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Book Review :: April at the Ruins by Lawrence Raab

April at the Ruins poetry by Lawrence Raab book cover image

Guest Post by James Scruton

Depending on the reader, the title of Lawrence Raab’s tenth poetry collection, April at the Ruins, might evoke “the cruelest month” of Eliot’s The Waste Land or a postcard from a Henry James character on The Grand Tour. There are glimmers of each here — mixtures of memory and desire as well as travels both real and metaphorical. But more often we find Raab meditating on love and loss (and much besides) with his characteristic sense of gratitude, entire lives suggested by a precise detail or turn of phrase:

… and as they crossed
the street she took his hand,
just as if everything
they hadn’t told each other
had never happened.
(“One of the Ways We Talk to Each Other”)

In “Little Ritual,” stones collected and then forgotten beside a lake become metaphysical emblems, the “zigzags of blue” in a “shiver of quartz” reminding the speaker “that some day everything / I love must be set aside, / or given away, or lost.” Amid the ruin we’ve made or witnessed of this world, Raab nonetheless celebrates an April of the spirit. “Nothing is beyond repair,” he writes. “How can there be a beautiful ending / without many beautiful mistakes?”

April at the Ruins by Lawrence Raab. Tupelo Press, 2022.

Reviewre bio: James Scruton is the author of two full collections and five chapbooks of poetry, most recently The Rules (Green Linden Press, 2019). He has received the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry magazine, among other honors.

New Book :: The Southernization of America

The Southernization of America: A Story of Democracy in the Balance Essays by Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker

The Southernization of America: A Story of Democracy in the Balance
Essays by Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker
NewSouth Books, February 2022

In 1974 John Egerton published his seminal work, The Americanization of Dixie. Pulitzer Prize-winning University of Southern Alabama Journalist-in-Residence Cynthia Tucker and Pulitzer Prize-winning commentator and University of Southern Alabama Writer in Residence Frye Gaillard carry Egerton’s thesis forward in The Southernization of America. They dive deeper, examining the morphing of the Southern strategy of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan into the Republican Party of today, the racial backlash against President Obama, family separation on our southern border, the rise of the Christian right, the white supremacist riots in Charlottesville, the death of George Floyd, and the attack on our nation’s capitol. They find hope in the South too, a legacy rooted in the civil rights years that might ultimately lead the nation on the path to redemption. Tucker and Gaillard bring a multiracial perspective and years of political reporting to bear on a critical moment in American history, a time of racial reckoning and democracy under siege.

New Book :: O

O by Niki Tulk book cover image

O
Poetry by Niki Tulk
Driftwood Press, July 2022

Chosen as one of three manuscripts for publication from their 2020 poetry collection reading, writer and performance artist Niki Tulk’s O explores the aftermath of sexual assault, unearthing myths, folklore, and profound truths about our collective history of violence, womanhood, and justice. Niki Tulk is an ex-pat Australian and experimental theatre-maker, improviser, writer, poet and author of Performing the Wound: Practicing a Feminist Theatre of Becoming (Routledge, 2022).

Contest :: June 15 Deadline to Enter 2022 New American Fiction Prize

2022 New American Fiction Prize

New American Press has announced the 2022 New American Fiction Prize with a deadline of June 15. Weike Wang, author of Joan is Okay, will act as final judge. All full-length fiction manuscripts are welcome. Winner receives publication contract including $1,500, 25 copies, and promotional support. View their ad in the NewPages Classifieds to learn more.

New Book :: Plans for Sentences

Plans for Sentences by Renee Gladman book cover image

Plans for Sentences
Poetry by Renee Gladman
Wave Books, May 2022

“These sentences—they—will begin having already been sentences somewhere else, and this will mark their afterlife, and this will be their debut.” So begins Renee Gladman’s latest interdisciplinary project, Plans for Sentences. Gladman’s book blurs the distinctions between text and image, recognizing that drawing can be a form of writing, and vice versa: a generative act in which the two practices not only inform each other but propel each other into futures. In this radical way, drawing and writing become part of a limitless loop of energy, unearthing fertile possibilities for the ways we think about poetry. If Gladman ascribes to any particular type of poetics, here in Plans for Sentences, readers are sure to find that it is robustly grounded in a poetics of infinite language.

