AUTHOR OF THE PULITZER PRIZE AND NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER, JAMES

AUTHOR OF ERASURE, now adapted for the screen as the OSCAR-WINNING FILM, AMERICAN FICTION

Percival Everett is diving back into poetry with his spellbinding new collection, SONNETS FOR A MISSING KEY

“Few writers pay more rapt attention to the fact that history is, fundamentally, storytelling . . . A pebble in every shoe. It’s the Everett way.”—New York Times

Inspired by the Preludes of Chopin and the piano solos of Art Tatum, these sonnets leap and turn through philosophical musings accrued across a life well lived, with inventive language, crystalline imagery, and turns of phrase that lift off the page and glimmer. Everett’s sonnets soar through the musical scale, from A Minor to A Major, exploring relationships, spirituality, compassion, despair, and how the stories we tell ourselves shape our realities.

Everett continuously defies convention with every creative expression and brings his literary audacity back to his poetic roots with this, his sixth collection with Red Hen Press.

Sonnets for a Missing Key is a mesmerizing feat of language that reinforces Percival Everett as one of the great wordsmiths of the century.

AUTHOR OF LIVID • SHORTLISTED FOR THE MISSOURI REVIEW EDITORS PRIZE, THE SARTON AWARD, AND THE NAUTILUS AWARD

Cai Emmons awes readers with the release of  THE BELLS

"An immersive psychological portrait of one man’s battle with lifelong anger and guilt."–Kirkus Reviews

“A book Cai finished on the day she died, is a story of life: how to live fully, embrace our messy complications, and swim toward love.”–Miriam Gershow, author of Closer and Survival Tips: Stories

Thirty-three-year-old Niall O’Malley has failed a five-year mission to live as a monk and is attempting to redefine himself as a high school teacher in New Jersey.

As The Bells opens, thirty-three-year-old Niall O’Malley has failed a five-year mission to live as a monk and is attempting to redefine himself as a high school teacher in New Jersey. The transition has been bumpy. He loves teaching history to inner city teens, but he hits a roadblock when a belligerent student, Colton, possibly a white-supremacist, behaves in ways that threaten Niall. As troubles mount at school, Niall’s girlfriend Lluvia pressures him into making a deeper commitment to their relationship. She wants them to move in together with Lluvia’s pre-teen daughter and elderly mother.

Haunted by his failure as a Cistercian monk and his troubles with one man in particular, the abusive Brother Thomas, Niall abandons Lluvia and heads back to his old monastery in Massachusetts for a final showdown with Thomas, now dying of ALS. Redemption for Niall is elusive as he strives to mend his faith.

“A witty, sultry, and thoughtful new collection."—Ron Charles, Washington Post

Obsessive love has never been so much fun! What She Wants: Poems on Obsession, Desire, Despair, Euphoria is a powerful tribute to the intensity of obsessive love, told through the trademark humor and heartbreak of bestselling poet Kim Dower.

Following the commercial and literary success of her bestselling poetry collection, I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom: Poems on Motherhood, Kim Dower delivers What She Wants: Poems on Obsession, Desire, Despair, Euphoria—turning her keen eye, vibrant imagination, trademark insight, and humor to the intensity of obsessive love. These steamy and provocative poems, combining humor and heartache, run through the four phases of Limerence, the state of being infatuated or obsessed with another person: Infatuation, Crystallization, Deterioration, and Ecstatic Release.

From the opening poem, “She’ll do anything for food,” to the sexy title poem, “What She Wants,” the painfully funny, “His Other Girlfriend,” to the longing in “Visiting Baudelaire,” and the sad, sweet final poem, “Fish’s Lament,” Kim Dower captures the essence of what it means to be stuck on someone—even on a squirrel! Her eclectic, growing readership will savor these poems that can be read in one sitting, like a story with an arc, or separately, each one recalling the moment of falling in or out of love, the moment our hearts skipped a beat.

AUTHOR OF THE PULITZER PRIZE AND NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER, JAMES

AUTHOR OF ERASURE, now adapted for the screen as the OSCAR-WINNING FILM, AMERICAN FICTION

Featured in the New York Times!

Percival Everett’s The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, VA, 1843, Annotated From the Library of John C. Calhoun, is poetry within the harsh confines of a mock historical document—a guidebook for the American slave owner. The collection features lists of instructions for buying, training, and punishing, equations for calculating present and future profits, and handwritten annotations affirming the brutal contents. The Book of Training lays bare the mechanics of the peculiar institution of slavery and challenges readers to place themselves in the uncomfortable vantage point of those who have bought and enslaved human beings.

NATIONALLY-HONORED POET • POET LAUREATE OF SOUTH PASADENA, CALIFORNIA • PUSHCART PRIZE WINNER 

Ron Koertge explores human fragility throughout history in his poetry collection, PANDORA’S KITCHEN

“Moral certainties and stereotypes vanish in these sly/subversive, satiric/tender, achingly funny/humane poems.”–Amy Gerstler • “They are poetry at its best, causing his readers to laugh, think, and feel anew.”–Billy Collins, former US poet laureate. 

The subjects in Ron Koertge’s poems include Hades’ unhappy wife Persephone, Nancy Drew, and Dracula’s Wives.

The subjects in Ron Koertge’s poems include Hades’ unhappy wife Persephone, Nancy Drew, and Dracula’s Wives. He has located Jane Austen at the mall, comforted the sun itself, and celebrated a winning day at the races. In an early poem, he extols his chosen vocation by saying this: “It’s so great to be a poet. I’m basically self-employed with nobody to please but myself.” Yet pleasing his many fans is at the top of his Things-To-Do list. That is why poets from Billy Collins to B. H. Fairchild have called his poems masterful, quirky, deliciously sly, inventive and surprisingly sweet.

AUTHOR OF AWARD-WINNING I WAS A BELL

M. Soledad Caballero explores the complexities of the body, delving into themes such as cancer, memory, and love in a lyrical collection of poems you won’t want to miss.

“This stunning book is an elegy for the body before, an ode for the body after.”–Carmen Giménez, author of Be Recorder

“Masterfully uses visceral language and vivid imagery to hold space for both sorrow and hope, beauty and pain, the light and the dark, the water and the land.”–Jasminne Mendez, author of City Without Altar

In this inventive collection, cancer transforms the body, art ignites healing, and faith is a restless vexation.

Flight Plan charts the trajectories of bodies and birds, navigating the dynamic interplay of past, present, and what happens in the in-between. These lyrical poems map the aftermaths of cancer, the varied routes of migration, and the geographies of memory. They document stories of love and its legacies, personal, familial, and national. They reject reductive diagnoses and soar and hunt with birds of prey. In this inventive collection, cancer transforms the body, art ignites healing, and faith is a restless vexation. M. Soledad Caballero urges us to remember that women’s aging bodies are evocative, that disease is a hungry creature, and that the interstices of blood and flesh are universes teeming with possibility.

AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR of CONFESSIONS OF A BAREFACED WOMAN

2022 ILLINOIS AUTHOR OF THE YEAR

Allison Joseph searches for home in her poetry collection, DWELLING

Dwelling is the latest collection from Allison Joseph, whose wise words, narrative passion, and lyrical intensity have made her a fan favorite with audiences of all ages. In Dwelling, Joseph is concerned with the inevitable search for home—as a woman, as a person of color, and as a poet. Her poems take on subjects from the serious and sublime to the humorous and ironic. Whatever her subject, Joseph is humane, humble, hilarious, and high-spirited. This poet goes wherever her imagination thrives—dwelling among us and beyond us.

