At the NewPages Blog readers and writers can catch up with their favorite literary and alternative magazines, independent and university presses, creative writing programs, and writing and literary events. Find new books, new issue announcements, contest winners, and so much more!
Rooted in the Midwest but at home anywhere, Glenna Luschei has spent over fifty years writing and supporting other writers in the midst of adventures that have taken her around the globe. Now in her late eighties and as vibrant as ever, Luschei has crafted a collection that comprises a retrospective of her life: her youth during World War II; her adventures in New Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, and elsewhere; and her ongoing love affair with the arts. Luschei relives highs and lows through these poems and reminds readers to live life to the fullest as we never know if tomorrow will be our last day.
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!
Another week and more storms. Mother Nature is sure giving us a great reason to stay inside to write, edit, and submit, isn’t she? In good news, NewPages is offering a 20% discount on annual subscriptions to our weekly newsletter. This makes it just $40. Consider subscribing today to get first access to submission opportunities and upcoming events, the majority before they go live on our site.
Let’s dive into our weekly roundup of submission opportunities without further ado.
The newest issue of Chinese Literature and Thought Today (vol. 53, no. 3–4, 2022) examines Chinese literature and culture in the time of contagion, and offers part two of a special section “Re-Aestheticizing Labor.” The featured scholar is Deng Xiaomang, an important philosopher and public intellectual. Moving to a mostly digital format, this full issue is available to read through Taylor & Francis Online. More developments are in the works for this already outstanding publication of intellectual literary culture – stay tuned!
After spending five years in LA working successfully as a screenwriter, the protagonist of this novel decides it’s time to return to his hometown, Santa Luz, New Mexico, to pen the novel he has always needed to write about the strained relationship with his father. He reconnects with old friends and meets new ones, and the parade of quirky characters—self-proclaimed artists, wealthy retirees, corrupt lawyers—distracts him from his project. There’s Helen, who hooks up with an unsavory character and winds up in jail—for murder. Sheryl can’t take her philandering husband anymore and drives her car off a mountaintop, killing herself and her children. And there’s Paul, who lives a double life as a happy family man, but who has a serious drug addiction. Against the backdrop of mystical mornings and beautiful mountains, the writer soon realizes things aren’t always what they seem in Santa Luz. The writer’s sympathies are with the working class, and his satirical gaze embraces the people who live in the shadows, those considered “misfits.” Jimmy Santiago Baca writes compellingly about artists and their responsibility to society.
The March 2023 issue of The Lake online poetry magazine is now available for reading and features works by Jean Atkin, Jimmy R. Coleman, Sandra Hosking, Beth McDonough, Bruce McRea, Jeff Mock, Leah Mueller, Wren Tuatha, and Susan Waters.
In Issue 3.4 of Cutleaf online, Craig Holt barely survives, and may have learned his lesson, in “Drinking the Ocean: Notes on Travel and Drowning.” A young man negotiates family expectations and his relationship with a widow in Maya Kanwal’s “A Shade for the Window.” And Carolyn Oliver says “In another life, I am…” in four poems that expand on the possibilities of what we all are or might be, beginning with the poem “Deep Learning.” This issue features stills from John Frankenheimer’s film “Seconds” (1966).
Notes from the Passenger by Gillian Conoley is a collection written over the course of the last few years, as the author sought for ways to make room for joy amongst an upturned and unsteady quotidian. Written in response to climatic and societal catastrophe, war, increasing gun violence, plague, and the global spread of white supremacy and patriarchy, the sonically vivid and cinematic poems in Notes from the Passenger arrive like missives from a journey between the living and the dead. Gillian’s use of play, music, and humor offers us pleasure when we need it most, reminding us to turn our heads toward the light. Gillian Conoley is the author of nine collections. A long-time resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, she is currently Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at Sonoma State University where she edits VOLT.
A Thousand Ways to Pay Attention: A Memoir of Coming Home to My Neurodivergent Mind by Rebecca Schiller explores the several-year period when she untangled the threads of her health diagnoses and the background of the land she and her family recently purchased. Compared to my memoir intake, my nature reading is slim, but Schiller’s sumptuous sensorial descriptors of her small farm in the UK enmesh the reader in the landscape of its mucky, weather-beaten, seasonal wonders. Interwoven with this ecological narrative is the history of former owners of their two-acre property, including interpretive retellings of their experiences supported by primary documentation and literary device.
