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

New Book :: Patterns of Orbit

Patterns of Orbit poetry by Chloe N Clark published by Baobab Press book cover image

Patterns of Orbit
Poetry by Chloe N Clark
Baobab Press, April 2023

Available now for pre-order, Chloe N Clark’s Patterns of Orbit spans genres, perspectives, and styles to articulate contemporary uncertainties in a rapidly changing world. Steadily gazing into and across the uncanny valley, Clark examines those jarring or subtle shifts in familiar stories, writing light into dark, and offering slivers of hope despite the longest of odds. Navigating a potent concoction of science fiction, folktale, and horror this collection of literary, character-driven stories combines the accumulated forces and darker natures of those genre elements, unleashing the terrors of alien fungi, forest demons, and interplanetary specters upon her characters. While these characters, capable and intelligent, face off against their prescribed monsters, it is their existential misgivings on the state of their worlds or conditions that will leave an indelible mark on the reader. As a notable contribution to the literary/genre hybrid canon, this collection offers a crossover read to the connoisseurs of both genre and literary fiction.

New Book :: Morality Play

Morality Play poetry by Lauren Hilger published by Northwest Editions book cover image

Morality Play
Poetry by Lauren Hilger
Northwest Editions, June 2022

In Morality Play, Lauren Hilger forges a restless path between the impressionable folly of youth and the boundlessness of individual becoming. A motley bildungsroman of fierce imagination, Morality Play reveals, and revels in, the paradox inherent in its title, angling for a tender virtue in the sensuousness of words. “Raised on a fast pencil, a sound expiring,” Hilger reminds us that “From the world’s first cities, it was always a woman / telling the future.” Like a wild song fluent in, or flung against, awkward self-delusion and constrictive cultural norms, Morality Play offers a vision of womanhood as expansive as lucid dreaming, where all the “wrong words” become our “mother tongue.” Lauren Hilger is the author of Lady Be Good (CCM, 2016). Named a Nadya Aisenberg Fellow in poetry from MacDowell, she has also received fellowships from the Hambidge Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in BOMB, Harvard Review, KenyonReview, Pleiades, The Threepenny Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for No Tokens.

New Book :: An Adventurous Spirit

An Adventurous Spirit: A Lowestoft Chronicle Anthology edited by Nicholas Litchfield published by Lowestoft Chronicle Press book cover image

An Adventurous Spirit: A Lowestoft Chronicle Anthology
Edited by Nicholas Litchfield
Lowestoft Chronicle Press, October 2022

A brief stop in Missouri to see a buzzworthy dead pig and a local pickler assist a Californian family in avoiding a menacing encounter with drug smugglers. In New York City, a riled, hotshot salesman endeavors to hunt down the brazen thieves who made off with his briefcase and wallet in a crowded subway car. And a subway train driver with a history of fatalities on his service record is on the hunt for another victim. An Adventurous Spirit shimmers with high adventure, comedy, drama, introspection, and intelligent observation. From psychedelic taxi rides and dubious genealogical quests across the United States heartland to farcically troublesome road trips and intense ancestral pinball duels in Europe, this collection features poetry and prose by Linda Ankrah-Dove, Robert Beveridge, Jeff Burt, DeWitt Clinton, DAH, Rob Dinsmoor, Mary Donaldson-Evans, Catherine Dowling, Tim Frank, James Gallant, Bruce Harris, Marc Harshman, Jacqueline Jules, Richard Luftig, Robert Mangeot, George Moore, James B. Nicola, and Robert Wexelblatt. Plus, exclusive interviews with award-winning authors Abby Frucht and Sheldon Russell. Founded in September 2009, Lowestoft Chronicle is an online literary magazine, published quarterly, accepting flash fiction, short stories, poetry, and creative non-fiction with preference given to humorous submissions with an emphasis on travel. An anthology of the best work is published annually. The mission of Lowestoft Chronicle is “to form a global ‘think tank’ of inquisitive, worldly scribblers, collectively striving towards excellence and, if possible, world domination.”

New Book :: The Happy Valley

The Happy Valley a novel by Benjamin Harnett published by Serpent Key Press book cover image

The Happy Valley
Fiction by Benjamin Harnett
Serpent Key Press, October 2022

In the early 1990s, in Harmony Valley, a rural, Upstate New York village faded from its 18th and 19th-century heyday, a group of teens engaged in an idiosyncratic role-playing game cross paths with June, a mysterious girl whose family has deep roots in the area, and Clyde Duane, a janitor who makes weekly visits to a strange room – the headquarters of a secret society – opening its door with a golden, serpent-headed key. Meanwhile, an eccentric Utica lawyer pulls his young Vietnamese protégée into their firm’s special case, which stretches back to the 1840s. Decades later, in 2034, as the United States is breaking apart and a new way of life taking shape, June has disappeared. The mystery of her disappearance inspires a journey back to “The Happy Valley,” and a reevaluation of the past that exposes the dark personal and societal secrets betraying our founding myths. Harnett’s debut novel is 412 pages, with 66 full-page b&w illustrations by the author, and includes an Appendix with a Timeline, and a detailed Reading Group Guide.

New Book :: Strong Feather

Strong Feather poetry by Jennifer Reeser published by Able Muse Press book cover image

Strong Feather
Poetry by Jennifer Reeser
Able Muse Press, March 2023

The poems in Jennifer Reeser’s Strong Feather center on a Native American Indian female character of the author’s creation. She is a poet/prophet/warrior of sorts. All the poems are masterfully deployed in form, but they vary in tone and content. While many of the poems use the Strong Feather character, there are also personal poems, and translations and tales from actual Cherokee and other indigenous traditions. The title poem opens the collection:

End of the winter, middle March,
Waking, I find it beneath my quilt
Clinging to linens the hue of larch,
Softer and whiter than milk when spilt—
One petite feather. Its hollow “hilt”
Pointing toward me, is curved and long,
Slightly translucent, and at a tilt.
How has this feather stayed so strong?
. . . .

Jennifer Reeser is the author of six collections of poetry, and her poems, reviews, and translations of Russian, French, along with the Cherokee and various Native American Indian languages, have appeared in numerous publications. A biracial writer of European American and Native American Indian ancestry, Reeser was born in Louisiana. She studied English at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. She now divides her time between Louisiana and her land on the Cherokee Reservation in Indian Country near Tahlequah, Oklahoma, capital of the Cherokee Nation of which her family is a part.

