Before Lawrence v. Texas: The Making of a Queer Social Movement by Wesley G. Phelps University of Texas Press, February 2023
In 2003 the US Supreme Court overturned anti-sodomy laws across the country, ruling in Lawrence v. Texas that the Constitution protects private consensual sex between adults. To some, the decision seemed to come like lightning from above, altering the landscape of America’s sexual politics all at once. In actuality, many years of work and organizing led up to the legal case, and the landmark ruling might never have happened were it not for the passionate struggle of Texans who rejected their state’s discriminatory laws. Before Lawrence v. Texas tells the story of the long, troubled, and ultimately hopeful road to constitutional change. Wesley G. Phelps describes the achievements, setbacks, and unlikely alliances along the way. Over the course of decades, and at great risk to themselves, gay and lesbian Texans and their supporters launched political campaigns and legal challenges, laying the groundwork for Lawrence. Phelps shares the personal experiences of the people and couples who contributed to the legal strategy that ultimately overturned the state’s discriminatory law.
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Like Keegan’s earlier book, Small Things Like These, Foster is slight in size, but not in emotional heft. This novella tells the story of a nameless girl in the Irish countryside whose parents must send her to stay with neighbors for a summer while her mother is pregnant. The main financial problem seems to be her father who loses cows in card games and has a liquid supper on a regular basis, while her mother has too many children to pay attention to all of them. The Kinsellas, who take the girl for the summer, don’t care much for her father, Dan, and it’s clear he thinks similarly of them. The situation is one of convenience more than care. Or so it seems. The Kinsellas love the girl in a way that neither of her parents do, a care they show in small ways that seem obvious: her new clothes and a bit of spending money for ice cream; a lack of shame when she wets the bed; lessons on how to read and cook. By the end of the novella, the Kinsellas have fostered the girl not only by keeping her for a few months, but by encouraging her, nourishing her, promoting her development, and, most importantly, cherishing her.
Fosterby Claire Keegan. Grove Atlantic, November 2022.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
A Fire in the Hills by Afaa Weaver Red Hen Press, April 2023
In A Fire in the Hills, Afaa Weaver focuses on one of the central threads in his body of work. His ongoing project of an articulation of self in relation to the external landscape of the community and the world and the writing of spirit through those revelations of sublimation of self gives way here to a material focus. The racial references are explicit as are the complexities of life lived as a Black man born in America in the mid-twentieth century. These are poems emanating from an attempt to follow Daoist philosophy for most of his life. Knowledge of other is in relation to knowledge of self, and self is an illusory continuum, a perspective wherein the poet embodies the transcendent arc of Malcolm X’s life as credo.
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The Naked Room by Willa Schneberg Broadstone Books, January 2023
Poetry is a form of writing ideally suited to the expression of emotion and the most profound and subtle workings of the mind. But what if that mind is shattered, and those emotions in disarray? Such is the subject explored in Willa Schneberg’s new poetry collection The Naked Room, which draws on her experiences as a therapist to take readers on a journey through the disturbing history of psychotherapy and the treatment of mental illness, and into the current state of the art and state of the world. What keeps this from being a grim undertaking is the sheer beauty and precision of her language, as in this passage from “Tiny Monuments” describing the urns that hold the cremated remains of patients at the Oregon State Hospital (depicted on the cover of the book in a photograph by the poet): “These tiny monuments to the scorned and unknown, / wear patinas of pink, burnt sienna, ocher, aqua, / and if you look closely you will find / moon craters, archipelagos, frozen waterfalls, / Big Dippers and dunes with lone tracks.” The goal of healing that drives her therapeutic practice informs these poems as well, ending in the necessity of love, her closing image that of a long-time couple spooning in bed, “as if we would always / fit that way.” These poems, too, fit that way, a comforting reassurance.
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Reading TimeLock by Howard Berk and Peter Burk is a great way to celebrate National Science Fiction Day (January 2). In the crime-ridden near future where a bold new technology transforms the justice system and challenges America’s moral compass, the President authorizes a hugely controversial program: TimeLock, a cellular acceleration process whereby select prisoners are instantly aged the total number of years of their sentence. In other words – three strikes and you’re old . . . very old. Only one problem—what happens if someone is innocent? When everyman Morgan Eberly is arrested for a murder he didn’t commit, he’s subjected to this experimental new technology. Now 43 and on the run, Morgan teams up with Janine Price, the FBI agent who arrested him, as they embark on a dangerous quest to find out the terrifying truth behind the TimeLock program.
Special thanks to Peter Berk for this title which he co-wrote with his late father, Howard. “My dad – Howard Berk – wrote numerous shows, films and novels, with credits including Columbo, The Rockford Files and Mission: Impossible. A few years before his passing, we wrote a screenplay which I later novelized along with several sequels also based on related scripts. TimeLock is the first of five planned novels in the series.”
Stories No One Hopes Are About Them Short Fiction by A. J. Bermudez University of Iowa Press, November 2022
At once playfully dark and slyly hopeful, Stories No One Hopes Are About Them explores convergences of power, privilege, and place. Characters who are ni de aquí, ni de allá—neither from here nor there—straddle competing worlds, disrupt paradigms, and transition from objects of other people’s stories to active subjects and protagonists of their own. Narratives of humanity and environment entwine with nuanced themes of colonization, queerness, and evolution at the forefront. Big things happen in this collection. But it’s also a collection of small intimacies: misremembered names, chipped teeth, and private rituals; unexpected alliances and barely touched knees beneath uniform skirts; minutiae of the natural world; incidents that quietly, achingly, and delightfully transgress the familiar. Winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award.
Julie Otsuka uses shifting points of view to make her books both universal and specific. In her novel, The Swimmers, she begins with the first person plural point of view to give voice to the titular swimmers, exploring the diversity of their reactions when the pool develops a crack, a metaphor for the loss to come in the second half of the novel. Otsuka sets up the idea of memory, collective and individual, she will explore through Alice, one of the swimmers. The reader learns little about Alice in the second half, though Otsuka shifts to the second person point of view to put the reader in the position of Alice’s daughter (who sounds quite similar to Otsuka, from the few hints the reader receives, including her mother’s interment in camps during World War II, one of the memories her mother holds onto throughout much of her deterioration). The reader sees Alice from a distance as one of the swimmers and up close as a mother who is becoming a different person than the daughter remembers. The reader empathizes with the mother and daughter, but knows, as the doctors make clear, there is nothing to do, but to endure the inevitable loss and rebuild a life after that loss.