Book Review :: On the Verge of Something Bright and Good by Derek Pollard

On the Verge of Something Bright and Good by Derek Pollard book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

On the Verge of Something Bright and Good by Derek Pollard is a collection of poems “not elegiac” but of “another kind of seeing that involves letting go.” That requires “a dream we hold to,” where “orange and quick” fish are held as “dear / … as headstones,” and a guiding question is: “How to love in the midst of tumult?” These poems are too humble and intelligent to answer conclusively. But slant. From a squad car that runs over a squirrel to a child whacked for dropping ice cream, these poems acknowledge the range of “advent, accident, / celebration” in our lives together where either “we take up arms” — “The war / Is a war we all fight, and is near” — or we open our arms to “our / Life together / Quiet / Aimless / And full.” There is love in these poems. Love of life and others. And, love of language: a “ricocheting” “hallelujah” “Heaven” of sound and meaning unabashedly riots throughout — “What care for shame? In any of this?” Lovingly the poems share with the tender reader “the holy / Moment this moment.” Reading this book, “To be sitting / Here, the two of us”: “It felt good. And sad, of course. But mostly just good.”

On the Verge of Something Bright and Good by Derek Pollard. Barrow Street Press, 2021.

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 are forthcoming.

Books Received May 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 “New Books” tag under “Popular Topics.”

Poetry
A Peculiar People, Steven Willis, Button Poetry
And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight, Lynn Xu, Wave Books
Anthropocene Lullaby, K. A. Hays, Carnegie Mellon University Press
Bassinet, Dan Rosenberg, Carnegie Mellon University Press
Bath, Jen Silverman, Driftwood Press
Behind the Tree Backs, Iman Mohammed, Ugly Duckling Presse
Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine, Nick Francis Potter, Driftwood Press
Copy, Dolores Dorantes, Wave Books
Green Regalia, Adam Tavel, Stephen F. Austen State University Press
Greyhound Americans, Moncho Ollin Alvarado
Harsh Realm: My 1990s, Daniel Nester, Indolent Books
Idle Fancies, Joseph Hart, Cyberwit.net
Indian Poems, Joseph Hart, Kelsay Books

Continue reading “Books Received May 2022”

New Book :: One Person Holds So Much Silence

One Person Holds So Much Silence by David Greenspan book cover image

One Person Holds So Much Silence
Poetry by David Greenspan
Driftwood Press, March 2022

Chosen as one of three manuscripts for publication from their 2020 poetry collection reading, Greenspan’s work explores the intersection of physical and emotional traumas and was selected for its “surprising, jaw-dropping language from poem to poem.” Simultaneously lush and bizarre, the poems culminate in a striking deep dive into the pain and experiences of existing within a body. From self-harm to suicidal ideation, Greenspan tackles these topics through writing brimming with original language and wrought empathy. David Greenspan is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Mississippi and earned an MFA in Poetry from UMass Amherst.

New Book :: The Bar at Twilight

The Bar at Twilight stories by Frederic Tuten book cover image

The Bar at Twilight
Stories by Frederic Tuten
Bellevue Literary Press, May 2022

In the fifteen stories contained in this collection, The Bar at Twilight, Frederic Tuten entertains questions of existential magnitude, pervasive yearning, and the creative impulse. A wealthy older woman reflects on her relationship with her drowned husband, a painter, as she awaits her own watery demise. An exhausted artist, feeling stuck, reads a book of criticism about allegory and symbolism before tossing her paintings out the window. Writing a book about the lives of artists he admires — Cezanne, Monet, Rousseau — a man imagines how each vignette could be a life lesson for his wife, the artist he perhaps admires the most. New York-based Frederic Tuten is the author of five novels, the memoir My Young Life, and two short story collections. Among other honors, Tuten has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Writing.

New Book :: Coining a Wishing Tower

Coining a Wishing Tower poetry by Ayesha Raees book cover image

Coining a Wishing Tower
Poetry by Ayesha Raees
Platypus Press, March 2022

Selected by Kaveh Akbar as winner of the 2020 Broken River Prize, Coining a Wishing Tower by Ayesha Raees is both story and song, a lyrical narrative that gathers and releases. There are moments of childlike wonder and of adult meditation — oftentimes one and the same. In fragments both real and unreal, this is a book of rituals, of history, of surrender. Ayesha Raees identifies herself as a hybrid creating hybrid poetry through hybrid forms. Raees currently serves as an Assistant Poetry Editor at Asian American Writers’ Workshop The Margins and has received fellowships from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Brooklyn Poets, and Kundiman. From Pakistan, she currently lives between Lahore and New York City.

New Book :: Greyhound Americans

Greyhound Americans by Moncho Ollin Alvarado book cover image

Greyhound Americans
Poetry by Moncho Ollin Alvarado
Saturnalia Books, March 2022

Winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, this collection is “dazzlingly queer, inclusive, celestial, with indigenous ancestral heart.” Through his verse, poet Moncho Alvarado confronts a family history of borderland politics by discovering a legacy of violence, grief, trauma, and survival through poems that have an unmistakable spirit, tenderness, intimacy, and humility. These poems’ persistent resilience creates a constellation of songs, food, flowers, family, community, and trans joy, that, by the end, wants you to feel loved, nourished, and wants you to remember to say, “I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive.”

