Gordita: Built Like This by Daisy “Draizys” Ruiz Black Josei Press, January 2023
Gordita: Built Like This is an autobiographical comic by Daisy “Draizys” Ruiz. The 28-page color comic follows Gordita, a young Mexican-American teenager who lives in The Bronx. She’s judged for having no ass by classmates, strangers, and even family. Gordita struggles with low self-esteem and body dysmorphia. But, through her friendships with other girls who are also getting bullied and mentorship with her guidance counselor, Gordita, begins to speak up for herself and see that she is more than just her body. Ruiz started this comic as a 6-page black and white comic called “Built Like Spongebob,” which was created for and displayed at NYU’s exhibition, ¡Oye! Cuéntame un Cuento. Daisy’s first solo exhibit in Casita Maria in The Bronx featured pages from Gordita as well.
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Petrochemical Nocturne: A Novel by Amos Jasper Wright IV Livingston Press, August 2023
The Mississippi River. HAZMAT. Boxing. Suicide by cop. New Orleans Saints football. Chemical explosions. The Angola Prison rodeo. Chlorine gas ghost ships. Through these symbols and themes, readers learn about Toussaint and his formative experiences in the Standard Heights neighborhood of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. “Petrochemical Nocturne” results in an indictment of what Toussasint describes as “that dystopian haunted carnival cruise line called America.” A discursive and often surreal exploration of environmental racism, southern history, the prison-industrial complex, police brutality, inter-generational trauma, and climate change, Petrochemical Nocturne is both paean and eulogy for the formerly enslaved communities of Cancer Alley, the erasure of an entire people from a poisoned landscape.
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Romance Language: Poems by Amy Glynn Able Muse Press, January 2024
Winner of the 2022 Able Muse Book Award for Poetry, Amy Glynn’s Romance Language is a wellspring of culture, nature, natural phenomena, myths, esoterica. A kaleidoscope of sciences and disciplines—spanning archeology, acoustics, botany, zoology, psychology, cosmology, meteorology, mythology—are freely juxtaposed with the bliss of romance gained to longing for the one lost, the celebration of nature and the teeming creatures therein to hope for their enduring sustenance. A logophilic showcase, Romance Language transports the reader into a sensory and cerebral world of the real and imagined, ever reaching for stimulus, wisdom, understanding, and enlightenment.
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A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War: 20 Short Works by Ukrainian Playwrights Laertes Press, September 2023
These texts in the wake of invasion, written by the members of the Theater of Playwrights, Kyiv, in spring, summer, and fall of 2022, have a documentary thrust. Reporting from diverse places in Ukraine, from Kyiv, Lviv, Mykolaiv, from occupied Kherson, from the front itself, and locations farther afield in countries of refuge; employing diverse modes of expression: poetry, screenplay, dialogue, diary, diatribe, comedy, short story, recollection, each is a singular response to a seismic and agonizing shift. Each is an act of defiance as well, an assertion of the full human weight, of the integrity of a people.
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Whoever Drowned Here: New and Selected Poems by Max Sessner Translated by Francesca Bell Red Hen Press, August 2023
Beloved by contemporary German readers, the poetry of Max Sessner is gathered for the first time in English in Whoever Drowned Here: New and Selected Poems, translated by Francesca Bell. Painstakingly chosen from Sessner’s celebrated three collections and from new work, these poems employ a matter-of-fact magical realism to engage the profound, philosophical mysteries of the everyday. Sessner makes nimble use of the material world as he choreographs poignant reenactments of human yearning. Smocks in the window of a dry cleaner “trade stolen / caresses” at night. Death tries on your clothes while you sleep and eats your chocolate. A poem tires of being a poem, “a small mortal / thing that no one notices,” and sets off into the world to make a new life.
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Generation Exile: The Lives I Leave Behind by Rodrigo Dorfman Arte Público Press, March 2023
Rodrigo Dorfman, the son of prominent dissidents, was six years old when his family fled Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship a month after the CIA-backed coup in 1973. They fled to Argentina, and then to Havana, Paris, Amsterdam and finally Bethesda, Maryland. Mapping the memory of exile, he remembers the contradiction of living with his seething anger at losing his home and his resistance to settling down. Rebellion was an ancestral badge of honor he wore proudly. At 18, he returned to Chile and fought against the fascist dictatorship, running for his life with bullets and tear gas flying by. Dorfman’s involvement in the resistance movement there planted the seeds for his future life as a community-centered documentary filmmaker. His restless search for a place to call his own led to his wandering—around the United States, to Morocco and Turkey and the Path of Sufism. He finally made a home in the American South, where he became a “Latino” and found kinship with other immigrants who settled there. This compelling narrative recounts a displaced man’s life-long quest to establish family, roots and a sense of belonging by bearing witness to what he calls the “Nuevo South.”