Schiller’s mental health is addressed through the first two-thirds of the book via her interactions with her children and spouse, foggy memory, clumsiness, and heightened anxiety and depression since moving to their farm. Her diagnosis, and understanding of her neurodivergence, encompass only the latter third of the book and thus feel rushed.
Part of the joy, and potential conundrum, of A Thousand Ways to Pay Attention is the sheer amount of content all wrapped in a book that contains too many gifts: first years on a small family farm, obtaining a health diagnosis, and researching and reinterpreting the history of the land around her.
Reviewer bio: Amanda Weir-Gertzog is a writer, gerontologist, and eater of too much milk chocolate. A caregiver and community volunteer, she also authors book reviews to compensate for her prodigious reading habits. Amanda lives in Durham, North Carolina with her partner, pets, and overflowing bookcases.
The newest issue of Cholla Needles (74) features inspiring artwork by Nancy Brizendine and life-affirming words by Dorianne Laux, Joseph Millar, Domonique, Zary Fakete, Miriam Sagan, Roger G. Singer, Ruth Ann Dandrea, Kent Wilson, Jeffrey Alfier, Peter Nash, and Jonathan Ferrini.
Latina Leadership Lessons: Fifty Latinas Speak edited by Delia García Arte Público Press, November 2022
The recipient of numerous awards and accolades, García gathers “Top Ten Leadership Lessons” from 50 high-achieving women. This “who’s who” of movers-and-shakers contains representatives from government, corporate and non-profit worlds. While each woman’s unique experiences and heritage are reflected in her advice, there are several recommendations that made many of the lists, such as the importance of believing in oneself, the need to mentor and be mentored, remembering one’s roots, embracing change and taking care of one’s physical and emotional needs.
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!
Publishing twice year, Action, Spectacle is a new open-access online magazine of just about everything you could want: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, plays, graphic literature, comics, interviews, reviews, and still and video art. A spectacle of options indeed, but actually, the publication draws its name from Marxist theorist, Guy Debord’s well-known book, The Society of the Spectacle, in which he suggests, “All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.” However, ‘mere’ is not the word that comes to mind when viewing contributions to Action, Spectacle.
The publication was begun by Adam Day, as he says, for “the sheer joy of getting to see what’s out there, getting to feature new voices, getting to feature work we love.” Joining him behind the scenes are Prose Editors Kate Tough, novelist and story writer, and Sarah Rose Cadorette, Creative Writing MFA and a Travel and Social Advocacy BA, both from Emerson College. “We also have several guest editors per issue,” Day adds, “Usually up to ten.”
Day himself brings some credentials as author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press), and Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books), and the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and of a PEN America Literary Award.
For writers looking to submit works, Day explains that “all general submissions are read by the editors. We do not have screeners. There is also work published from creators solicited by our guest editors. We do not provide feedback, and our response time is usually a month.”
A well-run publication with experienced writers and editors on the team, Day comments that “it’s been super rewarding starting and publishing Action, Spectacle. Thankfully we have yet to run into any major challenges in keeping the publication going, other than some glitches with our old website.”
For readers, Action, Spetacle has much to offer. Day says, “The magazine exists at the intersection of the socio-political, the cultural, and the arts. We put a spectrum of voices online, seeking both debut and established writers and thinkers creating intriguing and original work, whether relatively conventional or extremely experimental, and we don’t shy away from the idea of a text that might be ‘difficult.’ We employ the broadest possible aesthetic when considering submissions, including translations and hybrid and collaborative work.”
Some recent contributors include Anne Carson, Douglas Kearney, Ron Padgett, Shelley Wong, Rodrigo Toscano, Denise Duhamel, Lidija Dimkovska, and Anna Badkhen.
The future for Action, Spectacle includes “building readership and continuing to publish fresh and exciting work,” as well as an annual chapbook contest judged by Dara Wier. A good look forward for both readers and writers.
The Falling Crystal Palace by Carl Fuerst Planet Bizarro, February 2023
The residents of Sterling, Indiana don’t know who they are. They can’t recognize voices on the telephone. They can’t recognize faces in the mirror. When their name is called, they don’t respond. When they flip through family photo albums, it’s like looking at strangers. Sixty-one-year-old Tory Stebbins runs a one-person Identity Verification agency that can help. But, as the town implodes, so does her business. She has fewer clients, stiffer competition, and her methods have become mysteriously ineffective. Tory is broke, lonely, and—most alarmingly—she’s now suffering from the same problems she’s helped her clients with over the length of her career. Just when her situation seems beyond hope, Tory receives a cryptic message from Hoppy Bashford, her best friend who disappeared forty years earlier. Tory’s quest to rescue Hoppy leads her through the strange, shifting landscapes. With the help of her odd intern, her bitter business rival, and her astrophysicist ex-wife, Tory ultimately follows Hoppy’s trail to the Crystal Palace Resort. To locate her lost friend, escape from the resort, and find a cure for the identity-scrambling, reality-bending condition from which everyone in her world suffers, Tory must come to terms with who she is.