The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka. Knopf, February 2022.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
Semantics of the World: Selected Poems by Rómulo Bustos Aguirre Edited and translated by Nohora Arrieta Fernández and Mark A. Sanders University of New Mexico Press, December 2022
A poet of both the body and spirit, the work of Rómulo Bustos Aguirre often explores the nature of existence at the turn of the twenty-first century–humankind’s relationship to itself and the universe, the meaning or purpose, if any, of human existence, and the daunting task of discerning that meaning. Critics have described his poetry as highly refined lyricism, metaphysical, existential, and at times erotic. Semantics of the World introduces the English-speaking world to the exciting work of Rómulo Bustos Aguirre, one of Colombia’s most celebrated living writers.
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In her latest novel, Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver updates Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (thus the name of the titular character), moving the story to turn-of-the-millenium Appalachia. This approach tempts those readers who are familiar with Dickens’s novel to play a matching game with characters and events, but Kingsolver’s novel goes much further than a literary exercise that tests readers’ nineteenth-century novel knowledge. Her interest in updating Dickens’ novel is to explore the poverty rampant in Appalachia (as it was in Dickens’s London), a problem made significantly worse because of the opiod crisis. While Dickens’s David struggles through his own forms of exploitation, Kingsolver’s Demon, his friends, and his family are all victims in various ways to the addiction that pharmaceutical companies created in places and people who lacked the means to fight back. As with cases from real life, Demon comes by his addictions innocently, but then struggles with them for hundreds of pages, despite those around him who are trying to help. While Kingsolver shows a community decimated by drugs, she creates characters—as does Dickens—the reader cares about. She puts a face to the headlines many of us have the luxury of skimming over and reminds readers there are too many people whose lives seem destined for destruction, through no fault of their own.
Demon Copperhead by Barabara Kingsolver. Harper Collins Publishers, October 2022.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
The Wandering Radiance: Selected Poems of Hilde Domin Translated by Mark S. Burrows Green Linden Press, April 2023
Hilde Domin is one of the most highly regarded German poets of the 20th century. A poet of the Jewish faith, she fled political developments in Germany in 1932 and spent more than twenty years in exile, first in Italy then the Dominican Republic, which became her self-chosen namesake. Her work was deeply influenced by her time in exile and the loss of homeland. After returning to Germany, she was known as the “poet of return” and received numerous honors for her literary work, including the Carl Zuckmayer Medal, the Nelly Sachs Prize, and the Grand Federal Cross of Merit. Presented bilingually, many of these poems appear here for the first time in English. Read a sample from Under a Warm Green Linden, Issue 13.
In What You Wish For, Ruth Bardon uses a feminist lens to take a fresh look at wishes, witches, magic spells, princesses, sleeping beauties, and 21st century queen bees. Her poems are sympathetic both to hopeful, yearning heroines and to equally hopeful, yearning villains and minor characters. At the same time, they are darkly pessimistic about the possibility of happy endings. With subtlety and humor, these quiet poems radically deconstruct familiar stories. Ruth Bardon grew up in Highland Park, New Jersey, and lived in a number of midwestern cities before firmly settling in Durham, North Carolina. She received an MFA degree from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1982 and a PhD in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1995. Her poems have appeared in journals, and her first chapbook, Demon Barber, was published by Main Street Rag in 2020.
In Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch, Rivka Galchen uses the story of Johannes Kepler’s mother, whom her neighbors accused of being a witch, to explore how easily people will bow to societal pressures. Katharina is a woman like many in the early 1600s: unable to read or write, but knowledgeable of the natural world. She is also a widow in possession of property. That combination makes her an ideal target for her accusers. Galchen also creates a seemingly innocent bystander—Katharina’s neighbor Simon, who serves as her guardian in the absence of her children—to take down her testimony. The reader watches the world through Simon’s eyes, as well as Katharina’s account of her experiences, and the reader also watches Simon react to the pressures the townspeople put on him. Through Simon, Galchen raises the question of who is willing to stand beside the accused even to their own detriment, as well as exploring what it feels like to be the accused. In her recreation of a time that seems so different from our own, Galchen reminds readers we will all have such moments—both of bearing witness and of standing up for ourselves—turning a time-bound tale into one that is terribly relevant.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
Black Fire This Time, Volume 1, edited by Kim McMillon and Kofi Antwi Aquarius Press/Willow Books, September 2022
Black Fire This Time, Volume 1 is an anthology celebrating the roots and legacy of the Black Arts Movement begins with a foreword by Ishmael Reed and introduction by Margot Crawford and features the works of over 100 poets and writers, including (in no particular order) Nikki Giovanni, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Amina Baraka, Eugene B. Redmond, Lucille Clifton, Haki R. Madhubuti, Wanda Coleman, E. Ethelbert Miller, Jerry Ward, Tom Dent, Michael Simanga, Quincy Troupe, Margaret Porter Troupe, Dudley Randall, Askia Toure, QR Hand, Jr., Denise Nicholas, Sonia Sanchez and many more. Michigan writer Denise Nicholas’s chapter is based on her true story as a voting rights volunteer from Michigan in 1964, inspired Michigan’s Office of the Governor to issue a Proclamation for an annual Freedom Summer Remembrance Day. Aquarius Press owner Heather Buchanan is a graduate of Wayne State University and UM-Dearborn, respectively. She was a director of the Idlewild Writers Conference and Midwest Poets & Writers Conference. Her press publishes many of the nation’s top poets and writers of color and national laureates, Including Dr. Mona Lisa Saloy (Louisiana), devorah major and Tongo Eisen-Martin (San Francisco) and Lupe Mendez (Texas). If not for yourself, consider purchasing a copy for your local public or school library.
instead, it is dark by Cynthia Hogue Red Hen Press, April 2023
Following her husband’s massive heart attack, Cynthia Hogue began writing poems based on dreams and memories that he, born during WWII in occupied France, had as a child growing up in a time of vast postwar food shortages. Hogue embarked on a quest to discover if there were more such memories in her extended family in France. When asked, family members told her never-before-shared tales of parents who were POWs, collaborators, Resistance fighters, and one most vulnerable—of a hidden child. Hogue spent years researching the lives of civilians during war, work crystallized in her tenth collection of poetry, instead, it is dark. The personal is alchemized as Hogue weaves history and present day in poems that explore how there, here, an individual voice in the stark language of lyric poetry, speaks a complex truth and casts a laser light on violence, resilience, survival, and—the heart of this collection—love.