No God Like the Mother: Stories by Kesha Ajọsẹ-Fisher Forest Avenue Press, April 2023
Kesha Ajọsẹ-Fisher’s debut collection of nine short stories, No God Like the Mother, follows characters in transition, through tribulation and hope. Set around the world–the bustling streets of Lagos, the arid gardens beside the Red Sea, an apartment in Paris, and the rain-washed suburbs of the Pacific Northwest–this collection of nine stories is a masterful exploration of life’s uncertainty. Ajọsẹ-Fisher was born in Chicago, raised in Lagos, Nigeria, and returned to the United States with her family in the early nineties. She won the Oregon Book Awards’ 2020 Ken Kesey Prize for this collection.
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The Death of Weinberg: Poems and Stories by Walter Weinschenk Kelsay Books, February 2023
The Death of Weinberg: Poems and Stories includes a wide sampling of Walter Weinschenk’s writing, much of which has appeared in print over the course of the last few years. Though the stories and poems vary in terms of length and style, there is a singular focus. The book is, essentially, a rumination upon life, death, and the search for meaning. Most of these pieces are speculative in the sense that there is absent any reference to a particular location, time frame, or historical context. However, these poems and stories, dreamlike in nature, focus upon essential issues with which we grapple throughout our lives: loss, loneliness, meaning, and mortality. The common thread is the narrator’s voice which is, essentially, an inner voice, a voice of consciousness, that engages us in a consideration of what it means to be human.
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An Influencer’s World: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Social Media Influencers and Creators by Caroline Baker and Don Baker University of Iowa Press, June 2023
An Influencer’s World: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Social Media Influencers and Creators by Caroline Baker and Don Baker explores the business of influencing built around likes and hate, which can take a huge psychological toll on those who choose to play the game. Their work pulls back the curtain and shines a light on the often-misunderstood realities of this dynamic industry. Featuring dozens of interviews with trending influencers, CEOs, leading industry insiders, brands, mental health professionals, and celebrities, this book provides an unconventional look at both the business side of influencing and the personal lives of influencers and creators.
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Under a Future Sky by Brynn Saito Red Hen Press, August 2023
Under a Future Sky is Brynn Saito’s poetic gathering of generations, a performance with ghosts anchored in a journey with her father to the desert prison where, over eighty years ago, her grandparents met and made a life. Born of a personal ache, an unquenchable desire to animate the shadow archive, Saito’s journey unfolds in lyric correspondences and epistolary poems that sing with rage, confusion, and, ultimately, love. In these works, descendants of wartime incarceration exchange dreams, mothers become water goddesses, and a modern daughter haunts future ruins. To enter this book is to enter the slipstream of nonlinear time, where mystical inclinations, yellow cedars, and sisterhood make a balm for trauma’s scars. Altogether, the work enacts a dialogue between the past and the present; the radical ancestor and the future child; and the desert prison and the family garden, where Saito’s father diligently gathers stones.
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Do I Belong Here? / ¿Es este mi lugar? by René Colato Laínez Illustrations by Fabricio Vanden Broeck Piñata Books, May 2023
An immigrant boy stands “in the middle of a whirlwind of children,” and wonders where he is supposed to go. Finally, a woman speaks to him in a language he doesn’t understand and takes him to his classroom. A boy named Carlos helps orient him, but later when he reads aloud, everyone laughs at him. And when he gets an “F” on an assignment, he is sure “I do not belong here.” Award-winning children’s book author René Colato Laínez teams up again with illustrator Fabricio Vanden Broeck to explore the experiences of newcomers in schools and affirm that yes! They do belong. With beautiful acrylic-on-wood illustrations depicting children at school, this bilingual kids’ book by a Salvadoran immigrant tells an important story that will resonate with all kids who want nothing more than to belong.
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Plums for Months: A Memoir of Nature and Neurodivergence by Zaji Cox Forest Avenue Press, May 2023
As a neurodivergent child in a hundred-year-old house, Zaji Cox collects grammar books, second-hand toys, and sightings of feral cats. She dances and cartwheels through self-discovery and doubt, guided by her big sister and their devoted single mother. Through short essays that evoke the abundant imagination of childhood, Plums for Months explores the challenges of growing up mixed race and low-income on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon.
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A rust belt city in decline retains the solace of romance, which often proves to be an empty promise or even a curse. In The Bridge on Beer River, a novel-in-stories set in Reagan-era Binghamton, New York, characters scramble for subsistence while hoping for love and a better life. View flyer and visit website for more information.
