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

New Book :: Embarrassed of the (W)Hole

Embarrassed of the (W)Hole by Panoply Performance Laboratory book cover image

Embarrassed of the (W)Hole by Panoply Performance Laboratory
Ugly Duckling Presse, March 2023

Embarrassed of the (W)Hole is an operating manual for an opera-of-operations. Oriented around formal and modal resistances to “wholism” as complex foil and the proposition to embarrass, the book includes scores-for-scores, theoretical frames, process notes, and a User Survey meant to be “operated” and “used” (specifically, rigorously) to stage and situate pertinent contexts, conditions, and embodiments of and for projected future operations.

Panoply Performance Laboratory is a thinktank, organizational entity, and flexible performance collective. Founded in 2006 by Esther Neff and co-directed with Brian McCorkle through 2018, PPL has also existed as a physical lab site (“institution as a verb”) in Brooklyn, hosting projects and performances by artists and thinkers from around the world.

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 :: HIGHER

HIGHER by Robert Stewart book cover image

HIGHER by Robert Stewart
Press Americana, April 2023

Winner of the 2022 Prize Americana, the poems in HIGHER by Robert Stewart are at once direct and resonant, celebratory of the natural world and of spiritual aspirations. Rising from a working-class, blue-collar sensibility, these pieces range from a short work about using a sledgehammer on a street crew to a multi-part longer work about animals in changing nature. These lyric poems include subtle metrics and enough narrative to drive events, often with elegiac references to a military vet friend, a brother, a Sicilian grandmother, and literary heroes. Their focus ultimately returns to hope and care for children, often with no small amount of humor.

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 :: Earth, Little Earth

Tierra, Tierrita / Earth, Little Earth by Jorgue Tetl Argueta book cover image

Tierra, Tierrita / Earth, Little Earth by Jorgue Tetl Argueta
Illustrations by Felipe Ugalde Alcantara
Piñata Books, May 2023

“My name is Earth / but people call me Little Earth.” In the fourth installment of their award-winning Madre Tierra / Mother Earth series of trilingual picture books about the natural world, Jorge Argueta and Felipe Ugalde Alcántara collaborate again to introduce Mother Earth, who is “full of all the colors / and all the flavors.” A Junior Library Guild selection, this book about Mother Earth reflects Argueta’s indigenous roots and his appreciation for the natural world. Containing the English and Spanish text on each page, the entire poem appears at the end in Nahuat, the language of Argueta’s Pipil-Nahua ancestors. This is an excellent choice to encourage children to write their own poems about nature and to begin conversations about the interconnected web of life.

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 :: How to Shoot a Tourist

How to Shoot a Tourist by Joseph D. Reich book cover image

How to Shoot a Tourist (With a Bow & Arrow) In a Hot-Air Balloon by Joseph D. Reich
Sagging Meniscus Press, April 2023

Joseph D. Reich’s 300-page, lyrical epic poem How to Shoot a Tourist (With a Bow & Arrow) in a Hot-Air Balloon contains surreal, confessional, stream-of-consciousness stanzas that run up and down the page in a desperate, fantastical rage. They are hypnotically interrupted by a recurring refrain from which they emerge and depart on wildly varied journeys: probing the nature, origins and psychological derivation of surrealism. Reich looks at persistent pain within and damage and devastation without in richly “ridiculous” images that are not only surreal but satirical and questioning, while also the best answer to the idiosyncratic machinations of authority. How to Shoot a Tourist is an exhaustive mythic encyclopedia of America and of Reich’s teeming inner world.

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 Connecticut Yankee Goes to Washington

A Connecticut Yankee Goes to Washington: George P. McLean, Birdman of the Senate by Will McLean Greeley book cover image

A Connecticut Yankee Goes to Washington: George P. McLean, Birdman of the Senate by Will McLean Greeley
Rochester Institute of Technology Press, March 2023

A Connecticut Yankee Goes to Washington: George P. McLean, Birdman of the Senate by Will McLean Greeley recounts Senator George P. McLean’s crowning achievement: overseeing passage of one of the country’s first and most important wildlife conservation laws, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. The MBTA, which is still in effect today, has saved billions of birds from senseless killing and likely prevented the extinction of entire bird species. A Connecticut Yankee Goes to Washington puts McLean’s victory for birds in the context of his distinguished forty-five-year career marked by many acts of reform during a time of widespread corruption and political instability. Author Will McLean Greeley traces McLean’s rise from obscurity as a Connecticut farm boy to national prominence when he advised five US presidents and helped lead change and shape events as a US senator from 1911 to 1929.

Will McLean Greeley grew up in western Michigan with a passion for American history, politics, and birds. He earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Michigan and then a master’s degree from Michigan in archives administration. After retiring from a thirty-five-year career in government and corporate market research, he embarked upon a three-year research and writing journey to learn about his great-great-uncle George P. McLean and his legacy.

