NewPages Blog

Floriography Child: A Memoir in Poems by Lisa C. Krueger
Red Hen Press, October 2023

Lisa C. Krueger’s Floriography Child is a book about salvation: what gives people strength in the face of adversity, not just to endure, but to move through and beyond our myriad human sufferings. Through poems, micro-essays, and visual art, Floriography Child addresses fundamental questions about purpose, connection, and resilience. Written in memoir form, this book examines the mother-daughter relationship and its intimacies in the context of a daughter’s developing chronic illness. How to bear another’s suffering—how to find sustenance in a world fraught with uncertainty and pain—is addressed through the language of flowers and the natural world. Ultimately, this book asks us to consider how each of us, whatever our path, is connected.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Sex Augury: Poems by C. Bain
Red Hen Press, September 2023

Sex Augury is a collection that practices divination with the symbolism of our radically changed and changeable world. Exercising trans poetics, C. Bain denormalizes the violence embedded in the most intimate strata of American life. Confrontationally queer, urgently wounded, deeply political, and metaphysically transported, these poems create their own system of meaning in an environment that is increasingly hostile to meaning of any kind. This collection spans digital culture, gender reversals, and archetypal-mythic vocabularies, alongside close observation of the surround of “ordinary” urban existence. These poems bristle with intelligence, acuity of feeling, and refusal to gloss the complexity of our moment into a false narrative of progress.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

You Were Watching from the Sand: Short Stories by Juliana Lamy
Red Hen Press, September 2023

Playful, kinetic, and devastating in turn, You Were Watching from the Sand is a collection in which Haitian men, women, and children who find their lives cleaved by the interminably strange bite back at the bizarre with their own oddities. In “belly,” a young woman abandoned by her only living relative makes a person from the mud beside her backyard creek. In “We Feel it in Punta Cana,” a domestic child servant in the Dominican Republic tours through his own lush imagination to make his material conditions more bearable. In “The Oldest Sensation is Anger,” a teenager invites a same-aged family friend into her apartment and uncovers a spate of disturbing secrets about her. Written in a mixture of high lyricism, absurdist comedy, and Haitian cultural witticisms, this is a collection whose dynamism matches that of its characters at every beat and turn.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!