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Player’s Vendetta A Willie Cuesta Mystery by John Lantigua Arte Público Press, March 2023
Willie Cuesta, former Miami Police Department detective-turned-private investigator, is swinging in his hammock, estimating the number of mango daquiris he can squeeze from a ripe piece of fruit about to fall from his tree. He’s also waiting for a prospective client who refused to discuss her case over the phone. Ellie Hernandez hasn’t seen her fiancé, Roberto “Bobby” Player, in ten days, and she wants Willie to find him. Bobby has been obsessed with the suspicious death of his parents more than thirty-five years ago in Cuba, and he recently went to the island to find their killers. Only six years old when they were murdered, he was living in the United States, where they were supposed to join him. He was one of the “Peter Pan” kids smuggled out when Fidel Castro took over. Willie learns the Players controlled one of the most successful casinos on the island and a large sum of money—half a million dollars—disappeared with their deaths. His investigation reveals an assortment of suspicious characters who were in Havana when the Players were killed, including a former Cuban spy now living in Little Havana, Mafia gangsters involved in gambling institutions and even an undercover US intelligence agent.
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The Hungers of the World: New & Collected Later Poems by John Morgan Salmon Poetry, April 2023
The Hungers of the World: New & Collected Later Poems by John Morgan joins its companion volume, The Moving Out: Collected Early Poems, published in 2019, to provide a comprehensive gathering of this Alaskan poet’s work. Originally from New York, Morgan moved with his family to Fairbanks, Alaska in 1976 to direct the creative writing program at the University of Alaska. In 1982, he and his wife Nancy built a house overlooking the Tanana River with a long view south to the Alaska Range. Morgan has written a series of poems which feature that view as it changes month by month through the seasons. Morgan’s family features prominently in his work as well as larger topics that deal with history and the arts. The final section of The Hungers of the World contains two long poems: The Wedge and River of Light: A Conversation with Kabir. The latter takes the reader on an adventurous raft trip down the Copper River in Southcentral Alaska with the Indian mystic poet Kabir as Morgan’s imaginary companion and spiritual guide.
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NewPages receives many wonderful book titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these by clicking on “New Books” under the NewPages Blog or Books tab on the menu. If you are a publisher or author looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us!
Poetry
Alone, J.R. Solonche, David Robert Books Bar of Rest, Sara Epstein, Kelsay Books Bridge at the End of the World, Scott T. Starbuck, Blue Light Press Broken Metronome, Connie Post, Glass Lyre Press The Death of Weinberg: Poems and Stories, Walter Weinschenk, Kelsay Books Dreaming in Cantera, Bonnie Wolkenstein, WordTech Editions The Dreams of Gods, J.R. Solonche, Kelsay Books EtC, Laura Mullen, Solid Objects excisions, Hilary Plum, Black Lawrence Press Expert Terrain, Diane Schenker, Word Poetry Fig Season, Joan E. Bauer, Turning Point Glass to Sand, John Van Dreal, Cherry Grove Collections gulp/gasp, Serena Piccoli, Moira Books Hearts, Joanne Corey, Kelsay Books
Best Material for the Artist in the World – Albert Bierstadt: A Biography in Poems by Kenneth Chamlee Stephen F. Austin University Press, March 2023
This poetic biography tracks the life and career of landscape artist Albert Bierstadt, whose 19th-century representations of the American West earned him wealth and international acclaim. These narrative, lyric, and ekphrastic poems touch the momentum of the developing west, the devastation of native tribes and the great buffalo herds, as well as the resiliency of Bierstadt’s art in times of environmental awareness and expansionist reappraisal.
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Embarrassed of the (W)Hole by Panoply Performance Laboratory Ugly Duckling Presse, March 2023
Embarrassed of the (W)Hole is an operating manual for an opera-of-operations. Oriented around formal and modal resistances to “wholism” as complex foil and the proposition to embarrass, the book includes scores-for-scores, theoretical frames, process notes, and a User Survey meant to be “operated” and “used” (specifically, rigorously) to stage and situate pertinent contexts, conditions, and embodiments of and for projected future operations.
Panoply Performance Laboratory is a thinktank, organizational entity, and flexible performance collective. Founded in 2006 by Esther Neff and co-directed with Brian McCorkle through 2018, PPL has also existed as a physical lab site (“institution as a verb”) in Brooklyn, hosting projects and performances by artists and thinkers from around the world.
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Winner of the 2022 Prize Americana, the poems in HIGHER by Robert Stewart are at once direct and resonant, celebratory of the natural world and of spiritual aspirations. Rising from a working-class, blue-collar sensibility, these pieces range from a short work about using a sledgehammer on a street crew to a multi-part longer work about animals in changing nature. These lyric poems include subtle metrics and enough narrative to drive events, often with elegiac references to a military vet friend, a brother, a Sicilian grandmother, and literary heroes. Their focus ultimately returns to hope and care for children, often with no small amount of humor.
