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NewPages Blog :: New Books

Discover new and forthcoming books from independent publishers and university presses on the NewPages Book Stand.

New Book :: Without Goodbyes

Without Goodbyes: From Puritan Deerfield to Mohawk Kahnawake Poetry by Ginny Lowe Connors book cover image

Without Goodbyes: From Puritan Deerfield to Mohawk Kahnawake
Poetry by Ginny Lowe Connors
Turning Point, December 2021

Without Goodbyes by Ginny Lowe Connors is a collection of poems based on a historical event: the infamous 1704 raid on the village of Deerfield, Massachusetts. More than 100 Deerfield residents: men, women, and children, were captured. Then they began the 300-mile trek to New France, the French colony, in Quebec. The poems, which trace a narrative but are lyrical in nature, focus on Joanna Kellogg, an eleven-year-old girl, and two of her siblings. They were adopted into Mohawk families in the village of Kahnawake, a Mohawk community centered around a Jesuit mission. The physical journey Joanna and her siblings took to reach Kahnawake was grueling; of even greater interest is the journey she took to truly become a member of the Mohawk community. Read sample poems here.

New Book :: Slight Return

Slight Return poetry by Rebecca Wolff book cover image

Slight Return
Poetry by Rebecca Wolff
Wave Books, October 2022

In her new collection, renowned publisher and poet Rebecca Wolff voyages in the myopia of American consumer consciousness—erotic regard, spiritual FOMO, gentrification, branding—without destination. Labyrinthine in their paradoxical musings and incisive in their witty recriminations, these poems grapple with the hubris and dysmorphia of the soul. Wolff is a poet that is unafraid to be a querent, not only of sages (“I only hang out with people / who are psychic / anything else is a / waste of precious / continuity”) but of language itself (“How else is one to know how to proceed / How is one to make a motion against— / electric word life”) In Slight Return, the journey is infinite and elusive—aspiring in the best way toward a point of diminishing returns and withholding any promise of a comfortable landing.

New Book :: The Displaced

The Displaced a novel by Rodrigo Ribera d'Ebre book cover image

The Displaced
Fiction by Rodrigo Ribera d’Ebre
Arte Público Press, June 2022

Mikey and Lurch are worlds apart, even if they’re from the same Mexican neighborhood in West Los Angeles. Mikey just graduated from UCLA and is determined to get out. Lurch, the leader of the Culver City gang, loves the hood—its projects, beat-up apartments, and crackheads—more than his own life. They hook up with a doctor, who is from the same area. He put himself through medical school selling dope and now is back, running a clinic across from the Mar Vista Gardens housing project. All three notice changes. Suddenly there are outsiders everywhere: white people with beards, wearing V-neck sweaters and plaid shirts, running in jogging outfits or riding bikes with helmets, oblivious to the gangbangers. They’re artists, students, developers and entrepreneurs; a plague, pushing people out of their homes. Old people on fixed incomes start getting evicted or foreclosed on and the residents of the projects are being relocated, but some of the locals aren’t going to sit by without a fight. Soon they are fortifying the housing projects and stockpiling assault weapons! This absorbing novel follows a group of people who are determined to save their homes and neighborhood from gentrification, even if it means turning to violence.

July 2022 eLitPak :: Get These Summer 2022 Titles from Livingston Press

Screenshot of Summer 2022 Titles from Livingston Press flyer for the June 2022 eLitPak
click image to open PDF

New from Livingston Press! Aftershock by George H. Wolfe is a novel about GI’s returning from WWII to about-face and enter colleges under the GI Bill. Zero to Ten: Nursing on the Floor by Patricia Taylor is a story collection about nursing, its joys, frustrations, and heartbreak. See flyer for more details or visit website.

Not a NewPages Newsletter subscriber yet? View the full July 2022 eLitPak here.

New Book :: Pacific Light

Pacific Light poetry by David Mason book cover image

Pacific Light
Poetry by David Mason
Red Hen Press, August 2022

David Mason was born in Washington State, forty-odd degrees north latitude, and now lives on the Australian island of Tasmania, forty-odd degrees south latitude. That Pacific crossing is the work of a lifetime of devotion and change. The rich new poems of Pacific Light explore the implications of the light as well as peace and its opposing forces. What does it mean to be an immigrant and face the ultimate borders of our lives? How can we say the word home and mean it? These questions have obsessed Mason in his major narrative works, The Country I Remember and Ludlow, as well as his lyric and dramatic writing. Pacific Light is a culmination and a deepening of that work, a book of transformations, history and love, endurance and unfathomable beauty, by a poet “at the height of his powers.”

New Book :: American Narratives

American Narrative poetry by T.P. Bird book cover image

American Narratives
Poetry by T.P. Bird
Turning Point, November 2021

In this newest collection of poems, American Narratives, T.P. Bird offers the reader narratives of America that portray the grit of the street, the noise of the crowd, and the softness of the heart in a manner as large and capacious as a myth and a country. Bird is a retired industrial drafter/designer and minister now living in Lexington, Kentucky with his spouse. He has published widely in literary journals and is the author of two previous chapbooks, Mystery and Imperfections and Scenes and Speculations. Read sample poems here.

