The Femme Fatale Hypothesis  by David R. Roth

11/19/2021

A contemporary suburban-Gothic tale about a woman with a ferocious desire to defy death, her husband’s increasingly futile attempt to deny death, and their reluctant caretaker’s dueling crises of flagging faith and the loss of a sense of place in the world.

Focal Point  by Jenny Qi

10/13/2021

Winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award, Focal Point is a scientist's unofficial dissertation, a daughter's faithful correspondence, and a coming-of-age story. Written while Jenny Qi was a young PhD student conducting cancer research after her beloved mother's death, the collection turns to "all the rituals of all the faiths," invoking Western and Eastern mythology and history, metaphors from cell biology, and even Jimi Hendrix.

A Cluster of Noisy Planets  by Charles Rafferty

10/05/2021

Charles Rafferty’s latest collection of prose poems turns philosophical. In A Cluster of Noisy Planets, Rafferty captures the rhythms and patterns of life as a lover, father, and poet, grounding them collectively in the wider perspective of a changing world, the constant turning of the stars and the changing seasons of the New England countryside.

When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery and other Baseball Stories  by E. Ethelbert Miller

09/07/2021

Much-honored Washington, D.C., poet activist E. Ethelbert Miller delights and surprises us with his deft imaginings and portraits. Ethelbert’s poems play out in baseball rhythm and express the joy of living, despite the bitter challenges in today’s world. These poems define our time and allow us to see ourselves as human through the lens of baseball, family and music.

In Our Beautiful Bones  by Zilka Joseph

08/31/2021

In Our Beautiful Bones reckons with the violence of white supremacy and colonialism. In these poems, Joseph surveys the ecological, physical, emotional, and psychological traumas of that violence, with a central focus on the agonies of constant interpellation by whiteness’s gaze.

The Speed of Mercy  by Christy Ann Conlin

08/23/2021

Moving, funny, and propulsive. In prose both lyrical and sharp, compassionate and wise, Christy Ann Conlin delivers a page-turner with a fierce heart at its core.” — Mona Awad, author of All's Well, Bunny, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

Venice Beach: A Novel  by William Mark Habeeb

08/17/2021

It's 1968. A thirteen-year-old loner flees his abusive father and alcoholic mother for the lure of California. He struggles alone on the streets of Los Angeles, conversing with the ghost of his beloved dog and trying to avoid the police, until a fateful encounter leads him to the bohemian community of Venice Beach, known at the time as the "Slum by the Sea."

Compositions: Sinking, Floating, Sailing  by Jhazzmyn Joiner

08/15/2021

Compositions: Sinking, Floating, Sailing consists of poetry and short stories about love and heartbreak, injustice, growth, and hope.

Mid-Bloom  by Katie Budris

08/13/2021

Mid-Bloom is one woman's exploration of grief, illness, and survival as she faces a breast cancer diagnosis. Having lost her mother to cancer two decades prior, author Katie Budris is forced to confront that loss again as her own treatment unearths a deep longing to connect with her late mother. Through a loosely chronological structure, these poems invoke nostalgia through childhood memories and use nature-centered imagery to guide the reader through some of her most difficult experiences.

A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form  by Brenda Miller

07/13/2021

An accessible and personable guide to writing creative nonfiction.

The Freedom Race  by Lucinda Roy

07/13/2021

THE FREEDOM RACE, a novel, is Volume I of Lucinda Roy’s speculative slave narrative trilogy, set after another Civil War has ripped the country apart.

The Soul of Rock & Roll: Poems Acoustic, Electric & Remixed, 1980-2020  by John Repp

07/01/2021

With 10-gauge steel strings, Repp solos electric in images that shred until we are heart-deep in the bodies of real people. He’s an intellectual, and he’s salt-of-the-earth—an endangered species. Repp’s voice—underrated and never overstated—bottleneck-slides the heart of night and makes us believe in the spirit of living again—it’s that good. —Jan Beatty

Mona at Sea  by Elizabeth Gonzalez James

06/30/2021

A darkly funny coming-of-age tale set against the backdrop of the Great Recession that takes the audience on a wild journey through a strange, uncertain modern America.

Faraway Places  by Teow Lim Goh

06/15/2021

Faraway Places resides in the spaces between the wild and the tamed, from orchid gardens and immense seas to caged birds and high alpine landscapes. It may be a private dictionary: “Those / who know the lore can use them / to find their way / in the world.” Haunted and searching, these poems navigate the distances between light and shadow, secrets and silence.

The Rock Eaters  by Brenda Peynado

05/11/2021

What does it mean to love in a world determined to keep us apart? Threaded with magic and portals into other worlds, these stories cross borders and break down walls. The Rock Eaters features ghosts, angels perched on rooftops, aliens falling from the sky, Latin American superheroes, and girlhood.

The Diamond Cutter's Daughter: a Poet's Memoir  by Elaine Terranova

05/07/2021

In short lyrical essays, Terranova recounts the wonder and difficulty of growing up in a working-class Orthodox Jewish home in the Philadelphia of the 1940s and 1950s. "This lovely book functions as an elegy for a father who was late to appreciate his daughter’s gift. 'A diamond, they say, lasts forever, but so too, I’d wanted to tell him, does some writing.' ” —Natasha Sajé