Jody Keisner’s Under My Bed and Other Essays explores the ritualistic aspect of fear, the summoning of anxiety’s ghosts, and what it means to be a woman living under the promise of male violence. Although Keisner speaks truth to power on what it is like to live with anxiety, it is the exploration of fear and her grandmother that ties the themes of womanhood, illness, and survival. Keisner’s three-section arrangement (Origins, Under the Skin, and Risings) plays an intricate role in how the work is both read and experienced. The reader could interpret the three sections as a balanced academic and creative essay of the Genesis of anxiety, the kinesthetic journey of a disabled body, and the resurrection of Self, which are all ideas Keisner studies deeply about herself.
In “Origins,” the opening essay, Keisner explores her fear as her partner asks, “Why does your mind go down such dark corridors?” This is the premise of the collection of essays in which Keisner, while realizing her own body has an autoimmune disorder, is also realizing that the world is constantly telling women that there is always a threat. Learning how to coexist with this notion, Keisner offers an exploration of female-bodied anxiety through beautifully curated pieces with profound research that both enriches and empowers the reader. Always paying respect to queer and disabled bodies, Keisner unites her voice as part of a symphony of those trying to survive in an increasingly antagonistic world.
To offer a counter point to the deeply embedded fear, Keisner devotes beautiful moments and lyrical prose to speak of her beautifully messy and human grandmother, Grace. Always studying the power behind language, Keisner speaks of her paternal grandmother with admiration and fondness, “My grandmother protected my joy-filled childhood, but to do so, she had to keep a part of herself from me: her pain and suffering.” It is through Grace, ironically, that the readers find a form of respite and the goal that, regardless of how much this world tells us we’re not welcomed, there are ways to not be afraid.
Reviewer bio: Olga Montenegro is a grad student at Bridgewater State University. She splits her time between Mexico City and Massachusetts. You can find her @ActuallyOlga on Twitter.
Chaos, Crossing by Olivia Elias Translated by Kareem-James Abu-Zeid World Poetry Books, November 2022
In her English-language debut, with a foreword by Najwan Darwish, acclaimed French-language poet of the Palestinian diaspora Olivia Elias probes deeply into the upheavals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Chaos, Crossing—translated by award-winning translator Kareem James Abu-Zeid—is a powerful chronicle of uprootedness, of times marked by inequality, injustice, and disconnection. These poems—presented here in a bilingual edition—seek the calm at the center of the storm, the still point amidst the chaos. Poet of the Palestinian diaspora, born in Haifa in 1944, Olivia Elias writes in French. She lived until she was 16 years old in Lebanon where her family took refuge in 1948, then in Montréal-Canada, before moving to France. Characterized by terse, laconic language and strong rhythms, her poetry shows a deep sensitivity to the Palestinian cause, the plight of refugees and human suffering in general. Her work, translated into English, Arabic, Spanish, Italian and Japanese, has been published in numerous journals and in anthologies.
Night by Ennio Moltedo Translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz World Poetry Books, November 2022
Written during the Pinochet dictatorship but not published until democracy’s return, Ennio Moltedo’s Night is a masterpiece of controlled rage, mourning, resistance, and astonishing humor, and the first of his books to appear in English translation. Moltedo, whom Raúl Zurita called “one of the finest, greatest, most curious and honorable poets of Chile,” is at once lyrical and political, a dramatist, a historian, and a critic. Ennio Moltedo (1931-2012) spent his life in the small Chilean coastal cities of Valparaíso and Viñ a del Mar. Born to Genoese immigrants, he is a poet of the New World Mediterranean: inspired, chastened, and challenged by the ancients, and in conversation with his contemporaries, including Huidobro, Girondo, Neruda, and de Rokha. A revered “poet’s poet,” he published eight individual collections of poetry, as well as an anthology of Romanian poetry co-translated with Neruda, and a chronicle of Neruda’s life (Neruda: poeta del cerro Florida). Longtime director of the University of Valparaíso Press, Moltedo also wrote criticism, journalism, and text for books of visual art and cartoons.
As fearless as she is creative, Chelsea Stickle reaches deep into her bag of tricks to “wow” her readers with every story in her debut chapbook, Breaking Points. Many of these stories captivate the reader in such a way that it feels criminal that they’re only flash fiction pieces, but it’s beautiful enough to accept them as the art forms they are. The courage to experiment with various styles of writing, including a multiple-choice quiz and a flow chart, reveal Stickle’s hidden genius by telling deep stories in unorthodox ways, one that might even spark the beginning of a writing revolution! A standout piece, “How Mature Are You: A Quiz,” exemplifies the glories of pushing conventional boundaries within flash fiction formatting through its whimsical and ironically hard-nosed approach to storytelling with a choose-your-own-adventure type of beat. These kinds of structures, while puzzling at first glance, expand a reader’s view of how effectively a writer can tell a story without falling into familiar patterns. It would not be surprising to see a wide range of unique, personalized styles born from Stickle’s innovation. Ultimately, this collection is more than just an ensemble of witty tales but a mosaic of brilliant artistry.
Breaking Points by Chelsea Stickle. Black Lawrence Press, April 2021.
Reviewer bio: Matthew Rodriguez is a graduate student at Bridgewater State University pursuing his English MAT (Master of Arts in Teaching) and currently works as a freshman English teacher at B.M.C. Durfee High School.
The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone is a collection of distinguished and diverse writers gathered in a volume of unifying isolation narratives, a wonderful contradiction illustrating the affliction or privilege of solitude. Editor Natalie Eve Garrett aimed “to summon cathartic personal essays illuminating the experience of being alone” to challenge the shame and the taboo aspect of discussing one’s loneliness. Collected and crafted before and during the worst of pandemic lockdowns, the stories act upon the hard-learned lessons of the times, showing our isolation was not some passing phase.
Writing can be a punishingly lonely craft, so it’s the writers themselves that tie this collection together best. Each entry is a mosaic showing the complex solidarity of feeling alone. It’s in the “utter brownness” of Claire Dederer’s West Texas landscape and in the silenced pain of Yiyun Li, who “disowned [her] native tongue.” We feel the despair of it in Imani Perry’s hospital room, described as “a funhouse of refracted and repeated loneliness,” and the “different texture” of loneliness in the pre-internet era of Lev Grossman’s “Maine Man.”
