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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.

The best of contemporary nature writing from the winners of the inaugural international Nature Chronicles Prize.

The Nature Chronicles Prize is a new biennial, international, English-language literary award founded to celebrate engaging, unique, essay-length nonfiction that responds to the time we are in and the world as it is. Conceived in 2020 to mark the global pandemic, the prize is also a memorial to Prudence Scott, a lifelong British nature diarist who died in 2019.

Contained within this volume are the outstanding nominated entries for the inaugural prize. These winning works express diverse responses to our planet and its life, and together embody the best of contemporary nature writing.

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 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.

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.

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.

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!

Winner of the Reading the West Book Award

Winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award

A People Best Memoir of the Year

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction of the Year Selection

A Book Riot Best Book of the Year

“I’m in awe of Chris La Tray’s storytelling. Becoming Little Shell creates a multilayered narrative from threads of personal, family, community, tribal, and national histories.”—Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass

Growing up in Montana, Chris La Tray always identified as Indian. Despite the fact that his father fiercely denied any connection, he found Indigenous people alluring, often recalling his grandmother’s consistent mention of their Chippewa heritage.

When La Tray attended his grandfather’s funeral as a young man, he finally found himself surrounded by relatives who obviously were Indigenous. “Who were they?” he wondered, and “Why was I never allowed to know them?” Combining diligent research and compelling conversations with authors, activists, elders, and historians, La Tray embarks on a journey into his family’s past, discovering along the way a larger story of the complicated history of Indigenous communities—as well as the devastating effects of colonialism that continue to ripple through surviving generations. And as he comes to embrace his full identity, he eventually seeks enrollment with the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians, joining their 158-year-long struggle for federal recognition. 

Both personal and historical, Becoming Little Shell is a testament to the power of storytelling, to family and legacy, and to finding home. Infused with candor, heart, wisdom, and an abiding love for a place and a people, Chris La Tray’s remarkable journey is both revelatory and redemptive.

Winner of the Southern Book Prize
Winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

From the author of the bestselling #ReadWithJenna/TODAY Show book club pick Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

For the past four years, Margaret Renkl’s columns have offered readers of The New York Times a weekly dose of natural beauty, human decency, and persistent hope from her home in Nashville. Now more than sixty of those pieces have been brought together in this sparkling new collection.

“People have often asked me how it feels to be the ‘voice of the South,’” writes Renkl in her introduction. “But I’m not the voice of the South, and no one else is, either.” There are many Souths—red and blue, rural and urban, mountain and coast, Black and white and brown—and no one writer could possibly represent all of them. In Graceland, At Last, Renkl writes instead from her own experience about the complexities of her homeland, demonstrating along the way how much more there is to this tangled region than many people understand.

In a patchwork quilt of personal and reported essays, Renkl also highlights some other voices of the South, people who are fighting for a better future for the region. A group of teenagers who organized a youth march for Black Lives Matter. An urban shepherd whose sheep remove invasive vegetation. Church parishioners sheltering the homeless. Throughout, readers will find the generosity of spirit and deep attention to the world, human and nonhuman, that keep readers returning to her columns each Monday morning.

From a writer who “makes one of all the world’s beings” (NPR), Graceland, At Last is a book full of gifts for Southerners and non-Southerners alike.

From New York Times contributing opinion writer Margaret Renkl comes an unusual, captivating portrait of a family—and of the cycles of joy and grief that inscribe human lives within the natural world.

Growing up in Alabama, Renkl was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, she traces a tender and honest portrait of her complicated parents—her exuberant, creative mother; her steady, supportive father—and of the bittersweet moments that accompany a child’s transition to caregiver.

And here, braided into the overall narrative, Renkl offers observations on the world surrounding her suburban Nashville home. Ringing with rapture and heartache, these essays convey the dignity of bluebirds and rat snakes, monarch butterflies and native bees. As these two threads haunt and harmonize with each other, Renkl suggests that there is astonishment to be found in common things: in what seems ordinary, in what we all share. For in both worlds—the natural one and our own—“the shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is only love’s own twin.”

Gorgeously illustrated by the author’s brother, Billy Renkl, Late Migrations is an assured and memorable debut.

Updated with a new introduction from Robin Wall Kimmerer, the special edition of Braiding Sweetgrass, reissued in honor of the fortieth anniversary of Milkweed Editions, celebrates the book as an object of meaning that will last the ages. 

