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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 :: 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.

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 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.

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 :: 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.

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 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.

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 :: 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.

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 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.

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 :: 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.

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 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.

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 :: 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.

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 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.

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

New Book :: Between 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.”

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 :: 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.

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 :: 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.

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 :: 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 :: pH of Au

pH of Au by Vanessa Couto Johnson book cover image

pH of Au by Vanessa Couto Johnson
Parlor Press, January 2023

Through chemistry, alchemy, citizenship, and social connections, the speaker of pH of Au navigates location and displacement, physical and otherwise. A Brazilian, a Texan, a granddaughter, a periodically long-distance partner—through her various identities, some properties of gold manifest.

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 :: The Exhausted Dream

The Exhausted Dream by Joshua Edwards book cover image

The Exhausted Dream by Joshua Edwards
Marfa Books, March 2023

Also known as A Monthly Account of the Year Leading Up to the End of the World, by AGONISTES, Prophet and Fulfiller, this is Joshua Edwards’ longish poem in iambic pentameter about Love, Television, Philosophy, Prophecy, and the transience of Worlds. It’s also about the swiftness of iambic time, as the reader’s experience of the book’s nominal subjects is secondary to their experience of time as structured in this way. Sitcoms, French restaurants, favorite museums, incense, Atlas, and Caspar David Friedrich are all grains of sand in this small, though finely shaped hourglass.

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 :: Failures of the Poets

Failures of the Poet by Anthony Robinson book cover image

Failures of the Poets by Anthony Robinson
Canarium Books, April 2023

After more than 20 years of publishing poems in magazines and chapbook, Anthony Robinson has brought together an incredible collection for his long-awaited first full-length book, Failures of the Poets. Full of beauty, heartbreak, humor, pain, absurdity, sorrow, friendship, and love, as well as bridges, family, lakes, God, feathers, and food, this is a book brimming over with thinking and with things, as Robinson’s intense attention collides with the world. “All winter we waited / For the sun and now he’s here but will / He make it through another year?”

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 :: Exceeds Us

Exceeds Us by Leah Poole Osowski book cover image

Exceeds Us by Leah Poole Osowski
Satrunalia Books, March 2023

Taking its name from a line in Rilke’s second Duino Elegy, “For our own heart always exceeds us,” at its core, this is a book about new love and underlying illness. A lyric pursuit of our existence among the natural world, these poems keep in mind that existence is transient. They straddle reality lines, often stepping over into dream spaces or pushing against a linear world. But they are solidly of this world, its ground and various bodies of water, where a boy can become a field and a girl can drown in the rivers of her own body. At once intimate—“I would know you in someone else’s life, someone else’s storm cellar”—and expansive—“We rape the landscape / we can see, start with what covers the light”—Osowski is a poet of language, of notice, and of inquiry. Rilke writes, “Wasn’t love and departure placed so gently on shoulders that it seemed to be made of a different substance than in our world?” Exceeds Us is interested in that substance and the notion that our lives are not singular. These poems exceed the pair at their center, they exceed the one life we’re granted, and they are not bound to the laws of our earth. “Prove how weather is not a god and I’ll believe in you.”

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 London Revolution 1640-1643

The London Revolution 1640-1643 by Michael Sturza book cover image

The London Revolution 1640-1643 by Michael Sturza
The Mad Duck Coalition, March 2022

The London Revolution 1640–1643: Class Struggles in 17th Century England chronicles England’s history through the revolution in 1641–1642, which toppled the feudal political system, and its aftermath. It explores how the growing capitalist economy fundamentally conflicted with decaying feudal society, causing tensions and dislocations that affected all social classes in the early modern period. In contrast with most other works, this book posits that the fundamental driving force of the revolution was the militant Puritan movement supported by the class of petty-bourgeois artisan craftworkers, instead of the moderate gentry in the House of Commons. This is a peer-reviewed publication.