Each contribution is a flare sent out of the darkness. In their glare, we see the individual reflections of loneliness. In their glow, we bask in the rebuttal.
Reviewer bio: Sam Tarr is a graduate student at Bridgewater State University and writer living in Weymouth, MA. His work has appeared in 86 Logic and The Bridge.
Trouble Funk by Douglas Manuel Red Hen Press, April 2023
The speaker of Douglas Manuel’s Testify, a book of elegiac interrogations of race in America, returns to divulge his parents’ love story in the forthcoming poetry collection, Trouble Funk. Set in Anderson, Indiana in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, Trouble Funk exposes ways Black Love is thwarted but never destroyed by racism, classism, and sexism. Eschewing the “lyrical I” in favor of a third person omniscient point of view, Manuel exhibits how the latter half of the twentieth century rhymes with our current moment when it comes to political division, the hardships that Black folks face, and the rise of toxic right-wing policies. In many ways, Trouble Funk serves as a prequel to Testify, in which Manuel seeks to better understand and love himself, his family, and his country.
In her heartfelt memoir of four chapbook essays, Animal, Roadkill, Ashes, Gone, Emily Pittinos animates familial memories and the personal process of grief. This collection pays tribute, not only to the memory of our passed loved ones, but to the exponential growth of their children in their absence. As we learn the details of her ancestral losses, the narrator weaves in and out of time and space. Through the iterative process of processing her father’s unexpected death we “[become] squires of each other’s grief.” Pittinos’s familiar trauma is rendered stark and bare in this “summary of his body.”
Our relatable Gen-X protagonist, a wry wit demonstrating vulnerable frankness, reminds us that, “We’ll live in cardboard boxes until we die poor and alone” in the inevitably “promise-less future.” Pittinos’s voice powerfully echoes generational attitudes of frustration and hopelessness without getting bogged down. “Nothing will ever be the same,” and we are “always preparing for the worst,” but these essays gracefully illuminate that “the mind abuses its license to change.” In the face of trauma and loss, the mind finds a way to connect back to its natural state, one of peace, gratitude, and remembrance.
Reviewer bio: Alice Verlezza, educator, writer, and mother of two was raised in Rhode Island. An MS graduate of Queens University in Sociology, Alice continues her scholarly work earning an English Masters at Bridgewater State University where she researches gender identity and mental health in narrative.
Her Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems, 1971-2021 by Irena Klepfisz Wesleyan University Press, December 2022
A trailblazing lesbian poet, child Holocaust survivor, and political activist whose work is deeply informed by socialist values, Irena Klepfisz is a vital and individual American voice. This book is the first complete collection of her work. For fifty years, Klepfisz has written powerful, searching poems about relatives murdered during the war, recent immigrants, a lost Yiddish writer, a Palestinian boy in Gaza, and various people in her life. In her introduction to Klepfisz’s A Few Words in the Mother Tongue, Adrienne Rich wrote: “[Klepfisz’s] sense of phrase, of line, of the shift of tone, is almost flawless.” Irena Klepfisz taught Jewish Women’s Studies at Barnard College for 22 years. She is the author of four books of poetry, a collection of essays, and was co-editor of The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women’s Anthology. An advocate of the Yiddish language and active in its renaissance in the United States, she has published poetry and essays have appeared in Jewish Currents, Tablet Magazine, In Geveb, Sinister Wisdom, The Manhattan Review, Conditions, The Georgia Review and Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures.
In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful by Abigail Chabitnoy Wesleyan University Press, November 2022
In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful, poetry by Abigail Chabitnoy, is a meditation on water, land, women, and violent environmental changes as they affect both the natural world and human migration. The poet reckons with the unsettling realities that women experience, questioning the cause and effect of events and asking why stories of oppression are so often simply accepted as the only stories. Alutiiq language is used throughout these poems that are in conversation with history, ancestors, and an uncertain future, in imagery that moves in waves, returning again and again to the ocean, and a deep visioning of the “current.” Abigail Chabitnoy is a Koniag descendent and a member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, Alaska. Her first book, How to Dress a Fish, won the Colorado Book Award in the Poetry category and was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. She is an assistant professor at UMass Amherst.
Grief and loss in Sin City. Erin Langner’s debut essay collection, Souvenirs from Paradise, hits on the allure and beauty of one of America’s favorite tourist destinations – Las Vegas. The backdrop of the classic Vegas casinos led Langner to receive the Wendy S. Walters’ 2021 Creative Nonfiction Book Award from publisher Zone 3 Press. Weaving in the city’s history – the fabled old strip, various casino myths, and celebrity stories – with her own experiences and emotions are what makes this collection so hard hitting. Langner convinces the reader of all the charm and complexity of Vegas’s most popular casinos, driving us with her when she writes about her first road trip into town. She captures the outsider-moved-in perspective seamlessly while reconciling the irreparable pain of loss: “People had been telling me for years that I would love Las Vegas, but I refused to believe them.” Neon lights, ringing slot machines, musical impressions, mob memories, and painful history. . . what’s not to love? Langner expresses a complicated and scintillating love in brilliant lyrical prose.
Reviewer bio: Shauna Briggs is an English teacher on Cape Cod and is currently pursuing her MA in English at Bridgewater State University. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, dog, and two cats.
Steinbeck’s Imaginarium: Essays on Writing, Fishing, and Other Critical Matters by Robert DeMott University of New Mexico Press, November 2022
In Steinbeck’s Imaginarium, Robert DeMott delves into the imaginative, creative, and sometimes neglected aspects of John Steinbeck’s writing. DeMott positions Steinbeck as a prophetic voice for today as much as he was for the Depression-era 1930s as the essays explore the often unknown or unacknowledged elements of Steinbeck’s artistic career that deserve closer attention. He writes about the determining scientific influences, such as quantum physics and ecology, in Cannery Row and considers Steinbeck’s addiction to writing through the lens of the extensive, obsessive full-length journals that he kept while writing three of his best-known novels – The Grapes of Wrath, The Wayward Bus, and East of Eden. DeMott insists that these monumental works of fiction all comprise important statements on his creative process and his theory of fiction writing. DeMott further blends his personal experience as a lifelong angler with a reading of several neglected fishing episodes in Steinbeck’s work. Collectively, the chapters illuminate John Steinbeck as a fully conscious, self-aware, literate, experimental novelist whose talents will continue to warrant study and admiration for years to come.
apocrifa poetry by Amber Flame Red Hen Press, May 2023
apocrifa imagines a love that sits comfortably at the crossroads of commitment and freedom. The developing intimacy between a lover and their beloved is propelled by a compendium of words for love, romance, sex, relationships, and affection that do not lend to direct translation in English. Serving as both titles and markers of the progression of time, these poetically defined words highlight the growing tension of one who claims “i cannot love you enough / to unlove the wide world” and yet is inextricably drawn to the offer of “a place of sustenance, rest, and my delight in your very bones.” Heavily inspired by the metaphors and structures of Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon), from the Apocryphal books of the Bible, the characters speak to each other with contrapuntal call-and-response while letting readers into their private thoughts through epistles, sestinas, odes, and other poetic forms.