New Book :: Not a Soul but Us

Not a Soul but Us A Story in 84 Sonnets by Richard Smith book cover image

Not a Soul but Us: A Story in 84 Sonnets
Poetry by Richard Smith
Bauhan Publishing, April 2022

Not a Soul but Us: A Story in 84 Sonnets by Richard Smith is the winning collection of the 2021 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. In it, Smith tells the story of mid-fourteenth century Yorkshire, when the plague pandemic wipes out half the inhabitants of a remote village. Left behind is a twelve-year-old shepherd boy, who, with the help of his dog, survives near-starvation and a brutal winter and keeps his flock alive. In the months and years that follow, he struggles to reconnect with the life around him. Judge Meg Kearney said this of her selection, “A mastery of craft. Music. An undulating urgency of tone that leaves no doubt about the emotional impulse that drives the work. A voice that you trust, even when the syntax or the material is difficult. And that material needs to feel relevant, of substance, necessary. Not a Soul But Us is an achievement on every front.”

New Book :: The Girl I Never Knew

The Girl I Never Knew Who Killed Melissa Witt a true crime book by LaDonna Humphrey book cover image

The Girl I Never Knew: Who Killed Melissa Witt?
True Crime by LaDonna Humphrey
Genius Book Publishing, April 2022

For over two decades, the identity of Melissa Witt’s killer has been hidden among the dense trees and thorny undergrowth rooted deeply in the uneven ground of a remote mountaintop in the Ozark National Forest. Determined to find answers, LaDonna Humphrey has spent the past seven years hunting for Melissa’s killer. Her investigation, both thrilling and unpredictable, has led her on a journey like no other, at times her own safety at risk from those who want this mystery to remain unsolved. LaDonna Humphrey is a writer, documentarian, investigative journalist, private investigator, and advocate for victims of crime. “I’m hopeful that the book will put some pressure on some of those people who know they are being looked at [as suspects] but have not been named publicly.” Visit the publisher’s website for links to radio and news media interviews with the author.

New Book :: Blood Snow

Blood Snow poetry by dg nanouk okpik book cover image

Blood Snow
Poetry by dg nanouk okpik
Wave Books, October 2022

American Book Award–winning poet dg okpik’s second collection of poems, Blood Snow, tells a continuum story of a homeland under erasure, in an ethos of erosion, in a multitude of encroaching methane, ice floe, and rising temperatures. Here, in a true Inupiaq voice, okpik’s relationship to language is an access point for understanding larger kinships between animals, peoples, traditions, histories, ancestries, and identities. Through an animist process of transfiguration into a shaman’s omniscient voice, we are greeted with a destabilizing grammar of selfhood. Okpik’s poems have a fraught relationship to her former home in Anchorage, Alaska, a place of unparalleled natural beauty and a traumatic site of devastation for Alaskan native nations and landscapes alike. In this way, okpik’s poetry speaks to the dualistic nature of reality and how one’s existence in the world simultaneously shapes and is shaped by its environs.

New Book :: These Dark Skies

These Dark Skies: Reckoning with Identity, Violence, and Power from Abroad a collection of essays by Arianne Zwartjes book cover image

These Dark Skies: Reckoning with Identity, Violence, and Power from Abroad
Essays by Arianne Zwartjes
University of Iowa Press, June 2022

In These Dark Skies, Arianne Zwartjes interweaves the experience of living in the southern Netherlands—with her wife, who is Russian—and the unfolding of both the refugee crisis across Europe and the uptick in terrorist acts in France, Greece, Austria, Germany, and the Balkans. She probes her own subjectivity, as a white American, as a queer woman in a transcultural marriage, as a writer, and as a witness. The essays investigate and meditate on a broad array of related topics, including drone strikes, tear gas, and military intervention; the sugar trade, the Dutch blackface celebration of Zwarte Piet, and constructions of whiteness in Europe and the U.S.; and visual arts of Russian avant-garde painters, an Iraqi choreographer living in Belgium, and German choreographer Pina Bausch.

New Book :: Chronicles of a Luchador

Chronicles of a Luchador YA fiction by Ray Villareal book cover image

Chronicles of a Luchador
YA Fiction by Ray Villareal
Arte Público Press, June 2022

Jesse Baron, the son of the American Championship Wrestling star known as the Angel of Death, is about to graduate from high school. His parents expect him to attend the University of Texas and study mechanical engineering, something he’s not interested in. The young man knows he would be a natural at professional wrestling, and with his father’s help, he might even reach the same level of fame and success. But the Angel of Death, retired from the ACW and running a wrestling promotion and school, refuses to train his son for fear he will choose sports entertainment over a college degree. Jesse decides that once he gets settled at UT, he’s going to look for another place to wrestle. To keep his father from finding out, he’ll promote himself as a masked luchador from Oaxaca, Mexico, named Máscara de la Muerte. When no one will hire him, Jesse reluctantly considers joining a lucha libre organization, even though he doesn’t speak Spanish. Will the fans and his fellow wrestlers see him as a luchador—or just a gringo with a mask?

New Book :: The Ultimate Havana

The Ultimate Havana: A Willie Cuesta Mystery by John Lantigua book cover image

The Ultimate Havana: A Willie Cuesta Mystery
Fiction by John Lantigua
Arte Público Press, March 2022

Willie Cuesta, former Miami Police detective turned private investigator, is struggling to pay the bills when he receives a call from an old family friend. Cesar Mendoza is the blind, elderly owner of Tabacos El Ciego, a cigar store in Little Havana. Cesar is worried about Victoria Espada, a friend from the old days in Cuba. As a young woman, she was so beautiful that cigar makers competed to put her image on their boxes. She came from a long line of tobacco growers and married a man from an old, respected clan of cigar makers. The couple, who represented one of the great cigar dynasties of all time, fled the island after the revolution, but things didn’t go well. Ernesto Espada ultimately committed suicide, leaving his widow with two young children to raise. Now, her son, a less-than-successful cigar salesman, has gone missing, and the detective is tasked with finding him.

