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NewPages Blog :: New Books

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

New Book :: In Kind

In Kind: Poems by Maggie Queeney book cover image

In Kind: Poems by Maggie Queeney
University of Iowa Press, May 2023

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.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Gay Giant

Gay Giant by Gabriel Ebensperger book cover image

Gay Giant by Gabriel Ebensperger
Street Noise Books, May 2022

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.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: A Duration

A Duration by Richard Meier book cover image

A Duration by Richard Meier
Wave Books, June 2023

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.”

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Elegiaca Americana

Elegiaca Americana: Poems by Claire Millikin book cover image

Elegiaca Americana: Poems by Claire Millikin
Littoral Books, October 2022

Elegiaca Americana by Claire Millikin is a collection of deeply personal poetry that contains poems of childhood, youth, and adulthood, set mostly in the southern United States. It is a book about reckoning with grief, about the beauty and brutality of life in America, about living in exile in one’s own land. Millikin is the author of eleven collections of poetry. She is the co-editor of Enough! Poems of Resistance and Protest, winner of the 2021 Maine Literary Award. A feminist scholar and art historian, she teaches art history at the University of Maine and for the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Leda

Leda: Poems by J. R. Solonche book cover image

Leda: Poems by J. R. Solonche
Dos Madres Press, May 2023

In Leda, his thirty-first poetry collection, J.R. Solonche once again proves that he has not lost his wit, insight, playfulness, honesty, and empathy. William Carlos Williams once said that “if it ain’t a pleasure, it ain’t a poem.” So once again, pleasure after pleasure in the form of poem after poem in page after page here await the reader. An excerpt from “TREE WORK”:

The tree crew is trimming a large oak.
Take off that one, the boss on the ground says.
What for? It looks all right, says the trimmer in the cherry picker.
I don’t like the looks of it. Take it off, says the boss on the ground.
But the one above it on this side is really bad, says the trimmer in the cherry picker.
No, no, that’s not a problem. Do what I said, says the boss on the ground.
You’re wrong, boss. You’re making a mistake, says the trimmer in the cherry picker.
Okay, okay, take ‘em both off, says the boss on the ground.
You got it, boss, says the trimmer in the cherry picker.
Jesus, why can’t all the world’s problems be solved so easily?

New Book :: Chariot

Chariot by Timothy Donnelly book cover image

Chariot by Timothy Donnelly
Wave Books, May 2023

Timothy Donnelly’s fourth collection of poems, Chariot, ferries the reader toward an endless horizon of questioning that is both philosophical and deeply embodied. “How did we get here?” he asks in his title poem—one of several in conversation with French symbolist Odilon Redon—to which he responds, “Unclear, if it matters; what matters // is we stay—aloft in possible color.” With a similar sensibility to previous collections The Problem of the Many and The Cloud Corporation (winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award), Chariot deepens Donnelly’s inquiry into artistic histories, from Jean Cocteau to The Cocteau Twins, while celebrating the power of poetic imagination to transport us to new zones of meaning and textual bliss. The collection also marks an exciting shift in form for Donnelly, who confines these new poems to twenty lines each, so that to read Chariot is to look through a many-paned, future-facing window, refracting and reflecting, letting all the light in.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: This Far North

This Far North: Poems by Jason Tandon book cover image

This Far North: Poems by Jason Tandon
Black Lawrence Press, March 2023

Jason Tandon’s This Far North practices a poetics of breathtaking quietude. These meditative, imagistic poems evoke a Zen-like “suchness” as Tandon writes about the natural world and the daily tasks with which we busy our lives. Readers looking to slow down, looking for a poetry that is seasonal and sapre, present and attentive, will find much to savor in this collection that makes ordinary moments numinous.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: What is Home, Mum?

What is Home Mum by Sabba Khan book cover image

What is Home, Mum? by Sabba Khan
Street Noise Books, May 2022

In this debut graphic memoir, What is Home, Mum?, Sabba Khan explores race, gender, and class in a compelling personal narrative creating a strong feminist message of self-reflection and empowerment. As a second-generation Pakistani immigrant living in East London, Khan paints a vivid snapshot of contemporary British Asian life and investigates the complex shifts experienced by different generations within immigrant communities. Khan is a visual artist, graphic novelist, and architectural designer. She is an advocate for increasing working-class black and brown representation in the arts and publishing as well as in architecture and construction. Her work is included in the Eisner award-winning graphic anthology Drawing Power.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Between Paradise & Earth: Eve Poems

Between Paradise & Earth: Eve Poems edited by Nomi Stone & Luke Hankins book cover image

Between Paradise & Earth: Eve Poems edited by Nomi Stone & Luke Hankins
Orison Books, April 2023