Margaret R. Sáraco’s solid debut poetry collection, If There Is No Wind, begins with a paean to a once-imposing, now-deceased maple tree, skillfully interweaving emotions and memories: “we sat on the stump remains, holding vigil, wishing her well in the afterlife.” It ends with a poem that transforms her into a seabird, exchanging the anguish of being shut in for the joy of freedom, “swimming in warmth, bathing my afterimage away.” In between are 77 pages of sometimes melancholy, sometimes uplifting, but always affecting, poetry. With a personal bias toward surrealism, perhaps my favorite poem in this collection is the lightly surrealism-tinged “Lifeline,” in which Saraco considers that her life has been spent “seated in a kayak / paddling rivers I’ve never seen.” She is waiting for her turn
To pull the kayak ashore, climb out discover what is buried in my dense weeds.
In the next-to-last poem in this book, “Quiet Moment,” Sáraco views a reflected moon in a puddle on a clear night and is waiting “for a message / to tell me what this means.” It is indeed a feeling that many of us have had.
If There Is No Wind by Margaret R. Sáraco. Human Error Publishing, September 2022.
Reviewer bio: R. Bremner has been writing of incense, peppermints, and the color of time since the 1960s in journals and anthologies including International Poetry Review and Climate of Opinion: Sigmund Freud in Poetry. Eight published books and chapbooks bear his name, including Hungry Words (Alien Buddha Press).
What Small Sound by Francesca Bell Red Hen Press, May 2023
Francesca Bell’s second collection of poems, What Small Sound, interrogates what it means to be a mother in a country where there are five times as many guns as children; female in a country where a woman is raped every two minutes; and citizen of a world teeming with iniquities and peril. In poems rich in metaphor and music and unflinching in their gaze, Bell offers an exacting view of the audiologist’s booth and the locked ward as she grapples with the gradual loss of her own hearing and the mental illness spreading its dark wings over her family. This is a book of plentiful sorrows but also of small and sturdy comforts, a book that chronicles the private, lonely life of the body as well as its tender generosities. What Small Sound wrestles with some of the broadest, most complicated issues of our time and also with the most fundamental issue of all: love. How it shelters and anchors us. How it breaks us and, ultimately, how it pieces us back together.
In Borealis, a stunning long form essay published by Coffee House Press, Aisha Sabatini Sloan reckons with the vast expanse of nature, simultaneously negotiating her relationship to queerness, blackness and the Alaskan landscape. Written lyrically with the use of white space as a conduit for understanding solitude as a person of color in an overwhelming white population, Sloan wonders “when there is no Black figure, what am I supposed to like looking at?” She artfully explores interactions as intimate collisions and reconciliations, whether that be a lover or the way color displays in the sky; all experiences are showcased as this prismatic aurora. Sloan paints her images with dazzling natural light, calling us to take a moment to look and listen to the world around us. Borealis is one great luminous moment, a meditation of self-reflection in contrast to the wilderness. What is similar and what is starkly different becomes resigned to the mystery of images, the way they mimic and shift: “The fog has lowered itself like haunches over a toilet across the tops of mountains.” This essay is as concerned with music as it is silence; we hear “The opening strains of Bjork’s ‘Bachelorette’ play as a bald eagle opens its wings above a lamppost on the spit,” or how “Beaches tend to mean your ear hurts a little; the wind is loud.” Lists give way to observations and letters to a nephew in jail expose how captivity is not just the body in a physical place. Sloan creates collages of color and revelations, “Now I think crying is like touching time. A half-hearted attempt to crash into now.” Sloan’s essay encourages readers to spend time with nature in a way that is patient, humorous and imaginative, with the reminder to not look past any moment, as there is magic and horror everywhere.
Borealis: An Essay by Aisha Sabatini Sloan. Coffee House Press, November 2021.
Reviewer Bio: Alexandria Machado is a graduate student studying English at Bridgewater State University and a writer living in Providence, RI. Her poems, essays and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Boshemia, Vagabond City, The Merrimack Review, 86 Logic and other publications.
Secret Waltz by Karen Lee Brown Flexible Press, June 2022
Secret Waltz by Karen Lee Brown follows the coming-of-age journeys of three teens whose lives are turned upside down by the secrets they keep. Four best friends, Will, Kirstin, Leo, and Emelia, are growing up together, finding themselves and what it means to be a budding adult. They do all the things teens do—hang out at the pool, bike everywhere, and discover their bodies. But this growing up thing is hard. On her 16th birthday, Emelia receives stunning news from her aunts who raised her. Seems they’ve been keeping a secret from her for her entire life, one that forces Emelia to re-evaluate everything she thought she know about her family and herself, sending her on a journey of discovery with few tools and no idea what she might find along the way. Meanwhile, Leo is struggling with his abusive father, who leads a polka band, drinks too much, and cheats on Leo’s mother. Leo plays the guitar. He’s good, too. But his father wants Leo to stay away from that so-called music of rock and roll. Their relationship is complex: Leo both looks up to and hates his father for the control he has over his music and his life. All that is hard enough, but then Leo and Emelia and their friends Will and Kirstin stumble across Sonya, someone they’ve seen at school but don’t really know, doing what to them is an inexplicable and horrifying act. What should they do? What can they do? This begins a chain of actions that escalate and spiral out of their control. In the end, Secret Waltz asks, what does it mean to be a “good girl” or a “good boy”? If you have a secret, do you get to still be “good”?
