New & Noteworthy Books

New Books from Independent &
University Presses

See full list of noteworthy books by category below

Posted on May 20, 2010

Available Light

Recollections and Reflections of a Son

Nonfiction by Reamy Jansen

Hamilton Stone Editions, 2010

ISBN-13: 978-0980178609

Paperback: 103pp; $15.95

Reamy Jansen’s collection of memoir essays, Available Light, weaves together past and present, focusing on the writer’s father and mother. He treats with delicacy material that could easily be melodramatic in another writer’s hands: a distant father writing articles on railroading in the middle of the living room; the alcoholic mother; their deaths; a threat to his own eyesight. Jansen handles these subjects with a surprisingly light touch, offering the suffering honestly but with a clear tone of forgiveness for the deeply flawed people in his past. //

 

Bird Lovers, Backyard

Poetry by Thalia Field

New Directions Books, April 2010

ISBN-13: 978-0-8112-1840-5

Paperback: 144pp; $16.95

Bird Lovers, Backyard continues the Chicago-born poet’s explorations of storytelling and her experiments with mixing genres (poetry, prose, essay, and drama). Field’s poems address scientists, philosophers, animals, and the military. They explore current issues of global warming, over-development and destruction of natural landscapes and animal species, mingling fact with fiction. //

 

The Hotel Under the Sand

Children's/YA Fiction by Kage Baker

Tachyon Publications, 2009

ISBN-13: 978-1-892391-89-6

Paperback: 180pp; $8.00

Nine-year-old Emma is lost at sea, awakening alone on a deserted island. Yet brave, quick-witted Emma soon discovers a century-old mystery. The Grand Wenlocke was a spectacular hotel with a miraculous device that could slow down time (making vacations as long as you’d like). But then the Grand Wenlocke suddenly disappeared, sinking under the sands of the island. Now the storm has re-awakened the hotel, which is perfectly preserved and as incredible as ever. As she explores the magical hotel, Emma will find new friends, adventure, peril...and perhaps even treasure...

 

Isobel and Emile

Fiction by Alan Reed

Coach House Books, 2010

ISBN-13: 978-1552452271

Paperback: 156pp; $18.95

Isobel and Emile is the story of two lovers without each other. Isobel and Emile wake up beside each other one morning. It is the last time that they will sleep together. They know it. They get out of bed and they go to a train station. Emile gets onto a train. Isobel does not. She stands on the platform and she watches him go. He is going to the city, where he will be an artist. She will stay in the small town. She will work at a small grocery store and write letters to Emile.

 

Look Back, Look Ahead

The Selected Poems of Srecko Kosovel

Poetry by Srecko Kosovel

Ugly Duckling Presse, March 2010

ISBN-13: 978-1-933254-54-8

Paperback: 232pp; $17.00

Srečko Kosovel (1904-1926) experimented with a wide variety of styles—impressionist, symbolist, expressionist, futurist, Dadaist, and surrealist. In his short life, he was active in the literary world and founded a literary review, Beautiful Vida. In 1925 he prepared a manuscript for publication called The Golden Boat, but it was subsequently lost and never published in its original form. He died of meningitis at the age of 22, leaving over 1,000 poems as well as prose writings, essays and vignettes totaling several hundred pages. Look Back, Look Ahead is the first American edition of Kosovel’s selected poetry.

 

Metrophilias

Fiction by Brendan Connell

Better Non Sequitur, May 2010

ISBN-10: 0974323578

Paperback: 102pp; $12.00

Thirty-six cities. Thirty-six stories of obsession. From ancient Thebes to present day Berlin, these little portraits of humans superimposed on their suburban environment are corroding treats thrown together in a past-modern beaker, landmark tales of love in the metropolis. A round-the-world tour of craving and decadence. //

 

Portrait of Colon Dash Parenthesis

Poetry by Jeffrey Jullich

Litmus Press, 2010

ISBN-13: 978-1933959108

Paperback: 75pp; $15.00

Of his second collection of poetry, Jeffrey Jullich writes "The colon dash parenthesis of the title refers to the “emoticon”; it marks a threshold of new emotional communication..." and if emotion implies a body, a body implies a person, and a pronoun.” In non-verbal marks of punctuation, dangling definitions, and evocations of the “unimaginable afterimage” of action, these poems literalize to make visible a metaphysics of absence, of alterity. Jullich’s work re-inflates the “I”—“suddenly, utterly sublime”—by enlarging the space, social and psychic, it inhabits. This is a book of revision and surprise—of liberation. //

 

Post Moxie

Poetry by Julia Story

Sarabande Books, May 2010

ISBN-13: 978-1-932511-84-0

Paperback: 77pp; $14.95

Julia Story's Post Moxie documents the half-measures and approximations, the metaphorical conceits we use to tell the stories of our lives. Story's use of prose blocks—discrete, bounded sections of text—frames the attempts at narrative, arguing for how we use language to approach, and fail to reach, a defining architecture of our lives. Using the detritus of Midwestern suburbia, clichés of eighties movies and bad first dates, and an almost mystical attachment to artifacts of the natural world, Story reveals in fragments the struggle to be complete, and to be read. //

 

Time of Sky & Castles in the Air

Poetry by Ayane Kawata

Litmus Press, 2010

ISBN-13: 978-1933959085

Paperback: 144pp $18.00

Time of Sky & Castles in the Air is the first full-length translation of Ayane Kawata’s work to appear in English, translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu. In Time of Sky, terse, incongruous syntactic arrangements, action, location and journey enfold, situating the self at a precarious border between dispossession and metamorphosis. In Castles in the Air, a diary of dreams, experience unfolds in shifting contexts whose details mutate as the poet revises position and perspective, groping at communication, disoriented by desire.

 

To Light Out

Poetry by Karen Weiser

Ugly Duckling Presse, February 2010

ISBN-13: 978-1-933254-63-0

Paperback: 72pp; $15.00

The potential of poetic language is mapped onto the potential of pregnancy in Karen Weiser's first collection of poetry, To Light Out. Written in anticipation of the birth of the poet’s daughter, the book combines a series of dynamic poems of perception with imagined conversations between the late-Enlightenment mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg and San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer—both of whom were preoccupied with the “outside” forces that influence our lives and work. //

 

Page updated August 18, 2010