New Book :: Late Work

Late Work: A Literary Autobiography of Love, Loss, and What I Was Reading essays by Joan Frank published by University of New Mexico Press book cover image

Late Work: A Literary Autobiography of Love, Loss, and What I Was Reading
Nonfiction by Joan Frank
University of New Mexico Press, October 2022

Curious, ruminative, and wry, this literary autobiography tours what Rachel Kushner called “the strange remove that is the life of the writer.” Frank’s essays cover a vast spectrum—from handling dismissive advice, facing the dilemma of thwarted ambition, and copying the generosity that inspires us, to the miraculous catharsis of letter-writing and some of the books that pull us through. Useful for writers at any stage of development, Late Work offers a seasoned artist’s thinking through the exploration of issues, paradoxes, and crises of faith. Like a lively conversation with a close, outspoken friend, each piece tells its experience from the trenches. Joan Frank is the award-winning author of twelve books of literary fiction and essays including Because You Have To: A Writing Life and Try to Get Lost: Essays on Travel and Place (UNM Press).

New Book :: Elizabeth/The Story of Drone

Elizabeth/The Story of Drone hybrid poetry by Louise Akers published by Propeller Books book cover image

Elizabeth/The Story of Drone
Poetry by Louise Akers
Propeller Books, September 2022

In this hybrid poem about militarized drones and militant angels, Elizabeth abandons her career as a physicist to become a museum administrator, finds god in the basement below the galleries, and dies there. But that is not the end. A blend of form and genre, Elizabeth/The Story of Drone takes readers on a journey through terrain in which the personal and the political collide. Louise Akers is a poet living in Brooklyn, New York. They earned their MFA from Brown University in May of 2018, and received the Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop Prize for Innovative Writing in 2017 and the Confrontation Poetry Prize in 2019. Their chapbook, Alien Year, was selected by Brandon Shimoda for the 2020 Oversound Chapbook Prize.

New Book :: If This Should Reach You In Time

If This Should Reach You In Time poetry by Justin Marks published by Barrelhouse Books book cover image

If This Should Reach You In Time
Poetry by Justin Marks
Barrelhouse Books, December 2022

If This Should Reach You in Time sounds the alarm of climate change and democratic collapse with tender lament and guarded hope from award-winning poet Justin Marks. In “Along for the Ride,” Marks writes, “There’s no way around / not being part // of the problem” and “The best case scenario / is long term disaster.” In this fourth collection of poetry, Marks renders global threats as intimate and personal. As we turn inward, terror and sadness take hold. This is a book of crisis and dread, both human and spiritual. Through these poems, Marks shows readers what could be and what might have been. In the titular poem, he writes, “know / that we didn’t see / the disaster coming / That it wasn’t / imaginable, hadn’t / existed until, gradually / it was, and did / Or that we saw it / and refused to believe / Or saw it and thought / something or someone / else would save us.”

New Book :: In a Few Minutes Before Later

In a Few Minutes Before Later poetry by Brenda Hillman published by Wesleyan University Press book cover image

In a Few Minutes Before Later
Poetry by Brenda Hillman
Wesleyan University Press, October 2022

An iconoclastic ecopoet who has led the way for many young and emerging artists, Brenda Hillman continues to re-cast innovative poetic forms as instruments for tracking human and non-human experiences. At times the poet deploys short dialogues, meditations or trance techniques as means of rendering inner states; other times she uses narrative, documentary or scientific materials to record daily events during a time of pandemic, planetary crisis, political and racial turmoil. Hillman proposes that poetry offers courage even in times of existential peril; her work represents what is most necessary and fresh in American poetry.

New Book :: The Beckoning World

The Beckoning World, a novel by Douglas Bauer published by University of Iowa Press book cover image

The Beckoning World
Fiction by Douglas Bauer
University of Iowa Press, November 2022

Douglas Bauer’s newest work, The Beckoning World, is set in the first quarter of the twentieth century and follows Earl Dunham, whose weeks are comprised of six days mining coal followed by Sundays playing baseball. Then, one day, a major-league scout happens on a game, signs Earl, and he begins a life he had no idea he could even dream. But dreams sometimes suffer from a lovely abundance, and in Earl’s case, her name is Emily Marchand. They fall quickly and deeply in love, but with that love comes heartbreaking complications. The Beckoning World gathers a cast of characters that include Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, a huge-hearted Pullman steward offering aphoristic wisdom, and countless others, not least of which is the 1918 Spanish flu taking vivid spectral form. At the center is a relentless love that Earl and Emily are defenseless against, allied as they are “in this business of their hearts.” Douglas Bauer has written several books, including Prairie City, Iowa: Three Seasons at Home (Iowa, 2008). He teaches writing at Bennington College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

New Book :: The Six-Minute Memoir

The Six Minute Memoir Fifty-Five Short Essays on Life by Mary Helen Stefaniak published by University of Iowa Press book cover image

The Six-Minute Memoir: Fifty-Five Short Essays on Life
Memoir by Mary Helen Stefaniak
A Bur Oak Book
University of Iowa Press, October 2022

Culled from two decades’ worth of Mary Helen Stefaniak’s “Alive and Well” column in the Iowa Source, each essay invites readers into the ordinary life of a woman “with a family and friends and a job . . . and a series of cats and a history living in one old house after another at the turn of the twenty-first century in the middle of the Middle West.” One great aunt presides over nineteen acres of pecan grove profitably strewn with junk. A borrowed hammer rings with the sound of immortality. Famous poets pipe up where you least expect them. Living and dying are found to be two sides of the same remarkable coin. Writing prompts at the end of the book invite readers to search their own lives for such moments—the kind that could be forgotten but instead are turned, by the gift of perspective and perfectly chosen detail, into treasure. The Six-Minute Memoir encourages people to tell their own stories even if they think they don’t have the kind of story that belongs in a memoir.

New Book :: The Red Ear Blows Its Nose

The Red Ear Blows Its Nose Poems for Children and Others by Robert Schechter Illustrated by S. Federico published by Word Galaxy Press book cover image

The Red Ear Blows Its Nose: Poems for Children and Others
Poetry by Robert Schechter
Illustrations by S. Federico
Word Galaxy Press, April 2023

If you’ve got any “littles” in your life, The Red Ear Blows Its Nose is the perfect gift book to preorder for next year’s National Poetry Month. Published by Word Galaxy Press, an imprint of the well-respected Able Muse Press, The Red Ear Blows Its Nose dishes out hilarity, wit, wordplay, and wisdom in a playfully illustrated collection of poems “for children and others.” It considers thought, identity and what it means to be a person, nature and the seasons, and includes assorted creatures, such as a horse who says “Moo,” a “Dear Earthling” letter from an invading alien, bees, ants, birds, and elephants. Several poems focus on the senses and the brain, including this thoughtful short work:

Just Wondering

For there to be a butterfly
must the caterpillar die?
Or does the caterpillar brain
in the butterfly remain?

