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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 :: Call Me Fool

Call Me Fool poetry by William Trowbridge book cover image

Call Me Fool
Poetry by William Trowbridge
Red Hen Press, September 2022

Call Me Fool by William Trowbridge is based on an archetype that runs from the beginnings of storytelling up to modern films (silent and sound), fiction, poetry, and stand-up comedy. He is combination schlemiel and shlimazel, alternately the spiller and the spilled-on. He is often the scapegoat, as St. Chrysostom put it, “he who gets slapped.” After blundering into hell with Lucifer and company, Trowbridge’s Fool is reincarnated in various historical times, with occasional unplanned visits back to the heavenly realm, operated as a mega-corporation by its Enron-style CEO.

New Book :: Ascension

Ascension fiction by Steve Tomasula book cover image

Ascension
Fiction by Steve Tomasula
University of Alabama Press/FC2, August 2022

Ascension by Steve Tomasula is a novel about the end of nature, or rather, the end of three “natures”: the time just before Darwin changed the natural world; the 1980s, just as the digital and genetic revolutions begin to replace “nature” with “environment”; and today, a time when we have the ability to manipulate nature at both the scale of the planet and at the genome. The narrative follows three different biologists on the brink of each of these cultural extinctions to explore how nature occupies our imaginations and how our imaginations bring the natural world, and our place in it, into existence.

Books Received June 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
BABE, Dorothy Chan, Diode Editions
Best of the Sucks, ed. Mark Spitzer, MadHat Press
Beyond the Time of Words, Marjorie Agosín, Sixteen Rivers Press
Breaking Down Familiar, Donald Levering, Main Street Rag Publishing
A Brilliant Loss, Eloise Klein Healy, Red Hen Press
Call Me Fool, William Trowbridge, Red Hen Press
Cance Voodoo, Melissa C. Johnson, Diode Editions
Cannon Fodder, Jay Sizemore, Crow Hollow Books
Coining a Wishing Tower, Ayesha Raees, Platypus Press
The Convert’s Heart is Good to Eat, Melody S. Gee, Driftwood Press

Continue reading “Books Received June 2022”

New Book :: Reverse Engineer

Reverse Engineer poetry by Kate Colby book cover image

Reverse Engineer
Poetry by Kate Colby
Ornithopter Press, October 2022

In Kate Colby’s ninth collection of poems, Reverse Engineer, she continues her excavation of the unknown, “the key to which breaks / the lock by breaking in it.” Operating at the junctures of perception and sensation, philosophy and grief, Reverse Engineer explores the deep recesses of human experience where conventional language doesn’t quite reach. Katy Colby has received awards and fellowships from the Poetry Society of America, Rhode Island State Council for the Arts, The Dodd Research Center at University of Connecticut, and Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room.

New Book :: Breaking Down Familiar

Breaking Down the Familiar poetry by Donald Levering book cover image

Breaking Down Familiar
Poetry by Donald Levering
Main Street Rag Publishing, May 2022

Donald Leverings’s 16th book of poetry, Breaking Down the Familiar, grapples with a host of harrowing assaults to the narrator and his family: illness and accidents, addiction and madness, estrangement and divorce. Yet as mind and body falter, as faith is undermined and relationships sunder, as aging parents can neither be changed or saved and former athletes tally their infirmities, previously obscured strength emerge – as a ruined golfer in one poem says, “Your character is revealed / in the handicap you claim.” Finally, the poems re-enact the family’s reconstitution, the way in the eponymous poem, shattered bottle pieces are refashioned into artisan’s sea glass crafts. A former NEA Fellow, Donald Levering won the Tor House Robinson Jeffers Award, selected by Eavan Boland; the Carve Poetry Prize, judged by Carmen Giménez Smith; and the Literal Latté Poetry Award. Levering’s work has also been featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac podcast.

New Book :: Rx

Rx poetry by Josh Sapan book cover image

Rx
Poetry by Josh Sapan
Red Hen Press, November 2022

In this debut poetry collection, Rx, Josh Sapan guides us through a lifetime of love and loss as he navigates death — of loved ones, of crickets, of houseplants — in an American landscape teeming with wonder and the promise of rebirth — in the stars, the wind, the minnows in the bay. In Rx, the prescription is literal (“blue-fog medicine breath”) and figurative (“Love so big, / it comes in a gigantic red box.”). Sapan offers a glimpse into the sometimes painfully delicate and beautiful parts of life.

New Book :: Elixir

Elixir poetry by Lewis Warsh book cover image

Elixir
Poetry by Lewis Warsh
Ugly Duckling Presse, April 2022

Animated by a poignant blend of humor, pathos, joie de vivre, and nostalgia, Elixir is an extended meditation on everyday life and the passage of time. Fragments of narrative, overheard dialogue, song lyrics, and slant memoir surface and recede throughout. Examining the inseparable entanglement of the quotidian and the profound with wit and candor, these poems are personal, direct, and elusive at the same time. Lewis Warsh (1944–2020) was a key poet of the second generation New York School and — as a teacher, poet, mentor, and publisher of Angel Hair and United Artists Books — a significant figure in New York poetry communities for over 50 years. He authored over thirty volumes of poetry, fiction, and autobiography.