In addition to featuring winners of the 2022 Perkoff Prize, The Missouri Review Winter 2022 is themed “The Body” and includes new fiction from Dina Guidubaldi, Shala Erlich, Malerie Willens, Peter Grimes, and Robynne Graffam; new poetry from Bridget O’Bernstein, Anna V. Q. Ross, and Jeff Whitney; and new essays from Faith Shearin, Adam Boggon, and Joshua Doležal. Also included are features on dressing Greta Garbo and the influence of anime on contemporary art, and an omnibus review of contemporary memoirs about coming to terms with illness and affliction.
Fertility: 40 Years of Change by Maureen McTeer Delve Books, May 2022
In Fertility: 40 Years of Change, lawyer and author Maureen McTeer explores key medical, research, and legal developments in assisted human reproduction since the birth of the first IVF baby in 1978. With keen insight, she analyses how Canada has responded to the many legal and societal opportunities this foundational reproductive technology has created, such as new types of human relationships; the treatment of infertility; human embryo research; and the revolutionary possibilities for society raised by the combination of reproductive and genetic technologies, as we create, manipulate, and alter human life in the laboratory.
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!
Marry Me a Little by Rob Kirby Graphic Mundi, February 2023
In Marry Me a Little, Rob Kirby recounts his experience of marrying his longtime partner, John, just after same-sex marriage was legalized in Minnesota in 2013, and two years before the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges made same-sex marriage the law of the land. This is a personal story—about Rob’s ambivalence (if not antipathy) toward the institution of marriage, his loving relationship with John, and the life that they share together—set against the historical and political backdrop of shifting attitudes toward LGBTQ+ rights and marriage. With humor, candor, and a near-whimsical drawing style, Rob relates how he and John navigated this changing landscape, how they planned and celebrated their wedding, and how the LGBTQ+ community is now facing the very real possibility of setbacks to marriage equality.
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!
In her collection of essays, Bright Unbearable Reality, Anna Badkhen—a former war correspondent, now essayist—forces us to examine the reality of migration despite the desire to look away. As her title implies, she compels readers to see the true causes of the massive amounts of people—one in seven worldwide, she says—who relocate due to climate change or suffering related to new weather patterns and natural disasters. I had planned to write that those people are forced to relocate, but that would be a false passive, a sentence construction Badkhen points out that ignores the true action and actor in order to make ideas more palatable. Badkhen doesn’t allow the reader this comfort, as she continually highlights the systemic problems that those in the wealthier countries cause, while at the same time, those countries deny entry to those whom they have displaced. In her essay, “Ways of Seeing,” she points out that there is the surface reality that most of us who have the privilege of reading her book know and the reality of those whose lives enable us to have that privilege; the difference, to use one of her images, between the restaurants and hotels that line Waikiki and the hotel workers striking for a living wage.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
The Sins of Mortality by Marilyn Fox and Nancye McCrary EastOver Press, February 2023
The Sins of Sweet Mortality is a collection of poems by Marilyn Fox and illuminative paintings by Nancye McCrary. In this unique collaborative project with full-color images throughout, Fox and McCrary combine poetry with painting — juxtaposing voice and image, wonder and sensation — to create literary and visual work that is impassioned, thought-provoking, disturbing, and healing. Endlessly suggestive, consistently evocative, this work entices the reader into a deep dive to discover what’s beyond the surface.
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!
Exilium by María Negroni Translated by Michelle Gil-Montero Ugly Duckling Presse, December 2022
As Juan Gelman once wrote, “exile has no form but leaves a trace.” In Exilium, Argentine poet María Negroni sketches precisely such a trace, in a poetic form that approaches opposite extremes of material immediacy and evanescence. On an imaginative terrain that sweeps the Greco-Roman, the “long night” of Argentina’s last dictatorship, and the crisis of displaced migrants today, Negroni locates the exile within poetry itself. In this poetics of exile, the poem shines in its utopian desire to write the “unwritten words,” revealing language at its most estranged, most wanting.