The recent and contemporary poems about the biblical figure Eve gathered in this anthology refuse given narratives. Here, poets of diverse backgrounds and traditions conjure a heterogeneous concert of Eves to reckon with desire, blame, power, gender, the body, race, politics, religion, knowledge, violence, and time. She becomes a door for dreaming of origins, for considering naming and language, for challenging assumptions and structures of power, and for examining the human condition. In these poems, Eve loves, grieves, rages, and proves a perennially relevant figure in our contemporary mythos.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Deep Are These Distances Between Us

Deep Are These Distances Between Us: Poems by Susan Atefat-Peckham book cover image

Deep Are These Distances Between Us: Poems by Susan Atefat-Peckham
Edited with a Foreward by Darius Atefat-Peckham
CavanKerry Press, May 2023

In Deep Are These Distances Between Us, Susan Atefat-Peckham troubles preconceptions of nationhood and fixed systems of power by bringing her reader into the home and offering twilit glimpses of boundless familial love and intimacy. Atefat-Peckham reaches for a network of care, the foundations of which are laid in these poems’ ability to imagine and access the multiplicities of the human experience. Evoking a rich Iranian-American landscape, these poems ultimately articulate a spirituality that has no spatial or temporal boundaries, one that travels effortlessly between life and death to arrive at a timeless poetics, a treatise on empathy we need now more than ever.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Murmurations

Murmurations by Andrea Rinard book cover image

Murmurations by Andrea Rinard
EastOver Press, June 2023

In Murmurations, Andrea Rinard’s debut collection of twenty-six flash and micro fiction, readers are introduced to an eclectic array of women attempting to claim their own space and to find meaning in the extraordinary mundanity of moments large and small. Stark, spare, sometimes surreal but always illuminated with honesty, these stories are at once amusing and infuriating, comforting and heartbreaking, and always familiar. Rinard explores the art of literary distillation, packing whole worlds into few words. Sometimes ordinary, other times other-worldly, the myriad topics addressed by these small stories leave a big impression.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Iggy Horse

Iggy Horse by Michael Earl Craig book cover image

Iggy Horse by Michael Earl Craig
Wave Books, April 2023

The poems in Michael Earl Craig’s sixth book, Iggy Horse, resonate with an inscrutable logic that feels excitedly otherworldly and unsettlingly familiar, whether he be writing about the cadaver that Hans Holbein the Younger used as a model, Montana as the “Italy of God,” or the milking rituals in Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow. Not merely absurdist, Iggy Horse is a book that articulates the sadness and strangeness of American life with the poetic observations of true satire.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Outer Sunset

Outer Sunset: A Novel by Mark Ernest Pothier book cover image

Outer Sunset: A Novel by Mark Ernest Pothier
University of Iowa Press, May 2023

Jim Finley—a recently retired English teacher living alone on the shifting edge of San Francisco—has been set, unwittingly, on the back porch of life. Trying to harmonize the voices in his head, he sits most days by his stack of “to-do” books until, one day, his daughter comes home with the worst news of her life. Everything changes. As his broken heart reengages, he steps back into a new world. He sees his ex-wife has launched into a larger life than the one they’d shared. He is surprised to find it easier to talk to his son’s immigrant girlfriend, or even the remains of a Russian saint, than to the young man he’s raised. He misconnects with Carol—his first date in decades—a woman he enjoys talking with but doesn’t quite hear. Set in the pre-tech calm before the turn of this century, Outer Sunset is a deeply felt story about the intimate place where long-lasting growth occurs in our lives; how we revise, or live without, our dreams; how to love the flaws of those closest to you and watch a child grow away into someone better than you’d imagined; and how to be shaken by beauty amidst unimaginable loss and remain standing.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: The Optimist Shelters in Place

The Optimist Shelters in Place by Kimberly Ann Priest book cover image

The Optimist Shelters in Place by Kimberly Ann Priest
Small Harbor Publishing, April 2022

While The Optimist Shelters in Place by Kimberly Ann Priest isn’t so brand new, we continue to help spotlight titles that may have been overlooked during the pandemic years, which is no irony intended on this particular title. Priest is the author of several other collections: Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress 2021), finalist for the American Best Book Award, as well as the chapbooks Parrot Flower (Glass 2021), Still Life (PANK 2020), and White Goat Black Sheep (Finishing Line Press 2018). Each poem in this newest book plays on the title, starting with “The Optimist,” which adds a weighted perspective as they reflect on the poet’s time during the shutdown. There are some humorous titles that I’m sure many readers will relate to, such as “The Optimist Takes a Personality Test,” “…Spends a Lot of Time on Pinterest,” “…Tries a New Recipe for BBQ Chicken,” “…Doesn’t Wash Her Hair,” but also some that will draw the reader in with their more allusive considerations, “…Imagines What It Would be Like if Her Daughter Were Actually Dead,” “…Remembers What is Needed to Feel Essential,” and the great closing poem, “…Sleeps Through the Night.” Priest is an associate poetry editor for the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry and Assistant Professor at Michigan State University. Find her work at kimberlyannpriest.com.

