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Book Review :: Unusual Fragments: Japanese Stories

Unusual Fragments: Japanese Stories from Two Lines Press book cover image

Two Line Press’ Unusual Fragments: Japanese Stories brings together five previously untranslated peers of Osamu Dazai and Kōbō Abe in an exceptionally curated anthology of short fiction. While never explicitly stated, these are horror stories. Although their focus is never similar, enough themes and ideas are shared across all stories that it is hard to decide whether these are five isolated stories or equal parts of a homogenous universe.

Four of the five authors are women, the other queer, and gendered institutions form the bedrock through which strangeness grows. In one story, a wife’s simple hopes of going to the opera are complicated by her husband’s dimensions (he can fit in the box of a large sake bottle) and her mother-in-law’s connection to an ancient dwarf tribe. Elsewhere, a woman is so terrified by her husband’s annual departures that she obsessively buys new locks and mutilates herself — “radical cosmetic treatment” — in a way in which she hopes will keep him interested when he returns.

This is an amorphous collection, in which the only certainty is chaos. Age, size, gender and sexuality are in flux, and these characters — who seem to be contorting more than acting on their will — are archetypal protagonists of weird fiction.

Unusual Fragments: Japanese Stories, authors: Nobuko Takagi, trans. Philip Price; Tomoko Yoshida, trans. Margaret Mitsutani; Jeffrey Angles, trans. Jeffrey Angles; Takako Takahashi, trans. Brian Bergstrom; Taeko Kono, trans. Lucy North. Two Lines Press, Center for the Art of Translation, March 2025.

Reviewer bio: Colm McKenna is a writer based in Norfolk, England.

Book Review :: Always There, Always Gone by Marty Ross-Dolen

Always There, Always Gone by Marty Ross-Dolen book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

From earliest childhood, memoirist Marty Ross-Dolen, a now-retired child psychiatrist, knew that her mother’s life had been marked by something she could only glimpse, but which manifested as a sadness and sense of loss that nothing could fix. As she came of age, she learned the reason: her mother, Patricia [called Patsy] the second of five children, had been orphaned in 1960 when she was fourteen. A plane carrying her parents – the executives at Highlights for Children Magazine – had been flying to a meeting in New York City to discuss expanded newsstand placement when a collision between their commercial jet and another plane left no survivors. This abrupt end to life as she knew it catapulted Patsy and her siblings from their midwestern home into the home of relatives in Texas. Although they were well cared for and well-treated, from that moment on, a gaping absence hovered over every aspect of Patsy’s life.

Likewise for daughter Marty, who feared upsetting her mom by asking too many questions about the people whose photos stared at her from the living room mantlepiece. Still, she wanted to know more about her maternal lineage, so she started digging. The result, Always There, Always Gone, involved fourteen years of research, including the perusal of thousands of letters – miraculously saved by family and Highlights archivists – between Ross-Dolen’s grandmother, Mary Martin Myers, and her business associates and relatives before her death at age thirty-eight.

The result is a genre-bending memoir, offering readers fragments that Ross-Dolen calls “wisps,” a blend of conventional narrative, erasure poetry, imagined conversations between her and her grandmother, and family photographs. Moving, if somewhat enigmatic, the memoir is an emotionally rich interrogation of the legacy of grief on people who are both directly and indirectly impacted by tragedy. A wise and thoughtful addition to our understanding of the long-term effects of trauma and its transmission from parent to child.

Always There, Always Gone by Marty Ross-Dolen. She Writes Press, May 2025.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: Blade by Blade by Danusha Laméris

Blade by Blade by Danusha Laméris book cover image

Review by Aiden Hunt

Danusha Laméris displays her skill for sensual poetics in this latest collection, Blade by Blade from Copper Canyon Press. The book’s naturalist bent is apparent from poem titles like “Okra,” “Praying Mantis,” and “Let Rain Be Rain.” It’s in thoughts of this natural world that the poet has taken refuge from the grief of losing both a brother and a son. As the speaker of “Slither” says, Laméris wants to “go back into the green, green world” of her youth, when she was “small as the curve / of a spoon,” and she invites readers along with her to “start over / leaf by leaf, blade by beckoning blade.”

Laméris may miss this world, but she has no illusions about its sometimes brutal nature. As the speaker of “The Cows of Love Creek” proclaims, alluding to the circle of life, “We cannot love the earth / without getting blood on our hands.” There’s bittersweet longing in many of these poems, with the natural world linked with the emotional through techniques like the double entendre in the poem, “(R)egret,” which begins simply with, “I see the word egret, but read, instead, / regret.”

While Laméris delivers a fine collection of poems with long, lush lines, there’s a distracting tendency to stray into cliche, seen even in poem titles like, “They Say the Heart Wants.” Though not every poem hit its mark for me, the poet’s skillful lines employing deft alliteration and assonance make the collection a pleasant read overall. Readers looking for an accessible, but meaningful poetry will enjoy this.

Blade by Blade by Danusha Laméris. Copper Canyon Press, October 2024.

Reviewer bio: Aiden Hunt is a writer, editor, and literary critic based in the suburbs of Philadelphia, PA. He is the editor and creator of the Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, an online literary magazine dedicated to poetry chapbooks. Aiden’s critical work has been published by The Adroit Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, On the Seawall, and Fugue, among others venues.

Book Review :: Joyride by Ellen Meister

JoyRide by Ellen Meister book cover image

Review by Elizabeth S. Wolf

Joyride by Ellen Meister invites readers to travel along as Joybird Martin embarks on her dream of becoming a life coach — from the driver’s seat of her humble blue Honda Accord. Despite a challenging upbringing and an array of insecurities, Joybird is a determined optimist, seeing the glass always brimming: “It’s a choice. I make that decision every day.”

There were times I wanted to reach into the story and shake that young woman by the shoulders for putting the needs of others ahead of her own and for some questionable choices, particularly regarding her love life. I was that invested. Also, I was occasionally annoyed at her brittle, sarcastic father. There’s some mystery around why the father’s career is in desperate straits, although I can surely guess.

Meister is skilled in advancing plot and developing characters through dialogue. With unexpected challenges or new clients, Joybird needed only a few centering breaths to find her way to empathy. Navigating plenty of intergenerational, romantic, and New York City caste conflict, Joybird journeys towards a future as bright “as the sun rising resplendently over a seedy New York City impound lot.” A fun read about the power of attitude and choices.

Joyride by Ellen Meister. Montlake, April 2025.

Reviewer bio: Elizabeth S. Wolf has published five books of poetry, most recently I Am From: Voices from the Mako House in Ghana (2023). Her chapbook Did You Know? was a 2018 Rattle Prize winner. Elizabeth’s poetry appears in multiple journals and anthologies and has received several Pushcart nominations.

Book Review :: Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Ferdia Lennon’s debut novel, Glorious Exploits, is set in ancient Greece, fifth-century Syracuse, to be exact. The Syracusans have recently defeated the Athenians in battle, a surprise to both sides, and they are keeping their prisoners of war in a quarry until they die. Lampo and Gelon are unemployed Syracusan potters, so they use their free time to visit the quarry to see which, if any, Athenians know any of Euripides’ plays, given Gelon’s love of theatre. That interest ultimately leads to their putting on a production of both Medea and The Trojan Women in one afternoon.

Lampo and Gelon, as well as the narrator, don’t sound like they live in ancient Greece, though; they sound like they live in twenty-first Ireland, more or less. Lennon, though, doesn’t play that approach for laughs. He simply uses contemporary language and voice to delve into the life of Lampo — the center of attention — as he tries to understand who he is. Gelon is the one who loves theatre and comes up with the idea to visit the Athenians, while Lampo simply goes along with his friend. Along the way, though, he has to make choices that will define the rest of his life.

It would be easy to say that this novel is about the power of art — Gelon at one point says, “It’s poetry we’re doing. It wouldn’t mean a thing if it were easy.” — but the novel is about more than that, as any good art is. It’s about friendship and sacrifice and hatred and love and mistakes. In other words, it’s about humanity, whether in ancient Greece or contemporary Ireland. The struggles and successes are the same, no matter the time or place.

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon. Henry Holt and Company, March 2024.

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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites

New Books January 2025

Picture of a stack of books; photo by Alexander Grey via Pexels

Turning the calendar to a new year is also a great time to be turning the pages on some new books! To help you achieve that goal, check out our monthly round-up of New Books. Each month we post the new and forthcoming titles NewPages selects from small, independent, university, and alternative presses as well as author-published titles and recent reviews.

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.

Book Review :: Rendered Paradise by Susanne Dyckman & Elizabeth Robinson

Rendered Paradise by Susanne Dyckman and Elizabeth Robinson book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Though Susanne Dyckman’s and Elizabeth Robinson’s collaborative poetry collection Rendered Paradise “offers no route” to the poets’ compositional method, the experience of reading the collection prompts consideration of what constitutes collaboration. True artistic collaboration occurs when the combined result exceeds the sum of its parts, creating a third entity that, to borrow phrases from the poems, “assures its own fidelity” to a “truer / form of two,” one that is “sublimely unemphatic.” The emphasis and spirit of Rendered Paradise is on “Voices conjoined” in an “intimacy” of seeing.