This debut collection from Robert Schechter is complemented by S. Federico’s illustrations, which add to the possible interpretations of the works. Robert Schechter’s award-winning poetry for children has appeared in Highlights for Children, Cricket, Spider, Ladybug, the Caterpillar, Blast Off, Countdown, Orbit, and more than a dozen anthologies published by Bloomsbury, National Geographic, Macmillan, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the Emma Press, and Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.

New Book :: How to Maintain Eye Contact

How to Maintain Eye Contact poetry by Robert Wood Lynn published by Button Poetry book cover image

How to Maintain Eye Contact
Poetry by Robert Wood Lynn
Button Poetry, January 2023

The 2020 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest Runner-Up, Robert Wood Lynn’s How to Maintain Eye Contact is set in three sections that explore interior uncertainty, interpersonal uncertainty, and uncertainty at a larger scale. These narrative poems, influenced by storytelling traditions, find themselves at the nexus of the intimate and the humorous, as well as the absurd and the tragic. These poems examine isolation and grief in their many forms—through heartbreak or the death of loved ones, or show us the world looking back at itself after it ends. Lynn’s poems have recently appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Narrative Magazine, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, and other journals. He splits his time between Brooklyn, New York, and Rockbridge County, Virginia. Signed copies of How to Maintain Eye Contact are available to order from the publisher’s website.

New Book :: What’s Left to Us by Evening

What's Left to Us by Evening poetry by David Ebenbach published by Orison Books book cover image

What’s Left to Us by Evening
Poetry by David Ebenbach
Orison Books, October 2022

How does one live in a world that is both beautiful and broken—a world of cherry blossoms and gun violence, fellowship and political enmity, plague and rebirth? What’s Left to Us by Evening, David Ebenbach’s unsparing and timely new poetry collection, examines the obligation—and privilege—of carrying it all. Ebenbach is the author of numerous books of fiction, poetry, and essays. He lives in Washington, DC, where he teaches creative writing at Georgetown University.

New Book :: Sit Down and Have a Beer Again

Sit Down and Have a Beer Again poetry and fiction by Greg Wyss published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library book cover image

Sit Down and Have a Beer Again
Fiction and Poetry by Greg Wyss
Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, June 2022

The poems and stories that make up Sit Down and Have A Beer, the first chapter here, were in a chapbook published in 1977 by Realities Library. The stories and poems had been published in small press magazines impacting a small cadre of creatives in the country in those days.

The Small Press world of those days was the precursor to the internet – insane editors and publishers who believed that the established publications had simply lost touch with the creative reality of our nation. And, just like the internet, the small presses were eventually bought out by the rich folks who figured out the best way to beat them was to buy them out.

The second chapter of the book contains the other poems that were published in these mags but never collected till now.

The third chapter represents a small sample from When Life Was Like A Cucumber, the great novel about the early 1970’s that tells the story of a young man’s journey of self-discovery and sexual awakening as he tries to find his place in
post-Sixties America.

New Book :: Sweet, Young, & Worried

Sweet Young and Worried poetry by Blythe Baird published by Button Poetry book cover image

Sweet, Young, & Worried
Poetry by Blythe Baird
Button Poetry, November 2022

Following her successful debut, Sweet, Young, & Worried is the sophomore collection by author Blythe Baird. Invoking breathtaking imagery and punching narratives, Baird guides readers on an expedition embracing queerness, love, loss, mental health, feminism, and healing along the way. At only 25 years old, Baird is already recognized and acclaimed for her work in spoken word poetry. Originally from the northwest suburbs of Chicago, the viral writer has garnered international recognition for her performance pieces that speak urgently and honestly about sexual assault, mental illness, eating disorder recovery, sexuality, and healing from trauma. Baird graduated from Hamline University in 2018 with a dual degree in creative writing and women’s studies. In 2020, she became the recipient of the prestigious McKnight Artist Fellowship for Spoken Word administered by The Loft Literary Center in Minnesota. Signed copies of Sweet, Young, & Worried are available to order from the publisher’s website.

New Book :: Anchor

Anchor poetry by Rebecca Aronson published by Orison Book cover image

Anchor
Poetry by Rebecca Aronson
Orison Books, October 2022

Threaded with epistolary poems to Gravity—envisioned as a capricious god as the author’s father began to fall frequently at the outset of a progressive illness—Aronson’s latest poems contemplate and address what anchors us, literally and figuratively. These poems excavate grief during the process of losing parents, one to physical illness and the other to dementia. But even in the midst of grief, Aronson never loses sight of the larger world, ever present in all its danger and beauty.

New Book :: The Anchored World

The Anchored World: Flash Fairy Tales and Folklore Fiction by Jasmine Sawers published by Rose Metal Press book cover image

The Anchored World: Flash Fairy Tales and Folklore
Fiction by Jasmine Sawers
Rose Metal Press, October 2022

A goat begins to grow inside a human heart. The rightful king is born a hard, smooth seashell. Supernovas burst across skin like ink in water. Heartbreak transforms maidens into witches, girls into goblins, mothers into monsters. Hunger drives lovers and daughters, soldiers and ghosts, to unhinge their jaws and swallow the world. Drawing inspiration from a mixed heritage and from history—from the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen to the ancient legends of Thailand, from the suburbs of Buffalo, New York to the endless horizon of the American Midwest—Jasmine Sawers invents a hybrid folklore for liminal characters who live between the lines and within the creases of race and language, culture and gender, sexuality and ability. The Anchored World: Flash Fairy Tales and Folklore is equal parts love letter to the old tales and indictment of their shortcomings, offering a new mythology to reflect the many faces and voices of the twenty-first century.

