Dante Di Stefano creates a fascinating read of precise opinions and clever phrasing with poetry in his new book, Ill Angels. If I were to divide it roughly into subject chapters, one would be musicians, another would be portraits, then love poems to his wife, verses about America, and poems for his students. Throughout the book, a characteristic worthy of attention is his skill in giving fresh meaning to words.
‘Did You Know?’ by Elizabeth S. Wolf
Subscribers to Rattle received a bonus with their Summer 2019 issue: Rattle Chapbook Prize winner Did You Know? by Elizabeth S. Wolf.
When her mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the 60s, Wolf’s father conspired with doctors, friends, and family to conceal the truth from her, a secret he ends up taking to the grave, a family member the one to finally break the silence. Wolf’s poems are about this time in her family’s lives, the title drawing from the conversation in which Wolf finds out about her mother’s illness:
“Did you know?” she asked.
“Know what?” I responded.
“Did you know the secret?” she asked.
“What secret?” I responded.
[ . . . ]
Now there was an “us”:
the ones who did not know.
Following the revelation about her health, Wolf’s mother challenges the life she created behind the shield of her husband’s secrecy; Wolf the voice in her ear urging her to finally do whatever she wants.
Wolf writes in a straightforward voice, never losing readers in overly flowery language, instead focusing on clearly relating her mother’s story, giving her a voice when she was denied one by her husband for so long.
Reading Did You Know? is an intimate peek into an archaic practice—a husband able to dictate his wife’s medical care while hiding it from her—but as women are currently fighting for bodily autonomy while access to abortion is challenged, the chapbook ends up feeling incredibly current.
Review by Katy Haas
‘One Little Secret’ by Cate Holahan
“People in glass houses should not throw stones”
One Little Secret by Cate Holahan is a brilliantly written novel enabling the reader to feel suspense as they whizz through the chapters.
The characters within the novel are very thought out, and the reader is able to visualize their appearance as well as learn about their personalities through the words on the page. Gabby, who is a detective, is a strong female lead, and this is nice to read as she is seen as a feminist character. Each character adds their own input into the story and their lives are all intertwined through a series of events which will be revealed within the novel.
Each chapter is full of suspense, and they are short, so the reader is not left hanging or bored with the content. The plot is structured into two strands: before and after the murder.
The settings are beautiful within the book, and they can only be described as a paradisiacal haven where only the rich of the rich get to go. The story is set, for the most part, in a huge glass rental house, and though cliché, the saying “people in glass houses should not throw stones” perfectly applies to this novel. Pathetic fallacy is used a lot to set the tone of each chapter as the plot twists and turns.
As the reader, you go through a roller coaster of emotions throughout, deciding who to side with and trying to work out who is lying and who is telling the truth. And you constantly question yourself as to whodunit.
Overall, this was a very good novel by Holahan, and I will not hesitate to pick up another of her books in the future, as I read this one in only one weekend!
Review by Tom Walker
‘Bicycle/ Race’ by Adonia E. Lugo
In “Bicycle/ Race: Transportation, Culture and Resistance,” Dr. Adonia Lugo brings her anthropology dissertation research into a readable and accessible book, documenting the intersection of race, transportation inequality and bicycling. As a mixed race Chicanx, having grown up in Orange County, California, Lugo explores resistance against car culture as well as her own place in bike activism. Where does she stand in a majority white-led movement? Lugo’s book forces readers to understand the stakes of cars versus bikes, with particular consideration to history, race, and who gets left behind. Continue reading “‘Bicycle/ Race’ by Adonia E. Lugo”
‘The Author is Dead’ by Ches Smith
It’s nothing new for a novel’s key character to share his name with the book’s author. Past examples are Stephen King in Song of Savannah, Paul Auster in New York Trilogy, and Philip Roth in Operation Shylock. But Ches Smith’s protagonist, Ches Smith, is something apart and definitely a standout character in Smith’s new book, The Author is Dead. Try not to speculate on any detail in this book that might be drawn from the author’s life, except that it’s about a writer who writes a book titled The Author is Dead.
We meet Ches, the character, at Sugarville Mall. He carries his writings, his so called “loose-leaf chronicles,” in a black binder that’s always with him. Ches is intrigued by Thalia, lead singer with the Zombie Cowgirls, a “punk-country fusion” band. One short conversation with her and he’s hooked. It won’t be giving anything away to tell that Thalia very soon becomes his ghostly muse, since her otherworldly presence is key to this story’s setup.
New eChapbook from 2River View
Living Midair by Karen June Olson is the newest offering in the 2River Chapbook Series. Numbering 26, these chapbooks are available open access online as well as free download using the PDF or “chap the book” feature which provides a booklet formatted print copy.
Author Karen June Olson is Professor Emerita of Early Care and Education at St. Louis Community College. Her poems in this collection examine nature, rural life, writing class, grief, death, and the familial relationships between daughters, mothers, grandmothers, and grandfathers.
From the title poem, “Living Midair”:
That night we sat on a veranda,
our glasses clinked a cheer or two
and we noticed the moon rise
from the water as waves
seemed to give the needed lift
and curled around its bright edges.
‘The Wonderling’ by Mira Bartók
“Have you been unexpectedly burdened by a recently orphaned or unclaimed creature? Worry not! We have just the solution for you!” Welcome to the Home for Wayward and Misbegotten Creatures!
