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Review :: “Leaving” by Jesús Papoleto Meléndez

Borracho [Very Drunk] Love Poems & Other Acts of Madness by Jesus Papoleto Melendez book cover image

Guest Post by Jennifer Grotzinger

“Leaving” by Jesús Papoleto Meléndez comes from his poetry collection, Borracho [Very Drunk]: Love Poems & Other Acts of Madness, first published in 2020 by 2Life Press and now available to read on the Poetry Foundation website. If you are a sucker for love poems, “Leaving” will take you down a path to feel the hurt and the emotions from the point of view of the significant other. It starts, “The storm came.” Meaning a fight just happened or an argument just occurred. The speaker goes into how they saw it coming, the tension was building, “We had already felt / the tremor / of its warning. . . ” It was there, and at any time, it was going to explode, it was just a matter of when. When it did explode, the partner realized that no fight is worth losing someone you love and care about. However, the end is what made me sympathize with the speaker: “But you walked out, / To meet the wind / & the rain / intotheStorm / without me.” It makes my heart break a little to feel the hurt when the speaker realizes that they just lost someone they truly love and care about. That they are never coming back. This poem is short, yet it speaks so loudly.

“Leaving” by Jesús Papoleto Meléndezcomes. Poetry Foundation, reprinted by permission of 2LeafPress, 2020.

Reviewer bio: Jennifer Grotzinger is a student in an intro to poetry class. Her Instagram handle is @jenniferrodd_

New Book :: Patterns of Orbit

Patterns of Orbit poetry by Chloe N Clark published by Baobab Press book cover image

Patterns of Orbit
Poetry by Chloe N Clark
Baobab Press, April 2023

Available now for pre-order, Chloe N Clark’s Patterns of Orbit spans genres, perspectives, and styles to articulate contemporary uncertainties in a rapidly changing world. Steadily gazing into and across the uncanny valley, Clark examines those jarring or subtle shifts in familiar stories, writing light into dark, and offering slivers of hope despite the longest of odds. Navigating a potent concoction of science fiction, folktale, and horror this collection of literary, character-driven stories combines the accumulated forces and darker natures of those genre elements, unleashing the terrors of alien fungi, forest demons, and interplanetary specters upon her characters. While these characters, capable and intelligent, face off against their prescribed monsters, it is their existential misgivings on the state of their worlds or conditions that will leave an indelible mark on the reader. As a notable contribution to the literary/genre hybrid canon, this collection offers a crossover read to the connoisseurs of both genre and literary fiction.

New Book :: Morality Play

Morality Play poetry by Lauren Hilger published by Northwest Editions book cover image

Morality Play
Poetry by Lauren Hilger
Northwest Editions, June 2022

In Morality Play, Lauren Hilger forges a restless path between the impressionable folly of youth and the boundlessness of individual becoming. A motley bildungsroman of fierce imagination, Morality Play reveals, and revels in, the paradox inherent in its title, angling for a tender virtue in the sensuousness of words. “Raised on a fast pencil, a sound expiring,” Hilger reminds us that “From the world’s first cities, it was always a woman / telling the future.” Like a wild song fluent in, or flung against, awkward self-delusion and constrictive cultural norms, Morality Play offers a vision of womanhood as expansive as lucid dreaming, where all the “wrong words” become our “mother tongue.” Lauren Hilger is the author of Lady Be Good (CCM, 2016). Named a Nadya Aisenberg Fellow in poetry from MacDowell, she has also received fellowships from the Hambidge Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in BOMB, Harvard Review, KenyonReview, Pleiades, The Threepenny Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for No Tokens.

New Book :: An Adventurous Spirit

An Adventurous Spirit: A Lowestoft Chronicle Anthology edited by Nicholas Litchfield published by Lowestoft Chronicle Press book cover image

An Adventurous Spirit: A Lowestoft Chronicle Anthology
Edited by Nicholas Litchfield
Lowestoft Chronicle Press, October 2022

A brief stop in Missouri to see a buzzworthy dead pig and a local pickler assist a Californian family in avoiding a menacing encounter with drug smugglers. In New York City, a riled, hotshot salesman endeavors to hunt down the brazen thieves who made off with his briefcase and wallet in a crowded subway car. And a subway train driver with a history of fatalities on his service record is on the hunt for another victim. An Adventurous Spirit shimmers with high adventure, comedy, drama, introspection, and intelligent observation. From psychedelic taxi rides and dubious genealogical quests across the United States heartland to farcically troublesome road trips and intense ancestral pinball duels in Europe, this collection features poetry and prose by Linda Ankrah-Dove, Robert Beveridge, Jeff Burt, DeWitt Clinton, DAH, Rob Dinsmoor, Mary Donaldson-Evans, Catherine Dowling, Tim Frank, James Gallant, Bruce Harris, Marc Harshman, Jacqueline Jules, Richard Luftig, Robert Mangeot, George Moore, James B. Nicola, and Robert Wexelblatt. Plus, exclusive interviews with award-winning authors Abby Frucht and Sheldon Russell. Founded in September 2009, Lowestoft Chronicle is an online literary magazine, published quarterly, accepting flash fiction, short stories, poetry, and creative non-fiction with preference given to humorous submissions with an emphasis on travel. An anthology of the best work is published annually. The mission of Lowestoft Chronicle is “to form a global ‘think tank’ of inquisitive, worldly scribblers, collectively striving towards excellence and, if possible, world domination.”

New Book :: The Happy Valley

The Happy Valley a novel by Benjamin Harnett published by Serpent Key Press book cover image

The Happy Valley
Fiction by Benjamin Harnett
Serpent Key Press, October 2022

In the early 1990s, in Harmony Valley, a rural, Upstate New York village faded from its 18th and 19th-century heyday, a group of teens engaged in an idiosyncratic role-playing game cross paths with June, a mysterious girl whose family has deep roots in the area, and Clyde Duane, a janitor who makes weekly visits to a strange room – the headquarters of a secret society – opening its door with a golden, serpent-headed key. Meanwhile, an eccentric Utica lawyer pulls his young Vietnamese protégée into their firm’s special case, which stretches back to the 1840s. Decades later, in 2034, as the United States is breaking apart and a new way of life taking shape, June has disappeared. The mystery of her disappearance inspires a journey back to “The Happy Valley,” and a reevaluation of the past that exposes the dark personal and societal secrets betraying our founding myths. Harnett’s debut novel is 412 pages, with 66 full-page b&w illustrations by the author, and includes an Appendix with a Timeline, and a detailed Reading Group Guide.