AWARD–WINNING AUTHOR OF HUSH NOW, DON’T EXPLAIN

2014 USA BEST BOOK AWARD LITERARY FICTION FINALIST 

Dennis Must explores the boundaries of reality and myth in his final book in a series, CIRCLING TOWARD NIGHTFALL

Circling Toward Nightfall is a lyrical exploration of blood, duality, and the search for origins—a meditation on reconciling the body with the innermost self. Its narrator, Jeremiah Coombs, may be the only man on earth with two fathers. Told by Billy Coombs that he had no mother, Jeremiah later learns from his grandmother that her name was Bernadette and that she died in childbirth—despite his vivid memories of her presence in his early life.

As the mysterious neighbor “Ichabod” Ernest Tyner takes on a growing role in Jeremiah’s life, he reveals that Bernadette was a nun from the Sisters of Conscience who gave birth to Jeremiah on the banks of the Ohio River before drowning herself. When the truth of his conception comes to light, Jeremiah is seized by a patricidal urge that drives the novel toward its haunting revelation. With characters who drift in and out like echoes from another world, Circling Toward Nightfall is an enigmatic and mythic final work.

Beloved by contemporary German readers, the poetry of Max Sessner is gathered for the first time in English in Whoever Drowned Here: New and Selected Poems. Painstakingly chosen from Sessner’s celebrated three collections and from new work, these poems employ a matter-of-fact magical realism to engage the profound, philosophical mysteries of the everyday. Sessner makes nimble use of the material world as he choreographs poignant reenactments of human yearning. Smocks in the window of a dry cleaner “trade stolen / caresses” at night. Death tries on your clothes while you sleep and eats your chocolate. A poem tires of being a poem, “a small mortal / thing that no one notices,” and sets off into the world to make a new life. The poems of Max Sessner are like compact, musical fairytales. They delight us and frighten us. They touch us with their ghostly, melancholy fingertips and lead us onward.

A campy dark comedy for the angry and the disenchanted.

Last November, I found a dead body inside the freezer that my roommate keeps inside the garage. My first thought was to call the police, but Jignesh hadn’t paid his share of the rent just yet. It wasn’t due until the thirtieth, and you know how difficult it is to find people who pay on time. Jignesh always does. Also, he had season tickets for the LA Opera, and well . . . Madame Butterfly. Tosca. The Flying Dutchman . . . at the Dorothy Chandler . . . you cannot say no to that, can you? Well, it’s been a few good months now—Madame Butterfly was just superb, thank you. 

However, last Friday, I found a second body inside that stupid freezer in the garage. This time I’m evicting Jignesh. My house isn’t a mortuary . . . alas, I need to come up with some money first. You’ll understand, therefore, that I desperately need to sell this novel. Just enough copies to help me survive until I find a job . . . what could I do that doesn’t demand too much effort? We have a real treasure here, anyhow. Some chapters are almost but not quite pornographic. You could safely lend this to nana afterward!

BOOK 2 OF THE CURSEBREAKERS SERIES

FEATURED ON KIRKUS REVIEWS’ 20 SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY NOVELS TO READ NOW

Author Madeleine Nakamura plunges readers back into her spellbinding series, where Professor Adrien Desfourneaux’s journey through peril, passion, and dark magic takes a thrilling new turn in Angel Eye.

"Nakamura has knocked it out of the park once again . . . A fast-paced return to Nakamura's magical world."—Kirkus *Starred Review*

“A queer, smart, bewitching read." —Meredith Katz, author of The Cybernetic Tea Shop

When a healer begins murdering hospital patients, Professor Adrien Desfourneaux discovers that the threat is far closer to him than he could have imagined.

Still recovering from a recent institutionalization and unable to trust his own mind or magic, Adrien is drawn into the witch hunt as suspicion falls upon those closest to him. The city’s inquisitors and witchfinders are losing control, the magicians are growing more and more resentful, and the scars from Adrien’s last brush with disaster refuse to fade. To put an end to the innocent deaths, to keep his dearest friends, and to prove himself worthy of a potential new romance, Adrien is forced to confront his own blind spots before he’s fatally ensnared by the angel of death’s machinations.

ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF FOURTEEN STORIES, NONE OF THEM ARE YOURS, CO-WRITER OF EILEEN

RECIPIENT OF PRESTIGIOUS RONALD SUKENICK INNOVATIVE FICTION PRIZE AND JOAN SCOTT MEMORIAL FICTION AWARD

“If this book were any better, I’d cut my own head off.”—Ottessa Moshfegh

“Kill Dick is a fever dream.”—Harriet Armstrong, author of To Rest Our Minds and Bodies

A fever dream, Kill Dick is a literary thriller that plunges into the chaos of Los Angeles, where addiction, privilege, and corruption combust. 

At nineteen, Susie Vogelman should be coasting: she’s an NYU dropout with no responsibilities, endless prescription pills, and a Brentwood estate to waste away in. But Los Angeles has other plans. A string of brutal murders targeting addicts spreads through the city, and Susie’s ivory tower begins to crumble. The headlines point too close to home: her father’s ties to an opioid empire, a sinister secret society, and her own complicity in the systems holding it all together.

Then there’s Peter Holiday, a disgraced professor running a rehab scam so audacious it’s almost admirable. When their lives collide, Susie and Peter are dragged into a web of privilege, corruption, and violence, where every escape leads deeper into the rot.

Dark, satirical, and razor-sharp, Kill Dick is a modern literary thriller that unflinchingly dissects wealth, exploitation, and the perilous line between survival and self-destruction.

AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR

“Morning Leaves is a gift to all who open their eyes to its images and their hearts to its whispers and exhortations.”—Faith Salie, Emmy-winning contributor to CBS News Sunday Morning and author of Approval Junkie

A radiant fusion of poetry and nature art, Morning Leaves: Cultivating a Life of Beauty, Meaning, and Joy is a tender, soul-stirring meditation on grief, healing, and the quiet joy of rediscovering beauty one morning at a time.

Steeped in beautiful art and verse that invites reflection, Morning Leaves is the perfect gift book or self-purchase.

An award-winning blend of reflection, poetry, and nature-inspired art, Morning Leaves invites readers to slow down into the beauty of everyday life. With honesty and warmth, Laing Rikkers offers insights on healing, presence, and hope.

Through the lens of nature and creativity, she reveals that in uncertain or chaotic times, there is a path to meaning, connection, and light. Walk with her through the garden of imagination and rediscover your own wellspring of joy.

AWARD WINS FOR MORNING LEAVES:
2023 FOREWORD INDIES AWARDS WINNER
2023 PUBWEST DESIGN AWARDS WINNER
2024 FEATHERED QUILL BOOK AWARDS WINNER | GOLD
2024 IBPA BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AWARDS WINNER | GOLD

MORE PRAISE FOR MORNING LEAVES:
“The poems within Morning Leaves are tender, compassionate and full of wonder. Laing's writing and Kelly's illustrations are conduits for healing and hope.”
—Kristin A. Meekhof, co-author of A Widow's Guide to Healing

“So beautifully written and thoughtfully constructed. Visceral. Visual. Vulnerable. The passages cracked open my heart.”
—Amy K. Hutchens, award-winning speaker and bestselling author of Get It and The Secrets Leaders Keep

“An unprecedented breakthrough novel about life after war.”—Cara Hoffman, author of Running, Be Safe, I Love You and So Much Pretty 

“This is not only a massively good book, it is absolutely necessary.”—Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, author of The Storyteller of Marrakesh and The Watch

A bold and compassionate novel about war’s aftermath, The Soldier’s House confronts the uneasy truths of rescue, redemption, and what it means to share a home and future with a former enemy.

