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Composed entirely of words taken from the letters and public statements of the notorious segregationist Bull Connor, the poems in White Bull use language that was wielded in violence and oppression to reckon with the present moment. The city of Birmingham is a character too, with its suffocating heat and humidity, quarry pools, and mountain in the distance. Here, the truth comes out, like a child whispering in the midst of a political rally, “Summer separates us with the same trees.” And, “I thought if I repeated a word enough it would change its meaning.” Elizabeth Hughey holds up and examines the things handed down to us—from patterned wing backs and chipped tea sets to family names and gender roles—and asks if we should keep any of it or burn it all down and start again.

Readers familiar with Sallie Bingham’s 1989 memoir, Passion and Prejudice, will remember her provocative chronicle of the Bingham family saga, cited by Gloria Steinem as “a major step toward feminist change and democracy.” 

 In Little Brother, she reflects on just one of her siblings: the youngest son Jonathan and his all-too brief life. The book begins with a count she calls her “dreadful list” of nine close relatives who died by accident, suicide, overdose, exposure to the elements, and electrocution, all before the age of 50. Jonathan was only twenty-two years old when he climbed a pole, hoping to rig up some lighting for a barn party and, by some fluke, grabbed a live wire. But even before his fatal fall to the ground, the boy suffered from insecurity, isolation, and difficulty relating to his large family. Bingham draws from archived material, chief among them the young man’s journal and letters. She writes his short history with obvious affection and tenderness, along with more than a dash of survival guilt. Little Brother is a moving and honest new work.

"Petrosino is a canny, wide-ranging and formally nimble writer with a magician's command of atmosphere."
—The New York Times, "The Best Poetry of 2017"

Witch Wife is back in a brand new paperback edition, featuring a reader’s guide and writing prompts from the poet herself.

The poems of Witch Wife are spells, obsessive incantations to exorcise or celebrate memory, to mourn the beloved dead, to conjure children or keep them at bay, to faithfully inhabit one’s given body. In sestinas, villanelles, hallucinogenic prose poems and free verse, Kiki Petrosino summons history’s ghosts—the ancestors that reside in her blood and craft—and sings them to life.

Here are poems with music matched to matter, so that reading them often involves both swoon and startle: “When it folds open, the rule-less rile / of sky,” Evans, writes, “the comets and giants. And also: / books, chamomile, and more kissing.” Panoramic in time and space, Lives knows each of us, our ordinary lives and our occupancy within history and the universe, our yearning for connection: “And if I turned to you now, my one wet muscle run dry, would you / turn to me? And what else could my heart be for if not to try?”

Early in her powerful, affecting debut, Desautels writes: “I always mention gratitude because/people like that ending.”  Unflinching in its candor, this is the story of a woman with two swellings in her belly: a nascent baby, and a cancerous tumor. The poet could focus on the particulars of the medical case, using language from a traditional illness narrative. Instead she gives us the basics, then gathers up surprising and expansive material from various landscapes—the Black Hills, the prairies of Texas, the mountains, switchgrass, and, especially, the neighboring buffalo, to which she feels a profound connection. Desautels’ metaphors strike home; they are counterpoints, balm to the uncertainty and grief that make us uncomfortable. The book moves elegantly from its dark beginnings to a transcendent thankfulness.  With healing lyricism, she writes: “And I imagine the white sheets as heron wings./And the whirring machines are white eggs./And the worried voices are sunlight on water.”

"Marianne Chan's brilliant debut collection masterfully develops themes of identity and the long-term effects of colonization."
—Largehearted Boy

All Heathens is a declaration of ownership—of bodies, of histories, of time. Revisiting Magellan’s voyage around the world, these poems explore the speaker’s Filipino American identity by grappling with her relationship to her family and notions of diaspora, circumnavigation, and discovery. Whether rewriting the origin story of Eve (“I always imagined that the serpent had the legs of a seductive woman in black nylons”), or ruminating on what-should-have-been-said “when the man at the party said he wanted to own a Filipino,” Chan paints wry, witty renderings of anecdotal and folkloric histories, while both preserving and unveiling a self-identity that dares any other to try and claim it.