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Tierra, Tierrita / Earth, Little Earth by Jorgue Tetl Argueta Illustrations by Felipe Ugalde Alcantara Piñata Books, May 2023
“My name is Earth / but people call me Little Earth.” In the fourth installment of their award-winning Madre Tierra / Mother Earth series of trilingual picture books about the natural world, Jorge Argueta and Felipe Ugalde Alcántara collaborate again to introduce Mother Earth, who is “full of all the colors / and all the flavors.” A Junior Library Guild selection, this book about Mother Earth reflects Argueta’s indigenous roots and his appreciation for the natural world. Containing the English and Spanish text on each page, the entire poem appears at the end in Nahuat, the language of Argueta’s Pipil-Nahua ancestors. This is an excellent choice to encourage children to write their own poems about nature and to begin conversations about the interconnected web of life.
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How to Shoot a Tourist (With a Bow & Arrow) In a Hot-Air Balloon by Joseph D. Reich Sagging Meniscus Press, April 2023
Joseph D. Reich’s 300-page, lyrical epic poem How to Shoot a Tourist (With a Bow & Arrow) in a Hot-Air Balloon contains surreal, confessional, stream-of-consciousness stanzas that run up and down the page in a desperate, fantastical rage. They are hypnotically interrupted by a recurring refrain from which they emerge and depart on wildly varied journeys: probing the nature, origins and psychological derivation of surrealism. Reich looks at persistent pain within and damage and devastation without in richly “ridiculous” images that are not only surreal but satirical and questioning, while also the best answer to the idiosyncratic machinations of authority. How to Shoot a Tourist is an exhaustive mythic encyclopedia of America and of Reich’s teeming inner world.
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A Connecticut Yankee Goes to Washington: George P. McLean, Birdman of the Senate by Will McLean Greeley recounts Senator George P. McLean’s crowning achievement: overseeing passage of one of the country’s first and most important wildlife conservation laws, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. The MBTA, which is still in effect today, has saved billions of birds from senseless killing and likely prevented the extinction of entire bird species. A Connecticut Yankee Goes to Washington puts McLean’s victory for birds in the context of his distinguished forty-five-year career marked by many acts of reform during a time of widespread corruption and political instability. Author Will McLean Greeley traces McLean’s rise from obscurity as a Connecticut farm boy to national prominence when he advised five US presidents and helped lead change and shape events as a US senator from 1911 to 1929.
Will McLean Greeley grew up in western Michigan with a passion for American history, politics, and birds. He earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Michigan and then a master’s degree from Michigan in archives administration. After retiring from a thirty-five-year career in government and corporate market research, he embarked upon a three-year research and writing journey to learn about his great-great-uncle George P. McLean and his legacy.
In Gay Poems for Red States, Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr. counters the injustice of a persistent anti-LGBTQ+ movement by asserting that a life full of beauty and pride is possible for everyone. More than a collection of poetry, Carver’s earnest and heartfelt verses are for those wishing to discover and understand the vastness of Appalachia, and for the LGBTQ+ Appalachians who long for a future—for a home—in an often unwelcoming place.
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As with any disaster, 1/6: The Graphic Novel is emotionally difficult to read, but nearly impossible to look away from. Volume 1: Remember This Day Forever takes readers into the surreal (for now) world of ‘what if’ the insurrection had been successful. Propaganda messaging drones patrol the streets, news stations are taken by force and resistant newscasters killed on the spot (the Second Amendment ‘trumps’ the First), and Trump supporters rally on the National Mall for the unveiling of an “Independence Day January 6, 2021” statue with state militia (Georgia and Arizona specifically) recognized for their efforts. A MAGA father whose son was killed in the event comes to honor him, only to be distraught by the messaging scapegoating Antifa and BLM. The hero (so far) is a journalist who joins a group of ‘freedom fighters’ working to reinstate democracy, and the cliffhanger ending reveals they’ve got a volatile treasure critical to their success. While the authors note “This is a work of speculative fiction grounded in real events,” it will be all too real a match to what many have feared might have and might still happen in our lifetimes. This will be a four-issue series with free copies available to non-profits and advocacy groups as well as wholesale pricing.
In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind by Marjorie Maddox and Anna Lee Hafer Shanti Arts, May 2023
In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind is a collaboration of poetry by Marjorie Maddox and art by her daughter Anna Lee Hafer, inspirited by a rainy-day excursion when Maddox and Hafer visit the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. As never before, they realized how their passions for art and poetry intersect. With this exhibit and Hafer’s own surreal paintings as inspiring backdrop, they exchanged their responses to joy and trauma more deeply—artist to artist, mother to daughter. These connections between poet and visual artist constitute the core of this ekphrastic collection. In addition, Maddox includes nine poems based on work she saw that day by Antar Mikosz, Greg Mort, Margaret Munz-Losch, Ingo Swann, and Christian Twamley, as well as several later collaborations with Karen Elias.