Books Received October 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 “Books” tag under “Popular Blog 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

All the Blood Involved in Love, Maya Marshall, Haymarket Books
Anchor, Rebecca Aronson, Orison Books
Belly to the Brutal, Jennifer Givhan, Wesleyan University Press
Duets, Alexis Rhone Fancher & Cynthia Atkins, Small Harbor Publishing
The Elliott Erwitt Poems, Simon Perchik, Cholla Needles Art & Literary Library
F & G, D. Marie Fitzgerald, Cholla Needles Art & Literary Library
Green Burial, Derek Graf, Elixir Press
How to Maintain Eye Contact, Robert Wood Lynn, Button Poetry
How Much?, Jerome Sala, NYQ Books
How to Cut a Woman in Half, Janis Harrington, Able Muse Press
Never Catch Me, Darius Simpson, Button Poetry
O, Tammy Nguyen, Ugly Duckling Press
Poetry Mountain, David Chorlton, Cholla Needles Art & Literary Library
Selected Poems, Takuboku Ishikawa, Cholla Needles Art & Literary Library
Seven Stars Anthology 1973-1998, realities library
Sit Down And Have A Beer Again, Greg Wyss, Cholla Needles Art & Literary Library
Sweet, Young, & Worried, Blythe Baird, Button Poetry
Talk Smack to a Hurricane, Lynne Jensen Lampe, IceFloe Books
Tits on the Moon, Dessa, Rain Taxi Review of Books
What’s Left to Us by Evening, David Ebenbach, Orison Books

Continue reading “Books Received October 2022”

New Book :: Dancing for Our Tribe

Dancing for My Tribe: Potawatomi Traditions in the New Millennium by Sharon Hoogstraten published by The University of Oklahoma Press book cover image

Dancing for Our Tribe: Potawatomi Tradition in the New Millennium
Native American/U.S. History by Sharon Hoogstraten
The University of Oklahoma Press, July 2022
Hardcover, 304 pages, 9.5 X 13 format
272 Color and 32 B&W Illustrations, 2 maps

In the heyday of the Anishinaabe Confederacy, the Potawatomis spread across Canada, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Pressured by the westward expansion of the fledgling United States of America, they became the most treatied of any Indian tribe. Forced removals and multiple treaty-era relocations resulted in cultural chaos and an enduring threat to their connections to the ancestors. Despite these hardships, they have managed to maintain (or restore) their rich heritage.

Beginning with Citizen Potawatomi Nation, photographer and Citizen Potawatomi Sharon Hoogstraten visited all nine nations of the scattered Potawatomi tribe to construct a permanent record of present-day Potawatomis wearing the traditional regalia passed down through the generations, modified to reflect the influence and storytelling of contemporary life. While the silver monochrome portraits that captured Native life at the turn of the twentieth century are a priceless record of those times, they contribute to the impression that most Indian tribes exist only as obscure remnants of a dimly remembered past. With more than 150 formal portraits and illuminating handwritten statements, Dancing for Our Tribe portrays the fresh reality of today’s Native descendants and their regalia: people who live in a world of assimilation, sewing machines, polyester fabrics, duct tape, tattoos, favorite sports teams, proud military service, and high-resolution digital cameras.

The Potawatomi nations have merged loss and optimism to reinforce their legacy for generations to come. We learn from the elders the old arts of language, ribbonwork, beading, and quillwork with renewed urgency. Preserving Potawatomi culture, tribal members are translating traditional designs into their own artistic celebration of continuing existence, lighting the path forward for the next seven generations. Dancing for Our Tribe illustrates vividly that in this new millennium, “We Are Still Here.”

New Book :: Selected Poems

Selected Poems by Takuboku Ishikawa edited by r soos published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library book cover image

Selected Poems
Poetry by Takuboku Ishikawa
Edited by r soos
Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, August 2022

This book is a selection of Ishikawa’s youthful poems, and a complete imagining into English of his final collection known in English as Grieving Playthings, Sad Toys, and more specifically Suffering Playthings. For over 100 years Ishikawa’s work has been exciting for the modern reader because he was among the very first to bring the depths of his inner turmoil as a human being to life on the page.

New Book :: All the Blood Involved in Love

All the Blood Involved in Love poetry by Maya Marshall published by Haymarket Books book cover image

All the Blood Involved in Love
Poetry by Maya Marshall
Haymarket Books, June 2022

In a moment of critical struggle for reproductive justice, Maya Marshall’s haunting debut, All the Blood Involved in Love, meditates on womanhood—with and without motherhood. Traversing familial mythography with an unflinching seriousness, Marshall moves deftly between contemporary politics, the stakes of race and interracial partnership, and the monetary, mental, and physical costs of adopting or birthing a Black child. Maya Marshall, a writer, and editor, is cofounder of underbellymag.com, the journal on the practical magic of poetic revision. As an educator, Marshall has taught at Northwestern University and Loyola University Chicago. She holds fellowships from MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, Callaloo, The Watering Hole, Community of Writers, and Cave Canem.

New Book :: Never Catch Me

Never Catch Me poetry by Darius Simpson published by Button Poetry book cover image

Never Catch Me
Poetry by Darius Simpson
Button Poetry, October 2022

Darius Simpson’s debut collection Never Catch Me centers on Black boyhood in the midwest and familial disintegration over time. Simpson pulls back the curtain, exposing the violence enacted against and upon, Black bodies, and yet, still, each poem is saturated in revolution and hope. Never Catch Me is the anthem necessary to organize a community that is committed to a better right now–one that can only be achieved with an intensity and action that goes far beyond the page. Darius Simpson is a writer, educator, performer, and skilled living room dancer from Akron, Ohio. Much like the means of production, he believes poetry belongs to and with the masses. He aims to inspire those chills that make you frown and slightly twist up ya face in approval. Darius believes in the dissolution of the empire and the total liberation of Afrikans and all oppressed people by any means available. Free The People. Free The Land. Free All Political Prisoners. Signed copies of Never Catch Me are available to order from the publisher’s website.

New Book :: Rules of Order

Rules of Order fiction by Jeff Vande Zande published by Montag Press cover art by Andrew Reider book cover image

Rules of Order
Fiction by Jeff Vande Zande
Montag Press, August 2022

Written in a fever dream during the first five weeks of the 2020 Covid lockdown, Jeff Vande Zande’s newest novel, Rules of Order, tells the story of Harvey Crowe, a community activist, who lives in what could be the last remaining high-rise building on the wrecked planet. Cracks in the ground-floor apartments are appearing exponentially. The building’s tensile strength can’t possibly hold against the load it bears. Crowe works tirelessly to inform tenants on the upper floors that the weight of their possessions could bring the entire building down. Working with ACT (the Anti-Collapse Trust), Crowe encounters obstacles to his message, including indifferent tenants, his self-doubt, hostile security guards, and a co-op board, headed by the corrupt Chairman Burke. Even as Crowe makes meaningful alliances with other influential tenants, he can feel the way they are working against a ticking clock. With time running out, Crowe and his militant colleague Dagmar carry out a desperate plan to save what might be the planet’s last habitable space. The book features a number of boardroom scenes driven by Robert’s Rules of Order, most likely influenced by Vande Zande’s time working as a college English teacher and witnessing such nonsense in real life. Cover art features the painting Mine by art teaching colleague Andrew Reider.

