Support independent literary publishers by picking a read from the list below, which features new books forthcoming in April 2023 from CLMP members.
Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Margot Hover
Bamboo Dart Press | April 1, 2023
Four and Twenty Blackbirds is “a collection of word portraits of the people, places, and events populating the author’s universe.”
Autumn House Press | April 2, 2023
This debut poetry collection “considers the notions of home and family and how to survive the changes and losses associated with both.”
Iggy Horse by Michael Earl Craig
Wave Books | April 3, 2023
Craig’s poetry collection “articulates the sadness and strangeness of American life with the poetic observations of true satire.”
Saltwater Demands a Psalm by Kweku Abimbola
Graywolf Press | April 4, 2023
This poetry collection “creates a cosmology in search of Black eternity governed by Adinkra symbols—pictographs central to Ghanaian language and culture in their proverbial meanings—and rooted in units of time created from the rhythms of Black life.”
The Sky above the Roof by Nathacha Appanah
Translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan
Graywolf Press | April 4, 2023
Appanah’s novel “is both a portrait of a fractured family and a poetic exploration of the ways we break apart and rebuild.”
Odes to the Ordinary by Emily Benson-Scott
Green Writers Press | April 4, 2023
In Odes to the Ordinary, Benson-Scott “employs a poetic form dating back to ancient Greece to valorize the commonplace.”
Wave Books | April 4, 2023
Božičević’s latest poetry collection “is Dantesque in its ability to commune with the dead without becoming fixed in the past.”
Fire Index by Bethany Breitland
Green Writers Press | April 4, 2023
Fire Index “measures the interior life of a survivor against the world she creates through her own fractured marriage, motherhood, and religion.”
Book*hug Press | April 4, 2023
This poetry collection explores “domestic and artistic life amidst the environmental crisis and the surprising ways that every philosophical quandary—large and small—converges in the home, in small objects, conversations, and moments.”
Patterns of Orbit by Chloe N. Clark
Baobab Press | April 4, 2023
In this short fiction collection, Clark navigates “a potent concoction of science fiction, folktale, and horror.”
The Purchased Bride by Peter Constantine
Deep Vellum | April 4, 2023
Set in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, this novel “relates the story of Maria, a Greek girl who was bought when she was fifteen by a much older, wealthy Ottoman man.”
The Geography of First Kisses by Karin Cecile Davidson
Kallisto Gaia Press | April 4, 2023
The fourteen stories in this collection “are tethered to the bays and backwaters of southern Louisiana, the fields of Iowa and Oklahoma, the pine woods of Florida.”
Green Writers Press | April 4, 2023
This collection of poems “celebrates the sense of mystery, wonder, and comfort that is integral to the natural world as well as relations with others.”
Black Ocean | April 4, 2023
Hall’s poetry collection “braids the panic-inducing catastrophes of now with a long view of solidarity in struggle.”
Human Time: Selected Poems by Kim Haengsook
Translated from the Korean by Susan K, Léo-Thomas Brylowski, Hannah Quinn Hertzog, Joanne Park, Soohyun Yang, Soeun Seo, and Jiyoon Lee
Black Ocean | April 4, 2023
In this selection drawing on her work across her career and five books in Korean, Haengsook’s “poetic spaces are shrouded in a magic fog that is clarifying instead of obscuring.”
instead, it is dark by Cynthia Hogue
Red Hen Press | April 4, 2023
In her tenth book of poetry, Hogue “speaks a complex truth and casts a laser light on violence, resilience, survival, and—the heart of this collection—love.”
I Sing the Salmon Home: Poems from Washington State
Empty Bowl Press | April 4, 2023
Edited by Rena Priest, this anthology “sings of salmon—lamented and praised, hooked, and netted, spawned out and dammed from home; of their magnificence and generosity, of how the fish continue to give and of what they gave.”
Interglacial Narrows by Pierre Joris
Contra Mundum Press | April 4, 2023
Interglacial Narrows gathers a range of Joris’s poems written between 2015 and 2021, including “a diaristic sequence of poems and notes started during the spring of 2020.”
Always the Many, Never the One by Pierre Joris
Contra Mundum Press | April 4, 2023
Throughout this collection of conversations with Florent Toniello, Joris “develops a core concept of his thinking and writing, ‘in-betweenness,’ using both literary examples and life anecdotes, some never shared in Joris’s vast bibliography so far.”
Diary of an Invasion by Andrey Kurkov
Deep Vellum | April 4, 2023
This journal collects Kurkov’s “searing dispatches from the heart of Kyiv.”