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 :: General Release from the Beginning of the World

General Release from the Beginning of the World by Donna Spruijt-Metz book cover image

General Release from the Beginning of the World by Donna Spruijt-Metz
Parlor Press, January 2023

In General Release from the Beginning of the World, Donna Spruijt-Metz attempts to reconcile the death of the father, the lies of the mother, a hidden half-sister, and the love for a daughter – with the impossible desire to banish the past from the present. She examines shifting relationships with the holy, referred to in the book only as ‘YOU.’ She asks: “Do YOU hear / a whisper / in YOUR // constant night / -and then listen?” She breaks her own heart to touch yours.

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 :: Joy Ride

Joy Ride by Kristen Jokinen book cover image

Joy Ride by Kristen Jokinen
Hawthorne Books, May 2023

Explorers Kristen and Ville Jokinen met and fell in love while scuba diving in Vietnam. Ville then left his native Finland to join Kristen in Oregon and together they embarked on a life-changing two-year cycling adventure covering 18,000 miles from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Ushuaia, Argentina. Despite never having cycled further than around the block, they persevered unrelenting, punishing rain and wind, altitude sickness, dog attacks, bike accidents, and countless flat tires to cycle between the ends of the earth. Kristen and Ville believe that kindness connects us to our shared humanity. They held babies, attended quinceañeras, drank pulque, played soccer, and visited schools. People in Mexico, Central America, and South America invited them into their hearts and homes, allowed them to camp in their fields and farms, and acted as personal tour guides. Kristen and Ville are love on wheels, and who doesn’t need a little more love in their lives?

New Book :: 回 /Return

Return by Emily Lee Luan book cover image

回  / Return by Emily Lee Luan
Nightboat Books, April 2023

Rooted in the classical tradition of the Chinese “reversible” poem, 回 / Return is engaged in the act of looking back—toward an imagined homeland and a childhood of suburban longing, through migratory passages, departures, and etymologies, and into the various holes and voids that appear in the telling and retelling of history. The poems ask: What is feeling? What is melancholy? Can language translate either? A former Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Emily Lee Luan is the author of I Watch the Boughs, selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. She lives in New York City.

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New Book :: Down to the Bone

Down to the Bone: A Leukemia Story by Catherine Pioli, trans. J.T. Mahany book cover image

Down to the Bone: A Leukemia Story by Catherine Pioli, trans. J.T. Mahany
graphic mundi, December 2022

When Catherine is diagnosed with acute leukemia, a deadly form of cancer that attacks the immune system, her life is turned upside down. Young and previously healthy, she now finds herself catapulted into the world of the seriously ill—constantly testing and waiting for results, undergoing endless medical treatments, learning to accept a changing body, communicating with a medical team, and relying on the support of her partner, family, and friends. A professional illustrator, Catherine decides to tell the story of her disease in this graphic novel, and she does so with great sincerity, humor, and rare lucidity. We accompany her through the waiting, the doubts, the fears, and the tears—but also the laughter, the love, and the strong will to live.

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New Book :: In Sprintime

In Springtime by Sarah Blake book cover image

In Springtime by Sarah Blake
Wesleyan University Press, March 2023

In Springtime, Sarah Blake’s epic poem of survival, we follow a nameless main character lost in the woods. There, they discover the world anew, negotiating their place among the trees and the rain and the animals. Something brought them to the woods that nearly killed them, and they’re not sure they want to live through this experience either. But the world surprises them again and again with beauty and intrigue. They come to meet a pregnant horse, a curious mouse, and a dead bird, who is set on haunting them all. Blake examines what makes us human when removed from the human world, what identity means where it is a useless thing, and how loss shapes us. In a stunning setting and with ominous dreams, In Springtime will take you into a magical world without using any magic at all—just the strangeness of the woods. Includes an art portfolio by Nicky Arscott.

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New Book :: The Mare

The Mare by Seth Christian Martel book cover image

The Mare by Seth Christian Martel
graphic mundi, March 2023

Everyone else may be enjoying the summer, but Indigo’s life isn’t going so well. Her dad’s marriage just ended in a very public divorce, and now he’s drinking again. Indy barely graduated from high school, she just lost her job, and she doesn’t know what to do with her life. The stress is causing her nightmarish sleep paralysis—or so she thinks. Indy confides in her best friend, Kasia, who blames “The Mare” for her troubles—the spirit of someone wronged that saps its victim’s energy at night. It sounds crazy to Indy, but is it? Steeped in the nostalgia of lazy summers and mixtapes, concert tickets, and coffee, The Mare is a story about friends, family, and finding one’s way—with a touch of the supernatural and a powerful, surprising twist.