New Book :: Windows That Open Inward

Windows That Open Inward: Images of Chile book cover image

Windows That Open Inward: Images of Chile
White Pine Press, April 2023

With poems by Pablo Neruda and photographs by Milton Rogovin, Windows That Open Inward is a mosaic of visual images fused with words that create a compelling image of Chile. Rogovin, a well-known photographer, journeyed to Chile in 1967. At Neruda’s suggestion, he went to the island of Chiloe, in the south. Rogovin’s visit was most fruitful. He came away with some extraordinary photographs, capturing the stark beauty of Chiloe and the unromantic life of its people. His portraits depict individuals and families and the tools and elements of their existence. There is a symbiotic relationship between Rogovin and Neruda, a common interest in and respect for the ordinary. Editor Dennis Maloney has selected a diverse cross-section of Neruda’s poems to complement the photographs. White Pine Press is reissuing this classic to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the press.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: New Life

New Life by Ana Božičević book cover image

New Life by Ana Božičević
Wave Books, April 2023

In her latest book, New Life, Lambda Award–winning poet Ana Božičević writes, “For my birthday I want a cake / revealing the color of my soul.” Never saccharine, these poems are by turns cheeky and heartfelt, grounded and wistful, and above all—surprising. New Life is a book that is Dantesque in its ability to commune with the dead without becoming fixed in the past. Instead, the poems here have a distinct sense of nonlinear time, where each line feels like an ancient bone discovered, only to be reassembled into a chimera of another self. In this way, Božičević continually greets herself as a stranger, reminding us that in some respects every poem is a love poem.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Impossible People

Impossible People: A Completely Average Recovery Story by Julia Wertz book cover image

Impossible People: A Completely Average Recovery Story by Julia Wertz
Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, May 2023

Opening at the culmination of a disastrous trip to Puerto Rico, the first page of the graphic memoir Impossible People finds Julia standing stupefied in the middle of the jungle beside a rental Jeep she’s just crashed. From this moment, the story flashes back to the beginning of her five-year journey towards sobriety that includes group therapy sessions, relapses, an ill-fated relationship, terrible dates, and an unceremonious eviction from her New York City apartment. Far from the typical addiction narrative that follows an upward trajectory from rock bottom to rehab to recovery, Impossible People portrays the lesser-told but more common story: That the road to recovery is not always linear. With unflinching honesty, Wertz details the arduous, frustrating, and hilarious story of trying and failing and trying again.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Seeing the There There

Seeing the There There: Visual Poems by David Alpaugh book cover image

Seeing the There There: Visual Poems by David Alpaugh
Word Galaxy Press, September 2023

In Seeing the There There, David Alpaugh intermixes his poetry with his visual artwork, realized in collaboration with artists and photographers worldwide. The result immerses the reader in surprises of sense and meaning. Alpaugh’s poetic musings and preoccupations range from the irreverent to the meditative and include people, society, culture, nature, and the universe—visible, theoretical, imagined. This is a unique book that engages the reader with written and visual treats at each turn of the page.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Books Received May 2023

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
1/6 Volume 1: Remember This Day Forever, OneSixComics
Abyss and Song, George Sarantaris, World Poetry Books
Awaiting, Charisse Pearlinna Weston, Ugly Duckling Presse
Bar of Rest, Sara Epstein, Kelsay Books
Before Wisdom, Paul Verlaine, World Poetry Books
Between Paradise & Earth: Eve Poems, ed. Nomi Stone & Luke Hankins, Orison Books
Bone Wishing, Tara Flint Taylor, Slapering Hol Press
The Book of Noah, Yoni Hammer-Kossoy, Grayson Books
Deep Are These Distances Between Us, Susan Atefat-Peckham, CavanKerry Press
Don’t Leave Me This Way, Eric Sneathen, Nightboat Books
Dream of Xibalba, Stephanie Adams-Santos, Orison Books
Embarrassed of the (W)hole, Ugly Duckling Presse
Gay Poems for Red States, Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr., University Press of Kentucky
How to Shoot a Tourist (With a Bow & Arrow) In a Hot-Air Balloon, Joseph D. Reich, Sagging Meniscus Press

Continue reading “Books Received May 2023”

New Book :: perennial fashion presence falling

perennial fashion presence falling by Fred Moten book cover image

perennial fashion presence falling by Fred Moten
Wave Books, May 2023

Much like the poems found in The Feel Trio (Letter Machine 2014), which was a National Book Award finalist, and All That Beauty (Letter Machine, 2019), the poems here present Moten’s “shaped prose” on the page and the dizzying brilliance of both polyphonies and paronomasia. Within this collection, the poems hold an innate quantum curiosity about the infinitude of the present and the ways in which one could observe the history of the future. Poems beget poems, overflowing and flowering, urging deeper etymological investigations. In perennial fashion presence falling, Moten approaches the sublime, relishing that intermediary space of microtonal thought.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Imaginary Sonnets

