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Books Launching in August 2023

Support independent literary publishers by picking a read from the list below, which features new books forthcoming in August 2023 from CLMP members.

 

Cover of Weft by Kevin Allardice, with a distorted photograph of a suburban house and text reading "PM 07:49, Oct. 31 97"Weft by Kevin Allardice

Madrona Books | August 1, 2023

Weft is a novel “that will leave its crescent nail marks on us long after we’ve boxed up and returned our skeletons to the closet.”

 

 

 

Cover of The Invisible Elephant by Anna Anisimova, featuring an illustration of a girl in a yellow raincoat holding a white elephant like a balloon.The Invisible Elephant by Anna Anisimova

Translated from the Russian by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp

Restless Books | August 1, 2023

This illustrated chapter work follows “a blind girl who joyfully explores her environment using her senses and vivid imagination.”

 

 

 

Cover of Bar Guide for the Seriously Deranged by Alan Catlin, featuring an illustration of a crowded bar with pink and orange walls.Bar Guide for the Seriously Deranged by Alan Catlin

Roadside Press | August 1, 2023

This poetry collection explores Catlin’s “34 years in his unchosen profession as a barman in and around the greater Albany, New York, area.”

 

 

 

Cover of Kariba, with an illustration of a Black teen with a river and trees in the outline of their torso.Kariba by Daniel Clarke, James Clarke, and Daniel Snaddon

Catalyst Press | August 1, 2023

Kariba is “an African fantasy-adventure graphic novel inspired by the mythology of the Zambezi River and the history of the Kariba Dam.”

 

 

 

Dark blue cover of Night Logic with a qhite scribble above the title in lowercase handwriting.Night Logic by Matthew Gellman

Tupelo Press | August 1, 2023

The poems in Night Logic “deal with queer coming-of-age and desire, as well as the persistent impact that childhood trauma can have on queer relationship-building.”

 

 

 

Cover of Sweetbitter by Reginald Gibbons, featuring white text and a black ribbon on a red background.Sweetbitter by Reginald Gibbons

JackLeg Press | August 1, 2023

Gibbons’s debut novel, set in east Texas in 1910, “plumbs sacrifice, fear, and the loss of one’s identity, bringing the anguish of the two young lovers to life.”

 

 

 

Cover of This Brutal House by Niven Govinden, featuring a photograph of a masked and hooded Black figure behind white text and pink, yellow, and green squiggles.This Brutal House by Niven Govinden

Deep Vellum | August 1, 2023

This novel is “set across the arc of an active protest and the lives behind it—a group of silent Mothers, and one of their children now working for the city.”

 

 

 

Cover of The Boys by John Calvin Hughes, with an image of two dark-haired white boys seen from behind.The Boys by John Calvin Hughes

Regal House Publishing | August 1, 2023

In this novel, a college student “embarks on a series of increasingly bizarre and violent adventures, ultimately resulting in murder.”

 

 

 

 

Yellow cover of It's just skin, silly! featuring a brown splotch with a smiley face drawn on it.It’s Just Skin, Silly! by Nina Jablonski and Holly McGee

Catalyst Press | August 1, 2023

Illustrated by Karen Vermeulen, this children’s book explores “the evolution of skin color, based on a collective 40+ years of peer-reviewed research.”

 

 

 

Seeking Frozen Sound: PostCard Poems by Clark Lunberry

Tofu Ink Arts Press | August 1, 2023

This book contains a collection of postcards that the author’s father “collected and later carefully catalogued, as souvenirs, perhaps as a means of remembering the many places they had been.”

 

 

 

Gray cover of Feeling for Eggs featuring white text and a black-and-white photograph of a house.Feeling for Eggs by Elizabeth Patton

Clare Songbirds Publishing House | August 1, 2023

In this short fiction collection, “Patton’s crisp prose and dry humor invite the reader into a cross-section of a time in history and the women who journey through it.”

 

 

 

Cover of A Shape Produced by a Curve featuring bubble text over a colorful and tan, painterly background.A Shape Produced by a Curve

great weather for MEDIA | August 1, 2023

A Shape Produced by a Curve is “an invigorating collection of contemporary poetry and short fiction from established and emerging writers across the United States and beyond.”

 

 

 

Cover of Island Man, featuring a portrait of a short-haired Black man juxtaposed behind an X and panels of green, blue, and red, with white text reading "Discovering the past to heal the future."Island Man by Joanne Skerrett

Red Hen Press | August 1, 2023

In Skerrett’s novel, “a grieving Hector Peterson and his estranged father Winston Telemacque arrive on the lush island of Dominica in 2017 to spread his mother’s ashes when Hurricane Maria strikes.”

 

 

 

White all-caps text reading "And Dogs to Chase Them" against a hazy landscape image.And Dogs to Chase Them by Ray Trotter

EastOver Press | August 1, 2023

In this short fiction collection, “ordinary humans are pushed to do things in out-of-the-ordinary ways.”

 

 

 

 

Cover of Showboi, Too Deep Too Care, featuring rainbow splotches on a gray landscape background with white text.Showboi: Too Deep Too Care by Jimmy Cullen 

Read Furiously | August 7, 2023

Cullen’s poetry collection “is a journey through sight and sound using powerful poetic narrative.”

