Summer + Reading = Happy Place. To help you achieve that goal, check out the July 2024 New Books Received. Each month we post the new and forthcoming titles NewPages has received from small, independent, university, and alternative presses as well as author-published titles.
If you are a follower of our blog or a subscriber to our weekly newsletter, you can see several of the titles we received featured. For publishers or authors looking to be featured on our blog and social media, please visit our FAQ page.
Nwabineli’s second novel, Allow Me to Introduce Myself, follows Aṅụrị Chinasa, a twenty-five year-old woman born in Nigeria and raised in England. Her mother died in childbirth, so her stepmother, Ophelia, became the primary caregiver, as her father struggled with grief. Aṅụrị spends much of the novel involved in a lawsuit with Ophelia, as Ophelia was one of the earliest momfluencers, making millions through advertising and sponsorship, with all of the content focused on Aṅụrị. The effects of that childhood have prevented Aṅụrị from moving on, as she turned to alcohol as one of her main means of rebellion against Ophelia and her expectations.
Further complicating the situation is that Ophelia is now carrying out the same parenting approach with Noelle, Aṅụrị’s half-sister, with similar effects. Aṅụrị not only wants Ophelia to remove all of the content concerning her childhood; she wants Ophelia to stop posting about Noelle. In fact, Aṅụrị wants to take Noelle out of the house and raise her on her own.
Aṅụrị has several people helping her work to move past the scars of her childhood: her two best friends—Simi and Loki—her therapist Ammah, her lawyer Gloria, and a possible boyfriend, Christian. However, the years of damage make it difficult for Aṅụrị to trust anybody.
Nwabineli’s novel is an excellent exploration of the effects of the internet’s lack of privacy on children, calling into question parents (and children) who willingly give up their lives to total strangers for financial gain. This timely exploration should have every reader asking whether what they view online has effects they might not have considered.
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
The poems in Rennie Ament’s Mechanical Bull toggle between extremes, where it is “[l]earned anything has a punishing / angle. Tensions range between husbandry/slaughter, “wonder”/horror, humility/“hubris,” superluminal/“supraliminal,” human body/poetic form, “association”/“dissociation,” and a “new book”/old story of a girl on the roadside and a murderer under the trees. “Pick / your version,” reader, but understand you and the poet may be in “business together” but she has “all the capital.”
Ament’s “[p]oems are a bed of nails” and you prick “awake on their numerous tips.” The hypothesis: pleasure and pain are an “eerie glistening” on a continuum. Her poems, in turn, edulcorate and confront everyday “savagery / fallen short of its potential.” The potential for danger looms everywhere, “murder coming in” through fists or rape. “Who will do something. Like ring a bell. A good old-fashioned bell.”
Rennie Ament does something with Mechanical Bull; her poems ring bells.
Mechanical Bull by Rennie Ament. Cleveland State University Poetry Center, October 2023.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.
The forty-seven essays in Feminism, Violence and Nonviolence – all published between the 1970s and the 1990s – provide readers with a penetrating glimpse into the linkages between war, militarism, interpersonal violence, and women’s oppression. It’s a valuable collection, but because it is disconnected from the contemporary realities of 21st-century politics and social movements, its usefulness is likely limited to scholars, researchers, and academics.
Nonetheless, the essays remind readers of the extent of psychological and physical violence, noting that conflict exists far beyond the battlefield and can be seen in our home and work lives, as well as in interactions with a host of government agencies that belittle and condescend. What’s more, several of the essays offer an expansive view of violence and touch on pollution, racism, and economic inequity as potent forms of attack.
While many Second Wave feminists agitated for female parity in the armed forces and in law enforcement, the anti-violence segment of the movement is often sidelined. This book changes that. And while debates that raged during the 1970s and 80s – whether self-defense was a betrayal of nonviolent precepts or was a legitimate response to rape – seem dated, Feminism, Violence and Nonviolence reminds us that 20th-century pacifist-feminists were bold, creative, and radical.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
Stephen C. Pollock’s poetry collection Exits explores the beauty and frailty of life, the cycles of nature, and the potential for renewal. It also responds to contemporary anxieties surrounding death and the universal search for meaning.
Musical and multilayered, Exits features a potpourri of styles, ranging from traditional forms to free verse to hybrid works. Many of the images are drawn from nature. In addition, each poem is paired with a piece of artwork intended to resonate with the writing and enhance the reader’s experience.
Exits has been honored with the Gold Medal for poetry in the 2023 Readers’ Favorite International Book Awards and the Silver Medal for poetry in the 2024 Feathered Quill Book Awards. Echoing these accolades, Midwest Book Review declares: “Exits is a book that has profoundly impacted the literary world.”
“Pollock’s poetry is brilliant” —Kristiana Reed, editor-in-chief, Free Verse Revolution
“Exits exemplifies the musicality of language” —Foreword-Clarion Reviews
“Full of wit, insight and provocative imagery, Exits is a masterful collection” —IndieReader, 5.0 stars
Rendered Paradise by Susanne Dyckman & Elizabeth Robinson Apogee Press, April 2024
In Rendered Paradise, poets Susanne Dyckman and Elizabeth Robinson invite the reader into the worlds of three major women artists: Vivian Maier, Agnes Martin and Kiki Smith. Dyckman and Robinson bring a radical collaborative approach to this gathering: through their shared vision, contemplation, and creation, each artist’s works are encountered as unique presences coming alive in fresh and unexpected ways. “We have seen so many instance of men writing about men,” says Editor Edward Smallfield, “and have had many fewer opportunities to read women writing about women. The writing changes as the poets move from one artists to another, so that the focus of the language is the work of art, not the preferred vocabulary of the poets.” This remarkable book isn’t “about” the artworks it engages with, but is its own work of art, new and wondrous.
At the age of seven, Jennifer Coleman is severely burned in a house fire that kills her sister. Despite the barriers of her scarred face and her tragic childhood, she reaches the pinnacle of achievement as a classical concert pianist, but at a deep psychological cost.
During Jennifer’s meteoric rise as a virtuoso pianist, her disfigurement takes on mythic proportions. She is internationally loved and admired, but unable to love herself. At a pivotal point in her career, she meets an extraordinarily creative, suicidal musician named Felix, who challenges Jennifer’s beliefs and falls deeply in love with her. Will Jennifer be able to learn from Felix’s example before she self-destructs?