New Book :: Best of the Sucks

Best of the Sucks poetry collection edited by Mark Spitz book cover image

Best of the Sucks: High-Octane Poetix from the Legendary Toad Suck Review
Edited by Mark Spitz
MadHat Press, March 2022

For fans of the legendary Toad Suck Review, and for anyone who missed that boat but would have an appreciation for innovative literature that’s quirky, edgy, and International Avant-Garde, this revival publication is your ticket to get on board. This publication will reestablish Toad Suck Editions as MadHat takes it into the future, so consider this your time to catch up with the class! Digging back to its Exquisite Corpse roots, the transitional period to the inception of Toad Suck, and pummeling chronologically through the issues, works in this collection feature Michael Anania, Antler, Robert Archambeau, Debangana Banerjee, Amiri Baraka, Nicolas Bataille, Elva Maxine Beach, Marck Beggs, Jericho Brown, William Burroughs, Vincent Cellucci, Ha Kiet Chau, Jack Collom, Gillian Conoley, Heather Cox, JJ Cromer, Tim Dardis, Diane di Prima, The Dirty Poet, Allen Ginsberg, Lea Graham, Brenda Mann Hammack, Matthew Henriksen, Jack Hirschman, Tyrone Jaeger, Stacy Kidd, klipschutz, Scotty Lewis, Lyn Lifshin, Gerald Locklin, Sandy Longhorn, James McWilliams, Henri Michaux, Mlle. Akakia-Viala, Craig Paulenich, Gabriel and Marcel Piqueray, Jacques Prévert, Arthur Rimbaud, Ed Sanders, Davis Schneiderman, Norman Shapiro, Chris Shipman, Tim Snediker, Gary Snyder, Mark Spitzer, Daryl Spurlock, Frank Stanford, Mike Topp, Joey Trimble, Anne Waldman, Ken Waldman, Laurie Welch, Lew Welch, and CD Wright.

New Book :: News of the Air

News of the Air fiction by Jill Stukenberg book cover image

News of the Air
Fiction by Jill Stukenberg
Black Lawrence Press, September 2022

News of the Air by Jill Stukenberg was selected as the winner of the annual Black Lawrence Press Big Moose Prize (Dec 1 – Jan 31). In this novel, Allie Krane is heavily pregnant when she and her husband flee urban life after a rash of eco-terrorism breaks out in their city. They reinvent themselves as the proprietors of a northwoods fishing resort, where they live in relative peace for nearly two decades. That is, until two strange children arrive by canoe. Like the small ecological disasters lapping yearly at their shore, the problems of the modern world may finally have found Allie, her husband, and their troubled cypher of a teenage daughter. This eco-novel of a family, told from three points of view, explores how we remake our lives once we open our hearts to all the news we’ve chosen to ignore.

New Book :: The Mothers

The Mothers poetry by Dorianne Laux and Leila Chatti book cover image

The Mothers: Poems in Conversation & A Conversation
Poetry by Dorianne Laux and Lelia Chatti
Slapering Hol Press, April 2022

The Mothers by Dorianne Laux and Lelia Chatti comes to readers from one of the oldest chapbook presses in the United States, Slapering Hol Press. This “Conversation Series” published poetry by a well-known woman poet who chooses an emerging woman poet to appear in the same collection with a conversation between them included at the end. Dorianne Laux’s sixth collection, Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems was named a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Leila Chatti was born in 1990 in Oakland, California. A Tunisian-American dual citizen, she has lived in the United States, Tunisia, and Southern France. She is the author of the debut full-length collection Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and currently serves as the Consulting Poetry Editor at the Raleigh Review as well as teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is the Mendota Lecturer in Poetry. Slapering Hol books are collectible creations of beauty. The book design, typecasting, and cover letterpress printing are by Ed Rayher of Swamp Press in Northfield, Massachusetts, with cover art by Hyde Meissner, and run in a limited, hand-numbered edition.

New Book :: A Brilliant Loss

A Brilliant Loss poetry by Eloise Klein Healy book cover image

A Brilliant Loss
Poetry by Eloise Klein Healy
Red Hen Press, October 2022

Eloise Klein Healy’s A Brilliant Loss is a poetic journey into the loss of language and the reclaiming of it. Healy had Wernicke’s aphasia in 2013 when she was the first poet laureate of the City of Los Angeles, and the virus hit her the night of her reading with Caroline Kennedy at the Central Library. Also called fluent aphasia, Wernicke’s aphasia affects language and the use of words. Healy’s collection shows that her brain has access to its deepest unconscious, and that place is poetry. Her deepest language is poetry. It’s as if a dancer was denied the ability to walk or run, and could only dance. Healy writes of losing her words and finding big love.

New Book :: Dillydoun Prize Anthology Volume 1

Dillydoun Prize Anthology Volume 1 book cover image

Dillydoun Prize Anthology Volume 1
Edited by Amy Burns
Dillydoun Review, May 2022

In celebration of the 2021 Dillydoun International Fiction Prize, all the Winners and Honorable Mentions have been published online as well as in print. The first print anthology is now available to purchase. The Dillydoun Prize Anthology Volume 1 includes works from Alejandro de Gutierre, Kerri Schlottman, Chris Whyland, Nora Studholme, Cynthia Singerman, Alexandra Gowling, Rudy Ruiz, Anna Millard, Byron Spooner, Ronald Meek, Les Zig, Ellen Sollinger Walker, and Emma Gilberthorpe. Hosting two competitions this year, the 2022 Dillydoun Flash Fiction Prize closes July 31, 2022, and the 2022 Dillydoun Short Story Prize closes October 2, 2022. Visit The Dillydoun Review website for complete details.

