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Editor’s Choice :: Notes by John Murphy

Notes by John Murphy book cover image

Notes by John Murphy
The Lake, February 2025

The poems in this John Murphy’s newest poetry collection, Notes, focus on artists and producers in the popular music industry, covering all major genres: rock, jazz, and blues, as well as influential record producers.

Artists featured in the poems include Joni Mitchell, John Mayall, Cleo Laine, Chuck Berry, Brian Wilson, Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson, Paul McCartney, Tubby Hayes, Phil Spector, Blossom Dearie, Graham Nash, Bob Harris, and more.

“Notes takes us on a journey of appreciation of some of the key figures who made significant contributions to popular music in the 20th century… he writes not only as a poet but also as a seasoned musician of many years standing.” —David Mark Williams, author of The Odd Sock Exchange and Papaya Fantasia

“Notes interweaves two of John Murphy’s loves drawn from a lifetime as a poet and musician… Choosing exemplars from Doris Day to Dylan his writing honours its massive contribution to contemporary culture.” —Pippa Little, author of Time Begins to Hurt

“Murphy’s ear is true…he re-animates the great singers and songwriters, in his own affectionate tributes.” —Hannah Stone, editor of Dream Catcher.

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 :: (Re)Imagining Inclusion for Children of Color with Disabilities by Soyoung Park

(Re)Imagining Inclusion for Children of Color with Disabilities by Soyoung Park book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

Education professor Soyoung Park’s latest book, (Re)Imagining Inclusions for Children of Color with Disabilities, is grounded in her direct observations of public, elementary-level “special education” programs in California, New York, and Texas. Throughout, she lambasts the general segregation and isolation of children into separate and unequal classrooms and offers a critique of the pervasive biases that label some children — especially those who are neither white nor English-dominant — as uneducable and inferior.

But the book’s strength is not in its unraveling of the link between ableism and racism. Rather, it rests with its focus on teachers who do the seemingly impossible: quiet aggressive, disinterested, and overwrought children. Park showcases how these master educators make room for unexpected actions and revelations; allow students to develop their unique intellectual curiosities; and center the development of relationships between teacher and student and between the students themselves.

Reading these anecdotal examples is revelatory — and inspiring — particularly because the book is being released as federal cutbacks to public education are looming. Nonetheless, thanks to the concrete examples that are presented, the text offers well-grounded insights into best practices for teaching kids diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and autism. It’s an excellent model of what should happen in every special ed classroom.

At the same time, because the book never addresses the distinct needs of children who are deaf, blind, or severely intellectually impaired, it is not a one-size-fits-all reference. Still, teachers will learn a lot from the book and other readers will gain a profound appreciation of an often-denigrated profession.

(Re)Imagining Inclusion for Children of Color with Disabilities by Soyoung Park. Harvard Education Press, March 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 :: Heliotropia by Manahil Bandukwala

Heliotropia by Manahil Bandukwala book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

The first two words of Manahil Bandukwala’s second collection of poetry, Heliotropia, are “I love.” The poet turns toward topics she deems “worth loving” — plant life, love life, and love poetry — like a sunflower moves in response to the sun. The collection’s strength and its risk are its “leaning into love.”

In a current poetic landscape that leans toward first-person narratives of traumatic pasts and uncertain futures, Bandukwala’s lyric poems risk expressing an opposite to loss and fear. They turn away from what is life-depleting and toward what is life-giving. In doing so Bandukwala offers a poetry that reaches for a beloved, for connection, for light, trusting that “love is always within reach.”

“I try not to be at war with memories
I teach myself that I can be my own divine agent
I practice surrender in the name of something I believe in”

Bandukwala’s poetry proactively cultivates intimate fellowship and appreciative practice. The poet knows her “path / is tenuous at best,” but makes a practice of “being alive” and determines “each day can hold one thing to love.”

In exploring “the subject / of love,” the poet acknowledges its dynamic, everchanging, and multifaceted nature. To illustrate that love is “constantly changing” and encompasses multiple definitions, the poet references poetry, painting, music, cinema, Star Trek, and The Marigold Tarot Deck. Her response to the perspectives of notable artists, such as Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Canadian poet Phyllis Webb, American poet Ellen Bass, and Austrian Expressionist painter Egon Schiele, contributes a unique framework for understanding types of love such as eros, philia, philautia, and agape.

Bandukwala writes from love and to love, believing that “even at its most difficult / love is worth loving.” Heliotropia celebrates her personal love of galaxies, stars, flowers, kisses, and language. For Manahil Bandukwala, “There are more love poems to write.”