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Happy March…or is it? Seems like the weather wants to really dive into March Madness this year. While the month has come in like a lamb, it’s going to be roaring soon here with yet another winter snowstorm coming in this afternoon and a rain/snowstorm possibly coming in on Monday. If mother nature is being very fickle in your neck of the woods, too, spend time indoors writing, editing, and submitting. NewPages is here to help with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities.
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The poems in Testament by Luke Hankins bear witness to traumas—cultural, personal, and spiritual—as well as moments of revelatory transport. While the catalyzing tragedies and dilemmas are never out of mind, these nuanced poems maintain faith in the act of speaking as a pathway through despair and toward transformation. Hankins is the author of two poetry collections and a collection of essays. He is the founder and editor of Orison Books, a non-profit literary press focused on the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives.
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!
Sita in Exile by Rashi Rohatgi 2022 Novella Prize selected by Misha Rai Miami University Press, May 2023
When Indian American Sita moves to the Norwegian Arctic, she finds a warm welcome from Mona, a local surfer from a refugee family who sees her as someone with whom she can be herself. But Sita’s not sure how to reciprocate, for as she begins to discover impossible fruits in the forest, she grows more unsure of who she is: a happy wife, when her husband seems impatient with her inability to assimilate? A good mother, when she can’t fathom what her baby wants? A pet-killer, when she was just acting on instinct? A terrible person, for leaving behind her grieving father and her best friend Bhoomija, a brown feminist artist struggling to get by during the pandemic? Or someone even worse, as she finds herself drawn to Mona’s partner, Morten, who owns the only land on which she feels whole? When Bhoomija asks her to return home, Sita must take stock not only of the life she’s made in the far north with Mona, but also of the self she’s held back, lying in wait for forgiveness, and choose which version to make real. Drawing upon Hindu mythology, Sita in Exile is a lyrical exploration of migrant sisterhood and brown motherhood in today’s Europe.
Dreamer: Poems in Culture by Alan Botsford Cyberwit.net, January 2023
Dreamer: Poems in Culture, a companion volume with Possessions: Poems in American Poetry, features poems spoken in the voices of 170 contemporary cultural figures east and west, high and low, among them Lady Gaga, Clint Eastwood, Toni Morrison, Saul Williams, John Berger, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Roger Federer, Joan Baez, Bong Joon Ho, Tom Hanks, Bill Maher, Jerry Seinfeld, Bob Dylan, Dave Chappelle, Rihanna, Claire Danes, Diane Seuss, Ocean Vuong, Pico Iyer, George Clooney, Angela Carter, Wendy C. Oritz, Maggie Nelson, Cheryl Strayed, Patti Smith, Julian Assange, Barack Obama, Marilynne Robinson, Camille Paglia, Laura Kipnis, Oprah Winfrey, Mary Gaitskill, Rachel Cusk, Kendrick Lamar, Yuval Noah Harari, and Lewis Hyde, to name a few. It is also an attempt to lay bare the workings of the shadow economy rooted in vernacular energies, exploring how our rational thought process is linked to our dream life.
Chasing Giants: In Search of the World’s Largest Freshwater Fish by Zeb Hogan and Stefan Lovgren University of Nevada Press, April 2023
Seeking to answer the question Which of the giant freshwater species is the largest? motivates Zeb Hogan to understand the various species he studies. The megafish’s numbers are dwindling, and the majority of them face extinction. He teams up with award-winning journalist Stefan Lovgren to tell, for the first time, the remarkable and troubling story of the world’s largest freshwater fish. It is a story that stretches across the globe, chronicling a race against the clock to find and protect these ancient leviathans before they disappear forever. Chasing Giants combines science, adventure, and wonder to provide insights into the key role the massive fish of our lakes and rivers play in our past, present, and future.
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Ellie is twenty-four years old, stuck in a dead-end job, and questioning the meaning of life when she meets the much older Calvin. It’s as if her deepest wish has been granted. Star of the Buddhist teaching circuit in New York’s Greenwich Village, his wisdom is exactly what she’s been seeking. When she becomes the center of his attention, it’s almost pure bliss…until it becomes clear that Calvin expects sex as part of the bargain. At first reluctant, Ellie gradually falls ever more deeply in love, until Calvin is all she can think about. Calvin’s lectures stress the Buddhist concept of non-attachment, but that doesn’t salve her wounds when he abandons her. Suddenly alone, Ellie must find a way to heal from her loss, but not before devotion to her teacher takes her halfway across the world to Tibet, and puts her life in real danger. Hope for the Worst asks just how far someone will go for love.