New Book :: Gay Poems for Red States

Gay Poems for Red States by Willie Edward Taylor Carver book cover image

Gay Poems for Red States by Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr.
The University Press of Kentucky, June 2023

In Gay Poems for Red States, Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr. counters the injustice of a persistent anti-LGBTQ+ movement by asserting that a life full of beauty and pride is possible for everyone. More than a collection of poetry, Carver’s earnest and heartfelt verses are for those wishing to discover and understand the vastness of Appalachia, and for the LGBTQ+ Appalachians who long for a future—for a home—in an often unwelcoming place.

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 :: In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind

In the Museum of My Daughter's Mind by Marjorie Maddox and Anna Lee Hafer book cover image

In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind by Marjorie Maddox and Anna Lee Hafer
Shanti Arts, May 2023

In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind is a collaboration of poetry by Marjorie Maddox and art by her daughter Anna Lee Hafer, inspirited by a rainy-day excursion when Maddox and Hafer visit the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. As never before, they realized how their passions for art and poetry intersect. With this exhibit and Hafer’s own surreal paintings as inspiring backdrop, they exchanged their responses to joy and trauma more deeply—artist to artist, mother to daughter. These connections between poet and visual artist constitute the core of this ekphrastic collection. In addition, Maddox includes nine poems based on work she saw that day by Antar Mikosz, Greg Mort, Margaret Munz-Losch, Ingo Swann, and Christian Twamley, as well as several later collaborations with Karen Elias.

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 :: Spending Time With Dad

Mis días con Papá / Spending Time With Dad by Elías David book cover image

Mis días con Papá / Spending Time With Dad by Elías David
Illustrations by Claudia Delgadillo
Piñata Books, May 2023

Mis días con Papá / Spending Time With Dad follows a boy and his stay-at-home dad, who takes care of him while his mom goes to work at the port, “where huge cargo ships come and go every day.” She oversees the containers that go around the world! In this brightly illustrated bilingual picture book, young children will relate to the family and its daily routines while immigrants will see themselves as they adjust to life far away from relatives. And children will see that the roles of men and women are fluid; dads can be loving fathers in charge of their kids’ well-being and moms can go to the office every day—or vice versa.

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 :: 2.4.18

2.14.18 by Dan Kaplan book cover image

2.14.18 by Dan Kaplan
Spuyten Duyvil Press, April 2023

Dan Kaplan’s 2.4.18 is an erasure of the February 4, 2018 issue of The New York Times, a book that wades through distorted fact, eroded context, and what may (not) be newsworthy. Kaplan is the editor of Burnside Review Press, and 2.4.18 is his third book of poetry.

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 :: Proximal Morocco

Proximal Morocco by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine book cover image

Proximal Morocco by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine
Ugly Duckling Presse, March 2023

Proximal Morocco is a collection of poems by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine originally published in 1975. It was written in fits and starts during a span of ten years (1964-1974), during the fever pitch of his political exile from his homeland of Morocco which he fled, partly for fear of political persecution and partly to pursue a literary career in Paris, France. Laced with the same politically-inflected Surrealistic fervor as Aimé Césaire, the book is at once a powerful outcry to fellow artists for international solidarity of the colonized and outcast and a documentation of the pain and struggle of exile.

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 :: Bone Wishing

Bone Wishing by Tara Flint Taylor book cover image

Bone Wishing by Tara Flint Taylor
Slapering Hol Press, Aprl 2023

Bone Wishing by Tara Flint Taylor is the 2022 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Contest Winner. This contest is open until mid-June to all writers (who are not current students at HVWC) who have not yet published (including self-published) a collection of poems in book or chapbook form.

Taylor’s work has appeared in Poet Lore, River Styx, Poetry Quarterly, North American Review, Nimrod, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Inkwell Journal, and elsewhere. Her awards include second place in the 2011 River Styx International Poetry Contest as well as finalist in the 2011 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and 2018 James Hearst Poetry Prize. She is a graduate of Le Moyne College where she earned her BA, and of North Carolina State University, where she earned her MFA. She is the recipient of the John LaHey Award in Writing, the Newhouse Writing Award, and the Brenda Smart Poetry Prize. Originally from Syracuse, New York, she lives in Portland, Oregon with her spouse, painter Joshua Flint (chapbook cover artist).

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 :: No One is on the Line

No One Is on the Line: The Poetry of Mohsen Mohamed book cover image

No One Is on the Line: The Poetry of Mohsen Mohamed
Translated from the Arabic by Sherine Elbanhawy
Laertes Press, September 2023

These poems in No One is on the Line arose from the depths of incarceration, from the throat and intellect of Egyptian poetry Mohsen Mohamed who had been sentenced to five years of harsh imprisonment after a campus protest. The writing went on to win Egypt’s two most significant literary prizes. These poems speak of dislocation and the wrenching of the heart, of a found and forged community, of the bare lineaments of humanity disclosed in the throes of suffering. They are works of provocative witness and searching tenderness.