 

 

 

Cover of Scrap Bones by Collier Brown, featuring a black background and an X-ray-like human figure standing with one arm out beneath football-shaped objects.Scrap Bones by Collier Brown

Texas Review Press | August 8, 2023

Brown’s poetry collection “reads like a post-pandemic epilogue to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land…. panic disorders, email fatigue, and the spiritual dead end of a 23-and-Me test kit.”

 

 

 

Cover of I'm Here by David Nikki Grouse, featuring a blue-and-white illustration of an owl against a kaleidoscopic rainbow pattern and a black background.I’m Here: Alaska Stories by David Nikki Crouse

Red Hen Press | August 8, 2023

The stories in this collection “dramatize life in the Alaskan interior, describing the difficult lives of people in Fairbanks, Alaska, as they move through the long, brilliant days of summer into the deep winter months.”

 

 

 

Cover of The Beautiful Leaves by Karen Greenbaum-Maya, featuring an image of a thick wall with sixteen small square windows looking out at a tree.The Beautiful Leaves by Karen Greenbaum-Maya

Bamboo Dart Press | August 8, 2023

This collection “consists of poems about the diagnosis, illness, and death of the author’s beloved husband, and her grief.”

 

 

 

Cover of No Last Words by Tara Kelly, featuring a cut-off white-and-blue photograph of a man in a white tux and a woman in a white dress repeated three times vertically.No Last Words by Tara Kelly

EastOver Press | August 8, 2023

Kelly’s memoir follows “her life with Robert Willis, her husband, father of their children, restauranteur, sailor, bon vivant, and alcoholic.”

 

 

 

Cover of Story by Erasmus Yang by Scott Shibuya Brown featuring dark painted lines and a yellow splotch on a pale blue background.Story by Erasmus Yang by Scott Shibuya Brown

JackLeg Press | August 15, 2023

This novel “takes a comic look at one ambitious man’s efforts to promote a fraudulent war memorial, thereby almost precipitating international conflict. ”

 

 

 

Cover of Passport Stamps: Searching the World for a War to Call Home by Sean D. Carberry, featuring a design emulating a U.S. passport.Passport Stamps: Searching the World for a War to Call Home by Sean D. Carberry

Madville Publishing | August 15, 2023

In Carberry’s memoir, a former NPR journalist “seeks solace in the world’s most dangerous places and his pursuit to join the ranks of combat-tested war correspondents.”

 

 

 

Cover of God Mornings, Tiger Nights by Nuha Fariha, featuring an illustration of two tigers prowling around the text, surrounded by a red and flowery borderGod Mornings, Tiger Nights by Nuha Fariha

Game Over Books | August 15, 2023

This debut poetry collection “is an ode to the enduring spirit of the Bengal tiger and a love letter to an immigrant’s journey.”

 

 

 

Cover of Fishing for the Little Pike by Juhani Karila, featuring a green-blue background and an image of a pink fish surfacing its face and tail above a white squiggly wave line.Fishing for the Little Pike by Juhani Karila

Translated from the Finnish by Lola Rogers

Restless Books | August 15, 2023

In this novel, “a young woman’s annual pilgrimage to her home in Lapland to catch an elusive pike in three days is complicated by a host of mythical creatures, a murder detective hot on her trail, and a deadly curse hanging over her head.”

 

 

 

Cover of Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry: Expanded Anniversary Edition by Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison, featuring a hazy landscape image below dark blue and green text.Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry: Expanded Anniversary Edition by Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison

Copper Canyon Press | August 15, 2023

According to Naomi Shihab Nye, “Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry is one of the dearest, most appealing books ever published. These poems are tiny delicious American haiku affectionately exchanged between two friends.”

 

 

 

Cover of Twin A by Amit Majmudar featuring a sonogram of twins on a black and blue background with a heartbeat graph.Twin A by Amit Majmudar

Slant Books | August 15, 2023

This epistolary memoir “recounts the epic story of the open-heart surgeries, complications, and prolonged recoveries that Majmudar’s son survived in infancy and early childhood.”

 

 

 

Cover of Queer Then and Now: The David R. Kessler Lectures, 2002-2020, with yellow block text on a hot pink field.Queer Then and Now

Feminist Press | August 15, 2023

From CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies, edited by Debanuj DasGupta, Joseph Donica, and Margot Weiss, “these intertextual conversations tackle some of today’s most important interventions from the margins.”

 

 

 

Cover of Under a Future Sky by Brynn Saito, with a grayscaled Joshua tree against a pink and yellow dome.Under a Future Sky by Brynn Saito

Red Hen Press | August 15, 2023

In this poetry collection, Saito “takes her readers on a journey with her father to the desert prison at Gila River where, over 80 years ago, her grandparents met and made a life together.”

 

 

 

Cover of Echoes, or The Insistence of Memory by Tom Shachtman, featuring gold text and a crouching gold animal figure on a dark background.Echoes, or The Insistence of Memory by Tom Shachtman

Madville Publishing | August 15, 2023

In this novel, a millennial writer “delves into family mysteries—Civil War–era slaveholding, madness, and theft of artifacts.”

