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| New Poetry | Essay from Ugly Duckling Presse |
 Apart
Catherine Taylor $17 | paper | 168 pp. Ugly Duckling Presse ISBN: 9781933254968 Literary Nonfiction. APART grew out of Taylor's memories of visiting her family in South Africa as a child and her later curiosity about her (white) mother's involvement in early anti-apartheid women's groups. Mixing narrative prose, poems, social and political theory, and found texts culled from years of visiting South African archives and libraries, APART navigates the difficult landscapes of history, shame, privilege, and grief. |
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| New Poetry from Shearsman Books |
 Book of Changes
Paul Naylor $15 | paper | 88 pp. Shearsman Books ISBN: 9781848611993 Poetry. "Paul Naylor has surreptitiously begun to publish an important poetry. The result is the development of a poetry informed by philosophy and spiritual practice, and by a commitment to innovation, combined with a commendably stubborn unwillingness to stay away from poetry's traditionally most compelling topics. It is a pleasure to see the unfolding of this humorous, ambitious, skeptical and serious poetry."—Hank Lazer |
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| New Essays from BookThug |
 Nilling: Prose
Lisa Robertson $18 | paper | 96 pp. BookThug ISBN: 9781897388891 Literary Nonfiction. NILLING: PROSE is a sequence of five loosely linked prose essays about noise, pornography, the codex, melancholy, Lucretius, folds, cities and related aporias: in short, these are essays on reading. |
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| New Pictures & Prose from Les Figues Press |
 Tall, Slim & Erect: Portraits of the Presidents
Alex Forman $15 | paper | 131 pp. Les Figues Press ISBN: 9781934254318 Literary Nonfiction. Art. After stumbling upon a wooden box containing a complete set of miniature wax mold figurines of US presidents at a flea market, artist Alex Forman began photographing each little man, minus their pedestals. Presented for the first time in book format, Forman's elegant black and white portraits are accompanied by brief biographies composed entirely of appropriated texts cleverly cut and reassembled by the author. What emerges in TALL, SLIM & ERECT: PORTRAITS OF THE PRESIDENTS is not the tired tale of legendary men and their mythical quest for democracy, but rather, a gossip's dream: Jefferson could not ride a horse for months due to boils on his backside; Hayes felt a crazed and tender devotion to his sister Fanny; Wilson remained a virgin till twenty-eight. While playfully shedding light on these powerful men, their quirks, bodily functions, and stained sheets, TALL, SLIM & ERECT ultimately asks the reader to question how presidents, and history, is written and built on hearsay, conjecture, rumor, and repetition. |
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| New Poetry Anthology from EtherDome |
 As if It Fell from the Sun
Colleen Lookingbill and Elizabeth Robinson, Editors $14 | paper | 231 pp. EtherDome ISBN: 9781467514613 Poetry. Edited by Colleen Lookingbill and Elizabeth Robinson, this anthology brings together selections from the 21 poets EtherDome Chapbooks have published over the last 10 years. EtherDome publishes chapbooks by women who have not previously published books or chapbooks, though many of their authors have gone on to further publications. |
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| New Poetry in Translation from Canarium Books |
 The Invention of Glass
Emmanuel Hocquard $14 | paper | 128 pp. Canarium Books ISBN: 9780982237694 Poetry. Translated from the French by Cole Swensen and Rod Smith. This is a narrative that tries to explain and to crystalize (the fourth state of water) a situation that has not yet been clarified. Under the guise of memory's particular logic, its play of facets turns to fiction because its sense takes shape only as the series of grammatical phrases unfolds, fusing shadows and blind spots. And yet, like glass, which is a liquid, the poem is amorphous. It streams off in all directions, but reflects nothing. What is the meaning of blue? No one needs to interrogate the concept of blue to know what it means. |
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| New Literary Criticism from Counterpath Press |
 Confessions of a Plagiarist: And Other Tales from School
Kevin Kopelson $17.95 | paper | 240 pp. Counterpath Press ISBN: 9781933996301 Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. In college, Kevin Kopelson passed off a paper by his older brother Robert as his own. In graduate school, he plagiarized nearly an entire article from a respected scholar, and then later, having met her and been asked if he would send something for her to read, sent that essay he had plagiarized from her work. This is not to mention the many instances in which he quoted others extensively, not passing their work off as his own, but substituting it for his own words when his words were what were called for. Until recently, such plagiarisms and thefts had been his most shameful secret, shared only with a trusted few. But then Kopelson—now an English professor and the author of a number of respected books, most recently 2007's Sedaris—wrote an essay entitled "My Cortez," which was published in the London Review of Books in 2008. It was a satirical literary confession, an exploration of Kopelson's personal and professional life via his various acts of plagiarism. From that jumping off point and exploring also his other vices, CONFESSIONS OF A PLAGIARIST is the compelling and clever retelling (not to mention renovation) of Kopelson's life, one transgression at a time. |