Heliotropia by Manahil Bandukwala. Brick Books, September 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 Upstate by Lindsay Turner

The Upstate by Lindsay Turner book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

The title of Lindsay Turner’s second collection of poetry, The Upstate, locates the poems and the reader in the northwesternmost area of South Carolina. For those unfamiliar with this region, the term “upstate” may evoke other meanings such as standing, lifted, constructed, ready. These adjectives suggest the complicated realities of geographic capitalism and resource exploitation prevalent in American landscapes. From references to “clearcut” forests to a “paper mill,” the haunting essence of the “land unanswerable beneath the haze—”

Despite hazy disorientation, Turner invites us to examine what is in our “peripherals.” As “a person who believes in the value of intelligence,” she dons a headlamp and attempts to “find the verb for how you lost” and articulates the destruction of a place and people that she witnesses. But Turner does not write “at a remove”; she is our accomplice. And we are hers, because the crisis is ours. “We all did it.”

“The question is who does your money come from
The question is whose loss
The question is whose loves are torn like wet paper for your money
Whose lines are crossed by it
Who can’t live the thing she wants which is good and reasonable
Because of your money”

As Turner seeks orientation and perspective to “get at the truth of it,” she climbs “up a mountain” — another interpretation of “upstate”— and what she sees is devastating: “The only being on the rocky outcrop, some things present in their outlines while the others sink into the sea. The other things dissolve in toxic fog. The other things are sold in pieces so small you couldn’t recognize.” These days “heavy days,” struggling with what it means to live in a “bleak” state.

In The Upstate, Lindsay Turner “has a different song about being out of place.” A downstate. She sings to us, “Whose lives are rubbled,” acknowledging how “distanced” we are from “the garden.”

The Upstate by Lindsay Turner. The University of Chicago Press, 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 :: How to Sell Out: The (Hidden) Cost of Being a Black Writer by Chad Sanders

How to Sell Out by Chad Sanders book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Chad Sanders lays out his premise in the opening line of the opening chapter of his book: “This is my last time writing about race,” a line that echoes Reni Eddo-Lodge’s book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. Sanders takes a different approach to come to some similar and relevant conclusions, as he talks about the trades he has to make in order for (mostly) white executives to listen to him and greenlight his projects.

Sanders works in the entertainment industry, as well as in writing, and he spends a significant part of the book talking about the unpaid or underpaid work he has done in order to try to make the connections he needs in order to succeed. Much of that work involves talking about race, almost always including racial trauma. The parts of the book where he focuses on that part of his career mirror Danzy Senna’s recent novel Colored Television, with its portrayal of a Black woman trying to break into television writing.

Sanders also draws on his experience in Silicon Valley, which is strikingly similar to Hollywood, as well as conflict within the African American community, such as the debate over the Jack and Jill organization. By the end of the work, he reiterates that this will be his last time writing about race. However, he admits, “Unless I need the money again,” as he recognizes the realities of the world, even while critiquing them.

How to Sell Out: The (Hidden) Cost of Being a Black Writer by Chad Sanders. Simon & Schuster, February 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

Book Review :: Not a Force of Nature by Amy De’Ath

Not a Force of Nature by Amy De'Ath book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

With Bernadette Mayer’s record-keeping poetry and Laboria Cuboniks’s Xenofeminist Manifesto by her side, Amy De’Ath offers Not a Force of Nature. Each of these feminist writers resists “acting in the spirit of the contract” and seeks a “release from form” imposed by systems of power.

De’Ath writes at the intersection of feminism and capitalism, poetry and critique. Conscious of class, gender, sexuality, and other capitalist categories and oppressive systems, De’Ath writes against a “culture of financial bullshit” and attempts to make room for “Different shades of grey.” She “state[s] categorically that [she does] not endorse / whatever it is / people don’t like about these others—”

Readers will recognize categories of form such as a sonnet and an email, but what if “work emails” are made sonnets? That may seem like a simple question, but the implications are complex, suggesting not only a subversion of written forms, but a change in categorical concept. De’Ath proposes this “alternative trajectory” of tradition and conformity to the reader without coercion. As she considers “changeable forms of praxis,” De’Ath shifts readers away from being passive consumers of her art to being active thinkers within it. That’s art! And an act of love! “Since LOve tackles DEbt, [De’Ath] will follow it to / the marrow.”