Orphaned from the age of 19, James Wrexham finds himself employed in a dreary office. Without friends or family, he is merely “a spectator in life”. James’ humdrum existence comes to an end after being hired as secretary to Mr. Jonathan Scrivener, an independent gentleman soon leaving England. He is set to receive a lavish salary and live in Scrivener’s flat while he is away. Scrivener remains a shadowy figure throughout; details about him come from a cast of his friends who in turn come to know James. Initially, they are all unaware of each other, and all describe Scrivener as a completely different person.
I am Jonathan Scrivener revolves around two central themes, the first being the existence of an untapped potential in the men and women of inter-war Britain. Instead of painting his characters as gloomy hollow men (seemingly well adjusted and successful people, yet spiritually bankrupt), Houghton is more optimistic. Wrexham writes countless formulaic job applications, but what he submits to Scrivener is a long epistle about himself, which he doesn’t reread. There is something in Wrexham that Scrivener appreciates, even if he is blind to it himself.
Houghton protects his characters from material constraints, because “leisure reveals us”. Work and physical necessity don’t allow us to understand ourselves: “of course people behave themselves on a treadmill; what the hell else can they do?” Wrexham was a shell of a man before being hired by Scrivener. The job he is hired into plays a minor part in the story. It simply functions as a springboard to leisure, the realm in which introspection begins, as well as life’s “real” problems. Though no doubt controversial, it is a profound thesis.
Although Valancourt Books have republished six of Houghton’s novels, there remains a dearth of content out of print. He wrote essays, theatre, poetry and plays; reprinting these would be a good way to show a newfound audience the other strings to Houghton’s bow. Many of his works are nearing their centenary; as the copyright is coming up for some of his underrated pieces, hopefully someone will resurrect them.
There is no biography on Houghton, and little else remains to pad out his life beyond a brief interview given to a writer’s directory in 1950. I Am Jonathan Scrivener was eventually dramatized in 1953, but this was 22 years after the book’s release, and by then Houghton’s fame had already begun to dwindle. He shared an agent with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Agatha Christie and William Faulkner (to name a few), and had a host of celebrity admirers. Whatever the reason for his lost fame, it will be obvious to his readers that it has nothing to do with literary merit.
Reviewer bio: Colm McKenna is a second-hand bookseller based in Paris. He has published and self-published an array of short stories and articles, hoping to eventually release a collection of stories. He is mainly interested in the works of John Cowper Powys, Claude Houghton and a range of Latin American writers.
Secret Agent Gals by Richard Gid Powers Livingston Press, February 2023
Called “the female version of a bromance,” Richard Gid Powers has created a world in which quick-witted Secret Agent Gals outwit bumbling Nazi assassins, boneheaded Communist spies, and slick Irish manure cart bombers, and must rescue dimwitted FBI Directors, fellow secret agents, crazy Presidents and First ladies from the dumb messes they get themselves into. Peggy Guggenheim and Baroness Hilla Rebay, both famous art collector/museum directors, are recruited by the FBI to plow through the painters the two women have been helping escape the Nazis, to see if there are any spies. That’s their start as counterspies, and how the story begins. In the end, they win the war and have lots of laughs doing it. They go through Special Agent basic training, bond with each other against their drill sergeant, learn to march, tie knots, practice jabs and jiu-jitsu, shoot John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd targets, work their Secret Decoder rings and get fitted for designer G-girl suits. The plot starts to get complicated à la Indian uprisings, revolts in the Japanese-American internment camps, and Irish terrorists. The Nazis kidnap General Eisenhower’s girlfriend, and Ike refuses to invade France until he gets her back. The G-Girls are sent to England, where they meet James Bond’s dad, Jonquil “Junk” Bond. Ike’s girlfriend is also a secret agent, in fact almost everyone in the book is a secret agent, and she has a plan to rub hair remover on Hitler’s moustache and steal his mojo. There is a supervillain, who is, by turns, a rogue FBI agent, an atomic spy, a Nazi traitor, an agitator at the Japanese-American internment camps, and finally head of a terrorist campaign by rebel FBI agents disguised as Irish manure cart bombers to kill Hoover and take over the Bureau. These Gals have seriously got their hands full, which makes for a rollicking read!
Betcha can’t eat just one! Reading the flash fictions in Luke Rolfes’s Impossible Naked Life, winner of the Acacia Fiction Prize from Kallisto Gaia Press, you’ll tell yourself: Okay, maybe just one more. . . and then read another half-dozen of them. These stories are, by turns (and turns of the pages that keep you wondering what the author will think of next) heartfelt and hilarious. The first sentence of each is a runway from which Rolfes takes an imaginative flight, and the only regret is that sometimes the ride seems too short. Some of the best of these stories are the longer ones—longer, in this case, meaning about ten pages.
One of the funniest, “My Neighbor, Ray,” begins: “On day three of the global crisis, a person crawls out of my mouth. The person is small at first—the size of a marble—but then he grows and grows until full sized.” The person is essentially the narrator’s (Luke’s) alter ego; he befriends the next-door neighbor, who moves in with Luke and his family. Covid cabin fever induces late-night discussions on subjects such as what the concerns of the toothbrush and razor might be if inanimate objects had feelings; and an afternoon when Luke’s kids use some of the overstock of toilet paper to wrap Ray up like a mummy in the backyard.
Not all the stories are surreal but, as does the one described above, all have an emotional accuracy. You aren’t sure where you’re going in Impossible Naked Life, but you’re enjoying a Denis Johnson kind of trip.
We invite Northern California authors to submit book-length poetry manuscripts. All manuscripts will be read blind. Sixteen Rivers values diversity. We encourage poets of color, young poets, and LGBTQ writers to submit. Sixteen Rivers Press is a shared-work collective, with a three-year commitment. PDF email submissions from November 1, 2022 to February 1, 2023.View flyer and see complete guidelines on our website.
Deadline: March 31, 2023 The 17th annual National Indie Excellence® Awards (NIEA) are open to all English language printed books available for sale, including small presses, mid-sized independent publishers, university presses, and self-published authors. NIEA is proud to be a champion of self-publishing and independent presses. Monetary awards, sponsorships, and entry rules are described in detail on our website.