Beautifully bound with a new cover featuring an engraving by Tony Drehfal, this edition includes a deckled edge and five brilliantly colored illustrations by artist Nate Christopherson. In increasingly dark times, we honor the experience that more than 350,000 readers in North America have cherished about the book—gentle, simple, tactile, beautiful, even sacred—and offer an edition that will inspire readers to gift it again and again, spreading the word about scientific knowledge, indigenous wisdom, and the teachings of plants. 

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Dear Committee Members, a collection of wryly funny stories about ordinary women—in all their complexity, fallibility, and humanity.  

An unsuspecting couple is treated to a luxury vacation by their deceased neighbor. After begrudgingly agreeing to volunteer at a nursing home, a middle school girl gambles over games of bridge with elderly residents. A single mother struggles to understand the unique bond between her autistic son and his dying grandmother. Four friends experience decades of highs and lows as pawns in The Game of Life. A professional gynecology patient runs into a high school flame while at work, undressed, on the job.

In this irreverent collection, celebrated novelist Julie Schumacher balances sorrow against laughter. Here, we experience story not only as narrative, but as syllabus and as board game. Each protagonist—ranging from girlhood to senescence—receives her own indelible voice as she navigates social blunders, generational misunderstandings, and the absurdity of the human experience. Exquisitely honest and expertly crafted, Patient, Female renders—with dark humor and wit—the foibles of human behavior and our endearing imperfections. 

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.

“The anthology dares to hold the face of this country, its long history and structural realities, for the possibility of a new kind of existence.”—E. J. Koh, author of The Liberators and The Magical Language of Others.

Uncertain Girls in Uncertain Times is a luminous collection blending poetry, reflection, and intergenerational conversation that offers young women the courage to trust themselves, embrace uncertainty, and step boldly into adulthood.

Uncertain Girls in Uncertain Times is an anthology that encourages young women launching into adulthood to imagine deeply, create bravely, and find the confidence to build a meaningful life in this uncertain and chaotic world. Each one of the forty contributors brings their voice and experience to reflect on a poem that has held particular significance in their life, sharing words of wisdom, vulnerable admissions, and life lessons. Reflections range from practical advice to philosophical musings, from stories of triumph to somber tellings of the tougher days, while the selected poems fill in the gaps, offering access to invaluable, timeless wisdom. Interwoven between the poems and essays are snippets of conversation between a mother and her daughter, who is beginning her own launch into adulthood, held over the course of a year.

AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR

“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 

“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.

Morning Leaves is an invitation to dream of a life where you are moving away from whatever has stopped you. It might be a death, trauma, loss of a relationship, some wild dark night of the soul is upon you and you enter this book, these poems and Kelly Leahy Radding’s magnificent nature art.

You enter the possibility: Walk it. Talk it. Write it. Create it. Keep moving forward. Find your joy. Find your blessing. Find who you are going to be in your wild and precious life - one butterfly flight, one mourning dove wing, one frog leap at a time. This is a book that invites a journey into wholeness through creativity and conversation and writing and movement.

Healing isn’t static. It’s energetic! I am here to take your hand. Morning Leaves is a love letter to the growing soul who wants to move on to the next place and find 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 and child by bringing them to his home in upstate New York. For the soldier, this is a way of making amends for his interpreter’s death. 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. Like Benedict’s related novels, Wolf Season and Sand Queen, both of which feature some of the same characters that appear in The Soldier’s House, this book breaks new ground. No novel has yet been written about soldiers rescuing refugees (although many soldiers have) and no other American novelist has written as Benedict has from the point of view of an Iraqi woman. In the light of the increasing influx of refugees from all over the world into the United States, 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.

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.

“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.

“It’s a story about how our ideas of success change over time, and the mysterious ways that our deepest friendships both hold us and release us.”—Rene Steinke, novelist and National Book Award finalist

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.

"Individually and collectively, the poems in Mark Jarman's beautiful book, To the Green Man, recognize both the need for the consolations of faith and elusiveness of faith in the face of the hard facts of experience: the loss of loved ones, depression, mortal fears, the sheer contingencies of daily life. Beyond the wonderful music of his lines, the formal poise, the mix of narrative and lyric modes, what makes To the Green Man such an important and memorable book is its enactment of a spiritual struggle to be at once at home in the world and astonished by it." —Alan Shapiro