New Book :: How We Disappear

How We Disappear by Tara Lynn Masih book cover image

How We Disappear
Novella & Stories by Tara Lynn Masih
Press 53, September 2022

In this collection, Masih offers readers transporting and compelling stories of those taken, those missing, and those neither here nor gone – runaways, exiles, wanderers, ghosts, even the elusive Dame Agatha Christie. From the remote Siberian taiga to the harsh American frontier, from rural Long Island to postwar Belgium. Masih’s characters are diverse in identity and circumstance, defying the burden of erasure by disappearing into or emerging from physical and emotional landscapes. Tara Lynn Masih is a National Jewish Book Award Finalist and winner of numerous other book awards. She is the author of My Real Name is Hanna and editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction.

Book Review :: How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Sequoia Nagamatsu’s novel, How High We Go in the Dark, doesn’t have a plot per se, as it reads more like an interconnected collection of short stories than it does a novel. A character’s wife from one chapter will show up in a later chapter as a friend to the girlfriend of another character, a minor characters in one chapter becomes the focus of a later chapter or vice versa. What the characters do have in common is a tenuous existence, as Earth has become less and less habitable. Throughout much of the book, a pandemic is ravaging the world, killing people by mutating their organ cells, causing hearts to behave like livers or brains to change into lungs. Even after that tragedy becomes more controllable, there is still environmental disaster, as wildfires rage constantly, the Arctic is quickly melting, and sea levels rise by feet, not by inches. What Nagamatsu is most interested in exploring, however, is how people avoid one another, even in the midst of suffering, and how they might still be able to connect to one another. Though technology — perhaps even space travel — could save people’s lives, only true connection has a chance of healing their souls.

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu. William Morrow, 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. You can find out more about him and his work on Twitter at @kevinbrownwrite or http://kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

New Book :: Plan B: A Poet’s Survivors Manual

Plan B a Poet's Survival Manual by Sandy McIntosh book cover image

Plan B: A Poet’s Survivors Manual
Memoir by Sandy McIntosh
Marsh Hawk Press, June 2022

If you’re a poet, how are you going to survive if you can’t get a teaching job? McIntosh offers the answer: You need a Plan B if you want to put food on the table, wear shoes without holes in the soles, and stop living with roommates before you turn sixty. Taking readers through his own experiences in the world of commercial writing and publishing, McIntosh asserts that it is possible to have a successful career as a poet while holding down day jobs that make us better writers. Sandy McIntosh is publisher of Marsh Hawk Press. He has published fifteen collections of poetry and prose as well as three award-winning computer software programs.

Contest :: 2022 Autumn House Prizes in Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction

Autumn House Press logo

Deadline: May 31, 2022
The 2022 Autumn House Press Prizes in Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction are open! Winners of each prize receive publication of their full-length manuscripts. Each winner also receives a $1,000 honorarium and a $1,500 travel/publicity grant to promote the book. The submission period closes on May 31 (Eastern Time). Please submit online, through our online submission manager. The reading fee is $30 (we will waive the submission fee for those undergoing financial hardship or living with limited means). Submission should be previously unpublished. Simultaneous submissions permitted. The judges for the 2022 prizes are Carl Phillips (poetry), Venita Blackburn (fiction), and Lia Purpura (nonfiction).

New Book :: Tribar

Tribar by Andra Rotaru book cover image

Tribar
Poetry by Andra Rotaru
Translated by Anca Roncea
Saturnalia Books, March 2022

Winner of the Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize, translated from Romanian by Anca Roncea, Tribar starts from the geometrical concept of an impossible triangle whose three sides do not connect but still exist in the form of a triangle, creating a direction for movement. Andra Rotaru’s poetic work has developed from some of her encounters with modern dance choreography: her poems simultaneously mimic and track the body in motion. Her “connections” become joints or articulated bones that work together to carry the body along. This translation recreates this embodiment in English by focusing on the minute details of movement and sound in Andra’s language and on the “kinetic air” of Romanian.

New Book :: They Don’t Want Her There

They Don't Want Her There by Carolyn Chalmers book cover image

They Don’t Want Her There: Fighting Sexual and Racial Harassment in the American University
Nonfiction by Carolyn Chalmers
University of Iowa Press, April 2022

Decades before the #MeToo movement, Chinese American professor Jean Jew M.D. brought a lawsuit against the University of Iowa, alleging a sexually hostile work environment within the university’s College of Medicine. As Jew gained accolades and advanced through the ranks at Iowa, she was met with increasingly vicious attacks on her character by her white male colleagues. After years of demoralizing sexual, racial, and ethnic discrimination, finding herself without any higher-up departmental support, and noting her professional progression beginning to suffer by the hands of hate, Jean Jew decided to fight back. Carolyn Chalmers was her lawyer. This book tells the inside story of pioneering litigation unfolding during the eight years of a university investigation, a watershed federal trial, and a state court jury trial.