In The Soldier’s House, Helen Benedict tells the story of an Iraq War veteran who saves the lives of his assassinated Iraqi interpreter’s widow, child, and mother by bringing them to his upstate New York home. For the soldier, this is a way of making amends, but the widow finds being rescued by the enemy both humiliating and compromising. This is a compassionate tale that examines whether redemption and forgiveness are even possible in the wake of war. In light of the increasing displacement of people all over the world, The Soldier’s House is particularly timely and poignant.

A haunting, lyrical reckoning with war’s aftermath, The Afterlife of a Threadbare Jester confronts the brutality of Vietnam’s reeducation camps while illuminating the enduring power of memory, loyalty, and the human will to survive. 

Centering on a Vietnamese intelligence officer’s years-long ordeal in communist reeducation camps, The Afterlife of a Threadbare Jester offers a heartrending and an illuminating look at the Vietnam War and its aftermath. War, literature, religion, politics, loyalty—they are all expertly interrogated through the protagonist’s compelling voice and the memorable cast of characters he encounters. Despite the struggle and suffering, the story never veers into the sentimental or cynical. Instead, it returns again and again to the complexities of the human heart and its will to endure. This is not a novel of ism excoriation; it is, in fact, a story that seeks questions to the truths of life and asks the question: “How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand a man who’s cold?” A moving, unforgettable, and enlightening must-read.

“In this brilliant bilingual anthology, William Archila creates a powerful and fiery poetics of exile, war, and, ultimately and brilliantly, survival.”—Daniel Borzutzky, National Book Award winner

From war-torn El Salvador to the streets of East LA, Canícula / Dog Days is a bold, bilingual collection chronicling exile, memory, and resilience across borders.

William Archila’s Canícula / Dog Days is a bilingual selection of his first two books of poetry, The Art of Exile and The Gravedigger’s Archaeology, two collections that chart the emergence of a newcomer in the chorus of Latin Poetry. Canícula, which means “dog days” in English, takes the reader on a poignant journey from the unrest in El Salvador in the 1980s to the urban landscape of the US immigrant, revealing the turmoil and memory of the disempowered, the impoverished, and the displaced who struggle back home in Central America. In lyrical and often harrowing language, Archila unearths the vestiges of war and the exile’s return in an elegy, the fragments of a myth, or a jazz riff. They come together like the bilateral symmetry of a volcano, and the result is the introduction to Archila’s poetry for the Spanish reader.

AUTHOR OF FIVE POETRY COLLECTIONS • NATIONALLY RECOGNIZED AUTHOR, Brendan Constantine presents his newest collection, The Opposites Game.

A playful and profound meditation on language, binaries, and the radical act of seeing each other more clearly.

In his fifth collection of verse, The Opposites Game, poet Brendan Constantine inspires us to revel in the abundance of life by reckoning its many astonishments (and antonyms). Through a simple yet profound framework of odes, lists, memoirs, and classroom assignments, Constantine asks us to think critically about how we define and understand each other, urging us to look beyond simplistic binaries and engage with the deeper nuances of meaning.

The Opposites Game is a powerful reminder of the intricate relationship between words and the realities they represent, and an invitation to explore the rich, beautiful, and often perilous terrain of human thought and emotion.

“Soyer's beautiful debut is essential reading for anyone trying to understand how, why, and through what means we construct ourselves.”—Cyrus Dunham, author of A Year Without a Name

Dreams in Which I’m Almost Human is a genre-defying memoir of disability, identity, and desire that fuses lyricism, myth, and medical truth to explore what it means to live and love a body defined by others.

At eight years old, Hannah Soyer had no choice but to undergo an intensive spinal fusion surgery, in order to keep her lungs from eventually collapsing. Fourteen years later, she chose another treatment for her neuromuscular condition: regular drug injections into her spinal fluid. But what does “choice” really mean, and how much weight do our choices hold?

In taut, lyrical chapters, Dreams in Which I’m Almost Human confronts and communes with bodily autonomy, medical and sexual consent, traveling abroad in a wheelchair, caregiving and caretaking, appreciating the natural world, family history, bedtime stories, fantastical creatures, Irish poetry, and the limits and wonders of language and love. A bold collection of genre-bending essays, this memoir is an investigation into what we (and our words) are capable of, as we yearn to make sense of our relationships to ourselves, each other, and the worlds we inhabit.

FORMER COLORADO POET LAUREATE

From the volcanic landscapes of the Pacific Rim to the mythic echoes of Greece and India, Cold Fire is a radiant meditation on memory, nature, and the enduring sparks of love and creation.

David Mason’s poetry circles the globe. The urgent and beautiful poems of his new book, Cold Fire, have settings in Australia, India, Greece, Turkey and the American West. A title sequence takes up the Aboriginal practice of cool burning for fire mitigation, and moves to the Ring of Fire, the volcanoes of Mason’s childhood home in the Pacific Northwest—fires of creation and destruction. Here the dream life of art is pitched against human conflict. Here we have poems of family life, aging, and a deep conversation with history and myth. This is a book of light, love, and powerful remembrance from the edge of the world.

A searing portrait of forced girlhood and generational grief, Given Away reveals the quiet strength of a woman suriving child marriage and motherhood in 1930s Iran.

In 1930s Iran, ten-year-old Mehri is given away in marriage, the first step in a life shaped by forced motherhood, loss, and sacrifice. Alone and afraid, she navigates married life far from the support of her mother and sisters. Pregnant by thirteen, Mehri bears child after child, losing many along the way, and struggles to mother her five surviving children through a haze of grief. In Given Away, Nahid Rachlin traces the hidden scars of her family’s history, carved by a system that grants men complete control and strips women of their voices. Yet within that silence, Rachlin reveals a quiet resistance rooted in sisterhood, love, and endurance.

“Molly Fisk reminds us what poetry can do, put to the service of Story.”—Molly Gloss, author of The Hearts of Horses and The Jump-Off Creek

Walking Wheel is a tender, lyrical portrait of pioneer love and labor that revives the quiet heroism of everyday life in 1875, where intimacy, resilience, and devotion shape the story of home.

In this rich new collection, Molly Fisk braids together the ordinary tasks of love and work in 1875, a century we've almost forgotten but whose human concerns are universal and timeless.

Fisk describes the journey of newlyweds Phoebe and Miles Imlay from their birthplace in central Oregon to California's Surprise Valley. These are quiet, lyrical poems building a private world of intimacy and effort in alternating voices. From sawing timber, turning the heel of a sock, and measuring a pie's baking with verses of a song, through sex, pregnancy, and childbirth, the couple's first year of marriage working side by side is offered to us in resonant, unexpected detail.

Captivating and accessible, by turns tender, funny, erotic, and surprising, Walking Wheel chronicles a self-sufficient era that some only half-remember and many find hard to believe. With these linked poems, Fisk brings a measure of balm and solace to our often fraught, overwhelming times.

"Evocative, rich, and simply bursting with rage and love. A gorgeous novel."—Lauren Groff, bestselling author of Fates and Furies

Talking to the Wolf is a poignant and haunting exploration of female friendship that unearths the past and the ghosts we carry into the present.

Four women. Thirty-five years. A lyrical and unsettling look at female friendship across time. 

A failed rockstar, an awarded scientist, a work-obsessed misanthrope, and a ghost, whose untimely death ruptured the once-solid quartet, steel themselves for their thirty-fifth high school reunion dinner. Set during a surprise snowstorm in New York City the day of the reunion, Talking to the Wolf is a lyrical exploration of female friendship across decades.

Like a Meg Wolitzer novel shot by filmmaker Nicole Holofcener and blessed by Virginia Woolf, Talking to the Wolf pole-vaults over the Bechdel Test.

CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED AUTHOR

“Mysterious and mesmerizing.”––Claire Stanford, Author of Happy for You 

Yellow is a luminous, genre-defying debut that fuses cosmic mystery, trauma, and transformation. It will take you on a journey through time, space, and the inner wilderness of one girl’s mind.

It’s 1973: summer of the Watergate hearings and Skylab’s launch into space when 12-year-old Z discovers an unclassified slime mold growing in her Louisiana backyard. Something compels her deep coherence with this magical creature—until an incident with a serial killer at the lake disrupts their connection. Both mystifying and metaphorical, Yellow becomes a guiding force for her brother Clem, a New Orleans seeker. As years pass, Z tries to recover what life has taught her to forget. A multi-threaded novel, Yellow weaves fact, physics, space exploration, and philosophy to create a transcendent reading experience.

BOOK 1 OF THE CURSEBREAKERS SERIES, FEATURED #1 ON KIRKUS REVIEWS’ 20 SCIENCE FICTION FANTASY NOVELS THAT WILL BLOW YOUR MIND

Debut Author Madeleine Nakamura captivates readers with a tale of magic, adventure, and unexpected friendships in this thrilling fantasy, CURSEBREAKERS

“Superbly developed.”—Kirkus Reviews, STARRED
“An exciting read.”—Booklist 
“Outrageously good—phenomenal.”—Independent Book Review

Adrien Desfourneaux, professor of magic, must survive his own failing mental health and a tenuous partnership with a dangerous ally in order to save the city of Astrum from a spreading curse.

Adrien Desfourneaux, professor of magic and disgraced ex-physician, has discovered a conspiracy. Someone is inflicting magical comas on the inhabitants of the massive city of Astrum, and no one knows how or why. Caught between a faction of scheming magical academics and an explosive schism in the ranks of the Astrum’s power-hungry military, Adrien is swallowed by the growing chaos. Alongside Gennady, an unruly, damaged young soldier, and Malise, a brilliant healer and Adrien’s best friend, Adrien searches for a way to stop the spreading curse before the city implodes. He must survive his own bipolar disorder, his self-destructive tendencies, and his entanglement with the man who doesn’t love him back.

But it’s the dead folks that do him the damage. It’s the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and don’t try to hold him, that he can’t escape from. —William Faulkner, Light in August

There is an inexplicable gravity in a small town. It can be read and enjoyed like a favorite book for most of its inhabitants. Comforting are its streets and institutions, its wedding and obituary announcements. Banjo Grease is about life and death in a mill town where at each epiphany and rite of passage, the narrator yields a ration of innocence. Characters portray class as a marker as strong as race and gender, and distrust that they will ever escape in their lifetimes. Faulkner uses the term “eager fatalism.” These stories’ cumulative effect asks: When exchanging naivete for worldliness, what is lost in denying one’s past?

In Alphabetica, Juliet Mattila guides readers through a poetic journey that captures moments of clarity and introspection within the intricate landscapes of memory, art, and nature. Her deft language and keen observation bring to life the invisible spectrum of emotions and experiences that define human existence. Through carefully crafted lines and a reflective voice, Mattila examines themes both personal and universal, inviting readers to see the world anew. This collection resonates with a timeless legacy, blending tradition with insight and paying homage to poetic forms while exploring contemporary depths. Alphabetica is a work that challenges and rewards, inviting readers who seek meaning in layered expressions of language.

Featured by CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS, one of "12 MUST-READ BOOKS OF SEPTEMBER 2025"

AUTHOR OF AWARD-WINNING, ANIMAL WIFE
WINNER OF CAI EMMONS FICTION AWARD and ERIC HOFFER AWARD
FOREWORD INDIE AWARD FINALIST 

"The poetic prose mixed with the intense subject matter creates an undertow that will pull readers in."—Booklist

“A modern-day fairy tale that is both ghastly and beautiful.”—Kirkus

Mother and daughter mermaids navigate starting over and finding their place in the world in Lara Ehrlich’s debut novel.

The youngest siren sister, Ceto is weary of an existence driven by hunger, no better than a fish. She trades her tail for legs, marries the first man she meets, and bears a daughter—only to find domesticity as suffocating as the sea. Craving more, Ceto flees with her daughter Naia back to the ocean, where she reinvents herself as the star of a mermaid burlesque, performing in a lavish tank carved into the limestone cliffs above the waves.

At Sirenland, Ceto’s sensual performances and the erotic allure of her trained sirens transform the seaside attraction into a national sensation—a glittering empire where spectacle, desire, and female power reign. But as Naia comes of age and begins to question her mother’s vision, the boundary between empowerment and exploitation grows dangerously thin. When a shocking death rocks Sirenland, Ceto’s rule is threatened, and mother and daughter must reckon with the cost of performance on their already tenuous bond.

Bind Me Tighter Still is a lush, provocative exploration of power, sex, sacrifice, and motherhood—a celebration of female strength in a world determined to tame it.

A Spanish woman trying to retire as an assassin, a French Foreign Legion deserter from Madagascar, a mysterious (perhaps CIA) woman from America, a billionaire military contractor, and a man wandering the seas alone on a sailing ship bump into each other in the Indian Ocean, and not all of them survive.

Mónica has had enough of her life as a contract killer when she meets lonely wanderer Frank Baltimore in a stupidly expensive resort in Madagascar. A few hundred miles away, Alain has had more than enough of his solitary post on a tiny island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and so when the mysterious Skye offers him a job, he says yes—he doesn’t know if she is CIA, Wagner, Darkwater, or a gangster, but he wants in. She takes him to Diego Garcia, the top-secret US military base in the middle of the Indian Ocean, for training. Things turn ugly and deadly when a man from Frank’s past turns up trying to break into the lucrative, secretive, already crowded world of paramilitary contractors. He, Monica, Alain, and Skye end up on his bad side and turn to each other for help.

AWARD-WINNING CO-AUTHORS

PEN OPEN BOOKS AWARD WINNER

PEN USA NONFICTION BOOK AWARD FINALIST

Ten short stories written by Lily Hoàng and Vi Khi Nào explore a range of styles from love stories to speculative fiction and fairy tales.

In this inventive collaboration, Hoàng and Nào blend Vietnamese, English, and Vietlish, creating a fresh, dynamic voice that captures the complexity of the Vietnamese-American experience. Their stories dive into themes of generational trauma, identity, and cultural clash, offering everything from love stories pieced together from memory, to folklore and fantasy, to post-apocalyptic worlds where Vietnamese-American identities are reimagined.

Timber and Lụa is playful, moving, and full of surprises. The authors experiment with language and translation, showing how meaning can shift and change between cultures. Released on the fiftieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, this collection is both a celebration of diasporic voices and a tribute to the power of storytelling across generations.

AWARD-WINNING POET • AUTHOR OF ELEVEN POETRY COLLECTIONS

FORMER POET LAUREATE OF NEW ZEALAND

David Eggleton explores the voices of New Zealand, Australia, and Polynesia in his latest collection, LIFTING THE ISLAND

“This is vital, elastic, expertly handled language in a Pacific voice of cultural and musical sensibility, poetry to be spoken aloud or in the mind.”–Cilla McQueen, MNZM, and former New Zealand Poet Laureate

This own-voices collection is a kind of lyrical world map of the South Pacific, built up through a lush epic catalog of flora, fauna, and artifacts.

This collection is a kind of lyrical word map of the South Pacific, built up through a lush epic catalog of flora, fauna, and artifacts. The poems are frequently infused with a wry humor—and while they often eschew both narrative and personal epiphany, they make intensely detailed, vigorous observations of place and landscape that are curious, sparkling, and sometimes hilarious.

