NewPages Blog :: New Books

The Rwanda Poems: Voices and Visions from the Genocide by Andrew Kaufman
NYQ Books, March 2023

The only book of poetry to date devoted to the Rwanda genocide and published in this country, this is a work of nonfictional poetry, a cousin in genre to the nonfictional novel. It is based not only on the poet’s observations and encounters during months spent in post-genocide Rwanda, but on his numerous extensive interviews with survivors, all of whom lost most if not all of their families, and with convicted genocide perpetrators, conducted in prisons. The result is a startling book of poems that by turns is unthinkably horrifying, heartbreaking, and enraging, yet which at times breaks unexpectedly into stunning revelatory moments of grace.

As a poetry of witness this book reveals what it is like to carry on with daily life in a society where nearly every adult male is either a genocide survivor or perpetrator, almost every woman either a survivor or the wife of a perpetrator, and where nearly every child at the time of the genocide witnessed multiple killings, often of immediate family members. Ranging from free verse to stanzaic forms, this book by an NEA-award-winning poet uses tools and methods of poetry to distill each of its many varied voices to its essence, allowing those who are heard in these poems to speak for themselves, often in juxtapositions that lend the book the structure and tension of a drama. Considered more broadly, The Rwanda Poems is a book about the extremities of evil that the human psyche is capable of enduring and inflicting, and the resulting psychic costs to survivors and perpetrators.

Music for Ghosts by Christopher Locke
NYQ Books, May 2022

Christopher Locke’s new collection of poetry Music for Ghosts is a visceral testament to youth and hubris, erasure, and forgiveness. The heart of these poems straddles the space between the personal and the universally lived, where the past can shatter our best intentions at love, while the future holds us wanting at the precipice of joy. From his Pentecostal childhood to the blazing religion of punk rock, Locke caromed straight into the void of addiction, even as marriage and fatherhood hinted at something better. But in spite of loss, or maybe because of it, Locke remains steadfast in his quest to seek fearlessly and intentionally, reclaiming every light offered in hope’s name.

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The Taco Boat by Al Ortolani
NYQ Books, October 2022

Al Ortolani’s most recent collection of poems, The Taco Boat, focuses not just on the people of the American Midwest, but on the connection to the humor and pragmatism of working men and women. His poems are vignettes from the fields of Kansas, the hills of the Ozarks, and the streets of Kansas City. They are about good dogs and crazy cats. His people are family and strangers alike. Both are seen with an empathetic eye. They share an attachment to the joys and exasperations of being human, struggling to understand, to thrive. The poems in The Taco Boat step back from the day-to-day with an acceptance of the life its characters have been tossed into. The images are frequently taken from the natural world, but just as often are from the mechanic’s garage, the fast-food restaurant, the baseball diamond, the assisted living cafeteria. The poems in The Taco Boat are about the relationships people build, dismantle, and build again.

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Vistor by Clint Margrave
NYQ Books, October 2022

The poems in Clint Margrave’s Visitor, travel to distant lands and familiar ones, through museum doors and down the aisles of grocery stores, into the pages of books and along the shared walls of an apartment complex, far out in space and up close in the inner space of love and loss, life and death. Visitor is a collection that calls on readers to let it in. Clint Margrave is the author of several books of fiction and poetry, including Lying Bastard, Salute the Wreckage, and The Early Death of Men. His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Rattle, The Moth, Ambit, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others.

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THIRDOUROBOROS by Richard Kostelanetz
NYQ Books, September 2022

Richard Kostelanetz says in his preface to THIRDOUROBOROS, “When I first heard the epithet afterimage as an honorific among visual artists, I recognized it as analogous to the strongest lines in strictly verbal poetry.” In his third installment of this series, Kostelanetz visually lays out words in circles. And just like the ancient symbol, allows them to devour themselves as much as they create themselves as afterimages are embedded in the reader’s mind. The two preceding books in this series are OUROBOROS and SECONDOUROBOROS, also from NYQ Books.

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It’s About Time by Barry Wallenstein
NYQ Books, February 2022

Barry Wallenstein’s poetry, from his first book in 1977 to now, addresses his awareness of time’s swift passing. The poems in It’s About Time continue this time-honored theme and its attendant thoughts and emotions. Now in his eighth decade, this theme is paramount. While time is explicitly central in the first and eighth sections, other sections speak of desire, music, current events, creatures of all sizes, and states of mind. Poems in each of the groups reflect the anxieties of our current period including references to the ongoing pandemic and quarantine, as well as overriding reflections on temporality. These poems also are full of appreciation and gratitude for life’s bounty. While avoiding the “personal” or autobiographical, Wallenstein’s emotional life is more apparent here than in his work of the past.

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Under Sleep’s New Moon: Rescued Poems 1970-1990 by Joseph Hutchison
NYQ Books, September 2021

The road a poet travels is often littered with unrealized fragments, half-realized drafts, and unfinished poems that found their ways into a magazine but never earned their way into a book. If a poet is lucky, a few such left-behinds might be “rescued,” released into their true form thanks to abilities that have ripened over many years of practice. In Under Sleep’s New Moon, Joseph Hutchison (Colorado Poet Laureate, 2014-2019) offers a range of such poems, all rescued from twenty years of writing between 1970-1990. The poems in this new/old collection are by turns personal and public, surreal and naturalistic, musical and plain-spoken. But all explore the liminal regions we live in every day, too often unconscious of what we’re finding there. What this poet found there he has lifted into new configurations, where at last the poems can speak for themselves.

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Taking the F Train by Linda Lerner
NYQ Books, October 2021

In Linda Lerner’s Taking the F Train, a New York City poet rides the F Train through the final years of the 20th century into the 21st; both gentrification and technology are rapidly transforming life as she has known it. Her old haunts – cafés, bookstores, diners, are being replaced by luxury co-ops. There are also losses due to illness and aging – those of others as well her own. And it’s not ok, she cries out! At the same time, for every push forward into the future, she’s witnessing an opposite push back into the past by the so-called leader of the free world. Nothing makes sense to her anymore. There’s only what can be salvaged by art…the act of creation.

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Minotaur Snow by Ryan Quinn Flanagan
NYQ Books, January 2022

Ryan Quinn Flanagan’s Minotaur Snow is an urban menagerie of very human poems. Difficult situations, individual foibles, that unescapable rush of the modern city; the sights and sounds and smells and touch, all told with great humor and at times, compassion. Flanagan peoples the landscape in such a way that his experiences become your experiences, his revelations and perspectives a busy populous of comings and goings all captured in a language that is both highly accessible and littered with odd notions or turns of phrase. Minotaur Snow above all else is a book that captures what is timeless to our shared experience, but with a fierce individuality that washes over everything like a heavy falling snow.

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!