New Book :: A Song by the Aegean Sea

A Song by the Aegean Sea poetry by Mohamed Metwalli book cover image


A Song by the Aegean Sea
Poetry by Mohamed Metwalli
Translated by Gretchen McCullough
Egret Chapbooks, 2022

From the Introduction: “Mohamed Metwalli was recognized as a poet in the Arab world at a young age in 1992, when he won the prestigious Yousef el-Khal prize by Riad El-Rayyes Books in Lebanon for his poetry collection, Once Upon a Time. He was only twenty-two. The Yousef El-Khal prize was a highly coveted award for the best first collection for poets in the Arabic-speaking world. Once, with a mischievous grin on his face, he told me how he rolled up at the ceremony in Beirut, clad in jeans and sneakers to pick up the prize – it was his first trip out of Egypt. A little over fifty now, he has published four collections of poetry. . . This book celebrates the underbelly of the city: the gypsies selling flowers, the roving musicians, the mussel-sellers, and the protesters. The elements of the city’s coastline are merged with the characters in an impressionistic, yet surreal canvas from a stranger’s point of view. The Traveler, i.e., the poet, or the singer of the Aegean song yearns to become part of the scene. Through this yearning, the poetry becomes lyrical.” – Gretchen McCullough

New Book :: Copy

Copy by Dolores Dorantes translated by Robin Myers

Copy
Poetry by Dolores Dorantes
Translated by Robin Myers
Wave Books, April 2022

“Without the copying process,” the poet Dolores Dorantes has said, “there would be no life, no reality.” Through deconstructed dictionary entries and powerfully syncopated, recursive texts, Copy is a prose poem sequence that insinuates an experience of violent removal: a person’s disappearance from a country, from normal life, and forcible reintegration into a new social and existential configuration. This displaced, dispossessed voice explores what it means to be extracted, subtracted, abstracted out of being—and returned into it. Meditative, urgent, and alive, Copy asserts itself as an invocation, both intensely personal and insistently communal, of the right to refuge, and it enacts a powerful homage to the human capacity for creation and metamorphosis. In this way, this book points to the wound of being extricated, serving as both a suture and a salve.

New Book :: And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight

And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight book cover image

And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight
Poetry by Lynn Xu
Wave Books, April 2022

Part protest against reality, part metaphysical reckoning, part internationale for the world-historical surrealist insurgency, and part arte povera for the wretched of the earth, this book-length poem by Lynn Xu holds fast to our fragile utopias. Under the auspice of birth and the contingency of this beginning, time opens: Ecstatic, melancholy, and defiant, the voices of the poem flicker between life and death, gorgeous and gruesome, visionary and intimate. Born in Shanghai, China, Lynn Xu is the author of the full-length collection Debts & Lessons (Omnidawn, 2013) and the chapbooks June (Corollary Press, 2006) and Tournesol (Compline, 2021). She has performed cross-disciplinary works at the Guggenheim Museum, The Renaissance Society, Rising Tide Projects, and 300 S. Kelly Street. She teaches at Columbia University, coedits Canarium Books, and lives with her family in New York City and Marfa, Texas.

Contest :: 2022 North Street Book Prize for Self-Published Books

North Street Book Prize logo 2022

Deadline: June 30, 2022
Now in its eighth year, the North Street Book Prize is sponsored by Winning Writers. Self-published books in seven categories can win up to $8,000 plus additional benefits. Submit online or by mail. Winning Writers is a partner member of the Alliance of Independent Authors, and this contest is recommended by Reedsy. Entry fee: $70 per book. Free gifts from our co-sponsors for everyone who enters. winningwriters.com/northnp22

Contest :: Submit to the 2022 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry

The Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry 2022 Flyer screenshot
click image to open PDF

Deadline: June 15, 2022
Lynx House Press seeks submissions of full-length poetry manuscripts for the annual Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry. The winner will receive $2,000 and publication. Entries must be at least 48 pages in length. The fee for submitting is $28. Previous judges include James Tate, Yusef Komunyakaa, Dorianne Laux, Dara Wier, Melissa Kwasny, and Robert Wrigley.

