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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 :: 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.

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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.

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 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.

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 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.”

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 :: 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.

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 :: 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.”

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 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.

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 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.

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 :: 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.

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 :: 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.

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 :: 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.

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 :: 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.

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 :: 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.

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 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.

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 :: 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.

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 :: 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.

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 :: 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.”

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 :: 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.

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 :: 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.

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 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.

New Book :: Sonnets with Two Torches and One Cliff

Sonnets with Two Torches and One Cliff by Robert Thomas book cover image

Sonnets with Two Torches and One Cliff by Robert Thomas
Carnegie Mellon University Press, February 2023

In Sonnets with Two Torches and One Cliff, Robert Thomas presents eighty nontraditional sonnets that explore love and jealousy—the traditional obsessions of sonnets—from nontraditional angles. Other galaxies are jealous of Earth in these heartbreaking, funny, ecstatic, profound, and never boring poems. “What if creatures in other galaxies / have a vague sense that something is missing, / but don’t know it’s Little Richard, Shakespeare, / and cornbread with plum jam?”

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 :: Hydra Medusa

Hydra Medusa by Brandon Shimoda book cover image

Hydra Medusa by Brandon Shimoda
Nightboat Books, June 2023

Hydra Medusa by Brandon Shimoda is part coping mechanism, part magical act, and was composed while Shimoda was working five jobs and raising a child—during bus commutes, before bed, at sunrise. Encountering the ghosts of Japanese American ancestors, friends, children, and bodies of water, it asks: What is the desert but a site where people have died, are dying; are buried, unburied, memorialized, erased. Where they are trying, against and within the energy of it all, to contend with our inherited present—and to live.

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 :: Crimes of the Tongue

Crimes of the Tongue: Essays and Stories by Alicia Gaspar de Alba book cover image

Crimes of the Tongue: Essays and Stories by Alicia Gaspar de Alba
Arte Público Press, March 2023

In Crimes of the Tongue: Essays and Stories, award-winning writer Alici Gaspar de Alba explores other “crimes of the tongue” in the essays in this volume: pochismo, or the mixing of English and Spanish, as both a family taboo and a politics of identity; the haunting memory of La Llorona, protector of undocumented immigrants and abandoned children, and her blood-curdling cry of loss and revenge; the intersection of the personal and the political in the transgressive work of Chicana/Latina artists; the sexual and linguistic rebellions of La Malinche and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; and the reverse coyotaje, or border crossing, of Chicana lesbian feminist theory translated into Spanish and visual art as a way of sneaking this counterhegemonic pocha poetic thought into Mexico. These essays and stories are always intellectually rigorous and often achingly personal.

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 :: Bark On

Bark On: A Novel by Mason Boyles book cover image

Bark On: A Novel by Mason Boyles
Driftwood Press, February 2023

In Bark On: A Novel by Mason Boyles, Ezra Fogerty is an aspiring professional triathlete training out of his ma’s trailer in the eroding North Carolina beach town of Kure. When the recently disgraced celebrity coach Benji Newton shows up at his doorstep offering to train him for the Chapel Hill Ironman, Ezra accepts eagerly. Benji’s methods prove brutal and ritualistic, and seem connected to Kure’s abruptly climbing coyote population. As Ezra begins to question the logic behind his preparation, Benji invites the orphaned prodigy Casper Swayze to train with them. The diminutive Casper one-ups Ezra in every workout until suffering a disastrous injury that coincides with Benji’s disappearance, leaving Ezra to choose between caring for Casper and completing preparations for the biggest race of his career.

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 :: So Much for Life

So Much for Life by Mark Hyatt book cover image

So Much For Life by Mark Hyatt
Nightboat Books, June 2023

Scarcely published in his lifetime, Hyatt’s work survives thanks to the intervention of poets and friends who saved his manuscripts and kept his poems in circulation. Queer in the decades before Gay Liberation; Romani; incarcerated in prisons and asylums; illiterate into adulthood: it’s tempting to read Hyatt according to the familiar script of the doomed poet, resounding with loneliness and isolation. But his poetry—“hot and tender,” funny and sad—tells another story: of love, liberatory commitment, and desire.