New Book :: Strong Feather

Strong Feather poetry by Jennifer Reeser published by Able Muse Press book cover image

Strong Feather
Poetry by Jennifer Reeser
Able Muse Press, March 2023

The poems in Jennifer Reeser’s Strong Feather center on a Native American Indian female character of the author’s creation. She is a poet/prophet/warrior of sorts. All the poems are masterfully deployed in form, but they vary in tone and content. While many of the poems use the Strong Feather character, there are also personal poems, and translations and tales from actual Cherokee and other indigenous traditions. The title poem opens the collection:

End of the winter, middle March,
Waking, I find it beneath my quilt
Clinging to linens the hue of larch,
Softer and whiter than milk when spilt—
One petite feather. Its hollow “hilt”
Pointing toward me, is curved and long,
Slightly translucent, and at a tilt.
How has this feather stayed so strong?
. . . .

Jennifer Reeser is the author of six collections of poetry, and her poems, reviews, and translations of Russian, French, along with the Cherokee and various Native American Indian languages, have appeared in numerous publications. A biracial writer of European American and Native American Indian ancestry, Reeser was born in Louisiana. She studied English at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. She now divides her time between Louisiana and her land on the Cherokee Reservation in Indian Country near Tahlequah, Oklahoma, capital of the Cherokee Nation of which her family is a part.

New Book :: Late Work

Late Work: A Literary Autobiography of Love, Loss, and What I Was Reading essays by Joan Frank published by University of New Mexico Press book cover image

Late Work: A Literary Autobiography of Love, Loss, and What I Was Reading
Nonfiction by Joan Frank
University of New Mexico Press, October 2022

Curious, ruminative, and wry, this literary autobiography tours what Rachel Kushner called “the strange remove that is the life of the writer.” Frank’s essays cover a vast spectrum—from handling dismissive advice, facing the dilemma of thwarted ambition, and copying the generosity that inspires us, to the miraculous catharsis of letter-writing and some of the books that pull us through. Useful for writers at any stage of development, Late Work offers a seasoned artist’s thinking through the exploration of issues, paradoxes, and crises of faith. Like a lively conversation with a close, outspoken friend, each piece tells its experience from the trenches. Joan Frank is the award-winning author of twelve books of literary fiction and essays including Because You Have To: A Writing Life and Try to Get Lost: Essays on Travel and Place (UNM Press).

Book Review :: Memphis by Tara Stringfellow

Memphis a novel by Tara M. Stringfellow published by The Dial Press book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

In Memphis, Tara Stringfellow’s debut novel, she traces three generations of African American women from the 1930s to the early 2000s. The four main characters—Joan, her mother Miriam, her aunt August, and her grandmother Hazel—all encounter the obstacles one would expect African American women living through those decades to struggle against; however, Stringfellow goes beyond stereotypical concerns to craft fully-realized characters who have hopes and dreams of their own. Hazel wants to live a long, stable life with the man she loves; Miriam wants to create a safe space for her and her children while also carving out a meaningful career. August not only nurtures her nieces, but she tries to save her son from the childhood he had, while Joan wants to create art and beauty. As the title implies, they all pursue their desires in Memphis, which changes over the decades but still provides stability in the midst of chaos for each generation. Though some of the references to historical events seem predictable and almost obligatory, Stringfellow’s fleshing out of her characters enables the reader to enter into their lives and their city, to provide the empathy that all literature strives to evoke.

Memphis by Tara Stringfellow. The Dial Press, April 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/.

If you are interested in contributing a Guest Post to “What I’m Reading,” please click this link: NewPages.com Reviewer Guidelines.

New Book :: Elizabeth/The Story of Drone

Elizabeth/The Story of Drone hybrid poetry by Louise Akers published by Propeller Books book cover image

Elizabeth/The Story of Drone
Poetry by Louise Akers
Propeller Books, September 2022

In this hybrid poem about militarized drones and militant angels, Elizabeth abandons her career as a physicist to become a museum administrator, finds god in the basement below the galleries, and dies there. But that is not the end. A blend of form and genre, Elizabeth/The Story of Drone takes readers on a journey through terrain in which the personal and the political collide. Louise Akers is a poet living in Brooklyn, New York. They earned their MFA from Brown University in May of 2018, and received the Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop Prize for Innovative Writing in 2017 and the Confrontation Poetry Prize in 2019. Their chapbook, Alien Year, was selected by Brandon Shimoda for the 2020 Oversound Chapbook Prize.

New Book :: If This Should Reach You In Time

If This Should Reach You In Time poetry by Justin Marks published by Barrelhouse Books book cover image

If This Should Reach You In Time
Poetry by Justin Marks
Barrelhouse Books, December 2022

If This Should Reach You in Time sounds the alarm of climate change and democratic collapse with tender lament and guarded hope from award-winning poet Justin Marks. In “Along for the Ride,” Marks writes, “There’s no way around / not being part // of the problem” and “The best case scenario / is long term disaster.” In this fourth collection of poetry, Marks renders global threats as intimate and personal. As we turn inward, terror and sadness take hold. This is a book of crisis and dread, both human and spiritual. Through these poems, Marks shows readers what could be and what might have been. In the titular poem, he writes, “know / that we didn’t see / the disaster coming / That it wasn’t / imaginable, hadn’t / existed until, gradually / it was, and did / Or that we saw it / and refused to believe / Or saw it and thought / something or someone / else would save us.”

New Book :: In a Few Minutes Before Later

In a Few Minutes Before Later poetry by Brenda Hillman published by Wesleyan University Press book cover image

In a Few Minutes Before Later
Poetry by Brenda Hillman
Wesleyan University Press, October 2022

An iconoclastic ecopoet who has led the way for many young and emerging artists, Brenda Hillman continues to re-cast innovative poetic forms as instruments for tracking human and non-human experiences. At times the poet deploys short dialogues, meditations or trance techniques as means of rendering inner states; other times she uses narrative, documentary or scientific materials to record daily events during a time of pandemic, planetary crisis, political and racial turmoil. Hillman proposes that poetry offers courage even in times of existential peril; her work represents what is most necessary and fresh in American poetry.