Imaginary Sonnets by Daniel Galef book cover image

Imaginary Sonnets by Daniel Galef
Word Galaxy Press, July 2023

In Daniel Galef’s Imaginary Sonnets, a cast of people and objects from mythology, history, the news, and the quotidian parades through a variety of imaginative scenarios. In dialogues, dramatic monologues, satires, lamentations, eulogies, and execrations, the sonnets adopt perspectives ranging from the familiar to the novel to the twisty and surprising. Characters include not only widely known figures such as Cassandra, Pandora, St. Augustine, Byron, and Doris Day, but also obscure ones such as Henrique of Melacca, Emmett Till’s father, John Taurek, and—more startling—a salmon, a snowflake, and a pair of parallel lines. Imaginary Sonnets entertains and entrances with every turn of the page.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Knockout Beauty and Other Afflicaitons

Knockout Beauty and Other Afflictions: Stories by Mariana Rubin book cover image

Knockout Beauty and Other Afflictions: Stories by Mariana Rubin
Crowsnest Books, January 2023

Insightful, and often wickedly funny, Marina Rubin’s Knockout Beauty and Other Afflictions is a collection of stories of desire, damage, and human meandering. The profound, “Man in a Fedora,” examines the depths and reality of friendship; In “Smorgas,” a woman’s relentless quest to have it all hurls her into a passionate and intricate relationship with two men who happen to be best friends; “Who to Call in Case of Emergency” is a unique take on the #MeToo movement, and “You Can Live with This Nose” is a conversation about plastic surgery overheard at an LGBTQ synagogue. Knockout Beauty and Other Afflictions is filled with drama, irony, humor, and unforgettable characters.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: When Did We Stop Being Cute?

When Did We Stop Being Cute?: Poems by Martin Wiley book cover image

When Did We Stop Being Cute?: Poems by Martin Wiley
CavanKerry Press, April 2023

Martin Wiley grew up confronting and embracing a world as mixed and confused as he was, surrounded by beautiful words one minute and screamed at with hate the next. Set to a soundtrack of ’80s hits, When Did I Stop Being Cute?, a novel in poetic form, tells the story of a young man dealing with the challenges of being mixed-race, growing up, facing the police, and confronting himself. It is a time of change, for himself and the world around him, as he seeks to “remember / just when I stopped / being cute.” A longtime activist, spoken-word artist, and slam poet, Wiley earned his MFA from Rutgers University-Camden, where he was a Rutgers University Fellow. He is now the Adult Learning Lead Instructor for Project HOME, a nonprofit focused on ending homelessness and poverty within Philadelphia, and an adjunct professor at Rosemont College.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Wolf Trees

Wolf Trees: Poems by Katie Hartsock book cover image

Wolf Trees: Poems by Katie Hartsock
Able Muse Press, September 2023

The forestry term wolf tree for a large specimen with spreading branches—“prominent and self-isolating,” just as “[b]eing a good diabetic is lonely work”—is a central conceit in Katie Hartsock’s second full-length collection, Wolf Trees. Hartsock muses on classical and modern figures (such as Hermes, Thetis, John the Baptist, Wyatt Earp, Dervla Murphy, Jane Jacobs), family, motherhood, the wolf and coywolf, glucose tablets, and the lot of the diabetic “in a body that would have perished years / ago” if not for medical advances. Through loss and hope, trials and triumphs, and the challenges and blessings of life and living, Katie Hartsock’s Wolf Trees uplifts the spirit.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Awaiting

Awaiting by Charisse Pearlina Weston book cover image

Awaiting by Charisse Pearlina Weston
Ugly Duckling Presse, March 2023

Part autobiography, part play, part fictive dream as long poem, Awaiting begins by detaching phrases and motifs from two seemingly disparate plays (Lorraine Hansberry’s What Use are Flowers? and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot) and entangling them into centos or poetic remixes. Through the incorporation of these entanglements, original poetry, and a surreal landscape, what develops is a new work blurring the sightlines of narrative space by way of the spiral, by way of the fragment and the self-reflective slip of the fold into and out of itself.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Brother Poem

Brother Poem by Will Harris book cover image

Brother Poem by Will Harris
Wesleyan University Press, March 2023

At the heart of Brother Poem is a sequence addressed to a fictional brother. Through these fragments, Will Harris attempts to reckon with the past while mourning what never existed. The text moves, cloud-like, through states of consciousness, beings and geographies, to create a moving portrait of contemporary anxieties around language and the need to communicate. With pronominal shifts, broken dialogisms, and obsessive feedback loops, it reflects on the fictions we tell ourselves, and in our attempts to live up to the demands of others.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Dream of Xibalba

