caused by her boyfriend’s satanic possession; a suburban mother reckons with Kafka’s The Metamorphosis in mass-casualty form. Meade’s craft in this debut collection dissipates with shockingly deadpan ease into sensitive accounts of ordinary human relationships and resilience. With its heartfelt portraits of a magical world where late-stage capitalism has blurred the boundaries between the living and the dead, Strip Mall presents a strangely grace-filled vision of the dystopia already upon us.

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

New Books September 2023

We receive many wonderful book titles each month to share with our readers. Visit New Books Received to discover new authors as well as new works by your favorites. This page is updated monthly, but subscribers to our newsletter have these featured titles and more of ‘what’s new’ at NewPages.com delivered weekly. For publishers or authors looking to be featured on our blog and social media, please visit our FAQ page.

American Roulette: The Story of a Mass Shooting and Its Impact on Eight Lives :: Two Authors Share Their Insights and Experience

American Roulette book cover image

Like a page ripped from the headlines, the Sunbury Press release of American Roulette takes readers inside a mall where a mass shooting has taken place. It’s a grisly and up-close look at a wholly preventable, if common, occurrence.

The novel was written by eight authors, each of whom introduces readers to someone caught in the rampage. Two of the characters, Will Humphreys and Roger Elliot, are young, disgruntled white men who are eager to retaliate for years of familial and schoolhouse bullying, and provide a window into the minds of people driven to the edge and then given access to assault weapons.

Other characters include a minister struggling with medical debt; a young woman battling a depressive disorder; an elderly gun aficionado; a homeless mall security guard who has been living in her car; a local television personality; and a man hired by the mall’s owners to do damage control.

Two of the authors, Rev. Matthew Best and Pat LaMarche, spoke with Eleanor J. Bader in advance of the book’s October release:

Continue reading “American Roulette: The Story of a Mass Shooting and Its Impact on Eight Lives :: Two Authors Share Their Insights and Experience”

New Book :: 18: Jewish Stories Translated from 18 Languages

18: Jewish Stories Translated from 18 Languages edited by Nora Gold book cover image

18: Jewish Stories Translated from 18 Languages edited by Nora Gold
Academic Studies Press, October 2023

This anthology offers readers the first collection of translated multilingual Jewish fiction in twenty-five years: a collection of eighteen stories, each translated into English from a different language: Albanian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Ladino, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Yiddish. These compelling, humorous, and moving stories, written by eminent authors, reflect both the diversities and the commonalities within Jewish culture and are easily accessible and enjoyable not only for Jewish readers but for story-lovers of all backgrounds.

Authors in the order they appear in the book: Elie Wiesel, Varda Fiszbein, S. Y. Agnon, Gábor T. Szántó, Jasminka Domaš, Augusto Segre, Lili Berger, Peter Sichrovsky, Maciej Płaza, Entela Kasi, Norman Manea, Luize Valente, Eliya Karmona, Birte Kont, Michel Fais, Irena Dousková, Mario Levi, and Isaac Babel.