"Called or not called, God is present. These words attributed to the Delphic Oracle serve as epigraph to one of the finest poems in Mark Jarman's stunning new collection. They also point to this poet's great theme and overshadowing preoccupation: the insoluble mystery (call it God if you wish) underlying human existence and the material world. Call on God, and he is silent (and do not presume to supply him with words of your own); do not call on him, and he is nonetheless present and may indeed be calling on you. This is the ultimate paradox confronted by Jarman in poem after brilliantly executed poem—and it is his courageous confrontation of the mystery inso many of its guises that gives his work a depth and richness matched by very few poets of our time. To the Green Man is not only Mark Jarman's best book to date (there is not a weak poem in it), it is essential reading for all who wish to experience contemporary poetry at its most humane, meaningful, and profound." —Frederick Morgan

Praise for Michael Burkard:

"Burkard returns us to a primary strangeness. . . . [He] is invested in a metaphysics of relationship, probing into how we treat each other (and hence ourselves). . . . His is an honest introspection mapping out hearts that ever slide." —Timothy Liu, Harvard Review

"On rare occasions one comes across an artist whose work feels truly haunted, as mysterious and resonant as the landscape or the constantly shifting reality of our dreams. . . . Michael Burkard's poetry presents a kaleidoscopic and rigorously self-reflective vision, encompassing at once a great tenderness for the world and an uneasiness with the sufaces to which we cling. . . . Entire Dilemma serves as a touchstone, an indispensable reminder of just how quiet and redemptive poetry can be. —Kathryn Levy, Provincetown Arts

"Eleanor Lerman's 1970s books, Armed Love and Come the Sweet By and By, contained some of the most powerful, beautiful, and original poems ever written by an American poet. It was not amiss to summon comparison with Dickinson, Rimbaud, and Rilke (today we could add Paul Celan). Then, a Rimbaudian blank, twenty plus years of silence. Now, amazingly, Eleanor Lerman is back, a different poet, quieter, older, 'wiser,' more earthly yet still brilliant, a coruscating daughter of the poet of the Seventies. What luck for American literature." —Richard Stein

"Eleanor Lerman's poems in The Mystery of Meteors, as passionately questing as her brilliant early work, inhabit a vastly larger literal and emotional landscape. The momentum of Lerman's long cadences, the sureness and fluency of her syntax, the pithiness of her unmistakably American speech, are pleasures in themselves. They serve a vision steeped in paradox, as certain of the joy of 'life, life, life going on' as of the unresolvable ancient questions these poems articulate with intelligence and authority. I'm moved to hear this poet's voice again. Eleanor Lerman is a great and gifted original." —Joan Larkin

Winner of the 1999 Kathryn A. Morton Prize, selected by Charles Simic.

"The art of prosody, of which Deborah Tall is a master, is a jeweler's art. It is about ascertaining the weight of words, measuring each one of them in turn against silence and time. . . . As we read, line by line, sounds turn into music, words and images grow in meaning. If you believe that this is what all poets do anyway, you are wrong. Only the best of them know how to make us reread with increasing pleasure a few lines of poetry." —from the Foreword by Charles Simic

"Wormser brilliantly captures the way in which the mind (or heart or body) can tax its own resolves. Only poets as honest as this one can persistently acknowledge the mercuriality of 'truth' and can therefore pseak, not sloganistically but literally, for us all. . . . I feel the poverty of my own efforts to explain this impressive and timely book."

—Sydney Lea, The Georgia Review

The Baby Can Sing and Other Stories introduces a writer who approaches the world at a surprisingly oblique angle. Judith Slater writes in a prose dance, dramatizing the lives of ordinary people who wonder what they can do to bring more passion into their lives, or at least less loneliness. The characters in these stories are a diverse bunch—a floral clerk with aspiration of being a ballet dancer, a photographer volunteering to take the pictures at his ex-girlfriend's wedding, a father playing the role of reluctant chaperone at his daughter's school dance—but all of them are alert to the moments of possibility, transcendence, and sometimes even magic that exist just under the surface of ordinary life.

"The body knows a language the mind never wholly masters." In this remarkable debut collection essentially a memoir in essay form Brenda Miller creates an autobiography that locates her body as its central reference point. Single and unable to bear children of her own, Miller details a life in relationship to the extended human family, a journey that traverses realms physical, emotional, and spiritual.