Book Review :: Interior Femme by Stephanie Berger

Interior Femme poetry by Stephanie Berger published by University of Nevada Press book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

Among the first four poems of Stephanie Berger’s Interior Femme, the 2020 Betsy Joiner Flanagan Poetry Prize winner, there’s a “Foreword,” a “Prelude,” and a “Preface,” as if there is an anxiety about beginning or that beginning takes time: “she opened up gradually to the possibility of beauty and a city.” The bicoastal cities of San Diego and New York are among the urban settings for these poems as they trace archetypes of the feminine and the matriarchy of family, society, and art—“a lineage // of pain”—focusing primarily on “two subjects: death / & domesticity” while vying for “survival / of the beautiful.” Survival from whom or what might dominate is a central pursuit of these poems. What has power and influence: memories—“a sadness took / my mother to the movies one day / & never brought her back.” The poems puzzle over the implications of the first woman in our lives and the primal feminine being lost to violence. Memories, based in gender dominance and sexual degradation, are “the mercurial knee-jerk / of the patriarchy.” The poet beseeches: “strip me / from what abyss of memory I dragged.” Ultimately, Berger’s is a poetry of ascent; Persephone emerges and “imagination dominates.” In these poems, imagination has the power to counter and save; even “a pit at the bottom // of the kitchen sink, available / for discovery.” Dear reader, in Interior Femme, Stephanie Berger is “a real woman [and poet] / with the scars to prove it,” who understands it is “important to remember / there are windows in the water.” Dear reader, Interior Femme is a window.

Interior Femme, Stephanie Berger. University of Nevada Press, January 2022.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear. More at https://jamimacarty.com/

New Book :: The Beckoning World

The Beckoning World, a novel by Douglas Bauer published by University of Iowa Press book cover image

The Beckoning World
Fiction by Douglas Bauer
University of Iowa Press, November 2022

Douglas Bauer’s newest work, The Beckoning World, is set in the first quarter of the twentieth century and follows Earl Dunham, whose weeks are comprised of six days mining coal followed by Sundays playing baseball. Then, one day, a major-league scout happens on a game, signs Earl, and he begins a life he had no idea he could even dream. But dreams sometimes suffer from a lovely abundance, and in Earl’s case, her name is Emily Marchand. They fall quickly and deeply in love, but with that love comes heartbreaking complications. The Beckoning World gathers a cast of characters that include Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, a huge-hearted Pullman steward offering aphoristic wisdom, and countless others, not least of which is the 1918 Spanish flu taking vivid spectral form. At the center is a relentless love that Earl and Emily are defenseless against, allied as they are “in this business of their hearts.” Douglas Bauer has written several books, including Prairie City, Iowa: Three Seasons at Home (Iowa, 2008). He teaches writing at Bennington College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

New Book :: The Six-Minute Memoir

The Six Minute Memoir Fifty-Five Short Essays on Life by Mary Helen Stefaniak published by University of Iowa Press book cover image

The Six-Minute Memoir: Fifty-Five Short Essays on Life
Memoir by Mary Helen Stefaniak
A Bur Oak Book
University of Iowa Press, October 2022

Culled from two decades’ worth of Mary Helen Stefaniak’s “Alive and Well” column in the Iowa Source, each essay invites readers into the ordinary life of a woman “with a family and friends and a job . . . and a series of cats and a history living in one old house after another at the turn of the twenty-first century in the middle of the Middle West.” One great aunt presides over nineteen acres of pecan grove profitably strewn with junk. A borrowed hammer rings with the sound of immortality. Famous poets pipe up where you least expect them. Living and dying are found to be two sides of the same remarkable coin. Writing prompts at the end of the book invite readers to search their own lives for such moments—the kind that could be forgotten but instead are turned, by the gift of perspective and perfectly chosen detail, into treasure. The Six-Minute Memoir encourages people to tell their own stories even if they think they don’t have the kind of story that belongs in a memoir.

October 2022 eLitPak :: Fifteenth Annual Tartt First Fiction Award

Screenshot of Fifteenth annual Tartt First Fiction Award from Livingston Press flier
click image to open PDF

Deadline: December 31, 2022
The Tartt First Fiction Award from Livingston Press at the University of West Alabama is given annually to a collection of short stories written in English by an American citizen. Writers cannot have already published or be under contract to publish a fiction collection. Winner will receive $1000, plus standard royalty contract, which includes 60 copies of the book. Visit the Livingston Press website or view flyer to learn more.

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October 2022 eLitPak :: Madville Publishing at the 2022 Southern Festival of Books

Screenshot of Madville Publishing 2022 Southern Festival of Books flyer for the NewPages October 2022 eLtiPak
click image to view PDF

Madville Publishing congratulates Pauletta Hansel, Susan O’Dell Underwood, and Jeff Hardin, all featured authors at The Southern Festival of Books this year, Friday, October 14, 12 PM – Sunday, October 16, 5 PM, in Nashville, Tennessee. We hope to see you there! (We’ll be in booth #15!) View flyer or visit our website.

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New Book :: The Red Ear Blows Its Nose

The Red Ear Blows Its Nose Poems for Children and Others by Robert Schechter Illustrated by S. Federico published by Word Galaxy Press book cover image

The Red Ear Blows Its Nose: Poems for Children and Others
Poetry by Robert Schechter
Illustrations by S. Federico
Word Galaxy Press, April 2023

If you’ve got any “littles” in your life, The Red Ear Blows Its Nose is the perfect gift book to preorder for next year’s National Poetry Month. Published by Word Galaxy Press, an imprint of the well-respected Able Muse Press, The Red Ear Blows Its Nose dishes out hilarity, wit, wordplay, and wisdom in a playfully illustrated collection of poems “for children and others.” It considers thought, identity and what it means to be a person, nature and the seasons, and includes assorted creatures, such as a horse who says “Moo,” a “Dear Earthling” letter from an invading alien, bees, ants, birds, and elephants. Several poems focus on the senses and the brain, including this thoughtful short work:

Just Wondering

For there to be a butterfly
must the caterpillar die?
Or does the caterpillar brain
in the butterfly remain?

This debut collection from Robert Schechter is complemented by S. Federico’s illustrations, which add to the possible interpretations of the works. Robert Schechter’s award-winning poetry for children has appeared in Highlights for Children, Cricket, Spider, Ladybug, the Caterpillar, Blast Off, Countdown, Orbit, and more than a dozen anthologies published by Bloomsbury, National Geographic, Macmillan, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the Emma Press, and Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.