This is a book of tragicomic gurlesque word-witchery inspired by the Kate Bush cosmos. Campily glamorous, darkly funny, obsessively ekphrastic, boozily baroque, psychedelically girly & musically ecstatic, 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse dazzles as Karyna McGlynn's third collection.

An anthology edited by acclaimed poets Kaveh Akbar and Paige Lewis.

“What magic, what beauty there is in these pages.”—John Freeman, author of Wind, Trees

2024 Winner of The Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, selected by Lauren Groff

Wild places and hidden urban spaces exert a gravitational pull in Lake Effect, the debut story collection by Hillary Behrman. On the surface of an ancient bone-dry lake, amidst pockets of urban wilderness, on top of unmapped mountain ridges, and in cities ranging from Seattle to Istanbul the characters in these stories are always on the move but rarely headed to where they want to be. Viv’s tenuous grip on reality is shattered when she is forced to leave her desert outpost. Paula’s real and dream life become indistinguishable. Oliver can’t shed the hold of family lore as he negotiates his love affair with Daniel. Siblings, Alex and Marcie, are comforted and scraped raw by intimacy as they traverse the years from juvenile vandalism to a labor and delivery gone terribly wrong. Miles searches for his mother in a homeless encampment beneath a maze of freeways. And in the aftermath of her mother’s death, Sam finds herself on a frozen lake miles from shore with a virtual stranger. These stories exist at the intersection of social isolation and fierce intimacies and call into question the limits of our well-intentioned efforts to care for each other.

Winner of 2024 Sarabande 2024 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, the 2023 Nightboat Poetry Prize and selected by Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize winning poet Louise Glück as Finalist for the 2021 Bergman Prize

Intifadas is a subtly transgressive poetry collection about uprising in its many forms—in art, politics, and in our most personal relationships. Channeling influences such as Taha Mohammed Ali, Daniel Borzutsky, and Tony Hoagland, these voice-driven narrative poems seek out meaning through personal, discrete acts of resistance.

Written across the Palestinian diaspora—from Gaza and the West Bank to across the United States—Intifadas confront their personal and ancestral alienation using their environment as their canvas. Whether by dumping black paint on a park where a tank and fighter jet commemorate a war, or by trying to rescue a moth trapped in a garage, they find empowerment in creative expression. These poems process familial loss, exile and occupation while representing the defiant and resilient voices who continue to resist the machinations of war subverting traditional narratives of grief, trauma and oppression.

In Ancient Algorithms, Katrine Øgaard Jensen mistranslates, rewrites, and remixes her award-winning translations of Danish Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s poetry based on a series of self-imposed rules and rituals in collaboration with poets Sawako Nakayasu, Aditi Machado, CAConrad, Baba Badji, Paul Cunningham, and Ursula Andkjær Olsen herself. Envisioned as a shared debut, this collection of collaborative poems is equal parts exercise and exorcism, a haunting of literary influences that repositions translation as the very act of writing—exploring what it means for something to be an original, a translation, a poem.

The sophomore visual poetry collection from Sarah J. Sloat, whose Hotel Almighty was a 2020 NYT Editors’ Choice pick. 

Classic Crimes is a book of visual poetry sourced from William Roughead’s true-crime 20th century classic of the same name. Roughead’s text is known for its ghastly recountings of murder and deceit, though such gloom is barely detectable under Sloat’s sharp eye and transformative hand. In these erasure poems, each adorned with its own colorful, meandering collage, “public opinion [is] always willing to wink at the picturesque,” and “to sleep…[is] an interlude of little dinners.” Where mayhem once lived, Sloat invites readers into a brand new world, one blooming with whimsy, play, delight, and cheeky, liberating poetics.

A cheeky debut of short fictions exploring the pitfalls and minor triumphs of the creative process.