New Book :: Talk Smack to a Hurricane

Talk Smack to a Hurricane poetry collection by Lynne Jensen Lampe book cover image

Talk Smack to a Hurricane
Poetry by Lynne Jensen Lampe
IceFloe Press, September 2022

In her first published poetry collection, Lynne Jensen Lampe deals intimately and specifically with the impact of her mother’s mental illness. The poems in Talk Smack to a Hurricane explore their relationship, a bond bruised by absence and shaped by psychiatry. One sequence, eight erasures sourced from a letter the author’s mother wrote the day after giving birth, tells of a new mother happy with life until an inexplicable mental shift sends her from maternity ward to psych ward—for a year, 2400 miles away from her infant and husband. Using vivid imagery, startling sonics, and odd juxtapositions, Lampe explores a tender and volatile mother-daughter relationship that fed love as well as insecurities. Talk Smack to a Hurricane also includes details of 1883 asylum records, lobotomies, even 1960s fashion icons. In examining family heritage, antisemitism, and the quest for identity, the collection also fights both shame and stigma.

New Book :: House of the Nine Devils

House of the Nine Devils fiction by Johannes Urzidil published by Twisted Spoon Press book cover image

House of the Nine Devils: Selected Bohemian Tales
Fiction by Johannes Urzidil
Twisted Spoon Press, November 2022

Collected here and translated into English for the first time
are some of the most renowned Bohemian stories from Prague native Johannes Urzidil, a long-neglected writer whose short fiction herein spans centuries, from the bygone mythical Prague of alchemists to the late Habsburg metropolis where ethnic tensions seethed under a genteel veneer to the terror-filled days of Nazi occupation and a desperate flight to safety. Bearing his trademark wisdom, empathy, and wit, the writing often blurs the border between reportage, memoir, and fiction, such as an encounter with Gavrilo Princip, wasting away in the Terezín prison after his assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, or a WWI soldier trying to evade military police and thus disrupting a night at Café Arco, a favorite haunt of the Prague Circle that included Brod, Kafka, and Werfel, as well as Urzidil, the group’s youngest member and one of the last links to that symbiotic milieu of Prague German-Jewish artists. Translated from the German by David Burnett.

New Book :: The Illuminated Burrow

The Illuminated Burrow fiction by Max Belcher published by Twisted Spoon Press book cover image

The Illuminated Burrow: A Sanatorium Journal
Fiction by Max Belcher
Twisted Spoon Press, November 2022

Max Blecher began writing The Illuminated Burrow in 1937 and continued working on it until his death the following spring, but its full version was only published posthumously in 1971. It was the final “novel” in what can be called a trilogy that includes Adventures in Immediate Irreality and Scarred Hearts, and like those, its imaginative distortion of real experiences is reminiscent of Bruno Schulz as well as the Surrealist autofiction of André Breton and Michel Leiris. Set in the sanatoria where Blecher received treatment for spinal tuberculosis, the ostensible narrator is forced to confront the power and limitations of memory as he attempts to capture the last moments of life as they pass “like ash … through a sieve,” one final effort to reclaim the beauty of days spent straddling the boundary between waking and dreaming, encountering the marvelous both inside and outside the sanatorium’s walls, inside and outside his very body. As his physical powers decline and he becomes permanently bedridden, the narrator’s life migrates to his inner consciousness, an “illuminated burrow” where reality is indistinguishable from fantasy, where the surreal and the mundane seamlessly fuse to enact the fears and fascinations elicited by the vibrant world that is gradually slipping away. Translated from the Romanian by Gabi Reigh with an afterword by Gabriela Glăvan.

New Book :: Tits on the Moon

Tits on the Moon by Dessa book cover image

Tits on the Moon
Poetry by Dessa
Doomtree and Rain Taxi, October 2022

Tits on the Moon features a dozen “stage poems,” many of which Dessa performs at her legendary live shows; they’re funny, weird, and occasionally bittersweet. The collection opens with a short essay on craft (and the importance of having a spare poem around for when the power goes out). Published by Rain Taxi Review of Books in association with Doomtree, Tits on the Moon features a stunning cover pressed with gold foil and structurally embossed, designed by Studio on Fire. “Singer, rapper, and writer Dessa has made a career of bucking genres and defying expectations—her résumé as a musician includes performances at Lollapalooza and Glastonbury, co-compositions for 100-voice choir, performances with the Minnesota Orchestra, and top-200 entries on the Billboard charts.”

New Book :: How to Cut a Woman in Half

How to Cut a Woman in Half poetry by Janis Harrington published by Able Muse Press book cover image

How to Cut a Woman in Half
Poetry by Janis Harrington
Able Muse Press, November 2022

Janis Harrington’s How to Cut a Woman in Half is a testament to resiliency in the throes of mounting family tragedies and trials “beyond human comprehension.” This odyssey from loss toward recovery and hope celebrates the boundless love and support between siblings. Using an adapted sonnet form, Harrington has wrought a taut and spellbinding tale in this finalist for the 2020 Able Muse Book Award. Janis Harrington’s first book, Waiting for the Hurricane, won the Lena M. Shull Book Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Tar River Poetry, Journal of the American Medical Association, North Carolina Literary Review, and Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease. After living in Switzerland for many years, she and her husband returned to Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

New Book :: Murder in Times Square

Murder in Times Square a novel by William Baer published by Many Words Press book cover image

Murder in Times Square
Fiction by William Baer
Many Words Press, February 2023

Murder in Times Square, a Deirdre Mystery, initiates a new series by the author of the popular Jack Colt mystery series: When a young woman in a red designer dress falls twenty-five stories from the roof of Times Square One, the well-known New York fashion model known as Deirdre resolves to unravel the mystery. Capable and determined, Deirdre is relentless in her drive to unravel the mystery and find justice for the victim, while protecting those she loves from looming threats. Baer, who has worked in New York City’s fashion district, showcases not only his depth of knowledge of the fashion industry but also of New York City and its landmarks and history. He weaves an intricate, fast-paced, and spellbinding narrative that takes us through New York City, Atlantic City, the Jersey Shore, and the Caribbean. In Murder in Times Square, Baer once again proves he is a master of suspense and intrigue. Many Words Press is an imprint of Able Muse Press.

New Book :: O

O poetry by Tammy Nguyen published by Ugly Duckling Presse book cover image

O
Poetry by Tammy Nguyen
Ugly Duckling Presse, September 2022

From a dentist’s office in San Francisco to the caves of the Phong Nha Karst, Tammy Nguyen’s O sounds the depths of personal, mineral, and geopolitical histories of Vietnam. In this many-threaded narrative, a wind that carved mountains whistles through a young girl’s teeth. The electric green of a plastic forest glints off of glazed porcelain. The shape of a bowl becomes the mouth of a cave. What emerges is a story without a center: an anti-allegory that finds its meaning in echoes and refracted light, a book stitched together by the O woven through the work as its visual spine and sonic refrain. Tammy Nguyen is a multimedia artist and writer whose work spans painting, drawing, printmaking, and publishing. Intersecting geopolitical realities with fiction, her practice addresses lesser-known histories through a blend of myth and visual narrative. She is the founder of Passenger Pigeon Press, an independent press that joins the work of scientists, journalists, creative writers, and artists to create politically nuanced and cross-disciplinary projects. Ngueyn is Assistant Professor of Art at Wesleyan University.