Book Review :: The Fastening by Julie Doxsee

The Fastening, poetry by Julie Doxsee published by Black Ocean book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

In The Fastening, Julie Doxsee’s fifth collection, the poet makes a poetry of unburdening “that feeling / she always felt”: imperiled. At the center of these poems is a “flesh-twin” of childhood that arises when a new mother’s fears for the safety of her children trigger a visitation of memories of her own lack of safety as a child:

When I am old enough, I’ll know
a mother’s sunset can’t blacken out
the underside of the door, I’ll know
I can’t stay by the river in the park
because there’s no protection
from being a girl.

(“Masterpiece of the Hijacked Girl”)

As well as being a book that plumbs the experiences of a childhood, the implications of being a daughter, and the meaning of motherhood, this is a book about survival—the precarious survival of a woman and an artist: the “rough forms of me.” In these poems, there always seems to be something inserting hooks, applying thumbs; something to get out from under so the “body / can shake this debt” of gender-blame in pursuit of the pleasure orbiting connections between life partners and between mother and sons. The pleasure that fastens a woman to her life and a poet to her “imagination— / the strobing mono-light blurring as it wails near.” With narrative concision, lyric urgency, and emotional coherence, Julie Doxsee speaks from “roadways that artists can’t / fake.”

The Fastening, Julie Doxsee. Black Ocean Press, May 2022.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear. More at https://jamimacarty.com/

If you are interested in contributing a Guest Post to “What I’m Reading,” please click this link: NewPages.com Reviewer Guidelines.

New Book :: How to Maintain Eye Contact

How to Maintain Eye Contact poetry by Robert Wood Lynn published by Button Poetry book cover image

How to Maintain Eye Contact
Poetry by Robert Wood Lynn
Button Poetry, January 2023

The 2020 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest Runner-Up, Robert Wood Lynn’s How to Maintain Eye Contact is set in three sections that explore interior uncertainty, interpersonal uncertainty, and uncertainty at a larger scale. These narrative poems, influenced by storytelling traditions, find themselves at the nexus of the intimate and the humorous, as well as the absurd and the tragic. These poems examine isolation and grief in their many forms—through heartbreak or the death of loved ones, or show us the world looking back at itself after it ends. Lynn’s poems have recently appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Narrative Magazine, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, and other journals. He splits his time between Brooklyn, New York, and Rockbridge County, Virginia. Signed copies of How to Maintain Eye Contact are available to order from the publisher’s website.

New Book :: What’s Left to Us by Evening

What's Left to Us by Evening poetry by David Ebenbach published by Orison Books book cover image

What’s Left to Us by Evening
Poetry by David Ebenbach
Orison Books, October 2022

How does one live in a world that is both beautiful and broken—a world of cherry blossoms and gun violence, fellowship and political enmity, plague and rebirth? What’s Left to Us by Evening, David Ebenbach’s unsparing and timely new poetry collection, examines the obligation—and privilege—of carrying it all. Ebenbach is the author of numerous books of fiction, poetry, and essays. He lives in Washington, DC, where he teaches creative writing at Georgetown University.

New Book :: Sit Down and Have a Beer Again

Sit Down and Have a Beer Again poetry and fiction by Greg Wyss published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library book cover image

Sit Down and Have a Beer Again
Fiction and Poetry by Greg Wyss
Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, June 2022

The poems and stories that make up Sit Down and Have A Beer, the first chapter here, were in a chapbook published in 1977 by Realities Library. The stories and poems had been published in small press magazines impacting a small cadre of creatives in the country in those days.

The Small Press world of those days was the precursor to the internet – insane editors and publishers who believed that the established publications had simply lost touch with the creative reality of our nation. And, just like the internet, the small presses were eventually bought out by the rich folks who figured out the best way to beat them was to buy them out.

The second chapter of the book contains the other poems that were published in these mags but never collected till now.

The third chapter represents a small sample from When Life Was Like A Cucumber, the great novel about the early 1970’s that tells the story of a young man’s journey of self-discovery and sexual awakening as he tries to find his place in
post-Sixties America.

New Book :: Sweet, Young, & Worried

Sweet Young and Worried poetry by Blythe Baird published by Button Poetry book cover image

Sweet, Young, & Worried
Poetry by Blythe Baird
Button Poetry, November 2022

Following her successful debut, Sweet, Young, & Worried is the sophomore collection by author Blythe Baird. Invoking breathtaking imagery and punching narratives, Baird guides readers on an expedition embracing queerness, love, loss, mental health, feminism, and healing along the way. At only 25 years old, Baird is already recognized and acclaimed for her work in spoken word poetry. Originally from the northwest suburbs of Chicago, the viral writer has garnered international recognition for her performance pieces that speak urgently and honestly about sexual assault, mental illness, eating disorder recovery, sexuality, and healing from trauma. Baird graduated from Hamline University in 2018 with a dual degree in creative writing and women’s studies. In 2020, she became the recipient of the prestigious McKnight Artist Fellowship for Spoken Word administered by The Loft Literary Center in Minnesota. Signed copies of Sweet, Young, & Worried are available to order from the publisher’s website.

New Book :: Anchor

Anchor poetry by Rebecca Aronson published by Orison Book cover image

Anchor
Poetry by Rebecca Aronson
Orison Books, October 2022

Threaded with epistolary poems to Gravity—envisioned as a capricious god as the author’s father began to fall frequently at the outset of a progressive illness—Aronson’s latest poems contemplate and address what anchors us, literally and figuratively. These poems excavate grief during the process of losing parents, one to physical illness and the other to dementia. But even in the midst of grief, Aronson never loses sight of the larger world, ever present in all its danger and beauty.

New Book :: The Anchored World

The Anchored World: Flash Fairy Tales and Folklore Fiction by Jasmine Sawers published by Rose Metal Press book cover image

The Anchored World: Flash Fairy Tales and Folklore
Fiction by Jasmine Sawers
Rose Metal Press, October 2022

A goat begins to grow inside a human heart. The rightful king is born a hard, smooth seashell. Supernovas burst across skin like ink in water. Heartbreak transforms maidens into witches, girls into goblins, mothers into monsters. Hunger drives lovers and daughters, soldiers and ghosts, to unhinge their jaws and swallow the world. Drawing inspiration from a mixed heritage and from history—from the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen to the ancient legends of Thailand, from the suburbs of Buffalo, New York to the endless horizon of the American Midwest—Jasmine Sawers invents a hybrid folklore for liminal characters who live between the lines and within the creases of race and language, culture and gender, sexuality and ability. The Anchored World: Flash Fairy Tales and Folklore is equal parts love letter to the old tales and indictment of their shortcomings, offering a new mythology to reflect the many faces and voices of the twenty-first century.