Four in Hand by Alicia Mountain
BOA Editions | April 4, 2023
Four in Hand “is both formal and experimental, ranging from lyric romantic and familial narratives to blank verses of reconfigured found text pulled from financial newsletter emails.”
Spring in Siberia by Artem Mozgovoy
Red Hen Press | April 4, 2023
Set in Russia in 1985, Spring in Siberia is “a coming-of-age novel that, in the darkest of times, glows with hope and the yearning for freedom to be oneself.”
The Kevin Powell Reader: Essential Writings and Conversations by Kevin Powell
Akashic Books | April 4, 2023
This book contains a selection from Powell’s lifework, “spanning the Reagan-Bush years of AIDS and crack epidemics to our current era framed by the COVID-19 pandemic; the tragic killing of George Floyd; the #MeToo movement; and much more.”
Black Sun Lit | April 4, 2023
According to David Lau, “With a vocabulary more alarmingly varied than entire shelves of contemporary verse, this manual against all pieties hammers the conspiracy of marketable somethings.”
Urban Folk Tales by Y. Rodriguez
Read Furiously | April 4, 2023
Urban Folk Tales is “a work of fiction based upon the true life experiences of the people who live in the working poor and working class neighborhoods of New York City.”
Material Exercises by Blanca Varela
Translated from the Spanish by Carlos Lara
Black Sun Lit | April 4, 2023
This bilingual poetry collection “is a display of the vatic exorcism of the unconscious and a phenomenological investigation of space and intersubjective incarnation.”
All of Us Together in the End by Matthew Vollmer
Hub City Press | April 4, 2023
Vollmer’s family memoir “shimmers with wonder and enchantment and begins with the death of his mother from early-onset Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.”
Wail Song: or wading in the water at the end of the world by Chaun Webster
Black Ocean | April 4, 2023
Webster’s book “is a multi-form long poem that offers an extended contemplation on being that lays bare how the construction of the human and the animal both rely on black abjection.”
When Did We Stop Being Cute? by Martin Wiley
CavanKerry Press | April 4, 2023
This novel in poetic form “tells the story of a young man dealing with the challenges of growing up mixed-race in 1980s suburbia.”
All of This Was Once Under Water by Natalie Padilla Young
Quarter Press | April 4, 2023
According to Dan O’Brien, this illustrated poetry book is “a collection of poetic dispatches from a terrain of lost faith and ecological decline.”
Book*hug Press | April 6, 2023
This debut poetry collection “traces fragments of family, becoming and unbecoming against the shifting shorelines of loss, multigenerational migration, and (un)belonging.”
Sea Crow Press | April 7, 2023
In Erzinger’s poems, “revelations are made in the middle of the night, during a pandemic, in the heart of the forest, at the seaside and in food, snapshots of past and present.”
Casualties of Honey by Madison Gill
Middle Creek Publishing & Audio | April 8, 2023
According to Juan J. Morales, in this poetry chapbook Gill “embraces worry for wildfires, she laments broken economies, she praises Hygeia, and she slips into multiple lifetimes with a lover.”
Nothing Is a Cure by Jeff Horwat
Wolfson Press | April 9, 2023
In Horwat’s wordless graphic novel, “the protagonist (whom the author has named Charlie) explores a disorienting checker-board terrain that is strewn with bones even as vines and flowers burst through the cracks.”
Of This World by Benjamin Kessler
Game Over Books | April 11, 2023
According to Gabriel Urza, “Kessler has a gift for capturing fleeting, vivid moments that indelibly reveal a character’s deepest fears or desires in a flash.”
Sweet Undoings by Yanick Lahens
Translated from the French by Kaiama L. Glover
Deep Vellum | April 11, 2023
In this novel set in Port-au-Prince, “violence never consumes. It finds its counterpart in a ‘high-pitched sweetness,’ a sweetness that overwhelms Francis, a French journalist.”
A Present Past: Titan and Other Chronicles by Sergei Lebedev
Translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis
New Vessel Press | April 11, 2023
The eleven stories in this collection “share a mystical topography in which the legacy of totalitarian regimes is ever-present—from Katyn to Chechnya, from Lithuanian KGB documents to the streetscape of unified Berlin, from the fragments of family history to the echoes of foot soldiers in Russia’s wars of aggression.”
AUTHOR OF ALL ILL by Charlie Perseus
Fifth Wheel Press | April 11, 2023
This poetry collection is “both an ode to and an elegy for the author’s own falling.”