At the core, Amy De’Ath is a revolutionary, writing against narrow cultural and institutional parameters. She refuses to conform to economic systems of artistic reproduction. Instead, she writes poetry to “make a concept out of it,” enabling socio-political thinking and heart-poetic communication. She writes for “People who like [her]… don’t want to reproduce / Themselves that way or this way.” Amy De’Ath’s way vies for people “roaming free” and a poetry “made by human hands.”

Not a Force of Nature by Amy De’Ath. Futurepoem, Fall 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 :: Gliff by Ali Smith

Gliff by Ali Smith book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The word gliff has a variety of definitions, one of which — now long since out of use — is “to make a slip in reading.” In that line, Ali Smith’s most recent novel seems a simple story, a dystopian tale about two children, Briar and Rose, who are unverifiables, people who are living off the grid, after their mother and (maybe) step-father go missing.

Along the way, they meet Colon (that seems to really be his name) who has a horse that Rose tries to buy, a horse she names Gliff. They also live with other unverifiables for a brief period of time. Smith never explains what has happened in the broader society to lead to whatever dystopian world now exists, but the monitoring certainly feels like something that could happen in any society today (there are also references throughout to Brave New World, though Smith isn’t concerned with the same questions Huxley was, as she’s writing about a different world than he could imagine).

It’s also never clear what Briar and Rose’s mother did that would lead to her being removed from the society or fleeing the society to avoid that removal, but Briar clearly doesn’t fit into the gender binary of this world. Smith doesn’t mention how they present their gender for much of the novel, but they ultimately encounter the world outside of their community of unverifiables, a situation that pushes Briar to choose one side of the binary.

The reader gets to see a bit of that world, as Briar has a good job a few years after having to make that choice. Ultimately, though, they encounter somebody else, somebody with news about Rose that reminds Briar who they once were and who they might still be. Though this novel seems to cover “a short space of time; a moment,” possibly only offering “a passing view; a glance, glimpse” of this world (other definitions for gliff), Smith clearly conveys the oppressive views of those who seek to impose their ideas — especially about gender and heteronormativity — on others, but she also reminds readers that there are ways to resist.

Gliff by Ali Smith. Pantheon Books, February 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

Book Review :: Corner Office by Susan Hahn

Corner Office by Susan Hahn book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Susan Hahn’s Corner Office features the dramatis personae: Earth, Man, and Woman. Each character “pines” for what has been lost. For Earth, that’s “pastures” and “seasons.” For Man, it’s his corner office and the status it conferred. For Woman, who once had a corner office that was later “sliced in half, it’s more complicated.

It may be troubling to a feminist, but for a while in the unfolding drama, Woman “pines” for Man, “pray[ing] each night that he’ll change— / spin only around [her].” Eventually, Woman decides “not / to call him, or anyone, but to exist / not inside the clutter of others’ thoughts, / or corner offices and those who mourn them.” Phew!

Hahn presses her Man and Woman against the thin wall between gender stereotypes and archetypes, highlighting tensions between capitalism’s professional hierarchy and the patriarchy’s gender roles. His office furniture “bubble-wrapped,” Man soothes himself with the idea of having “seven different pairs / of breasts in one week—new moons / circling [his] face.” Man views women primarily as sexual objects, a “substitute” mother, or a therapist. That artistic choice carries ethical risks; stereotypical portrayals of men and women in society and art can perpetuate misogyny.

Hahn takes another artistic and ethical risk in having Earth speak in first person: “I cannot seem to stop / the injuries inflicted upon my surface.” While this utterance is moving, anthropomorphizing Earth risks reducing the planet to a vessel filled with human rationality. Early in the book, Earth asks, “How did it come to this?” A reader could argue that the human perception of Earth as a metonymic and metaphoric figure underlies climate crises.
Hahn’s Man and Earth lose power. But Hahn’s Woman emerges as the most nuanced, sympathetic character, ultimately finding freedom in the metaphorical “open field / of a poem.” The corner office is hers!

Corner Office by Susan Hahn. Word Poetry, 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 :: The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective by Steven Johnson

The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective by Steven Johnson book cover image

Review by Aiden Hunt

In The Infernal Machine, Steven Johnson tells a story of explosive political violence, boosted in the late 19th century by Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite (later dubbed “infernal machines” by the press), and culminating in the U.S. Red Scare arrests and deportations of 1919-20. While some of the actors are well-known to history, such as anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, along with their eventual persecutor, J. Edgar Hoover, Johnson also follows lesser-known creators and early adopters of modern policing techniques, like fingerprint analysis and bomb disposal, to combat the threat.