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The Grand Promise by Rebekah Anderson Empty Bowl Press, June 2022
The Grand Promise by Rebekah Anderson takes readers back to the 1930s New Deal public works program. An Eastern Washington town is uprooted and a family grapples with personal and financial dilemmas. A father resists inevitable change and enters into a fierce conflict with his son. The historic construction of the Grand Coulee Dam, a massive project destined to bring prosperity to the Pacific Northwest, will also destroy the family’s home and their town, but it will change the lives of their community and the lives of indigenous people who have sustained themselves on the Columbia River for generations. The Grand Promise is a work of literary fiction loosely based on Anderson’s family history.
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Sinners on Fox Street: A Novella and Stories by Yolanda Gallardo Arte Público Press, November 2022
In this poignant and often humorous account of growing up in the Bronx in the 1950s, Yolanda Gallardo’s mischievous young character vividly recalls her childhood as the neighborhood changed from Jewish to Latino. She and her siblings swam in the East River, despite the rats and garbage; watched police beat up local kids; and got involved in gangs, like the Royals and Young Sinners. Their family was financially impoverished, but there were many happy times as they watched their parents dance to “hick Spanish records,” helped their mom cook pasteles and learned to dance the mambo and cha-cha.
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!
adjacent islands by Nicole Cecilia Delgado Translated by Urayoán Noel Ugly Duckling Presse, December 2022
Nicole Cecilia Delgado’s poetry in adjacent islands is intimate yet poised toward the radically communitarian, both in the people and histories evoked and in the collaborative and unabashedly political orientation of her editorial and publishing work. adjacent islands / islas adyacentes is a bilingual edition of her artist books amoná (2013) and subtropical dry (2016), both based on camping trips to islands in the Puerto Rican archipelago: the uninhabited Mona to the west of the main island and the municipality of Vieques to the east (Amoná and Bieké in the reconstructed indigenous Taíno language). Challenging the insularist logic that has historically defined Puerto Rican national imaginaries, on these adjacent islands, people and nature connect in unexpected ways, as Delgado documents the art of survival under military occupation, extractivism, and the surveillance state. Part of a larger corpus of what Delgado calls “camping books,” adjacent islands / islas adjacentes seeks to translate the intemperie (open sky) of the camping trip onto the confines of the page. Delgado follows the late Ulises Carrión in enacting a networked book art where “communication is still inter-subjective, but it occurs in a concrete, real, physical space—the page.” Call it book art as counterarchive.
The title for Magic Nation #1 by Ellen O’Grady comes from her having misunderstood her mother, who said, “You sure have an imagination.” Instead, Ellen hears, “magic nation.” Indeed much more fitting for what she offers readers in this first installment of her ongoing graphic autobiography. Originally published on SOLRAD, Magic Nation recounts memories from O’Grady’s childhood of time spent meandering a wooded lot near her home. She sings lines from the Grizzly Adams television theme song, at times having him and his friend Nakoma join her as she goes wandering. She takes readers on an exploration of an abandoned pool and pool house, conjuring past lives lived in darkly shaded imagery, then back out into the brilliantly colored natural world. Her interactions with natural life are as delicate as her graphic style, using fine lines in a mixture of semi-realism and minimalism. Most striking are the unfinished lines that don’t complete figures and white spaces where she doesn’t take the watercolors right to the edge. This creates a kind of soft invitation for viewers to participate in completing the pictures, bringing their own imaginations into play. A beautiful and thoughtfully paced narrative and a welcome meditative escape to visit again and again.
Magic Nation #1 by Ellen O’Grady. Fieldmouse Press, September 2022.
Reviewer bio: Denise Hill is Editor of NewPages.com and reviews books she chooses based on her own personal interests.
In her new poetry collection, suddenly we, Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes toward openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious “we.” How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are, we are in relation to each other? Beginning with the visionary art of Black women like Alison Saar and Alma Thomas, Shockley’s poems draw and forge a widening constellation of connections that help make visible the interdependence of everyone and everything on Earth. Evie Shockley, poet and scholar, is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English at Rutgers University. A Lannan Literary Award-winner, she is the author of multiple books of poetry and a 2018 Pulitzer Prize finalist.
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!