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Mis días con Papá / Spending Time With Dad by Elías David Illustrations by Claudia Delgadillo Piñata Books, May 2023
Mis días con Papá / Spending Time With Dad follows a boy and his stay-at-home dad, who takes care of him while his mom goes to work at the port, “where huge cargo ships come and go every day.” She oversees the containers that go around the world! In this brightly illustrated bilingual picture book, young children will relate to the family and its daily routines while immigrants will see themselves as they adjust to life far away from relatives. And children will see that the roles of men and women are fluid; dads can be loving fathers in charge of their kids’ well-being and moms can go to the office every day—or vice versa.
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Sivan Piatigorsky-Roth’s Diana: My Graphic Obsession made me realize that Diana holds a fairly firm place in my life experience. Having practically grown up with her, at least in news stories, I was surprised to have so many of Roth’s graphic renditions of famous photographs strike one memory chord after another. Most surprising is to see her life anew, through Roth’s insightful yet somewhat melancholy commentary, like the fact that Diana was only 16 years old when she first met Charles, who was then 29. Roth comments, “He was the very embodiment of charm. Standing next to him, Diana was just a child. His attention was overwhelming.”
Dan Kaplan’s 2.4.18 is an erasure of the February 4, 2018 issue of The New York Times, a book that wades through distorted fact, eroded context, and what may (not) be newsworthy. Kaplan is the editor of Burnside Review Press, and 2.4.18 is his third book of poetry.
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Proximal Morocco is a collection of poems by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine originally published in 1975. It was written in fits and starts during a span of ten years (1964-1974), during the fever pitch of his political exile from his homeland of Morocco which he fled, partly for fear of political persecution and partly to pursue a literary career in Paris, France. Laced with the same politically-inflected Surrealistic fervor as Aimé Césaire, the book is at once a powerful outcry to fellow artists for international solidarity of the colonized and outcast and a documentation of the pain and struggle of exile.
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Bone Wishing by Tara Flint Taylor is the 2022 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Contest Winner. This contest is open until mid-June to all writers (who are not current students at HVWC) who have not yet published (including self-published) a collection of poems in book or chapbook form.
Taylor’s work has appeared in Poet Lore, River Styx, Poetry Quarterly, North American Review, Nimrod, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Inkwell Journal, and elsewhere. Her awards include second place in the 2011 River Styx International Poetry Contest as well as finalist in the 2011 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and 2018 James Hearst Poetry Prize. She is a graduate of Le Moyne College where she earned her BA, and of North Carolina State University, where she earned her MFA. She is the recipient of the John LaHey Award in Writing, the Newhouse Writing Award, and the Brenda Smart Poetry Prize. Originally from Syracuse, New York, she lives in Portland, Oregon with her spouse, painter Joshua Flint (chapbook cover artist).
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Translated by Jennifer Croft, The Woman From Uruguay by Pedro Mairal follows Lucas Pereyra’s day trip from Buenos Aires to Montevideo, which is fuelled by two motives: to exchange a 15,000 dollar advance for his last book, and to spend some time with a young girl from a literary conference he is trying to bed.
The unpredictability of the Argentinian economy means that if Lucas were to take his advance in Buenos Aires, he would receive less than half of what he would get in Uruguay. Transporting money that way is illegal, though he really is between a rock and a hard place; dealing with Argentinian pesos is like “being paid in ice in the middle of the summer, and freezers are illegal.”
Anxiety abounds here, anxieties which are further fostered by an ambivalence towards his young son, and suspicions about his wife’s adultery. The story is dejected and hopeless, full of self-doubt and hatred. Hints of ambition filter through though, even if these are buried under familial and professional obligations.
An anti-hero in the truest sense, we are still somewhat drawn to Lucas due to his playful, vivid style, his biting social criticism, and most importantly the strength of his writerly ambitions, which unfortunately butt heads with the bleak reality of literary production, As one of his colleagues puts it, “books have to be written… then you decide how much they’re worth… you polish them like diamonds, and then you sell them like a string of sausages.”
Mairal’s protagonist is far from likable, but it would be unjust to make him so. This man, whose obligations towards his family and his career are at odds with his fundamental desire, holding him back from it; how can we expect him to come up smiling?
The Woman From Uruguay by Pedro Mairal; translated by Jennifer Croft. Bloomsbury Publishing, October 2022.