New Book :: Out of Patients

Out of Patients a novel by Sandra Carallo Miller book cover image

Out of Patients
Fiction by Sandra Carallo Miller
University of Nevada Press, August 2022

After practicing medicine for more than thirty years in the sweltering suburbs of Phoenix, Dr. Norah Waters is weighing her options, and early retirement is looking better and better. At age fifty-eight, she questions whether she still needs to deal with midnight calls, cranky patients, and the financial headaches that come with running a small clinic. Fighting burnout and workplace melodrama, Norah gives herself one final year to find the fulfillment and satisfaction she remembers from the early years of her once-cherished career. Supported by her steadfast dog, a misfit veterinarian, and a thoughtful radiologist, Norah wrestles through a surprising assortment of obstacles, sometimes amusing and sometimes dreadful, on her way to making a final decision about her future.

Books Received July 2022

NewPages receives many wonderful titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these titles by clicking on the “New Books” tag under “Popular Topics.” If you are a publisher or author looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us!

Poetry

American Narratives, T.P. Bird, Turning Point
Book of the Cold, Antonio Gamoneda, World Poetry Books
Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic and Artistic Collaboration, 2005-2020
Buy a Ticket, Judith R. Robinson, Word Poetry
Cold Fire, Veronica Zondek, World Poetry Books
Coming To, J.R. Solonche, David Robert Books
Flutter Kick, Anna V.Q. Ross, Red Hen Press
Gold Hill Family Audio, Corrie Lynn White, Southeast Missouri State University
Hechizo, Mark Statman, Lavendar Ink
Hers, Maria Laina, World Poetry Books
I Dreamed I was Emily Dickinson’s Boyfriend, Ron Koertge, Red Hen Press
Living in a Red State Blues, M. Scott Douglass, Paycock Press
The Lowly Negro, James Smith, Revolutionary Books
Love Poems in the Apocalypse, Dani Gabriel, Main Street Rag Publishing
Love’s Universe, Nin Carey Tassi, Cherry Grove Collections
Lynchings: Postcards from America, Lester Graves Lennon, WordTech Editions
The Ones with Difficult Names, David Brendan Hopes, Kelsay Books
Oxblood, Nicole Caruso Garcia, Able Muse Press
Salem Revisited, Charles K. Carter, WordTech Editions
Sheltered in Place, CJ Giroux, Finishing Line Press
A Woman Somehow Dead, Amy Locklin, David Robert Books

Continue reading “Books Received July 2022”

New Book :: Talking to Strangers

Talking to Strangers: Poetry of Everyday Life Poetry by Peter Neil Carroll book cover image

Talking to Strangers: Poetry of Everyday Life
Poetry by Peter Neil Carroll
Turning Point, January 2022

In this newest collection, Talking to Strangers: Poetry of Everyday Life, Peter Neil Carroll employs a multiplicity of voices to ensure that no one is, truly, a stranger. Carroll is the author of several previous collections, including Fracking Dakota, Riverborne: A Mississippi Requiem and A Child Turns Back to Wave: Poetry of Lost Places, which won the Prize Americana in 2012. Other books include the memoir Keeping Time. His poems have appeared in many journals. He has taught creative writing at the University of San Francisco, taught history and American Studies at Stanford and Berkeley, and hosted “Booktalk” on Pacifica Radio. Read sample poems here.

New Book :: Hechizo

Hechizo
Poetry by Mark Statman
Lavender Ink, January 2022

Lavender Ink poetry by Mark Statman book cover image

An hechizo is a spell, an incantation that attempts to effect change in the world via language. Mark Statman’s Hechizo is woven through a world of personal demons, past and present, a world facing a pandemic and social, political, and environmental dissolution. These incantations take aim at the world from the smallest lizard that crawls into view to overarching political structures. It’s a register not seen in his work before—of foreboding, the forbidden, concluding in tentative, possible joy.

New Book :: The Sustain Pedal

The Sustain Pedal poetry by Carol Jennings book cover image

The Sustain Pedal
Poetry by Carol Jennings
Cherry Grove Collections, February 2022

In The Sustain Pedal, Carol Jennings continues the poetic journey she began in The Dead Spirits at the Piano. Her poems create a connection with the composers she listens to and plays on the piano-Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Mendelssohn-as well as with the natural world she loves and mourns for what is being lost. Retreating glaciers, volcanoes, coral reefs, viruses, the outer edge of the solar system-her poetic craft evokes both what we cannot control and what we must learn to control to survive. Read sample poems here.

New Book :: Yazoo Clay

Yazoo Clay stories by Schuyler Dickson published by Livingston Press book cover image

Yazoo Clay
Stories by Schuyler Dickson
Livingston Press, August 2022

Co-winner of the Tartt First Fiction Award, Yazoo Clay is a collection of character-driven deep south stories from writer and regenerative farmer Schuyler Dickson. Experimental, humorous, and thought-provoking, this is a book “about the collapsing floor of living.” Dickson earned a BA in Southern Studies from Ole Miss and his MFA in Creative Writing from Northwestern. Readers can find an excerpt from the book here: “Happy Birthday.”