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New Book :: & there’s you still thrill hour of the world to love

& there's you still thrill hour of the world to love by Aby Kaupang book cover image

& there’s you still thrill hour of the world to love by Aby Kaupang
Parlor Press, February 2023

Aby Kaupang’s & there’s you still thrill hour of the world to love invokes life’s relentless suffusion of “&,” forging a conjunctive body in which an inevitable landscape of contemporary crisis, suicide, disability, failed promises & the quotidian accrue. In the Sisyphean challenge of day after day, how does one helm stone? Through the page’s shattered frame, & in formally audacious exchanges, Kaupang risks recombinatory possibilities arising not as recovery, per se, but as endurance, awe, & possibly joy. Inflorescence is cyclic, turns towards fodder, feeds the day, recedes. The poems are beautifully complemented by images of James Sullivan’s sculptures, one of which adorns the book’s cover.

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New Book :: Disequilibria

Disequilibria: Meditations on Missingness by Robert Lunday book cover image

Disequilibria: Meditations on Missingness by Robert Lunday
University of New Mexico Press, February 2023

Winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, Disequilibria: Meditations on Missingness is a hybrid memoir that recounts the 1982 disappearance of the author’s stepfather, James Edward Lewis, a pilot and Vietnam veteran. Recounting his family’s experiences in searching for answers, Lunday interrogates the broader cultural and conceptual responses to the phenomenon of missingness by connecting his stepfather’s case to other true-life disappearances as well as those portrayed in fiction, poetry, and film. In doing so Disequilibria explores the transience in modern life, considering the military-dependent experience, the corrosive effects of war, and the struggle to find closure and comfort as time goes by without answers.

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New Book :: W. E. B. Du Bois Souls of Black Folk

The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963); A Graphic Interpretation by Artist Paul Peart-Smith book cover image

W. E. B. Du Bois Souls of Black Folk: A Graphic Interpretation by Paul Peart-Smith
Rutgers University Press, April 2023

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” These were the prescient words of W. E. B. Du Bois’s influential 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk. The preeminent Black intellectual of his generation, Du Bois wrote about the trauma of seeing the Reconstruction era’s promise of racial equality cruelly dashed by the rise of white supremacist terror and Jim Crow laws. Yet he also argued for the value of African American cultural traditions and provided inspiration for countless civil rights leaders who followed him. Now artist Paul Peart-Smith offers the first graphic adaptation of Du Bois’s seminal work.

Peart-Smith’s graphic adaptation provides historical and cultural contexts that bring to life the world behind Du Bois’s words. Readers will get a deeper understanding of the cultural debates The Souls of Black Folk engaged in, with more background on figures like Booker T. Washington, the advocate of black economic uplift, and the Pan-Africanist minister Alexander Crummell. This new release vividly conveys the continuing legacy of The Souls of Black Folk, effectively updating it for the era of the 1619 Project and Black Lives Matter.

New Book :: Icelight

Icelight by Ranjit Hoskote book cover image

Icelight by Ranjit Hoskote
Weselyn University Press, March 2023

Icelight, Ranjit Hoskote’s eighth collection of poems, enacts the experience of standing at the edge—of a life, a landscape, a world assuming new contours or going up in flames. Yet, the protagonists of these poems also stand at the edge of epiphany. In the title poem, we meet the Neolithic cave-dweller who, dazzled by a shapeshifting nature, crafts the first icon. The ‘I’ of these poems is not a sovereign ‘I’. A questing, questioning voice, it locates itself in the web of life, in relation to the cosmos. In “Tacet,” the speaker asks: “What if I had / no skin / Of what / am I the barometer?” Long committed to the Japanese mono no aware aesthetic, Hoskote embraces talismans, premonitions, fossils: active residues from the previous lives of people and places. Icelight is a book about transitions and departures, eloquent in its acceptance of transience in the face of mortality.

