Fiction

• Fatima and the Sons of Abraham, Val Bonacci, self-published

• Shirtless Men Drink Free, Dwaine Rieves, Leapfolio

Nonfiction

• Edible Wild Plants and Useful Herbs, Jim Meuninck, Falcon Guides

• The First Writings of Napoleon Hill: Truthful Living, Jeffrey Gitomer, Amazon Publishing

• Generating Business with Referrals without Asking, Stacey Brown Randall, Morgan James Publishing

• How to Become a Digital Leader: A Roadmap to Success, Cathy C. Smith, Amazon Digital

• One Pill Makes You Stronger: The Drug that Scorched My Soul, Jill Stegman, Transformation Media Books

• Tuesdays with Jack, Pauline Daniel, Granville Island Publishing

• What Self-Made Millionaires Do That Most People Don’t, Ann Marie Sabath, Career Press

• Where the Colors Blend, Stephen Copeland, Morgan James Publishing

• You Can Invest Like a Stock Market Pro, James Pattersenn Jr., Trilogy Publishing Group

Poetry

• Hungry Words, R. Bremner, Alien Buddha Press

• I was the girl with the moon-shaped face, Heather Lang Cassera, Zeitgeist Press

• Revealing Self in Pictures and Words, Tom Taylor, Eye Point Press

• So Be It, Ralph Culver, WolfGang Press

Children's/YA Lit

• Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide: Volume 5, Edited by Sean and Corie Weaver, Dreaming Robot Press

Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Rae Armantrout is at once a most intimate and coolly calculating poet. Her language is unexpected yet exact, playing off the collective sense that the shifting ground of daily reality may be a warning of imminent systemic collapse. While there are glimmers here of what remains of “the natural world,” the poet confesses the human failings, personal and societal, that have led to its devastation. She leaves us wondering if the American Dream may be a nightmare from which we can’t awaken. Sometimes funny, sometimes alarming, the poems in Wobble play peek-a-boo with doom.

The interrelated short prose pieces in Ben Berman’s Then Again explore a life outside of chronological order, bounce back and forth between foreign adventures and domestic routines. One moment we’re in a Mommy and Me yoga class, the next we’re gutting a goat in rural Zimbabwe. As much a meditation on language as a coming to terms with middle age, these stories navigate the distance between words and worlds. And yet whether getting chased by wild dogs through the alleyways of Kathmandu or desperately trying to stop his three-year-old from drawing all over the walls, Berman contemplates life’s ambiguities with both wisdom and wonder.

The residents of The Sound of Holding Your Breath could be neighbors, sharing the same familiar landscapes of twenty-first-century Appalachia. They could be your neighbors. Yet tragedy and violence challenge these unassuming lives: A teenage boy is drawn to his sister’s husband, an EMT searching the lake for a body. A pregnant widow spends Thanksgiving with her deceased husband’s family. Siblings grapple with the death of their sister-in-law at the hands of their brother. Accidents and deaths, cons and cover-ups, abuse and returning veterans—Natalie Sypolt’s characters wrestle with who they are during the most trying situations of their lives.

Rewilding, a relatively new ecological term, means to return an area of land to its original state. Reveling in letting go of the damaged and broken parts of ourselves while celebrating renewal and new beginnings, O’Neil’s poetry examines the external worlds of race and culture and the internal, personal worlds of family and desire. Ultimately, these poems tap into what is wild and good in all of us.

Anchored in the community of first-, second-, and third-generation Welsh Americans in Utica, New York, during the 1960s, the stories in David Lloyd’s The Moving of the Water delve into universal concerns: identity, home, religion, language, culture, belonging, personal and national histories, mortality. Unflinching in their portrayal of the traumas and conflicts of fictional Welsh Americans, these stories also embrace multiple communities and diverse experiences in linked, innovative narratives. The complexly damaged characters of these surprising and affecting stories seek transformation and revelation, healing and regeneration: a sometimes traumatic “moving of the water.”

“’A woman’s smile / can be a muzzle.’ With shocking dexterity, Anne Champion invokes the voices of her foremothers. Like Florence Nightingale, we must become ‘everything.’ Like Sylvia Plath, we should aspire to be 'the most terrible thing' until the good girl/bad girl binary collapses, until we are whole. Champion’s poems urge us to wake up, to check our pulses, that the ‘good girl’ has already died—and this is the book that buries her.” —Brandi George, author of Gog

Baby Bear's Adoption, Jennifer Keats Curtis, Arbordale Publishing

Cheetah Dreams, Linda Stanek, Arbordale Publishing