Dream of Xibalba: A Poem by Stephanie Adams-Santos book cover image

Dream of Xibalba: A Poem by Stephanie Adams-Santos
Orison Books, May 2023

Dream of Xibalba, Stephanie Adams-Santos’s incantatory long poem, draws the reader into a dreamworld where the barrier between life and death grows porous, populated by ancestors and spirits. The influence of such poets as Cecilia Vicuña, Federico García Lorca, and Yvan Goll is evident here, yet Adams-Santos’s voice and vision are entirely her own. Dream of Xibalba is a unique, epic work of cultural and spiritual significance.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Highway 28 West

Highway 28 West by Joe Taylor book cover image

Highway 28 West by Joe Taylor
Sagging Meniscus Press, May 2023

Preacher is not a preacher, though death’s vicissitudes clamor around him in a disturbingly ecclesiastic manner. When he finds a pit bull puppy by the side of the road and gets a job at a boxing manufacturer, he declares his luck changed. One small-town cop has doubts: “It ain’t your luck needs changing, but the folks you meet.” And so it stands, as the sun and moon revolve in their tango—or is it a waltz?—and whisper to one another. Forever Director of Livingston Press, Joe Taylor’s seventh novel, with previous works revealing his mastery in a variety of forms, from comic novels-in-verse to a multiple view-point murder mystery/love story and more. Readers are always in for something new and different when reading Taylor’s work.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: The Loved Ones

The Loved Ones: Essays to Bury the Dead by Madison Davis book cover image

The Loved Ones: Essays to Bury the Dead by Madison Davis
Dzanc Books, June 2023

The Loved Ones: Essays to Bury the Dead by Madison Davis, Winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize, explores the deaths of four family members across three generations: an inexplicable double murder, a fatal car accident, a long illness, and a conscripted solider killed in action. Piece by piece, each essay explores the death a loved one in a collage of vignettes: the loss, the aftermath, the funerals, and the rituals used to say goodbye to the body. As the investigation deepens, Davis lines up other forms of death—capital punishment and murder; medically-assisted suicide and “natural” death from disease; military conscription and “freak accident”—to see what comes to the surface.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Books :: Containing History

Containing History: How Cold War History Explains US-Russia Relations by Stephen P. Friot book cover image

Containing History: How Cold War History Explains US-Russia Relations by Stephen P. Friot
The University of Oklahoma Press, June 2023

Cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural in its scope, Containing History employs the tools and insights of history, political science, and international relations to explain how twenty-first-century public attitudes in Russia are the product of a thousand years of history, including searing experiences in the twentieth century that have no counterparts in U.S. history. At the same time, Friot explores how—in ways incomprehensible to Russians—U.S. politics are driven by American society’s ethnic and religious diversity and by the robust political competition that often, for better or worse, puts international issues to work in the service of domestic political gain. Looking at history, culture, and politics in both the United States and Russia, Friot shows how the forty-five years of the Cold War and the seventy years of the Soviet era have shaped both the Russia we know in the twenty-first century and American attitudes toward Russia—in ways that drive social and political behavior, with profound consequences for the post–Cold War world.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Rise above the River

Rise Above the River: Poems by Kelly Rowe book cover image

Rise above the River: Poems by Kelly Rowe
Able Muse Press, May 2023

In Kelly Rowe’s Rise above the River, we find a sister powerless to redress her brother’s fall from grace after the trauma of his childhood sexual abuse by a female authority figure. Rise above the River interrogates in a quest for answer, meaning, reason, justice, and mercy—along the way, exploring the conceit of the fallen angel with ekphrases on artwork such as Alexandre Cabanel’s L’ange déchu and Hugo Simberg’s The Wounded Angel. This powerful and emotionally charged collection is the winner of the 2021 Able Muse Book Award.

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New Book :: The Boxer of Quirinal

The Boxer of Quirnial: Poems by John Barr book cover image

The Boxer of Quirnial: Poems by John Barr
Red Hen Press, June 2023

All animals struggle to survive. In John Barr’s The Boxer of Quirinal poems, the success of the heron hunting, the albatross breeding, and the inchworm spinning give proof of life. But for us, that struggle includes the eternal presence of war. Does the fall of Rome, the Battle of Shiloh, the Normandy Landings – and today’s wars – give proof of life or only of the struggle? Poet John Barr grew up in a rural township outside Chicago. An honors graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School, he served on Navy destroyers for five years, including three tours to Vietnam. His poems have appeared in the New York Times, Poetry, and Flaunt Magazine among many periodicals and anthologies. He was president of the Poetry Foundation and publisher of Poetry magazine for its first decade. The Boxer of Quirinal is his tenth to be published over the past thirty years.

