New T itles
Adam in the Garden
By AE Hines Charlotte Lit Press
“With Adam in the Garden, AE Hines dares to imagine a new Eden, as his speaker finds himself ‘middle-aged and queer,’ in poems that weave sound and image into tightly crafted narratives. Whether confronting betrayal and loss, sex and desire, or even environmental collapse, threads of hope and gratitude run throughout these verses, as does the speaker’s anxiety about the fragility of what binds.”—Dorianne Laux.
www.aehines.net
Dancing on the Sun Stone: Mexican Women and the Gendered Politics of Octavio Paz
By Marjorie Becker
University of New Mexico Press
In this important book, scholar and poet Marjorie Becker focuses on the remarkable Mexican women who performed a transformative dance. By placing those women and their dance in dialogue with Octavio Paz’s signature poem, “Sun Stone,” this multi-genre exploration reveals ways the dancing women changed Mexican history itself.
www.unmpress.com/9780826364180/dancing-on-the-sun-stone/
Music for Exile
By Nehassaiu deGannes Tupelo Press
“Music for Exile reconfigures saltwater as blood and sweat as hurricane…”—Phillip B. Williams. “…these wide-ranging, rapturous poems roam. What they gather—and what they set free—sing and grieve the miracle of ‘love’s small galaxy.’”—Tracy K. Smith. “… a fresh voice, unafraid of labels or schools, formalism/experimental in the same poem. The same line!—hallelujah!” —Bob Holman.
tupelopress.org/product/music-for-exile/
In the Field of Unintended Consequences
By Peter Schneider PB&J Books
The poems in The Field of Unintended Consequences evoke the natural and human ecologies of rural Vermont and the urban wilderness of Brooklyn, NY. “Two long, rangy, allusive poems … frame Peter Schneider’s excellent full-length collection… [They] blend physical description, scientific fact, environmental consciousness, and Eastern and Western philosophy.”—Tom Zimmerman, Editor of The Big Windows Review.
www.amazon.com
American Bastard
By Jan Beatty Red Hen Press
American Bastard is a lyrical inquiry into the experience of being a bastard in America. This memoir travels across literal continents—and continents of desire as Beatty finds her birthfather, a Canadian hockey player who’s won three Stanley Cups—and her birthmother, a working-class woman from Pittsburgh. American Bastard sandblasts the exaltation of adoption in Western culture.
www.janbeatty.com
Unblock Your Creative Flow: 12 Months of Mindfulness for Writers and Artists
By Dr. Madhu Bazaz Wangu Year of the Book Press
Do you dread when it’s time to write but ideas don’t develop? Doubt if your work is worth it? Rest easy, Madhu Wangu has the solution. Crack open this book and begin your writing transformation. It’s a portable life coach designed just for you. Silence your inner critic, increase focus, improve productivity and delve into the gifts you already possess.
www.madhubazazwangu.com
Sailing to Noon
By Hoyt Rogers Spuyten Duyvil Press
“Sailing to Noon has enormous vitality and texture: it is a big performance—the epic myth of Canuba.”—Jonathan Galassi. “I really felt this book: I entered its geography, saw and smelled and moved in it, which is a tribute to its vivid intimacy.”—Siri Hustvedt. “You should put this novel in a tightly sealed drawer; otherwise it’s so alive it might run away.”—Edmund White.
www.spuytenduyvil.net/sailing-to-noon.html
Swans of the Boundary Waters
By Linda Marie Hilton Atmosphere Press
Take flights of fancy like a swan perusing vegetation patterns: see what can be wrapped in a poem: a pita full of the savory haiku surprise. Linda Marie Hilton’s second volume of poetry: Swans of the Boundary Waters!
www.amazon.com
The Black Attaché: Vignettes from a Life
By JK Cheema Calumet Editions
My memoir is made up of vignettes which cover my early years during India’s partition into India and Pakistan, to my student and work life in the US and later as a diplomat with the United States Agency of International Development. These short stories show that even in my darkest moments, I always believed that things would work out and I never gave up hope, as my mother taught me to do.