New Book :: Tree Lines

Tree Lines 21st Century American Poems an anthology edited by Jennifer Barber, Jessica Greenbaum, and Fred Marchant book cover image

Tree Lines: 21st Century American Poems
Edited by Jennifer Barber, Jessica Greenbaum, and Fred Marchant
Grayson Books, April 2022

This important new collection of works by 130 poets reflects contemporary American poets’ heightened awareness of place, close observation of nature, concern for climate, and our psychological, spiritual, and physical need for trees. A portion of the book’s proceeds will be donated to the National Park Service Foundation. The anthology treasure includes poems by Ellen Bass, Jaswinder Bolina, Victoria Chang, Anthony Cody, Toi Derricotte, Camille T. Dungy, Ross Gay, Rachel Hadas, Joy Harjo, Robert Hass, Edward Hirsch, Jane Hirshfield, Major Jackson, Fady Joudah, Yusef Komunyakaa, Ted Kooser, Ada Limón, Esther Lin, Philip, Metres, D. Nurske, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sharon Olds, Linda Pastan, Kay Ryan, Evie Shockley, Vijay Seshadri, Tracy K. Smith, Arthur Sze, Natasha Trethewey, Rosanna Warren, Afaa M. Weaver, and Javier Zamora, among many other great poets of our time.

New Book :: What Flies Want

What Flies Want poetry by Emily Perez book cover image

What Flies Want
Poetry by Emily Pérez
University of Iowa Press, May 2022

In What Flies Want, disaster looms in domesticity: a family grapples with its members’ mental health, a marriage falters, and a child experiments with self-harm. With its backdrop of school lockdown drills, #MeToo, and increasing political polarization, the collection asks how these private and public tensions are interconnected. The speaker, who grew up in a bicultural family on the U.S./Mexico border, learns she must play a role in a culture that prizes whiteness, patriarchy, and chauvinism. As an adult, she oscillates between performed confidence and obedience. As a wife, she bristles against the expectations of emotional labor. As a mother, she attempts to direct her white male children away from the toxic power they are positioned to inherit, only to find how deeply she is also implicated in these systems. Tangled in a family history of depression, a society fixated on guns, a rocky relationship, and her own desire to ignore and deny the problems she must face, this is a speaker who is by turns defiant, defeated, self-implicating, and hopeful. Winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. Emily Pérez is author of House of Sugar, House of Stone, and coedited The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood.

New Book :: Live Caught

Live Caught a novel by R. Cathey Daniels book cover image

Live Caught
Fiction by R. Cathey Daniels
Black Lawrence Press, April 2022

Live Caught by R. Cathey Daniels is the story of Lenny, who finds himself out of options. He’s lost his arm to his abusive older brothers and lost his bearing within his family. Desperate to escape and determined not to lose hope, Lenny steals a skiff and attempts to ride the Carolina rivers from his family’s farm deep in the western North Carolina mountains all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. When a storm sinks his boat, he is suddenly in the hands of a profanity-slinging priest, whose illegal drug operation provides food and wages for the local parish. Snared within a power struggle between a crooked cop and the priest, Lenny must once again rely on the thinnest shred of hope in his attempt to escape.

New Book :: Plagios / Plagiarisms, Vol. 2

Plagios / Plagiarisms, Vol. 2 poetry by Ulalume González de León book cover image

Plagios / Plagiarisms, Vol. 2
Poetry by Ulalume González de León
Sixteen Rivers Press, April 2022

Plagios / Plagiarisms is the second of three bilingual volumes which present several short collections of poems Ulalume González de Leόn produced from 1970 to 1975. Through her experimentation with unconventional syntax and borrowed texts, the poet skillfully blends anatomical, scientific, and philosophical vocabulary with richly erotic imagery to question our assumptions about identity and intimacy. Ulalume González de León was born in 1928 in Montevideo, Uruguay, the daughter of two poets, Roberto Ibañez and Sara de Ibañez. She studied literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the University of Mexico. While living in Mexico in 1948, Ulalume became a naturalized Mexican citizen. She married painter and architect Teodoro González de León, and

Continue reading “New Book :: Plagios / Plagiarisms, Vol. 2”

New Book :: Mother Kingdom

Mother Kingdom poetry by Andrea Deeken book cover image

Mother Kingdom
Poetry by Andrea Deeken
Slapering Hol Press, April 2022

Mother Kingdom by Andrea Deeken is the winning collection of the 2021 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Contest. This annual contest is open to promising new poets whose work has not yet appeared in book or chapbook form. Andrea Deeken was born in rural Missouri and has lived in the Pacific Northwest for most of her adult life. She holds a BA from Drake University and an MS in Writing and Publishing from Portland State University. Slapering Hol books are collectible creations of beauty. The book design, typecasting, and cover letterpress printing are by Ed Rayher of Swamp Press in Northfield, Massachusetts, with cover art by Hyde Meissner, and run in a limited, hand-numbered edition.

New Book :: Cancer Voodoo

Cancer Voodoo poetry by Melissa C. Johnson book cover image

Cancer Voodoo
Poetry by Melissa C. Johnson
Diode Editions, March 2022

Cancer Voodoo grew out of the experience of Johnson’s mother’s illness and death from lung cancer and her own attempts to come to terms with that loss. “I was trying to write about the experience of watching a parent die, an experience that most people will have, but also about the particulars of my mother’s life and death and her family history. There’s a kind of madness of grief — the way that it unhinges and unmoors — that I’m trying to capture. I’m also trying to get at how illness and death re-arrange and collapse time — how they create a milestone that all other events gather around.” Melissa C. Johnson serves as Associate Vice President and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education at The Pennsylvania State University. She earned a BA in English and Fine Arts from the College of Charleston, an MFA in poetry, and a Ph.D. in twentieth-century British Literature and Women’s Studies from the University of South Carolina.