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 :: Prayersrheds

Prayershreds: Poems by Bruce Beasley book cover image

Prayershreds: Poems by Bruce Beasley
Orison Books, May 2023

Suppose the shreds of our prayers and of our faiths could themselves become a radical new form of devotion. Bruce Beasley confronts the apocalyptic zeitgeist of our time (political turmoil, societal division and isolation, spiritual despair, environmental catastrophe) and the crisis of faith in the human future. These poems make of the vocabulary of doubt a strange kind of sermon, summoning into chorus Heraclitus, Zeno, the Buddha, Roget’s Thesaurus, ancient prayers and hymns and scriptures, and an AI chatbot. In these fractured and ecstatic psalms, Beasley makes his ruptured way toward a faith that relies not on dogmas and creeds, but on a broken utterance for a torn and living faith.

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 :: Stone Breaker

Stone Breaker: The Poet James Percival and the Beginning of Geology in New England by Kathleen L. Housely book cover image

Stone Breaker: The Poet James Percival and the Beginning of Geology in New England by Kathleen L. Housely
Wesleyan University Press, January 2023

Stone Breaker by Kathleen L. Housely is an in-depth, accessible biography of a true American polymath, James Gates Percival. A poet, linguist, and unstable savant, Percival was also a brilliant geologist who walked thousands of miles crisscrossing first Connecticut and then Wisconsin to lay the foundation for the work of generations of Earth scientists. Exploring the confluences of literature, art, and geology, Housley reveals how one of most famous poets of the 1820s became a renowned geologist with his groundbreaking 1843 work Report on the Geology of the State of Connecticut. The book includes historic photographs and paintings of the Connecticut landscape.

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 :: Look Again

Look Again by Elizabeth A. Trembley book cover image

Look Again by Elizabeth A. Trembley
Street Noise Books, September 2022

The graphic memoir Look Again recounts Elizabeth Trembley’s experience, years ago, of walking her dogs in the woods and finding a dead body. Trauma can make truth hard to find. Have you ever experienced a terror, grief, or confusion so great that when you try to share it you can only find shattered images floating in darkness? You try over and over, but can’t tell the story, to yourself or to anyone else. Look Again presents six variations of the same event, seen through the different lenses caused by other life revelations. It explores the fragmenting nature of trauma by tracing the convoluted evolution of the author’s story, a process often experienced by trauma sufferers and their loved ones. Trembley is a Lambda Literary Award-winning mystery writer (pen name Josie Gordon) and memoirist who now tells her stories in comics. She has a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Chicago and has taught college courses and public workshops on storytelling and comics. She currently works for the Sequential Artists Workshop.

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 :: Worn Smooth between Devourings

Worn Smooth Between Devourings: Poems by Lauren Camp book cover image

Worn Smooth Between Devourings: Poems by Lauren Camp
NYQ Books, September 2023

The poems in Lauren Camp’s Worn Smooth between Devourings travel through fears of ecological devastation and national and global tragedy, and map routes away from despair. Worry remains in the background, even in landscapes that still hold time’s beginning. Even in long love. “We are suspended in places / entire and different and home,” Camp writes. These precise, sonically-driven poems investigate a confessed gaze for contentment with the conviction of quiet rebellion. Through repeating distance, multiplying birds and crisscrossing storylines, they offer a testament to land and lack, grief, faith, and endurance.

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 :: Compass Lines

Compass Lines by John Messick book cover image

Compass Lines: Journeys Toward Home by John Messick
Porphyry Press, March 2023

From Antarctica to the Arctic, the Florida swamps to a Cambodia tattoo parlor, a Middle East bicycle route to a Yukon River canoe trip, Compass Lines: Journeys Toward Home by debut Alaska author John Messick brings readers on adventures that traverse latitudes and continents in pursuit of that most elusive place: home. These essays ask readers to think about encounters with cultures not our own through acts of witness—the imprint of immigration, the foreshadowing of war, the complexities of masculinity. Even after settling in Alaska, Messick finds the same colonial legacies taking a toll on land and people. Slowly, through deep and difficult interactions with the natural world, Messick realizes that sustainable existence depends on community and shared values. Neither travel nor homecoming are about conquering obstacles, but about applying attention and learning to listen.