New Book :: Green Burial

Green Burial poetry by Derek Graf published by Elixir Press book cover image

Green Burial
Poetry by Derek Graf
Elixir Press, January 2023

Winner of the Elixir Press 2021 Antivenom Poetry Award, Judge Kirun Kapur had this to say: “Lush and frantic, Green Burial submerges us in a dazzling, apocalyptic pastoral. Here we find a brother’s funeral and a lover’s last drink on the way to rehab as we travel a dreamscape of birds, trash, down-on-their-luck towns, motels and oil derricks. ‘A body falls / through the galaxies / inside an opal,’ the poet writes. And so, we do. In Graf’s hands the end of the world is both grief-stricken and saturated with an exhilarating, hallucinatory zeal.” Derek Graf was born in Tampa, FL. He completed his MFA at Oklahoma State University and his PhD at the University of Kansas. He currently lives in New York City. Green Burial is his first collection.

New Book :: Writing While Parenting

Writing While Parenting by Ben Berman published by Able Muse Press book cover image

Writing While Parenting
Essays by Ben Berman
Able Muse Press, March 2023

Ben Berman’s Writing While Parenting explores what it means to pursue one’s creative passions while also raising a family, how having children can make us more vulnerable and imaginative as artists. Given how hectic parenting is, it is possible to balance a career and family let alone find two minutes to pee without someone tugging your leg and asking to watch you make bubbles? How do we possibly find the time or energy to be creative? Spanning five years, these essays range from humorous beginnings (the seven-year-old daughter complaining that she just got kicked in the weenie) to more serious moments (finding two swastikas etched into the slide at the playground, a few blocks down the street from the family home). No matter the genesis, each piece examines the overlaps and dissonance between the creative life and the procreative one. This is a witty, inspired, and illuminating collection for the writer and/or the parent.

New Book :: How Much?

How Much New and Selected Poetry by Jerome Sala published by NYQ Books cover image

How Much? New and Selected Poems
Poetry by Jerome Sala
NYQ Books, November 2022

How Much? New and Selected Poems by Jerome Sala offers a panoramic view of a poet whose work has often been a cult-pleasure until now. Spanning Sala’s early years as a punk performance poet in Chicago to his career as a copywriter/Creative Director in New York City, these poems offer satiric insights from the “belly of the beast” of commercial and pop culture. Sala’s books of poetry include cult classics such as I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent, The Trip, Raw Deal, Look Slimmer Instantly, Prom Night (a collaboration with artist Tamara Gonzales), The Cheapskates, and Corporations Are People, Too! His poetry and criticism have appeared widely. Before moving to New York City in the 80s, Sala and his spouse, poet Elaine Equi, did numerous readings together, helping to create Chicago’s lively performance poetry scene. He has a PhD in American Studies from New York University.

New Book :: Girl Flees Circus

Girl Flees Circus a novel by C W Smith published by University of New Mexico Press book cover image

Girl Flees Circus
Fiction by C. W. Smith
University of New Mexico Press, September 2022

Girl Flees Circus, the newest release by C. W. Smith, follows nineteen-year-old aviatrix Katie Burke after she crash lands her biplane on the only street in No Name, New Mexico. Her arrival changes her life and the lives of everyone around her. As Katie and her craft need repair, locals take her in and help her, including a schoolteacher who longs for Katie’s friendship, an interracial couple who own the town’s diner, a handsome young mechanic who lives in a teepee, and a shell-shocked veteran of World War I. As her story unfolds, Katie’s mysteries deepen—revealing shocking secrets, a scandalous past, and a future in true peril. Girl Flees Circus takes flight the moment Katie crashes to earth, promising a journey into the lives of a glamorous, redheaded stranger and the people she will change forever.

New Book :: Myopia

Myopia graphic novel by Richard Dent published by Dynamite Entertainment book cover image

Myopia
Graphic Novel by Richard Dent
Dynamite Entertainment, August 2022

A homeless man is mysteriously abducted. A journal is left on the edge of a subway platform, filled with stories about a world that doesn’t exist. Not far from here a scientist is murdered in cold blood. The only clues are his burned-down lab. A magnetically propelled motorcycle, and a man walking around New York City with the last living falcon on the planet. Imagine a world where your every thought, your every move, is filtered through The Central Lens Network. Now imagine being a twelve-year-old boy and discovering a special pair of lenses that allow you to access this network undetected. This is exactly what happens to Matthew Glen the day his father is murdered then two years later mysteriously appears back in his life. In a style that echoes back to the Dark Age of Comics when graphic novels were coming into an art form of their own, Myopia merges science fiction with noir steampunk into a thrilling alternative reality, where government and big business use entertainment devices to cover up a new authoritarian landscape.

New Book :: Essentially

Essentially essays by Richard Terril published by Holy Cow Press book cover image

Essentially
Essays by Richard Terrill
Holy Cow! Press, October 2022

From Minnesotan author and jazz musician, Richard Terrill’s Essentially is an essay collection that explores what is most essential to him, from the difficult lives of jazz musicians, to trout fishing, to the shifting population and mores of suburbia. “Here’s the thing,” Terrill writes. “There’s always the thing, isn’t there, and most often, not just one?” Terrill asks through this series of wide-ranging, funny, and sometimes gut-punchingly vulnerable essays, What is essential? Maybe trout fishing, the music of Bill Evans, or the whys of dog ownership. Maybe Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story, WeChat messaging app, a musician’s early hearing loss, and spying on the neighbors. Or maybe the coming apocalypse, almost getting lost in the woods, trespassing, town clean-up days, and the reason Miles Davis never listened to his own recordings. At times self-effacing and funny, at times outspoken and provocative, Terrill fixes a clear eye on the contradictions in our present moment. “We’re at that point in a journey where you know where you’re going, but you don’t know where you are,” he writes. “The destination should come anytime now.”