From her training in massage and reflexology, to her volunteer work in a hospital s infant ward, Miller remains a constant seeker and humble teacher. Raised in a suburban Jewish household in the sixties, Miller grows up to find herself sitting in meditation for hours at a time, both bemused and intrigued by Buddhist precepts. Or she engages in her own ironic brand of mindfulness while caring for two little girls or attending the birth of her godson. She brings us to Portugal, Syria, Israel, and the deserts of southern Utah, but these are no mere travelogues: they become, instead, maps by which to navigate the intricate maze of our lives. These personal essays vary from the lyric to the narrative to the humorous, but always we warm to Miller s authentic voice as she explores personal joys and heartbreaks within a larger domain.

Organically shaped, never forced, these award-winning essays arrive with the pleasant snap of physical detail and leave with unforgettable insights on birth, prayer, and human resilience. Nurturing, yet uncommonly honest, Season of the Body articulates the unspoken losses, the desires held deep in the mute chambers of the heart.

From a Costa Book of the Year winner, Booker nominee and double Granta-selected Best Young British novelist comes a searing portrayal of the gradual uncovering of one woman's past psychological wounds, set in motion by the arrival of an unexpected letter.

In the 1980s, Anna McCormick was an anti-nuclear peace activist. She was used to taking on those abusing their political power, but when she was targeted by abuse herself, it left a wound so deep it would still be reverberating through her life decades later.

In 2020, Anna is teaching nine-year-olds on Zoom, navigating a relationship interrupted by enforced distance, and coping with a teenaged son who cannot leave the house. When an unstamped envelope arrives overnight, the traumatic past she had tried to bury begins to cast its own long shadow on the present.

This is a twisty, heart-racing page-turner and an incisive look at the personal impact of the violence of the state, the police and the villains much closer to home.

From Jim Crumley, the “pre-eminent Scottish nature-writer” (Guardian), this landmark volume documents the extraordinary natural life of the Scottish Highlands and bears witness to the toll climate chaos is taking on its wildlife, habitats, and biodiversity—laying bare what is at stake for future generations.

In this landmark volume, Jim Crumley brings together a sweeping five-year quest to document the seasons and how he has seen them change. It explores the damage to the Earth’s natural rhythms, but also relishes the enduring beauty and wonder of nature itself.

Drawing on his studies of each season over more than thirty years and reworking the volumes in his best-selling Seasons quartet, Crumley has created this unique account of our natural world today.

After a lifetime of immersing himself in the landscapes of Scotland and a handful of other northern countries, Crumley has amassed a body of knowledge and insight and a bank of memorable imagery.

Combining lyrical prose and passionate eloquence, he lays bare the impact of an increasingly chaotic climate and urges us all towards a more daring conservation vision that embraces everything from the mountain treeline to a second spring for the wolf.

Longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and named among the 50 most notable new books from Africa, Castles from Cobwebs follows one girl’s transition from youthful innocence to understanding as she navigates questions about family, identity, and race.

"I'd always known that I was Brown. Black was different though; it came announced. Black came with expectations, of rhythm and other things that might trip me up."

Imani is a foundling. Rescued as a baby and raised by nuns on a remote Northumbrian island, she grows up with an ever-increasing feeling of displacement. Full of questions, Imani turns to her shadow, Amarie, and her friend Harold. When Harold can't find the answers, she puts it down to what the nuns call her "greater purpose". At nineteen, Imani answers a phone call that will change her life: she is being called to Ghana after the sudden death of her biological mother. 

Past, present, faith and reality are spun together in this enthralling debut. Following her transition from innocence to understanding, Imani's experience illuminates the stories we all tell to make ourselves whole.

 A bestselling British birder, naturalist, writer and broadcaster leads us on a springtime journey of discovery through daily walks in the area surrounding his home, highlighting the joys of connecting with wildlife and our environment.

As spring arrives, Stephen Moss’s Somerset garden is awash with birdsong: chiffchaffs, wrens, robins and more. Overhead, buzzards soar, ravens tumble and the season gathers pace. But this equinox is unlike any other. As the nation goes into lockdown, Stephen records the wildlife around his home, with his fox-red Labrador, Rosie, by his side. When old routines fall away, and blue skies are no longer crisscrossed by contrails, they discover the bumblebees, butterflies and birdsong on their local patch.

This evocative account underlines how a global crisis changed the way we relate to the natural world, giving us hope for the future. And it puts down a marker for a new normal: when, during that brief but unforgettable spring, nature gave us comfort, hope and joy.

“Delightful … The lyrical prose elevates Crumley’s detailed descriptions of the natural world he encounters … Readers will be transported by this immersive outing.” Publishers Weekly

A BBC-serialized vision of spring, ravaged by climate change yet still astonishing, by Scotland’s leading nature writer.