Equal parts melody and malaise, The Longest Way to Eat a Melon charts the activities of a cast of speakers who all grapple in their own ways with what it takes to conjure a self in the midst of discordance. A brain argues with a non-brain about how to remain productive from a place of exhaustion; two supernaturally inclined twins named Han are separated at birth; and an emerging artist paralyzed by possibility considers how best to transform a melon into a breakthrough work of art. Incorporating elements of fable, surrealism, satire, and art and cultural criticism, these stories have a playful peculiarity to them, an interweaving of self-deprecation and curiosity, of woe and hope, of absurdity and humanity. Reader, you will want to savor every bite. 

BOMB Magazine, "2023 Small Press Gift Guide"

Autostraddle, “45 Queer and Feminist Books You Need to Read in Early 2017" 

Academy of American Poets, “Most Anticipated Collections”

Signature Reads, “28 Breathtaking Poetry Books to Read Now”                        

Harvard Book Store Staff Recommendation

These sensuous poems explore love, desire, ecology, queerness in the 'natural' world, loss, and LGBTQ lineage and community.

Sinuous and sensual, the poems of In Full Velvet interrogate the nuances of desire, love, gender, ecology, LGBTQ lineage and community, and the tension between a body’s material limits and the forms made possible by the imagination. Characterized by formal poise, vulnerability, and compassion, Johnson's debut collection is one of resounding generosity and grace.

Written with tremendous urgency and ferocious candor, the prose poems of Book of Potions captures a woman caught in the middle of life: no longer young, not yet old, trapped between generations, locked in stereotyped roles and stultifying social norms, confined by other people’s expectations and their projections of what a woman should be.

By turns enraged, funny, frustrated, astute and joyful, these short hybrid pieces (potion = poem + fiction) combine the lyric compression of poetry with the narrative expansiveness of prose. Readers will meander, spellbound, through a wildly imaginative dream world of fairy-tale landscapes, allegorical insights, social satire, thought experiments and vivid surreal imagery, scenes of otherworldly strangeness and haunting beauty. These potions are elixirs in language, some healing, some poisonous, all magical.

A coming-of-age narrative, Leaving Biddle City details one Filipina American speaker’s experience of growing up amid a white, Midwestern suburbia mythologized as “Biddle City.” Through prose poems, pantoums, ballads, flattened haikus, and thematic autobiographies, Chan maps a territory of intergenerational conflict, racial alienation, and memory and forgetfulness. What’s achieved is a work of play and meticulous beauty, a collection that reframes how we may understand ourselves, our histories, and the places where we are from.

Reader, I draws its title from the conclusion to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: “Reader, I married him.” Spanning the first years of a marriage, the speaker in Reader, I both courts and eschews nuptial myths, as its speaker—tender and callous, skeptical and hopeful, daughter and lover—finds a role for herself in marriage, in history, in something beyond the self. While these poems burn with a Plathian fire, they also address and invite in a reader who is, as in Jane Eyre, a confidant. Steeped in a world of husbands and fathers, patriarchal nations and power structures, Reader, I traverses bowling alleys and hospital rooms, ancient Troy and public swimming pools, to envision domestic life as a metaphor for civic life, and vice versa.

A Louisville Poets Anthology edited by Louisville native and acclaimed Horsepower author Joy Priest.

Conceived in the aftermath of city-wide protests in 2020, Once a City Said showcases the polyvocal communities of Louisville, Kentucky, a city celebrated for its bourbon, basketball, and horseracing, but long fraught with racial injustice, police corruption, and social unrest.

Priest takes the city’s narrative out of the mouths of politicians, news anchors, and police chiefs, and puts it into the mouths of poets. What emerges is an intimate report of a city misshapen by segregation, tourism, and ruptures in the public trust. Featuring thirty-seven acclaimed and emerging poets—including Mitchell L. H. Douglas, Erin Keane, Ryan Ridge, and Hannah L. Drake—Once a City Said archives the traditions and icons, the landmarks and spirits, the portraits and memories of Derby City.

This publication is supported by individual donors who gave to the 2021 Fund for the Arts ArtsMatch campaign. Matching funds were made possible by Fund for the Arts in partnership with LG&E and KU Foundation. 