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New Book :: A Pros and Cons List for Strong Feelings

A Pros and Cons List for Strong Feelings: A Graphic Memoir by Will Betke-Brunswick book cover image

A Pros and Cons List for Strong Feelings: A Graphic Memoir by Will Betke-Brunswick
Tin House Books, November 2022

During Will Betke-Brunswick’s sophomore year of college, their beloved mother, Elizabeth, is diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. They only have ten more months together, which Will documents in evocative two-color illustrations. But as we follow Will and their mom through chemo and hospital visits, their time together is buoyed by laughter, jigsaw puzzles, modern art, and vegan BLTs. In a delightful twist, Will portrays their family as penguins, and their friends are cast as a menagerie of birds. In between therapy and bedside chats, they navigate uniquely human challenges, as Will prepares for math exams, comes out as genderqueer, and negotiates familial tension.

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New Book :: The Third Renunciation

The Third Renunciation: Poems by Matthew E. Henry book cover image

The Third Renunciation: Poems by Matthew E. Henry
NYQ Books, June 2023

Heeding St. John Cassian’s call, the poems in Matthew E. Henry’s The Third Renunciation reject classic depictions of divinity and religious dogma to see God more fully. Each begins with a proposition (e.g. “Say God is the music we strain to hear,” “Say prayer is just a fire alarm,” “Say faith can become like lackluster sex,” “Say unarmed Black men herald His return”), or an explanation for a Biblical story (e.g. “maybe Jesus was having an off day,” “Say Jonah was right and grace is wasted,” “Say angels aren’t always trustworthy.”). Henry’s poetry offers answers to the myriad whys at the center of faith and doubt, gives voice to the notion that both singing and screaming are authentic responses to suffering, and argues that “grace is a Twinkie or a cockroach— / something that never goes bad, can survive / anything the cold world throws… / despite all our best efforts to quell it.”

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New Book :: Girl Country

Girl Country: Stories by Jacqueline Vogtman book cover image

Girl Country: Stories by Jacqueline Vogtman
Dzanc Books, May 2023

Girl Country: Stories by Jacqueline Vogtman is Winner of the Dzanc Shorty Story Collection Prize with stories that feature a near-future farmer battling environmental crises who takes in a mysterious girl he finds on the roadside. A bus driver navigates through treacherous weather and memories of her tragic past as she races to save children from the end of the world. A woman keeps giving birth to children from different time periods. And a woman struggles with her young daughter mysteriously transforming into something wild and unruly, confronting themes of motherhood and family. Girl Country ranges from medieval Belgium to the near future of the American Midwest, populated by mothers and monsters, mermaids and milkmaids, nuns and bus drivers—women in every walk of life, but particularly working-class women, navigating the intersection of the mundane and the magical.

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New Book :: All We Could Have Been and More

All We Could Have Been and More: Stories by Joshua Shaw book cover image

All We Could Have Been and More: Stories by Joshua Shaw
Livingston Press, July 2023

Tartt First Fiction Award winner, All We Could Have Been and More by Joshua Shaw features stories about zombie ant fungus and self-conscious crash test dummies, which surely conveys to readers the dark humor focus of this collection. The author comments, “A lot of the stuff I’m publishing these days in philosophy involves defenses of pessimism and misanthropy. I credit the last few elections for inspiring this new research line.”

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New Book :: The Auburn Conference

The Auburn Conference: A Novel by Tom Piazza book cover image

The Auburn Conference: A Novel by Tom Piazza
University of Iowa Press, May 2023

In The Auburn Conference: A Novel by Tom Piazza, it is 1883, and America is at a crossroads. At a tiny college in Upstate New York, an idealistic young professor has managed to convince Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Confederate memoirist Forrest Taylor, and romance novelist Lucy Comstock to participate in the first (and last) Auburn Writers’ Conference for a public discussion about the future of the nation. By turns brilliantly comic and startlingly prescient, The Auburn Conference vibrates with questions as alive and urgent today as they were in 1883—the chronic American conundrums of race, class, and gender, and the fate of the democratic ideal.

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New Book :: The Lioness of Boston

The Lioness of Boston: A Novel by Emily Franklin book cover image

The Lioness of Boston: A Novel by Emily Franklin
David R. Godine Publisher, April 2023

By the time Isabella Stewart Gardner opened her Italian palazzo-style home as a museum in 1903 to showcase her collection of old masters, antiques, and objects d’art, she was already well-known for scandalizing Boston’s polite society. But when Isabella first arrived in Boston in 1861, she was twenty years old, newly married to a wealthy trader, and unsure of herself. Puzzled by the frosty reception she received from stuffy bluebloods, she strived to fit in. After two devastating tragedies and rejection from upper-society, Isabella discovered her spirit and cast off expectations. Freed by travel, Isabella explores the world of art, ideas, and letters, meeting such kindred spirits as Henry James and Oscar Wilde. From London and Paris to Egypt and Asia, she develops a keen eye for paintings and objects, and meets feminists ready to transform nineteenth century thinking in the twentieth century. Isabella becomes an eccentric trailblazer, painted by John Singer Sargent in a portrait of daring décolletage, and fond of such stunts as walking a pair of lions in the Boston Public Garden.