Books Received October 2022

NewPages receives many wonderful titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these titles by clicking on the “Books” tag under “Popular Blog Topics.” If you are a publisher or author looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us!

Poetry

All the Blood Involved in Love, Maya Marshall, Haymarket Books
Anchor, Rebecca Aronson, Orison Books
Belly to the Brutal, Jennifer Givhan, Wesleyan University Press
Duets, Alexis Rhone Fancher & Cynthia Atkins, Small Harbor Publishing
The Elliott Erwitt Poems, Simon Perchik, Cholla Needles Art & Literary Library
F & G, D. Marie Fitzgerald, Cholla Needles Art & Literary Library
Green Burial, Derek Graf, Elixir Press
How to Maintain Eye Contact, Robert Wood Lynn, Button Poetry
How Much?, Jerome Sala, NYQ Books
How to Cut a Woman in Half, Janis Harrington, Able Muse Press
Never Catch Me, Darius Simpson, Button Poetry
O, Tammy Nguyen, Ugly Duckling Press
Poetry Mountain, David Chorlton, Cholla Needles Art & Literary Library
Selected Poems, Takuboku Ishikawa, Cholla Needles Art & Literary Library
Seven Stars Anthology 1973-1998, realities library
Sit Down And Have A Beer Again, Greg Wyss, Cholla Needles Art & Literary Library
Sweet, Young, & Worried, Blythe Baird, Button Poetry
Talk Smack to a Hurricane, Lynne Jensen Lampe, IceFloe Books
Tits on the Moon, Dessa, Rain Taxi Review of Books
What’s Left to Us by Evening, David Ebenbach, Orison Books

Continue reading “Books Received October 2022”

New Book :: Dancing for Our Tribe

Dancing for My Tribe: Potawatomi Traditions in the New Millennium by Sharon Hoogstraten published by The University of Oklahoma Press book cover image

Dancing for Our Tribe: Potawatomi Tradition in the New Millennium
Native American/U.S. History by Sharon Hoogstraten
The University of Oklahoma Press, July 2022
Hardcover, 304 pages, 9.5 X 13 format
272 Color and 32 B&W Illustrations, 2 maps

In the heyday of the Anishinaabe Confederacy, the Potawatomis spread across Canada, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Pressured by the westward expansion of the fledgling United States of America, they became the most treatied of any Indian tribe. Forced removals and multiple treaty-era relocations resulted in cultural chaos and an enduring threat to their connections to the ancestors. Despite these hardships, they have managed to maintain (or restore) their rich heritage.

Beginning with Citizen Potawatomi Nation, photographer and Citizen Potawatomi Sharon Hoogstraten visited all nine nations of the scattered Potawatomi tribe to construct a permanent record of present-day Potawatomis wearing the traditional regalia passed down through the generations, modified to reflect the influence and storytelling of contemporary life. While the silver monochrome portraits that captured Native life at the turn of the twentieth century are a priceless record of those times, they contribute to the impression that most Indian tribes exist only as obscure remnants of a dimly remembered past. With more than 150 formal portraits and illuminating handwritten statements, Dancing for Our Tribe portrays the fresh reality of today’s Native descendants and their regalia: people who live in a world of assimilation, sewing machines, polyester fabrics, duct tape, tattoos, favorite sports teams, proud military service, and high-resolution digital cameras.

The Potawatomi nations have merged loss and optimism to reinforce their legacy for generations to come. We learn from the elders the old arts of language, ribbonwork, beading, and quillwork with renewed urgency. Preserving Potawatomi culture, tribal members are translating traditional designs into their own artistic celebration of continuing existence, lighting the path forward for the next seven generations. Dancing for Our Tribe illustrates vividly that in this new millennium, “We Are Still Here.”

New Book :: Selected Poems

Selected Poems by Takuboku Ishikawa edited by r soos published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library book cover image

Selected Poems
Poetry by Takuboku Ishikawa
Edited by r soos
Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, August 2022

This book is a selection of Ishikawa’s youthful poems, and a complete imagining into English of his final collection known in English as Grieving Playthings, Sad Toys, and more specifically Suffering Playthings. For over 100 years Ishikawa’s work has been exciting for the modern reader because he was among the very first to bring the depths of his inner turmoil as a human being to life on the page.

New Book :: All the Blood Involved in Love

All the Blood Involved in Love poetry by Maya Marshall published by Haymarket Books book cover image

All the Blood Involved in Love
Poetry by Maya Marshall
Haymarket Books, June 2022

In a moment of critical struggle for reproductive justice, Maya Marshall’s haunting debut, All the Blood Involved in Love, meditates on womanhood—with and without motherhood. Traversing familial mythography with an unflinching seriousness, Marshall moves deftly between contemporary politics, the stakes of race and interracial partnership, and the monetary, mental, and physical costs of adopting or birthing a Black child. Maya Marshall, a writer, and editor, is cofounder of underbellymag.com, the journal on the practical magic of poetic revision. As an educator, Marshall has taught at Northwestern University and Loyola University Chicago. She holds fellowships from MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, Callaloo, The Watering Hole, Community of Writers, and Cave Canem.

New Book :: Never Catch Me

Never Catch Me poetry by Darius Simpson published by Button Poetry book cover image

Never Catch Me
Poetry by Darius Simpson
Button Poetry, October 2022

Darius Simpson’s debut collection Never Catch Me centers on Black boyhood in the midwest and familial disintegration over time. Simpson pulls back the curtain, exposing the violence enacted against and upon, Black bodies, and yet, still, each poem is saturated in revolution and hope. Never Catch Me is the anthem necessary to organize a community that is committed to a better right now–one that can only be achieved with an intensity and action that goes far beyond the page. Darius Simpson is a writer, educator, performer, and skilled living room dancer from Akron, Ohio. Much like the means of production, he believes poetry belongs to and with the masses. He aims to inspire those chills that make you frown and slightly twist up ya face in approval. Darius believes in the dissolution of the empire and the total liberation of Afrikans and all oppressed people by any means available. Free The People. Free The Land. Free All Political Prisoners. Signed copies of Never Catch Me are available to order from the publisher’s website.