Cadenza is symphonic. It succeeds not only as an absorbing, psychologically nuanced novel, but also as a tragic fable of ambition and virtuosity. Its extraordinary heroine offers profound truths about purpose, memory, trauma, and the transcendent powers of art and love.
— Lauren Acampora, author of The Hundred Waters
“An engrossing epic of artistic triumphs and personal disasters, unflinching in its depiction of scars both physical and emotional, Cadenza reads like a piano concerto playing in a house on fire.”
Killer Insight by Karoline Anderson Flare Books, September 2024
When a local woman’s body is found in a shallow grave on one of Seattle’s pristine hiking trails, Detective Kaitlyn Kruse and her partner Joe Riley are under pressure to find her killer as swiftly as possible. But more than one body is recovered at the site, and – alarmingly – they all look a bit like Kaitlyn.
Fortunately, Kaitlyn has a secret weapon. She dreams of her past lives, and their memories are always eager to help her solve the crime at hand. But Kaitlyn’s dreams are getting more desperate every night, like one of her past selves is trying to tell her something, and a shady black sedan is tracking her every move. It may be too late to stop the inevitable – but Kaitlyn is determined to get justice for the dead before she becomes one of them.
In this rousing crime debut with a touch of the supernatural, the first in her Detective Kaitlyn Kruse series, Karoline Anderson proves she’s got a knack for the thrill.
Killer Insight is Karoline Anderson’s debut novel as well as the inaugural publication from Flare Books, an imprint of Jessica Powers’ Catalyst Press founded in 2017.
8000 Mile Roll: A Motorcycle Memoir by M. Scott Douglass Paycock Press, April 2024
In 2021, in the fading days of the pandemic, M. Scott Douglass took a motorcycle ride across America. The ride itself took 24 days and covered 8001 miles through 24 states with extended stops in the Grand Canyon area and his native state of Pennsylvania. This book is a journal of that adventure, the places where he went, and the people he met along the way. North Carolina Poet Laureate Joseph Bathanti says, “It’s impossible to read and not conjure Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to Be Wild,’ the revving, reverberating anthem to the iconic film Easy Rider.” And check out Charlotte Readers Podcast Episode 385 which features Douglass in conversation with Landis Wade.
The 2024 Rattle Young Poets Anthology curates another year of delightful and insightful poetry that happens to be written by young people. As always, this is not a book of poems for children, but the other way around—these are poems written by children for us all, revealing the startling insights that are possible when looking at the world through fresh eyes.
This 36-page chapbook is mailed to all Rattle subscribers along with the Summer 2024 issue of Rattle poetry magazine. Eighteen poets age 15 or younger contributed to the 2024 volume, offering their perspectives on life in an impressive variety of poetic forms, including an abecedarian, a ghazal, a contrapuntal poem, and a haiku series.
Cover art: “Rainbow Cake” by Amy DiGi (2022, Oil on panel)
Garcia-Gonzalez’s work forays into numerous aspects of our existence to probe into the constraints of the human experience. What is reality? What incites the disparity between one individual’s observation of reality and another’s? As the author dives deeper into his immense understanding of what is, he provides a series of intriguing, thought-provoking insights that cut right to the core of one’s belief system, yet he does so with grace and knowledge that impels readers to at least consider what is being proposed.
Check out these great titles received in the month of May 2024, just in time to transition us into summer reading. Each month we post the new and forthcoming titles NewPages has received from small, independent, university, and alternative presses as well as author-published titles. You can view the full list here.
If you are a follower of our blog or a subscriber to our weekly newsletter, you can see several of the titles we received featured. For publishers or authors looking to be featured on our blog and social media, please visit our FAQ page.
Mary Ann Redmond’s Boopable! is a beautifully illustrated and fanciful book for toddlers and pre-schoolers that is meant to introduce kids to the joyous bonds that can develop between animals and humans. By zeroing in on the irrepressible urge to snuggle and boop the nose of a cherished furry family member or four-legged friend – or even a creature seen only in the zoo, in stories or poems, or on TV – Boopable! makes clear that even when love is wordless, it is deeply felt.
“Would you be shocked if you booped a fox?” it asks. “Would you laugh if you booped a giraffe?…Would you be smitten if you booped a kitten?… Would you swoon if you booped a raccoon?”
Forget logic or the practical implications of such encounters; neither is on display here. Instead, Boopable! utilizes humorous rhymes to evoke affection for nine distinct members of the animal kingdom. And while most of the critters are unlikely to be within booping range of the book’s audience, this does not matter. Thanks to Kathy Moore Wilson’s exceptionally soulful watercolors, the book is a sweet tribute to love, whimsy, and imagination. It is sure to win cheers from both kids and adults.
Boopable! by Mary Ann Redmond with illustrations by Kathy Moore Wilson. Author Published, January 2024.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
Cemetery Citizens: Reclaiming the Past and Working for Justice in American Burial Grounds by Adam Rosenblatt Stanford University Press, April 2024
Across the United States, groups of grassroots volunteers gather in overgrown, systemically neglected cemeteries. As they rake, clean headstones, and research silenced histories, they offer care to individuals who were denied basic rights and forms of belonging in life and in death. Cemetery Citizens is the first book-length study of this emerging form of social justice work. It focuses on how racial disparities shape the fates of the dead, and asks what kinds of repair are still possible. Drawing on interviews, activist anthropology, poems, and drawings, Adam Rosenblatt takes readers to gravesite reclamation efforts in three prominent American cities.
Cemetery Citizens dives into the ethical quandaries and practical complexities of cemetery reclamation, showing how volunteers build community across social boundaries, craft new ideas about citizenship and ancestry, and expose injustices that would otherwise be suppressed. Ultimately, Rosenblatt argues that an ethic of reclamation must honor the presence of the dead—treating them as fellow cemetery citizens who share our histories, landscapes, and need for care.
Adam Rosenblatt is Associate Professor of the Practice in International Comparative Studies and Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. He is the author of Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science after Atrocity (2015).
It’s clear from Adelle Waldman’s second novel, Help Wanted, that she has worked in retail before, specifically in the warehouse section. Her story follows a small group of workers who arrive before the big-box store, Town Square, opens, so they can unload the truck, break down the boxes, and stock the shelves. While the plot focuses on the question of who will become the new general manager and, thus, which of the main cast of characters would take over as the manager of Movement—the business-speak title for the warehouse team—the real heart of the novel are the characters and their struggles.