May 2022 eLitPak :: Muddy Backroads: Stories from off the Beaten Path

Muddy Backroads: Stories from off the Beaten Path May 2022 eLitPak flyer
click image to open PDF

Our editors asked for stories that moved away from the norms of daily life to explore the side roads that take us away from the known. What do the characters do when they step away from what’s seen as normal or usual? What happens when they find themselves in unexpected situations or locations? Visit website.

View the full May 2022 eLitPak newsletter.

May 2022 eLitPak :: Two Great Titles from Livingston Press

screenshot of Livingston Press' flyer for the May 2022 eLitPak newsletter
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Get your copies of George H. Wolfe’s novel Aftershock, set at the architecture school at the University of Alabama, and Patricia Taylor’s Zero to Ten: Nursing on the Floor which incorporates over forty years of nursing experience as she moves from joy to frustration to devastation. View flyer for more information. Visit website.

View the full May 2022 eLitPak newsletter.

New Book :: Antipodes

Antipodes stories by Holly Goddard Jones book cover image

Antipodes: Stories
Fiction by Holly Goddard Jones
University of Iowa Press, May 2022

In this collection of eleven stories, a harried and depressed mother of three young children serves on a committee that watches over the bottomless sinkhole that has appeared in her Kentucky town. During COVID lockdown, a thirty-four-year-old gamer moves back home with his parents and is revisited by his long-forgotten childhood imaginary friend. A politician running for a state congressional seat and a young mother, who share the same set of fears about the future, cross paths but don’t fully understand one another. A woman attends a party at the home of a fellow church parishioner and discovers she is on the receiving end of a sales pitch for a doomsday prepper. These stories and more contemplate our current reality with both frankness and hard-earned hopefulness, realism and fabulism, tackling parenthood, environment, and the absurd-but-unavoidable daily toil of worrying about mundane matters when we’ve entered “an era of unknowability, of persistent strangeness.” Holly Goddard Jones is associate professor in the MFA program in creative writing at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is author of Girl Trouble, The Next Time You See Me, and The Salt Line.

New Book :: Rotura

Rotura poetry by José Angel Araguz book cover image

Rotura
Poetry by José Angel Araguz
Black Lawrence Press, March 2022

Selected out of the Black Lawrence Press open reading period, the shifting speakers and landscapes of Rotura allow the poet to explore the themes of the Latinx experience and life itself; truth, family, longing are searched through language both direct and lyrical. It’s a long journey, but Araguz’s poems travel borders and boundaries creating an essential collection. José Angel Araguz’s most recent collection is An Empty Pot’s Darkness (Airlie Press). He blogs at The Friday Influence. José is an Assistant Professor at Suffolk University where he serves as Editor-in-Chief of Salamander and is also a faculty member of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program.

New Book :: Inside Outrage

Inside Outrage poetry by Gary Glauber book cover image

Inside Outrage
Poetry by Gary Glauber
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, September 2022

Inside Outrage by Gary Glauber captures wild wisdom and abject love, the amity and misguided memories keeping us whole in this precarious viral existence. These points of refuge and resilience both unmask and protect us, using frustrations to confront rooted fears. In the end, we must own identities, forgive mistakes, and grow older through the salvation of words. In daring to learn the steps and missteps of this odd dance called life, we maneuver through to find where our ‘inside outrage’ happily resides.

New Book :: She Has Dreamt Again of Water

She Has Dreamt Again of Water poetry by Stephanie Niu book cover image

She Has Dreamt Again of Water
Poetry by Stephanie Niu
Diode Editions, March 2022

In her debut chapbook She Has Dreamt Again of Water, Stephanie Niu imagines the deep sea as sanctuary. Her poems seek solace from generational guilt and a fractured family by diving into dreamscapes where gills grow as easily as wings. Here, the world shimmers with small, stunning miracles: a fish that looks like light, a river delta seen from the moon, a single coyote in the road. In the search for sanctuary, “There is no split, a real self and a dream self / to divide neatly. There are just dreams.” Even upon waking, “she does not weep. She has dreamt again / of water, that place where the river / meets the sea, where long-legged birds / tiptoe through the cordgrass, dipping / their heads to feed.” In these poems, the surreal and unseen suggest the shapes of shared longing. Stephanie Niu is a poet from Marietta, GA. She earned her degrees in symbolic systems and computer science from Stanford University. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Award for work on decolonizing historical narratives of overseas Chinese laborers through digital techniques. She lives in New York City.

New Book :: Beyond the Time of Words

Beyond the Time of Words / Más allá del tiempo de las palabras poetry by Marjorie Agosín book cover image

Beyond the Time of Words/Más allá del tiempo de las palabras
Poetry by Marjorie Agosín
Sixteen Rivers Press, April 2022

Marjorie Agosín’s bilingual book of poetry, Beyond the Time of Words/Más allá del tiempo de las palabras, was composed during the time of isolation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, and in it, she embraces that darkness with profound compassion and humanity. Born in Chile, Agosín came to the United States as a political exile, and her prolific career has been inspired by both political activism and the pursuit of social justice. While bearing witness to our collective grief, these poems also offer reminders of bravery and ultimately hope: They are meant, the poet says, “to cleanse and mend the world.” Marjorie Agosín is a Chilean American poet who writes in Spanish, her native language. She is also a human rights activist and the Andrew Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Wellesley College. Her work has been inspired by the causes of social justice and human rights. In addition to her numerous collections of poetry, Agosín has written young-adult novels, memoirs, and anthologies promoting international women writers.