New Book :: Rules of Order

Rules of Order fiction by Jeff Vande Zande published by Montag Press cover art by Andrew Reider book cover image

Rules of Order
Fiction by Jeff Vande Zande
Montag Press, August 2022

Written in a fever dream during the first five weeks of the 2020 Covid lockdown, Jeff Vande Zande’s newest novel, Rules of Order, tells the story of Harvey Crowe, a community activist, who lives in what could be the last remaining high-rise building on the wrecked planet. Cracks in the ground-floor apartments are appearing exponentially. The building’s tensile strength can’t possibly hold against the load it bears. Crowe works tirelessly to inform tenants on the upper floors that the weight of their possessions could bring the entire building down. Working with ACT (the Anti-Collapse Trust), Crowe encounters obstacles to his message, including indifferent tenants, his self-doubt, hostile security guards, and a co-op board, headed by the corrupt Chairman Burke. Even as Crowe makes meaningful alliances with other influential tenants, he can feel the way they are working against a ticking clock. With time running out, Crowe and his militant colleague Dagmar carry out a desperate plan to save what might be the planet’s last habitable space. The book features a number of boardroom scenes driven by Robert’s Rules of Order, most likely influenced by Vande Zande’s time working as a college English teacher and witnessing such nonsense in real life. Cover art features the painting Mine by art teaching colleague Andrew Reider.

Book Review :: We Won’t Be Here Tomorrow by Margaret Killjoy

We Won't Be Here Tomorrow and Other Stories by Margaret Killjoy published by AK Press book cover image

Guest Post by Saga

Suspenseful and thought-provoking, We Won’t Be Here Tomorrow and Other Stories by Margaret Killjoy is a collection that moves skillfully from humor to horror, passing between science fiction and fantasy to depict human strength and determination against forces both supernatural and all too real. Killjoy’s clear, gripping voice comes through as her cast of queer characters face flesh-eating ghouls, murderous time travelers, post-apocalyptic militias — and other, more mundane threats such as law enforcement, fascists, and nature itself. We might not be here tomorrow, they say, but we’ll fight like hell today.

We Won’t Be Here Tomorrow and Other Stories by Margaret Killjoy. AK Press, September 2022

Reviewer bio: Saga is a writer and editor currently working on a publishing master’s degree on the East Coast. Enjoys sci-fi, video games, worldbuilding, and iced tea. Annual National Novel Writing Month survivor and Radon Journal editor.

If you are interested in contributing a Guest Post to “What I’m Reading,” please click this link: NewPages.com Reviewer Guidelines.

New Book :: Talk Smack to a Hurricane

Talk Smack to a Hurricane poetry collection by Lynne Jensen Lampe book cover image

Talk Smack to a Hurricane
Poetry by Lynne Jensen Lampe
IceFloe Press, September 2022

In her first published poetry collection, Lynne Jensen Lampe deals intimately and specifically with the impact of her mother’s mental illness. The poems in Talk Smack to a Hurricane explore their relationship, a bond bruised by absence and shaped by psychiatry. One sequence, eight erasures sourced from a letter the author’s mother wrote the day after giving birth, tells of a new mother happy with life until an inexplicable mental shift sends her from maternity ward to psych ward—for a year, 2400 miles away from her infant and husband. Using vivid imagery, startling sonics, and odd juxtapositions, Lampe explores a tender and volatile mother-daughter relationship that fed love as well as insecurities. Talk Smack to a Hurricane also includes details of 1883 asylum records, lobotomies, even 1960s fashion icons. In examining family heritage, antisemitism, and the quest for identity, the collection also fights both shame and stigma.

New Book :: House of the Nine Devils

House of the Nine Devils fiction by Johannes Urzidil published by Twisted Spoon Press book cover image

House of the Nine Devils: Selected Bohemian Tales
Fiction by Johannes Urzidil
Twisted Spoon Press, November 2022

Collected here and translated into English for the first time
are some of the most renowned Bohemian stories from Prague native Johannes Urzidil, a long-neglected writer whose short fiction herein spans centuries, from the bygone mythical Prague of alchemists to the late Habsburg metropolis where ethnic tensions seethed under a genteel veneer to the terror-filled days of Nazi occupation and a desperate flight to safety. Bearing his trademark wisdom, empathy, and wit, the writing often blurs the border between reportage, memoir, and fiction, such as an encounter with Gavrilo Princip, wasting away in the Terezín prison after his assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, or a WWI soldier trying to evade military police and thus disrupting a night at Café Arco, a favorite haunt of the Prague Circle that included Brod, Kafka, and Werfel, as well as Urzidil, the group’s youngest member and one of the last links to that symbiotic milieu of Prague German-Jewish artists. Translated from the German by David Burnett.

New Book :: The Illuminated Burrow

The Illuminated Burrow fiction by Max Belcher published by Twisted Spoon Press book cover image

The Illuminated Burrow: A Sanatorium Journal
Fiction by Max Belcher
Twisted Spoon Press, November 2022

Max Blecher began writing The Illuminated Burrow in 1937 and continued working on it until his death the following spring, but its full version was only published posthumously in 1971. It was the final “novel” in what can be called a trilogy that includes Adventures in Immediate Irreality and Scarred Hearts, and like those, its imaginative distortion of real experiences is reminiscent of Bruno Schulz as well as the Surrealist autofiction of André Breton and Michel Leiris. Set in the sanatoria where Blecher received treatment for spinal tuberculosis, the ostensible narrator is forced to confront the power and limitations of memory as he attempts to capture the last moments of life as they pass “like ash … through a sieve,” one final effort to reclaim the beauty of days spent straddling the boundary between waking and dreaming, encountering the marvelous both inside and outside the sanatorium’s walls, inside and outside his very body. As his physical powers decline and he becomes permanently bedridden, the narrator’s life migrates to his inner consciousness, an “illuminated burrow” where reality is indistinguishable from fantasy, where the surreal and the mundane seamlessly fuse to enact the fears and fascinations elicited by the vibrant world that is gradually slipping away. Translated from the Romanian by Gabi Reigh with an afterword by Gabriela Glăvan.