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 :: Recalibrating and Other Poems

Recalibrating and Other Poems by Christopher Norris book cover image

Recalibrating and Other Poems by Christopher Norris
Parlor Press, February 2023

These poems in Recalibrating continue Christopher Norris’s spirited exploration of the paths by which contemporary poetry might find its way out of the self-enclosed sphere of lyric subjectivity into the larger air of philosophical, ethical, political, scientific, and environmental debate. They do so through a range of formal resources, among them rhyme and meter, which Norris regards as portals of creative-intellectual discovery. Norris also deploys a great range of stanza forms and verse structures to demonstrate the variety of ways in which technique and prosody can serve not only to emphasize, deepen or qualify a point but to express thoughts and feelings beyond the communicative reach of prose discourse. These aspects of his work are subject to commentary in a concluding essay where Norris talks about his passage from literary theory to philosophy and thence to poetry, although—as the reader will soon discover—without having left those earlier interests behind.

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 April 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
The Boxer of Quirinal, John Barr, Red Hen Press
Brother Poem, Will Harris, Wesleyan University Press
Chariot, Timothy Donnelly, Wave Books
Dear Outsiders, Jenny Sadre-Orafai, University of Akron Press
A Duration, Richard Meier, Wave Books
The Flowers of Buffoonery, Osamu Dazai, New Directions Publishing
Fulgurite, Catherine Kyle, Cornerstone Press
Hydra Medusa, Brandon Shimoda, Nightboat Books
Iggy Horse, Michael Earl Craig, Wave Books
Imaginary Sonnets, Daniel Galef, Word Galaxy Press
In Deep, Judith Sanders, Kelsay Books
Lucky Breaks, Yevgenia Belorusets, New Directions Publishing

Continue reading “Books Received April 2023”

New Book :: Joy Ride

Joy Ride by Ron Slate book cover image

Joy Ride by Ron Slate
Carnegie Mellon University Press, February 2023

The poems of Ron Slate’s Joy Ride look for the connections and listen for the echoes between world events, family lore, work, mortality, and art. Slate examines the intangibility of the past by exploring the notion of storytelling itself—the stories we tell ourselves, our families, and our communities about the events that have shaped our experience.

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 :: Fulgurite

Fulgurite by Catherine Kyle book cover image

Fulgurite by Catherine Kyle
Cornerstone Press, May 2023

Named for the glassy, mazelike structures that can form underground when lightning strikes sand, Fulgurite weaves together reality and myth. Informed by fairy tales, domestic fabulism, and environmental concerns, Catherine Kyle examines gender on large and small scales. Patriarchal influences in domestic spaces are compared to patriarchal influences on national and global levels, and identity is made complex by the fusion of survival, dissociation, and promise. The collection bears witness to the grief of the everyday while simultaneously pursuing hope.

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New Book :: The Middle Daughter

The Middle Daughter by Chika Unigwe book cover image

The Middle Daughter by Chika Unigwe
Dzanc Books, April 2023

When seventeen-year-old Nani loses her older sister and then her father in quick succession, her world spins off its axis. Isolated and misunderstood by her grieving mother and sister, she’s drawn to an itinerant preacher, a handsome self-proclaimed man of God who offers her a new place to belong. All too soon, Nani finds herself estranged from her family, tethered to her abusive husband by children she loves but cannot fully comprehend. She must find the courage to break free and wrestle her life back—without losing what she loves most.