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| New Poetry from Almost Island Books |
 Trying to Say Goodbye
Adil Jussawalla $18 | paper | 88 pp. Almost Island Books ISBN: 9788192129501 Poetry. South Asia Studies. TRYING TO SAY GOODBYE is the long anticipated third collection of poems by Adil Jussawalla, who continues to be a seminal figure in post-independence Indian poetry. Jussawalla's is a sharp yet intimate voice, fearless but melancholic, marked by a darting, wily syntax, bristling rhymes, and an original prosody. Here, he moves across time to address an array of histories, both personal and public. He lifts from and pays homage to poets, artists, drunks, vagabonds, and eccentrics, and writes through the deep materiality of everyday objects—a wristwatch, a radio, clay, wood, marble, a cloud, a fly—in reaching toward a further scale. |
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| New Poetry from sunnyoutside |
 Settlement
Micah Ling $13 | paper | 68 pp. sunnyoutside ISBN: 9781934513354 Poetry. With a historian's perspective and a journalist's eye, Micah Ling surveys the oppression of America's indigenous people and the imposition of the United States government upon them. These inequalities are then used to draw parallels to the current Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and subsequent crimes and inequity. Set in two acts with two casts of characters, from Marlon Brando to Leonard Peltier to Banksy, SETTLEMENT cries out against injustices while celebrating the human will to persevere. |
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| New Poetry from Tres Chicas Books |
 Her Knees Pulled In
Elizabeth Jacobson $14 | paper | 84 pp. Tres Chicas Books ISBN: 9781893003132 Poetry. "HER KNEES PULLED IN is a highly skilled, no-bullshit, sexual and creaturely poetry, accounting for the earthly life of a woman. If I were going to give a friend any book of poems as representative of the inner life of New Mexico, and of what it feels like to be a western woman, it would be this one."—Tony Hoagland |
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| New Poetry Anthology from Station Hill Press of Barrytown |
 America a Prophecy: A New Reading of American Poetry from Pre-Columbian Times to the Present
Jerome Rothenberg and George Quasha, Editors $34.95 | paper | 642 pp. Station Hill Press of Barrytown ISBN: 9781581771268 Poetry. African American Studies. Native American Studies. This groundbreaking anthology from the early 1970s takes such an approach in presenting the poetry of the North American continent, from pre-Columbian times to the present. It includes many recognized poets of the period, though appearing here in often unexpected contexts, and others who have been overlooked but whose contributions to the development of poetry are revolutionary. Starting from their own moment, the editors have read back into the more distant past and selected from broad American traditions works that had thitherto been considered outside the realm of poetry proper: the native poetry of the American continent, African-American sermons, blues and gospels, and the sacred, often innovative poetry of such radical religious groups as the Shakers. |
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| New Essays from The Green Lantern Press |
 The Brightest Thing in the World: 3 Lectures from the Institute of Failure
Matthew Goulish $12 | paper | 70 pp. The Green Lantern Press ISBN: 9781450742177 Literary Nonfiction. THE BRIGHTEST THING IN THE WORLD: 3 LECTURES FROM THE INSTITUTE OF FAILURE is a collection of essays that touch on seating strategies, Dick Cheney, cuckoo clocks, the Fibonacci series, butterflies and old friends. These threads weave together like a tapestry and by their accumulated resonance create an impression of loss and longing. As in Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, the reader passes through an associative experience. These are the essays of a poet; like a performance of words, each verb is as active as a muscle. While every sentence tends to its end, the reader resists its inevitable conclusion. |
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| New Fiction in Translation from White Pine Press |
 A Talisman in the Darkness: Selected Stories of Olga Orozco
Olga Orozco $16 | paper | 170 pp. White Pine Press ISBN: 9781935210306 Fiction. Latino/Latino Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Mary G. Berg and Melanie Nicholson. This collection introduces readers to the hallucinatory yet lucid world that Olga Orozco's young narrator, Lía, inhabits and animates with her prodigious imagination and the reality of small-town life on the Argentine plains in the 1920s. |
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| New Poetry from Elixir Press |
 Mormon Boy
Seth Brady Tucker $17 | paper | 80 pp. Elixir Press ISBN: 9781932418439 Poetry. MORMON BOY by Seth Brady Tucker is one of the winners of the Elixir Press 11th Annual Poetry Awards. David Kirby has this to say about it: "A young man goes to a desert war, somehow returns with body and mind intact, and begins to write poems about his experiences. Will they be raw, brutal, all but impossible to read? Actually, no. Seth Tucker looks into the abyss, but it's a 'pretty abyss,' as one of these poems says, because life rendered with feeling is always beautiful. Tucker embraces his subject but transcends it; a pleasure to read, these poems show poets how great poems are written." |