They struggled in school, whether because they were uninterested, had undiagnosed learning disabilities, or encountered financial or family hardships, leading their lives to end up in the warehouse. Some of them are divorced and juggle childcare obligations; some are single and trying to figure out how to create a life; all of them have dreams, even if that’s nothing more than to move up one rung in the Town Square corporate ladder.
The backdrop for the novel heightens their concerns even more, as Potterstown, where the store is located, has never recovered from the 2008 financial crash and companies’ decisions to move to other countries, where labor costs are cheaper. And, of course, there’s the competition with the online retailer, whom the characters never name.
The team does find moments of joy and companionship, especially when they are all working toward a common goal that they, not management, define, but the book is not ultimately hopeful. Instead, Waldman creates real characters with real struggles that will persist for most, if not all, of their lives. She bears witness to the realities of those who work in the warehouse of the world, where most of us never think to look.
Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman. W.W. Norton, March 2024.
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
Xochitl Gonzalez’s second novel, Anita de Monte Laughs Last, tells two parallel stories about women in the art world. The titular Anita de Monte is a Latina artist on the rise in the middle of the 1980s, but she’s married to Jack Martin, a well-established, minimalist artist known as much for his affairs as his art. Raquel Toro is a college student at Brown University in the late 1990s, just beginning work on her undergraduate thesis, which will focus on Jack Martin. Her experience as a Latina in a white-dominated university and department has led to her alienation, both from those around her and from her culture and background.
Anita disappears from art history after her death until Raquel, with guidance from Belinda—the director of the Rhode Island School of Design’s gallery, as well as another woman of color—rediscovers Anita’s work, as well as more details about her death. Raquel’s life had already begun to mirror Anita’s, as she begins dating Nick, a graduating senior with a promising art career before him, though it’s driven more by connections than talent. Though Nick is not a mirror for Jack, he is an echo, a reminder of the men who have tried to control female artists and the narrative of art history.
Raquel’s discovery of Anita de Monte not only resurrects Anita’s reputation, but also helps Raquel begin to discover who she is and who she can be. Through her two main characters, Gonzalez crafts realistic portrayals of the challenges women have and continue to face, along with the importance of role models as one means of pushing through those struggles.
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
Willow Books has announced the release of Black Fire This Time, Volume 2 (2024) edited by Derrick Harriell with Assistant Editor Kofi Antwi with an introduction by Mona Lisa Saloy. The second in a series celebrating the history and legacy of the Black Arts movement, Volume 2 continues to showcase the works of multiple generations, from the founders of the movement to contemporary writers in the tradition. Hailed as the “New Golden Age of Black Writing,” the Black Fire This Time series is an unprecedented collection of the best in writing by black writers. Featured writers in the series include Sonia Sanchez, Ishmael Reed, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, 2023 American Book Award winner Everett Hoagland and 75 new poets, dramatists and fiction writers from across the country. Black Fire This Time Volume 2 will be distributed by the University of Mississippi Press.
Mark Cox pulls no punches in these poems about family, relationships, loss, regret, growing older and our human condition, generally. Sometimes wry, sometimes tender, always thought provoking, Knowing is the seventh volume of poetry from a lauded veteran poet who has been publishing prominently for almost 40 years.
Previous Praise for Mark Cox:
On Readiness
Thrilling prose poems from a cherished writer . . . . Cox gives lie to the common notion that prose poetry is too formless to count as real verse . . . . [He] is as careful with diction, rhythm, and even rhyme as one might be if they were writing strict alexandrines-and yet, his poems are as fluid and readable as Jack Kerouac’s novels.
Kirkus Reviews
On Sorrow Bread
Tony Hoagland has said Mark Cox is “a veteran of the deep water; there’s no one like him,” and Thomas Lux identified him as “one of the finest poets of his generation.” No one speaks more effectively of the vital and enduring syntaxes of common, even communal, life.
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, James McBride’s latest novel, centers around a small community in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, in the early and middle twentieth century. The neighborhood of Chicken Hill is changing, first from a largely Jewish area to a primarily African American one, but then even that dichotomy breaks down with a significant influx of Eastern European Jews who don’t always see the world the same way the older immigrant community does.
Moshe bridges the original divide, as he owns a theatre that once hosted vaudeville acts, but then transitioned to Black bands as demand grew. His primary employee is Nate, a Black man, who helps Moshe work across the racial divide. However, the main impetus for Moshe’s doing so is his wife, Chona, who runs the titular grocery store. She encourages (forces, really) Moshe to leave the grocery store in the neighborhood even as its demographics change, and she becomes the face of welcome to anyone who walks in.
She even makes Moshe hide Dodo, Nate and Addie’s deaf nephew, when the state comes to take him away, a decision that will lead to much of the conflict in the novel. However, Chona stands for the heaven and earth of the store, as she attempts to live out the love of God, the will of God, on earth, as it is in heaven, a message of inclusivity needed now as much as ever.
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
A Nice Safe Place: A Cutler Series Book 1 by Andrew Madigan Next Chapter, August 2024
One day, Amy Snyder disappears. Her father Wayne starts looking for her because the sheriff can’t be bothered. Who took her? There are a few sketchy people around: Jason, Amy’s boyfriend; Lupo, the middle-aged drug dealer who dates teenage girls; the creepy minister, Pastor Stone. Wayne searches all over the county but doesn’t find answers. As Wayne slowly discovers, Belvue isn’t the nice, safe place he thought it was.
Amy suddenly returns, but that’s just the beginning of her story. She’s quiet, thin, traumatized. She says a man kept her locked in a basement along with several other girls. Wayne takes her to the sheriff to make a statement, and she sees her captor’s face in a book of mug shots. Ray Loris, a cutler. Loris is arrested, but a few days later he’s released. There’s no material evidence at his home, no girls, not even a basement. And one more thing: Amy’s pregnant. She swears Loris isn’t the father, and neither is Jason, but she won’t say who is.
A Nice Safe Place follows Wayne as he searches for his daughter while other sections of the novel shift from the point of view of Amy to Loris to Pastor Stone. It is a story about a girl, her family, and a town that’s struggling through hard times. It’s also a story of family secrets and the terrible things people can do to one another, and a story of what it takes to heal.
Goyhood, Reuven Fenton’s debut novel, mixes a road trip with a twist on a coming-of-age story to develop Mayer (née Marty) Belkin’s existential crisis. Mayer grew up with his twin brother David in Georgia until one day when they were both twelve, and a rabbi came to town. When they discover they’re Jewish, Mayer goes to New York to study, marrying the daughter of a famous rabbi, while David explores a more hedonistic life. They reunite when their mother dies, leaving them with information that will change their lives, especially Mayer’s. David takes Mayer on a road trip during the week he’s away from his wife, exposing him to ideas and experiences that broaden his view of the world and himself.