New Book :: Challenging Pregnancy

Challenging Pregnancy: A Journey Through the Politics and Science of Healthcare in America Nonfiction by Genevieve Grabman book cover image

Challenging Pregnancy: A Journey Through the Politics and Science of Healthcare in America
Nonfiction by Genevieve Grabman
University of Iowa Press, March 2022

In Challenging Pregnancy, Genevieve Grabman recounts being pregnant with identical twins whose circulatory systems were connected in a rare condition called twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome. Doctors couldn’t “unfuse” the fetuses because one twin also had several other confounding problems: selective intrauterine growth restriction, a two-vessel umbilical cord, a marginal cord insertion, and, possibly, a parasitic triplet. Ultimately, national anti-abortion politics — not medicine or her own choices — determined the outcome of Grabman’s pregnancy. At every juncture, anti-abortion politics limited the care available to her, the doctors and hospitals willing to treat her, the tools doctors could use, and the words her doctors could say. Although she asked for aggressive treatment to save at least one baby, hospital ethics boards blocked all able doctors from helping her. Challenging Pregnancy is about Grabman’s harrowing pregnancy and the science and politics of maternal healthcare in the United States, where every person must self-advocate for the desired outcome of their own pregnancy.

New Book :: Jordemoder

Jordemoder Poems of a Midwife by Ingrid Andersson book cover image

Jordemoder: Poems of a Midwife
Poetry by Ingrid Andersson
Holy Cow! Press, April 2022

Jordemoder is an age-old Swedish word for midwife. It means earth/land/world mother and reflects Ingrid Andersson’s poetry and practice as a midwife, as well as her background as an immigrant farmer’s daughter. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with degrees in Scandinavian Studies, German literature and anthropology, she worked in countries where access to equitable health care, education, safe and humane environments and food felt more prioritized than in America. Returning to America, she began working as a health care activist and promoting midwifery models of care. As a licensed board-certified nurse midwife, she has caught more than 1000 babies at home. This is Ingrid Andersson’s debut collection of poetry.

New Book :: If I Go Missing

If I Go Missing poetry by Carol Lynne Knight book cover image

If I Go Missing
Poetry by Carol Lynne Knight
Fernwood Press, April 2022

What happens when the ex-wife of an ex-cop, with a penchant for TV detectives, speculates about her own disappearance? In this poetic journey, fictional detectives examine her house, her belongings, her lovers, and her longings. Poem by poem, Carol Lynne Knight mixes imaginary investigations with the intimate, often stark, realities of life as the wife of a street cop in South Florida. If I Go Missing mixes the sensual with procedural detail in a surprising, original new trope, with an introduction by Diane Wakoski.

New Book :: Nein, Nein, Nein!

Nein Nein Nein by Jerry Stahl book cover image

Nein, Nein, Nein!: One Man’s Tale of Depression, Psychic Torment, and a Bus Tour of the Holocaust
Nonfiction by Jerry Stahl
Akashic Books, July 2022

In September 2016, Jerry Stahl was feeling nervous on the eve of a two-week trip across Poland and Germany. But it was not just the stops at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau that gave him anxiety. It was the fact that he would be traveling with two dozen strangers, by bus. In a tour group. And he was not a tour-group kind of guy. The decision to visit Holocaust-world did not come easy. Stahl’s lifelong depression at an all-time high, his career and personal life at an all-time low, he had the idea to go on a trip where the despair he was feeling—out-of-control sadness, regret, and fear, not just for himself, but for the entire United States—would be appropriate. And where was despair more appropriate than the land of the Six Million?

New Book :: Let No One Sleep

Let No One Sleep a novel by Juan José Millás book cover image

Let No One Sleep
A Novel by Juan José Millás
Bellevue Literary Press, August 2022

After Lucía loses her job at an IT firm, she has a vision of her future career as a taxi driver, brought on by the intoxicating opera floating through her apartment’s air vent. She obtains her taxi license and meets the neighbor responsible for the music. Calaf is the man’s name, which also happens to be the name of the character in Puccini’s Turandot and the bird Lucía received on her tenth birthday from her long-since-dead mother. When he moves out of her building, Lucía becomes obsessed, driving through Madrid and searching for him on every corner, meeting intriguing people along the way. What follows is a phantasmagoria of coincidence, betrayal, and revenge, featuring Millás’s singular dark humor. Translated by Thomas Bunstead. Juan José Millás is the recipient of Spain’s most prestigious literary prizes: the Premio Nadal, Premio Planeta, and Premio Nacional de Narrativa. He is the author of several short story collections and works of nonfiction as well as over a dozen novels.

New Book :: Night Swim

Night Swim poetry by Joan Kwon Glass book cover image

Night Swim
Poetry by Joan Kwon Glass
Diode Editions, March 2022

In Night Swim, Joan Kwon Glass navigates the dark sea of mourning after losing her sister and her 11-year-old nephew to suicide within a two-month span of time. Night Swim does not turn away from the ugly, unreconciled side of grief: the recurring nightmares, life with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, questions that will never have answers, the desire to hold someone responsible for the deaths when there is no one left to blame. The collection begins with a solitary, titular poem which asks the reader to consider what grief feels like when “the landscape doesn’t change // but everything else does.” Joan Kwon Glass’ first full-length poetry collection, Night Swim, won the 2021 Diode Poetry Prize. She is the author of several chapbooks and has spent the past 20 years as an educator in the Connecticut public schools. She tweets @joanpglass and is online at www.joankwonglass.com.