Linguistically agile, this book’s stanzas bring together the lyrical and the slangy, celebrating the local vernaculars of New Zealand, Australia, and Polynesia. Many of its poems work as cascading streams of image; of pronouncements; of dramatic tonal shifts almost line by line; and with dense, daring metaphor clusters that entertain as well as illuminate.

AUTHOR OF BESTSELLER, IN A PERFECT WORLD

AUTHOR OF THREE BOOKS ADAPTED TO FILM: SUSPICIOUS RIVER, THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES, AND WHITE BIRD IN A BLIZZARD

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER IN POETRY FOR SPACE, IN CHAINS

Laura Kasischke dives back into novels with this thrilling small town mystery, THE LIFEGUARD

This is a novel about grief and ambition, innocence and blame—a tale that spools out of and around a Midwestern swimming pool one summer afternoon, 1969, and into the future of an America yet to be imagined.

In the town of Mission Hills, Michigan, an elementary school child drowns in the Olympic-sized pool at a summer swim club. By most, but not all, the lifeguard on duty that afternoon—a teenage girl who becomes the town’s scapegoat, bearing the weight of their grief and fears—is seen as responsible for the tragedy.

Kasischke weaves together overlapping narratives and shifting perspectives, gradually peeling back the layers of what really happened that day. Through poetic, sensory-rich prose, she explores the liminal spaces between memory and reality, innocence and culpability, childhood and adulthood. The story probes the arbitrary, inexorable nature of fate—how a single moment can alter lives forever, and how the search for answers can reveal unsettling truths about ourselves and those around us.

Blood Flower is a masterful exploration of resilience, love, and the echoes of history, set against the stark beauty of nature and the sharp edges of human conflict. Pamela Uschuk’s poetry weaves a tapestry of intimate personal struggles and broader societal turmoil. Her vivid language captures the visceral textures of life—from the Siberian tundra to family kitchens—and transforms pain, loss, and longing into transcendent art.

With themes ranging from the oppressive silences of political exile to the haunting legacies of war, Blood Flower is a poignant tribute to the enduring power of the human spirit. Uschuk’s voice, sharp as a wolf’s howl and tender as a lover’s whisper, invites readers to confront both the scars of the past and the fragile hope of renewal. This is a collection for anyone who dares to seek beauty in the ashes and strength in vulnerability.

Dreams Like Thunder takes place on a small Eastern Oregon farm between Baker and Hells Canyon. The story is set over a couple of days in 1959, but part of the family seems less in touch with the twentieth century than with the myth of their own pioneer past. The myth varies according to who is doing the telling. It is up to Alberta, who is ten years old and heir to both the farm and the myth, to discover some truth behind the stories—a truth that will help her know who she is and what her own future might be.

Dive into the depths of the unknown with The Underwater Mystery, where Jin Tan leads the adventure! Imagine a world where the ocean holds incredible secrets—like waves you can’t even see from the surface. Follow Jin as she unravels the fascinating science of internal waves, mysterious forces that can stop ships in their tracks, and even affect submarines. Travel back in time to learn about the strange “dead water” phenomenon, first experienced by real-life explorer Dr. Fridtjof Nansen. Explore how these invisible waves shape our climate, protect coral reefs, and present unexpected challenges to submarines!

Packed with mind-blowing facts, hands-on experiments you can try at home, and thrilling true stories, Jin guides you through a hidden world beneath the ocean’s surface. Find out why the Arctic ice is melting faster, how waves can form and travel between layers of water without losing its identity, and what makes these mysterious waves so powerful. Ready to dive into an ocean full of hidden wonders? Join Jin Tan in The Underwater Mystery for an unforgettable adventure!

The pieces in this collection capture the feeling of being buffeted by great gusts of middle-aged longing.

What began as one woman’s quarrel with Buddhism, especially its doctrine of non-attachment, morphs into a larger question: What’s the right way to love a person or a thing? With voluptuous detail and rigorous self-interrogation, Jennifer Brice looks for answers in family lore, personal experience, conversations with friends, and beloved books. The result is a tender, moving, far-reaching—sometimes delightfully funny, sometimes achingly poignant—exploration of the powerful ties that bind us to one another and to the world around us.

*Recommended in The New York Times*

A Punishing Breed, the first in a series of novels featuring Detective DJ Arias, is a murder mystery that takes place in Los Angeles, the city of angels, freeways, Santa Ana winds, and honeysuckle slithering through chain-link fences and perfuming LA's dark streets and neighborhoods.

Detective Arias hunts for a murderer on a liberal arts campus that prides itself on its progressive curriculum but is rife with jealousy, racial and sexual tensions, and a hierarchy as real and destructive as a medieval fortress. DJ Arias, good at his job because he sees the worst in people, is challenged by the college community, a neighborhood recluse, and a young Latino gardener he sent to jail ten years ago for a hit-and-run accident. Through the course of his investigation, Arias will find out no one is who they appear to be. He begins to reclaim his humanity by adopting a dog he names Evidence and finding the clues to a crime born from a dark secret not contained in the past but alive in the present, which will cast destruction and murder on the denizens of the small liberal arts campus.

Seventeen-year-old Annika Rose and her father Wes have spent the years since the death of Annika’s mother in self-imposed social isolation on their farm on the edge of the woods. When a young woman named Tina moves into a house down the road, the result is a sudden explosion of feelings in both father and daughter and a fierce rivalry. At stake in the competition is not only their relationship, but the life of the vulnerable young woman at the center of it all.

Dear Edna Sloane is a funny, fast-paced epistolary novel about fame, writers, ambition, and the ups and downs of a creative life.

Edna Sloane was a promising author at the top of her game. Her debut novel was an instant classic and commercial success, vaulting her into the heady echelons of the 1980s New York City lit scene. Then she disappeared and was largely forgotten. Decades later, Seth Edwards is an aspiring writer and editor who feels he’s done all the right things to achieve literary success, but despairs that his dream will be forever out of reach. He becomes obsessed with the idea that if he can rediscover Sloane, it will make his career. His search for her leads to unexpected places and connections, and the epistolary correspondence that ensues makes up this book, a novel infused with insights and meditations about what our cultural obsession with the "next big thing" does to literature, and what it means to be a creative person in the world.

A Professional Lola is a collection of short stories that blend literary fiction with the surreal to present the contemporary Filipino American experience and its universal themes of love, family, and identity. A family hires an actress to play their beloved grandmother at a party; a couple craving Filipino food rob a panaderya; a coven of Filipino witches cast a spell on their husbands; a Lolo transforms into a Lola. These are just a few of the stories in the collection that represent its roster of stories beautifully grounded in culture and vividly and meticulously painted to make the absurd seem mundane and the commonplace, sinister. A Professional Lola embodies the joy, mystery, humor, sadness, hunger, and family that inhabit modern-day Filipino American virtues.

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.

Set in 2018 against the backdrop of an overcrowded, fetid refugee camp on the beautiful Greek island of Samos, The Good Deed follows the stories of four women living in the camp and an American tourist who comes to Samos to escape her own dark secret.

When the tourist does a “good deed,” she triggers a crisis that brings her and the refugee women into a conflict that escalates dramatically as each character struggles for what she needs.