New Book :: All Is Leaf

All Is Leaf: Essays and Transformations by John T. Price published by University of Iowa Press book cover image

All Is Leaf: Essays and Transformations
Nonfiction by John T. Price
University of Iowa Press, June 2022

All Is Leaf: Essays and Transformations by John T. Price draws inspiration and urgency from the storied Goethe Oak tree at Buchenwald concentration camp—and from the leaf as a symbol of all change, growth, and renewal—and explores a multitude of dramatic transformations, in his life and in the fragile world beyond: “the how of the organism—that keeps your humanity alive.” Price employs an array of forms and voices, whether penning a break-up letter to America or a literary rock-n-roll road song dedicated to prairie scientists, or giving pregame pep talks to his son’s losing football team. Here, too, are moving portrayals of his father’s last effort as a small-town lawyer to defend the rights of abused women, and his own efforts as a writing teacher to honor the personal stories of his students.

New Book :: Almost: My Life in Theater

Almost: My Life in the Theater a memoir by Roselee Blooston published by Apprentice House Press book cover image

Almost: My Life in Theater
Memoir by Roselee Blooston
Apprentice House Press, September 2022

Almost: My Life in the Theater tells the story of Roselee Blooston’s decades-long struggle to fulfill her early promise by becoming a professional actress, taking her to far-flung locales from Europe to Texas to New York City. Along the way, she encounters several Oscar winners and nominees—including Meryl Streep, Greer Garson, and Olympia Dukakis—who each had a profound effect on her self-image and trajectory, though no one had more influence than her mother, a visual artist, whose life served as both cautionary tale and beacon. Blooston can lay claim to trailblazer status as a solo performer, but she asks herself and the reader to deeply consider the true meaning of success and the value of a creative life. Her calling, commitment, and longing for recognition will resonate with anyone who has followed a passion, been thwarted in the attempt, and then successfully and happily reinvented themselves. Apprentice House is an entirely student-managed book publisher with students at Loyola University Maryland responsible for every aspect of the publishing process, from acquisitions to design and publication of every book. Learn more here.

New Book :: summonings

summonings poetry by Raena Shirali published by Black Lawrence Press book cover image

summonings
Poetry by Raena Shirali
Black Lawrence Press, October 2022

Indebted to the docupoetics tradition, Raena Shirali’s summonings investigates the ongoing practice of witch (“daayan”) hunting in India. Winner of The Hudson Prize, these poems interrogate the political implications and shortcomings of writing Subaltern personae while acknowledging the author’s Westernized positionality. Continuing to explore multi-national and intersectional concerns around identity raised in her debut collection, Shirali asks how first- and second-generation immigrants reconcile the self with the lineages that shape it, wondering aloud about those lineages’ relationships to misogyny and violence. These poems explore how antiquated and existing norms surrounding female mysticism in India and America inform each culture’s treatment of women. As Jericho Brown wrote of Shirali’s poetics in GILT, her “comment on culture, on identity, on justice is her comment on poetry.” summonings offers a commentary on power and patriarchy, on authorial privilege and the shifting role of witness, and ultimately, on an ethical poetics, grounded in the inevitable failure to embody the Other.

New Book :: Wise to the West

Wise to the West poetry by Wendy Videlock published by Able Muse Press book cover image

Wise to the West
Poetry by Wendy Videlock
Able Muse Press, November 2022

In Wise to the West, Wendy Videlock embraces her Western terrain and surroundings—family, neighbor, barbershop, morning shower, coyote, badger, wolf, blackbird, hawk, canyon, mesa, mountain—with songs, odes, witticisms, lamentations. Along the way, she tilts toward the grand view of the world around—relaying turns of uncertainty or affirmation, history or the latest news, myths and the mystic—and gifting readers musings and meditations in her unique style full of quirks, wit, wisdom, and surprising turns. Wendy Videlock lives on the western slope of the Colorado Rockies with her husband and their assorted critters. Her work appears in Hudson Review, Oprah Magazine, Poetry, Dark Horse, the New York Times, Best American Poetry, and other venues.

New Book :: Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists

Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists poetry by Laynie Browne published by Wave Books book cover image

Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists
Poetry by Laynie Browne
Wave Books, June 2022

Laynie Browne’s latest poetry collection, Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists playfully employs the list poem and delivers poems which evade genre and subvert the quotidian material of daily life. These poems consider elegy, absence and bewilderment while allowing associative logic to make poetic leaps in imagination and mood that belie convention. This book explores the myriad ways one could attempt to categorize a lived experience with its dizzying infinitudes by marking it in finite language and ultimately shows how poetry is an experiment for that translation. Browne’s collection considers language, time, and poetics in a way that is as electrifying as it is elusive. In homage to poet C.D. Wright, her title is inspired by Translations of the Gospel Back into Tongues.

New Book :: The Lowly Negro

The Lowly Negro poetry by James Smith published by Revolutionary Books book cover image

The Lowly Negro
Poetry by James Smith
Revolutionary Books, May 2022

Revolutionary Books is a new imprint of Artvoices Books, seeking to publish “Poets who embody the essence of the revolutionary: fearless, passionate and unwavering.” This, their debut title, The Lowly Negro by James Smith, is a written account of a poor, destitute, and uneducated inner-city Black male’s life and journey in the U.S., showing his ability to sustain and survive by weathering the lows as well as the highs. As an African American, he is both an invisible man and one who believes he is the sum of his experiences. The poems relate how Others believe his existence is an illusion of rehearsed lines, walking with his eyes closed, hoping for the best. The Lowly Negro is a singular voice representing countless men and women from disenfranchised and marginalized communities. The forgotten and neglected of society who only have the written word as their protest find a voice in this collection. Author James Smith is an American poet who comments, “I write for catharsis: my weapon of choice. I am a black man who has survived Hell on Earth in search of forgiveness, enlightenment and sanity.” Poem samples and a companion film by Jameson Stokes can be found here.