Author/illustrator Mira Bartók’s debut novel follows the story of a one-eared fox groundling (human-animal hybrid) named Thirteen. As if having one ear isn’t bad enough, Thirteen was abandoned in a grim-filled orphanage under the control of a wretched villainess called Miss Carbunkle. But the turn of events led to unexpected paths, both good and bad. Thirteen’s gut-wrenching encounters with brutality, deprivation, and unappetizing Dickensian roads are intertwined with gentle humor, uplifting vibes, and epic journeys.
Music and friendship play essential roles in the story. This explains why, in spite of the rouge-ish undertakings of rouge-ish characters, any reader will surely immerse oneself with the rollercoaster ride of events and keep the pages turning. Bartók’s writing draws rich kaleidoscopes of characters, steampunk setting, and sensational quests. The delightful illustrations brought a new level of charm to this adventure, making the whole experience undeniably jam-packed with surprises to the brim.
Blend in Miss Peregrine’s characters with the woeful mishaps in A Series of Unfortunate Events, then top it off with the legendary tale of King Arthur, and there you have it! The Wonderling! In a nutshell, The Wonderling takes its readers into a world of infinite possibilities.
Don’t let people tell you that this book is just for children, because adventure has NO age limit!
Review by Mary Kristine P. Garcia
‘Too Many Questions About Strawberries’ by Jen Hirt
Brandi Pischke’s cover art of sparkly strawberries invites us into Jen Hirt’s book of poems, Too Many Questions About Strawberries. Can we expect a romp through a garden or farmer’s market? Not necessarily, though Hirt’s book takes us through fun, rowdy poems, as well as challenging ones that do, in some cases, concern plant life.
Let’s start with “Why not malachite for resurrection.” In this poem, an apartment’s appeal is heightened because its back steps are perfect for a container garden.
Continue reading “‘Too Many Questions About Strawberries’ by Jen Hirt”
Free Audiobooks for Teens
There’s still a lot of summer left and many books titles to enjoy from Sync Audiobooks for Teens free summer program.
Each week, Sync provides two paired titles for free download using Overdrive. The titles include both non-fiction and a wide genre range of fiction. Once the week is over, the titles can no longer be downloaded, but the site has the previous books listed with descriptions so listeners can find the titles via their local library or other audio venue. [Pictured: The First Time She Drowned by Kerry Kletter, one of the titles this week.]
A great way to encourage summer reading for teens, for reluctant readers, and for adults who aren’t afraid to cross over!
April 2019 Award Winners
National Poetry Month may have ended in April, but you can keep the festivities kicking by checking out poetry contest winners published last month.
BOA Editions, LTD published the winner of the James Laughlin Award, Night Angler by Geffrey Davis, and the winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, Documents by Jan-Henry Gray.
The A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize is annually award to honor a poet’s first book. Jan-Henry Gray’s Documents is rooted in the experience of living in America as a queer undocumented Filipino. The poems repurpose the forms and procedures central to an immigrant’s experience: birth certificates, ID cards, letters, and interviews. An excerpt, “Across the Pacific Ocean,” can be found at the publisher’s website.
The James Laughlin Award is presented by the Academy of American Poets, and judges selected Night Angler by Geffrey Davis as the 2018 winner. Night Angler “Reads as an evolving love letter and meditation on what it means to raise an American family.” Readers can find Davis’s second collection at the BOA Editions LTD website.
From Press 53, find the winner of the Press 53 Award for Poetry: Bully Love by Patricia Colleen Murphy. The poems in this collection examine the long-term effects of displacement, and how we form relationships with landscapes and lovers. Learn more about what Bully Love has to offer.
Bauhan Publishing released the winner of the 2018 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. The Double Zero by Marilee Richards, according to Judge David Blair, “reminds us of what the country has gained in consciousness and freedom, . . . what sorrows and suicides we have left necessarily behind, as the bus pulls up at the curb in the don’t-you-get-it-yet years we have been motoring through lately.” Find out more here.
Keep your support of poetry going throughout the year, starting with these award winners.
Books :: 2018 Iowa Poetry Prize Winner Published
Founded in 1990, the Iowa Poetry Prize is awarded for a book-length collection of poems each year.
This month, the 2018 winner was published: The Year of the Femme by Cassie Donish.
From the publisher’s website: “These are poems that assess and dwell in a sensual, fantastically queer mode. Here is a voice slowed by an erotics suffused with pain, quickened by discovery. In masterful long poems and refracted lyrics, Donish flips the coin of subjectivity; different and potentially dangerous faces are revealed in turn. With lyricism as generous as it is exact, Donish tunes her writing as much to the colors, textures, and rhythms of daily life as to what violates daily life—what changes it from within and without.”
Visit the press’s website to order your copy (currently on sale for the frugal reader) and visit the prize page, entries accepted throughout the month of April.
Books :: 2017 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry Winner Published
In January, Anhinga Press released the winner of their 2017 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry: Known by Salt by Tina Mozelle Braziel.
The annual prize awards $2000 to the winner, as well as publication and distribution of their winning manuscript. Submissions open in July.
Known by Salt was selected by C.G. Hanzlicek who says the collection: “is very much a book of celebrations. One arc of the book is the move from a life in a trailer park to a house that Tina and her husband build with their own hands, [ . . . ]. It also is a celebration of Alabama, [ . . . ]. Her observations are so keen [ . . . ] that they make me laugh out loud in my own celebration.”
Learn more at the publisher’s website, where you can also find a sample poem from the collection, “House Warming.”
Books :: 2018 Rising Writer Contest Winner Published
This month, find Luxury, Blue Lace by S. Brook Corfman at Autumn House Press. Winner of the 2018 Rising Writer Contest, judge Richard Siken notes how Corfman “examines the ways that presentation and representation conflate and complicate. Expansive, generous, deeply considered, and highly lyric, this book, with its transformations and overlaps, astounds.”