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New Book :: Suggest Paradise

Suggest Paradise by Ray Gonzalez book cover image

Suggest Paradise by Ray Gonzalez
University of New Mexico Press, February 2023

Born and raised in El Paso, Texas, Ray Gonzalez returns to Texas and nearby New Mexico to meditate on love, literature, loss, and la línea in Suggest Paradise. The collection offers readers some of the richest and most complex poems that embody the Southwest and the borderlands, including a poignant look at the massacre at the El Paso Walmart. A unique voice of the Southwest, Gonzalez brings his intellect and his well-honed craft to this work and offers readers a nuanced and powerful perspective on poetry and the Border.

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New Book :: Our Beautiful Reward

Our Beautiful Reward, ed. Catherine Rockwood book cover image

Our Beautiful Reward, ed. Catherine Rockwood
Reckoning Press, March 2023

Our Beautiful Reward is a collection of works from Reckoning Press, a nonprofit, annual journal of creative writing on environmental justice. This special issue on bodily autonomy, edited by Catherine Rockwood, was anthologized on the occasion of the repeal of Roe v. Wade and features work by Mona Robles, Linda Cooper, Dana Vickerson, Leah Bobet, Laurel Nakanishi, Robert René Galván, Anna Orridge, Taylor Jones, Julian K. Jarboe, Dyani Sabin, Annabelle Cormack, Rimi B. Chatterjee, Taylor Jones, Amber Fox, Juliana Roth, Mari Ness, Riley Tao, Taylor Jones, M.C. Benner Dixon, and Marissa Lingen.

There will be a free virtual launch event for the publication featuring eight contributors. For more information and to RSVP, click here.

Books Received March 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
adjacent islands, Nicole Cecilia Delgado, Ugly Duckling Presse
& there’s you still thrill hour of the world to love, Aby Kaupang, Parlor Press
Before After, Owen McLeod, Saturnalia Books
Between Twilight, Connie Post, NYQ Books
The Book of John, Lindsey Royce, Press 53
Boy, Tracy Youngblom, CavanKerry Press
Crisis Inquiry, Tony Iantosca, Ugly Duckling Presse
The Day Every Day Is, Lee Upton, Saturnalia Books
Dreamer: Poems in Culture, Alan Botsford, Cyberwit.net
Ephemera, Sierra DeMulder, Button Poetry
Exceeds Us, Leah Poole Osowski, Saturnalia Books
The Exhausted Dream, Joshua Edwards, Marfa Book Company
Exilium, Maria Negroni, Ugly Duckling Presse
Failures of the Poet, Anthony Robinson, Canarium Books
Far from New York State, Matthew Johnson, NYQ Books
The Fight Journal, John W. Evans, Rattle Poetry

Continue reading “Books Received March 2023”

New Book :: Waiting for Wovoka

Waiting for Wovoka by Gerald Vizenor book cover image

Waiting for Wovoka by Gerald Vizenor
Wesleyan Unviersity Press, March 2023

In the summer of 1962, a group of young Native American puppeteers travel in a converted school bus from the White Earth Reservation to the Century 21 Exposition, World’s Fair in Seattle, Washington. The five Natives, three young men and two young women, have endured abandonment, abuse, poverty, and find solace, humor, and courage with a mute puppeteer—a Native woman in her seventies who writes original dream songs, and creates hand puppets and ironic parleys that mock the ghosts of authority. Dummy Trout, the mute puppeteer, also figured in Vizenor’s previous books, Native Tributes and Satie on the Seine. The troupe attends a performance of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett and they create a puppet parley for Wovoka, the inspiration of the Native American Ghost Dance Religion.

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New Book :: Victory Garden

Victory Garden by Glenna Luschei book cover image

Victory Garden by Glenna Luschei
University of New Mexico Press, February 2023

Rooted in the Midwest but at home anywhere, Glenna Luschei has spent over fifty years writing and supporting other writers in the midst of adventures that have taken her around the globe. Now in her late eighties and as vibrant as ever, Luschei has crafted a collection that comprises a retrospective of her life: her youth during World War II; her adventures in New Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, and elsewhere; and her ongoing love affair with the arts. Luschei relives highs and lows through these poems and reminds readers to live life to the fullest as we never know if tomorrow will be our last day.