Following the destruction trail of dynamite, Johnson shows how Nobel’s invention was soon adapted by radicals opposed to oppression and the capitalist order. It featured increasingly in political violence from the high-profile assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, to the U.S. organized labor campaigns around the century’s turn, the intimidating blasts of the extortionist Black Hand in the aughts, and the prominent Italian anarchist bombing wave that swept the U.S. in 1919. Johnson weaves accounts of anarchist events from the writings of Goldman and Berkman with the creation of modern police surveillance techniques to provide an even-handed and satisfying account from both sides.

While some readers may bristle at the foundation of a surveillance state that continues to flourish, Johnson tactfully acknowledges these perils while providing the compelling reasons for its creation. Beginning his story in the Russian “old country,” Johnson returns there after Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and 247 other leading “alien anarchists” are deported in December 1919 to revolutionary Russia and its nascent civil war. However, the U.S. revolutions in both political violence and state control would continue to shape our future.

The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective by Steven Johnson. Crown, May 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 journal of poetry and poetics, focusing on chapbooks. Aiden’s critical work has been published, or is forthcoming, in The Adroit Journal, Jacket2, The Rumpus and Fugue, among others venues.

Book Review :: The Black Box: Writing the Race by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The Black Box: Writing the Race by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. book cover image

Review by Aiden Hunt

“Did you check the box?” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. asks while celebrating a new granddaughter in the preface to his latest book. The pleasure he derives from his son-in-law’s having checked the Black box on the newborn girl’s birth certificate feels bittersweet, though. As a “race man,” he wants the girl to take pride in the heritage of Black America; one in which he’s played a significant role in sharing. Still, he also knows she’s now in a more insidious box, despite her 87.5% European ancestry, containing the fraught baggage of Black American history.

Drawing from his Intro to African American Studies course at Harvard, Gates delivers a real education in The Black Box: Writing the Race. While it provides an excellent overview of Black American thought from Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. De Bois to Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, Gates goes deeper than how things have appeared to outsiders. He guides readers through different ways Black writers have approached escaping from the negative aspects of the box with strong, sometimes conflicting, convictions.

The Black Box shows that “Black thought” has never been unified or unchallenged, a fact that’s unlikely to change. By understanding the different ways Black writers and thinkers have conceived of their own identities, however, we can better understand how to overcome the racial challenges our society still faces, including in our literature. Maybe understanding and compassion can help smooth the sharp edges of the box.

The Black Box: Writing the Race by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Penguin Press, March 2024. Paperback release March 2025.

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, The Rumpus, Jacket2, and The Adroit Journal, among other venues.

Book Review :: Unrig the Game: What Women of Color Can Teach Everyone About Winning by Vanessa Priya Daniel

Unrig the Game: What Women of Color Can Teach Everyone About Winning by Vanessa Priya Daniel book cover image

Reviewed by Eleanor J. Bader

Longtime activist and community organizer Vanessa Priya Daniel, founder and former executive director of the Groundswell Fund, a foundation dedicated to supporting grassroots, women of color-led organizations, has written an extraordinary book that merges memoir with matter-of-fact advice for advancing social change.

She begins by situating herself as the biracial daughter of a Sri Lankan father and white mother and describes what happened after she told her paternal family about being sexually abused by a relative. The family’s refusal to believe Vanessa caused her mom to flee; she ultimately opted to raise her only child in the mostly-white Pacific Northwest. The move caused a deep rupture for Vanessa, separating her from a Sri Lankan community that she had previously loved. Moreover, this foundational disruption has continued to indirectly impact her work as a progressive change agent and parent.

But other factors have also affected her, and the book offers a deconstruction of the ways she – indeed, all people – internalize racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, “isms” that can support or stymie community organizing. Concrete examples highlight the ways groups can be destroyed from within by allegations that a leader of color is “acting white” if they demand punctuality, good grammar, and productivity. While this may be seen as a public airing of dirty laundry, by calling out the deleterious impact these assertions have on targeted people, Unrig the Game provides a courageous interrogation of organizational implosions. It also provides a direct pathway out of destructive behavior, showcasing the experiences of several women of color who, like Daniel, have had their authority challenged and character derided.

Unrig the Game is a celebration of collaboration over competition and a wise analysis of the ways personal and political power, mental illness, and “cancel culture” intersect. This makes the book essential reading for everyone who works for, or with, feminist, queer, antiracist, and pro-democracy organizations.