Rendered Paradise “tells” the poets’ “story of looking” inspired by artists Vivian Maier, Agnes Martin, and Kiki Smith. The collection is divided into three sections, each devoted to looking at, responding to, and highlighting the artists’ subject matter and aesthetic. Poems inspired by Vivian Maier’s artworks emphasize portrait and gesture. Those responding to Agnes Martin explore color, shape, and pattern. Poems influenced by Kiki Smith’s artworks incorporate themes of animals, reptiles, and the cosmos. The poems “model” a language of active looking regardless of the subject-artist or the poet-speaker.

Collectively, they are “Who see it all.” The poems sometimes convey the perspective of one of the poets, and at other times reflect the viewpoints of the artists. The reader is left uncertain of who “I” or “you” refers to within the poems. This “gesture beyond its own climate” suggests the poets’ intention to transcend the “dispute” over the “proximity of the pronoun.” As one poem describes, “Where / voice stops explaining patterns, it begins to have a body.”

With both collaborative method and “Identity pushed aside,” Dyckman’s and Robinson’s ekphrastic poems are “assemblage bound” and stand “for the mixing,” writing toward a “release” of pride in the seer and attachment to the seen/scene. Rendered Paradise is an exaltation of pure seeing.

Rendered Paradise by Susanne Dyckman & Elizabeth Robinson. Apogee Press, April 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Editor’s Choice :: Why We Eat Fried Peanuts

Why We Eat Fried Peanuts: A Celebration of Family and Lunar New Year Traditions by Zed Zha, illustrated by Sian James book cover image

Why We Eat Fried Peanuts: A Celebration of Family and Lunar New Year Traditions by Zed Zha, illustrated by Sian James
becker&mayer! kids (Quarto), January 2025

Readers are invited to join Mèng, a Chinese American girl, as she prepares for the Lunar New Year with her family. Through Mèng’s conversation with her father, readers will learn about the rich significance of ancestral stories, the history of the Mandarin language, and the traditional foods that make the holiday so special. Mèng’s father shares the inspiring tale of Tài Nǎi Nai, Mèng’s great-grandmother, whose act of bravery a century ago left a lasting legacy and offers timeless lessons for today’s generation. As Mèng learns, food plays a vital role in the celebration, with fried peanuts serving as a special snack tied to the family’s traditions. The story concludes with a simple, fun recipe for fried peanuts, offering a hands-on way for readers to bring the spirit of the Lunar New Year into their own homes.

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 :: Close to Home by Michael Magee

Close to Home by Michael Magee book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Sean is a young man in Belfast, Ireland, who spends most of his time drinking or doing drugs, seemingly not making any progress in life. He and one of his best friends, Ryan, live in an apartment that they’re about to be evicted from, as their landlord ran away, and it has black mold growing in it, as well. They both work as bartenders to try to make some money, but they’ve been barred from most of the places they try to go and drink due to their behavior. In fact, the novel opens with Sean about to go to court for punching somebody at a house party, causing serious harm to the young man’s face and mouth.

However, life wasn’t supposed to go this way for Sean, as he was different than his friends. He left Belfast and went to Liverpool, where he attended university and received a degree in English. He wanted to be a writer.

He has long odds to overcome, though, as his family has fallen apart. His mother left his father when Sean was young, and it’s clear that the lack of a father has wrecked Sean. He spends part of his free time looking his father online, as well as his half-sister from his father’s new marriage. Both of Sean’s brothers behave as recklessly as he does, prompting his mother to be surprised that it’s Sean who ends up going to court due to violence. They may have learned that violence from the IRA members they grew up around.

The one bit of light in Sean’s life is Mairéad, a young woman Sean grew up with. She was as violent and out of control as Sean and his friends, but she has changed her life. She spends much of the novel preparing to move to Berlin to try to break into the world of independent filmmaking. The problem is Sean makes the same mistakes again and again. Magee raises the question of how much environment shapes people and how one can love friends and family who might be preventing one from growing. There aren’t easy answers, but the reader continues to hope Sean can figure his life out.

Close to Home by Michael Magee. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, May 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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites

Book Review :: gutter rainbows by Melissa Eleftherion

Gutter Rainbows by Melissa Eleftherion book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

As the title gutter rainbows implies, “grit” and “glitter” coexist in Melissa Eleftherion’s third poetry collection. “Double consciousness” is also a characteristic of the poems’ speaker: “Before [she] understood the war of misogyny / [she] battled [her] own blood for understanding.” The poems also double in their artistic purpose, offering the poet “an attempt to / convene with the memory of the / interruption” while offering the reader “the story of [a girl’s] formation.”

The collection opens with Eleftherion’s portrayal of a “defiant,” self-possessed girl, navigating life between her own “kindling” and the challenging, often dangerous interactions with men. Eleftherion’s girl was “taught to hold space for the lion / sit quiet at his table” and to endure the “street mouths” as she walks “the avenue of eyeballs.” The poems highlight how these power dynamics and threats “damage” the girl’s sense of self-worth, leading to “internalized hatred” and “misogyny.”

As Eleftherion explores how the male gaze and patriarchal expectations “fracture” a girl’s life, she draws comparisons with how a geological depression interrupts a landform. Fracture variously appears in the poems as “gutter,” “gash,” “crack,” “ditch,” “pit,” “trench,” but in each case describes the shape of a landform that is lower in elevation than the surrounding area. This metaphor provides a visual and visceral vocabulary for experiences of trauma and the challenges faced by girls “fighting to be seen beneath” “a line of semen.”

Dear Sister Reader, “her story is my story is your story the axes we intersect.” Along with Eleftherion, we “hover as transformation / in the interstices / warrior, queen.”

So too, the transformation of trauma into poetry. Melissa Eleftherion’s gutter rainbows constructs a “lyric from the detritus.” While the poems explore themes of faults and fractures, they simultaneously reach “up up,” embodying true feminist resilience.

gutter rainbows by Melissa Eleftherion. Querencia Press, August 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen

A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The title of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s memoir, A Man of Two Faces, might lead readers to think that he is the center of the book, especially with a focus on the various ways he feels pulled in two different directions. That latter part is true, but the true center of the book is Ba Má, his parents. He describes how they fled from North to South Vietnam, then to the United States. While Nguyen was alive during that time, he was too young to have many memories. He also talks about how hard his parents worked owning and running a grocery store, helping to provide for him and his brother.

However, Nguyen also talks about how he began to pull away from his parents, while also celebrating them in this book. Like many refugees and immigrants who come to America (or, as Nguyen describes it, AMERICATM), he loses much of his language and culture, partly because he wants to be more American, but partly because the culture that surrounds him shapes him differently than it does his parents, who spend much of their time at work.

That culture leads to a serious fracture in how Nguyen sees himself and the world, especially the various portrayals of Vietnam in the culture of his childhood. He talks about watching movies, such as Apocalypse Now and Rambo II: First Blood, seeing actors from other Asian countries play Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. However, he also digs deeper into the idea of colonizer and colonized, showing that people from North Vietnam, like his parents, took land from the Montagnards, an Indigenous group in the Central Highlands of the country.

One question he continually returns to is what has made him (and other refugees) who he is: is that because he is a refugee and Vietnamese or because of his family and his personal traumas. His book explores both of those poles without trying to reconcile them, as if there is any way they could be reconciled.

A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Grove Press, October 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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites

Book Review :: Behind You is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj

Behind You is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Susan Muaddi Darraj’s latest work, Behind You is the Sea, is a series of interlocking stories that follow several Palestinian American families through their lives in Baltimore. While they all know each other well, their relationships both between families and within families are often strained, sometimes due to differences in class, but often because of a moral judgment one makes against another.

For example, the opening story centers on Reema Baladi, a young woman pregnant with her first child. She’s been seeing Torrey, but now that she’s pregnant, he is less interested in her. She compares herself to Amal, who is also pregnant, but who is planning to have an abortion, a decision that has made her an outcast in the community, including her family, as her parents have kicked her out of the house.

The collection ends with a story focused on Marcus Salameh, Amal’s brother. Their father has died, and Marcus has to take the body back to Palestine to bury him there. He discovers that their father had been supporting a woman named Rita, whom the Israelis had imprisoned and raped, leading to the community’s subtly ostracizing her—she’s invited to funerals, but not to weddings, for example. Marcus is confused as to how his father could reconcile supporting Rita, while banishing Amal, his own daughter.

The stories in between explore other relationships that are severed or strained, but also those that reconnect and grow. While some families break apart, other relationships develop and strengthen. There are stories that deal with domestic violence and eating disorders, but also those that reveal characters who discover the ability to love and forgive. As Marcus reflects in the final story, “The Arabs were a people that knew life could be horrifically unjust and unfair—and yet they cherished it.” Through all of their suffering, these are characters who cherish life, even when, like all of us, they do so inconsistently and imperfectly.