New Book :: Tits on the Moon

Tits on the Moon by Dessa book cover image

Tits on the Moon
Poetry by Dessa
Doomtree and Rain Taxi, October 2022

Tits on the Moon features a dozen “stage poems,” many of which Dessa performs at her legendary live shows; they’re funny, weird, and occasionally bittersweet. The collection opens with a short essay on craft (and the importance of having a spare poem around for when the power goes out). Published by Rain Taxi Review of Books in association with Doomtree, Tits on the Moon features a stunning cover pressed with gold foil and structurally embossed, designed by Studio on Fire. “Singer, rapper, and writer Dessa has made a career of bucking genres and defying expectations—her résumé as a musician includes performances at Lollapalooza and Glastonbury, co-compositions for 100-voice choir, performances with the Minnesota Orchestra, and top-200 entries on the Billboard charts.”

Contest :: Fifth Annual Open Book Prize—$1,500 and Publication

Conduit Books & Ephemera Book Prizes

Conduit Books and Ephemera is open to submissions for their fifth annual Open Book Prize. The winner receives $1,500 and book publication. Any poet writing in English can enter regardless of previous publication record. Do check out their literary magazine Conduit for an idea of what they like. They do charge an entry fee. View their full ad in the NewPages Classifieds to learn more.

New Book :: How to Cut a Woman in Half

How to Cut a Woman in Half poetry by Janis Harrington published by Able Muse Press book cover image

How to Cut a Woman in Half
Poetry by Janis Harrington
Able Muse Press, November 2022

Janis Harrington’s How to Cut a Woman in Half is a testament to resiliency in the throes of mounting family tragedies and trials “beyond human comprehension.” This odyssey from loss toward recovery and hope celebrates the boundless love and support between siblings. Using an adapted sonnet form, Harrington has wrought a taut and spellbinding tale in this finalist for the 2020 Able Muse Book Award. Janis Harrington’s first book, Waiting for the Hurricane, won the Lena M. Shull Book Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Tar River Poetry, Journal of the American Medical Association, North Carolina Literary Review, and Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease. After living in Switzerland for many years, she and her husband returned to Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

New Book :: Murder in Times Square

Murder in Times Square a novel by William Baer published by Many Words Press book cover image

Murder in Times Square
Fiction by William Baer
Many Words Press, February 2023

Murder in Times Square, a Deirdre Mystery, initiates a new series by the author of the popular Jack Colt mystery series: When a young woman in a red designer dress falls twenty-five stories from the roof of Times Square One, the well-known New York fashion model known as Deirdre resolves to unravel the mystery. Capable and determined, Deirdre is relentless in her drive to unravel the mystery and find justice for the victim, while protecting those she loves from looming threats. Baer, who has worked in New York City’s fashion district, showcases not only his depth of knowledge of the fashion industry but also of New York City and its landmarks and history. He weaves an intricate, fast-paced, and spellbinding narrative that takes us through New York City, Atlantic City, the Jersey Shore, and the Caribbean. In Murder in Times Square, Baer once again proves he is a master of suspense and intrigue. Many Words Press is an imprint of Able Muse Press.

New Book :: O

O poetry by Tammy Nguyen published by Ugly Duckling Presse book cover image

O
Poetry by Tammy Nguyen
Ugly Duckling Presse, September 2022

From a dentist’s office in San Francisco to the caves of the Phong Nha Karst, Tammy Nguyen’s O sounds the depths of personal, mineral, and geopolitical histories of Vietnam. In this many-threaded narrative, a wind that carved mountains whistles through a young girl’s teeth. The electric green of a plastic forest glints off of glazed porcelain. The shape of a bowl becomes the mouth of a cave. What emerges is a story without a center: an anti-allegory that finds its meaning in echoes and refracted light, a book stitched together by the O woven through the work as its visual spine and sonic refrain. Tammy Nguyen is a multimedia artist and writer whose work spans painting, drawing, printmaking, and publishing. Intersecting geopolitical realities with fiction, her practice addresses lesser-known histories through a blend of myth and visual narrative. She is the founder of Passenger Pigeon Press, an independent press that joins the work of scientists, journalists, creative writers, and artists to create politically nuanced and cross-disciplinary projects. Ngueyn is Assistant Professor of Art at Wesleyan University.

New Book :: Green Burial

Green Burial poetry by Derek Graf published by Elixir Press book cover image

Green Burial
Poetry by Derek Graf
Elixir Press, January 2023

Winner of the Elixir Press 2021 Antivenom Poetry Award, Judge Kirun Kapur had this to say: “Lush and frantic, Green Burial submerges us in a dazzling, apocalyptic pastoral. Here we find a brother’s funeral and a lover’s last drink on the way to rehab as we travel a dreamscape of birds, trash, down-on-their-luck towns, motels and oil derricks. ‘A body falls / through the galaxies / inside an opal,’ the poet writes. And so, we do. In Graf’s hands the end of the world is both grief-stricken and saturated with an exhilarating, hallucinatory zeal.” Derek Graf was born in Tampa, FL. He completed his MFA at Oklahoma State University and his PhD at the University of Kansas. He currently lives in New York City. Green Burial is his first collection.

September 2022 eLitPak :: Madville has Two Open Calls for Submissions in September

Screenshot of Madville Publishing's two open calls for submissions in September flier
click image to open PDF

Madville Publishing currently has two open calls for submissions, The Second Annual Arthur Smith Poetry Prize for a full length poetry collection closes September 30, and the Sticks & Bricks: Stories from the Wrong Side of Town Anthology closes November 30, 2022. Visit our site and view our flyer for more information.

View the full September 2022 eLitPak Newsletter here. Want to get our eLitPak opportunities delivered straight to your inbox? Subscribe today!

New Book :: Writing While Parenting

Writing While Parenting by Ben Berman published by Able Muse Press book cover image

Writing While Parenting
Essays by Ben Berman
Able Muse Press, March 2023

Ben Berman’s Writing While Parenting explores what it means to pursue one’s creative passions while also raising a family, how having children can make us more vulnerable and imaginative as artists. Given how hectic parenting is, it is possible to balance a career and family let alone find two minutes to pee without someone tugging your leg and asking to watch you make bubbles? How do we possibly find the time or energy to be creative? Spanning five years, these essays range from humorous beginnings (the seven-year-old daughter complaining that she just got kicked in the weenie) to more serious moments (finding two swastikas etched into the slide at the playground, a few blocks down the street from the family home). No matter the genesis, each piece examines the overlaps and dissonance between the creative life and the procreative one. This is a witty, inspired, and illuminating collection for the writer and/or the parent.