Fenton slips into some writerly tics that can sometimes crop up in first novels: his narrator often comments that characters see something at their one o’clock (or some different time/location marker); he feels compelled to tell every city or town where they stop, even when nothing happens there, as if proving he knows the area; Mayer’s wife seems more like a plot point than an actual person; and he sometimes overwrites—“masticated” for “chewed” for one example.
However, the relationship between David and Mayer in Goyhood rings true, as does what Mayer needs to learn on his spiritual and emotional journey, as well as the physical one. One could do worse than spend time in a car with them and the people they meet along the way.
Goyhood by Reuven Fenton. Central Avenue Publishing, May 2024.
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
Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity, a stunning collection of 47 essays and poems by award-winning Brisbane, Australia, based Aboriginal-Dutch writer Ellen van Neerven, straddles the line between personal reflection and political polemic. The nonbinary author’s reach is broad and the diverse pieces in the anthology touch on the importance of athletics in the social and physical development of girls; the sexual harassment and abuse that often derail the participation of female players; the massive fires, brutal storms, and dislocation that have been caused by ever-worsening climate change; and the persistence of racism against indigenous and other people of color.
The anthology also includes a searing indictment of anti-trans bigotry and zeroes in on the sidelining of Native knowledge about plants, animals, and land management by so-called scientific “experts.” In addition, colonialism is effectively denounced. Lastly, the book offers a moving analysis of illness and addresses the ways disability impacts their ability to write, participate in social justice movements, and socialize with family, friends, and colleagues.
By turns angry, mournful, moving, and persuasive, Personal Score reminds us of a foundational First Nation belief: “Only two relationships matter in the world, relationship with land and relationship with people.” van Neerven beautifully honors both.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
“Eugene Stevenson’s Heart’s Code is a work of true wonder. Ever since my introduction to his poetry, I have awaited his first collection and it is nothing short of magnificent. With deft precision and a keen eye, Stevenson captures ‘the places of great joy [and] the places of great pain’ with a tender grace and moving beauty that will leave readers’ hearts aching for more.”—Michelle Champagne, Susurrus, A Literary Arts Magazine of the American South
“Filled with snapshots of compassion, the poems in Heart’s Code explore both the grand and pocket-sized experiences that drive us apart and bring us back together again, transformed into something greater than before.”—Maxwell Bauman, Door Is A Jar Literary Magazine Editor-In-Chief
“Expansive and stirring, Heart’s Code carries us through complex landscapes of generational love and loss. A study in impermanence, anchored to nature’s juxtaposed cycles of rebirth, Stevenson’s verse offers redemption through the very journey itself. A poetic atlas of life’s gutting transience, not to be missed.”—Kelly Easton, Editor, Compass Rose Literary Journal
“Eugene Stevenson’s debut collection of poetry ruminates on points of origin and journeys in sharply observed language. Simultaneously plain and artful, poem after poem draws us into dislocated people finding their way, following their own path, as a sensuous realism that conducts its own exploration, both familiar and unfamiliar, without constraining, as the ‘world / recede[s] in the distance.’ Heart’s Code is a meditation on a world balancing at the edge of its own disappearance.” —Geoffrey Gatza, author of Disappointment Apples
The Other Side of Nothing, Anastasia Zadeik’s second novel, is an emotionally resonant exploration of what it means to love someone with a life-threatening mental illness. The story centers around Julia, a suicidal soon-to-be-18-year-old who believes that she hastened her father’s death from cancer. After signing herself into a psychiatric hospital, she begins to stabilize. That is, until she meets 23-year-old Sam in group therapy. Sam, an up-and-coming artist, is everything Julia admires and they immediately become a couple. But things unravel almost as quickly as they began.
As Sam’s release date approaches, he convinces Julia to bolt the facility and join him on a cross-country road trip to Yosemite National Park. Once there, he intends to replicate Ansel Adams’ photo of Half Dome. From the start troubles lurk: Sam discards his medication, takes Julia’s cell phone, and becomes increasingly manic and controlling. Julia is terrified.
The hospital, meanwhile, has no clue about Julia’s whereabouts, and although staff have suspicions, they also know that they have to do something–and fast. Despite hesitation, they notify Sam and Julia’s mothers about the disappearance, prompting the pair to take a harrowing road trip of their own.
The Other Side of Nothing addresses heavy themes–bipolar disorder, depression, suicide–with sensitivity and grace, making the book both illuminating and unforgettable.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
Most people know Salman Rushdie only for the publication of The Satanic Verses and the fatwa issued against his life, much to his regret. He and others thought he had moved on from that time in his life. However, on August 12, 2022, a man attacked him when he was on stage to speak at the Chautauqua Institution, leading Rushdie to lose sight in one eye and much of the mobility in one hand in addition to wounds in his neck and stomach. Medical specialists and his family thought he would die.
This memoir is the account of the attack, as Rushdie recounts that day, but it is much more about the power of love and art. Through his long recovery, Rushdie repeatedly returns to those two aspects of his life to help him through the roughest periods. As he has done his entire career, he celebrates freedom of speech that he believes all writers and individuals possess, but he also speaks much more openly of the love of his wife, Eliza, and his family, as well as the writers and broader literary community that rallied to his support.
In a time where extremism continues to be on the rise, this memoir celebrates that which we need most to combat it: the love of those around us and the art we all can create and celebrate.
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
“Poetry was a place to play / with language” for Amy Berkowitz: “There were no rules.” That is until she went to “grad school” and “learned” “that she had nothing to say” from professors in a creative writing program who “refused” to protect women students from the “serial abuser who’s been molesting / and harassing them for decades.” She had “been accepted to the program on the merit of a writing sample,” yet in response to what she was writing while a student there she was told her “poems lack gravitas.”
In a particularly adroit maneuver, Berkowitz claims the word used to undermine her artistic confidence. She titles each poem in a series of thirteen “Gravitas” followed by a numeral and a colon, e.g. “Gravitas Ten: The Size of the Problem.” In each poem, she describes an aspect of the gendered power struggles, violence, and abuse, and how sexism impacts expression within academia. Though the oppressive experiences at the academic institution Berkowitz attended are foregrounded, “the shit” she shares with readers “happens fucking everywhere” where there is “a guy like that” and “the lives of women…aren’t taken seriously.”