Reviewer bio: Colm McKenna is a second-hand bookseller based in Paris. He has published and self-published an array of short stories and articles, hoping to eventually release a collection of stories. He is mainly interested in the works of John Cowper Powys, Claude Houghton, and a range of Latin American writers.
No One Is on the Line: The Poetry of Mohsen Mohamed Translated from the Arabic by Sherine Elbanhawy Laertes Press, September 2023
These poems in No One is on the Line arose from the depths of incarceration, from the throat and intellect of Egyptian poetry Mohsen Mohamed who had been sentenced to five years of harsh imprisonment after a campus protest. The writing went on to win Egypt’s two most significant literary prizes. These poems speak of dislocation and the wrenching of the heart, of a found and forged community, of the bare lineaments of humanity disclosed in the throes of suffering. They are works of provocative witness and searching tenderness.
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Prayershreds: Poems by Bruce Beasley Orison Books, May 2023
Suppose the shreds of our prayers and of our faiths could themselves become a radical new form of devotion. Bruce Beasley confronts the apocalyptic zeitgeist of our time (political turmoil, societal division and isolation, spiritual despair, environmental catastrophe) and the crisis of faith in the human future. These poems make of the vocabulary of doubt a strange kind of sermon, summoning into chorus Heraclitus, Zeno, the Buddha, Roget’s Thesaurus, ancient prayers and hymns and scriptures, and an AI chatbot. In these fractured and ecstatic psalms, Beasley makes his ruptured way toward a faith that relies not on dogmas and creeds, but on a broken utterance for a torn and living faith.
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Stone Breaker: The Poet James Percival and the Beginning of Geology in New England by Kathleen L. Housely Wesleyan University Press, January 2023
Stone Breaker by Kathleen L. Housely is an in-depth, accessible biography of a true American polymath, James Gates Percival. A poet, linguist, and unstable savant, Percival was also a brilliant geologist who walked thousands of miles crisscrossing first Connecticut and then Wisconsin to lay the foundation for the work of generations of Earth scientists. Exploring the confluences of literature, art, and geology, Housley reveals how one of most famous poets of the 1820s became a renowned geologist with his groundbreaking 1843 work Report on the Geology of the State of Connecticut. The book includes historic photographs and paintings of the Connecticut landscape.
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Thurber Prize winner Harrison Scott Key’s third memoir How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told is a heartbreakingly honest, and often hilarious, account of marital infidelity and the resultant fallout from what he calls “an absurdist nightmare.” Hyperbole aside – this isn’t the world’s most insane love story – the book lays bare the complex and fragile ties that bind. How they fray, sometimes without us noticing the unraveling, is clearly presented. What’s more, Key delineates the many pressures, from demanding jobs to demanding kids, that can stymie communication and lead to spousal dissatisfaction. Key’s astute analysis digs into the psychological wiring that initially drew him and his wife together and, later, caused them to separate. But this is not a self-help treatise. Instead, it’s a very particular story about a very particular marriage and Key takes pains to avoid oversimplification.
That said, the book emphasizes that Key got through this period thanks to good friends and Christian faith. And while he concedes that religion is not always a source of comfort, in conjunction with therapy and a deeply-felt appraisal of his missteps, it provided the foundation for him and his wife to reconcile. For them, shared values, shared time, and shared laughter proved potent. Whether they’re enough, however, remain open questions.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
The graphic memoir Look Again recounts Elizabeth Trembley’s experience, years ago, of walking her dogs in the woods and finding a dead body. Trauma can make truth hard to find. Have you ever experienced a terror, grief, or confusion so great that when you try to share it you can only find shattered images floating in darkness? You try over and over, but can’t tell the story, to yourself or to anyone else. Look Again presents six variations of the same event, seen through the different lenses caused by other life revelations. It explores the fragmenting nature of trauma by tracing the convoluted evolution of the author’s story, a process often experienced by trauma sufferers and their loved ones. Trembley is a Lambda Literary Award-winning mystery writer (pen name Josie Gordon) and memoirist who now tells her stories in comics. She has a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Chicago and has taught college courses and public workshops on storytelling and comics. She currently works for the Sequential Artists Workshop.
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Worn Smooth Between Devourings: Poems by Lauren Camp NYQ Books, September 2023
The poems in Lauren Camp’s Worn Smooth between Devourings travel through fears of ecological devastation and national and global tragedy, and map routes away from despair. Worry remains in the background, even in landscapes that still hold time’s beginning. Even in long love. “We are suspended in places / entire and different and home,” Camp writes. These precise, sonically-driven poems investigate a confessed gaze for contentment with the conviction of quiet rebellion. Through repeating distance, multiplying birds and crisscrossing storylines, they offer a testament to land and lack, grief, faith, and endurance.