New Book :: Harsh Realm: My 1990s

Harsh Realm: My 1990s poetry by Daniel Nester book cover image

Harsh Realm: My 1990s
Poetry by Daniel Nester
Indolent Books, May 2022

This collection of poems centers on the decade of fax machines and grunge through the lens of a speaker coming to terms with young adulthood and trying to make their way as a writer in New York City. In other words, the 90s are having a moment. In his foreword to the collection, Matthew Lippman writes, “this book is a conduit to that time and space vortex of love. Nester, with these poems, folds that piece of paper in half, sticks that pencil through, and fires up the rocket ship and there we are, immediately, in that wormhole, cavorting with cultural icons the likes of Vince Neil, Gary Coleman, U2, Mazzy Star, Sugar Ray, Live, David Lee Roth, De La Soul, Smashing Pumpkins, Sleater-Kinney, Dr. Octagon, even KISS. Even the title is a reflection on the era, coming from the infamous Megan Jasper interview in which she made up “grunge speak,” with “harsh realm” being fake grunge-speak for “bummer.”

New Book :: Women and Print Culture

Women and Print Culture book cover image

Women and Print Culture
Essays edited by Donna M. Kabalen Vanek and María Teresa Mijares Cervantes
Arte Público Press, November 2021

This collection of ten essays, based on the examination of publications from the US-Mexico region between 1850-1950, explores the role of women in print culture. Leading to a better understanding of women in the history of Mexican border life, the essays are organized in three thematic groupings: “Exploring the Archives: Women and Written Culture in Northeastern Mexico during the Late Nineteenth Century,” “The Cultural History of Women and Print Culture” and “A Transcultural View of Women and their Role as Activists in Northern Mexico and Texas.”

New Book :: The Fact of Memory

The Fact of Memory essays by Aaron Angello book cover image

The Fact of Memory: 114 Ruminations and Fabrications
Essays by Aaron Angello
Rose Metal Press, April 2022

In this genre-defying collection of short prose pieces, Aaron Angello explores the subtleties of recollection, imagination, and the connections, both momentary and long-lasting, between oneself and others. Each piece riffs on a word from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29; over the course of 114 days, Angello woke early, meditated upon a single word from the sonnet, and wrote. The results are sometimes funny, sometimes profound, and sometimes heartbreaking, accumulating into a map of a mind at work, a Gen X coming-of-age of sorts, seamlessly invoking the likes of The Golden Girls, Spinoza, Rick Springfield, and Rimbaud.

New Book :: Migrations: Poem, 1976-2020

Migrations Poem 1976-2020 by Gloria Gervitz book cover image

Migrations: Poem, 1976-2020
By Gloria Gervitz
Translated by Mark Schafer
New York Review Books, November 2021

The story of Gervitz’s poem is an epic in itself. Migraciones began as “Shajarit,” a fifteen-page poem, which Gervitz began writing in 1976 and published three years later. So began the poem that would grow over the next forty-one years as a tree incorporates its rings, or a river is fed by its tributaries. Gloria Gervitz’s book is an epic journey in free verse through the individual and collective memories of Jewish women emigrants from Eastern Europe, a conversation that ranges across two thousand years of poetry, a bridge that spans the oracles of ancient Greece and the markets of modern Mexico, a prayer that blends the Jewish and Catholic liturgies, a Mexican woman’s reclamation through poetry of her own voice and erotic power.

New Book :: Palm-Lined with Potience

Palm Lined with Potience poetry by Besie Allen book cover image

Palm-Lined with Potience
Poetry by Basie Allen
Ugly Duckling Presse, March 2022

Palm-Lined with Potience is New York City poet and visual artist Basie Allen’s debut collection of poems. Basie’s work is by turns political and lyrical, charting both physical and emotional landscapes, making maps of paintings and paintings of maps. While rooted in Pro-Black theory, art, and precise description, Basie makes space in the ekphrastic for the eerie and abstract. The poems in this collection search for nodes of truth in a tumultuous sea of fractured facts.

New Book :: A Peculiar People

A Peculiar People poetry by Steven Willis book cover image

A Peculiar People
Poetry by Steven Willis
Button Poetry, May 2022

In A Peculiar People, poet Steven Willis creates an entire microcosm crafted within a cast of characters, showcasing their struggles, identities, and underlying emotions. Willis champions the art of storytelling: weaving pop-culture and screenwriting elements to allow the reader to view this social commentary with a fresh lens. This collection examines the author’s life experience; the pain of being Black and facing systemic racism.

New Book :: Receta

Receta by Mario José Pagán Morales book cover image

Receta
Poetry by Mario José Pagán Morales
great weather for MEDIA, April 2022

In this debut poetry collection, Mario José Pagán Morales explores the journeying of mind, spirit, and body to and from Puerto Rico and New York City. Boricua and part of a proud tradition of Nuyorican poets before and around him, Pagán balances a generous heart with striking and visceral imagery. The line breaks and movement between English and Spanglish are reflective of the poems’ settings: the constant journeying of mind, spirit, and body to and from Guayanilla and Ponce, Puerto Rico, Philadelphia, and New York City. The Bronx. History amplifies the colonizer, but Morales invokes voices from the sites of struggle. Here, even the abandoned buildings and trash heaps speak of lives that matter(ed).