“It’s incredible how an institution can make it impossible for students to have certain thoughts. So much violence in that, so much power and control, so sinister, so invisible.”
School Communities of Strength: Strategies for Education Children Living in Deep Poverty, long-time teacher-researcher Peter W. Cookson’s latest book, is a forthright call to political leaders to end the continued scourge of American poverty. He defines this as having an annual income of $15,000 or less for a household of four, a condition that typically catapults whole families into homelessness and hunger.
Predictably, poverty and want cause children’s schooling to suffer, making the promise of an equal education little more than a pipedream. But poverty is not inevitable, and Cookson offers strategies not only for eradicating it but for meeting the needs of “the whole child.” This, he writes, starts with the belief that every student can learn and then zeroes in on the material resources that support their abilities, from free school meals to computer access, from safe, secure, and habitable school buildings to onsite medical and psychological care for kids and the adults they live with.
In addition, Cookson argues that ending poverty requires an understanding that penury is a policy choice. “Giving people crumbs that fall off the table of influence is not the same as empowering people with real education, real jobs, and real dignity,” he concludes.
School Communities of Strength is a potent directive for policymakers, educators, and those who care about children and families.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
So long, April! Hello May! Each month we post the new and forthcoming titles NewPages has received from small, independent, university, and alternative presses as well as author-published titles. You can view the full list here.
If you are a follower of our blog or a subscriber to our weekly newsletter, you can see several of the titles we received featured. For publishers or authors looking to be featured on our blog and social media, please visit our FAQ page.
Anybody who pays attention to the news, especially sports news, probably thinks they know Semenya’s story, even if they don’t know her name. She’s a two-time Olympic medalist in the 800 meters from South Africa, but she was banned from running because her testosterone levels were too high, according to World Athletics, the governing board for track and field. They and some of her competitors argued that she had an unfair advantage.
This memoir is Semenya’s taking control of her own narrative, as she tells the story of how she fell in love with running, the acceptance she felt in her family and village, the success she had on the track, and her fight against World Athletics. Despite doctors’ classifying her as intersex, Semenya says she has never seen herself as anything other than female. She also argues that World Athletics never presented any scientific evidence that her testosterone levels gave her any advantage, and her racing times were well in line with other women she raced against.
For those who know Semenya’s story, The Race to be Myself by Caster Semenya will only deepen their knowledge, as she presents what she was thinking during her career. For those who think they know what happened during those years, her memoir presents a different view than the dominant narrative. For those who think they have no interest in a memoir about a runner, Semenya’s book reminds us that, when we talk about gender and access, we’re not talking about an issue; we’re talking about people.
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
“Love is on the line” in Susana H. Case’s If This Isn’t Love. With her characteristic assured and unapologetic voice, Case “organizes / … [the] pens and pages” of her ninth poetry collection around “[u]nrequited love, rapes, / tumors, mental hospitals, and secret / adoptions,” among other open narratives in “romance comics,” “telenovelas,” and her own real-life, “sad increments” having to do with “broken family,” “abusive men,” “my abortion,” and “female cancers.”
In her “spill / of words,” Case cautions: “Forget the fairy gold we’re sold / in the media.” Then asks: “How else will girls learn what it takes” to survive in a world “scheming / against” them? Case brings readers to the “wall between” the “bloodthirsty” and the “beautiful,” and by doing so, she asks us to confront life’s game of “chess” in which “there are only / squares and pieces to lose.”
Who does not “wish” she “were a better player”? But who can maintain “thinking about moves” when “distracted by… / all the ways” to “choose our sides” “between loss of control” and the humiliation that comes from “love’s inevitable losses.” In “reality” there may be “no true protection” from “[w]ar and eros,” but by taking on the ménage à trois between romance, reason, and imagination, Case holds media’s purveying of “human cruelty” and “life’s atrocities” to account.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.
In Thine, Kate Partridge’s meditative lyrics generously allow poetic perspectives physical and cognitive, situated in landscape and observation, located in “the city, the body” and “the peopled land the landed people.” Whether “the burn crouching through the valley” or “a gauntlet of yellow flowers” the poet “let[s] things gather around” her.
Simultaneously the poet reckons with her positionality; “one’s position is fault.” Whether “at the precipice,” “on a dock,” “above the playa,” or “standing on the bike path,” the poet wishes for the “presence / / and vision” of others—intimates, artists, and writers. The writers range from Jorie Graham to Marianne Moore to C. D. Wright; six poems “erase… one reserved letter from Willa Cather to her partner Edith.” Joining epistles, homages, and erasures, ekphrastic poems engage Dorothea “Lange’s photos of women in deserts,” Agnes Martin’s grid paintings, and Walter de Maria’s land art, among others.
The poet’s multiple poetic perspectives, conversations, and forms offer readers an artist’s “many ways to give, / thought to the other.” For the poet, engagement with artists, art, land, and self seems to offer her heart means to “expanding in all / sorts of ways” and to “gird” for the necessary wait for the “pockmarked future.”
Dear Reader, “if at any time / you have need of a beginning, look” to Kate Partridge’s “evident truths.” There among “the rising proof of grass” she will meet thee and these poems will be Thine.
Thine by Kate Partridge. Tupelo Press, September 2023.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.
In her latest memoir, Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, Leslie Jamison tells the story of the dissolution of her marriage, a splintering that happened roughly a year after the birth of her daughter. That tension is the driving force in her work, as she tries to navigate being a single mother and a writer, while also dating.
Each of these aspects of who she is pulls on the other. She feels guilty when she undertakes part of a book tour without her daughter or even when she has left her daughter with a babysitter, so she can write. Her frustrations with her ex-husband often prevent her from seeing that he’s an important part of her (their, she reminds herself) daughter’s life. She dates men she knows aren’t a good fit, one of whom (she refers to him only as tumbleweed, an apt description) repeatedly tells her that he doesn’t want children, or even monogamy.
She never truly answers the questions she asks about how to manage her newly-fractured life, as she’s having to, as Rilke writes, live into those questions. However, she is asking the key question so many of us have, regardless of our parental or relationship status: how do I manage all that I love in my life?
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
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet as well as an essayist, and he brings a lyrical style to his latest book, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension. While the subtitle might discourage non-basketball fans from cracking the cover, this work is more of a meditation on the narrative of uplift than anything else.