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 Misfits

The Misfits by Jimmy Santiago Baca book cover image

The Misfits by Jimmy Santiago Baca
Arte Público Press, November 2022

After spending five years in LA working successfully as a screenwriter, the protagonist of this novel decides it’s time to return to his hometown, Santa Luz, New Mexico, to pen the novel he has always needed to write about the strained relationship with his father. He reconnects with old friends and meets new ones, and the parade of quirky characters—self-proclaimed artists, wealthy retirees, corrupt lawyers—distracts him from his project. There’s Helen, who hooks up with an unsavory character and winds up in jail—for murder. Sheryl can’t take her philandering husband anymore and drives her car off a mountaintop, killing herself and her children. And there’s Paul, who lives a double life as a happy family man, but who has a serious drug addiction. Against the backdrop of mystical mornings and beautiful mountains, the writer soon realizes things aren’t always what they seem in Santa Luz. The writer’s sympathies are with the working class, and his satirical gaze embraces the people who live in the shadows, those considered “misfits.” Jimmy Santiago Baca writes compellingly about artists and their responsibility to society.

New Book :: Notes from the Passenger

Notes from the Passenger by Gillian Conoley book cover image

Notes from the Passenger by Gillian Conoley
Nightboat Books, May 2023

Notes from the Passenger by Gillian Conoley is a collection written over the course of the last few years, as the author sought for ways to make room for joy amongst an upturned and unsteady quotidian. Written in response to climatic and societal catastrophe, war, increasing gun violence, plague, and the global spread of white supremacy and patriarchy, the sonically vivid and cinematic poems in Notes from the Passenger arrive like missives from a journey between the living and the dead. Gillian’s use of play, music, and humor offers us pleasure when we need it most, reminding us to turn our heads toward the light. Gillian Conoley is the author of nine collections. A long-time resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, she is currently Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at Sonoma State University where she edits VOLT.

New Book :: Latina Leadership Lessons

Latina Leadership Lessons: Fifty Latinas Speak edited by Delia García book cover image

Latina Leadership Lessons: Fifty Latinas Speak edited by Delia García
Arte Público Press, November 2022

The recipient of numerous awards and accolades, García gathers “Top Ten Leadership Lessons” from 50 high-achieving women. This “who’s who” of movers-and-shakers contains representatives from government, corporate and non-profit worlds. While each woman’s unique experiences and heritage are reflected in her advice, there are several recommendations that made many of the lists, such as the importance of believing in oneself, the need to mentor and be mentored, remembering one’s roots, embracing change and taking care of one’s physical and emotional needs.

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 Falling Crystal Palace

The Falling Crystal Palace by Carl Fuerst book cover image

The Falling Crystal Palace by Carl Fuerst
Planet Bizarro, February 2023

The residents of Sterling, Indiana don’t know who they are. They can’t recognize voices on the telephone. They can’t recognize faces in the mirror. When their name is called, they don’t respond. When they flip through family photo albums, it’s like looking at strangers. Sixty-one-year-old Tory Stebbins runs a one-person Identity Verification agency that can help. But, as the town implodes, so does her business. She has fewer clients, stiffer competition, and her methods have become mysteriously ineffective. Tory is broke, lonely, and—most alarmingly—she’s now suffering from the same problems she’s helped her clients with over the length of her career. Just when her situation seems beyond hope, Tory receives a cryptic message from Hoppy Bashford, her best friend who disappeared forty years earlier. Tory’s quest to rescue Hoppy leads her through the strange, shifting landscapes. With the help of her odd intern, her bitter business rival, and her astrophysicist ex-wife, Tory ultimately follows Hoppy’s trail to the Crystal Palace Resort. To locate her lost friend, escape from the resort, and find a cure for the identity-scrambling, reality-bending condition from which everyone in her world suffers, Tory must come to terms with who she is.