Learn what others have to say about Luxury, Blue Lace as you pick up a copy at Autumn House Press’s website.
Books :: End of Year Award Winners 2018
There was a lot going on at the end of 2018, so maybe you missed out on some of the award-winning books published toward the tail end of the year. Don’t worry—we’ve got you covered.
October saw the publication of Earthly Delights and Other Apocalypses by Jen Julian, winner of the 2018 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. Judge Kevin Morgan Watson says the stories “range from straight-ahead fiction to sci-fi or dystopian, all with a strong sense of place with well-developed characters whose challenges draw the reader in.” Order copies and learn more at the Press 53 website.
In November, BkMk Press published Sweet Herbaceous Miracle by Berwyn Moore, winner of the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry. Selected by Enid Shomer, Moore’s third collection of poetry arrives “like good news, like spring flowers from the garden,” according to advance praise from George Bilgere. Find out more at the publisher’s website.
BkMk Press also released When We Were Someone Else by Rachel Groves, winner of the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, selected by Hilma Wolitzer. Quirky characters in unlivable spaces occupy the stories in this collection. On the press’s website, find advance praise and links to reviews to learn more.
Another title out in November: The Good Echo by Shena McAuliffe, winner of the Black Lawrence Press 2017 Big Moose Prize. Readers can find an excerpt of the novel at the publisher’s website when they order their copies.
Wrapping up the month of November is UNMANNED by Jessica Rae Bergamino, winner of the 2017 Noemi Press Poetry Prize (with submissions currently open until May 1). UNMANNED features persona poems from the perspective of two Voyager Space probes as queer femmes exploring space. See what readers thought of the collection as you order your copies.
Books :: 2018 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize Winner Published
Pleaides Press annually hosts the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize, the winning writer receiving $3000 with the winning collection published by the press and distributed by Louisiana State University Press. Readers can find the winner of the 2018 prize published last month: dark // thing by Ashley M. Jones.
From the publisher’s website: “dark // thing is a multi-faceted work that explores the darkness/otherness by which the world sees Black people. Ashley M. Jones stares directly into the face of the racism that allows people to be seen as dark things, as objects that can be killed/enslaved/oppressed/devalued.”
Jones challenges form with more experimental pieces worked in throughout the collection, and if readers still want more of Jones’s award-winning work after checking out dark // thing, they can find her debut collection Magic City Gospel at Hub City Press which won silver in poetry from the Independent Publisher’s Book Awards.
Books :: Press 53’s 2018 Short Fiction Winner for Preorder
If you’ve been itching to get your hands on copies of the 2018 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction winner, now you can. Readers may now preorder copies of Jen Julian’s Earthly Delights and Other Apocalypses which will ship early October and is available in both paperback and hardcover.
Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Kevin Morgan Watson says the collection:
held my interest while taking me on a variety of journeys, both real and surreal, from a paleontologist who spontaneously crumbles to dust during a lecture, to siblings dealing with their hoarder-father’s estate. These stories ranged widely in theme and style, and after finishing one story I looked forward to where I would be taken in the next.
While you’re waiting on your signed copy of Earthly Delights and Other Apocalypses, you can stop by TriQuarterly’s website for a taste of Julian’s writing with “Attachment,” published this past July.
Trump Sonnets by Ken Waldman
Frustrated with the current policital administration? You protest, rally, write letters, get yourself and others ready to vote…what more can you do? For poet and musician Ken Waldman (aka Alaska’s Fiddling Poet), there’s poetry. Sonnets to be exact, and a lot of them. With two volumes already completed and one more (at least) on the way, Waldman is taking this administration to task – and perhaps salvaging his own sanity as well as that of his readers – responding to the daily fodder by turning it to his muse for poetry.
Like many of us, in a stunned stupor the day after the election, Wednesday, November 9, 2016, Waldman writes that he was “processing Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and wrote, ‘You make George W. seem a statesman–your opening trick,’ which I turned into the first line and a half of a sonnet. A week later I wrote two more Donald Trump-inspired sonnets. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, another 68. That’s 71 sonnets, a full-length collection. 41 were written in the voice of Donald Trump. The rest were addressed to him.” The book’s subtitle – The First 50 Days – speaks to the process many of us went through at the start.
Now in our second year of Trump’s reign, Waldman continues to see us through with Trump Sonnets Volume 2: 33 Commentaries, 33 Dreams. “Half of this sequel’s 66 poems is incisive commentary,” writes Waldman,. “Half, dreams that I imagine Donald Trump might have, and those are in Trump’s voice.”
Both volumes, as well as Waldman’s other books, are available through SPD Distribution or directly from Waldman. Visitors to his website can also view YouTube videos of Waldman reading the poems with a little bit of his iconic fiddling style thrown in.
Books :: 2017 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize Winner Published
Available this month is the winner of the 2017 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry: Bridled by Amy Meng. Selected by Jaswinder Bolina, Bolina says of his selection:
Bridled is poetry as slow-burn opera. [ . . . ] The poems here offer, in reverse chronology, the story of a crumbling relationship between an unnamed speaker and her nameless ‘lover.’ In this telling, Bridled articulates a politics of self versus other, of body and gender, of loneliness and togetherness. It’s a collection you’re going to want to read from start to finish and then from finish to start.
A Kundiman Fellow and poetry editor at Bodega Magazine, this is Amy Meng’s first collection. Stop by the Pleaides Press website to learn more.