Jim Crumley chronicles the wonder, tumult, and spectacle of that transformation, but he shows too that it is no Wordsworthian idyll that unfolds. Climate chaos brings unwanted drama to the lives of badger and fox, seal and seabird and raptor, pine marten and sand martin. Crumley lays bare the impact of global warming and urges us all towards a more daring conservation vision that embraces everything from the mountain treeline to a second spring for the wolf.

With a naturalist’s eye and a poet’s instinct, acclaimed nature writer Jim Crumley traces the place of our first and most famous National Park in the evolution of global conservation and pleads the case for a far-reaching reappraisal of its wildness.

Books of the Year, Mark Avery

The Lake District is one of England’s busiest national parks. Many people believe that wildness is long gone from the fells, lakes, tarns and becks, yet, within its boundaries, Jim Crumley sets out to prove them wrong—to find “a new way of seeing and writing about this most seen and written about of landscapes."

With a naturalist’s eye and a poet’s instinct, he is drawn to Lakeland’s turned-aside places where nature still thrives, from low-lying shores to a high mountain oakwood that is not even on the map. Through backwaters and backwoods, Crumley traces this captivating land’s place in the evolution of global conservation and pleads the case for a far-reaching reappraisal of all of Lakeland’s wildness.

The Mahogany Pod is a moving portrayal of a joyful love affair that was cut short by a terminal illness after just one exhilarating year – and an inspirational account of vulnerability, reconciliation and learning to live fully after loss. 

“Gorgeous … her narrative packs a world of feeling within it, rendering a poignant look at how love can unfold even amid immense loss.” Publishers Weekly, starred review

"A work of literature: beautifully written, meticulously structured and heart-rending." Guardian

What if you knew from the beginning how your relationship was going to end?

When Jill Hopper first met Arif, they were living in a shared house on the island of Osney in Oxford, on the River Thames. Surrounded by willow trees, birds and reflections, it was an idyllic home. But no sooner had they begun to fall in love than Arif was given the news that he had only a few months to live.

Everyone told Jill to walk away, but she was already in too deep. Years later, Jill rediscovers Arif's parting gift—an African seedpod—and finally sets out to trace the elusive patterns that shaped their relationship.The Mahogany Pod is a tender and vital account of what it means to live, and love, fully.

Nominated for two major literary awards, this is an urban nature book telling the story of an historic part of London through its trees, past and present.

Even in the brick and concrete heart of our cities, nature finds a way. Birds and mammals, insects, plants and trees—they all manage to thrive in the urban jungle, and Bob Gilbert is their champion and their chronicler. He explores the hidden wildlife of the inner city and its edgelands, finding unexpected beauty in the cracks and crannies, and uncovering the deep and essential relationship that exists between people and nature when they are bound together in such close proximity.

Beginning from Poplar, the East End area in which he lives, Bob explores, in particular, our relationship with the trees that have helped shape London; from the original wildwood through to the street trees of today. He draws from history and natural history, poetry and painting, myth and magic, and a great deal of walking, observing and listening.

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.

AUTHOR OF AWARD-WINNING, ANIMAL WIFE • WINNER OF CAI EMMONS FICTION AWARD, ERIC HOFFER AWARD, AND FOREWORD INDIE AWARD FINALIST • Lara Ehrlich presents her debut novel, BIND ME TIGHTER STILL 

“A gorgeous, playful, thoughtful novel for feminists, for mothers and daughters, for those of us who grew up on the *other* version of mermaids, and who’ve thought from time to time that we might prefer to join the sirens rather than tie ourselves to the mast."
—Amber Sparks, author of And I Do Not Forgive You

The youngest of three siren sisters, Ceto is weary of an existence driven by hunger, no better than a fish. She trades her tail for life on land, marries the first man she meets, and bears a daughter, only to discover that domesticity is just as mundane as sirenhood.

In search of something more, she flees with her daughter Naia to the ocean, where she establishes a mermaid burlesque and recreates herself, performing as a siren in a tank built into the limestone cliffs overlooking the sea. She trains more sirens, expanding Sirenland from a roadside attraction to a national sensation she rules without opposition—until Naia, at 15, begins to push back against the world Ceto has created and the role she performs in her mother’s shows. A death at Sirenland threatens Ceto's authority and leads Naia to question whether this women-ruled kingdom is truly as empowering as her mother would have her believe. Bind Me Tighter Still explores power and hunger, sacrifice and motherhood, and celebrates the fierceness of female strength in a male-dominated world.

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.