New Book :: The Convert’s Heart is Good to Eat

The Convert's Heart is Good to Eat Poetry by Melody S. Gee book cover image

The Convert’s Heart is Good to Eat
Poetry by Melody S. Gee
Driftwood Press, June 2022

Melody S. Gee’s The Convert’s Heart is Good to Eat meets at the intersection of cultural and spiritual identity, culminating in a set of harrowing poems that investigates how belief defines us. Melody S. Gee is the author of The Dead in Daylight (Cooper Dillon Books, 2016) and Each Crumbling House (Perugia Press, 2010), winner of the Perugia Press Prize. She is the recipient of Kundiman poetry and fiction fellowships, two Pushcart Prize nominations, and the Robert Watson Literary Prize. Her poems, essays, and reviews appear in Commonweal Magazine, Blood Orange Review, Lantern Review, and The Rappahannock Review. She is a freelance writer and editor living in St. Louis, Missouri with her husband and daughters. An excerpt from the collection:

THE CONVERT DESIRES HER WAY INTO A FIRST PRAYER

Her mother’s first lesson
was chew your wants and spit
the pulp, grow skinny feeding everyone else your flesh.
A heart’s cargo is sometimes oil, sometimes crude. A spill can undo
the waterproof of any surface.
And still the diving birds must feed,
must point their beaks past the slick that seals the cornea to eternal blur.
Does the Lord ask her what she wants when he already knows its name?

New Book :: The Land and the Days

The Land and the Days a Memoir of Family Friendship and Grief by Tracy Daugherty book cover image

The Land and the Days: A Memoir of Family, Friendship, and Grief
Memoir by Tracy Daugherty
The University of Oklahoma Press, January 2022

In “Cotton County,” the first of the dual memoirs in The Land and the Days, Tracy Daugherty describes the forces that shape us: the “rituals of our regions” and the family and friends who animate our lives and memories. Combining reminiscence, history, and meditation, Daugherty retraces his childhood in Texas and Oklahoma, where he first encountered the realities of politics, race, and class. The “Unearthly Archives,” the second of Daugherty’s memoirs, expands the realistic accounts of the first narrative, providing a meditation on the meaning of grief. Daugherty demonstrates his curiosity and indefatigable quest for understanding and closure by examining his life-long store of literary readings, as well as the music he loves, to discover the true value of a life dedicated to art.

New Book :: Spirit Matters

Spirit Matters with Clay Red Exits Distant Others poetry by Gordon Henry book cover image

Spirit Matters: White Clay, Red Exits, Distant Others
Poetry by Gordon Henry
Holy Cow! Press, June 2022

Spirit Matters by Gordon Henry offers readers a view into shadow spheres, of creative memory, reinvention of storied characters and place. These serve as reminders of how poetry might turn longing back to the very sound that memory makes as a means to honor the imaginative lives of people and place. Spirit Matters is a collection of poetry informed by irretrievable letters of loss, love, and trauma, forged by musing on imagined relatives – living, dead, yet to be – shaped by the spirit of places we can never return to without understanding the living power of memory, story, and song. Gordon Henry is an enrolled member/citizen of the White Earth Anishinaabe Nation in Minnesota. He is also a Professor in the English Department at Michigan State University, where he teaches American Indian Literature and Creative Writing. He serves as Senior Editor of the American Indian Studies Series at Michigan State University Press.

New Book :: Drowning in Light

Drowning in Light poetry by Taylor Steele book cover image

Drowning in Light
Poetry by Taylor Steele
Platypus Press, March 2022

The poems in Taylor Steele’s Drowning in Light traverse the daily—the sickness, the loneliness, and the hope that yawns from within. There are continuous trails of light peeking through, hands grasping, fingers trailing—a notion of persistence, always. Taylor Steele is a queer, Black, NYC-born-and-based writer, performer, and photographer. Her poetry has been featured on Huffington Post, Brooklyn Poets, Button Poetry, and is a 2016 Pushcart Nominee. A triple-Taurus, she believes in the power of art to change, shape, and heal.

New Book :: Real Rhyming Poems

Real Rhyming Poems by J. M. Allen book cover image

Real Rhyming Poems
Poetry by J. M. Allen
Kelsay Books, April 2022

Rhymers unite! Real Rhyming Poems by J. M. Allen is a chapbook of exclusively rhyming poems, which is quite uncommon, so the reader is in for a rare treat with this book. Twenty of the thirty poems in this collection had been accepted individually in thirteen different publications. The poem “Genes” won first place in a 2021 contest, and the poem “Ten Hours of Sleep” was picked up by Associated Press (immediately after it was published in a Minnesota newspaper). The author is a parent and included some poems regarding teenagers in this collection of humorous and serious poems. If you haven’t read good rhyming poems in a while, here is your chance! J. M. Allen is an electrical engineer and parent, who enjoys writing rhyming poems. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and has been a longtime resident of Rochester, Minnesota.