Books :: 2017 University of Iowa Press Fiction Award Winners
The University of Iowa Press published the winners of the 2017 Iowa Short Fiction Award and the 2017 John Simmons Short Fiction Award last month.
Matthew Lansburgh’s Outside is the Ocean, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, was chosen by Andre Dubus III, who calls the linked collection “mesmerizing” as it “explores, among other things, the tenuous tie between mother and son, between the Old World and the New, between what was and what is.”
Winner of the John Simons Short Fiction Award, What Counts as Love by Marian Crotty, is “sensual, brave, and wonderfully evocative” as Crotty examines“the seemingly tattered nature of love, taking us deeply into the varied lives of her characters and making us care for them all.” The nine stories follow people—most often young women—searching for human connection, their stories touching on themes of addiction, class, sexuality, and gender.
Stop by the University of Iowa Press website to learn more about the awards and winning titles.
Books :: October 2017 Book Award Winners
October offered more treats than just candy this year. Readers, a handful of prize-winning books hit bookshelves last month, and if you haven’t already gotten your hands on them, now is your chance!
The grand finalist of the Vine Leaves Vignette Collection Award, The Walmart Book of the Dead by Lucy Biederman, draws inspiration from the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. Biederman’s version includes shoplifters, grifters, drifters, and hustlers as they wander Walmart unknowingly consigned to their afterlives.
Stephanie Carpenter brought home the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction with Missing Persons. Selected by Press 53 Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Kevin Morgan Watson, the collection contains stories that are “diverse in setting, conflict, and style,” and it rose above over 230 other manuscripts to claim the prize.
Pleaides Press awards the Editors Prize for Poetry each spring. The 2016 winner, A Lesser Love by E. J. Koh, was published this month. “Love, war and recovered testimony from Korea’s unhealed border inform the formal and imaginative boundaries” within the debut collection, according to D. A. Powell’s advance praise. Learn more about the collection at the press’s website.
In Set to Music a Wildfire, Ruth Awad’s homage to her father “explores the violence of living, the guilt of surviving, the loneliness of faith, and the impossible task of belonging.” Winner of the Michael Waters Poetry Prize, Awad writes of family, country, and the Lebanese Civil War.
Be sure to stop by each press’s website listed above to learn more about the award-winning books published last month.
Books :: September 2017 Prize Winners
September is a busy month for award-winning book releases. Here is just a sampling of small press and university press titles readers can look for this month.
At the beginning of September, Southeast Missouri State University Press published the winner of the 2015 Nilsen Literary Prize for a First Novel: Pie Man by John Surowiecki. The debut novel is told through a series of reminiscences by the titular character’s family, friends, and teachers, and explores the story of a boy, Adam Olszewski, who on his seven birthday tries to leave his family house but can’t. Soon after, the boy believes the house is alive and an inseparable part of him. Pie Man is a vivid exploration of what it means to be normal.
A Brief Alphabet of Torture: Stories by Vi Khi Nao, winner of the FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, is also out this month. A Brief Alphabet of Torture is made of many modes and genres—poetry, essay fiction, drama—and almost constitutes a novel of a different kind. Each tale is a chapter that captures the concerns that pervade life.
In poetry, readers can pick up a copy of To Whitey & the Crackerjack by May Yang (Hauntie), winner of the 2016 Robert Dana Anhinga Prize, selected by Evie Schockley. Shockley says of her selection: “May Yang’s poetry pierces the silence in which the history of Hmong women has been blanketed, with indecorous wordplay, unruly rhymes, and evocative, unequivocal images. This book begins by naming names (America, global capitalism) and ends by revivifying the poetic epigram.”
Check out the publishers’ websites to learn more about these newly-releaed, award-winning titles.
Read & Listen Entre Rios Books
Entre Rios Press offers readers several new titles that will come with free audio download.Publisher Knox Gardner has been working closely with the book designer and audio producer. He tells me, “When I get the audio back from the studio, I am always startled to hear something new about the poems. I love it.” Gardner says they will have audio on all of their books and these first three will be available for free download for all listeners (not password protected). Samples are currently available on their website or here on their SoundCloud station. Entre Rios is also working to include an interview/discussion with Maya Zeller and Carrie DeBacker as part of their audio download.
Flowers & Sky: Two Talks by Aaron Shurin
Mary’s Dust poems by Melinda Mueller with music by Lori Goldston
Alchemy for Cells & Other Beasts poetry and art by Maya Jewell Zeller and Carrie DeBacker
Books :: 2015 NOS Book Contest Winner
Les Figues Press held their NOS Book Contest every year from 2011-2015, awarding $1,000 and publication to a writer of a poetry or prose manuscript, which includes lyric essays, hybrids, translations, and more.
The 2015 contest was judged by author and performance artist lê thi diem thúy, who chose Irradiated Cities by Mariko Nagai. She says of her selection:
This book, a sifting and circling, a calm and masterful layering of voices and vantage points, a slowly emerging portrait of four different Japanese cities and their inhabitants, resists any effort at arrivals or conclusions. By doing so, it shows us that while we may have an accumulation of facts for what happened on a particular day in a particular place, perhaps even the names and words and pictures of the people to whom catastrophe struck, and would not let go, it is within the dark sedimentation and the feather-light drift of history that we might glean what yet remains, and gives off light, to summon and trouble us still.
Nagai explores the aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima. With lyrical fragments and black-and-white photographs, Nagai guides us through loss, silence, echo, devestation, and memory, creating a haunting piece of work.
Read through advance praise of the collection and order a copy for yourself at the Les Figues Press website.