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New Book :: Lifeline to a Soul

Lifeline to a Soul by John K. McLaughlin book cover image

Lifeline to a Soul by John McLauglin
Lifeline Education Connection, April 2023

Lifeline to a Soul: The Life-Changing Perspective I Gained While Teaching Entrepreneurship to Prisoners by John McLaughlin was released this month in celebration of Second Chance Month: “On March 31, 2023, President Joseph R. Biden proclaimed April 2023 as Second Chance Month and called for observance of the month with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities.” For John McLaughlin, this was the perfect time to share his experiences with others. After devoting half of his lifetime transforming his start-up business into a multi-million dollar industry leader, McLaughlin set out in a new direction: to teach what he had learned to others. Due to a lack of teaching experience, his only job offer was to teach entrepreneurship to prisoners at a minimum-security camp in North Carolina. McLaughlin gradually built an effective program until a scandal involving prison officials blindsides his progress and threatens to bring his teaching career to an unceremonious end. Lifeline to a Soul takes readers inside the fence and chronicles the victories and challenges one man faced as a first-time teacher in the strange world of prison life. McLaughlin also works with Lifeline Education Connection, which offers low-cost classes to the public, allowing individuals “who have faced obstacles in their life achieve their aspirations in the areas of personal finance and entrepreneurship,” hosted by Founder Tavares James.

New Book :: Queering the Border

Queering the Border: Essays by Emma Pérez book cover image

Queering the Border: Essays by Emma Pérez
Arte Público Press, November 2022

The essays in Queering the Border by Emma Pérez reveal the influence of Gloria Anzaldúa’s scholarship; recount the controversy surrounding artist Alma López’s digital print, “Our Lady,” in which the Virgin of Guadalupe appears in a provocative bikini; and evaluate interviews with 25 LGBTQ people in the El Paso/Ciudad Juárez area to expose life on the border as a queer of color. This collection also includes short fiction and an epistolary love poem to the first feminist of the Americas, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, or in this case, Sor Juanx. Bringing together the work of a noted Chicanx writer and academic, this volume reinforces the body of work by LGBTQ people of color dealing with racism and sexism, conquest and colonization, power and privilege, all with a particular emphasis on the Southwest borderlands.

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New Book :: A Suit of Paper Feathers

A Suit of Paper Feathers by Nate Duke book cover image

A Suit of Paper Feathers by Nate Duke
Parlor Press, January 2023

In A Suit of Paper Feathers, Nate Duke writes about Americana singers like Lucinda Williams and Tom T. Hall. Several poems interrogate his experiences working on farms in rural Oregon with WWOOF. The ‘farm’ poems in the manuscript are complemented by some poems about working for his mother’s environmental mitigation company in Arkansas. Duke engages these experiences through an ecocritical lens, which he also turns to broader cultural referents such as installation artist Christo.

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New Book :: Ephemera

Ephemera by Sierra DeMulder book cover image

Ephemera by Sierra DeMulder
Button Poetry, June 2023

In Sierra DeMulder’s melancholic yet beautifully hopeful poetry collection, Ephemera, she writes with the wisdom of someone who has learned to love and lose. Each poem reads delicately and elegantly, just fleeting memories on the page. Split into four sections detailing intimate experiences from the painful deaths of family members who clung to life, to passionate love she feels for her own mortal wife, DeMulder plays a sweet song by pulling on her own well-worn heartstrings. DeMulder ruminates on what will come and what will fade. Despite this impermanent nature, you can feel the tender warmth DeMulder holds for her family in every line, even the moments she wishes she could forget.

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New Book :: The Orchestra of Wind Chimes

The Orchestra of Wind Chimes by Geoffrey Jacques book cover image

The Orchestra of Wind Chimes by Geoffrey Jacques
Wayne State University Press, March 2023

This powerful collection of poems draws on American and African-American experimental lyric traditions, pushing language and form to their limits. Geoffrey Jacques’s poetry inspires deep thought, taking up themes of music, psychology, and literature. This work embodies the potential of poetry to forge new connections between aesthetic expression and the often onerous facts of human existence. Poems such as “Still Life” and “Detour Ahead” produce a juxtaposition of inspired poetic form and rich, complex realities of life, addressing topics of joy and love, race, class, politics, and the aesthetics of the everyday. With a contemporary and sophisticated tenor, Jacques lends his uniquely moving and provocative perspective to advancing discourse in these critical topics.