New Book :: Love’s Universe

Love's Universe poems by Nina Carey Tassi book cover image

Love’s Universe: New & Selected Poems
Poetry by Nina Carey Tassi
Cherry Grove Collections, April 2022

Nina Carey Tassi’s intimate poems in Love’s Universe explore the myriad ways that love finds a home in human hearts, from searing first desire through the oceanic depths of marriage and family to soul-piercing faith and the uplifting joys of nature and one’s country; not least is the unexpected miracle of suffering, all suggesting that love indeed animates the universe. Read sample poems here.

New Book :: Without Saints

Without Saints essays by Christopher Locke published by Black Lawrence Press book cover image

Without Saints
Essays by Christopher Locke
Black Lawrence Press, October 2022

Runner-up for the Monadnock Essay Collection Prize, Without Saints by Christopher Locke is a journey to rediscover hope between the ruins: Poet Christopher Locke was baptized by Pentecostals, absolved by punk rock, and nearly consumed by narcotics. Like the propulsive Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, Without Saints is a brief, muscular ride into the heart of American desolation, and the love one finds waiting for them instead. Christopher Locke was born in New Hampshire and received his MFA from Goddard College. His poems, fiction, criticism, and essays have appeared in numerous publications, and he is the recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Award and the 2018 Black River Chapbook Award. He now lives in the Adirondacks where he teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at North Country Community College.

New Book :: American Dude Ranch

American Dude Ranch: A Touch of the Cowboy and the Thrill of the West by Lynn Downey published by University of Oklahoma Press book cover image

American Dude Ranch: A Touch of the Cowboy and the Thrill of the West
Nonfiction by Lynn Downey
The University of Oklahoma Press, March 2022

Viewers of films and television shows might imagine the dude ranch as something not quite legitimate, a place where city dwellers pretend to be cowboys in amusingly inauthentic fashion. But the tradition of the dude ranch, America’s original western vacation, is much more interesting and deeply connected with the culture and history of the American West. In American Dude Ranch, Lynn Downey opens new perspectives on this buckaroo getaway, with all its implications for deciphering the American imagination. The book is 246 pages with 32 black and white illustrations.

New Book :: Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina

Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina poetry by Dara Barrois/Dixon published by Wave Books book cover image

Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina
Poetry by Dara Barrois/Dixon
Wave Books, June 2022

With the same tender honesty found in all of Dara Barrois/Dixon’s (formerly Dara Wier) poetry, the poems in Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina are curious about the world we inhabit and the worlds we create. Barrois/Dixon brings profound attention to the things we love—be they animals, books, skyscapes, movies, poems, or other human beings—and to the stories that shape our worlds. Here, with emotional exactitude, is a collection of poems that is unafraid to express “love humor despair loving kindness love humor empathy/humor joy sympathy love kindness courage.”

New Book :: All the Rivers Flow Into the Sea

All the Rivers Flow Into the Sea and Other Stories by Khanh Ha published by EastOver Press book cover image

All the Rivers Flow Into the Sea and Other Stories
Fiction by Khanh Ha
EastOver Press, June 2022

From Vietnam to America, Khanh Ha’s All the Rivers Flow Into the Sea is a story collection that brings readers a unique sense of love and passion alongside tragedy and darker themes of peril. The titular story features a love affair between an unlikely duo pushing against barely surmountable cultural barriers. In “The Yin-Yang Market,” magical realism and the beauty of innocence abound in deep dark places, teeming with life and danger. “A Mute Girl’s Yarn” tells a magical coming-of-age story like sketches in a child’s fairy book. Bringing together the damned, the unfit, the brave who succumb to the call of fate, All the Rivers Flow Into the Sea is a great journey where redemption and human goodness arise out of violence and beauty to become part of an essential mercy. All the Rivers Flow into the Sea was selected as a winner of the 2021 EastOver Prize for Fiction.

June 2022 eLitPak :: Check out Madville Publishing’s Summer Reading List!

Screenshot of Madville Publishing's Summer Reading List flyer for the June 2022 eLitPak
click image to open PDF

Madville publishing is pleased to announce our summer reading list! Our authors worry at questions of family, home, and belonging in this amazing quartet of books. All available now for order or preorder: 

  • Worrisome Creatures: Poems by Kate Sweeney
  • Genesis Road a novel by Susan O’Dell Underwood
  • Provenance: A Novel by Sue Mell
  • Secret City: Poems by Katherine Smith

View flyer or visit website to learn more.

If you’re not subscribed to our weekly newsletter, view the full June 2022 eLitPak here.

June 2022 eLitPak :: Summer Titles from Livingston Press at University of West Alabama

Screenshot of Summer 2022 Titles from Livingston Press flyer for the June 2022 eLitPak
click image to open PDF

New summer titles from Livingston Press at the University of West Alabama include a novel about GI’s returning from WWII to about-face and enter colleges under the GI Bill. A story collection about nursing, its joys, frustrations, and heartbreak. See flyer for more details or visit website.

If you’re not subscribed to our weekly newsletter, view the full June 2022 eLitPak here.