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Compass Lines: Journeys Toward Home by John Messick Porphyry Press, March 2023
From Antarctica to the Arctic, the Florida swamps to a Cambodia tattoo parlor, a Middle East bicycle route to a Yukon River canoe trip, Compass Lines: Journeys Toward Home by debut Alaska author John Messick brings readers on adventures that traverse latitudes and continents in pursuit of that most elusive place: home. These essays ask readers to think about encounters with cultures not our own through acts of witness—the imprint of immigration, the foreshadowing of war, the complexities of masculinity. Even after settling in Alaska, Messick finds the same colonial legacies taking a toll on land and people. Slowly, through deep and difficult interactions with the natural world, Messick realizes that sustainable existence depends on community and shared values. Neither travel nor homecoming are about conquering obstacles, but about applying attention and learning to listen.
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Winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, Melissa Crow’s Lo maps the deprivation and richness of a rural girlhood and offers an intimate portrait of the woman—tender, hungry, hopeful—who manages to emerge. In a series of lyric odes and elegies, Lo explores the notion that we can be partially constituted by lack—poverty, neglect, isolation. The child in the book’s early sections is beloved and lonely, cherished and abused, lucky and imperiled, and by leaning into this complexity the poems render a tentative and shimmering space sometimes occluded, the space occupied by a girl coming to find herself and the world beautiful, even as that world harms her.
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You Will Remember Me: Ekphrastic Poems by Barbara Lydecker Crane Word Galaxy Press, October 2023
In You Will Remember Me, Barbara Lydecker Crane’s masterful sonnets illuminate the work and lives of artists from medieval through contemporary times. We visit a lustful duke of Milan in “His Last Mistress,” Van Gogh and a French asylum in “My Present,” Munch’s health battle in “After Influenza,” Sherald on her Blackness in “Tell Me What You Think,” or the first Native Harvard graduate in “Imagining Caleb.” Often accompanied by full-color reproductions of the art that inspired them, these vivid ekphrases immerse in a synergistic experience of sight, language, and meaning that’s both entertaining and enlightening.
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In voices of a people’s history of the UNITED STATES in the 21st century: documents of hope and resistance edited by Anthony Arnove and Haley Pessin, progressives looking for honest reflection about ongoing efforts to eradicate racism, sexism, classism, homophobia and transphobia will find hard facts and clear insights. The fourth book in a series inspired by historian Howard Zinn’s now-classic A People’s History of the United States, it brings more than 100 essays, poems, speeches, and proclamations together.
The book opens with efforts to avoid war following the terrorist attacks on 9-11-2001 and then moves into other campaigns: The promotion of environmental stewardship; opposition to restrictive immigration policies; efforts to stop rape and sexual assault; protection of queer communities; and the development of mutual aid networks, among them. Although the collection sidesteps housing justice, the otherwise inclusive volume brings the words of well-known (Michelle Alexander, Kimberle Crenshaw, Colin Kaepernick, Keeanga-Yamahta Taylor) and lesser-known (Elvira Arellano, Evann Orleck-Jeter, Gustavo Madrigal) writers, theorists, and activists into a cogent and comprehensive social history.
All told, voices of a people’s history is an effective rebuttal to those who are pushing book bans, opposing LGBTQIA+ rights, and fighting liberalized treatment of asylees and refugees. It’s a powerful teaching tool as well as a good read and affirms the need for vigilance to protect our fragile democracy and extend social justice to all.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
Man of the People: The Autobiography of Congressman Robert Garcia Arte Público Press, April 2023
Three weeks into his first term as a US Congressman, Robert Garcia found himself sitting down for a second time with the president of the United States. The son of a laborer at the Central Aguirre sugar mill in Puerto Rico, he couldn’t help but think, “Only in America!” Garcia grew up in the South Bronx and in his autobiography—published posthumously—he shares his story of struggle, rising from poverty to become a Korean War veteran, New York State Assemblyman and Senator and ultimately a US Congressman representing his beloved community.
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There was a time when countless young people in the Midwest, South, and Southwest went to dances and stage shows to hear a territory band play. Territory bands traveled from town to town, performing jazz and swing music, and Tulsa-based musician Ernie Fields (1904–97) led one of the best. In Going Back to T-Town, Ernie’s daughter, Carmen Fields, tells a story of success, disappointment, and perseverance extending from the early jazz era to the 1960s. This is an enlightening account of how this talented musician and businessman navigated the hurdles of racial segregation during the Jim Crow era.
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gulp/gasp by Serena Piccoli Moria Books, September 2022
Temporally composed between 2019-2022, punctuated with socio-political, cultural, and linguistic shifts, and wry wordplay, gulp\gasp navigates the complexities within Italy, the British Isles, Zanzibar, and Europe, journalistically drawing on interviews, reports, photographs, essays, and articles. Though formally witty, playful, and punningly provocative, each piece packs a hard punch; and as such, serves as a powerful tool for raising awareness. Piccoli is an Italian poet, artistic director, playwright, translator, teacher, and photographer. She is the co-founder and director (with Giorgia Monti) of the Poetry and Sister Arts International Festival (Forlì – Cesena, Italy).