Losing the Precious Few: How America Fails to Educate Its Minorities in Science and Engineering by Richard A. Tapia Arte Público Press, April 2022
A professor for almost 50 years in Rice University’s Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics, nationally acclaimed scholar Richard Tapia is struck by the number of Chinese students in the hallways and wonders how the United States can remain globally competitive. Tapia asserts it is critical to the nation’s health and well-being to improve the representation of “the precious few,” or domestic minority groups, in STEM education and careers. African Americans and Latinos alone make up 31% of the population, and he writes the country cannot maintain its economic and scientific health when such a large part of the population is left out of science and engineering. In addition, he contends the United States will not have racial justice without educational justice. Underrepresented groups must have equal access to higher education. Providing a road map to increase the representation of domestic minority learners in academia and STEM fields, this is a must-read for university administrators and professors who want to attract and retain a diverse student body. In addition, Tapia includes advice for students, their parents and teachers, who will also benefit from his wisdom and years of experience serving as a mentor to those from diverse backgrounds.
Our Missing Hearts by Celest Ng is a dystopian novel in the vein of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Ng says she drew everything in her fictional world from real life, which makes her United States scarily believable. The government has passed the PACT act, which prohibits discussion of un-American ideas; targets people of Chinese descent; and uses the government’s right to remove people’s children as a means of control. This law leads to rampant discrimination and violence against Asian Americans, ultimately forcing the mother of the main character to flee. While there are parts of exposition to explain this alternate America, the heart of the book is Margaret’s difficult decision to leave Bird when he was nine. He has spent several years without her, but he ultimately goes looking for her, partly because of a cryptic note he receives, but also because of the disappearance of one of his classmates, Sadie, who has been removed from her family and relocated. By centering the novel on these relationships and the effects of such a law on parents and children, Ng reminds readers that laws don’t exist in a vacuum: there are always real individuals who suffer, whether we choose to see them or not.
Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng. Penguin, 2022.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
Lords of Misrule: 20 Years of Saturnalia Books Edited by Henry Israeli and Rebecca Lauren Saturnalia Books, December 2022
Twenty years ago, Saturnalia Books opened its doors for business, and soon thereafter published, The Babies, an astonishing collection of poetry by Sabrina Orah Mark. Since then, Saturnalia Books has published some of the most innovative new voices in the poetry world, including poets Sarah Vap, Catherine Pierce, Kathleen Graber, Kristi Maxwell, Natalie Shapero, Peter Jay Shippy, Martha Silano, Timothy Liu, Cortney Lamar Charleston, Hadara Bar-Nadav, and Kayleb Rae Candrilli, as well as the groundbreaking Gurlesque anthology. This collection gathers poems from all of our poet’ s books, giving readers a good taste of twenty years’ worth of Saturnalia Books publications. With an introduction by poet and founder Henry Israeli and managing editor Rebecca Lauren.
Throughout Sound Fury, poems by metaphysician Robert Herrick are refashioned into phantasmagorical oddities of likeness and difference. Figures from the fringes of popular imagination—Zane Grey, Robinson Crusoe, Porfirio Díaz—surface as cobbled-together avatars on the theme of identity. Brilliantly asserting the necessity of humane and resistant modes of speech against the vapid sounds and enforced silences of orthodoxy, Sound Fury finds the poet “Now, in our former state/ In our current one/ In stately procession,” venturing forth in a world “where things of questionable being go.”
The Entre Ríos Trilogy Fiction by Perla Suez, Trans. by Rhonda Dahl Buchanan White Pine Press, November 2022
The three novels in this collection, written by Perla Suez in Spanish, and expertly translated to English by Rhonda Dahl Buchanan, take place in Entre Ríos, the Argentine province where thousands of Jewish immigrants settled at the end of the nineteenth century. Suez weaves history and memory in these tales of passion, violence, and intrigue. Déborah, the protagonist of Lethargy, narrates the traumatic experiences of her youth in Basavilbaso, and captures the stifling atmosphere of intolerance and repression during the 1950s. In The Arrest Lucien Finz, a young Jewish farmer, leaves the rice fields of Villa Clara to study medicine in Buenos Aires, where he becomes a victim of La Semana Trágica, the “Tragic Week” in January of 1919, when government forces arrested, tortured, and murdered striking workers and many innocent people. Complot is an intricate web of lust, deceit, murder, and power, which spans the first three decades of the twentieth century, when Great Britain influenced the growth of the Argentine nation.
Taken to Heart: 70 Poems from the Chinese Translated by Gary Young and Yanwen Xu White Pine Press, November 2022
The seventy poems that comprise this collection constitute an anthology, Elementary School Chinese Textbook (Jiangsu Edition), given to Chinese school children as a text to aid their instruction in Mandarin and to introduce them to China’s rich literary history. The poems are considered representative of China’s highest poetic achievements from the Han Dynasty to the Qing. The study of these poems is also meant to subtly guide students toward an appreciation of traditional Chinese virtues, culture, historical events, and social etiquette. The poems are memorized by every student, and by the end of their course of study, Chinese children will have absorbed a storehouse of Chinese characters and been steeped in a cultural tradition that spans more than two thousand years.
Through a mix of literary journalism and memoir in Powder Days: Ski Bums, Ski Towns and the Future of Chasing Snow, Heather Hansman asks the question: is the ski town dream dead, and did it ever exist in the first place? Hansman uses her own connections and experiences as a former ticket checker, ski patroller, and restaurant worker in a Colorado ski town to tell a story of the realities of working-class skiers who are still “living the dream.”
“We moved to the mountains and let the other facets of our lives fall into place from there.” In dispelling the common perceptions of the archetypical ski bum, Hansman paints a picture of communities in crisis due to stagnant wages and rising housing costs, mental health issues among ski industry workers, racial tensions, and the ever-looming threat of disappearing snow due to climate change. All framed by her nostalgic, months-long road trip to ski towns across the country. Anyone who has ever loaded everything they owned into their car and moved to a ski town – or even considered doing so after a weekend on the slopes – will find something to relate to in Powder Days.
Reviewer bio: Keegan Waller is a graduate student in Utah State’s creative writing program. His writing has been featured in Door is a Jar, Boston Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. You can find him on Twitter @keeg_wall.
Welcome to Dragon Talk: Inspiring Conversations About Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Love to Play It By Shelly Mazzanoble and Greg Tito University of Iowa Press, December 2022
If you have any D&D fans on your holiday gift lists, then Welcome to Dragon Talk is exactly what you are looking for! Hosts of the official D&D podcast, Shelly Mazzanoble and Greg Tito and their surprising guests show how this beloved pastime has amassed a diverse, tight-knit following of players who defy stereotypes. The authors recount some of their most inspiring interviews and illuminate how their guests use the core tenets of the game in everyday life. An A-list actor defends D&D by baring his soul (and his muscles) on social media. A teacher in a disadvantaged district in Houston creates a D&D club that motivates students to want to read and think analytically. A writer and live-streamer demonstrates how D&D–inspired communication breaks barriers and empowers people of color. Readers will see why Dungeons & Dragons has remained such a pop culture phenomenon and how it has given this disparate and growing community the inspiration to flourish and spread some in-game magic into the real world.