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 :: Lo

Lo: Poems by Melissa Crowe book cover image

Lo: Poems by Melissa Crowe
University of Iowa Press, May 24 2023

Winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, Melissa Crow’s Lo maps the deprivation and richness of a rural girlhood and offers an intimate portrait of the woman—tender, hungry, hopeful—who manages to emerge. In a series of lyric odes and elegies, Lo explores the notion that we can be partially constituted by lack—poverty, neglect, isolation. The child in the book’s early sections is beloved and lonely, cherished and abused, lucky and imperiled, and by leaning into this complexity the poems render a tentative and shimmering space sometimes occluded, the space occupied by a girl coming to find herself and the world beautiful, even as that world harms her.

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 :: You Will Remember Me

You Will Remember Me: Ekphrastic Poems by Barbara Lydecker Crane book cover image

You Will Remember Me: Ekphrastic Poems by Barbara Lydecker Crane
Word Galaxy Press, October 2023

In You Will Remember Me, Barbara Lydecker Crane’s masterful sonnets illuminate the work and lives of artists from medieval through contemporary times. We visit a lustful duke of Milan in “His Last Mistress,” Van Gogh and a French asylum in “My Present,” Munch’s health battle in “After Influenza,” Sherald on her Blackness in “Tell Me What You Think,” or the first Native Harvard graduate in “Imagining Caleb.” Often accompanied by full-color reproductions of the art that inspired them, these vivid ekphrases immerse in a synergistic experience of sight, language, and meaning that’s both entertaining and enlightening.

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 :: Man of the People

Man of the People: The Autobiography of Congressman Robert Garcia book cover image

Man of the People: The Autobiography of Congressman Robert Garcia
 Arte Público Press, April 2023

Three weeks into his first term as a US Congressman, Robert Garcia found himself sitting down for a second time with the president of the United States. The son of a laborer at the Central Aguirre sugar mill in Puerto Rico, he couldn’t help but think, “Only in America!” Garcia grew up in the South Bronx and in his autobiography—published posthumously—he shares his story of struggle, rising from poverty to become a Korean War veteran, New York State Assemblyman and Senator and ultimately a US Congressman representing his beloved community.

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 :: Going Back to T-Town

Going Back to T-Town: The Ernie Fields Territory Big Band by Carmen Fields book cover image

Going Back to T-Town: The Ernie Fields Territory Big Band by Carmen Fields
The University of Oklahoma Press, June 2023

There was a time when countless young people in the Midwest, South, and Southwest went to dances and stage shows to hear a territory band play. Territory bands traveled from town to town, performing jazz and swing music, and Tulsa-based musician Ernie Fields (1904–97) led one of the best. In Going Back to T-Town, Ernie’s daughter, Carmen Fields, tells a story of success, disappointment, and perseverance extending from the early jazz era to the 1960s. This is an enlightening account of how this talented musician and businessman navigated the hurdles of racial segregation during the Jim Crow era.

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 :: gulp/gasp

gulp/gasp by Serena Piccoli book cover image

gulp/gasp by Serena Piccoli
Moria Books, September 2022

Temporally composed between 2019-2022, punctuated with socio-political, cultural, and linguistic shifts, and wry wordplay, gulp\gasp navigates the complexities within Italy, the British Isles, Zanzibar, and Europe, journalistically drawing on interviews, reports, photographs, essays, and articles. Though formally witty, playful, and punningly provocative, each piece packs a hard punch; and as such, serves as a powerful tool for raising awareness. Piccoli is an Italian poet, artistic director, playwright, translator, teacher, and photographer. She is the co-founder and director (with Giorgia Monti) of the Poetry and Sister Arts International Festival (Forlì – Cesena, Italy).

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 Principles of Comedy Improv

The Principles of Comedy Improv by Tom Blank book cover image

The Principles of Comedy Improv by Tom Blank
University of Iowa Press, June 2023

The Principles of Comedy Improv is an authoritative handbook for beginners and experts alike. More than just entertainment, improv’s tenets enable you to change every moment of your life. Your guide is Tom Blank, who crystallizes two decades of experience to convey improv in unparalleled scope, depth, and fun. Blank lives in Los Angeles and is senior instructor at the Groundlings Theatre & School, where he teaches improv and sketch comedy.

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 :: Prayer Book for the New Heretic

Prayer Book for the New Heretic by Colin Pope book cover image

Prayer Book for the New Heretic by Colin Pope
NYQ Books, March 2023

At the intersection of religion, politics, and Americana, Colin Pope’s latest collection inquires what it means to believe while living through unbelievable times. These poems careen and rollick, imagining a world in which conspiracy theory and urban myth figure as acts of God. Here, the notion of “blind faith” is subjected to kaleidoscopic interrogation in a madcap, whirling, unabashedly entertaining pursuit of the limits of dogma. In Pope’s vision of belief, wayward children are plucked up by eagles, the moon landing is faked via the liberal use of shaving cream, and a men’s room wall is elected president. But beneath their roiling surface, these poems surge on their dauntless quest for some understanding of how we ended up here, now, fighting for our humanity.

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 :: 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!