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New Book :: Her Scant State

Her Scant State by Barbara Tomash book cover image

Her Scant State by Barbara Tomash
Apogee Press, March 2023

In Her Scant State, Barbara Tomash’s brilliant reworking of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, the continuity and causality of the nineteenth-century novel are transformed into the isolate flecks of twenty-first-century poetry. Through excision and refashioning, Tomash has uncovered the troubling, luminous strands within the text, and provided a revelatory and radical new experience of her protagonist, Isabel. If the novelist built a world that is stable, the poet unveils a world that is fluid or broken or shifting and shimmering, in which the language has its own story to tell. When that language is set free in the poem, placed in dialogue with silence, what do we find in Her Scant State? America, men, marriage, money: the familiar detritus of our capitalism. And also a breathtaking lyricism, alive inside every word of this powerful poem.

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New Book :: A Short History of Anger

A Short History of Anger by Joy Manesiotis book cover image

A Short History of Anger by Joy Manesiotis
Parlor Press, February 2023

Both a book-length poetic hybrid and a live performance, A Short History of Anger takes as its source material the Destruction of Smyrna, the Turkish army’s genocide of Smyrna’s Greek citizens in 1922, and the resulting population exchange. Used as a blueprint for state-sponsored ethnic cleansing and forced migration, The Destruction of Smyrna is an event about which the world has remained strangely silent. Governed by its musical, ritualistic construction and lament structure, A Short History of Anger attempts to excavate the legacy of genocide and displacement that has resonated from The Destruction. It is meant to be deeply affective, rather than narrative, and move in the way historical occurrences pass into the present and live through subsequent generations. A Short History of Anger combines prose and poetry, essay and verse, persona and chorus; built with many voices, layers and fractures, it employs a modern-day Greek Chorus.

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New Book :: Staying Right Here

Staying Right Here by Usman Hameedi book cover image

Staying Right Here by Usman Hameedi
Button Poetry, April 2023

Usman Hameedi’s debut collection, Staying Right Here, is a journey in finding home. Hameedi invites readers to bear witness to vignettes of joy and hardship as he navigates finding his place in America. From an ode to Bodegas, an autobiography of his eyebrows, and elegies for lost friends, Hameedi’s thematic metaphors for family, wellness, and American biases weave a literary tapestry. Reading Usman’s work is like drinking a warm chai while watching the sunset in Brooklyn, or coming home to an aromatic Biryani. Hameedi writes with an unmistakably unique voice that is not afraid of who he is.

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New Book :: The Pearl Diver of Irunmani

The Pearl Diver of Irunmani by Marc Vincenz book cover image

The Pearl Diver of Irunmani by Marc Vincenz
White Pine Press,

Marc Vincenz’s The Pearl Diver of Irunmani charts the paths of consciousness on an aquatic journey into the heart of mind and matter. What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to be alive preparing for death? What animates the soul moments before death? In this collection, Marc Vincenz trans-navigates the oceans of consciousness that contain all the elements of life and death. . . and rebirth. In a language that is spare and ghostly, the narrator embarks upon finding that pearl of knowledge embedded in the heart of meaning.

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New Book :: Between Twilight

Between Twilight by Connie Post book cover image

Between Twilight by Connie Post
NYQ Books, February 2023

In Between Twilight, Post delves deep into the difficult journeys of everyday life and intersects those with the difficult maps of the past. There are “atrocities in the body” and many ways a person can falter, fall or rise from “the hue of an unseen self.” Post explores the necessary truths, the ones we can no longer hide, the ones we’ve held on to, for too long. In these poems, the reader will more fully understand Faulkner’s “the past is never the past in never past, it’s not even dead.” The poet infuses elements of evolution, illness, astronomy, humanity, internal travels inside our bodies, and travels back in time “before shadows understood their first for light.” Post’s poems will seep into our subconscious and help us see how a room can be “dark and iridescent all at once.”