New Book :: BABE

BABE poetry by Dorothy Chan book cover image

BABE
Poetry by Dorothy Chan
Diode Editions, December 2021

BABE is about owning the room. It’s about physical touch. It’s about dancing (actually, grinding) on a heart-shaped bed and starring as the leading lady of the film (no matter how risqué it gets). At the core of this collection, the Chinese American speaker questions the conventions around her, dating back to her origin story as a Hong Kongnese child who would get up to stretch in the middle of Cantonese class. As an adult, she questions her fate since the family fortune teller screwed her over with a lazy fortune, yet got her brother’s completely spot-on. She triple sonnets her way through confrontations of queerphobia in her family, the trauma from a past relationship with a significantly older man, and the constant male gaze. She pays homage to the first girls who ever loved her in this analysis of sexuality, queerness, popular culture, and resilience. She’s baby forever. Dorothy Chan (she/they) is the author of Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, 2019), Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold (Spork Press, 2018), and Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017). Chan is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Editor Emeritus of Hobart, Book Reviews Co-Editor of Pleiades, and Co-Founder and Editor in Chief of Honey Literary Inc., a 501(c)(3) literary arts organization. Visit their website at dorothypoetry.com

New Book :: Bath

Bath, poetry by Jen Silverman book cover image

Bath
Poetry by Jen Silverman
Driftwood Press, May 2022

Winner of the Driftwood Press 2021 Adrift Chapbook Contest, Silverman’s work was selected for its geographical and lyrical style, with poems that “communicate harrowing insights into the landscape of relationships.” Jen Silverman is a New York-based writer and playwright. She is the author of the debut novel We Play Ourselves and the story collection The Island Dwellers (Random House) which was longlisted for a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Jen also writes for TV and film.

New Book :: Voices in the Dead House

Voice in the Dead House a novel by Norman Lock book cover image

Voices in the Dead House
Novel by Norman Lock
Bellevue Literary Press, July 2022

Inspired by Whitman’s poem “The Wound-Dresser” and Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, the ninth stand-alone book in The American Novels series centers on the aftermath of the Union Army’s defeat at Fredericksburg in 1862 where Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott converge on Washington to nurse the sick, wounded, and dying. Whitman was a man of many contradictions: egocentric yet compassionate, impatient with religiosity yet moved by the spiritual in all humankind, bigoted yet soon to become known as the great poet of democracy. Alcott was an intense, intellectual, independent woman, an abolitionist and suffragist, who was compelled by financial circumstance to publish saccharine magazine stories yet would go on to write the enduring and beloved Little Women. As Lock captures the musicality of their unique voices and their encounters with luminaries ranging from Lincoln to battlefield photographer Mathew Brady to reformer Dorothea Dix, he deftly renders the war’s impact on their personal and artistic development.

New Book :: Green Regalia

Green Regalia poetry by Adam Tavel book cover image

Green Regalia
Poetry by Adam Tavel
Stephen F. Austin State University Press, April 2022

Written against the harrowing backdrop of climate change, Green Regalia explores our precarious ecological moment and increasingly fraught relationship with the natural world. In this collection, Adam Tavel chronicles the objectification of landscapes and the species within them, the cultural denial of the body’s transient nature, and the aftermath of an estranged father’s death. These poems of rot and renewal seek a wisdom free of domination, where both wonder and surrender may remind us of our place in the greater tapestry of life. Adam Tavel is the author of five books of poetry, including this collection and Sum Ledger (Measure Press, 2022).

New Book :: Up North in Michigan

Up North in Michigan A Portrait of a Place in Four Seasons essays by Jerry Dennis book cover image

Up North in Michigan: A Portrait of Place in Four Seasons
Essays by Jerry Dennis
University of Michigan Press, September 2021

Up North in Michigan, the new collection from celebrated nature writer Jerry Dennis, captures its author’s lifelong journey to better know this place he calls home by exploring it in every season, in every kind of weather, on foot, on bicycle, in canoes and cars. The essays in this book are more than an homage to a particular region, its people, and its natural wonders. They are a reflection on the Up North that can only be experienced through your feet and fingertips, through your ears, mouth, and nose—the Up North that makes its way into your bones as surely as sand makes its way into wood grain. Up North in Michigan has been selected as a 2022 finalist and is up for gold in the Non-Fiction – Nature Category of the Midwest Book Awards.

New Book :: The Man with Wolves for Hands

The Man with Wolves for Hands, a novella by Juan Eugenio Ramirez book cover image

The Man with Wolves for Hands
Novella by Juan Eugenio Ramirez
Southeast Missouri State University Press, September 2022

With panting, slobbering wolves where his hands should be, The Man with Wolves for Hands builds shelves, attends an HR meeting, gets drunk in a kiddie pool with his friend The Cowboy, and stumbles into a bacchanalian wake, held in a forest clearing, for a deceased soldier. In The Man with Wolves for Hands, Metaphor folds into allegory, folds into psychological exploration, folds into a meditation on trauma and struggle. These vignettes about a man and his lupine hands explore what it means to be compassionate in a world where perception is tenuous and morality fluid. Elements of myth and folklore anachronistically color the narrative creating a story that winds itself through both the present and some distant, primordial past. Winner of the Nilsen Literary Prize for a First Novel.

New Book :: Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine

Big Gorgeous Time Machine by Nick Francis Potter book cover image

Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine
Graphics and Poetry by Nick Francis Potter
Driftwood Press, March 2022

This is a collection of experimental graphic works and comics poetry. It includes more traditionally-minded comics (with a lyrical bent) with abstract and conceptual works, including text-based comics and comics inspired by modernist abstractions. Taken together, the work finds kinship with contemporary avant-cartoonists like Warren Craghead, Aidan Koch, and Simon Moreton, while striking out toward something altogether new. Nick Francis Potter is a writer, cartoonist, and educator who holds an MFA from Brown University and a PhD in English from the University of Missouri, where he currently teaches writing and theory in the Digital Storytelling Program.