Winner of the 2022 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, selected by Susan Minot.

 
The nine stories in The Book of Disbelieving open portals to fabulist worlds and magical objects: a village built on the back of a whale, a holiday that requires literal leaps of faith, a tower that houses an entire civilization, a diary that blurs the line between imagination and memory. The worlds Morse creates are fantastical, but the challenges his characters face are grounded in reality, calling into question issues of love, memory, and the subjectivity of experience. Steeped in the existential crises of our era, The Book of Disbelieving is a wondrous collection of fables and lore.

The latest installment in the Sarabande Series in Kentucky Literature, Mare’s Nest explores a Kentucky horse farm in its turbulent beginnings.

From Kentucky native and Brooklyn-based poet Holly Mitchell, Mare’s Nest troubles the meaning of a racehorse, in particular the broodmare and the foals she carries. Reaching from the photographic experiment of Muybridge’s "The Horse in Motion" to Patti Smith’s album Horses, Mitchell touches upon history, dreams, Southern family stories, and queer adolescence in the early aughts.

Colloquially referring to a muddled situation or an illusory discovery, the term “mare’s nest” can also refer quite literally to the soft depression left by a horse lying in grass. And so the idea of a “mare’s nest," in all of its linguistic potential, serves as the central focus for Holly Mitchell’s meditative debut. 

A Man with Eight Pairs of Legs is about the ways our bodies are marked by memory, often literally, and the risky decisions we make when pushed to the extreme. Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, this collection of short stories is a study in compassion and in passion, a must-read for our times.

Years after Caspers’s unnamed narrator loses her first lover in a tragic accident, she finds herself wondering, “What did she want from me? What are the things that matter?” In vivid, richly detailed vignettes, the book tracks the cyclical nature of grief and remembrance across a life fractured by loss. At times dryly comical, at other times radiantly surreal, The Fifth Woman is a testament to the resurrecting power of memory and enduring love.

In her opening, Amy Wright explains: “This essay anchors a central thread of dialogue over a dizzying divide. It weaves a decades-plus-worth of questions and answers from a range of discussions I’ve had with artists, activists, scientists, philosophers, physicians, priests, musicians, and other representatives of the human population. Some of them are famous, some will be, some should be—but all of them refract the light of the unknowable mystery of the self.”

Folding together conversations from a vast web of thinkers like Dorothy Allison, Rae Armantrout, Gerald Stern, Lia Purpura, Raven Jackson, Wendy Walters, Kimiko Hahn, Philanese Slaughter, and many, many more, Paper Concert depicts every individual as a collective in dire need of preservation. If this book is a paper concert, it is a symphony. Just pull up a chair and listen.

Buzzfeed News,"15 Small Press Books To Kick Off Your 2020 Reading Season"

The Millions, “February Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated”

"Death looms in these four sparkling novellas—thus the book’s sly title—but until then there’s the wonder of life. Frank’s subjects include fascinating friendships and complicated marriages, awful parties and odd enthusiasm. Bonus: song mentions that add up to a terrifically eclectic playlist.” —Kim Hubbard, People Magazine

In her quartet of novellas, Joan Frank invites readers into the inner lives of characters bewildered by love, grief, and inexplicable affinities.

A young couple navigates a strange friendship and unexpected pregnancy; a woman recalls the bizarre fallout of her former lover's fame; a lonely widow is drawn to an arrogant young man; a wealthy spiritual seeker grapples with what wealth cannot affect. Witty and humane, Frank taps the riches of the novella form as she writes of loneliness, friendship, loss, and the filaments of intimacy that connect us through time.

"Must-Read Poetry: October 2019" by Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions

“Best Books of 2019,” Book Riot

This astonishing, self-assured debut leads us on an exploration to the stars and back, begging us to reconsider our boundaries of self, time, space, and knowledge. The speaker writes, “…the universe/is an arrow/without end/and it asks only one question;/How dare you?”