Book Review :: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow a novel by Gabrielle Zevin published by Knopf book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

While Gabrielle Zevin’s title might initially make readers think of Shakespeare, she sets her story in the 1990s and 2000s video game culture. Her title refers to the ability to start over in games, to continue playing the game until one figures out how to win. Life, though, doesn’t present that same opportunity, and, while lifelong friends Sam and Sadie are still relatively young at the end of the novel, they have come to the clear realization that they are mortal. They are unable to start over during their experiences of loss, which, at times, paralyzes them; their differing approaches to those occurances often leads to the conflict between them. Sam and Sadie recognize each other’s gifts, but they also know each other better than most spouses, so they also see the other’s shortcomings. They thus often seem Shakespearean, star-crossed lovers who come together to create games, then drift apart, often over miscommunication and misunderstandings. Zevin’s novel explores creative friendships and the conflicts that come with them, but, more importantly, she creates characters one wants to spend time with, even when they are at their most frustrating. In other words, she creates characters who behave like humans, for better and worse.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. Knopf, July 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/.

If you are interested in contributing a Guest Post to “What I’m Reading,” please click this link: NewPages.com Reviewer Guidelines.

New Book :: How Much?

How Much New and Selected Poetry by Jerome Sala published by NYQ Books cover image

How Much? New and Selected Poems
Poetry by Jerome Sala
NYQ Books, November 2022

How Much? New and Selected Poems by Jerome Sala offers a panoramic view of a poet whose work has often been a cult-pleasure until now. Spanning Sala’s early years as a punk performance poet in Chicago to his career as a copywriter/Creative Director in New York City, these poems offer satiric insights from the “belly of the beast” of commercial and pop culture. Sala’s books of poetry include cult classics such as I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent, The Trip, Raw Deal, Look Slimmer Instantly, Prom Night (a collaboration with artist Tamara Gonzales), The Cheapskates, and Corporations Are People, Too! His poetry and criticism have appeared widely. Before moving to New York City in the 80s, Sala and his spouse, poet Elaine Equi, did numerous readings together, helping to create Chicago’s lively performance poetry scene. He has a PhD in American Studies from New York University.

New Book :: Girl Flees Circus

Girl Flees Circus a novel by C W Smith published by University of New Mexico Press book cover image

Girl Flees Circus
Fiction by C. W. Smith
University of New Mexico Press, September 2022

Girl Flees Circus, the newest release by C. W. Smith, follows nineteen-year-old aviatrix Katie Burke after she crash lands her biplane on the only street in No Name, New Mexico. Her arrival changes her life and the lives of everyone around her. As Katie and her craft need repair, locals take her in and help her, including a schoolteacher who longs for Katie’s friendship, an interracial couple who own the town’s diner, a handsome young mechanic who lives in a teepee, and a shell-shocked veteran of World War I. As her story unfolds, Katie’s mysteries deepen—revealing shocking secrets, a scandalous past, and a future in true peril. Girl Flees Circus takes flight the moment Katie crashes to earth, promising a journey into the lives of a glamorous, redheaded stranger and the people she will change forever.

New Book :: Myopia

Myopia graphic novel by Richard Dent published by Dynamite Entertainment book cover image

Myopia
Graphic Novel by Richard Dent
Dynamite Entertainment, August 2022

A homeless man is mysteriously abducted. A journal is left on the edge of a subway platform, filled with stories about a world that doesn’t exist. Not far from here a scientist is murdered in cold blood. The only clues are his burned-down lab. A magnetically propelled motorcycle, and a man walking around New York City with the last living falcon on the planet. Imagine a world where your every thought, your every move, is filtered through The Central Lens Network. Now imagine being a twelve-year-old boy and discovering a special pair of lenses that allow you to access this network undetected. This is exactly what happens to Matthew Glen the day his father is murdered then two years later mysteriously appears back in his life. In a style that echoes back to the Dark Age of Comics when graphic novels were coming into an art form of their own, Myopia merges science fiction with noir steampunk into a thrilling alternative reality, where government and big business use entertainment devices to cover up a new authoritarian landscape.

New Book :: Essentially

Essentially essays by Richard Terril published by Holy Cow Press book cover image

Essentially
Essays by Richard Terrill
Holy Cow! Press, October 2022

From Minnesotan author and jazz musician, Richard Terrill’s Essentially is an essay collection that explores what is most essential to him, from the difficult lives of jazz musicians, to trout fishing, to the shifting population and mores of suburbia. “Here’s the thing,” Terrill writes. “There’s always the thing, isn’t there, and most often, not just one?” Terrill asks through this series of wide-ranging, funny, and sometimes gut-punchingly vulnerable essays, What is essential? Maybe trout fishing, the music of Bill Evans, or the whys of dog ownership. Maybe Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story, WeChat messaging app, a musician’s early hearing loss, and spying on the neighbors. Or maybe the coming apocalypse, almost getting lost in the woods, trespassing, town clean-up days, and the reason Miles Davis never listened to his own recordings. At times self-effacing and funny, at times outspoken and provocative, Terrill fixes a clear eye on the contradictions in our present moment. “We’re at that point in a journey where you know where you’re going, but you don’t know where you are,” he writes. “The destination should come anytime now.”

New Book :: My Secret Place

My Secret Place stories by Max Talley published by Main Street Rag Publishing Company book cover image

My Secret Place
Stories by Max Talley
Main Street Rag Publishing Company, July 2022

In My Secret Place, Max Talley deftly mixes humor with pathos with biting social commentary in seventeen short stories, of legendary jazz musicians meeting for a recording session in 1966, of a painter dealing with the art market crash in downtown Manhattan, of a woman’s surreal walk home in Southern California after another day as a house cleaner, about a mid-’70s bar band achieving one-hit-wonder status, and a middle-aged wife dreaming of her imperious Long Island youth. Talley describes musicians and artists, underdogs and eccentrics; secret heroes of their own lives. People driven by eccentric quests that bewilder friends and family. Apartment managers, stoned teenagers, and pop culture collectors, all trying to live in and make sense of a modern world that may have already left them behind. Talley’s first novel, Yesterday We Forget Tomorrow, debuted in 2014, and his crime thriller, Santa Fe Psychosis, was published by Dark Edge Press in spring 2022. He teaches a writing workshop at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and at Santa Fe Workshops. More at www.maxdevoetalley.com.