New Book :: Oxblood

Oxblood poetry by Nicole Caruso Garcia published by Able Muse Press book cover image

Oxblood
Poetry by Nicole Caruso-Garcia
Able Muse Press, October 2022

Oxblood, Nicole Caruso Garcia’s debut poetry collection, testifies unflinchingly about the short- and long-term effects of a college student’s rape by her fiancé. As the poet engages with this serious topic, her arsenal includes wit, wordplay, and even humor. The diverse structures of traditional received forms—the sonnet, the sestina, various French repeating forms, the Afghan landay, blues tercets—form interesting contrasts with free verse poems in this collection. Oxblood was a finalist for the 2022 Able Muse Book Award.

New Book :: Broadsided Press Anthology

Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic and Artistic Collaboration, 2005-2020 book cover image

Broadsided Press Anthology
Fifteen Years of Poetic and Artistic Collaboration, 2005-2020
Provincetown Arts Press, April 2022

Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic and Artistic Collaborations, 2005-2020 is an anthology that celebrates Broadsided Press’s mission of “putting literature and art on the streets.” I have always loved the work of this organization, and since its founding, Broadsided has released one beautifully designed, original, letter-sized collaboration of poetry and art (a broadside) each month: a unique collaboration between a visual artist and a writer that is a work of art in itself. These were available for free download each month so that “vectors” could print them and post them with many taking pictures and sharing these on the site. Now, for the first time, more than fifty broadsides selected from over 300 published the past 15 years are presented in a first-ever book form alongside the interviews with artists and poets who collaborated to create them and photographs of the work in public spaces.

New Book :: My Haunted Home

My Haunted Home stories by Victoria Hood book cover image

My Haunted Home
Fiction by Victoria Hood
University of Alabama/FC2, October 2022

The stories in My Haunted Home by Victoria Hood delve in startling ways into the lives of the obsessed, the grieving, and the truly haunted. Winner of FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, Hood conjures a shifting range of narrators through an unstable range of worlds where mothers might be dead, girls compulsively shove peanuts inside their ears, agoraphobia traps people inside their houses, and cats won’t eat your soup. In “The Teeth, the Way I Smile,” a daughter who looks like her dead mother manifests grief both in her house and her body. In “Smelly Smelly,” a woman slowly comes to realize her boyfriend has been dead for weeks. In “You, Your Fault,” Hood explores the unfolding love of two women who love every part of each other—including the parts that fixate on arson and murder. In this debut story collection, Hood probes the worlds of what can be haunted, unpacking the ways in which hauntings can be manifested in physical forms, mentally harvested and lived through, and even a change in what is haunting.

New Book :: Wings & Other Things

Wings and Other Things stories by Chauna Craig book cover image

Wings & Other Things
Fiction by Chauna Craig
Press 53, September 2022

Wings & Other Things by Chauna Craig is a book of migrations. Its characters flutter and flap, take off and land, then take off again as they seek the places they belong. These are characters caught in transition: a widow searching for a past self on an “Impossible Blue” coast, lovers explaining to the police and themselves why they’re hiding in a Nebraska cornfield. a teacher struggling to be understood on a flight from Chengdu, a stranded artist riding with a stranger on a highway haunted y the ghost of a woman who never made it home. Each story is a transformation as Craig turns railroad tracks into an “infinite number line” and a lightning bolt into a “tentacle of the unseen.” A plastic fork becomes a parable of fragility, and a “scrap moon” is an image of what is lost and what yet remains.

New Book :: The Illusion of Simple

The Illusion of Simple a novel by Charles Forrest Jones book cover image

The Illusion of Simple
Fiction by Charles Forrest Jones
University of Iowa Press, May 2022

The Illusion of Simple by Charles Forrest Jones begins in a dry Kansas riverbed where a troop of young girls finds a human hand. This discovery leads Billy Spire, the tough and broken sheriff of Ewing County, to investigate and confront the depths of his community and of himself: the racism, the dying economy, the lies and truths of friendship, grievances of the past and present, and even his own injured marriage. But like any town where people still breathe, there is also love and hope and the possibility of redemption. To flyover folks, Ewing County appears nothing more than a handful of empty streets amid crop circles and the meandering, depleted Arkansas River. But the truth of this place—the interwoven lives and stories—is anything but simple. Charles Forrest Jones is former director of the Kansas University Public Management Center and believes that “public policy is rooted in the human condition, there is a place for the articulate, compelling, even beautiful.”

Sponsored :: New Book :: Refugee

cover of Refugee by Pamela Uschuk

Refugee 
Poetry by Pamela Uschuck
Red Hen Press, Spring 2022

Refugee deals with political refugees, refugees from racism, from domestic violence, from environmental destruction and cancer—and their stories of cruelty and courage, hardship, and hope to overcome the most daunting of circumstances.  This collection confronts and explores xenophobia, sexism, gun violence, domestic violence, corporate greed, environmental destruction and political tyranny. An ovarian cancer survivor, Pamela also writes about her own courageous confrontation with death.

“With tenderness, expansive compassion, and profound gifts of radiant description, Pamela Uschuk considers so many ways people may be estranged and lost in this precious, difficult world. With brave ferocity, her poems in Refugee navigate new vision and reconnection, so desperately longed for right now and always.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye, author of The Tiny Journalist

New Book :: Benefit Street

Benefit Street a novel by Adria Bernardi book cover image

Benefit Street
Fiction by Adria Bernardi
University of Alabama Press/FC2, August 2022

Benefit Street by Adria Bernardi is set in an unnamed provincial capital of an unnamed country and tells of a wide circle of friends—teachers, lawyers, missionaries, doctors, artisans—in a time of gathering and dispersal. It tells the story of mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, colleagues, and neighbors, as war to the East threatens and constitutional rights are daily eroded by an increasingly authoritarian regime. The ideals of youth, freedom, and coexistence are severely tested with the shocking revelation that the charismatic leader of their group has sexually abused the women under his care. The limits of reconciliation are tested as Şiva makes an arduous journey into the mountains to meet an estranged mother with a genius for weaving complex rugs.