Abdurraqib does write about basketball—whether that’s players from his neighborhood whom the reader has never heard of or LeBron James—but he does so in service of the idea of ascension. He’s questioning the narrative that white people want to tell about African Americans—and other minorities, but primarily Black people—overcoming difficult odds to succeed, whatever they need that success to look like at that moment. Thus, he celebrates the people from his neighborhood, city, and even state, who were great, if only for a moment, some of whom never went any further.
In fact, he not only celebrates individuals, but the place he is from. Abdurraqib loves his neighborhood, and he loves Columbus (and Cleveland, as well, when it comes to basketball), and Ohio. That love shines through in every section of the book—he’s structured it like a basketball game, complete with the clock counting down—and it’s difficult for the reader not to share that love by the end.
The people and places Abdurraqib loves don’t have to be anything other than what they are; by implication, neither does the reader and the places they love.
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
In Teach for Climate Justice: A Vision for Transforming Education, longtime education activist and teacher Tom Roderick argues that the primary role of schools today is to create ecologically-conscious students who are “courageous, intelligent, and wise fighters for social justice.” Indeed, as environmental degradation becomes more-and-more apparent, Roderick writes that the need to protect the earth should be woven into every academic discipline, pre-K through high school.
Thanks to numerous school-based examples and interviews, Teach for Climate Justice merges concrete scientific information about the crisis with a how-to on community organizing that zeroes in on the power of collective action to build momentum for change. The result is inspiring.
It’s also intersectional, linking efforts to win human and civil rights with campaigns for environmental justice. Throughout, the text highlights pollution’s disproportionate impact on communities of color. Moreover, it names the culprits–corporations that promote endless economic growth and lawmakers who do their bidding.
But how to force a reckoning with them?
Roderick argues that this existential question is foundational, if still unanswered. Nonetheless, he remains optimistic: Since 90 percent of US children attend public schools, he believes that students can learn to push back against climate deniers, develop personal agency, and foster respect between people and Mother earth. A compendium of resources is included to aid teachers in these efforts.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
Linda Russo’s The Verdant, 2023 Halcyon Poetry Award Winner, goes beyond usual eco-poetics to explore what it means to utter human sounds in wild places. In this case, the green world, the world away from plastics and electricity, becomes the focus, becomes the world.
The section called ‘Emergence’ is a long poem/poem series that makes up the book. Under the title/heading, “wild plum, western blue flax, wooly sunflower, come in,” Russo gives us what is essential about communing with wild places:
[. . . ] with rubbly tongue caressing grasses dropping live seeds caught in songs
We are whisked away to a landscape which does not seem like this planet at all because it is so much the planet that we forget where we are. Russo speaks from the land and all its inhabitants as a being moving through the landscape in a unique way.
Inventive open form poems with lots of white space, careful construction of headings/titles at the top of each page, and a meditative feature at the end do not let us off the hook; we must participate in this world.
the verdant is what happens after spending time out-of-doors. The doorway of the mind is propped open, left open to possibility.
the verdant by Linda Russo. Middle Creek Publishing & Audio, March 2024.
Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).
New titles from Black Rose Books, Montreal’s radical publisher since 1969. This year’s catalogue includes Freedom or Death, the definitive text on Mikhail Bakunin, titan of the Left; Eros and Revolution, a daring exploration into the history of revolutionary social movements; and Castoriadis Against Heidegger, a critical tour-de-force juxtaposing the politics of these two pivotal philosophers. View our flyer and see our website for more!
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The title of Sloane Crosley’s book, Grief is for People, makes the subject of her writing quite clear, as she is delving into grief; however, her focus is on her grief for the loss of one person. While Crosley uses other losses—especially jewelry stolen from her apartment and the Covid pandemic—she is mainly concerned with processing the death of Russell, her best friend and former boss. As with the theft and pandemic, Russell’s death is unexpected, so Crosley writes this book largely as a way to process and understand his absence.
She divides the book into five sections to mirror the stages of grief; however, the final section is subtitled “Afterward,” not “Acceptance,” as it is clear she has not come to an acceptance of his death, even by the end of the book. In fact, that final section is addressed to Russell, as if she still wants to talk to him, even about his own death.
This description makes the book sound depressing and heavy, and it certainly is, but Crosley brings her typical humor to the subject, as well, though much of it is gallows humor. What shines through more than anything, though, is her love for Russell, despite all of his failings, which helps the reader understand why this loss matters so much for Crosley, which reminds us of why our losses continue to matter, as well.
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
In Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity, unlike many books about longevity, Peter Attia’s goal isn’t to provide the reader with life hacks or technology that will help readers live until they’re one hundred and fifty. Instead, he lays out what he calls the Four Horsemen—“cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and related neurodegenerative conditions, and type 2 diabetes and related metabolic dysfunction”—with a clear-eyed approach of just how awful they are, as well as what causes them, as far as we know.
He then explores tactics that can help readers try to stave off those Horsemen, though he argues that we should start decades, not just years, earlier to do so (Medicine 3.0, as opposed to the current healthcare system, which he calls Medicine 2.0). He delves into the research on exercise, nutrition, stability, and emotional health to show how they can all work to help prevent suffering and decline.
In fact, the most important part of his book is that he wants people to have a longer healthspan (the amount of time we’re healthy and functional), not just lifespan. He wants people to be able to live full lives in their seventies and eighties, not just live longer Readers looking for a how-to manual might be disappointed, but Attia clearly explains the realities facing people as they age and gives them strategies and tactics for how to live a long and functional life.
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
Tommy Orange’s second novel, Wandering Stars, builds on characters from his first novel, There There, as he continues to portray the struggles of a Native American family in and around Oakland. Readers don’t need to have read the first novel to understand this one, though it certainly helps.
He uses the first third of this most recent work to explore the family’s lineage, going back to the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864. On the one hand, Orange’s novel shows the long-lasting effects of trauma, especially the various ways the family members self-medicate with (and become addicted to) alcohol and/or drugs. In each case, especially in this historical section of the novel, people end up losing their lives or those they love due to these addictions.
That trend seems to continue into the present, but there’s also a counter-narrative of survival. Despite all this family has endured and the ways in which it doesn’t match up to a “traditional” family (whatever that means in 2024), they still exist. One of the main ways they continue to live in a society designed to take everything from them is through the power of story and culture. There is a manuscript that celebrates their ancestors, passed down over several generations and surviving into the present, which gives the characters some bit of hope.
Orange’s characters, though, ultimately want to go beyond surviving. While it’s not clear what will happen to their family by the end of the novel, they clearly want to live and love one another; they want a life and a culture where they can be who they are, something so many in the U.S. take for granted.