Book Review :: You’re Not Listening by Kate Murphy

You're Not Listening by Kate Murphy book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

New York Times journalist Kate Murphy explores the many facets of listening: the physical, mental, and, most importantly, emotional. As her title implies, she points out the ways people have stopped listening to one another and the effects of that lack in our lives. She uses neuroscience to talk about how we sync with one another when we truly listen, as well as what we can learn from improvisational comedy about how to fully engage in a conversation. Murphy explores the loneliness that has crept into our lives due to a lack of feeling heard. That deficit can come from the assumptions one makes, the technology that distracts us, or the difference in how quickly our mind thinks of what to say and how slowly it processes what we hear. Thankfully, she also explores ways we don’t listen to ourselves, choosing the negative voices that override what we most need to hear, as well as times when we should stop listening to others who wish us nothing good. As we move into more face-to-face contact after the past two years, Murphy reminds us we should all work to be better listeners, so all of our lives will be richer.

You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters by Kate Murphy. Celadon Books, 2020.

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. You can find out more about him and his work on Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or  http://kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

New Book :: This Long Winter

This Long Winter poetry by Joyce Sutphen book cover image

This Long Winter
Poetry by Joyce Sutphen
Carnegie Mellon University Press, February 2022

This Long Winter contains meditations on life in the rural world: reflections on hard work, aging, and the ravages of time — erasures that Sutphen attempts to ameliorate with her careful attention to language. These poems move us from delight in precise description to wisdom and solace in the things of this world. These modern metaphysical poems are rooted in a love that calls to the things of this world (to steal a line from Richard Wilbur). Noticing its details, the snowflakes, clementines, the lilies, the cardinal’s call, is the key for this momentary stay against time that comes at us in a rush. The many mirror images in these poems of the poet in a window looking out but simultaneously reflecting back point to the complexity and hard, loving work of really living in the world.

New Book :: Somewhere, a Woman Lowers the Hem of Her Skirt

Somewhere, a Woman Lowers the Hem of Her Skirt by Laurie Rachkus Uttich book cover image

Somewhere, a Woman Lowers the Hem of Her Skirt
Poetry by Laurie Rachkus Uttich
Riot in Your Throat Press, May 2022

This collection of poems takes the reader on a journey through life as a woman breaking free from the constraints of a quiet, midwestern life, to fighting battles for equality, to raising boys in a harsh society, to teaching students and making connections in an unjust world. Uttich teaches at the University of Central Florida and also leads creative writing workshops at a men’s maximum-security correctional facility, bringing her collective experience to offer readers poems about hope and happiness and heartache and finding your way home.

Book Review :: The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton

The Final Revival of Opal and Nev by Dawnie Walton book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Dawnie Walton’s debut novel is a book by the main character Sunny Curtis, the first African-American female editor of a mythical, music magazine. Sunny seeks to discover the details surrounding the death of her father, who was killed at the final concert of Opal and Nev, a fictional duo from the early 1970s. Everybody knows what happened to him, but nobody knows exactly how and why he died in a riot near the end of that performance. Making matters more complicated, Opal was having an affair with Sunny’s father. The book is a series of interviews with those surrounding the event, plus Sunny’s editor’s notes.

Walton uses this setup to raise questions about privilege surrounding race and gender. While Nev, a White British man, goes on to have a successful career after the event, Opal, a Black woman, never has a chance to do so. Others define Opal in ways that limit her, even while she tries to challenge a variety of establishments. Nev plays music that makes people comfortable, so he succeeds. Opal’s struggles are mirrored in Sunny’s work and the events that surround one final revival show for Opal and Nev, revealing that not much has changed in fifty years.

The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton. 37 Ink, March 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. You can find out more about him and his work on Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or http://kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

New Book :: Henry Hamlet’s Heart

Henry Hamlet's Heart by Rhiannon Wilde book cover image

Henry Hamlet’s Heart
YA Fiction by Rhiannon Wilde
Charlesbridge, October 2022

Henry Hamlet doesn’t know what he wants after school ends. It’s his last semester of high school, and all he’s sure of is his uncanny ability to make situations awkward. Luckily, he can always hide behind his enigmatic best friend, Len. They’ve been friends since forever, but Len is mysterious and Henry is clumsy, and Len is a heartthrob and Henry is a neurotic mess. Somehow it’s always worked. That is, until Henry falls in love. Hard. How do you date your best friend? Rhiannon Wilde’s first novel invites readers to explore this passionate story of growing up, letting go, and learning how to love.