"In his extraordinary book Memoirs of a Minotaur: From Merrill Lynch to Patty Hearst to Poetry, Robin Magowan (grandson of the founder of Merrill Lynch and nephew of one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, James Merrill) turns his uncompromising vision and diamond-edged language toward the emotional terrain and the kind of privileged life very few of us have known, and against which he rebels. Unlike many memoirs, this one rewards the reader by enabling us to inhabit the rarefied existence the author both holds at arm’s length and admits into the chambers of his personal memory. Life is seen through a Proustian lens so that the narrative tells us as much about the man Magowan and his journey as it does about an entire world, one that encompasses business as well as social and personal upheaval, and ranges geographically from Manhattan and Southampton to Berkeley in the sixties, to Paris and Greece, and to other distant destinations, including the rarefied altitude of Tesi recognition that is both earned and liberating. Whether or not readers are familiar with Magowan’s stunning prose in his travel writings or with the voyages and discoveries finished by each carefully crafted chapter, Magowan’s writing bears an admirable family resemblance to that of his uncle’s work; for readers of James Merrill’s poetry, this memoir will hold an additional interest."—Helen Houghton and Bill Handley

A campy dark comedy for the angry and the disenchanted.

Last November, I found a dead body inside the freezer that my roommate keeps inside the garage. My first thought was to call the police, but Jignesh hadn’t paid his share of the rent just yet. It wasn’t due until the thirtieth, and you know how difficult it is to find people who pay on time. Jignesh always does. Also, he had season tickets for the LA Opera, and well . . . Madame Butterfly. Tosca. The Flying Dutchman . . . at the Dorothy Chandler . . . you cannot say no to that, can you? Well, it’s been a few good months now—Madame Butterfly was just superb, thank you. However, last Friday, I found a second body inside that stupid freezer in the garage. This time I’m evicting Jignesh. My house isn’t a mortuary . . . alas, I need to come up with some money first. You’ll understand, therefore, that I desperately need to sell this novel. Just enough copies to help me survive until I find a job . . . what could I do that doesn’t demand too much effort? We have a real treasure here, anyhow. Some chapters are almost but not quite pornographic. You could safely lend this to nana afterward!

In Ripples in the Fabric of the Universe, Jim Tilley draws on his experience as a poet and mathematician to fix a lens on the current raw state of the country and the world and on interpersonal relationships. At times, his mood is merely contemplative, especially while expressing his fondness for nostalgia and in his testaments to family and friends, but as he delves relentlessly into matters political, ecological, and environmental, that mood turns darker, even ominous, infused occasionally with humor to present a more optimistic outlook.

Theresa Bonpane’s memoir Sister Rebel is an inspiring and powerful read for anyone interested in the world of activism and social justice. The book charts Bonpane’s journey from a young Irish American woman, to a Maryknoll sister working in Chile, to a dedicated peace activist and director of the Office of the Americas. Along the way, she shares her experiences working alongside notable figures such as Howard Zinn and Martin Sheen, and how they helped shape her beliefs and actions in the fight for peace and justice. Through her personal anecdotes and reflections, Bonpane offers an insightful and thought-provoking look at the inner workings of the peace movement and the challenges faced by activists on the frontlines. This memoir is not only a testament to the power of one person’s commitment to change, but also a call to action for readers to join the fight for a better world.

Brynn Saito takes her readers on a journey with her father to the desert prison at Gila River where, over 80 years ago, her grandparents met and made a life together. Born of an unquenchable desire to animate the shadow archive, Saito’s poetry sings a song of rage, confusion, and, ultimately, love; descendants of wartime incarceration exchange dreams, mothers become water goddesses, and a modern daughter haunts future ruins. Mystical inclinations, yellow cedars, and sisterhood make a balm for trauma’s scars. This work opens a dialogue between the past and present, radical ancestor and future child, desert prison and family garden.

I discover a "lost" aunt, separated from our family due to racism and discrimination against the disabled. She had a mental disability due to childhood meningitis. She was taken away in 1942 when all Japanese Americans were considered the enemy and imprisoned. She then became a "ward" of the state. We believed she had died, but 70 years later found her alive and living a few miles from our family farm. How did she survive? Why was she kept hidden? How did both shame and resilience empower my family to forge forward in a land that did not want them? I am haunted and driven to explore my identity and the meaning of family—especially as farmers tied to the land. I uncover family secrets that bind us to a sense of history buried in the earth that we work and a sense of place that defines us.

The Rumpus Book Club Pick, May 2022

Most Anticipated Books of 2022, The Rumpus

16 Upcoming Books from Indie Presses You’ll Love, BuzzFeed

Best Books of the Summer, Powell’s

Saul doesn't get why he's misunderstood. At his high-tech day job, he hides in the bathroom writing a novel about his dead grandfather and wonders why his boss wants to fire him. He tells his almost ex-wife about a blind date and wonders why she slams the door in his face. He aches with worry for his seven-year-old son, who seems happier living with his mom and her new man.

When the blind date becomes a complicated relationship, and Saul’s blunders at work threaten the survival of the company, Saul has to wake up and confront his fears.

I Only Cry with Emoticons is a quirky comedy that reveals the cost of being disconnected—even when we're using a dozen apps on our devices to communicate—and an awkward man's search for real connections, on and offline.

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.

The first anthology to present the most exciting and unexpected new movement in American poetry—the revival of rhyme, meter, and narrative among poets—Rebel Angels gathers the best work of twenty-five poets who write memorably and movingly in a dazzling variety of forms—some traditional, some newly minted—out of the diverse experiences of their generation.

Contributors include Elizabeth Alexander, Julia Alvarez, Bruce Bawer, Rafael Campo, Tom Disch, Frederick Feirstein, Dana Gioia, Emily Grosholz, R.S. Gwynn, Marilyn Hacker, Rachel Hadas, Andrew Hudgins, Paul Lake, Sydney Lea, Brad Leithauser, Phillis Levin, Charles Martin, Marilyn Nelson, Molly Peacock, Wyatt Prunty, Mary Jo Salter, Timothy Steele, Frederick Turner, Rachel Wetzsteon, and Greg Williamson.

This edition brings together selected poems from all six previous editions of Frederick Feirstein's poetry published between 1974 and 1997. Feirstein is one of the founders of Expansive Poetry which reaches out to audiences beyond the academy and incorporates free verse, formal, and narrative techniques. The poems in this selection combine extraordinary lyric and storytelling skills. A poet of urban anger, humour reconciliation, and revelation. Frederick Feirstein dares to work on an epic scale. His ambitious vision makes for a unique accessible achievement in American poetry. This broad selection of poems is a cause for celebration.

In his debut collection, Josh Sapan guides us through a lifetime of love and loss as he navigates death-of loved ones, of crickets, of houseplants-in an American landscape teeming with wonder and the promise of rebirth-in the stars, the wind, the minnows in the bay. In Rx, the prescription is literal ("blue-fog medicine breath") and figurative ("Love so big,/ it comes in a gigantic red box."). Sapan offers a glimpse into the sometimes painfully delicate and beautiful parts of life.

Scene of the Crime exposes the poet’s inner criminality, where matricide and mother tongue engage in diabolic discourse. Confessing her outlaw sexuality, Ransom grapples with feminist theory and disembowels postmodern philosophy. Delighting in the multiplicity of self, language and desire, Ransom fires puns dead-aimed to riddle any interpretive reduction.

Six Mile Mountain is the seventh of Richard Tillinghast's twelve collections of poetry. The poems in this book, sometimes political in emphasis, sometimes sensual, sometimes elegiac, are rooted in the landscape of Ireland and America and explore love and betrayal, family, duty and grief, and the nature of personal identity. Tillinghast is adept with form, moving back and forth between free verse and metrical verse.

Each person lives but a single life—yet this is not wholly true. While our lives progress as a result of the choices we make—this career, that husband, this town, that house—we are left imagining a life we might have lived. If we are defined by our choices, in what ways are we limited by them? What of the spiritual lives we lead, the inner lives that others cannot truly know? Which life is truest?