Books :: From Klail City to Korea with Love
At the end of April, Arte Publico Press released a two-volume collection from Rolando Hinojosa. From Klail City to Korea with Love contains Rites and Witnesses and Korean Love Songs from the Klail City Death Trip Series.
In Rites and Witnesses, the author “captures the complex relationships and unsettling power struggles in both civilian and military life.”
Korean Love Songs has long been out of print, first published in 1978. In this section, Hinojosa presents his only poetry book, capturing the horror of war through Klail City native Corporal Rafe Buenrostro’s recollections.
Rolando Hinojosa is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Casa de las Américas prize in 1976, the most prestigious prize in Latin America. Now readers can bring home two of his books in one collection, continuing the examination of life along the border.
Learn more about From Klail City to Korea with Love at the publisher’s website.
Books :: 2017 PEN Debut Story Prize
The PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers recognizes 12 emerging fiction writers for their debut story published online or in a literary magazine during the calendar year. The twelve winners each receive $2000 and are to be compilated in the inaugural anthology published by Catapult in August 2017.
This year’s winners were chosen by judges Kelly Link, Marie-Helene Bertino, and Nina McConigley, and together “they act as a compass for contemporary literature; they tell us where we’re going.” Each piece is introduced by the editor who originally published the story, providing editorial insight to aspiring writers and curious readers.
The 2017 winning writers include: Angela Ajayi, Amber Caron, Emily Chammah, Jim Cole, Crystal Hana Kim, Samuel Clare Knights, Katherine Magyarody, Grace Oluseyi, Laura Chow Reeve, Amy Sauber, Ruth Serven, and Ben Shattuck.
Learn more about the prize, the judges, the honorees, and the journals at the PEN America website, and pre-order your copy from the Catapult website.
Books :: 2015 Nightboat Poetry Prize Winner
Nightboat Books publishes the winners of the annual Nightboat Poetry Prize, the 2015 winner to be released next month: No Dictionary of a Living Tongue by Duriel E. Harris. Judge Kazim Ali says of the poetry collection:
No Dictionary of a Living Tongue is formidable in its explorations of art, citizenship, and life as a body amid the social, political, and electronic networks that define us, hold us together, bind us. [ . . . ] An elegant use of sound couples with a keen and roving intelligence and a fierce commitment to social justice to create a unique and powerful collection of poems.
Paging through the poetry collection, I was struck by the variety in forms, visually arresting before even reading the content. I was especially drawn to the fold-out poem “Danger, Live Feed” on pages 69-70, which warrants tearing out and framing (if the idea of tearing apart a book doesn’t make you cringe, that is).
Check out the Nighboat Books website for more insight into Harris’s No Dictionary of a Living Tongue, where you will also find a PDF preview and a link to order from SPD.
Books :: Inside My Pencil
Recently chosen as a NewPages Editor’s Pick, Inside My Pencil by Peter Markus (Dzanc Books, March 2017) recounts poetry lessons taught to children in Detroit public schools. Markus, an award-winning writer and a writer-in-residence with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project of Detroit, sees the magic children hold inside their pencils and shares it with readers in this nonfiction book.
We start with Markus on his first day in the schools and then continue on to read his lessons on similes, metaphor, on the verb to be, the power of imagination. In prose that is poetic in itself, he brings us into the classroom and feeds us lines his students came up with in response. The creativity and imagination of the kids is a joy to read. In one chapter they define what beauty is, and in another, they turn love into metaphors, each line a beautiful display of the magic inside their pencils.
Inside my Pencil is available from the Dzanc Books website where readers can learn more.
Books :: #100 Love Notes Project
In 2015, on the anniversary of his wife’s death as a result ovarian cancer, Hyong Yi wrote 100 love notes and, along with his two children, handed them out to random passers by on the streets of Charlotte, North Carolina. The three-line poems were written as conversational love notes between Hyong and his wife, reading “Beloved, follow me to the top of the mountain. Hold my hand; I’m afraid of falling. Don’t let me go.” and “I don’t need a test to tell me who to love. I believe in you and me. I do until death do us part.”
Friends encouraged Hyong to create a website to commemorate his commitment to his wife, and now The #100 Love Notes Project: A Love Story book has been published by Lorimer Press. This beautifully crafted collection features the work of 17 artists commissioned by Hyong Li to illustrate his 100 three-line poems.
Books :: What is Poetry?
This historical tome edited by Anselm Berrigan has just been released from Wave Publishing: “The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church was founded in 1966 for the overlapping circles of poets in the Lower East Side of New York.These interviews from The Poetry Project Newsletter form a kind of conversation over time between some of the late 20th century’s most influential poets and artists, who have come together in this legendary venue over the past 50 years.” Poets/artists interviewed include: Akilah Oliver, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Barbara Henning, Bruce Andrews, Charles North, David Henderson, Eileen Myles, erica kaufman, Harryette Mullen, Judith Goldman, Larry Fagin, Magdalena Zurawski, Peter Bushyeager, Red Grooms, Sheila Alson, Tina Darragh, Victor Hernández Cruz, Will Alexander, and many more. The book can be ordered directly from the publisher for the discounted price of $17/shipping included.
Books :: 2016 May Sarton NH Poetry Prize Winner
Bauhan Publishing LLC hosts the May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize each year, awarding their sixth annual prize to Zeina Hashem Beck for her collection Louder than Hearts. The collection was chosen by Betsy Sholl, former poet laureate of Maine, who says Louder than Hearts “has it all—compelling language and a sense of moral gravitas, personal urgency and the ability to address a larger world with passion and artfulness.” She continues, calling the collection “timely in the way it provides a lens through which to see life in the Middle East, and hear the musical mix of English and Arabic.”