Canadian Policing: Why and How it Must Change by Kent Roach Delve Books, May 2022
Kent Roach’s Canadian Policing: Why and How It Must Change is a comprehensive and critical examination of Canadian policing from its colonial origins to its response to the February 2022 blockades and occupations. Police shootings in June 2020 should dispel any complacency that Canada does not face similar policing problems as the United States, and a vicious circle of overpolicing and underprotection plagues many intersecting disadvantaged groups. Multiple accountability measures — criminal investigations, Charter litigation, complaints, and discipline — have not improved Canadian policing. What is required is more active and proactive governance by the boards, councils, and ministers that are responsible for Canada’s police. Governance should respect law enforcement independence and discretion while rejecting overbroad claims of police operational independence and self-governance.
Winner of the Dzanc Prize for Fiction, Blair Austin’s debut Dioramas tells of a city far in the future, in a society that has come through a great upheaval. Retired lecturer Wiggins moves from window to window in a museum, intricately describing each scene. Whales gliding above a shipwreck and a lost cup and saucer. An animatronic forest twenty stories tall. Urban wolves in the light of an apartment building. A line of mosquitoes in uniforms and regalia honored as heroes of the last great war. Bit by bit, Wiggins unspools the secrets of his world—the conflict that brought it to the brink, and the great thinker, Michaux, who led the diorama revolution, himself now preserved under glass. In this hybrid novel—part essay, part prose poem, part travel narrative—Blair Austin brings readers to witness our own vanishing world, what we preserve and at what cost.
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!
Issue 34.2 of The Gettysburg Review features paintings by Tidawhitney Lek, fiction by Kate Jayroe, Marina Petrova, Rachel Klein, and Caitlin Boston Ingham; essays by James Whorton Jr., Samuel Ligon, Nicole Graev Lipson, and Catherine Niu; poetry by Will Brewbaker, Pablo Piñero Stillmann, James Davis, Sara Borjas, Jill McDonough, Tina Barr, Susan Rich, Jill Osier, Margaret Gibson, Colin Cheney, Philip Schultz, J. P. Grasser, Jim Daniels, Mihaela Moscaliuc, Brianna Noll, Fleda Brown, Joy Manesiotis, Mary Leauna Christensen, Anushka Shah, Laura Read, and Albert Goldbarth.
Crisis Inquiry by Brooklyn writer and educator Tony Iantosca is a collection of poems in three parts that unsettles the lyric poem from within its constraints in ways that are both sardonic and searching. These poems probe the corners of a crisis of inquiry both intimate and general, inquiring into the registers, rhetorics, and scales of the various ongoing crises we live through daily. Iantosca’s third full-length collection of poetry, Crisis Inquiry stages satire and candor as alternating strides of the same figure, walking to and fro between you and me.
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!
Author of Successful Aging, Daniel Levitin is a neuroscientist and cognitive psychologist who brings both of his specialties to bear in this book. Levitin explores how people’s behaviors affect their brains and vice versa as they age, with the ultimate goal of helping people navigate their later years with a better quality of life, focusing on health over longevity. Levitin pored through thousands of articles to determine what the latest science says about aging, and he comes out of that reading quite optimistic. One of my few complaints about the book, in fact, is that he seems too optimistic about science’s answers, too trusting of continued progress. However, he encourages readers to stay involved in some sort of meaningful work; to continue to develop relationships; to get outside and exercise, no matter the difficulty, choices most of us could integrate into our lives, in order to have a more enjoyable and healthier life. My other complaint is that there are times when the science gets overwhelming for a lay reader, as I skimmed the jargon, wanting to get back to more of his summary conclusions from that science. Levitin provides readers with practical, research-based techniques for moving into one’s sixties, seventies, and beyond in the best mental and physical health possible.
Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
In The History Hotel, his eleventh poetry collection, Baron Wormser offers the range of subjects and imaginative approaches his readers have come to expect—from the life of a candle to the life of a Jewish Résistance fighter, from elegy to monologue, from a Godard film to the National Football League. The historical circumstances that touch, anneal, shatter, and buttress a life are paramount. The reality of consequences remains the ongoing, ineluctable drama. We all live in the ‘History Hotel’ where love and betrayal, hope and despair go hand in hand. Showing those entangled hands is the work of these poems.
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It is the last full week of February. Next week starts March and if the weather reports are to believed…it just may roar in like a lion because it needs to compete with February for being a stormy month. So let’s keep ourselves indoors a little longer and work on keeping our submission goals. NewPages is here to help with our Weekly Round-up for the week of February 24, 2023.