New Book :: My Secret Place

My Secret Place stories by Max Talley published by Main Street Rag Publishing Company book cover image

My Secret Place
Stories by Max Talley
Main Street Rag Publishing Company, July 2022

In My Secret Place, Max Talley deftly mixes humor with pathos with biting social commentary in seventeen short stories, of legendary jazz musicians meeting for a recording session in 1966, of a painter dealing with the art market crash in downtown Manhattan, of a woman’s surreal walk home in Southern California after another day as a house cleaner, about a mid-’70s bar band achieving one-hit-wonder status, and a middle-aged wife dreaming of her imperious Long Island youth. Talley describes musicians and artists, underdogs and eccentrics; secret heroes of their own lives. People driven by eccentric quests that bewilder friends and family. Apartment managers, stoned teenagers, and pop culture collectors, all trying to live in and make sense of a modern world that may have already left them behind. Talley’s first novel, Yesterday We Forget Tomorrow, debuted in 2014, and his crime thriller, Santa Fe Psychosis, was published by Dark Edge Press in spring 2022. He teaches a writing workshop at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and at Santa Fe Workshops. More at www.maxdevoetalley.com.

New Book :: Music Gigs Gone Wrong

Music Gigs Gone Wrong anthology edited by Richard Peabody and Gerry LaFemina published by Paycock Press book cover image

Music Gigs Gone Wrong
Edited by Richard Peabody and Gerry LaFemina
Paycock Press, September 2022

File this one under Bad Luck/Fate/Music Musician: Someone who puts $5000 worth of gear into a $500 car to drive 100 miles to a $50 gig . . . What could possibly go wrong? Edited by Gargoyle Magazine‘s Richard Peabody and writer/musician Gerry LaFemina, Music Gigs Gone Wrong gathers 74 musicians and vocalists to share exactly what can happen, whether the music be punk, rock, folk, jazz, funk, you name it. Contributing writer Michael Gentile, SpliceToday, writes “Music Gigs Gone Wrong is the ultimate ‘I’m with the band’ backstage pass. Here’s a diverse look at a variety of live music disasters told firsthand. Whether it’s a half-empty biker bar or a packed 3,400-seat auditorium— turn on the house lights—you’ll hear about the people, dates and places from big cities to the middle of nowhere. The musicians will sing in your ear about the ordeals they had to go through. Tell me more, I love reading rattling rants and sneering inner thoughts. This grand and wonderful collection appeals to all, especially band members and admirers. Without reservation, swallow Music Gigs Gone Bad hook line and sinker. Go hang out with an enjoyable read; one that draws you in deeper and deeper, guiding visions that beckon you to ride away.”

New Book :: Belly to the Brutal

Belly to the Brutal poetry by Jennifer Givhan published by Wesleyan University Press book cover image

Belly to the Brutal
Poetry by Jennifer Givhan
Wesleyan University Press, August 2022

Belly to the Brutal by Jennifer Givhan sings a corrido of the love between mothers and daughters, confronting the learned complicity with patriarchal violence passed down from generation to generation. Givhan’s poetry edges into the borderlands, touching the realm of chora—humming, screaming, rhythm—transporting the words outside of patriarchal and racist constructs. Drawing from curanderisma and a revived wave of feminist brujería, Givhan creates a healing space for Brown women and mothers. Each poem finds its own form, interweaving beauty and devastation to create a pathway out of the systems that have for too long oppressed women. The poems dwell in the thick language of “motherfear,” “where love grows too / in the shining center of the wound.” This poetry of invocation moves toward a transformation of violence that is ultimately redemptive. Jennifer Givhan (Albuquerque, NM) is an award-winning Mexican-American poet and novelist whose family has ancestral ties to the Indigenous peoples of New Mexico and Texas.

New Book :: The Tree Stand

The Tree Stand stories by Jay Atkinson published by Livingston Press book cover image

The Tree Stand
Stories by Jay Atkinson
Livingston Press, October 2022

Jay Atkinson’s The Tree Stand presents short stories of hardscrabble living and crushing blows, shot through with seams of love and hope. Readers will find the settings convincing and mesmerizing; the characters heartwarming and heartbreaking. Along with the title story, the 300-page collection includes “Bergeron Framing & Remodeling,” “Lowell Boulevard,” “High Pine Acres,” “Java Man,” “Ellie’s Diamonds,” and “Hoot.” Atkinson is a professor of writing at Boston University and has an extensive sports background: he has done winter exercises with the US Marines, run with bulls in Pamplona, and played rugby in Belfast during “The Troubles” of the 1980s. He’s written two novels, a story collection, and five narrative nonfiction books, and received the 2016 Massachusetts Book Award Honors in Nonfiction, among other publications and awards. An excerpt and pre-order information can be found Livingston Press.

New Book :: Good Naked

Good Naked by Joni B Cole published by University of New Mexico Press book cover image

Good Naked: How to Write More, Write Better, and Be Happier
Revised and Expanded Edition by Joni B. Cole
University of New Mexico Press, September 2022

In this revised and updated edition of Good Naked: How to Write More, Write Better, and Be Happier, once again, Joni B. Cole’s humor and wisdom shine through as she debunks long-held misconceptions of how we’re supposed to write, replacing them with advice that works. Feeling overwhelmed? Having trouble getting started or staying motivated? In this edition, Cole offers more stories, strategies, tips on craft, and exercises to serve new and seasoned writers from the first draft to the final edit. Writers will even find help making peace with rejection. Admirers as well as newcomers to Cole’s work appreciate her uniquely cheerful approach, time tested to foster creativity and productivity. Keeping this generous and essential guide close by will provide a jump start to inspiration and a daily reminder of the meaning, humor, and happiness that can be discovered in your own writing life.

New Book :: The Most Excellent Immigrant

The Most Excellent Immigrant short story collection by Mark Budman published by Livingston Press book cover image

The Most Excellent Immigrant
Stories by Mark Budman
Livingston Press, November 2022

“There is a secret that we immigrants never share with the natives: a good immigrant adapts to a new country, while a most excellent immigrant makes the new country better.” The 22 stories in this newest collection by Mark Budman take readers on a ride from magic realism to hardcore realism to real magic. A certified interpreter of dreams and afflictions searches for treasure buried in a set of antique pillows. An interstellar alien in disguise guards the children at play. A prescription cream stops the dream thieves. A mass killer bares his soul, if he has any. The secret of eternal youth is for sale. And twelve potentially treasure-filled pillows float throughout, befuddling and entrancing their successive owners and seekers.