Behind You is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj. HarperVia, January 2025.

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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites

New Book :: Worlds End

Worlds End by George Myers Jr. book cover image

Worlds End by George Myers Jr.
Paycock Press, January 2025

Richly illustrated in color, George Myers Jr.’s novel Worlds End is a singular achievement, a one-of-a-kind tale about a time-obsessed historian and naturalist who’s trying to have his ephemeral life’s work included in his town’s time capsule. The illustrated Worlds End is told episodically through the items in the narrator’s map cabinet, where he has stored his research and memories about vanishing species, Mary Shelley, a beekeeper’s wife, a World War I ambulance driver, Marco Polo, and a woman with a prehensile ponytail. Myers blends the real and remembered in a haunting story about all that slips away. Myers also the author of Fast Talk with Writers and Mixers: On Hybrid Writing.

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 Canine Collection

The Canine Connection by Laura Shell book cover image

The Canine Collection: Horror Stories Spotlighting Man’s Best Friend by Laura Shell
Black Bed Sheet Books, March 2024

From veterinary assistant and exciting rising author, Laura Shell, comes Canine Collection, a fast-paced selection of four horror/paranormal stories featuring our beloved canines. In “My Sister’s Keeper,” a lonely woman worries that her vampire sister will turn on her new best friend, that just happens to be a dog. Will the vampire sister accept the canine as a pet or as a source of nourishment? In “The Shape of the Shift,” a shapeshifter is surprised to learn that the people around him aren’t what they appear to be, including the love of his life. In “Jinn or Jinx?,” the wishes granted by an ancient Jinn not only come with bizarre consequences but also reveal dark family secrets. In “Immortal Me,” a woman discovers she is immortal after surviving a brutal beating. While she tries to keep her newfound persona a secret, her attacker learns the truth and comes after her for a second time, but she has a few surprises for him.

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 :: Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect by Koss

Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect by Koss book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Through the poems in their debut chapbook, Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect, Koss “face[s] the world so raw and open,” endeavoring to address a traumatic past and to make “some beautiful things.” Accomplishing this entails “filling in the blanks” between the “sticky” memories of childhood “horror and experience” and taking “the liberties one / can take when” “art is conceived.”

The poet, “dancing [their] pen between” the verse line and the prose sentence, offers poems from the perspective of adulthood, looking “backwards” at the flawed adults who abused and abandoned them. Because the poems move between past and present selves, the writing is “in flux between connections and short circuits.” And, at turns, a “Cry or curse” infused with purpose: To name the “opt-out mother” and a father who “left when [they] were six”; To admit being “a victim more than once”; To grieve the death of a lover by suicide; To face the delusions of friendship and therapy. The writing also contains a “picture [of] tomorrow” in which coming to terms performs the magical act of making the trauma “go away.”

Unfortunately, it does not work that way. “There is no winning.” But trying to “be honest now” “ease[s] the pretending” and enables the poet/person to “become who they are.” Whether identifying as “craggy boxing bitch,” lesbian, “one-speed train,” or “withdrawn and frequently tired,” the poet is “a bit at odds with” self but is determined to “just feel what [they] feel.” To a survivor of abuse and oppression, the felt expression is the ultimate liberty and triumph.

These poems are “proof of… dysfunction,” but they also prove the function of art as a “salve” for what we “see / and don’t.” Whether engaging with self through trauma, queerness, psychology, or art, Koss approaches the page “with an open sense of wonder.”

Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect by Koss. Diode Editions, October 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: To Save and To Destroy: Writing as an Other by Viet Thanh Nguyen

To Save and To Destroy: Writing as an Other by Viet Thanh Nguyen book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

When Pulitzer Prize-winning writer-activist Viet Thanh Nguyen was asked to deliver Harvard’s annual Charles Eliot Norton lectures in 2023, he admits that he was intimidated. After all, a string of luminaries had preceded him – Leonard Bernstein, Nadine Gordimer, Czeslaw Milosz, Toni Morrison, Igor Stavinsky, and Wim Wenders, among them – but in accepting the honor, he agreed to probe what it means to write as an “other.”

To begin, he had to face his otherness as an amalgam: On one hand, he’s an outsider because of his race (Vietnamese) and working-class, refugee background. But he’s also an insider because of his occupation (English professor at USC) and current social standing (MacArthur Foundation and Guggenheim fellowship recipient).

Furthermore, Nguyen understands that his privilege is not representative of other “others.” Nonetheless, he defines otherness as encompassing all who are “out of step, out of tune, out of focus, even to themselves.” This, he writes, includes “the Asian, the minoritized, the racialized, the colonized, the hybrid, the hyphenated, the refugee, the displaced, the artist, the writer, the smart ass, the bastard, the sympathizer, and the committed.”

That is, pretty much everyone aside from white, ruling-class males.

The essays in To Save and To Destroy move seamlessly between the personal and the political, and while Nguyen presents a plethora of sometimes-obtuse literary references, he expresses heartfelt solidarity with refugees and those in exile. While he contests their categorization as voiceless – he believes everyone has a voice, even if it’s ignored – he is unfailingly sympathetic to individual struggles. Particularly moving is his account of displacement’s impact on mental health. In fact, by zeroing in on his mother’s psychiatric hospitalizations, the book provides a deeply-felt account of exile’s toll. It’s beautifully wrought.

Nguyen’s deepest wish is for humanity to move into “expansive political solidarity” for collective liberation. It’s an inspiring, if aspirational, vision.

To Save and To Destroy: Writing as an Other by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Belknap Press, April 2025.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: Come One Thing Another by Cory Lavender

Come One Thing Another by Cory Lavender book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

The poems of Cory Lavender’s Come One Thing Another form a “chromosomal / bridge of inheritance, progenitors resurrected.” Informed by his family’s lore, Lavender recounts the “crackling murmur” between generations while dispensing with categorical divisions between genre (poetry and memoir) and persona (poet and narrator).

Come One Thing Another is a collection of memoiristic poetry. Cory Lavender is the person recording the lives of his “Milk Father,” an uncle accidentally shot over the “fate of [his] heifer,” an aunt who survived the Depression, and a great grandmother with a bad temper, among others on his mother’s and father’s sides of the family.

The Roy and Lavender families are chock full of rebellious, tell-it-like-it-is characters with ties to Africa, Jamaica, Germany, and Nova Scotia. Lavender, the poet among them, writes idiomatically and colloquially, giving voice to and “capturing” his relatives’ “likenesses” in rangy poems that offer opinions on deer hunting, plastics pollution, lobster prices, and “Hard Times” that affect the way of life of his family, who farm and hunt the land in a “guns and grub” relationship that makes them intimately aware of change. “Nothing like it used to be.”

To “extend remembrance” is at the heart of what motivates Lavender to write his family story. The poet is also writing to address the “shadows” and “tangle” regarding his place in his family tree.

Necessarily, a few poems address the fact that he, like his father, “grew up unaware he’s mixed,” “half-ashamed of [his] signature curls.” In the poem “Fort Cory,” the most self-telling poem within the collection, the poet confesses feeling “embarrassed writing this.” Such are the personal and artistic pressures to measure up to the “hallowed coordinates” of the people he loves.

Despite being “Besieged by insecurities,” Cory Lavender walks his own “stretch of shore” in his “cobbled ode” and heartfelt memorial.

Come One Thing Another by Cory Lavender. Gaspereau Press, August 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Colorado Authors League January 2025 Member Releases

Screenshot of the first page of Colorado Author's League flyer for January 2025 eLitPak

The Colorado Authors League (CAL) supports and promotes its community of published writers while connecting with and adding value to the reading world. Formed in 1931, authors become members to: keep up with changes in the craft of writing, publishing, and marketing, gain greater visibility for their writing, join a group of like-minded people who love writing. View our flyer to see new releases by members and a link to our website.

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New Book :: The Muslims of Darürrahat

The Muslims of Darürrahat, trans. by Çiğdem Pala Mull, ed. by Sharon Carson book cover image

The Muslims of Darürrahat, trans. by Çiğdem Pala Mull, ed. by Sharon Carson
The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, October 2024

In Ismail Gaspirali’s 1890s story The Muslims of Darürrahat (the Peaceful Country), the not entirely intrepid narrator, Mullah Abbas Efendi, arrives in the imaginary land of Darürrahat. He has been led there by mysteriously appearing guides, who take him from Alhambra palace in Andalusia through an underground tunnel, where he emerges in Darürrahat to find a Muslim utopian country filled with progressive people and dotted with beautiful Islamic architecture and technologically advanced cities. As in most works of utopian imagination which are also aimed squarely at social critique of the author’s present day, there is nothing simple about this world or this literary work.

The Muslims of Darürrahat first appeared in serialized form in the widely circulated Central Asian newspaper Tercüman, which was edited and largely written by Crimean Tatar educator, journalist and Muslim reformer Ismail Gaspirali. This is the full story’s first appearance in English, translated by Çiğdem Pala Mull and the centerpiece of a book edited by Sharon Carson to include introductory materials, a contextual timeline, and three interpretive essays exploring the story as a work of nineteenth century utopian imagination which has some compelling resonance in our time.