A woman recalls her special bond with her father and compares it with her ties to other men; a man copes with his unloved life and finds a way to secretly inherit it; after making love for the first time, a young woman wishes to go back in time, erase what she’s done.

In readable, finely wrought, resonant, and memorable poems about the nature of longing and disappointment, desire and betrayal, pleasure and sorrow, The Other Life explores the dualities in life that every person experiences.

2023 Eric Hoffer Book Award Finalist! Kim Dower’s poetry has been described by the Los Angeles Times as “sensual and evocative . . . seamlessly combining humor and heartache,” and by O Magazine as “unexpected and sublime.” Acclaimed for combining the accessible and profound, her poems about motherhood are some of her most moving and disarmingly candid.  I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom is an anthology of her poems on being a mother—childbirth to empty nest—as well as being a daughter with all the teenaged messiness, drama and conflict, to finally caring for one's mother suffering from dementia. Culled from her four collections as well as a selection of new work, these poems, heartbreaking, funny, surprising, and touching, explore the quirky, unexpected observations, and bittersweet moments mothers and daughters share. These evocative poems do not glorify mothers, but rather look under the hood of motherhood and explore the deep crevices and emotions of these impenetrable relationships: the love, despair, joy, humor and gratitude that fills our lives.

Frederick Feirstein's tenth book, Time's Refugee, is chock-full of some of his best lyric and dramatic poems.

They are passionate, wise, and totally accessible to the general public. The diction is colloquial and the form excels in meter and rhyme.

This book is about Latina identity, a timely subject in today's America. The author’s journey begins as she, full of love for Mexico and its culture despite her closest blood connection being her bisabuela, boards a bus. She starts out determined: “Yes foreign is a word for fear. Yes I am coming home.” But then, because “it is afraid, staying in a language where you were not born,” she retreats, hiding first behind we, then behind masks. But when it becomes clear that the masks are her true self, she loses her fear, and barrels ahead as I, fully committed, all the way to the end.

Stephen Gibson’s poems are the work of a serious, intent, often appalled tourist. The word might look like a putdown, but his subject is the glamour and horror of history, and when it comes to the past, attentive tourism is the best that any of us can hope for. This tourist’s gaze if focused and fascinated, his tone is even and intelligent (as he has it in one poem, “scared in the headlights, but the brain busy nonetheless”), and his technique is all but flawless (unobtrusively so, a true case of art hiding art). Together the gaze, the subjects on which it alights, and the poet’s superlative skill add up to poems of astute, moving observation and often overwhelming authority.
—Dick Davis

Without Asking marks Jane Ransom’s debut as a book author, initially placing her within the poetic tradition of narrative Confessionalism. But one can already sense here the ambivalence that would lead both to a break from narrative—in her second poetry book, Scene of the
Crime—and her subsequent return to narrative in Bye-Bye, her first novel. This is a writer whose epistemological inquiry continuously turns both inward and outward, from linear to non-linear and back again, in an unrelenting quest for Truth.

The precise gaze and chiseled language of the poems in Oldest Mortal Myth authoritatively convey a broad and deep knowledge. Whether a reimagining a Greek myth in order to infuse it with a contemporary pain, extending empathy and humorous Mitmenschkeit to both denizens and voyeurs of the world's freakshows, or describing with wit and experience the spiritual affects of medical conditions, the book is infused with restrained but piercing emotion, a subtle metrical ear, and enough daring and wit to write in rhymed couplets to take the obvious, easy way. For instance, with the last line of “De Wallen, Amsterdam”: “The moon above the spires, a sexless disk,/eyes us coolly as an odalisque.” I so admire the refusal to make that last line scan as a perfect iambic pentameter line. It would be so easy; all you’d have to do is add the grammatical, but colloquial, “as.” Which would have ruined the line, and the poem. Oh, and the rhymes in the canzone! There’s much to admire here, much to enjoy.
—Marilyn Nelson

"The presiding spirit behind Ginger Andrews first book, An Honest Answer, must be William Carlos Williams. When he said he wrote in the speech of Polish mothers, he could have included the American working class anywhere. The sinewy resilience in Andrews’ individual poems honors the tradition of his free verse lyrics. She listens for the poetic measure in American speech and reproduces it in unique forms. I would venture to say that the poetry of Ginger Andrews is as close to the tradition of Williams as American free verse has ever been. . . . As for the voice speaking to us in these poems, it is as fresh as Ray Carver seemed twenty-five years ago. Another poet who comes to mind is her fellow Northwesterner Vern Rutsala, himself a descendent of Williams, who, like Williams, has kept his eye on the working poor throughout his career. Andrews is working class, born again in Sappho, an Ahkmatova who cleans houses and teaches Sunday school. These figures come to mind not for the sake of hyperbole, but to help understand the originality of this new and remarkable poet."
—Mark Jarman

Structured like the movements of a New Orleans jazz funeral, this all-sonnet collection deals with death, loss, war, disaster, the binding power of community, and the celebratory spirit that reemerges after all. In the words of poet and critic David Mason: “Part elegy for a city and a way of life, part meditation on mortality and grace, this book is wonderfully, defiantly alive.”

Breath in Every Room intertwines parents and children with encounters in the natural world. Ranging from birds in the forest to a boy’s captured frogs, from rattlesnakes in the prairie to a bat fallen from the sky. The book weaves in and out of myth and dream.

Adele Slaughter’s first book of poems, What the Body Remembers, was published by Story Line Press in 1994. It is an autobiographical collection of glimpses into a childhood fraught with familial violence, alcoholism, and trauma, and the life that has been led in its wake; the failure of a marriage and the experiences that forever mold us as human beings. Through all the abuse and suffering these poems portray, however, the driving theme behind What the Body Remembers never falters: the reader is left with an inspiring picture of courage, perseverance, femininity, and the survival of the truest self. The subject of the work remains always the poet, the speaker, even as great attention is drawn to the circumstance surrounding her, providing an impactful example of how our greatest pains may leave us changed, but not defined, and never defeated. Pat Monaghan called the book “a stunning debut volume.”

“Lola Haskins’s range is broad; her perceptions are always surprising. Natural objects surpass themselves and episodes of women’s history are rewritten in this lively, adventuresome collection.”
—Maxine Kumin

“ . . . Hunger is a cabinet of crystals each one with a cutting edge. It’s a wonder.”
—Beloit Poetry Journal

“She knows we are rooted to the earth but long for the stars. . . . And she’s wise enough to know that love searches us out. Dazzling.”
—Northwest Arkansas Times

“[The poems] richly present the experience of women, as the complexity of their material, emotional, and imaginative lives presses against the constraints of their assigned roles. . . wonderfully evocative.”
—The Hudson Review

“. . . Convincing and exquisitely visual. It plays off a painterly use of visualization and technique even as it enacts the limits of such artistry in the face of real feeling. . . . It is the clarity of Haskins’s poems and (her speakers’) observations, combined with the sometimes elegant, sometimes searing restraint with which the observations are made, that gives these poems their impact.”
—Colorado Review

The Island begins with a haunting 1848 journal entry from a man jailed on Spike Island in Ireland: “Gazing on gray stones, my eyes will grow stony.” Nearly 150 years later, Rosemary Canavan, a poet and painter, teaches literacy at the prison on Spike Island. How do her painter’s eyes and poet’s spirit meet the stony gray of prisoners’ eyes? Throughout these poems, and especially in her long sequence “The Island,” Canavan explores with tenderness and pathos the plight of the incarcerated. With lyrics that seem to be written in primary color, Canavan also celebrates love and children, her struggles as a working mother, and the emerging, vibrant feminist consciousness of a new generation of Irish women.