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
A Ten Peso Burial for Which Truth I Sign, debut poetry by Gabriel Palacios, is a book in four parts. The poems in part three, titled “Television Theater,” are “Spanish Trail Motel” encounters, hard-hitting and jagged, as they weave tales in and out of a journey. I find myself traveling along by horseback to stations on that fantastic journey across American desert country into a past/present that takes prisoners into its own chambers of cactus and canyons.
The vibe is Hotel California, but Palacios delves into an obsession with the Spanish Trail, the dignified name for what it really was and is: a trail of slaughter in the name of colonialism and conquest. Take “The Spanish Trail Motel /The Friar’s Daughter’s Mother”:
“My child’s eyeball strobic in the wide-brimmed hatted death’s head given placard”
and:
“In exterminating thinking I feel eyeless toward the proof I trust computer ghosts to translate”
Palacios describes this world from inside the people who live and die in desolate circumstances. These are depictions of life in the contemporary Southwest few have written about. From “The Spanish Trail Motel”:
“If I’m to live here as a pit bull smiling out of its Impound yard If I have to I will”
Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).
Dena Rueb Romero’s memoir, All for You, tells an incredible story about a love affair between the author’s German Lutheran mother, Deta, and German Jewish father, Emil, a relationship that began in pre-Nazi Germany and lasted until Emil’s death in 1980. As Romero recounts in her intro, she learned details about her parents’ liaison when she was house-sitting for her mom and discovered letters that documented their seven-year wartime separation.
The book, part political and part social history, covers the growth of Nazism in Europe. But this is also a highly personal story: Deta’s 1937 emigration to England and her subsequent work as a nanny were acts of anti-Hitler resistance. Nonetheless, as a German citizen, her loyalties were questioned and she was imprisoned as an “enemy alien.”
Emil’s story – his emigration to the US and his work as a photographer in Hanover, New Hampshire – both lucky breaks, offers additional insights into who got out of Germany and why. Still, there is tragedy here; although Emil and Deta reunited in 1946, he was unable to get his parents, sister, or brother-in-law out of Germany, a reality that cast an ever-present pall on his relationships and business dealings.
All told, All for You not only documents an enduring, if troubled, love, but offers insights into trauma and survival.
All for You by Dena Rueb Romero. She Writes Press, May 2024.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
In Romance Language, Amy Glynn seeks to “understand these undercurrents” that are “wrung from every one of us, in vast polyphonies / and syncopations, in desuetudes / and gasps of speechless praise.” The “truths of natural law” that govern worldly, bodily, and material things, which “crumble, and breakdown, / and are reconstituted,” catalyzes “a metaphor / that operates in every” poem. To “contemplate [this] dynamic tension,” Glynn uses “semantic fancy,” received forms, such as the ghazal and sonnet, and subject- and occasion-driven free verse.
Where language and romance are concerned “nothing’s truly off the table.” The things we tell ourselves and the advice we are given, the language used to romance “intensity / of feeling” or that contributes to “strained / relations,” and “how we conjure meaning from those chance / / alignments, accidents of circumstance” are the “tide, chaos, and rhythm” in Glynn’s poems.
Throughout the collection, chance’s “surge / of myth and implication” conjoins the “transitory and unstable.” For instance, the poems “Entre-Deux-Mers, June” and “Ruin” refute the advice to “turn” neglect “to your advantage” and to “not to let your damage / define you.” Glynn “think[s] that’s a mistake.” Then what are the implications of grieving the neglect you survived and allowing “your damage” to “define you”? A possible answer arrives in “Field Guide to the Birds of Ogygia”: The “gods send misery because they want / to hear more songs.”
Glynn’s songs contend with Keats’s declaration in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” As a survivor of life’s damage, the poet knows that is not “all”; she adds that “truth is complicated” and “overrated.” However, “beautiful is still a mandate.” With truth in perspective, the “primary phenomenon” the poet seeks “is clarity”; that which “is literal enough, the rising tide” while simultaneously acknowledging “the littoral / state, borderless as it is.” Everyone “leaves a record,” and Romance Language is Amy Glynn’s “adamant oratory / / on permanence.”
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.
When Irish immigrant Tom Rourke lays eyes on Polly Gillespie, sparks begin to fly. Sure, she’s the newly-arrived mail-order bride of Captain Anthony Harrington, boss of Butte, Montana’s, Anaconda mine, and he’s a poverty-stricken, drink-and-drug-loving dreamer who pens letters for the illiterate, writes ditties for the town’s many bars, and periodically assists a local photographer, but no matter. Dire circumstances–and Polly’s matrimony–aside, the two determine that destiny has brought them together in a rare love-at-first-sighting, and has left them unwilling, or perhaps unable, to question its logic.
In short order, the pair concoct a plan to head to San Francisco, a journey that requires a bit of thievery and includes both idyllic moments and horrific violence. As bounty hunters set out to return Polly to her spouse, the pair have to duck and dodge to evade capture. The result is ribald, profane, and immensely entertaining. It’s also emotionally affecting.
Although I wanted more of Polly’s pre-Montana back story, The Heart in Winter merges comedy and tragedy effectively. Moreover, while the novel is set in the late 19th century, the tale is timeless, a deeply-felt look at the mysteries of attraction and the wildly unpredictable rumblings of heart and mind.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
In A Rupture in the Interiors, Valerie Witte casts the “fugitive / dye” of her artistic attention on the manufacture of silk and the ruptures of skin, weaving an intricate and polyphonic textual fabric by blending the “intermittent hues” of her voice with the vocal registers and narrative threads from reference sources, such as the dictionary, a manual for growing silk, and a natural history of skin.
The multihued and multisensory poems bring to the fore the connections between the “fabrication” of silk and the “stratification” of skin and how each implies gender. For instance, marketing and advertising would have women desire silk clothing for its qualities of being like a second skin and would have them buy skincare products that promise skin like silk. As weavers “transfer the silk / to bobbins from skeins,” they tell the secret history of women’s work and high-risk labor in clothing manufacture. At the level of diction, the two monosyllabic words “silk” and “skin” share three of the same letters and a slant rhyme. These resonating qualities between the two words suggest the relationship between the skin-deep exterior and the penetrating interior central to the nine sequences that Witte has woven in her lyric, associative, innovative, and feminist second full-length collection.