New Book :: Ready, Set, Oh

Ready Set Oh by Diane Josefowicz book cover image

Ready, Set, Oh
Fiction by Diane Josefowicz
Flexible Press, May 2022

Diane Josefowicz’s debut novel, Ready, Set, Oh, is set against the upheavals of the Sixties and chronicles the struggles of a man who has just lost his draft deferment, a young pregnant woman with fragile mental health, and a UFO-chasing astronomer, each hostages in their own way to their families and to history. A portion of the proceeds from Ready, Set, Oh goes to the National Network to End Domestic Violence, a social change organization dedicated to creating a social, political, and economic environment in which violence against women no longer exists.

Book Review :: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Emily St. John Mandel takes the reader through locations that range from the woods of British Columbia to colonies on the moon and through times that move from 1912 to 2401. Her story follows several characters: Edwin, the youngest child in a British family who will inherit almost nothing and who is exiled to Canada after he questions England’s role in India; Gaspery Roberts, a hotel detective who takes on a case with implications he could never imagine; and Olive Llewellyn, a novelist on a book tour for her work about a pandemic in a world where such tragedies happen more and more frequently. Mandel draws on her experience for the last character, as readers and critics have seen her Station Eleven as prescient in its portrayal of a much worse pandemic than our current one. She draws on questions and comments from her book tours for some of the more humorous parts of the novel. Overall, however, she’s interested in larger questions of time and reality, even exploring whether or not the characters’ world — and, thus, our own — is nothing more than a simulation. If so, though, she seems to say that doesn’t make it any less meaningful.

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel. Alfred A. Knopf, 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. You can find out more about him and his work on Twitter at @kevinbrownwrite or at http://kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

New Book :: Anthropocene Lullaby

Anthropocene Lullaby poetry by K. A. Hays book cover image

Anthropocene Lullaby
Poetry by K. A. Hays
Carnegie Mellon University Press, February 2022

The poems of Anthropocene Lullaby move from the micro to the macro, from dragonflies to galaxies, from the intersecting forces of climate change, capitalism, and digital technologies to intersecting anxieties of selfhood and motherhood. These lyric and prose poems track change: underway and inevitable, personal and impersonal, generative and apocalyptic. The title poem sets in motion some of the collection’s concerns:

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New Book :: My Identity as a Stereotypical Side Character

My Identity as a Stereotypical Side Character poetry by Marcus Campbell book cover image

My Identity as a Stereotypical Side Character
Poetry by Marcus Campbell
Brick Cave Media, February 2022

My Identity as a Stereotypical Side Character is a complex interlocking of the personal, communal, and societal that reflects the challenges of growing up as a mixed-race minority in the new millennium. Campbell spares no subject, be it family, others, or even himself in this powerful collection of poetry that deals with mental health, race, and addiction.

New Book :: What Passes Here for Mountains

What Passes Here for Mountains poetry by Matt Morton book cover image

What Passes Here for Mountains
Poetry by Matt Morton
Carnegie Mellon University Press, February 2022

These poems are a kaleidoscopic journey across locales ranging from the West Texas desert to the bustling streets of Rome, from the social realm of festivity and ritual to the privacy of the imagination. Along the way, the search for meaning and stability within a world in constant flux is enlivened by a surrealist vitality. Cezanne and Shakespeare’s Caliban commingle with indie rock musicians and Humpy-Dumpty. A mystical encounter with an Edward Hopper painting butts heads with the mundanity of waking again to one’s morning routine. Poems of wry self-deprecation are juxtaposed with quiet meditations on memory, grief, and the relationship between the self and the cosmos.

New Book :: So, Stranger

So Stranger poetry by Topaz Winters book cover image

So, Stranger
Poetry by Topaz Winters
Button Poetry, May 2022

Winner of the Button Poetry Short Form Contest, Topaz Winters’ third poetry collection spans three countries and three generations. In a series of ars poeticas, Winters questions the boundary between the things we inherit and those we owe, stands at the grave of the American dream, and unspools the enormous grace and guilt of being loved.

April 2022 eLitPak :: 2022 Housatonic Book Awards

Screenshot of the 2022 Housatonic Book Awards flyer

Deadline: June 13, 2022
The MFA in Creative and Professional Writing at Western Connecticut State University is now accepting all books published in 2021 for the 2022 Housatonic Book Awards. Open to fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and young adult/middle grade. Winners receive $1,500 and an invitation to our summer or winter residency. See our website for past winners and submission details.

View the full April 2022 eLitPak Newsletter.