The Long Conversation combines David Dooley’s books The Volcano Inside and The Revenge by Love to create an extended dialogue between past and present, between stories of everyday life and accounts of historical figures, between the demands and delights of art and those of life, culminating in an eleven-poem sequence about the painter Georgia O’Keeffe and her husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Lyrical moments flourish within traditional dramatic monologues and a bold and unusual mix of other narrative strategies. The language ranges from vigorous Southern dialect, and even profanity, to a confident and original high style. In The Long Conversation, love is always complicated, the angle of vision is often surprising, and language must be able to cope with every kind of challenge.

Hurricane Sisters, award-winning poet Ginger Andrews’ second collection, contains poems of fierce candor and sharp, unique awareness from the perspective of Andrews herself, a cleaning woman in North Bend, Oregon. These Carver-esque insights into the everyday of the American working class balance grief, depression, lust, poverty, and, above all, faith; not in something beyond or higher than the living experience, but in a spirituality amidst the material truths of this world, even under the grimmest of circumstances. Hurricane Sisters stares into the holy, the barbaric, the beautiful and the hideous, the realities of blue-collar Americana, with the frankness and empathy of a survivor and a believer. It sees everything and never averts its eyes.

The Enemies of Leisure, a collection drawn from a decade of writing, wonders about the odd paradoxes of pleasure and mindfulness, leisure and labor, invisibility and truth. Bound by Aristotle’s comment, “Happiness appears to depend on leisure,” the book divides into four sections, gathering poems concerned with sex and love, home and distances, idleness and work, and uncertainty and death. Mixing traditional and open forms, as well as high and low idioms, these poems’ symmetry depends on remaining always precise without making too much sense, as they yoke the influences of Ashbery and Rich, Dorn and Wilbur, poets otherwise as estranged from each other as waffles from lust, domestic chores from Beauty and the Beast, ideas from hamburgers, and dying from a train trip cross country.

There are “no things / without the ideas we call them by,” proclaims the book’s opening poem, “American Ghost,” inverting Williams’s dictum not to undermine the dominant aesthetic principle of contemporary American poetry so much as to turn it inside out, to make room for a poetry that oscillates between the ghostly presence of thought and the constant fading of experience. Making their bleak way forward toward the new millennium from the barracuda under a tropical bay to “above the abundant sand of the Sudan,” these poems express the importance of being “grateful for / those interruptions in the blink / of time we had,” while cultivating “the grace to know what to ignore.”

Excontemporary, a collection of poems by Beth Baruch Joselow, was published by Story Line Press in 1993. Jousting with form and language, the book combines image and idea in a painterly style. It contains poetry of sharp observation, coalescing gracefully into a thoughtful meditation on the inner life and the everyday. Mark Wallace, winner of the Gertrude Stein Prize in poetry, was among many that met Excontemporary with high praise: “Joselow’s poems discover, and uncover, keen truths that always surprise and unsettle and make us think again about things we believed we understood.”

The forty poems in this first book by an Irish writer explore a variety of traditional and contemporary themes that combine to create the modern Irish consciousness. Beginning with poems that look back forty years or more on a childhood spent in the fabled country of Sligo, the book moves effortlessly to present-day issues of raising a family and making sense of the political turmoil unique to the country. Throughout the collection, McBreen also grapples with the contemporary Irish woman’s fight to assert her independence, asserting her own generous autonomy in the process. McBreen’s readers will quickly recognize the foundations of one of the world’s great oral traditions behind these evocative lyrics, and they will come away knowing much more about everyday Irish life than they did before.

Expanding the themes in The Presence of Things Past, his debut collection of stories, John Taylor reveals himself to be a master of the intimate in Mysteries of the Body and the Mind. Set in Iowa, Idaho, and France (where the author has lived since 1977), these twenty-four stories “act as a sort of reverse coming of age,” as Brian McCombie put it in his review of the first edition in The Bloomsbury Review, “with the memory evoked only now beginning to truly resonate in the main character’s life.” Lost love, unrequited love, or found love often function as compelling narrative impetuses. In subtle, allusive prose enriched by his long dialogue with European literature, this sensitive writer meditates on the passing of time and the quest for selfhood. Funny, sad stories with a final ironic twist are blended with short, dreamlike ruminations. Composed in a variety of styles, Taylor’s engaging prose goes straight to the reader’s heart.

This collection of poetry by the editor of EXPANSIVE POETRY, focuses
on life in New York—in language alternately hip, and nostalgic, the ten
characters in “Nomads” focus on abortion, divorce, the forces threatening the neighborhoods, and the need to preserve the family; in “The Psychiatrist At the Cocktail Party: A Dramatic Sequence,” Feirstein presents in formal verse a hilarious, and disturbing cast of urban professionals, sexual bandits, opportunists and international terrorists.

An interdisciplinary scholar, devotee of the classics, and leading practitioner of Expansive Poetry, Frederick Turner asks in the introduction to Hadean Eclogues, “Suppose there could be a poetry, even a scientific description of reality, that left undamaged the principles, the honor, the history and myth, the ritual, the intellectual criteria of believers and unbelievers—as long as they were people of depth and thought and imagination?”

A Walled Garden in Moylough demonstrates the ultimate gift of Joan McBreen’s poetry: her ability to distill the essence of a moment. She does this with an effortless elegance, a sure touch, and a lyric voice which is attuned to the inward echoes of the psyche.

Counterpoint, the first full collection of poems by David Alpaugh, was selected out of over 800 manuscripts for the seventh annual Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize by Story Line Press in 1994. The subjects of the book’s contemporary, witty, bizarre, and often moving poems range from POWs and salespeople to art and the dead. Alpaugh’s works speak to one another—child to adult, animal to human, ad man to poet, New Jersey to California, and past to present. He writes with affection and care for each of these points of unlikely connection. Harold Witt called Alpaugh “a unique voice to hear now and to listen for in the future.” More than twenty-five years after Counterpoint’s initial publication, these words ring more true than ever.

Sharon Hashimoto explores themes of what is heard and misinterpreted, what is left unexplained, and what is passed down in The Crane Wife. In these pieces, the Sansei poet leafs through old photographs—one of which is of a newlywed couple with the groom’s image cut away. Here is the rediscovered piece of barbed wire from outside the Heart Mountain concentration camp. That wire, a lei, and a car trip to an empty lot are all bits of evidence. Her questions address grandparents, mother and father, siblings, and the next generation. Hashimoto also reinvents Japanese folk tales and explores the different voices of the members of a downed JAL jet. Her poems travel in new directions in an attempt to fill in the gaps.

Collecting stories from John Taylor’s upbringing in Des Moines, these “charming evocations of a Midwestern childhood” (as the French film director Louis Malle called them), recall an “average” neighborhood in the 1950s and 1960s. The death of the author’s mother gives rise to these sensitive reminiscences, which also conjure up first loves, playmates, and a motley assortment of true-to-life characters who express their modest joys and lasting secret sorrows. The Presence of Things Past (the title alludes to the eleventh book of the Confessions of Saint Augustine), is a tribute to a lost mother, a lost neighborhood, a lost city, and a lost childhood.

When Jennifer Risher joined Microsoft in 1991, she met her husband, and with him became an extra-lucky beneficiary of the dot-com boom. By their early thirties, they had tens of millions of dollars. Today, there are millions of people like her. Jennifer’s thought-provoking, personal story includes the voices of others in her demographic and explores the hidden impact of wealth on identity, relationships, and sense of place in the world. At a time when income inequality is a huge problem, our country’s economic system is broken, and money is still a taboo subject even among those closest to us, this engaging, introspective memoir is essential reading: a catalyst for conversation that demystifies wealth and inspires us to connect.