Published in collaboration with North Dakota Review, The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota offers readers free digital downloads of titles which can also be purchased as low-cost paperbacks.

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!

Editor’s Choice :: Meet Me at the Library

Meet Me at the Library: A Place to Foster Social Connection and Promote Democracy by Shamichael Hallman book cover image

Meet Me at the Library: A Place to Foster Social Connection and Promote Democracy by Shamichael Hallman
Island Press, October 2024

Libraries have a unique opportunity to bridge socioeconomic divides and rebuild trust. But in order to do so, they must be truly welcoming to all. They and their communities must work collaboratively to bridge socioeconomic divides through innovative and productive partnerships.

Shamichael Hallman argues that the public library may be our best hope for bridging divides and creating strong, inclusive communities. While public libraries have long been thought of as a place for a select few, increasingly they are playing an essential role in building social cohesion, promoting civic renewal, and advancing the ideals of a healthy democracy. Many are reimagining themselves in new and innovative ways, actively reaching out to the communities they serve. Today, libraries are becoming essential institutions for repairing society.

Drawing from his experience at the Memphis Public Library and his extensive research and interviews across the country, Hallman presents a rich argument for seeing libraries as one of the nation’s greatest assets. As an institution that is increasingly under attack for creating a place where diverse audiences can see themselves, public libraries are under more scrutiny than ever. Meet Me at the Library offers a revealing look at one of our most important civic institutions and the social and civic impact they must play if we are to heal our divided nation.

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 Senator by Maya Golden Bethany

The Senator by Maya Golden Bethany book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

When Oliver Michaels was elected to represent the people of Maine in Congress, he pledged to fight hard for working-class and low-income people. But as progressive bill after progressive bill is defeated, his fury is mounting and he is seriously considering leaving the prestigious body. In addition, he and his wife have separated and he is depressed and lonely.

It is at this point that New York Times reporter Alex Broussard, Michaels’ college girlfriend, contacts him about an anonymous tip she’s received about collusion between two Senators, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and a corporate polluter. According to her source, the three individuals are embroiled in a pay-to-play scheme that has allowed industrial malfeasance to continue unchecked, with the dumping of tons of chemical waste into the waterway of a small, rural, Indiana town. Spiking cancer and respiratory illnesses in the area have concerned residents for decades, but it is not until Broussard and her colleagues begin investigating that the scope of the political scheme is uncovered. As the truth emerges, the culprits know they’re in trouble, but rather than come clean they concoct plans to retain their toehold on power.

It’s a tense and well-wrought setup that involves a slew of people – including mafia hitmen – and numerous federal agencies. While the latter work in tandem, suffice it to say that the novel has a happy ending, and anyone needing an infusion of progressive populism – as well as an example of a politician with humility, integrity, and grit – will get a hefty dose.

What’s more, The Senator is a good, old-fashioned story with characters you can root for. The satisfaction of seeing social justice prevail and a romance rekindled makes the novel an enjoyable, fun read. Highly recommended.

The Senator by Maya Golden Bethany. Rising Action Publishing Company, April 2025.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Orbital by Samantha Harvey book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Orbit, Samantha Harvey’s Booker-winning novel, has almost no plot, choosing a more meditative approach instead. Six astronauts and cosmonauts circle around the Earth sixteen times in the course of the day, living aboard the international space station. There is a different mission launching on that day, one that is going to the moon, implying the demise of the ISS, as humanity looks further out to space. The six reflect on that development, but most of the book is a meditation on Earth, not on space.

One of the two events that occurs in the course of the day is that one of the astronauts—Chie, from Japan—receives word that her mother has died. She has a few moments where she deals with that grief, but not much more. The other event is the build up of a typhoon on Earth, as the six take pictures of it, so meteorologists on Earth can see how it’s developing. It turns into a super-typhoon, wiping out parts of small islands, but Harvey shows little of that destruction.

Instead, there are chapters devoted to reflections on the beauty of the Earth, as well as its ordinariness. There are reflections on the absence of borders as seen from space, implying that national divisions are Earth-bound, human-created problems; however, the narrator also points out that all of the environmental changes they can observe from space are political problems, that the supposed constructs have real effects.

Harvey explores these types of tensions throughout the novel, not settling for traditional views of how humanity is nothing more than a speck in the cosmos. Instead, she writes, “We matter greatly and not at all.” The view from space reminds readers that the Earth is valuable and that we should do all we can to protect it, even though, in the broader view, it will ultimately get subsumed by some cosmic event. Orbital is a celebration of the beauty of life now, even while admitting what the future will bring.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Grove Press, December 2023. Winner of the Booker Prize 2024.

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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites

Sponsored :: New Book :: Language Like Water

cover of Language Like Water by Nancy Gerber

Language Like Water: Poems, Poetry by Nancy Gerber

Finishing Line Press, December 2024

Language Like Water explores the conflicts, challenges, and connections in a daughter’s relationship with her mother over the span of a lifetime. The poems resonate with longing and struggle as the daughter seeks to understand and restore her complicated mother, an enigmatic figure who struggles with depression. Ultimately the daughter recognizes her own strengths as she acknowledges and inscribes moments and memories of sharing and connection.

Bisbing Books has this to say: “Language Like Water is a moving, deeply personal glimpse into the mother-daughter relationship. The complexity of this bond is explored through sharp, evocative imagery that digs deep into the emotional terrain of love, guilt, memory, and loss. There’s a sense that words carry weight far beyond their surface meaning. Read these poems.”

Book Review :: Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips

Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Jayne Anne Phillips’ latest novel, Night Watch, is set in and around the Civil War, as sections take place in 1864 and 1874, with an epilogue in 1883. However, very little of the novel actually occurs in what most readers would think of as the Civil War. There’s only one battle scene, and there is little mention of slavery. Instead, Phillips is interested in the effects of the war, not just on those who fought in it, but on those whose lives are more peripheral to it.

The plot follows Eliza and her daughter ConaLee, as they try to survive while their husband and father, respectively—whose name the reader doesn’t learn until near the end of the novel—is away fighting. They live in rural West Virginia, so they have ConaLee’s grandmother (of sorts, it’s complicated), Dearbhla, living nearby to help, but they are largely isolated otherwise. A Confederate soldier appears in the 1864 section, but his real effect only shows up in the 1874 sections of the novel, as he has taken over the house and family, forcing them to refer to him as Papa. He ultimately has Eliza institutionalized in the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, with ConaLee pretending to be her attendant.

The novel reminds the reader of the traumas that women endured, but also that they continue to endure, especially at the hands of men. Even in the best times of their life, Eliza and ConaLee are largely dependent on men and the decisions they make. Phillips shows the effect of that trauma—and the larger traumas of the war—through characters repeatedly having their names taken from them or having to change their names. At the asylum, for example, Eliza becomes Miss Janet, while ConaLee becomes Eliza Connolly; Eliza’s husband becomes John O’Shea for a time when he loses his memory of who he was. At one point in the novel, Phillips writes, “…the past is the present unrecognized.”

While Night Watch is clearly about the Civil War, it’s also about the lack of freedom and traumas women continue to endure, the present reality that so many are unable or unwilling to recognize.

Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips. Alfred A. Knopf, September 2023; Vintage, February 2025. Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites

Sponsored :: New Book :: The Silver Squad

cover of The Silver Squad by Marty Essen

The Silver Squad: Rebels with Wrinkles, Fiction by Marty Essen

Encante Press LLC, January 2025

The Bold, the Brave, and the Wrinkled: Retirement Just Got Rowdy!

Barry and Beth, high school sweethearts separated by time and circumstance, find themselves reunited at the Blue Loon Village senior living center in Minneapolis. Unwilling to settle into lives of boredom, the two become Silver Squad vigilantes and embark on an epic road trip across America. No one they meet will ever be the same!

“A smart, funny tale of a Good Samaritan crime spree.”—Kirkus Reviews (Recommended)

“[A] sparkling road-trip comedy of retiree crimefighters taking the U.S. by storm.”—BookLife by Publisher’s Weekly (Editor’s Pick)

“An original and fun read (think senior citizen versions of Thelma & Louise) from start to finish, The Silver Squad: Rebels With Wrinkles by author Marty Essen is a deftly crafted and extraordinary story that will have a very special appeal to readers with an interest in inherently fascinating novels that imaginatively blend later-in-life romances with elements of an action/adventure.”—Midwest Book Review

“A delightful mix of observational humor, introspection, and respectful affection for the older generation, The Silver Squad: Rebels With Wrinkles is a scenic road trip through the country with a gratifying destination.”—Indies Today (5 Stars)

Book Review :: Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls

Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

In her debut graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts, Tessa Hulls tries to understand and explain—though, most of all, feel—the intergenerational trauma she inherited from her grandmother, Sun Yi, and mother, Rose. She knows what she experienced as a child, as her grandmother suffered from a mental illness that left her obsessed with writing her story, unable to communicate otherwise, leading Rose not only to devote her energies to caring for Sun Yi, but also to overprotecting Tessa to prevent her from suffering the same fate.