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The Principles of Comedy Improv is an authoritative handbook for beginners and experts alike. More than just entertainment, improv’s tenets enable you to change every moment of your life. Your guide is Tom Blank, who crystallizes two decades of experience to convey improv in unparalleled scope, depth, and fun. Blank lives in Los Angeles and is senior instructor at the Groundlings Theatre & School, where he teaches improv and sketch comedy.
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Prayer Book for the New Heretic by Colin Pope NYQ Books, March 2023
At the intersection of religion, politics, and Americana, Colin Pope’s latest collection inquires what it means to believe while living through unbelievable times. These poems careen and rollick, imagining a world in which conspiracy theory and urban myth figure as acts of God. Here, the notion of “blind faith” is subjected to kaleidoscopic interrogation in a madcap, whirling, unabashedly entertaining pursuit of the limits of dogma. In Pope’s vision of belief, wayward children are plucked up by eagles, the moon landing is faked via the liberal use of shaving cream, and a men’s room wall is elected president. But beneath their roiling surface, these poems surge on their dauntless quest for some understanding of how we ended up here, now, fighting for our humanity.
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Part wunderkammer, part grimoire, Maggie Queeney’s In Kind is focused on survival. A chorus of personae, speaking into and through a variety of poetic forms, guide the reader through the aftermath of generations of domestic, gendered, and sexual violence, before designing a transformation and rebirth. These are poems of witness, self-creation, and reclamation.
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Gabriel Ebensperger’s debut graphic novel, Gay Giant, is a coming-of-age and coming-to-terms-with-oneself story, showing readers what it feels like to grow up queer in a heteronormative society in the 1990s. Filled with pop-cultural touchstones from Cher to Laurie Anderson, Jurassic Park to My Little Pony, Ebensperger navigates both the joy and pain of puberty surrounded by ignorance and homophobia, the anxiety of casual hookups, and pressure to be more macho. How do you love yourself if you’ve learned so well to hate yourself? For all who’ve ever felt bizarre, damaged, or strange, Ebensperger asserts that all is full of love, and that true acceptance must come from within. Ebensperger lives by the sea in Chile and works as an illustrator, a graphic designer, and an art director. His work has been featured in several Chilean and international publications.
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In the poem-essays that comprise A Duration, writing is a physical act where writing and lived experience support one another in bodies—animal, plant, mineral, and word bodies—that are injured and heal, that die and continue in new forms, playing new roles. Here, in his fifth book, Richard Meier transmutes years of daily practices of attention—be it to a line spoken by Lear’s Fool, a train to Kingston, or “red inside green stem below eight white petals in a spiral with space between them attached to the yellow center”—into mesmerizing trajectories through an always unfolding present. In the collapse of the border between writing and the body, A Duration, “play[s] both hearts with a heartbeat and kinship of place, time, mundanity in the continuous onrushing imagined joy.”
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There have been a number of recent books about being a female runner, including Lauren Fleshman’s Good for a Girl; Kara Goucher’s The Longest Race; Alison Mariella Désir’s Running While Black; and Des Linden’s Choosing to Run. Similarly, there have been several relatively recent books about the benefits of exercise (running, in particular) to help slow down the aging process, including Daniel Levitin’s Successful Aging and Daniel Lieberman’s Exercised. In her Older, Faster, Stronger: What Women Runners Can Teach Us All About Living Younger, Longer, Margaret Webb was on track to explore both areas almost a decade ago. Webb blends research and memoir in this work to delve into the ways running can keep people younger and healthier, especially how it benefits women.
Inspired by her mother and sister, Webb decides to become more serious about running, spending a year training for a World Masters half-marathon. Drawing on her background in journalism, she interviews experts on exercise science and some of the world record holders who are in the sixties, seventies, and beyond. She uses that information to shape her own training, certainly, but, more importantly, she wants readers to see how important it is to stay active as we age. She consistently references the growing body of research that shows how one can remain active well past the traditional retirement age and the multitude of benefits that activity can have, as she focuses on the quality of one’s life as much as the quality of that life.
Webb draws inspiration from the runners she interviews (often, fittingly, while running), but she also serves as an inspiration herself. She, like most of the runners she talks to, doesn’t feel they are extraordinary, though the one question she is unable to answer is what motivates some people to remain active, while others become more and more sedentary. Reading this book certainly serves to motivate, as Webb’s enthusiasm is infectious.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