All This Thinking: The Correspondence of Bernadetter Mayer and Clark Coolidge Edited by Stephanie Anderson and Kristen Tapson University of New Mexico Press, December 2022
All This Thinking explores the deep friendship and the critical and creative thinking between Bernadette Mayer and Clark Coolidge, focusing on an intense three-year period in their three decades of correspondence. These fiercely independent American avant-garde poets have influenced and shaped poets and poetic movements by looking for radical poetics in the everyday. This collection of letters provides insight into the poetic scenes that followed World War II while showcasing the artistic practices of Mayer and Coolidge themselves. A fascinating look at both the poets and the world surrounding them, All This Thinking will appeal to all readers interested in post-World War II poetry.
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An Audible Blue: Selected Poems 1963-2016 Poetry by Klaus Merz, Trans. by Marc Vincenz White Pine Press, November 2022
Throughout his career, Swiss Poet Klaus Merz has been praised as an artisan of the understatement, and it is precisely in these smallest of details that the great unexpected has the potential to be illuminated. As Merz himself has said: “The poetry nudges toward a secret, hopefully without ostentation, rather through the power of its own alphabet.” This seminal volume brings together selections from Merz’s fifteen collections of poetry (1963-2016). Marc Vincenz is a poet, translator, fiction writer, editor, musician and artist. He has published over 30 books of poetry, fiction and translation. His newest books are There Might Be a Moon or a Dog (Gazebo, Australia, 2022) and The Pearl Diver of Irunmani (White Pine Press, forthcoming 2023).
Hajar Hussaini’s poems in Disbound scrutinize the social, political, and historical traces inherited from one’s language. The traces she finds—the flow of international commodities implied in a plosive consonant, an image of the world’s nations convening to reject the full stop—retrieve a personal history between countries (Afghanistan and the United States) and languages (Persian and English) that has been constantly disrupted and distorted by war, governments, and media. Hussaini sees the subjectivity emerging out of these traces as mirroring the governments to whom she has been subject, blurring the line between her identity and her legal identification. The poems of Disbound seek beauty and understanding in sadness and confusion, and find the chance for love in displacement, even as the space for reconciliation in politics and thought seems to get narrower.
Goddess of Water by Jeannette L. Clariond Trans. Samantha Schnee World Poetry Books, September 2022
Mexican poet Jeannette L. Clariond’s Goddess of Water draws upon Mesoamerican cosmogony to lament the present-day epidemic of femicides in Mexico. The author’s sixth book in English translation reconstructs the myth of the moon goddess Coyolxauhqui, employing the lyricism of Nahuatl philosophy and investigating gender construction and fluidity in Aztec mythology. Printed in a bilingual edition, the cycle of poems is accompanied by a glossary of the Nahuatl words and Aztec concepts critical to its comprehension. In Samantha Schnee’s keen and urgent translation, this collection of poems presents a surprising window on an invisible war waged against thousands of Mexican women. Clariond astounds us with her ability to painstakingly analyze a phenomenon that has drawn attention around the globe. Translator Samantha Schnee is the founding editor of Words Without Borders. Her translation of Carmen Boullosa’s El libro de Eva, a finalist for the Mario Vargas Llosa Biennial Novel Prize, will be published by Deep Vellum in 2023.
The Morning You Saw a Train of Stars Streaking Across the Sky by CooXooEii Black Rattle Poetry, November 2022
CooXooEii Black is an Afro-Indigenous writer and a member of the Northern Arapaho Tribe. He is an MFA creative writing candidate at the University of Memphis and a poetry reader for The Pinch Journal. His poetry has appeared in Eco Theo Review, Palette Poetry, and Carve Magazine. His creative nonfiction has appeared in The Tusculum Review. This collection of sixteen poems came bundled with the December issue of Rattle poetry magazine. Subscribers to Rattle are treated to bonus chapbooks and anthologies with each issue, but each issue and each bonus publication can also be purchased separately from the Rattle website.
NewPages receives many wonderful titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these titles 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
After Ward, Wendell Hawken, Cherry Grove Collections Alone in the House of My Heart, Kari Gunter-Seymour, Swallow Press Born Under the Influence, Andrena Zawinski, Word Poetry The Day Gives Us So Many Ways to Eat, Lindsay Wilson, WordTech Editions Disbound, Hajar Hussaini, University of Iowa Press Edgewood, Mark Belair, Turning Point Books Goddess of Water, Jeannette L. Clariond, World Poetry Books In the Plague Year, W.H. New, Rock’s Mills Press It’s About Time, J.R. Solonche, Deerbook Editions John Scotus Eriugena at Laon and Other Poems, Jacques Darras, World Poetry Books Leaving the Base Camp at Dawn, Daniel Thomas, Cherry Grove Collections Little Disruptions, Biljana D. Obradovic, WordTech Editions Little Wife: The Story of Gold, Nuova Wright, The Calliope Group Lords of Misrule, ed. Henry Israeli and Rebecca Lauren, Saturnalia Books
Dancing on the Sun Stone: Mexican Women and the Gendered Politics of Octavio Paz by Marjorie Becker University of New Mexico Press, December 2022
Dancing on the Sun Stone is a uniquely transdisciplinary work that fuses modern Latin American history and literature to explore women’s lives and gendered politics in Mexico. In this important work, scholar Marjorie Becker focuses on the complex Mexican women of rural Michoacán who performed an illicit revolutionary dance and places it in dialogue with Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz’s signature poem, “Sun Stone”–allowing a new gendered history to emerge. Through this dialogue, the women reveal intimate and intellectual complexities of Mexican women’s gendered voices, their histories, and their intimate and public lives. The work further demonstrates the ways these women, in dialogue with Paz, transformed history itself. Becker’s multigenre work reconstructs Mexican history through the temporal experiences of crucial Michoacán females, experiences that culminate in their complex revolutionary dance, which itself emerges as a transformative revolutionary language.
To find 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. Click here to sign up for our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