Zig-zagging through the realms of nature, science, and religion, one finds St. Francis sighing in the corner of a studio apartment, tides that are caused by millions of oysters “gasping in unison,” an ark filled with women in its stables, and prayers that reach God fastest by balloon. There’s pathos: “When my new lover tells me I’m correct to love him, I/realize the sound isn’t metal at all. It’s not the coins rattling/ on concrete, but the fingers scraping to pick them up.” And humor, too: “…even the sun’s been sighing Not you again/when it sees me.” After reading this far-reaching, inventive collection, we too are startled, space struck, our pockets gloriously “filled with space dust.”

"Online, month by month, I watched it happen: a new genre of poem was emerging, but I had no clue who was responsible. These brainy poems didn't wait to spout off trivia, historical and scientific—'Pavlov Was the Son of a Priest' (a characteristically quotable title) recalls that 'the moon smells like spent gunpowder,' then divulges some smoldering self-knowledge: 'I'm sorry/I couldn't hide my joy when you said lonely.' . . . [T]hese poems were fluent in funniness, retweetably jokey: 'I'm//the vice president of panic, and the president is/missing.' But once the play subsided, you found yourself moved—unaccountably, almost, until you discovered, reading back up the poem, that even the zaniest elements had several parts to play. What looked like a genre, I soon realized, was all the handiwork of one poet. Their name is Paige Lewis. . . . Don't doubt them."-—Christopher Spaide, Poetry

In Brood, Kimiko Hahn trains her eye on the commonplace—clothespins, bees, papaya, perfume, poached eggs, a sponge, fire, sand dollars—and reveals their very essence in concise evocative language. Underlying these little gems is a sense of loss, a mother's death or a longing for childhood. "Brood" connotes the bundling of family or beasts, but also dark thinking, and both are at play here where the less said, the better.

Kimiko Hahn is the author of ten books of poetry, including most recently, Brain Fever (Norton, 2014). She has received numerous honors, including the PSA's Shelley Memorial Prize, the PEN/Voelcker Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, and New York Foundation for the Arts. She is a distinguished professor in creative writing at Queens College (CUNY) and lives in Forest Hills, New York.

“Ryan Ridge’s verbal prestidigitation suggest a more rueful Mark Leyner, and he can make you both laugh and wince, but he can also kick up your pulse with a storytelling urgency that thrums under the attractively fragmented surfaces. His hard-boiled punchlines are rooted in geography and yearning and real American sadness.” —Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Feral Detective

In New Bad News, the frenetic and far-out worlds of fading celebrities, failed festival promoters, underemployed adjuncts, and overly aware chatbots collide. A Terminator statue comes to life at the Hollywood Wax Museum; a coyote laps up Colt 45, as a passerby looks on in existential quietude; a detective disappears while investigating a missing midwestern cam girl. Set in Kentucky, Hollywood, and the afterlife, these bright, bold short-shorts and stories construct an uncannily familiar, alternate-reality America.

Selected by Dean Young as winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, Fludde draws on Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience to critique and dismantle contemporary American values and conditioning: commodification, environmental negligence, corporate exploitation, toxic masculinity. At once surreal and satirical, vulnerable and nostalgic, Mishler channels the voices of disillusioned middle management alongside the freewheeling imaginative vision of children to disrupt the fixity of our received ideas. 

Beyond Measure is a fascinating exploration of the rituals, routines, metrics and expectations through which we attempt to quantify and ascribe value to our lives. With mordant humor and penetrating intellect, Arndt casts her gaze beyond event-driven narratives to the machinery underlying them: judo competitions measured in weigh-ins and wait times; the significance of the elliptical’s stationary churn; the rote scripts of dating apps; the stupefying sameness of the daily commute.

Rachel Z. Arndt’s writing has appeared in Popular Mechanics, Quartz, The Believer, and elsewhere. She received MFAs in nonfiction and poetry from the University of Iowa, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow and nonfiction editor of The Iowa Review. After stints in Rhode Island and New York, she now lives in Chicago and works as a reporter at Modern Healthcare, covering healthcare technology.