New Book :: Walking Uphill at Noon

Walking Uphill at Noon poetry by Jon Kelly Yenser book cover image

Walking Uphill at Noon
Poetry by Jon Kelly Yenser
University of New Mexico Press, March 2022

Walking Uphill at Noon showcases Yenser’s mastery of prosody and love of play. Including free verse as well as established and newly invented forms, Yenser’s collection is organized into four parts that each explore the author’s life and interests: part 1 focuses on neighborhood observations; part 2 delves into travel at home and abroad; part 3 consists of a “walking log” that muses on current events; and part 4 explores magic, mysteries, and sleights of hand. Ultimately, Yenser urges readers to consider that everyday situations can be made extraordinary if they keep their love of play and wonder close to their hearts. Jon Kelly Yenser is also the author of two chapbooks, Walter’s Yard and The Disambiguation of Katydids, and the poetry collection The News as Usual: Poems (UNM Press).

New Book :: Zero to Ten

Zero to Ten Nursing on the Floor stories by Patricia Taylor book cover image

Zero to Ten: Nursing on the Floor
Stories by Patricia Taylor
Livingston Press, July 2022

What’s your pain from zero to ten? How fast can you run on the floor, from zero to ten? How soon will you have burnout, from zero to ten? In this collection, Patricia “Tricia” Taylor takes over forty years of nursing experience in four southern states in the U.S. and weaves them into “mostly fictional” stories that move from joy to frustration to devastation. Taylor’s experiences included cancer nursing, hospice, med-surg, pediatrics, newborn nursery, and teaching psychiatric nursing in a nursing program for twenty years. Taylor then returned to med-surg, ER, quality control nursing, and finally psychiatric nursing, until her recent retirement. This collection highlights a career that was usually exhausting, sometimes tragic, frequently infuriating, occasionally funny, and consistently rewarding.

New Book :: Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful

Lost Hurt or in Transit Beautiful poetry by Rohan Chhetri book cover image

Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful
Poetry by Rohan Chhetri
Platypus Press, June 2022

Selected as the winner of The Kundiman Poetry Prize, Rohan Chhetri’s collection of poetry Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful is a travelogue of belonging. In parts a separation, a crossing of borders and landscapes, in others the sorrow and depths of home. But ultimately, this is the journey of weary travelers making ghosts of the night. Rohan Chhetri, a writer and translator, is the recipient of a 2021 PEN/Heim Grant for translation, and his poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Revue Europe, AGNI, and New England Review and have been translated into Kurdish, Greek and French.

New Book :: Adult Children Anthology

Adult Children Being One Having One and What Goes In Between anthology book cover image

Adult Children: Being One, Having One & What Goes In-Between
Nonfiction Edited by Heather Tosteson, Charles D. Brockett, Kerry Langan, and Michele Markarian
Wising Up Press, January 2022

What defines adulthood nowadays? Or ever? In particular, when do we see our own children as adults? When they are older than we were at the age we had them? When they have children of their own? Are fully self-supporting? What about the prematurely adult children some of us were or tried to be — where have they gone? And the lost and needy children in us? Are they still active? When our parents are failing, what is an adult-to-adult relationship then? When we have been completely dependent on someone — or fully responsible for them — is full parity ever possible? Desirable? In this Wising Up Anthology, fifty writers explore—with zest, angst, humor, humility, anger, and love—through stories, poems, memoirs, and creative non-fiction, our constantly changing and, hopefully, maturing relationships with those we raised and those who raised us.

New Book :: Spooks

Spooks by Stella Wong book cover image

Spooks
Poetry by Stella Wong
Saturnalia Books, March 2022

Winner of the Saturnalia Books Editor Prize, Stella Wong’s debut book of poems playfully subverts and willfully challenges any notions we might have about Asian Americanness and its niceties. While her previous chapbook stunned her admirers and adherents into an almost fawning incredulity, this outing eviscerates. More like getting struck with Chinese stars right between the eyes. TKO with a mean left hook to boot. And if you manage to get back up on your feet again, if your dare dance around in the haunted ring that American poetry is, be certain that this most un-model minority bard will teach you not to ever read the same way again.

New Book :: The Southernization of America

The Southernization of America: A Story of Democracy in the Balance Essays by Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker

The Southernization of America: A Story of Democracy in the Balance
Essays by Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker
NewSouth Books, February 2022

In 1974 John Egerton published his seminal work, The Americanization of Dixie. Pulitzer Prize-winning University of Southern Alabama Journalist-in-Residence Cynthia Tucker and Pulitzer Prize-winning commentator and University of Southern Alabama Writer in Residence Frye Gaillard carry Egerton’s thesis forward in The Southernization of America. They dive deeper, examining the morphing of the Southern strategy of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan into the Republican Party of today, the racial backlash against President Obama, family separation on our southern border, the rise of the Christian right, the white supremacist riots in Charlottesville, the death of George Floyd, and the attack on our nation’s capitol. They find hope in the South too, a legacy rooted in the civil rights years that might ultimately lead the nation on the path to redemption. Tucker and Gaillard bring a multiracial perspective and years of political reporting to bear on a critical moment in American history, a time of racial reckoning and democracy under siege.

New Book :: O

O by Niki Tulk book cover image

O
Poetry by Niki Tulk
Driftwood Press, July 2022

Chosen as one of three manuscripts for publication from their 2020 poetry collection reading, writer and performance artist Niki Tulk’s O explores the aftermath of sexual assault, unearthing myths, folklore, and profound truths about our collective history of violence, womanhood, and justice. Niki Tulk is an ex-pat Australian and experimental theatre-maker, improviser, writer, poet and author of Performing the Wound: Practicing a Feminist Theatre of Becoming (Routledge, 2022).