The collection will be released in April, but in the meantime, readers can read more about Zeina Hashem Beck, or they can try their hand at the May Sarton NH Poetry Prize themselves: submissions are open until the end of June.
Books :: CSU 2016 Book Award Winners
Each year, the Cleveland State University Press holds the Open Book Poetry Competition, the Essay Collection Competition, and the First Book Poetry Competition (all three open until March 31, 2017). The three 2016 winners are set to be published at the beginning of April 2017.
In One Form to Find Another by Jane Lewty was chosen as the 2016 Open Book Poetry Competition winner, selected by Emily Kendal Frey, Siwar Masannat, and Jon Woodward. Advance praise refers to the collection as “an heroically unsettling and compelling textual reenactment of feminine embodiments’ lament, contemplation, and recalibration of disturbed histories . . . ”
daughterrarium by Sheila McMullin, selected by Daniel Borzutzky, won the 2016 First Book Poetry Competition. Borzutzky says of his selection, “I admire daughterrarium for pushing too far, for making me cringe with its representations of what one human can do to another, of what a body can do to itself.”
James Allen Hall’s I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well won the 2016 Essay Collection Competition, chosen by Chris Kraus. From Kraus: “In these essays, Hall lives alongside, and empathically lives through, his family’s meth addiction, and mental illnesses . . . and considers his own penchants for less than happy, equal sex with an agility, depth, and lightness that is blissfully inconclusive.”
Check out the individual links to learn more about each prize-winning collection, and pre-order copies of all three.
Books :: Hell’s Gate
In mid-April, Gallic Books will be publishing Hell’s Gate by Laurent Gaudé. Gaudé’s The Scortas’ Sun is the winner of the Prix Gouncourt, the French literary award given to an author of the best imaginative work of prose each year. Hell’s Gate is a thrilling story following a father as he chases redemption for his murdered son. It explores “the effects of bereavement and grief on a family, and the relationship between the living and dead.”
Check out the Gallic Books website for more information about Hell’s Gate. Read advance praise, check out a downloadable PDF extract, and give yourself a chance to read work by one of France’s most highly respected playwrights and novelists.
Books :: 2016 Orison Poetry Prize Winner Published
The winner of the 2016 Orison Poetry Prize, Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom by Rebecca Aronson, will be published next month on April 4, 2017. Hadara Bar-Nadav, who selected the winner, calls the collection, “[e]xplosive, turbulent, haunting magnetic,” saying that “[m]ortality and death undergrid Aronson’s fantastical visions, where a child becomes a seagull, a woman turns tarantula, and a house threatens to fill with blood.”
Find sample poem “Wish” at the Orison Books website, where you can also find out more about Aronson and pre-order copies, which are currently on sale, a couple saved bucks you can set aside for even more poetry.
Books :: 2015 New Measure Poetry Prize Winner Published
Parlor Press’s annual New Measure Poetry Prize (now open for 2017 submissions until the end of June) awards a poet a cash award of $1,000 and publication of an original manuscript.
The 2015 winner, This History That Just Happened, by Hannah Craig, selected by Yusef Komunyakaa, was published at the beginning of the year. Komunyakaa says of his selection, “This History That Just Happened places the reader at the nexus where rural and city life converge, bridging a world personal and political, natural and artful, in a voice always uniquely hers.”
Craig has also won the 2016 Mississippi Review Prize and her manuscript was a finalist for the Akron Poetry Prize, the Fineline Competition, and the Autumn House Poetry Prize. Stop by the Parlor Press website to learn more about Craig and purchase her debut poetry collection digitally or in print.
Books :: 5th Annual Black Box Poetry Prize Winner
Each June, Rescue Press accepts submissions for the Black Box Poetry Contest for full-length poetry collections open to poets at any stage in their writing careers. The latest Black Box Poetry winner will be released later this month (March 15): What Was It For by Adrienne Raphel. Judge Cathy Park Hong calls the debut full-length collection “feral and full of feverish delight.” She continues, “Raphel takes Victorian nonsense verse into the twenty-first century and transforms it to her own strange and genius song.”
Readers can learn more about What Was It For at the publisher’s website, where they can also find Raphel’s bio with more information about the writer and pre-order copies.
2nd River Chapbook Series
Things Impossible to Swallow poems by Pamela Garvey is the newest in the 2River Chapbooks Series. 2River chapbooks can be read online, or to make your own print copy, click “Chap the Book” to download a PDF, which you can then print double-sided, fold, and staple to have a personal copy of Garvey’s chapbook. There are currently 24 chapbooks available for free download for readers to enjoy.
Books :: Diode Editions First Full-Length Book Contest Winners
Diode Editions recently held their very first full-length book contest and have announced two co-winners: Remica Bingham-Risher’s Starlight & Error, and Paula Cisewski’s quitter.
Starlight & Error retells through the lens of imagined memory the legacies of love between aunts and uncles, mothers and fathers, children and their children’s children. The poems ask how we transcend the mistakes of those who made us, and who will save us.
quitter is a “thoughtful protest in form, line, and ideology.” The collection invites readers to ask ourselves what we’ve tried, and if we’ve tried hard enough, challenging us to continue looking for solutions.
Learn more about the prize-winning collections at the Diode Editions website where readers can read advance praise and order copies.
Books :: The Lost Novel of Walt Whitman
The University of Iowa Press brings readers a real treat: the lost novel of Walt Whitman, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle. While we’re familiar with Leaves of Grass, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle was serialized in a newspaper under a pseudonym, read with little fanfare, and then disappeared.