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New Book :: Sprawl

Sprawl by Andrew Collard book cover image

Sprawl: Poems by Andrew Collard
Ohio University Press, March 2023

Sprawl by Andrew Collard is a reconstruction of the constantly shifting landscape of metropolitan Detroit, which extends over six counties and is home to over four million people, from the perspective of a single parent raising a young child amid financial precarity. Part memoir, part invention, the book is Andrew Collard’s attempt to reconcile the tenderness and sense of purpose found in the parent-child relationship with ongoing societal crises in the empire of the automobile. Here, a mansion may contrast with a burned-out home just up the street. How does one construct a sense of place in such a landscape, where once-familiar neighborhoods turn to strip malls or empty lots and the relationships that root us dissolve? Sprawl suggests that there is solace in recognizing that when we ask this question, we are never alone in asking.

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New Book :: Poppy and Mary Ellen Deliver the Goods

Poppy and Mary Ellen Deliver the Goods book cover image

Poppy and Mary Ellen Deliver the Goods by Roz Weedman and Susan Todd
Chapter Illustrations by Lane Trabalka
Mission Point Press, April 2023

In Book One of the Frankenmuth Murder Mysteries, the Stanley family gathers in the number one tourist town in Michigan—Frankenmuth. Known for its historically accurate, Bavarian-style architecture and famous chicken dinners, the festive, fun town experiences the murder of the Stanley family matriarch followed by the murder of another resident. The solution, though, isn’t obvious since there are plenty of suspects to consider: nieces, nephews, a disgruntled caterer, a carriage driver. Maybe it was someone else entirely or multiple killers with completely different motives! The local police step in to investigate under the spotlight of an unrelenting press. How long will it be before tourists are enjoying their chicken dinners again without looking over their shoulders? Meanwhile, local private eyes Mary Ellen and Poppy—best known for finding lost dogs, catching errant husbands, and playing a mean game of mah-jongg—find themselves in a daunting role. Hired by an out-of-state lawyer to find a missing heir, the local police welcome their inside information to help bring a killer (or killers?) to justice. Even Poppy’s Boston terrier, Babycakes, has a role in helping solve the case.

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New Book :: Gauntlet in the Gulf

Gauntlet in the Gulf edited by Claude Clayton Smith book cover image

Gauntlet in the Gulf: The 1925 Marine Log and Mexican Prison Journal of William F. Lorenz, MD edited by Claude Clayton Smith
Shanti Arts Publishing, March 2023

Lorenz Hall at the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison, Wisconsin, is named for William F. Lorenz, the man who first observed, in 1916, that chemistry could treat the mentally ill. Professor of neuropsychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Lorenz developed the fledgling Psychiatry Department while engaged in his ground-breaking research. In 1925, seeking a much-needed respite, he signed on with the Ruth, a fishing smack out of Pensacola, Florida, for a working vacation in the Gulf of Mexico. The Ruth struck a reef, the ship was abandoned, and the crew was rescued from perilous seas by a Mexican Navy vessel, only to be imprisoned as spies, smugglers, gun-runners, and for fishing in illegal waters. Dr. Lorenz’s diary details their ordeal.

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New Book :: Outside the Frame

Outside the Frame Catherine Pritchard Childress book cover image

Outside the Frame Catherine Pritchard Childress
EastOver Press, April 2023

The poetry in Outside the Frame by Catherine Pritchard Childress gives full-throated voice to those who are historically silenced, while bearing witness to a complex culture that both perpetuates that silence and cries out to be heard and to be seen. Seeking to subvert tradition in the pursuit of truth, these poems move seamlessly between worlds—the biblical and the contemporary, the mythical and the uncomfortably real. The speakers here reflect not the poet, but any woman, all women, from Lot’s wife to housewife—unnamed, unheard, yet unrelenting.

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New Book :: Wild Liar

Wild Liar by Deborah Pope book cover image

Wild Liar by Deborah Pope
Carnegie Mellon University Press, February 2023

The poems of Deborah Pope’s Wild Liar emerge from a fundamental engagement with the nature of memory—its shifting constructions and needs, its equilibriums and disquiets. Refracted through language rich with Pope’s distinctive lyricism and acute eye for detail, the poems plumb the experience of the passing of parents, the departure of children, the weathers of a long marriage, and an acknowledgment of mortality. Whether writing with sly humor or emotional directness, her voice compels attention—it is clear-eyed and assessing, poignant and wise.