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| New Poetry from IF SF Publishing |
 The Aphasia Café
Dawn McGuire $18.95 | paper | 82 pp. IF SF Publishing ISBN: 9780967472058 Poetry. The poems of THE APHASIA CAFÉ write the lives of individuals who, because of stroke or dementia, have lost all or part of their ability to use language, exploring what happens to self when language, the tool we use to construct who we are, suddenly fractures along one of its many fault lines. Sections of APHASIA CAFÉ also explore language and self-identity in relation to family life, political violence, bigotry, shame, and redemption. |
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| New Poetry from Hobblebush Books |
 Tales of the François Vase: A Poem
Julia Older $20 | paper | 88 pp. Hobblebush Books ISBN: 9780984592128 Poetry. Book + CD. Julia Older's obsession with the famous François Vase led to both the radio play and the book-length poem. The dramatic 25-century journey of the vase winds through a subterranean inferno of greed, passion, and terror. Twice it was smashed into 600-plus pieces, came unglued, and was puzzled together, each time with a piece missing. A third time—during the 1966 Florence Flood—a scientist intentionally broke the vase. He restored it with the missing piece, and at last it was whole. Older's book offers readers the entire fascinating story. The poem is illustrated with the vase figures from The Iliad and the book includes a "backstory" with Older's original translations of her research. |
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| New Poetry from Poetic Matrix Press |
 Whimsy, Reticence & Laud: Unruly Sonnets
Grace Marie Grafton $15 | paper | 76 pp. Poetic Matrix Press ISBN: 9780985288303 Poetry. "In these lush sonnets by Grace Grafton, the wild and the cultivated often collide. Here the habit of observation and the outcome of wonder produce a passionate immersion in the sensate pleasures of both language and being, where the weathers of the body, the floats and drifts of memory, and the bone and yearn of everyday life intersect and bring us into a place 'where blue's ease slips in,' a molten language captures us, and laud is a natural response."—Tobey Hiller |
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| New Poetry from Dos Madres Press |
 Ways We Hold
Jennifer Arin $16 | paper | 76 pp. Dos Madres Press ISBN: 9781933675718 Poetry. "In WAYS WE HOLD, Jennifer Arin takes the long view—from prehuman history to pumpkins in the state of Delaware, from a Sumerian scribe to her own Russian-Jewish grandparents. Confronting time, death, and chaos, she finds solace in human connection, the 'way[s] we hold on, or try to.' Her thoughtfully-shaped poems, 'planting word rows / across the page,' reveal a lively curiosity, a wry sense of humor and a levelheaded understanding of the human condition."—Chana Bloch |
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| New Poetry from Marsh Hawk Press |
 Weather Is Whether
Harriet Zinnes $15 | paper | 96 pp. Marsh Hawk Press ISBN: 9780984635344 Poetry. "In these newest of her poems, Harriet Zinnes has dared to accept the deepest challenge of all writing: i.e. to dwell in the moment that is the seed-time of moments and in the image that rests forever within the disappearance of all images once beloved. Here is an unconditional clarity. Here are poems whose singularities are never less than complete."—Donald Revell |
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| New Memoir from Pleasure Boat Studio |
 Notes from Disappearing Lake: The River Journals of Robert Sund
Robert Sund $15 | paper | 98 pp. Pleasure Boat Studio ISBN: 9781929355808 Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Edited by Glenn Hughes and Tim McNulty. For most of the 1970s and 80s, poet and painter Robert Sund spent part of each year his at small shack on the Skagit River estuary. There, he kept journals of his observations and reflections as well as encounters with friends and fellow artists from the nearby community of Fishtown. With freshness and immediacy, these poem-like notations reveal the poet's ongoing artistic discipline based on close attention to the natural world, as well as his spiritual insight, humor, and love for all that illuminates the mind and lifts the heart. NOTES FROM DISAPPEARING LAKE captures a creative spirit and an artistic moment in one of the Northwest's most mystically beautiful landscapes. |
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| BONUS: New Poetry from Displaced Press |
 Tout va bien
Suzanne Stein FREE* | paper | 138 pp. Displaced Press Poetry. Suzanne Stein's TOUT VA BIEN extends its process of structural interventions in social, discursive, and lyric space with a "51rst" poetic activity: it is being distributed for free through SPD. In a register related to her longtime work as Bay Area publisher (of "free" chapbooks), and her day labor as community producer for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, TOUT VA BIEN collects a series of talks, lyrics, performances, and related documents that punch a "hole in space" and time. *Please, one per reader; reader pays S&H. |
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