It wasn’t until 2016 that it was found by Zachary Turpan, a literary scholar. While following a deep paper trail into the Library of Congress, he stumbled upon the only surviving copy of Witman’s lost novel.
Now, after lying in wait for over 160 years, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle is available for modern readers both digitally and in print at the University of Iowa Press website.
Books :: 2015 Robert C. Jones Short Prose Contest Winner
Pleaides Press annually holds the Robert C. Jones Short Prose Book Contest in honor of Robert C. Jones, a former professor of English at the University of Missouri.
In February, the 2015 winner, Among Other Things by Robert Long Foreman, will be released. The essay collection reveals the “depth and significance of mundane objects—a puzzle, a skillet, an antique cannon, an avocado sandwich” and the essays “trace the author’s fraught path from adolescence to adulthood, and contemplate the complexities of family and belonging.”
While Robert Long Foreman has seen his work published in magazines since 2006, Among Other Things is his first collection. Find out more information and pre-order copies from the Pleaides Press website.
[Quotes from publisher’s website.]
Books :: 2015 Cowles Poetry Book Prize Winner
During the tail end of 2016, Southeast Missouri State University Press released the winner of the 2015 Cowles Poetry Book Prize: Everyone at This Party Has Two Names by Brad Aaron Modlin. Advance praise dubs the collection “Poignant, quirky, troubled” (Larissa Szporluk), “[a]n impressive debut from a poet who is as interesting as he is unpredictable” (J. Allyn Rosser). While this is Modlin’s first collection, his poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in Denver Quarterly, The Florida Review, Indiana Review, and DIAGRAM, among others.
Read more about Everyone at This Party Has Two Names at the SEMO Press website, where you can also find more information about the Book Prize, which has an upcoming annual deadline of April 1st.
Books :: February 2017 Sneak Peek
Next month, readers can look forward to the publication of two award-winning books: Small Crimes by Andrea Jurjević and When He Sprang From His Bed, Staggered Backward, And Fell Dead, We Clung Together With Faint Hearts, And Mutely Questioned Each Other by Christopher Kang.
Andrea Jurjević won Anhinga Press’s 2015 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry with Small Crimes, which begins during the early 90s, the speaker living their adolescence during the Croatian War, and then moves on to post-war years and life in America. Judge C. G. Hanzlicek says the collection “is often dark but just as often beautiful” with language that “crackles with energy.” Learn more at the publisher’s website.
Christopher Kang’s When He Sprang From His Bed . . . is a daring book that challenges on every read. Made of 880 stories, the collection won the Green Mountains Review Book Prize, selected by Sarah Manguso. From the publisher: “Each story contains a world, tilted on its own axis, strange, remarkable and bursting with heart.” Read more about the book and Kang at SPD.
2016 Cowles Poetry Book Prize Winner
Southeast Missouri State University Press announces the winner of the third annual Cowles Poetry Book Prize, held in honor of Vern Cowles: James Crews of Shaftsbury, VT with his winning manuscript Telling My Father.
Readers may recognize James Crews’s work which has appeared in Ploughshares, Raleigh Review, Crab Orchard Review and The New Republic, among other journals. No stranger to writing award-winning books, his first poetry collection The Book of What Stays won the 2010 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and received a Foreword Magazine Books of the Year Award. Telling My Father will be published by Southeast Missouri State Press.
Books :: Forthcoming from Mad River Books
Ohio State University Press has announced Mad River Books, their new literary imprint. Mad River Books will publish diverse and creative literary writing that’s both artistic and daring as they push boundaries, explore uncharted areas, and generate new ideas.
One of the first books under this imprint is Don’t Come Back by Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas, who won the 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. The collection of lyrical and narrative essays, experimental translations, and reinterpreted myths explores home, identity, family history, and belonging while examining what it means to feel familiarity but never really feel at home.
Copies of Don’t Come Back are available for pre-order at the Ohio State University Press website, or readers can sign up to be alerted when the book is published without pre-ordering. While at the website, readers can also check out the other books forthcoming from the Mad River Books imprint.
Books :: 2016 Rattle Chapbook Prize Runners-Up
Back in September, we let you know about Zeina Hashem Beck’s prize-winning chapbook 3arabi Song. Fans of Beck’s chapbook, chosen out of 1,720 entries to the 2016 Rattle Chapbook Prize, may also enjoy the chapbooks of the three runners-up: Kill the Dogs by Heather Bell, exploring an overarching metaphor of women fighting dog; Ligatures by Denise Miller, revealing the honesty and depth that is lost when the media reports on murders of black people by police; and Turn Left Before Morning by April Salzano, about the daily struggles when parenting a child with autism.
Subscribers to Rattle received 3arabi Song with their copy of the literary magazine earlier in the year, and then received one of the three runners-up with the latest issue, good motivation for subscribing to magazines.
Submissions to the 2017 Rattle Chapbook Prize are now open until January 15, so consider submitting while you’re picking up copies of last year’s four chosen chapbooks.
Books :: December 2016 Award Publications
Dylan D. Debelis’s poetry and vignette collection The Garage? Just Torch It. was published earlier this week from Vine Leaves Press. A semi-finalist in the Vine Leaves Annual Vignette Collection Award (submissions currently open until February 28), this collection is, according to the Vine Leaves website, a “rally cry for the healing power of wonder and the disarming catharsis of grief.” Debelis “balances themes of belonging, love, politics, illness, family and forgiveness with stunning imagery and an intense playfulness.” Paperback and e-book copies are available at the publisher’s website.