Two Lines Press | April 11, 2023
According to Shailja Patel, this first collection of Swahili fiction in English translation is “an absorbing sampler of the literary feast available in Africa’s most widely spoken language.”
Good Grief, the Ground by Margaret Ray
BOA Editions | April 11, 2023
In this poetry collection, Ray “is pulling back the curtains on our societal performance of culture, guiding an exposing light to the daily performance that is life in a woman’s body.”
Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility by Anna Laura Reeve
Belle Point Press | April 11, 2023
These poems “are wide-ranging in subject—postpartum depression, ecopoetics, creative manifestoes—yet all are rooted in the Southern Appalachia sprawl that she has made her home.”
Grid Books | April 11, 2023
Terranova’s seventh collection “charts inner landscapes in poems that read like memories surfaced in reflection and refracted through the lens of dreams.”
Millie and the Kitchen Witch by Hillary Vaillancourt
Orange Blossom Publishing | April 11, 2023
In this debut children’s book, “Millie hopes winning an annual baking contest will help bring notoriety and customers to the struggling diner like it does every year.”
A Fire in the Hills by Afaa M. Weaver
Red Hen Press | April 11, 2023
According to Rajiv Mohabir, “A Fire in the Hills burns through violences internal and external—whether in Chicago, in schools, in public pools, by police against Black folks—while writing back to America.”
The Flowers of Nonchalance by Dan Smart
Kallisto Gaia Press | April 14, 2023
Smart’s debut collection is “a snapshot of a turning year in his life as an artist—from spring through winter, and back again to spring.”
Portraits as Animal by Victoriano Cárdenas
Bloomsday Literary | April 14, 2023
In this collection “in conversation with Taos’s rich artistic tradition and the brutal, binding legacy of colonization, Cárdenas “writes through his transition, acknowledging that ‘to become a man means a lifetime of needles like the man who raised me.'”
The Art of Bagging by Joshua Gottlieb-Miller
Conduit Books & Ephemera | April 14, 2023
According to Kevin Prufer, “Gottlieb-Miller considers the grocery store as a site for meditations on vast economies, complex labor systems, and the ordinary, often nearly invisible, people who work within them.”
Mon Dieu, Love by Jane V. Blunschi
Texas Review Press | April 15, 2023
Set in Baton Rouge, this novella follows “a pair of sisters stuck in a non-stop loop of relationship mistakes, attempts at sobriety from drugs, alcohol, and general lesbian drama, and accidental, unwelcome emotional growth.”
Bamboo Dart Press | April 15, 2023
The forty “things” in this collection include “Story as thing. The soul of things. The essence of narrative. Bare bones. Blind alleys. Unanswered questions. And poems, a few pantoums and haiku too.”
Down Low and Low Down: Timothy Liu’s Bedside Bottom-Feeder Blues by Timothy Liu
Barrow Street Press | April 15, 2023
The poems in Liu’s latest collection “are unruly, naughty, looking for trouble, not poems you’d want to recite at a traditional Thanksgiving table where proper etiquette rears its gagged head.”
The Song Cave | April 15, 2023
Nicholson’s third collection “is filled with the perverse and the sacred, whether the subject is art, love, or sex, whether it’s ancient or contemporary.”
Landscape with Missing River by Joni Wallace
Barrow Street Press | April 15, 2023
Wallace’s poetry collection “traces the late life, addiction, and death of the speaker’s father, a Los Alamos scientist, living along the banks of the Animas River in rural northern New Mexico.”
Red Hen Press | April 18, 2023
Cárdenas’s poems “transgress illusory borders between lands, languages, humans and the rest of the natural world, waking and dreaming, and the living and the dead as they unearth traces of experience that shape and haunt us.”
Places Like These by Lauren Carter
Book*hug Press | April 18, 2023
This short fiction collection “plumbs the vast range of human reactions to those things which make us human—love, grief, friendship, betrayal, and the intertwined yet contrasting longing for connection and independence.”
Outside the Frame by Catherine Pritchard Childress
EastOver Press | April 18, 2023
In these poems Childress “gives full-throated voice to those who are historically silenced, while bearing witness to a complex culture that both perpetuates that silence and cries out to be heard and to be seen.”
The Wishing Pool and Other Stories by Tananarive Due
Akashic Books | April 18, 2023
In these fourteen stories, “Due further cements her status as a leading innovator in Black horror and Afrofuturism.”