Unrig the Game: What Women of Color Can Teach Everyone About Winning by Vanessa Priya Daniel. Random House, March 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.

Sponsored :: New Book :: Poetry Dust

cover of Poetry Dust by Alyssa Sykes

Poetry Dust: In the Middle of My Before and After, Poetry by Alyssa Skyes

Self-Published, January 2025

Poetry Dust is more than a poetry collection—it’s an immersive experience which blends over 60 never-before-published poems with over 60 bold, vibrant art pieces, each carefully designed to complement the text. This book was created in the hopes of igniting inspiration, for art lovers, seekers, and those drawn to the unseen emotions that connect us all. It journeys through themes of life, change, time, truth, loss, resilience, and the extraordinary beauty found in the often difficult contrasts of life.

My early years were spent traveling with nomadic parents across Central and South America and beyond. This constant movement shaped my creative spirit and deepened my awareness of impermanence—the fleeting nature our lives, of time, and experience. I am forever drawn to the exchange and connection between the physical and the unseen, the tangible and the metaphysical.

This book marks my first published collection, and I invite readers to pause, reflect, and allow inspiration to grow. Whether you are a lifelong poetry reader or new to the genre, my hope is that it will stir the soul, and remind us that art is a living thing, passing from contact to contact, ever growing and reshaping itself in new creations.

Book Review :: The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer

The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s most recent book, is a long essay, more of a meditation on the serviceberry than an argument. Honestly, though, it is not even about the serviceberry, as she uses that as a means to talk about, as her subtitle puts it, Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. However, her book is about much more than that, as she spends a substantial amount of time talking about gift economies and what that would look like in the twenty-first century world.

Kimmerer looks around the world as it currently is and finds a number of those types of gift economies already in existence. For example, in one section of the book, she uses quick examples of people taking somebody out to dinner or passing a stroller on to somebody else who needs it or another person who makes too much lasagna and shares it with a neighbor. In fact, Kimmerer often gets her serviceberries from a neighbor who grows and sells them, as that neighbor allows people to come and pick them for free.

She also uses larger examples, such as libraries and public roads or Scandinavian countries with a much higher tax base, but a much higher happiness index score, as well. Kimmerer pulls from her Indigenous roots and examines how various tribes have dealt with land management, including agreements to share lands between nations, recognizing that all benefit from the resources, so all should help care for them.

In a time where polarization seems not only to be the norm, but also to be widening in the United States (and a number of other countries around the world), a problem only reinforced by the widening wealth gap, Kimmerer reminds readers that there are other ways to be in the world. Not only that, she reminds us that those ways already exist, if only we take the time to notice them.

The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Scribner, November 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

Book Review :: Gay Poems for Red States by Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr.

Gay Poems for Red States by Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr. book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Gay Poems for Red States, Willie Carver’s debut collection of poems, draws heavily from his life growing up gay in rural Kentucky, as well as his years as a high school teacher (where he had great success, leading to his being named Kentucky Teacher of the Year in 2022). Not surprisingly, then, part of this collection focuses on the struggles he faced, especially within the education system as somebody who was openly gay in a red state.

However, Carver also talks about the love he received from his parents and others in his community, especially some of his teachers, ultimately leading to his relationship with and marriage to Josh, his current husband. In “Someday Child,” for example, when he was younger, he and his father were watching an episode of Jerry Springer, an episode that focused on a gay son coming out to an unaccepting father. His father comments, “You know, if I ever had a kid who felt comfortable telling me something like that, I hope they’d / know that it would be okay with me.” Carver’s not yet comfortable making that confession to his father, so he replies, “Well if you ever have a kid like that, I hope they do.”

This collection, though, is as much about class as it is about sexuality, as Carver also faced rejection because of where he came from. In “Hard to Take Seriously,” Carver tells of travelling to a state competition in speech and debate where he believes he performs amazingly. One judge, however, only provides the comment, “Hard to take seriously with your accent.”

Thus, Carver ends up struggling to find a place to fit in the world. Within the red state, people condemn his sexuality. In the wider world, they judge his socioeconomic status and cultural background.

However, in the final poem, “The Truth Will Stand When the World’s on Fire,” Carver shows how he has reconciled who he is with where he’s from and who he loves, largely based on the acceptance of those closest to him. It is a poem that draws from apocalyptic imagery, much like the book of Revelation; the revelation that he is true to himself and to all that has made him who he is, a reconciliation of both worlds.

Gay Poems for Red States by Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr. The University Press of Kentucky, June 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 :: 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-Dolan’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-Dolan 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.