Published by BkMk earlier in the month was Bonnie Bolling’s The Red Hijab. The poetry collection won the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, selected by H.L. Hix in 2015, and is written from the perspective of an American poet living in the Middle East. In his foreword to the collection, Hix says it “does not pretend divine perspective, and does not purport to have an answer to the conflicts reported in the news. It does, though, adopt an alternative form of attention and offer an alternative kind of account.” This results in a “more complex portrait than the news presents.” Stop by the publisher’s website to learn more about The Red Hijab.
Books :: November 2016 Award-Winning Books
With November practically over, let’s take a timeout to look back at award-winning small press and university press books published in the past few months.
In September, Rules for Lying by Anne Corbitt was published by the Southeast Missouri State University Press. Winner of the Nilsen Prize for a First Novel, Rules for Lying follows characters through a police investigation that makes them question their memories, allegiances, and actions, all while hiding secrets of their own. Check out the publisher’s website for more information.
Earlier in November, The Ashland Poetry Press released Life As It by Daneen Wardrop. The collection was selected by David St. John as the winner of the 2015 Snyder Memorial Prize Contest. The collection of prose poems (Wardrop’s third collection) features themes of music, family life, spirituality, and more. Check out the publisher’s website for multiple ways to order copies.
Also out this November is The Expense of a View by Polly Buckingham, winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. The stories explore the psyches of characters, most displaced and disturbed, under extreme duress. Judge Chris Offutt called the collection “a carefully rendered examination of memory, loss, and sadness.” University of North Texas Press’s website has a preview of Buckingham’s collection and ways to order.
Check out these three award-winning books and show your support to small and university presses.
Books :: 2016 WWPH Fiction Prize Winner
At the beginning of the month, Washington Writers’ Publishing House published the winner of the 2016 Fiction Prize: Strivers and Other Stories by Robert J. Williams.
From the publisher:
Set between the 1920s and the present day, Strivers and Other Stories explores a range of African-American and Southern voices reflecting characters striving towards their versions of the American dream. In 13 stories, we meet teachers and doctors, train porters and factory workers, soldiers and musicians; mothers, fathers, children and spouses; mentors and mentees. With a mix of humor and heart, satire and sentiment, this collection captures their everyday struggles for better lives and their hopes for promising futures.
Learn more at the publisher’s website.
Books :: Fall 2016 Book Award Winners
The fall season seems to be flying by, so let’s hit pause to look back at the award-winning books published in the past few months.
Back in September, Truman State University Press published Daughter, Daedalus by Alison D. Moncrief Bromage, winner of the 2016 T. S. Eliot Prize Winner. Jennifer Clement, contest judge, calls the collection “both original and very often masterful,” with an “elevated High Church intention [ . . . ] that T. S. Eliot would have recognized.” Copies are available digitally and in print at the press’s website.
Also published in September was the winner of Southeast Missouri State University Press’s Nilsen Prize for a First Novel: Rules for Lying by Anne Corbitt. Rules for Lying is a timely novel that explores the accusations and characters involved in an alleged rape, and how the families and the town they live in react, incriminate, and take sides. More information is available at the publisher’s website.
Moving on to October, Allegra Hyde’s Of This New World, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, was released. Judge Bennet Simms calls it “an ambitious and memorable debut.” In twelve stories, Hyde writes with a mix of lyricism humor, and masterful detail. Check out the University of Iowa Press website for more information.
And finally, Josh Rathkamp won the 2016 Georgetown Review Press Poetry Manuscript Contest with his collection A Storm to Close the Door. Terrance Hayes calls the collection stunning with poems that “are often quick-witted and charming, but they never shy away from their meditations and quotidian American blues.” SPD has A Storm to Close the Door available for purchase.
Books :: 2015 Noemi Press Poetry & Fiction Award Winners
This past October, Noemi Press released the winner of the 2015 Noemi Press Poetry Award: Bone Confetti by Muriel Leung. Leung’s first poetry collection, Bone Confetti reveals “there are two types of survivors at the end of the world.” Ash confetti “floats between funeral and parade, wedding and hell. When all that is left is the terrible residue of memory, lovers and ghosts try their best to make do [ . . . ] in an attempt to fashion a new sense of humanity.” Check out the Noemi Press website for more information and copies.
Looking ahead to December, the 2015 Winner of the Noemi Press Fiction Award will be released. Uncountry: a mythology by Yanara Friedland. The novel is “a collection of narratives that aim to expand creative pathways into historical space, particularly histories of migration and displacement.” Divided into four sections, each section explores “The gaps bweteen ‘remembered’ official history and the more unreliable spaces of private memory and unspoken unofficial history.” Copies of Uncountry are available for pre-order at the Noemi Press website.
[Quotes from SPD website]
Books :: Pint-Size Publications First Book
Pint-Size Publications, publisher of literary magazine Sport Literate, introduces their very first nonfiction, single-author book: A Proficiency in Billiards: Reflections from a Well-Traveled Life by Lance Mason. Mason first came to the editors’ attention with his essay “In the Lair of the Red Dragon,” published in an issue of Sport Literate earlier in the year.
A Proficiency in Billiards, Mason’s first essay collection, takes readers from his home base in South California where he stood “eyewitness to pool hustlers and drag racers in the 1960s” to travels throughout the world, including New Zealand, Ireland, Greece, and Yugoslavia, just to name a few. Readers are invited along Mason’s travels, all from the comfort of their homes.
Keep an eye on Pint-Size Publications to see what they’ll have on tap next, and head to their website to order copies of A Proficiency in Billiards.