Sleeping as Fast as I Can by Richard Michelson
Slant Books | April 18, 2023
Michelson’s poems “explore the boundaries between the personal and the political-and the deep connections between history and memory.”
Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes by Anne Elizabeth Moore
Feminist Press | April 18, 2023
This new edition of Body Horror is “a fascinating, insightful portrait of the gore that encapsulates contemporary American politics.”
Buffalo Girl by Jessica Q. Stark
BOA Editions | April 18, 2023
In these hybrid poems, Stark “explores her mother’s fraught immigration to the United States from Vietnam at the end of war through the lens of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale.”
Secret Rules to Being a Rockstar by Jessamyn Violet
Three Rooms Press | April 18, 2023
Violet’s debut LGBTQA+ YA novel “sizzles with a coming-of-age story set in an industry of ambition, secrets, lies, and utter joy. ”
I Will Keep My Soul by Helen Cammock
Siglio Press | April 21, 2023
I Will Keep My Soul is “an orchestral layering of photography, historical documents, poetry and interviews, rooted in the history, geography and community of New Orleans.”
Tursulowe Press | April 21, 2023
These photographs of readers “span over four decades and a half a dozen continents. Some capture a still or tranquil space, while some are more energetic, even raucous.”
Roots, Stones and Baggage by Richard Brown Lethem
Bamboo Dart Press | April 22, 2023
This collection features paintings and poems from seventy years of Lethem’s life, “written and painted in Missouri, Paris, Brooklyn, Maine, and California.”
Cypress Knees and Tupelo Trees: Discovering Plants and Animals of the Swamp by Cathy Melvin
Et Alia Press | April 22, 2023
In this children’s book about the swamp ecosystem, “plants and animals spring to life through lively rhyme and colorful painted collage.”
Robin and Her Misfits by Kelly Ann Jacobson
Three Rooms Press | April 25, 2023
In this YA novel, “a roving female gang of fun-loving rebel bikers and street racers, led by Robin, agree to give back to queer girls in need of help.”
Trouble Funk by Douglas Manuel
Red Hen Press | April 25, 2023
Set in Anderson, Indiana, Trouble Funk “exposes ways Black Love is thwarted but never destroyed by racism, classism, and sexism.”
Kidnapped: A Story in Crimes by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
Translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz
Deep Vellum | April 25, 2023
This novel set in the 1980s and ’90s “results in a drama worthy of a daytime soap opera: medical deceit, identity scams, and falsified death abound.”
The Red Book of Farewells by Pirkko Saisio
Translated from the Finnish by Mia Spangenberg
Two Lines Press | April 25, 2023
This novel is “an enigmatic work of autofiction set in a time of leftist politics and criminalized sexuality.”
Nomenclatures of Invisibility by Mahtem Shiferraw
BOA Editions | April 25, 2023
In these poems, “Shiferraw attends to personal and collective experiences of migration, motherhood, and immigration’s complicated notions of home.”
Invisible Publishing | April 25, 2023
Siklosi’s poetry collection is “a work of salvaging and selving, of salvaging a self from disparate elements.”
Come Back for a Little Bit by Elle Warren
Game Over Books | April 25, 2023
Come Back for a Little Bit is “a surreal and daydreamy collection asking the question ‘what if?’ in the face of momentous grief.”
Coach House Books | April 25, 2023
In this novel, Winkler “moves between the present day and Grim’s 1908-9 tour of Australia, bending genres and histories into a kaleidoscopic investigation of pain, masculinity, and narrative.”
Black Avatar and Other Essays by Amit Majmudar
Acre Books | April 28, 2023
In these essays, Majmudar “reflects on the effects of colonialism, drawing upon sources ranging from early Sanskrit texts to contemporary film and television.”
Box Turtle Press | April 29, 2023
In Hoffman’s novel, “the poet Maud Diamond not only indulges in reefer madness in her Beresford bathroom, but takes a much younger live-in lover, a handsome Russian (would-be-famous) artist, to the horror of her precocious children.”
Man of the People by Robert Garcia
Arte Público Press | April 30, 2023
Congressman Garcia’s memoir “reflects on the impact of the civil rights movement on the Hispanic community, particularly in New York.”
Latina Histories and Cultures by Montse Feu and Yolanda Padilla
Arte Público Press | April 30, 2023
These fifteen academic essays “use transnational approaches and Latina feminist theory to remind us of a principle that is still too often forgotten: that sex and gender should be centered as crucial problematics in the study of the long history of Latina/o/x literature and culture.”