Hulls spends much of the work using research to dig into Sun Yi’s life in China, showing how and why she had to flee during the Maoist revolution. Sun Yi was a journalist who became famous for writing a memoir about her time before she escaped China, fleeing to Hong Kong. However, the trauma of her repeated interrogations before she left the country leads to her mental illness, leaving her uncommunicative except for her constant writing, which becomes less and less intelligible as she ages.

Hulls also spends time talking to her mother, trying to understand how her mother coped with Sun Yi’s struggles, but also why Rose and Tessa were unable to communicate with each other. Hulls works to understand how Rose wanted emotional reactions from Tessa that she was unable to provide, leading Tessa to ultimately leave home as soon as she was able. In fact, she ends up living in Antarctica and Alaska, at various times, putting as much space between her and her mother as possible. A note to readers, as well: Tessa struggles with self-harm for a period of time, though she does not spend much time on that part of her life.

Hulls’ work on this book—ten years in the making—to face the ghosts that have haunted her family for three generations, is an attempt to work through the traumas rather than avoid them. The work is artistically and narratively dense, as Hulls has much to convey to help her and the reader understand the years of suffering, but that work is worth it for all involved. Readers will leave with a clearer understanding not just of Tessa and her family, but the effects that intergenerational trauma can have on those who have no first-hand knowledge of the suffering that began it all.

Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls. MCDxFSG Books, March 2024.

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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites

Editor’s Choice :: Corn Dance: Inspired First American Cuisine

Corn Dance: Inspired First American Cuisine by Loretta Barrett Oden with Beth Dooley book cover image

Corn Dance: Inspired First American Cuisine by Loretta Barrett Oden with Beth Dooley
The University of Oklahoma Press, October 2023

Corn Dance: Inspired First American Cuisine tells the story of Loretta’s journey and of the dishes she created along the way. Alongside recipes that combine the flavors of her Oklahoma upbringing and Indigenous heritage with the Southwest flair of her Santa Fe restaurant, Loretta offers entertaining and edifying observations about ingredients and cooking culture. What kind of quail might turn up in your vicinity, for instance; what to do with piñon nuts, sumac, or nopales (cactus paddles); when to add a bundle of pine needles or a small branch of cedar to a braise: these and many practical words of wisdom about using the fruits of the forest, stream, or plain, accompany Loretta’s insights on everything from the dubious provenance of fry bread to the Potawatomi legend behind the Three Sisters—corn, beans, and squash, the namesake ingredients of Three Sisters and Friends Salad, served at Corn Dance Café and now at Thirty Nine Restaurant at First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City, where Oden is the Chef Consultant.

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 Books December 2024

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash woman reading a book

Turning the calendar to a new year is also a great time to be turning the pages on some new books! To help you achieve that goal, check out our monthly round-up of New Books. Each month we post the new and forthcoming titles NewPages selects from small, independent, university, and alternative presses as well as author-published titles and recent reviews.

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.

[Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash]

Book Review :: Clear by Carys Davies

Clear by Carys Davies book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Apart from the writing, very little in Carys Davies’s novel is actually clear, as she sets her story in two historical upheavals. First, there is the Great Disruption in the Scottish Church, when roughly a third of the ministers rebelled against the system of patronage. Second, the Clearances led to landowners removing entire communities of the poor in rural areas from their homes, as they sought to profit from farming, raising cattle (then mainly sheep), a reshaping of the class and literal landscape that occurred from the mid-eighteenth century well into the nineteenth.

John Ferguson, the main character, finds himself caught in both of these significant changes, as he leaves the Scottish Church to become a member of the Free Church, which doesn’t yet have buildings or an infrastructure or means to pay ministers. Thus, he accepts a job that forces him to travel hundreds of miles to a remote island, one that Davies creates as existing somewhere between Shetland and Norway. He has to remove the one remaining inhabitant, Ivar, of that island for a landlord named Lowrie.

However, before he can present Ivar with a letter informing him of the removal, as John doesn’t speak his language, John falls and seriously injures himself, leading to Ivar’s nursing him back to health, unaware of John and his mission. They develop a deep friendship, as John works to learn Ivar’s language, and Ivar realizes how much he has missed community. While John is there, his wife Mary has begun a journey to bring him home, as she fears for his life, given what has happened to other messengers of such news.

Davies’s novel is brief, and the writing is spare and straightforward, beautiful because of that concision. While she sets her characters in an important historical time, her focus is on their relationships with one another, especially how language can bring people together, even when they can’t quite communicate. She reminds readers that true community is not one without conflict, but where one can develop their true selves, even when those don’t fit the expectations society has devised to keep people in line, especially during times of historic change.

Clear by Carys Davies. Scribner, April 2024.

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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrite

Book Review :: Fire Exit by Morgan Talty

Fire Exit by Morgan Talty book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The title of Morgan Talty’s debut novel, Fire Exit, might give the impression that the protagonist Charles’s life is on fire, and he needs to escape it. That would give Charles too much agency and too much urgency. However, it’s true that his life is not going well and has not been going well for quite some time.

There are two events that have left him estranged from those he cares about, as well as from himself. First, his mother holds him responsible for his step-father’s death, and he doesn’t seem inclined to correct that assumption. The reader is never clear on what happened, given that the story is from Charles’s vantage point, but the guilt Charles feels is real, as is the distance from his mother. He reconnects with her, but only as she’s losing her memory and her grasp of reality.

Second, he has a house across the river from where his daughter, Elizabeth, grew up with Mary and Roger. Mary is her mother, and Elizabeth knows Roger as her father, as they never told Elizabeth about Charles, her biological father. When Mary found out she was pregnant, she left Charles, as she wanted to raise Elizabeth as a Penobscot on the reservation, so Elizabeth needed a certain level of Indigenous blood. Charles is white, even though he grew up on the reservation with his mother and step-father, who was Penobscot.

Given that much of the novel relates Charles’s feeling stuck in his life, there’s not much of a plot propelling the story forward. Charles checks on his mother, watches Elizabeth from a distance, and spends time with his friend Bobby (who spends most of his time drinking, even though Charles is in AA). Charles spends much of that time considering taking an action that could change the lives of many of the people he knows. Like in most people’s lives, not much happens in Charles’s life, but characters develop, and life moves slowly forward until it lurches ahead, leaving people wondering where it’s gone.

Fire Exit by Morgan Talty. Tin House, June 2024.

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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrite

Book Review :: Pine Soot Tendon Bone by Radha Marcum

Pine Soot Tendon Bone by Radha Marcum book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Dear Reader, the poems of Pine Soot Tendon Bone, Radha Marcum’s second full-length poetry collection and the winner of The Word Works’s Washington Prize, “sing harmonies / to complicate your discontent” with public health, gun violence, and ecological degradation—the evidence at the crime scene and the stratum of prolonged grief “forcing us all off / center” in our cacophonic contemporary lives.

“When the semi-automatic facts rushed in,” when we entered a “Plague Year,” when a valley is “plundered, then / plowed… [and] divided / into… clone homes,” we have need of a poet as attentive to “sorrow” as to “tenderness.” Radha Marcum is such a poet. She acknowledges “worry” at “the fate / of glacier lilies” and “recognize[s] / abundance when it is offered.”

By combining a lyric attention fine as “red silt” with an intellect as “sharp [as cholla cactus] spines,” Marcum is “alert in the juxtaposition.” Her poems “mother stillness / even as they shiver.”

Like a Japanese Sumi-e artist using black ink, made from “pine, soot, tendon, bone,” to make a painting on contrasting white paper, Marcum’s “ink-marks” are meditations on what “traverses merciless spaces” while “looking for … respite, too.”

When a “wildfire haze… / peppers the membranes of our eyes,” Marcum reminds us to hear the “air singing in the redwoods / whose seeds require / / a germinating fire.” By facing what is “irretrievable,” Radha Marcum’s poems also show us what “survived” “the dark / mulch of [our] days.” In Pine Soot Tendon Bone, it is “tenderness” that proves fire-resistant and transforming.

Pine Soot Tendon Bone by Radha Marcum. The Word Works, June 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: The Burning Heart of the World by Nancy Kricorian

The Burning Heart of the World by Nancy Kricorian book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

The complex legacies of violence are central to Nancy Kricorian’s spare and poetic new novel, The Burning Heart of the World. The 15-year-long civil war in Lebanon (1975-1990) and its impact on a small Armenian Christian community in and around Beirut forms the backdrop of this searing tale. Fighting is ever-present.

Nonetheless, the conflict remains enigmatic, perhaps because the book’s narrator, Vera, is a teenage girl more interested in spending time with her friends than she is in understanding the nuances of politics. Still, near-constant bombings, blackouts, and shootings take a toll on Vera and her family, and as the conflict rages the adults decide that it is time to leave Lebanon – a move that necessitates parting from a beloved family member who’d survived the Armenian genocide in the early years of the 20th century. The impact of this upheaval is masterfully woven into Vera’s coming-of-age story, and the resultant separation from friends and family – coupled with the residue of having lived in a war zone – complicate Vera’s adjustment to her new life in the United States.