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New Book :: In Deep

In Deep by Judith Sanders book cover image

In Deep by Judith Sanders
Kelsay Books, July 2022

In Deep, Judith Sanders’ debut poetry collection shifts deftly among registers of language, from satirical to heartfelt to laugh-out-loud funny. Many of her poems delight in flights of imagination. Her observations are accurate, musical, and precise. Her politics are expressed slyly, elliptically; there’s a feminist strain, too. Her voice is unpretentiously real, whether probing everyday experiences or ultimate cosmic paradoxes. Wherever these wide-ranging poems travel, they plunge in deep.

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New Book :: Where Sunday Used to Be

Where Sunday Used to Be by Daniel Klawitter book cover image

Where Sunday Used to Be by Daniel Klawitter
Wipf and Stock Publishers, November 2022

The poems in Daniel Klawitter’s Where Sunday Used to Be display a masterful and contemporary twist on a beloved poetic tradition that carefully employs the tools of meter, rhyme, and rhythm. Readers will find these poems to be both accessible and thought-provoking. It is rare to encounter a poet capable of such range in tone and subject matter: from the humorous to the tragic, the divine to the devilish, the author expertly blurs the lines between our notions of the sacred and the secular.

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New Book :: Sacred Spells

Sacred Spells: Collected Works by Assotto Saint book cover image

Sacred Spells: Collected Works by Assotto Saint
Nightboat Books, August 2023

In this timely collection of poetry, plays, fiction, and performance texts, Assotto Saint draws upon music and incantation, his Haitian heritage, and a politics of liberation to weaves together a tapestry of literature that celebrates life in the face of death. Influential to contemporary writers such as Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs, and Melvin Dixon, Sacred Spells is Saint’s crucial legacy–five hundred incandescent pages of painful, lyric writing that exemplifies the visceral, spiritual dimensions of an artistic practice that’s integral to Black and trans activist movements in the United States, both historic and present.

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New Book :: Approximate Body

Approximate Body by Danielle Pieratti book cover image

Approximate Body by Danielle Pieratti
Carnegie Mellon University Press, February 2023

The poetry in Danielle Pieratti’s Approximate Body reflects upon the dramas of domestic life with equal parts cynicism, nostalgia, and grief. Richly narrative, fragmented, and featuring a variety of landscapes suburban, tropical, and ancient, these poems affirm an intricate mix of guilt and longing, proclaiming that “if I’ve loved / anything it has not been / enough.”

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New Book :: Dear Outsiders

Dear Outsiders by Jenny Sadre-Orafai book cover image

Dear Outsiders by Jenny Sadre-Orafai
University of Akron Press, March 2023

The prose poems in Dear Outsiders by Jenny Sadre-Orafai explore how we are part of and stranger to our environments and to our families and how identities form by where and who we come from. Told through two siblings’ perspectives of the loss of their parents, the book is a map of isolation, longing, and what it means to be deserted and alive. Sadre-Orafai is an Iranian Mexican American poet and writer. She is the co-author of Book of Levitations and the author of Malak and Paper, Cotton, Leather. Her poetry and prose have appeared in numerous literary magazines. She co-founded Josephine Quarterly and teaches creative writing at Kennesaw State University.

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New Book :: String

String by Matthew Thorburn book cover image

String by Matthew Thorburn
Louisiana State University Press, March 2023

A book-length sequence of poems, Matthew Thorburn’s String tells the story of a teenage boy’s experiences in a time of war and its aftermath. He loses his family and friends, his home and the life he knew, but survives to tell his story. Written in the boy’s fractured, echoing voice—in lines that are frequently enjambed and use almost no punctuation—String embodies his trauma and confusion in a poetic sequence that is part lullaby, part nightmare, but always a music that is uniquely his. Thorburn is the author of eight poetry collections, including The Grace of Distance, a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, and the book-length poem Dear Almost, which won the Lascaux Prize.

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New Book :: The EastOver Anthology of Rural Stories

The EastOver Anthology of Rural Stories, 2023: Writers of Color edited by Keith Pilapil Lesmeister book cover image

The EastOver Anthology of Rural Stories, 2023: Writers of Color edited by Keith Pilapil Lesmeister
EastOver Press, March 2023

The EastOver Anthology of Rural Stories, 2023: Writers of Color is a collection of short fiction from deep in the heart of America’s rural spaces. In this inaugural volume’s introduction, series editor Keith Pilapil Lesmeister points out that “people living in communities like mine aren’t simply thinking about the urban-rural divide, we’re living it.” He adds, “Pundits, political pollsters, politicians themselves all want to know…what’s going on out here in the sticks? What’s important to rural folks? What do we have foremost on our minds?”

The writers in this collection—all people of color—offer diverse answers. Their unique takes will, in many cases, startle readers who cling to stereotypical views of folks who live in rural America: Jinwoo Chong, Risë Kevalshar Collins, Jamie Figueroa, Libby Flores, Jane Hammons, Mark L. Keats, Laura Lee Lucas, Jennifer Morales, Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera, Jeanette Weaskus, and Erika T. Wurth.