aplacetobewillystreet.com
STONE SEEDS
By Marty Cohen
Third Generation Press
Marty Cohen’s poetry and essays have appeared in periodicals and anthologies since 1970. Stone Seeds is his first major collection since A Traveller’s Alphabet, a Prescott Street First Book. Stone Seeds is about paying attention to the connections between people and places, poetry and birds, songs and silence, spirituality and the material world. Order on www.amazon.com or contact martycohen36@gmail.com.
www.amazon.com
The Mother Artist: Portraits of Ambition, Limitation, and Creativity
By Catherine Ricketts Broadleaf Books
Few women artists feature prominently in the history of art, and even fewer who are mothers. Are motherhood and creativity at odds, or are other factors at play? The Mother Artist twines meditations on parenthood with studies of painters, writers, and others who blend caregiving and creative practice. Includes fullcolor images by mother artists.
broadleafbooks.com
Mi Vida Oakland (and other poems)
By Danny Romero Cholla Needles I wandered lonely as a cloud of crack smoke that floats on high over hill and valley across Oakland west toward the lake walking the miles to save the dollar for a bottle of fortified wine
www.amazon.com
A Leap Year of Haiku
By Michael R. Lane Bare Bones Press “one thousand years in / the body of nature is / a flitting heartbeat.” The haiku emerged in Japanese literature during the 17th century. The original art form focused on the natural world. A number of the haiku in this collection stray from that tradition, addressing a wide variety of subjects while maintaining at their core a desired emotional response.
www.bookshop.org
Journeying Home
By Barbara Kilde Carlier BookLocker Press
It is the future in Brittany, France. The two main characters, Elin and Talla, take the same road but at a 20-year interval in a world without electricity and after the second Chornobyl explosion. It’s with much hope that they look to start a new life at Mont St. Michel (now called Mikelmont).
www.booklocker.com
Tangible Terrain
By Christy Wise Finishing Line Press
“As the author lets us deeper and deeper into her life, we see the fears of adults, the dreams and advice they thought best to dispense to their own, manifesting deeper in the family and the poet’s consciousness, until we are released into the embrace and revelation of the natural world as the way to reclaim ‘our ground’.”—Paul Corman-Roberts, author of Bone Moon Palace and The Sincere.
www.christywise.com
Rabbit in the Moon: The Mexico Stories
By Karen Brennan Schaffner Press, Inc.
“How extraordinary this book is—dreamy and gritty, restless and free... A rare and wonderful collection.”—Joan Silber, author of Secrets of Happiness.
www.schaffnerpress.com
Mariposa: Opioid Abatement Poems
By Laverne Zabielski Act of Power Press
This heart-wrenching collection tells two parallel stories: the descent of a beloved adult daughter into heroin addiction and homelessness, and the mother’s journey toward a heroic selfdiscipline—keeping to herself the questions she’s burning to ask, refusing to impose her own opinions on her daughter. She treats her, even in her worst moments, with a radical respect.
www.lavernezabielski.net/writing
Immorality Act
By Berend Mets
The Book Guild Ltd.
Cape Town, in the 1960s. John Terreblanche, a police reporter seeking redemption, tells the story of a Xhosa nurse, Promise Madiba, a Dutch doctor, Willem Jansen, and a Malay prostitute, Marja de Koning, who engage in a passionate love triangle in the shadow of the Sharpeville massacre, as South Africa lurches to independence from Great Britain.
www.amazon.com
The Red Wheelbarrow: a Novel
By Marjorie Nelson Matthews Rootstock Publishing
Amy Barnes, a high school English teacher from Hawaii, and Paul Rideau, a Vermont farmer, each turn to their secret passions in poetry and painting to help them heal from life-changing tragedies. A quiet, literary story, The Red Wheelbarrow reminds us of the power of art to transform, of love and decency to triumph, and of hope to endure.
www.rootstockpublishing.com
The Unmoved Mover
By Ronald Pies Independently Published
This compact novelette tells the story of Judaic studies professor Aaron Shavoor and artist Rachel Gold, following a horrific school tragedy that overturns their world and unites them in bereavement. How does life go on after the worst occurs? How can two people who have experienced unspeakable loss find one another, and again find meaning in life? And who can ever believe in a benign and loving God, after such a tragedy?
www.amazon.com