New Book :: We Were Angry

We Were Angry a novella and stories by Jennifer S. Davis book cover image

We Were Angry: A Novella & Stories
Fiction by Jennifer S. Davis
Press 53, August 2022

We Were Angry by Jennifer S. Davis, introduces readers to a group of friends in small-town Alabama whose lives are haunted by tragedies that reverberate across generations. In Davis’s world, Alabaman is more than a fictional setting. It’s a scene for interrogating power, pain, and what it means to live in – and to leave – the American South. In a linked collection of stories shot through with dark humor, Davis offers glimpses of a land of contradictions: dollar stores and golf courses, dive bars and country clubs, and long-forgotten communities flooded to make way for mansions where missing women are rumored to be buried. Transversing these red dirt roads are mothers and mourners, rebels and addicts, lovers, liars, prisoners, politicians, theme park enthusiasts, and collectors of rejected housepets. Winner of the 2021 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction.

New Book :: Voices from the Other Side of Death

Voices from the Other Side of Death poetry by Ariel Dorfman book cover image

Voices from the Other Side of Death
Poetry by Ariel Dorfman
Arte Público Press, June 2022

Voices from the Other Side of Death by Ariel Dorfman offers readers a series of poems written from the perspective of deceased historical figures to contemporary politicians and soldiers, warning about the need for reckoning and atonement. In one, Pablo Picasso speaks to Colin Powell, asking why his famous painting depicting the horror of war, Guernica, was covered when the secretary of state spoke about the invasion of Iraq at the United Nations. Others explore connections to loved ones, including “the love of my life, Angélica, the woman who helped me survive exile and tribulations and peopled my world with hope.” Dorfman writes about the passionate love the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan felt for his wife, which led to the construction of the Taj Mahal, and imagines conversations between William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes, who died within hours of each other. These poems share the most human of emotions and expose Dorfman’s vulnerability as he embarks on the last leg of his journey.

New Book :: Shame

Shame autofiction by Grant Maierhofer book cover image

Shame
Autofiction by Grant Maierhofer
University of Alabama Press/FC2, September 2022

Shame by Grant Maierhofer is a daring exploration of the potential and limits of memory and self. Here we meet the author at various points within his life then, now, and in the future, as he investigates the sense of shame that haunts the course of his days. The real and unreal, fact and fiction, blur together in a Kaufmanesque sequence of overlapping narratives about who we really are, how we cope with regret, and the repetitions of our behavior. Through lists, fragments, recollections, and rants, the story of a son’s vexing grief for his father emerges. A sober addict trying to figure out how to navigate pleasure, diversion, and escape. A father trying to figure out marriage, children, maturity, and responsibility. A confused observer in a world constantly torn apart by media, politics, and aggression. A meditation on the nature of art, and art’s place in contemporary life.

New Book :: I Got Mine

I Got Mine memoir by John Nichols book cover image

I Got Mine: Confessions of a Midlist Writer
Memoir by John Nichols
University of New Mexico Press, June 2022

I Got Mine: Confessions of a Midlist Writer is the memoir of John Nichols as seen through the lens of his writing. Everything that went into making him a writer and eventually found an outlet in his work—his education, family, wives, children, friends, enemies, politics, and place—is told from the point of view of his daily practice of writing. Beginning with his first novel, The Sterile Cuckoo, published in 1965 when he was just twenty-four, Nichols shares his highs and lows: his ambivalent relationship with money; his growing disenchantment with the hypocrisy of capitalism; and his love-hate relationship with Hollywood—including the years-long struggle of working with director Robert Redford on the film version of The Milagro Beanfield War, which was filmed around Truchas and featured many of Nichols’ northern New Mexico neighbors. I Got Mine captures Nichols’ lifelong engagement with progressive political causes, his passionate interest in and identification with ordinary people, and his deep connection to the land.

New Book :: tender gravity

tender gravity poetry by Marybeth Holleman book cover image

tender gravity
Poetry by Marybeth Hollman
Red Hen Press, August 2022

tender gravity is Marybeth Holleman’s collection of poetry that charts her quest for relationships to the more-than-human world, navigating her childhood in North Carolina to her life in Alaska, with deep time in remote land and seascapes. Always the focus is on what can be found by attention to the world beyond her own human skin, what can be found there as she negotiates loss — the loss of beloved places, wild beings, her younger brother. “do not think,” she says to her mother, “that i love a bear more than my brother. / think instead that i cannot distinguish / the variations in / the beat of a heart.” Inevitably, solace is found in the wild world: “step back toward that joy-sap rising, step back / into the only world that is.” In a narrative arc of seeking, falling, and finding, Holleman’s exquisitely attentive immersion offers clear reverberations of Mary Oliver, of Linda Hogan, of Walt Whitman. These poems of grief and celebration pulse in and out, reaching to the familiar moon and out to orphan stars of distant galaxies, then pull close to a small brown seabird and an on-the-knees view of a tiny bog plant.