As the title suggests, what makes itself felt and seen from the inside out, particularly as it pertains to the skin, forms the interior inquiry of the collection. The poems contemplate the phenomenon and vulnerabilities of skin, skin sensitivities and permeabilities, and how skin protects and maps a life, particularly that of a woman in a society that prizes female perfection. Such a beauty standard denies the systemic eventuality that “what lies dormant for years | suddenly reappears.” In the end, skin’s hair, “redness,” “capillaries,” “bumps,” “wrinkles” and other “impressions” form “bodies of evidence,” “tissue of stories unfolding.”
Witte’s poems, “assembled / [by] a recruitment of parts,” turn as “a woman’s wheel turned… / never failing,” “treating the wounded” in “a bewilderment / process / called / reckoning,” making A Rupture in the Interiors a moving and permeating read.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.
With the end of the month comes our update of all the wonderful new and forthcoming titles that NewPages has received from small, independent, university, and alternative presses as well as author-published titles. You can view the full list here.
If you are a follower of our blog or a subscriber to our weekly newsletter, you can see several of the titles we received featured. For publishers or authors looking to be featured on our blog and social media, please visit our FAQ page.
The full title of Charan Ranganath’s work, Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters, implicitly lays out his goal, as he wants to talk about how and why our brains work, not those times when we believe they don’t. It’s that belief most of us have that Ranganath wants to disprove, as he argues that our brains are designed to forget almost everything we learn or experience; they couldn’t function otherwise.
Instead, he wants readers to see that our brains work quite well when it comes to memory, once we understand why we remember what we do and, thus, how we can retain more of what we want to remember. Part of the problem, he points out, isn’t memory; it’s our lack of attention and intention. We are easily distracted, and we don’t work to remember what we say we want to recall.
He delves into how our feelings do and don’t affect our memories, and he explores how and when our memories change, but also how reliable they often are. Ranganath draws on his experience with teaching to talk about how frequently testing oneself is more beneficial than the studying (i.e., cramming) that most students (and most adults) do.
I found the chapter on openness to novelty and “the strange” to be the most interesting, as we almost always talk about memory’s effects on our past, but, throughout the book, Ranganath also makes the case that our memory shapes who we are today and who we believe we can be tomorrow. His book looks forward as much as it looks back.
Why We Remember by Charan Ranganath. Doubleday, February 2024
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
The first half of the novel James by Percival Everett follows the plot of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn fairly closely, even taking parts of scenes almost word for word. And it seems as if Everett isn’t going to go beyond a few, superficial changes: when Jim is with other enslaved people, for example, they drop their dialect, and Jim can read and write. However, when Jim and Huck encounter the Duke and King, the novel takes a different, much darker and more realistic turn.
Unlike in Twain’s novel, Jim truly suffers, both physically—as several people whip and beat him—and emotionally, such as when he sees people he cares about die. Everett doesn’t only riff on Twain’s novel, though; he also pulls from writers ranging from Ralph Ellison to a variety of slave narratives, and Jim has imaginary conversations with some Enlightenment thinkers, questioning people like John Locke and Voltaire about their hypocrisy concerning slavery.
Writing is at the center of this novel, as Jim (and Everett) is the one telling this story, not a white man through the lens of a white boy from Missouri. Everett uses the change in narration to give Jim a voice, but also a name, as he uses writing to transform himself from a sidekick into a hero, to move from being an enslaved person without agency and choice to become James, a man who makes his own decisions and lives with the consequences. Everett knows this novel is only one more story, but he also knows that the stories we tell matter.
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
The poems in George Bilgere’s new chapbook, Cheap Motels of My Youth, are reminiscent of Billy Collins’s writing: imaginative, charming, and wryly humorous. Accessible upon first read, they deepen with subsequent perusal.
Bilgere is a master of shifts in perspective and time. For example, the poem “Nine,” opens in a child’s voice: “I am standing by the pop machine / at the gas station, drinking a root beer… Then, it leaps forward: “How am I supposed to know / that an old, white-haired guy, / a grown-up, is watching me / from his desk in the future, / writing down every move I make.”
The chapbook’s speaker is a son, father, husband, and teacher. He contemplates concerns ranging from grocery shopping and desire to bicycling and mortality. In “Where Will You Go When You Die?” he imagines himself as ashes in a garden watching his children play and his wife grills chicken:
“…not with the same skill, clearly, as her late husband, although she does seem to be improving, as I can see from my vantage point ….next to the hydrangeas, which I so often failed to fertilize, or weed, or even water back when I was alive. Make yourself useful, she used to say, and here I am doing exactly that.”
Reviewer Bio: Mary Beth Hines writes poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction from her home in Massachusetts. Her work appears in Cider Press Review, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso, and elsewhere. Kelsay Books published her poetry collection Winter at a Summer House in 2021.
The text of Mister, Mister, Guy Gunaratne’s second novel, is a letter written by the main character, Yahya Bas, to the Mister of the title, a shadowy figure whom the reader never sees or knows, but who seems to work for an intelligence/military arm of the British government. Yahya is writing his account because he has cut his tongue out and, thus, is unable to answer Mister’s questions.
It’s clear Mister believes Yahya is a terrorist, largely based on Yahya’s time spent in Iraq (it’s never clear) several years after the NATO invasion of that country and incendiary poems Yahya published before leaving Britain, writing under the name Al-Bayn, a pun on Albion. Yahya was inspired to write those poems after the pictures from Abu Ghraib became known, but he was already moving in that direction.
Yahya’s father, from all he can tell, left Britain (and Yahya’s mother) to fight in Iraq in the early 1990s, where he also recorded music and poetry, a further inspiration for Yahya’s verses. Yahya’s mother suffers from some sort of depression or anxiety, so she barely speaks, leaving Yahya to be raised by a range of women he calls Mother and his uncle in the house for widows where his mother lives.
Though Yahya’s interrogator is not interested in all of this backstory, Gunaratne is, and the backstory is part of the point. The British intelligence agent only sees Yahya as a terrorist, while he is a son, a nephew, a friend, a lover, a person, in addition to his ethnic heritage and his poems. Gunaratne wants to remind readers of the power of taking back one’s story, even if one has to stop talking to do so.
Mister, Mister by Guy Gunaratne. Pantheon Books, October 2023.
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
Just published! Pangyrus Press announces Wheatley at 250, celebrating the 250th anniversary of Phillis Wheatley Peters’s historic and transformative Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral with exciting re-inscriptions by some of today’s most compelling poets: U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, Evie Shockley, Kiki Petrosino, Mahogany L. Browne, and more. View our flyer and learn more at our website.
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