New Book :: Essential Voices

Essential Voices Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora edited by Christopher Nelson published by Green Linden Press book cover image

Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora
Edited by Christopher Nelson
Green Linden Press, September 2021

Published by the non-profit Green Linden Press, The Essential Voices series intends to bridge English-language readers to cultures misunderstood and under- or misrepresented. It has at its heart the ancient idea that poetry can reveal our shared humanity. The Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora anthology features 130 poets and translators from ten countries, including Garous Abdolmalekian, Kaveh Akbar, Kazim Ali, Reza Baraheni, Kaveh Bassiri, Simin Behbahani, Mark S. Burrows, Athena Farrokhzad, Forugh Farrokhzad, Persis Karim, Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, Sara Khalili, Mimi Khalvati, Esmail Khoi, Abbas Kiarostami, Fayre Makeig, Anis Mojgani, Yadollah Royai, Amir Safi, SAID, H.E. Sayeh, Roger Sedarat, Sohrab Sepehri, Ahmad Shamlu, Solmaz Sharif, Niloufar Talebi, Jean Valentine, Stephen Watts, Sholeh Wolpé, Nima Yushij, and many others. Introduced by Kaveh Bassiri.

New Book :: Bright Shade

Bright Shade poetry by Chelsea Harlan published by Copper Canyon Press book cover image

Bright Shade
Poetry by Chelsea Harlan
Copper Canyon Press, October 2022

Winner of the 2022 American Poetry Review Honickman First Book Prize selected by Jericho Brown, Bright Shade is an appreciation of the wild woods, the rolling hills, the Appalachian air, and the little rivers that were the setting of Chelsea Harlan’s upbringing. The poems speak through the liminal space between the body and its relationships to other bodies, and the human relationship with nature—and so climate change is, inevitably, part of this book’s undercurrent of grief. As the author navigates the high highs and the low lows of manic depression, Bright Shade articulates the wonder that accompanies sadness and the sadness that accompanies joy. Chelsea Harlan’s work is humorous, indeed bittersweet (bright / shade), and a little strange in exactly the right way.

New Book :: The Empty Bowl

The Empty Bowl: Poems of the Holocaust and After by Judith H Sherman published by University of Mexico Press book cover image

The Empty Bowl: Poems of the Holocaust and After
Poetry by Judith Sherman
University of New Mexico Press, September 2022

In The Empty Bowl: Poems of the Holocaust and After, Holocaust survivor Judith H. Sherman strives to record trauma through art. Her poems, written largely in the words of a fifteen-year-old survivor, provide historical entry into the Holocaust. Put simply, the poems explore the reality of the events experienced by Sherman in her determination to survive—from first leaving home to illegal border crossings, hiding, capture, imprisonment by the Gestapo, the horrors of the Ravensbrück concentration camp, liberation, and, finally, a full life of joys and challenges that came after, including the unyielding intrusions of the past and hopeful celebration of a compassionate future. Forward by Arthur Kleinman. Afterword by Ilana Gelb.

Books Received September 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 Blog 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

Almost Obscene, Raúl Gómez Jattin, CSU Poetry Center
Ancestry Unfinished, Yasmin Kloth, Kelsay Books
Bright Shade, Chelsea Harlan, Copper Canyon Press
The Empty Bowl, Judith H. Sherman, University of New Mexico Press
Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora, ed. Christopher Nelson, Green Linden Press
If Not These Things, Kenneth Chamlee, Kelsay Books
In Our Now, Valyntina Grenier, Finishing Line Press
Innocence, Micahel Joseph Walsh, CSU Poetry Center
The Gospel of Wildflowers & Weeds, Orlando Ricardo Menes, University of New Mexico Press
The Lost Notebook of Zhao Li, J.R. Solonche, Dos Madres
My Aunt’s Abortion, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, BlazeVOX
My Secret Place, Max Talley, Main Street Rag Publishing
Mouth, Sugar, & Smoke, Eric Tran, Diode Editions
Of the Florids, Shawn Hoo, Diode Editions
A Passable Man, Ralph Culver, Mad Hat Press

Continue reading “Books Received September 2022”

New Book :: Visiting Her in Queens

Visiting Her in Queens Is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet Poetry by Michael Mark published by Rattle Poetry book cover image

Visiting Her in Queens Is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet
Poetry by Michael Mark
Rattle Poetry, August 2022

Subscribers to Rattle poetry magazine not only get four issues of the journal each year but are also treated to four chapbooks, one being the Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner. This fall, subscribers are receiving Michael Mark’s winning entry, Visiting Her in Queens Is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet, “a kind of family photo album for the final years of a life.” As dementia progresses in Michael’s mother, each poem is at once a snapshot, a foreshadowing and a memory. And like memories, each is revealing, accurate, and blurry. Sample poems can be read on the Rattle website. Michael Mark has walked the Himalayas, Wales, Portugal, and Spain with his two children. He’s the author of two collections of stories, Toba and Toba at the Hands of a Thief (Atheneum).

New Book :: Lakȟóta

Lakȟóta : An Indigenous History
The Civilization of the American Indian Series, Volume 281
By Rani-Henrik Andersson and David C. Posthumus
The University of Oklahoma Press, November 2022

Lakhota: An Indigenous History by Rani-Henrik Andersson and David C. Posthumus published by The University of Oklahoma Press book cover image

Lakȟóta : An Indigenous History opens with an origin story, that of White Buffalo Calf Woman (Ptesanwin) and her gift of the sacred pipe to the Lakȟóta people. Drawing on winter counts, oral traditions and histories, and Lakȟóta letters and speeches, the narrative proceeds through such periods and events as early Lakȟóta-European trading, the creation of the Great Sioux Reservation, Christian missionization, the Plains Indian Wars, the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee (1890), the Indian New Deal, and self-determination, as well as recent challenges like the #NoDAPL movement and management of Covid-19 on reservations. This book centers Lakȟóta experience, as when it shifts the focus of the Battle of Little Bighorn from Custer to fifteen-year-old Black Elk, or puts American Horse at the heart of the negotiations with the Crook Commission, or explains the Lakȟóta agenda in negotiating the Fort Laramie Treaty in 1851. The picture that emerges—of continuity and change in Lakȟóta culture from its distant beginnings to issues in our day—is as sweeping and intimate, and as deeply complex, as the lived history it encompasses.

New Book :: Chino and the Dance of the Butterfly

Chino and the Dance of the Butterfly a memoir by Dana Tai Soon Burgess published by University of New Mexico Press book cover image

Chino and the Dance of the Butterfly
Memoir by Dana Tai Soon Burgess
University of New Mexico Press, September 2022

Renowned Korean American modern-dance choreographer Dana Tai Soon Burgess shares his deeply personal hyphenated world and how his multifaceted background drives his prolific art-making in Chino and the Dance of the Butterfly. The memoir traces how his choreographic aesthetic, based on the fluency of dance and the visual arts, was informed by his early years in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This insightful journey delves into an artist’s process that is inspired by the intersection of varying cultural perspectives, stories, and experiences. Candid and intelligent, Burgess gives readers the opportunity to experience up close the passion for art and dance that has informed his life.