New Book :: But Still, Music

But Still Music poetry by Anne Pitkin book cover image

But Still, Music
Poetry by Anne Pitkin
Pleasure Boat Studio, September 2022

Anne Pitkin’s third book, But Still, Music spans her childhood as a privileged white child in the Jim Crow South to the period of her grown daughter’s death. The poems in this collection visit the disquieting contradictions of a southern childhood marked by honeysuckle and lightning bugs and the racist culture that was the air Pitkin breathed. A number of poems address the loss of her daughter. Still, in the end, as she says in the final poem. ‘‘Tide”: “There you’ve been, loves of my life. / There you’ve changed me, one by one. . . “

New Book :: Gold Hill Family Audio

Gold Hill Family Audio poetry by Corrie Lynn White book cover image

Gold Hill Family Audio
Poetry by Corrie Lynn White
Southeast Missouri State University Press, October 2022

Winner of the 2021 Cowles Poetry Prize, Gold Hill Family Audio is Corrie Lynn White’s debut poetry collection. Her poetry has appeared in Oxford American, New Ohio Review, Best New Poets, Mid American Review, and Mississippi Review, among other publications. Originally from Gold Hill, North Carolina, she holds a BA from UNC Chapel Hill and an MFA from UNC Greensboro. She currently lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she works as a journalist and was named the 2021 Tennessee Arts Commission Fellow in Poetry.

New Book :: Glorious Fiends

Glorious Fiends fiction by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam book cover image

Glorious Fiends
Fiction by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam
Underland Press, September 2022

When infamous hot mess vampire Roxanne resurrects her deceased best friends, she’s confronted by a dream-dwelling Guardian of the Underworld, who demands that she replace them in his afterlife with three equally nefarious creatures — or he’ll drag her there instead. Reunited with Medusa and Mx. Hyde, Roxanne and her macabre girl gang must become monster hunters themselves and fight for the future of their friendship. Gory, sexy, silly, touching — Glorious Fiends asks who the real monsters are and if the bonds that we think are solely human are really ours alone. This Hammer-inspired odyssey is a nostalgic trip through ‘80s horror tropes — with modern sensibilities.

New Book :: Sheltered in Place

Sheltered in Place poetry by CJ Giroux book cover image

Sheltered in Place
Poetry by CJ Giroux
Finishing Line Press, August 2022

Infused with images of the natural world, Sheltered in Place features a braid of three poetic sequences. The first focuses on a grown child’s relationship with an aging parent living in a memory ward; the second focuses on a parent marking the growth of a child from her birth through her teen years; the third sequence, which gives the collection its title, examines life in the early days of the pandemic when shutdowns were imposed. CJ Giroux is a professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University, has helped direct the school’s writing center, and serves on the editorial board of Dunes Review. His dissertation, which he completed at Wayne State University, focused on representations of trauma in 20th- and 21st-century American plays.

New Book :: Living in a Red State Blues

Living in a Red State Blues poetry by M. Scott Douglass book cover image

Living in a Red State Blues
Poetry by M. Scott Douglass
Paycock Press, April 2022

Living in a Red State Blues by M. Scott Douglass is a collection years in the making, having been hatched prior to the pandemic and developed throughout the subsequent years of shutdowns and election cycles. Afraid that publishers may have become “exhausted” with the topics covered in these works, Douglass had all but given up on it ever seeing the light of day in print. That was until a few publishers began requesting some of the works to include in their anthologies and literary journals. Thus, life was breathed back into the endeavor and is now available for readers, with such titled works as “Erasing a Color (from literature),” “Cone of Uncertainty,” “Diluting Red,” “Forgiving Red,” “Neoconservatives,” “Punishing Red,” “The Color of Fraud,” “Assessing the VRBO,” and “A Tinderbox of Unsuble Discourse.” M. Scott Douglass is Publisher and Managing Editor of Main Street Rag Publishing Company and general all-around badass.

New Book :: An Earnest Blackness

An Earnest Blackness essays by Eugen Bacon book cover image

An Earnest Blackness
Nonfiction by Eugen Bacon
Anti-Oedipus Press, August 2022

An Earnest Blackness is Eugen Bacon’s debut collection of personal essays offering critical perspectives on blackness, Afrofuturism, colonialism, historicity, and (mis)recognition as she explores the untapped possibilities of speculative fiction. Using a variety of analytic, narrative, and anecdotal techniques, Bacon shares her experiences as an African Australian woman, mother, and writer who occupies a liminal space that is “betwixt” worlds and genres. She also considers work by “other” writers—ranging from Roland Barthes and Jorge Luis Borges to Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Sheree Renée Thomas—in an effort to chart a path towards greater social and cultural truth. Literary, adventurous, and insightful, An Earnest Blackness excavates the world(s) that not only construct contemporary authorship but the fluid nature of identity itself.

New Book :: Love Poems in the Apocalypse

Love Poems in the Apocalypse poetry by Dani Jeremiah Gabriel book cover image

Love Poems in the Apocalypse
Poetry by Dani Jeremiah Gabriel
Main Street Rag Publishing, May 2022

Love Poems in the Apocalypse is the newest collection of poems from Dani Jeremiah Gabriel, author of Low Rent Prophet (Nomadic Press) and several other titles. Gabriel says their “response to the pandemic was to write these unbelievably gritty and hopeful love poems, and the book is made up largely of that writing.” With such titled works as “election thursday poem,” “wish list,” “everyday insurrection,” “the antidote for everything,” and “poem for my white transgender twelve year old son thinking of twelve year old Tamir Rice shot by police while playing,” Gabriel asserts the range of what can constitute a love poem. The former Poet Laureate of El Cerrito, California, Gabriel earned an MFA from Mills College and resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.