But this unfolds slowly. In fact, for many years Vera is seemingly fine. Then, decades after leaving her birthplace, on a clear, sunny September day in 2001, the Twin Towers fell, triggering Vera’s long-repressed memories of wartime Beirut. Kricorian’s account of Vera’s unraveling is evocative and powerful, unsentimental but hard-hitting. There is emotional nuance here, and many brief but perceptive observations.

Published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the start of the Lebanese Civil War, The Burning Heart of the World is a beautiful, sad, and timely look at the aftermath of war and its lasting impact on survivors. Highly recommended.

The Burning Heart of the World by Nancy Kricorian. Red Hen Press, April 2025. Pre-order is available.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North by Michelle Adams

The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North, Michelle Adams book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

Seventy years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision was issued, public schools in most of the United States remain as racially and economically segregated as they were in 1954. In fact, as legal scholar Michelle Adams writes in The Containment, “since 1990, segregation has increased in every part of the country…Not only that, the school districts that serve nonwhite children receive far less financial support than those that serve mainly white children.” The difference, she writes, amounts to $2226 less per child. As a result, schools in low-income neighborhoods – the lion’s share of them filled with children of color – are more dilapidated and have fewer resources than those in higher-income areas.

These inequities could have been rectified had the 1974 Supreme Court decision in Milliken v. Bradley been different.

The Containment provides an exhaustive deconstruction of Milliken and focuses on the inexorable link between housing segregation and segregated schools. Furthermore, Adams convincingly argues that the only way to end “separate and unequal” education is to ensure that students of all races, religions, addresses, and creeds study together. Numerous plans — including busing and creating large, integrated K-12 Educational Parks — were presented in multiple trial iterations.

But SCOTUS scuttled these approaches, finding the plans invalid.

At issue was whether school segregation policies were deliberately developed or were unorchestrated. Despite reams of evidence documenting redlining and restrictive housing covenants, SCOTUS found that the city of Detroit – and by extension other locales – had not intentionally kept Black and White students apart.

The upshot? “Educational apartheid” for both Black and White kids. As Adams concludes, “the highest court in the land told the nation that suburban school district lines can be used as fences to exclude Blacks.” And most have done just that.

The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North by Michelle Adams. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, January 2025.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: Ojo en Celo by Margarita Pintado Burgos

Ojo en Celo by Margarita Pintado Burgos book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Margarita Pintado Burgos’s Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat, adroitly translated by Alejandra Quintana Arocho, is a meditation on vision, “Haunted by a slow want” to see the “glistening / from its own / beyond.”

Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat opens “on the brink of drought” with a figure who “put[s] forth the idea of rain before” “see[ing] it rain” and who wishes to “Allow oneself to rain.” Pintado Burgos’s use of the infinitive as a subject suggests the position of the figure who is seeing. It is not the seer, but the seeing and the seen that takes precedence. This is “The mystery of form” whose “forms resemble / other forms” Pintado Burgos pulls “hard into the pupils” to confront “opacity” and “seek brightness.”

Pintado Burgos’s seeker is a woman, “walking, as if there were a clear path,” through exiled and sublime spaces, “earnestly examining the makeup of days.” She asks, “What is an event?”: “Does the woman who crosses the street holding her skirt down, fearing the wind, constitute an event?” And, by extension, the poet also examines the line between being a vision and having a vision.

“No one sees her coming, but she arrives.” In her poems, Pintado Burgos stands before “a body of water” as if “in front of sadness.” This “woman / who had come from so far away,” “persisted, separating… / the vision from the retina / to look at [her]self without mirrors / broken but whole.”

In Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat Margarita Pintado Burgos “contort[s] all of [her]self” and empties herself out like “the sky empties itself out” to confront “Writing as an ailment of surfaces” and illuminate an “expansion” of vision. Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat rains, reins, and reigns!

Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat by Margarita Pintado Burgos, translated by Alejandra Quintana Arocho. Winner of the 2023 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets. The University of Arizona Press, February 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

For those fans of Oliver Burkeman’s previous work Four Thousand Weeks, his latest book, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts, may feel a bit redundant. Burkeman’s overall argument is the same: we only have a limited amount of time on this planet, so, despite what those who try to craft “life hacks” preach, there aren’t any tricks to change that cold reality. Thus, instead of spending time and energy trying to work in a few more minutes here and there in the misguided belief that people have the ability to do everything, Burkeman contends that we should focus on using our limited time doing what we love and what gives our life meaning.

However, he has updated some of the research from his previous book, and he formats this one in a package that’s easier to access for those who are coming to his work for the first time. In Meditations for Mortals, he divides the book into four sections—Being Finite; Taking Action; Letting Go; Showing Up—for the four weeks he suggests readers devote to the book. Each section, then, has seven brief (usually around five or six pages) readings moving through each of those ideas. Readers can follow that plan, as I tried to do for about a fourth of the book, or read the book straight through in a few sittings, which is how I ended up finishing it, and the book works just as well either way.

Burkeman positions his book as a type of anti-self-help, as he doesn’t want to try to convince readers that they can make a few changes and their lives will be perfect. He knows how unreasonable and unattainable that approach is. Instead, he wants readers to see their limits, then make changes to live more enjoyable, meaningful lives. His argument is compelling, and he brings in a number of resources to help readers take those steps. He knows they’re not easy, but they can make change feel much more doable. As his subtitle says, he wants readers to embrace their limitations and make time for what counts.

Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts by Oliver Burkeman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2024.

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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrite

Book Review :: Invisible Lives by Cristalle Smith

Invisible Lives by Cristalle Smith book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In Invisible Lives, Cristalle Smith writes “to offer / what [she] can” from the intergenerational trauma of her and her family’s lives which intersected with abuse of power and violence in the home, between intimate partners, and sexual abuse of children by adults. As the poet speaks from the “aching confusion” of her past, she breaks her family’s silence on these taboo subjects and those often cruelly adjacent such as poverty, homelessness, addiction, and suicide.

As Smith chronicles her life from a young girl to becoming a mother, she necessarily engages with gender — “When you’re a girl, you take things into you.” Memory, that “conduit / in between” experience and time, “lives in [her] body.” “It’s funny the things you remember.” And it is telling.

As she boldly shares what she remembers, Smith’s writing moves between the extension of the sentence and the brevity of the line, to get at the tensions between growing “up Always / on / the / run” and trying to “get the [life she] wished for.”

Moving from the prairies of Alberta to the Everglades of Florida with stints elsewhere in between, Smith’s restless writings chronicle lessons on how to drive and live along the way, transforming her traumatic past by singing the Blues of her survival.

Invisible Lives by Cristalle Smith. University of Calgary Press, July 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Editor’s Choice :: Teach Truth

Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education by Jesse Hagopain book cover image

Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education by Jesse Hagopain
Haymarket Books, January 2025

In just the last few years, scores of states have introduced or passed legislation that would require teachers to lie to students about structural racism and other forms of oppression. Books have been cut from curricula and pulled from school library shelves. Teachers have been fired and threatened with discipline.

Long-time organizer, writer, and high school teacher Jesse Hagopian argues in Teach Truth that our democracy is at stake, not to mention the annihilation of entire systems of knowledge that challenge the status quo. Hagopian explores the origins, philosophy, and manifestations of these attacks, and the Right’s effort to regulate knowledge as an attempt to maintain its power over the American capitalist system, now and into the future.

Yet the struggle for a liberatory education has a long history in the United States, from the days when it was illegal for Black people to be literate, to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, to Black Lives Matter at School today. Teachers, students, and their allies are already building a movement – in the classroom, on campus, and in the streets – to defend antiracist education.

Book Review :: Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive by Jennifer Tseng

Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive by Jennifer Tseng book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In her third full-length poetry collection, Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive, Jennifer Tseng includes the reader in an epistolary exchange between her and her father. Reading the lyric poems, constructed in part from letters written by Tseng’s father, is as intimate as reading over the poet’s shoulder.

The epistles/poems bring to the fore the “inherent dilemma” within human communication. Despite the impossible and the obdurate, the poems also reveal a humble striving for connection and understanding between parent and child. This parent and child reach toward each other through the challenges of speaking different languages—English and Mandarin—across oceans. Every letter is a “riddle,” “contradiction,” or a “code [they] sent back & forth.”

Tseng is, and therefore her readers are, situated both “Outside [her father’s] letters” and “inside” them, providing a near real-time experience of the poet rereading her father’s letters and writing back to him. “The letters’ spell: / What’s missing.” The poems then are part reconstruction of memory and completion of correspondence while always reaching “farther” for “father.”

In a book “of mourning,” Jennifer Tseng “sit[s] in her father’s Shanghai apartment & eat[s] / His letters.” She “swallows the underworld” of “regret,” digests incoherence, and arrives at a “Plush unity. / A father never ends.”

Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive by Jennifer Tseng. University of Massachusetts Press, April 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby

Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby book cover image

Review by Aiden Hunt

Fans of literary criticism and poetry have likely heard the buzz surrounding poet-scholar Ryan Ruby’s Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry, published by Seven Stories Press in November 2024. While I’m familiar with that feeling of disappointment when a hot new book just doesn’t live up to the hype, I was pleasantly surprised to find this book meeting, if not exceeding, the praise already being heaped upon it.

Ruby fills his epic poem about the history of poetry with plenty of footnotes—also presented as verse—explicating clever allusions to moments in the history of poetry and poetics through more detailed asides and famous quotes. With the exception of the prose prologue titled, “Razo” and the epilogue final section, “Tornada,” written in tercets, every other page contains footnotes on the right juxtaposed with one to twenty-nine lines of poetry on the preceding page, weaving text and subtext together in a feat that recalled to my mind Junot Diaz’s award-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Readers uninterested in footnotes and looking up literary quotes in various languages including French, Mandarin, Latin, and Ancient Greek might find the book not to their tastes. However, while this poem may be a challenge to consume, Ruby’s witty, often cheeky allusions to linguistic history pay intellectual dividends for the effort. First thought, best thought: While the subject may be too specialized to interest all readers, Context Collapse is educational, entertaining, and edifying, particularly for poetry enthusiasts.

Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry by Ryan Ruby. Seven Stories Press, November 2024.

Reviewer bio: Aiden Hunt is a writer, editor, and literary critic based in the Philadelphia, PA suburbs. He is the creator, editor, and publisher of the Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, and his reviews have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Fugue, On the Seawall, Jacket2, and The Adroit Journal, among others.

New Book :: Unit 29: Writing from Parchman Prison

Unit 29: Writing from Parchman Prison book cover image

Unit 29: Writing from Parchman Prison
VOX Press, December 2024

Unit 29: Writing from Parchman Prison is a collection of writings from Mississippi inmates housed in the infamously brutal Unit 29 at Mississippi State Penitentiary, known as Parchman Farm. The book is the culmination of three years of working with incarcerated students through VOX’s prison outreach program, Prison Writes Initiative. Comprised of writings from over thirty inmates, this collection delves into the after effects of the infamous December 2019 riots through April of 2020, and how the humans housed there deal with the conditions as they try to survive one of the country’s most notorious prison facilities. The collection is not a comfortable literary work but rather a cry for help from deep within a monstrous and insatiable beast known as Unit 29, Parchman.

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 Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Ta-Nehisi Coates addresses his most recent book, The Message, to a group of students enrolled in his writing class in 2022, calling them “comrades,” as he believes they all have an obligation to tell the truth through journalism. His first, brief essay—almost an introduction—provides his background and why he became interested in journalism, drawing on a Sports Illustrated story, as well as references to Shakespeare, Rakim, Audre Lorde, and Frederick Douglass. His father also helped point him in the direction of using research to understand important questions.

The rest of the book centers around three trips Coates took: to Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine. In Senegal, he visits places important in the sale of enslaved people, coming to understand that part of that story is myth—not the inhumanity, unfortunately, but the idea that there is a particular place that encapsulates all of that inhumanity, or that the inhumanity came only through colonization. He visits South Carolina to support a teacher who had allegedly violated a state law passed against teaching “critical race theory”; during a school board meeting he learns there are allies, as well as opponents.

The trip to Palestine is the longest section of the book, as Coates spends five days in Palestine for a literary festival and five days on the Israeli side. It is this section where Coates has his most dramatic epiphany, as he once compared the plight of the Israelis to formerly enslaved African Americans when he was making the argument for reparations. He sees, though, that Israel has now become an apartheid state, that those whom Germany once oppressed have now become the oppressor of others. Coates goes even further to show readers how Germany took the idea of race-based oppression from the United States and how Israel ultimately aligned themselves with South Africa.

Behind each of his trips, though, is the idea of what stories don’t get told. Whether that’s what he didn’t know about Senegal, what lawmakers in South Carolina were trying to keep students from learning, or how the media covers the oppression in Palestine—especially telling is that almost no major news outlet publishes work by people of Palestinian descent—Coates wants readers to dig deeper and find out what they’re not hearing.

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates. One World, October 2024.

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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrite

Book Review :: Colored Television by Danzy Senna

Colored Television by Danzy Senna book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Colored Television, Danzy Senna’s latest novel, follows Jane, an English professor working on her second novel—centered around the idea of the mulatto (Jane’s term; she is mixed-race)—for a decade. She now needs to complete that novel as her sabbatical is ending, and she needs the publication to earn tenure. She and her husband Lenny—an artist who only produces art he believes in, whether that earns him any money or not, and it’s more often not—along with their two children, have moved from one living situation to another over that time.

They begin this novel having moved into a fabulous house owned by Brett, one of Jane’s friends from graduate school, though Jane believes he has sold out by becoming a screenwriter and script doctor. Jane, however, begins to follow him down that path, as her novel draft, which she finally finishes, is a dead end, according to her publisher and agent. She emails Brett’s agent, who then puts her in touch with Hampton Ford, a television producer who is interested in producing diverse content.

Without telling Lenny, Jane begins meeting with Hampton to discuss a series that explores a family of mixed-race characters, much like Jane’s, in a sitcom setting. Jane is enamored of the life Brett has, and she consistently envisions her family living that life, as she believes she just needs one break to escape the supposed poverty she lives in.

While Senna is certainly exploring race in her novel, she equally critiques class, especially the greed that can drive one to ignore all that one already has in life, as Jane seeks to live a life that Lenny and the children have no interest in. While the ending of the novel is a bit pat, the questions that Senna raises are anything but.

Colored Television by Danzy Senna. Riverhead Books, September 2024.

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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrite

Book Review :: Airplane Mode by Shahnaz Habib

Airplane Mode by Shahnaz Habib book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Shahnaz Habib’s subtitle—An Irreverent History of Travel—is an apt description of her book, as she is, indeed, critical of what most people believe about travel and travel writing. For example, her opening chapter interrogates how guidebooks shape our views not only of where to go, but what to notice when we’re in those places, often leaving out the colonizing empires that lay behind those sites.

She discusses “passport privilege” in her second chapter, contrasting her experience trying to travel on an Indian passport with her husband, who has the much more desirable blue U.S. passport. She goes beyond that idea, though, to explore how passports began as a way of limiting travel, making it clear who gets in and who doesn’t.

In other chapters, she discusses railway systems and how the government and companies often took the land for the lines from Indigenous people groups, ignoring the treaties in the name of progress and tourism. She also explores nature and the outdoors, especially how many people groups—especially people of color—have a lack of access to those spaces.

Habib draws on her family and her hometown to examine why some towns begin to cater to tourists, while others, such as where her family moved, do not, as well as why some people love to travel, while others—like her father—do not. Rather than creating a clear dichotomy, though, she reminds readers that her father traveled through news and books, becoming more aware of the wider world than others who had visited countries across the globe.

Shahnaz Habib doesn’t merely want readers to question the benefits of tourism, as she’s a tourist herself, she admits. Instead, she wants to help them see behind the scenes of the entire idea of tourism, recognizing the people and cultures pushed to the margins, mainly so people with more coveted passports can believe they understand a world they haven’t yet begun to see.

Airplane Mode by Shahnaz Habib. Catapult, December 2024.

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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrite

New Books November 2024

Image by myfriso from Pixabay

No matter where you are, no matter the weather, the idea of hibernating with a stack of good books to read sounds enticing right about now. To help you achieve that goal, check out the November 2024 New Books Received.

Each month we post the new and forthcoming titles NewPages has received from small, independent, university, and alternative presses as well as author-published titles. If you follow our blog or a subscribe to our weekly newsletter, you can see featured titles with descriptions and links to their blog posts.

For publishers or authors looking to be featured on our blog and social media, please visit our FAQ page.

[Image by myfriso from Pixabay]

Book Review :: Playground by Richard Powers

Playground by Richard Powers book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The obvious playground in Richard Powers’ newest novel is an online platform Todd Keane developed, where users can submit comments people vote on for electronic currency, of sorts. He worked it out shortly after graduating college, which he attended with his best friend, Rafi Young, who wants to be a poet. The title also describes their love of games, in general, as they bond over chess, then Go, and even their relationship is a type of competitive game.

However, the ocean is also a type of playground, as Evie Beaulieu learns early in her life when her father uses her to test an early type of scuba equipment, leading her to spend as much time as she can underwater. She falls in love with the way the undersea animals play with one another or even by themselves. Unfortunately, humans also see the ocean as their playground, one more space they can colonize, disrupting and destroying the lives of those who were already there.

Ina Aroita’s life reinforces that idea, as she grew up on naval bases throughout the Pacific, but ends up on Makatea in French Polynesia, an island that phosphate mining had ravaged years before. Evie and Rafi are also there by the end of the novel, and a group of investors wants to use Makatea as a launching pad for man-made islands that exist outside of national jurisdictions (and, thus, regulations).