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NewPages receives many wonderful titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these titles by clicking on “New Books” under the NewPages Blog or Books tab on the menu. If you are a publisher or author looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us!
Poetry
Animal Afterlife, Jaya Stenquist, Airlie Press Binded, H Warren, Red Hen Press Border Line, Miriam Sagan, Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library Cherubims, Edward Clarke, Kelsay Books Come Closer, Laurie Blauner, The Bitter Oleander Press Complete Poems 1965-2020, Michael Butterworth, Space Cowboy Books Faith and Dreams for Zion, Shoshanah Weiss, Poetica Publishing Field Guide to the Human Condition, Adrian S. Potter, CW Books Ghost Apples, Katharine Coles, Red Hen Press How Much?, Jerome Sala, NYQ Books
Under the Madness Magazine began in the summer of 2021, the pandemic looming large, among so much other chaos, but imagine being a teenager during this time, trying to make sense of it all. Created by and for young writers 13-19 years old under the guidance of Alexandria Peary, New Hampshire Poet Laureate, Under the Madness Magazine got its name from the staff who felt it spoke to the confusing whirlwind teenagers face—political polarization, global warming, and inequity. “The whole phrase that came to mind,” Peary says, “was ‘under the madness lies literature,’ but it was too long for a magazine name. It was refined to retain the spirit of the name: how writing and creative expression help teens stay grounded when the adult-made sky seems to be spinning.”
The Rwanda Poems: Voices and Visions from the Genocide by Andrew Kaufman NYQ Books, March 2023
The only book of poetry to date devoted to the Rwanda genocide and published in this country, this is a work of nonfictional poetry, a cousin in genre to the nonfictional novel. It is based not only on the poet’s observations and encounters during months spent in post-genocide Rwanda, but on his numerous extensive interviews with survivors, all of whom lost most if not all of their families, and with convicted genocide perpetrators, conducted in prisons. The result is a startling book of poems that by turns is unthinkably horrifying, heartbreaking, and enraging, yet which at times breaks unexpectedly into stunning revelatory moments of grace.
As a poetry of witness this book reveals what it is like to carry on with daily life in a society where nearly every adult male is either a genocide survivor or perpetrator, almost every woman either a survivor or the wife of a perpetrator, and where nearly every child at the time of the genocide witnessed multiple killings, often of immediate family members. Ranging from free verse to stanzaic forms, this book by an NEA-award-winning poet uses tools and methods of poetry to distill each of its many varied voices to its essence, allowing those who are heard in these poems to speak for themselves, often in juxtapositions that lend the book the structure and tension of a drama. Considered more broadly, The Rwanda Poems is a book about the extremities of evil that the human psyche is capable of enduring and inflicting, and the resulting psychic costs to survivors and perpetrators.
NewPages receives many wonderful literary magazine and alternative magazine titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these titles by clicking on the “New Mag Issues” under NewPages Blog or Mags. Find out more about many of these titles with our Guide to Literary Magazines and our Big List of Literary Magazines and Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay the most up-to-date on all things literary!
Alaska Quarterly Review, Winter/Spring 2023 All My Relations, Volume 3 Barrow Street, Winter 2022-23 Big Muddy, 22/23 Black Warrior Review, Fall/Winter 2022 Carve, Winter 2023 Cream City Review, Fall/Winter 2022 Cutleaf, 3.3 Dreamers Magazine, Issue 13
After a brief hiatus, the Terrain.org podcast curated by Miranda Perrone, Soundscapes, is back. Their seventh new episode is “Wildness: Life, or Death?” This 36-minute podcast features Janisse Ray reading her essay “I Have Seen the Warrior: Crossing the Okefenokee,” in which she shares her three-day experience “crossing the largest swamp east of the Mississippi.” This is enhanced by a conversation between Janisse and Miranda. The episode opens with a poem by Robert Morgan, “Portal,” and ends with a poem by Kim Parko, “Our Woman.” Terrain.org also offers a full transcript of the program with time cues.
North Country: A Pedagogical Almanac by Carolyn Dekker Black Lawrence Press, February 2023
North Country: A Pedagogical Almanac by Carolyn Dekker is a memoir-in-essays about teaching and family life in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The book follows the cycle of seasons in this remote and beautiful place by the waters of Lake Superior during the years in which the author finds a place there. It’s also a look at higher education on the razor’s edge at a tiny and struggling liberal arts college. Above all, the memoir is about a life lived alongside books and what they might teach us about how to love, parent, mentor, and care for others.
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!