New Book :: The J Girls: A Reality Show

The J Girls A Reality Show by Rochelle Hurt book cover image

The J Girls: A Reality Show
Mixed Genre by Rochelle Hurt
Indiana University Press, March 2022

Winner of the 2021 Blue Light Books Prize, Rochelle Hurt’s The J Girls: A Reality Show is a tribute to the grit and glitter of millennial girlhood and a testament to its dangers and traumas. Ignoring the optimistic advice of elders, Jocelyn, Jodie, Jennifer, Jacqui, Joelle – five working-class teens in the Rust Belt – band together in their embrace of bad behavior and poor taste as they navigate sexuality and identity with loud-mouthed joy and clear-eyed cynicism. Hurt’s genre-bending mix of poetry, fiction, and screenplay brings the girls to life with campy performances of monologues, soap opera clips, mock interviews, talk shows, commercials, and even burlesque. Vulgar, rhapsodic language serves as costume and shield, allowing the J Girls to script their own images and project glowing, outsized versions of themselves into the safe space of the TV screen.

New Book :: Out Beyond the Land

Out Beyond the Land poetry by Kimberly Burwick book cover image

Out Beyond the Land
Poetry by Kimberly Burwick
Carnegie Mellon University Press, February 2022

Out Beyond the Land refracts the subtle moments in nature where what is seen and unseen twists and loops back, gently nudging the speaker to question how knowledge is formed and memorialized. Using the Latin’s “A priori” and “A posteriori” as a starting point, these lyrics work to form a kind of double helix in which the strands of empirical knowledge and intuitive knowledge twist and become one. In the silence that follows, the speaker comes to terms with both her attachment to nature’s permanence and nature’s solid independence from our attachment.

Book Review :: Walking with Aletheia: A Survivor’s Memoir by Jean Hargadon Wehner

Walking with Aletheia A Survivor's Memoir by Jean Hargadon Wehner book cover image

Guest Post by Bruce Mason

Netflix’s The Keepers – which was released five years ago in 2017 — follows the investigation into the 1969 death of Sister Catherine Cesnik, a Baltimore nun and former Archbishop Keough High School teacher, by a group of investigators including her former students. Her murder remains, to this day, unsolved, but members of her community believe she was killed to cover up Keough’s allegedly rampant clergy sex abuse, which was brought to light in the ’90s. One abuse victim previously known as “Jane Doe” is at the center of it all. “Doe” has since come forward publicly, leading many to wonder: What is Jean Hargadon Wehner doing now?

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New Book :: Plainchant

Plainchant by Eamon Grennan book cover image

Plainchant
Poetry by Emon Grennan
Red Hen Press, June 2022

Grennan’s new collection shows again his powers of close, patient, plainspoken observation. Whether his gaze falls on the dash of a hare, dive of a gannet, heavy stillness of a rain-flecked cow, the song of a lark, or the scurry of an ant across a page of Celan, the poem that emerges is a celebration of the momentary fact, how a particular detail can, when sufficiently attended to, glow with the truth of its own unrepeatable self. Set mostly in the landscape of coastal Connemara, these poems can also bring to vivid life a painting by Bonnard, a family walk, a childhood memory, a chance encounter, a man scything a field, or a brief probing of the work of Beckett.

New Book :: Bassinet

Bassinet poetry by Dan Rosenberg book cover image


Bassinet
Poetry by Dan Rosenberg
Carnegie Mellon University Press, February 2022

Dan Rosenberg’s third collection moves from loss into parenthood, exploring the roles of husband and father: their limits, their possibilities, and how they intersect with the wider world. Grounded in the familial, these poems wrestle with the political and the ecological, with heritage and hope, reimagining the breadth of home and what it means for one man to raise another to love it.

New Book :: You’ve Got Something Coming

You've Got Something Coming by Jonathan Starke book cover image

You’ve Got Something Coming
Fiction by Jonathan Starke
Black Heron Press, April 2020

A title you may have missed at the start of the pandemic, You’ve Got Something Coming is worth a throwback look. This breakthrough debut novel is about a down-and-outer and his small daughter and his attempt to give them a better life. Trucks, an aging boxer with only thirty dollars, breaks his deaf daughter, Claudia, out of a children’s home in Wisconsin one night during the dead of winter. He gives her used hearing aids, and they begin hitchhiking to Nevada. Claudia is a winsome, feisty little girl who tries to hold her father to account, and Trucks loves her unconditionally. Claudia’s mother, an addict, has disappeared and is likely dead.

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New Book :: Conscious Designs

Conscious Designs novella by Nathanial White book cover image

Conscious Designs
Novella by Nathanial White
Miami University Press, May 2022

Nathanial White’s speculative fiction explores the human psyche, physical disability, culture, technology, and consumerism. In this new work, Eugene, a wealthy paraplegic, must decide whether to preserve his consciousness forever in a digital utopia or suffer the pain tormenting his existence. Yet the more he learns about digital replication, the more deeply he understands personhood, empathy, and the value of suffering.