The narration moves between Todd’s telling his story to an unnamed listener—though the reader will ultimately discover who he’s talking to—and the stories of the three other characters until they all intersect on Makatea near the end of the novel. Powers also pulls a narrative trick, leaving the reader to wonder if the novel itself is one more playground, this time one that works for good.

In the same way that Powers helped readers see forests differently in Overstory, it’s clear he wants readers to wonder at the world beneath the sea, as he critiques the ways humanity has actively damaged oceans and the lives within. This time, though, he wants to remind readers that novelists can play, as well as preach.

Playground by Richard Powers. W.W. Norton, September 2024.

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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrite

Book Review :: My Marriage Sabbatical: A Memoir of Solo Travel and Lasting Love by Leah Fisher

My Marriage Sabbatical: A Memoir of Solo Travel and Lasting Love by Leah Fisher book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

By the time psychotherapist Leah Fisher was in her early 60s, she was sick of eating dinner alone while her husband, Charley, worked late into the evening. She was also sick of his reluctance to take an extended vacation. But rather than stew in resentment or anger, she presented him with a carefully thought-out plan. If he couldn’t envision taking a year-long trip – a real break from their life in the San Francisco Bay – she’d go alone.

As she presented it, the idea was more of a negotiation than an ultimatum. After all, Fisher still loved Charley and wanted to remain married. Nonetheless, she was ready for something new, an adventure. As the pair talked, they came up with an arrangement in which Fisher would travel for several months and then return home for a week or two. They also broached sexual infidelity and developed ground rules for what would, and would not, be allowed. Moreover, Charley arranged his occasional vacations to meet her in some of the seven countries – Bali, Costa Rica, Colombia, Cuba, Guatemala, Java, and Mexico – she visited.

Fisher’s travels – staying in each location for a month or longer – allowed her to learn Spanish and dance salsa, all while maintaining the spark between her and her mate. It also allowed her to contribute to the communities she visited. Indeed, Fisher moved beyond tourism and volunteered in numerous capacities, running a short-term women’s group and translating and adapting a workbook, first created for American hurricane survivors, to help kids process their emotions after a mudslide destroyed their homes.

Deeply felt and emotionally honest, Fisher spent 16 years writing and revising My Marriage Sabbatical. As she and Charley continually alter their relationship, they model lived feminism and compromise. The result is wanderlust-inducing – the stuff of dreams and daring.

My Marriage Sabbatical: A Memoir of Solo Travel and Lasting Love by Leah Fisher. She Writes Press, January 2025.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: Humble Pie by Pat LaMarche

Humble Pie by Pat LaMarche book cover image

Reviewed by Eleanor J. Bader

Journalist and longtime social justice activist Pat LaMarche’s latest book, Humble Pie, defies categorization. Yes, it deconstructs the horror of hunger in the US. And yes, it tells poignant stories of people – the housed, the unhoused, and the doubled-or-tripled up – who rely on the country’s nearly 100,000 food pantries to feed themselves and their families. And yes, it showcases the inadequacies of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) programs. But Humble Pie is more than an expose about people’s struggles. The book also sheds light on the cruel and arbitrary policies that govern both public and private social welfare programs and highlights the false narrative that continually smears low-income folks as undeserving, lazy, or morally lax.

Moreover, the book blurs the line between memoir – LaMarche’s account of the many years she’s worked to ameliorate hunger and homelessness – and cookbook. It’s a fascinating amalgam: Vivid anecdotes from homeless and formerly homeless individuals are presented alongside recipes for the low-cost meals they’ve created (or sometimes adapted). In addition, numerous budget-friendly recipes from British chef Archie, The Pie Guy, a former restauranteur, give the book heft.

“Food is more than sustenance,” LaMarche writes. “It is a form of communication, an expression of love.” Indeed, Humble Pie is a heaping serving of all of this. As a how-to guide, Humble Pie will help poor individuals and families survive. But the book can also be read as a policy guide for lawmakers, social service workers, and people who simply want to make a difference in the lives of their neighbors.

As LaMarche reports, approximately nine million people worldwide die of starvation annually. The US is not exempt: Anti-hunger researchers at Feeding America note that 40 million Americans are food insecure. “Starving children hamstring a country’s ability to flourish on the world stage,” she concludes.

Wouldn’t it be nice if politicians remembered this?

All proceeds from the sale of the book will benefit anti-poverty organizations in Pennsylvania.

Humble Pie by Pat LaMarche, Illustrated by Jeremy Ruby. Charles Bruce Foundation, November 2024.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: Ordinary Entanglement by Melissa Dickey

Ordinary Entanglement by Melissa Dickey book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In Ordinary Entanglement, Melissa Dickey speaks of the “harnessed unharnessed bound unbound” particular to a woman’s private life as mother, daughter, and lover and her reckoning with “power / and deception” in political society, “where marks are made.” But she “must be careful not to see everything / through a wound.”

This is a challenging endeavor for a mother when she realizes she has “brought / [her] children to [her] childhood”; when “betting on climate change [is a] good bet”; when the destruction of “historic Black neighborhoods” makes way for an interstate highway.

Dickey’s attention to what is unfolding internally — the thought of buying a “four-dollar coffee”— in response to what the poet encounters on the street — “people living / in tents”— is the entanglement of life. In other words, the phenomenon of “getting used to getting used to / a feeling [she doesn’t] want to get used to.”

The poet comes to recognize the plain fact that “everything we do we do at some cost.” It may be true that “people / have reasons for doing bad things / / but a reason doesn’t make the thing good.” And this is only one side of the reckoning, “Another knock / at the same door.” Dickey also aims to reckon with “goodness,” to “try to say ‘blessed’ and mean it.”

As she learns “how to live threaded / how to live tethered,” Melissa Dickey “disperse[s] what nags / let[s] a prayer unravel.”

Ordinary Entanglement by Melissa Dickey. CSU Poetry Center, October 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: EtC by Laura Mullen

EtC by Laura Mullen book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In Laura Mullen’s EtC, “each good lyric [is] dislodged from its place,” making way for “each new definition” of “what to let matter, and how much, and when.” What matters to Mullen is what is “Reserved for advertising”—the female body, “Elsie the C,” corporate power, and the “Industrialization of America’s / food supply.” “[T]here are / Always more cows,” but “repetition could lead to estrangement.”

The collection’s title, EtC, doubles as the abbreviation for the Latin phrase et cetera and as an anacronym for “Elsie the Cow.” “It’s a matter / Of emphasis.” Or “repetition could lead to” a narrator “uncertain, potentially mistaken, exposed as unreliable.” “Nothing in this book / should be confused / with the actual.”

What is in this book is “an arrangement / Of grievances,” “a collection of cuts” related to “a mostly hostile country. America. A land where you’re expected to pay, one way or the other for intimacy.” Between “the world that is / and exhibition,” Mullen is “trying to make the word [milk] come back to sense” as nourishment and eschew extraction.

Whether what is “Measured in exchange” is “Meat or milk” or a woman’s body that “became another border to be crossed,” Laura Mullen’s EtC asks “The most urgent questions facing us.” The poet leaves the reader contorting the “Sacred, scared, / Scarred.”

EtC by Laura Mullen. Solid Objects, November 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: Susto by Tommy Archuleta

Susto by Tommy Archuleta book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Before reading any poem in Tommy Archuleta’s Susto, the reader is situated by Eliseo “Cheo” Torres’s definition of “susto”: “1. shock; 2. magical fright.” That definition suggests the lyric, elegiac, surrealist, and fabulist poems to follow. The poems, presented in monostich, couplets, and tercets, fit the relationships central to Archuletta’s poems, the speaker-son’s relationship with himself and his relationship with his mother and father. The lack of poem titles has the effect of creating poetic continuity and expressing the continuousness of a son’s love for his parents and grief over their deaths.

Archuletta’s are personal poems, a “love / / letter to suffering” that he and his family have withstood. “Say little knives / litter the ground of every life / / we survive.” As the speaker-son “weep[s] / with” his life and “speak[s] to” his parent’s relationship he gains perspective, writing “light is light no matter how / dark things get.” This perspective is necessary to “survive [on] this side” and “keep singing.”

Each of the collection’s four sections contains one or two “Remedio[s],” botanical-based treatments sharing traditional knowledge for healing both spirit and body. The speaker-son is explicit about “suffering” caused by “pain / god and sometimes fever” that calls to be healed. The origins of some of the suffering remain private and mysterious—“after what happened / happened”—but nonetheless are felt. There is a sense that the speaker-son most desires to break out of an imprisonment of self, “the wolf you / the crow you / the weary supplicant.”

To break free, Tommy Archuleta is beseeching “of God,” “the ancients,” and of mother:

“Singing as
if I’ve always known

that hearing is the last
sense to go”

Tommy Archuleta’s songs “for you me and the ghosts / / inside us” all are those of a curandero and therefore spirit medicine.

Susto by Tommy Archuleta. The Center for Literary Publishing, April 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.