Lauren Fleshman, author of Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World and one of the top professional runners of her generation, never achieved the highest levels of success as she (at the time) and others defined it. She talks about her running career in her memoir, but her interests lay beyond training times and significant races, as she’s much more interested in why she and so many other female runners struggled to perform as well as they (and others) expected. She redefines success away from making the Olympic team to being able to run to one’s potential and still live a healthy life. While acknowledging her limited point of view and knowledge, she talks about the obstacles and struggles that come with being a female runner: unhealthy relationships with food and body image; coaches and trainers who treat females’ bodies as if they’re interchangeable with those of men; sponsors and marketers who objectify women or fail to take into account their different physical development. While she shares the clear events of misogyny and sexism, she also conveys the less-clear, more-frequent ways in which a patriarchal sport and society ignore women’s potential, hindering them from becoming the runners and people they could be.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
Music for Ghosts by Christopher Locke NYQ Books, May 2022
Christopher Locke’s new collection of poetry Music for Ghosts is a visceral testament to youth and hubris, erasure, and forgiveness. The heart of these poems straddles the space between the personal and the universally lived, where the past can shatter our best intentions at love, while the future holds us wanting at the precipice of joy. From his Pentecostal childhood to the blazing religion of punk rock, Locke caromed straight into the void of addiction, even as marriage and fatherhood hinted at something better. But in spite of loss, or maybe because of it, Locke remains steadfast in his quest to seek fearlessly and intentionally, reclaiming every light offered in hope’s name.
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!
Boy brings readers Tracy Youngblom’s second full-length collection of poetry. The death of a youngest sibling as a child, an alcoholic and distant father, a grief-stricken family, a tentative faith: these are the building blocks of the narrative of Boy, a sequence of poems that explores how death and loss color memory and influence the ways family members relate to each other and to their shared history.
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!
“The Russophone Literature of Resistance” headlines the March 2023 issue of World Literature Today. The eight writers included in the cover feature all oppose the Russian Federation’s current regime, whether from inside the country or beyond its borders. Additional writers highlighted inside include Alexandra Lytton Regalado (El Salvador), Siphiwe Ndlovu (Zimbabwe), and Bridget Pitt (South Africa), along with essays on “The New Cadre of Latin American Women Writers,” a postcard tour of unique bookstores along the US–Mexico border, and three dispatches from literary Istanbul. Be sure to check out the latest must-read titles in WLT’s book review section, three recommended Indigenous horror novels, and much more!
Michal “MJ” Jones’ debut poetry collection Hood Vacations is a rhythmic & quiet rumbling – an unflinching recollection of Blackness, queerness, gender, and violence through lenses of family lineage and confessional narrative. A nostalgia for an unreachable home permeates these poems: “We were mighty beautiful once, in golden dust.” The speaker of Hood Vacations tells of magic: of praying mantises, bathtub octopuses, Black ghosts, and bringing back “rainbow soap colors.” It is a book of passing – as, through, and on. Hop on in.
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!
For more than thirty years, diverse groups of passionate professional and novice writers have gathered at the Jackson Hole Writers Conference. While attending workshops and keynote addresses at the Jackson Hole Center for the Arts, writers learn about the craft of writing, share ideas, and make new friends while networking with authors, editors and agents from myriad backgrounds. Early-bird registration pricing available through May 12th. Join us!View flyer.
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WCSU’s MFA in Creative and Professional Writing is thrilled to announce that their 2023 Housatonic Book Awards are now open. All books published in 2022 are eligible. Winners receive $1,500 and present a reading and master class at residency. See full details here and view flyer here.
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A Promise Kept: The Muscogee (Creek) Nation and McGirt v. Oklahoma by Robert J. Miller and Robbie Ethridge The University of Oklahoma Press, January 2023
“At the end of the Trail of Tears there was a promise,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the decision issued on July 9, 2020, in the case of McGirt v. Oklahoma. And that promise, made in treaties between the United States and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation more than 150 years earlier, would finally be kept. With the Court’s ruling, the full extent of the Muscogee (Creek) Reservation was reaffirmed—meaning that 3.25 million acres of land in Oklahoma, including part of the city of Tulsa, were recognized once again as “Indian Country” as defined by federal law. A Promise Kept explores the circumstances and implications of McGirt v. Oklahoma, likely the most significant Indian law case in well over 100 years. Combining legal analysis and historical context, this book gives an in-depth, accessible account of how the case unfolded and what it might mean for Oklahomans, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, and other tribes throughout the United States.