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New Book :: Before After

Before After by Owen McLeod book cover image

Before After by Owen McLeod
Saturnalia Books, March 2023

From action figures to alcoholism, mental illness to mortality, devotion to divorce, Before After interrogates yet celebrates the paradoxes of living in a world both beautiful and brutal—a world, according to these poems, in which Jesus texts random emojis from the cross, people suddenly sprout wings, human hearts are replaced by Platonic machines, and caskets are shrunk down to serve as symbolic trinkets. Along this journey through the real and surreal, the works of great poets—Hopkins, Plath, Lowell, and more—are lovingly subverted in the search for novel meanings that match this world. Written by a self-taught and award-winning poet, Before After challenges, with wit and compassion, our distinctions between thinking and feeling, sacred and profane, wellness and madness, before and after.

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New Book :: Far From New York State

Far From New York State by Matthew Johnson book cover image

Far From New York State by Matthew Johnson
NYQ Books, March 2023

Matthew Johnson’s second poetry volume constructs a space where the rural communities of Upstate, the suburban living of the Lower Hudson Valley, and the metropolitan landscapes of the City are woven together in a mosaic snapshot. A collection of poems where the historical and cultural traditions of New York State meet, the reader is acquainted not only with seminal figures across the cultural channels of literature, music, and sports, such as Washington Irving, Paul Robeson, and the ’86 Mets, but to the author himself. Tender, playful, and meditative, Johnson presents stories that he has lived, and shares others that have been passed down through familial storytelling around the kitchen table and cookout barbecue pit.

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New Book :: Whatever’s Forbidden the Wise

Whatever's Forbidden the Wise by Anthony Madrid book cover image

Whatever’s Forbidden the Wise by Anthony Madrid
Canarium Books, April 2023

In Anthony Madrid’s fourth book, Whatever’s Forbidden the Wise, the poet appraises this world “full of ancient things whose shapes and colors have changed,” as his singular, unforgettable and voice resonates in ghazals, rubai, ditties, and “gnomic stanzas.” A polymath and iconoclast, Madrid knows the names of the stars and turns their light into astonishing music.

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New Book :: The Day Every Day Is

The Day Every Day Is by Lee Upton book cover image

The Day Every Day Is by Lee Upton
Saturnalia Books, March 2023

Whether crisp and understated or capacious and kinetic, the poems in Lee Upton’s seventh collection are lyrically dexterous and reverberant. Shrewd, formally ambitious, excavating cultural myths and contradictions, these poems allow the ordinary and the supernatural to inhabit one another. The poems are often attentive to suffering: torture as it persists through centuries, the extinction of species, and the agonies of illness, grief, and the blasting of innocence are meditated upon. At the same time, in this book of mysteries, the cultivation of the redemptive energy of wit, in favor of the sensual and tender, performs as a means to resist violence.

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New Book :: The Fight Journal by John Evans

The Fight Journal by John W. Evans book cover image

The Fight Journal by John W. Evans
Rattle Poetry, March 2023

Rattle Poetry Chapbook Prize Winner, The Fight Journal by John W. Evans is a heartsick elegy for a failed marriage. Written in couplets that mirror the back-and-forth of two parties alternately warring with each other and struggling to hold a family together, Evans explores the depths of longing, bitterness, resignation, and hope that humanize the struggle to live and parent during and after divorce. As much a story of resolve as it is vulnerability, The Fight Journal is a bittersweet account of the complexities of connection, the power of sympathy, and the many forms that love takes in lives that continue. This chapbook currently comes free with all spring-issue subscriptions to Rattle poetry magazine. Subscribers receive four issues of Rattle and four chapbooks for $25. See their website for more information.

New Book :: Gathering Sunlight

Gathering Sunlight by Silvia Scheibli & Patty Dickson Pieczka book cover image

Gathering Sunlight by Silvia Scheibli & Patty Dickson Pieczka
The Bitter Oleander Press, March 2023

Two extraordinary North American poets have come together in this shared book of poetry that exemplifies the depth to which the natural world and our place in it is perceived. Whether it’s Silvia Scheibli’s ability to connect with a Latin American culture that has been so influential on her own work, or Patty Dickson Pieczka’s wanderings through the dream-like reality of her ever-deepening world, these are all poems from poets who have not only earned their words but lived them as well.

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