 

 

 

Cover of Heaven, Hell and Paradise Lost by Ed Simon, featuring a white box with red and black text on a red background bifurcated by a black ribbon reading "bookmarked."Heaven, Hell and Paradise Lost by Ed Simon

Ig Publishing | August 15, 2023

In Heaven, Hell and Paradise Lost, Simon “considers Paradise Lost within the scope of his own alcoholism and recovery, the collapse of higher education, the imbecility of the canon wars, the piquant joys of labyrinthine sentences, and the exquisite attractions of Lucifer.”

 

 

 

Cover of The last Year by Jill Talbot, featuring a photograph of a tar-painted highway stretching beneath a storm sky.The Last Year by Jill Talbot

Wandering Aengus Press | August 15, 2023

According to Felicity Jones, “The Last Year is an evocative and heart wrenching portrait of her final days living with her daughter, Indie, who’s about to leave home for university—just as the world begins to shut down in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

 

 

 

Cover of No Evil Is Wide by Randall Watson, featuring an illustration of a bird-headed woman in a black swimsuit and red heels, surrounded by upside-down stick-figure men.No Evil Is Wide by Randall Watson

Madville Publishing | August 15, 2023

This graphic novel is “the violent story of an unnamed narrator, the prostitute he is tasked to ‘find,’ and Carpenter Wells, a man who has lost his soul and wanders, empty, unable to quench his desire.”

 

 

 

Cover of Born on Good Friday by Nathan Graziano, featuring a photograph of a white, brown-haired boy in a blue three-piece suit beside a tree.Born on Good Friday by Nathan Graziano

Roadside Press | August 18, 2023

In this poetry collection, Graziano “addresses his complicated relationship with Catholicism and guilt while staring down his vices and a veritable midlife crisis.”

 

 

 

Cover of Certain Silences by Michael Sharp, featuring four black-and-white photographs scrapbook-style on a black field.Certain Silences by Michael Sharp

Clare Songbirds Publishing House | August 18, 2023

Sharp’s poetic photo album is “filled with the drama, pain, and poignancy of human existence in a time of war.”

 

 

 

Cover of A Paul Gruchow Reader, featuring a photograph of a man in a hat beside a black dog, on a red background.A Paul Gruchow Reader

Shipwreckt Books | August 19, 2023

Edited by Louis Martinelli, this collection is a sampler of Paul Gruchow’s best writing from his many books.

 

 

 

Covier of The Beggar’s Coin: Short Stories of Vietnam & the Epic Poem, The ‘Nam by Lee Henschel, Jr., featuring black text and a black box containing red characters, all on a red field.The Beggar’s Coin: Short Stories of Vietnam & the Epic Poem, The ‘Nam by Lee Henschel, Jr.

Shipwreckt Books | August 21, 2023

This short fiction collection “gives the reader a hard-wired account of what Lee did, what he saw, and more than anything else, what he was thinking during his tour in Vietnam.”

 

 

 

Cover of Viscera by Felice Belle, featuring a purple-scale woman's face with the book's white title where her eyes should be, and the purple lower Manhattan skyline rising where the top of her head should be, juxtaposed against a gray city background.Viscera by Felice Belle

Etruscan Press | August 22, 2023

Viscera is “map and misdirection, evidence and contradiction, free will and fate at the blackjack table. A celebration of the multitudes without and within.”

 

 

 

Cover of Beneath the Sands of Monahans by Charles Alcorn, Featuring a black sedan driving against a yellow desert skyline, inside an asymmetrical shape against a blue and pink background.Beneath the Sands of Monahans by Charles Alcorn

Deep Vellum | August 22, 2023

This novel is “the tale of a stone-cold frontiersman blasting across his beloved Texas highways attempting to retain his sense of daring and independence among friends, family, bookies and under-reported enemies.”

 

 

 

Cover of Ravage & Son by Jerome Charyn, featuring a sepia photograph of a city scene, with the title in color on a billboard on the side of a building.Ravage & Son by Jerome Charyn

Bellevue Literary Press | August 22, 2023

Charyn’s novel “reflects the lost world of Manhattan’s Lower East Side—the cradle of Jewish immigration during the first years of the twentieth century—in a dark mirror.”

 

 

 

Cover of The Big Game is Every Night by Robert Maynor, featuring a black-and-white painting of a barred owl on a branch.The Big Game is Every Night by Robert Maynor

Hub City Press | August 22, 2023

Maynor’s novel “shines a harsh light on the ways American men are steeped in violence, and how hard it can be to shake loose the toxic norms that unchecked can keep us all so far apart.”

 

 

 

Cover of Whoever Drowned Here by Max Sessner, featuring a helmeted crash-test dummy tied to a railroad track extending into the distance.Whoever Drowned Here by Max Sessner

Translated from the German by Francesca Bell

Red Hen Press | August 22, 2023

The poems in this collection “employ a matter-of-fact magical realism to engage the profound, philosophical mysteries of the everyday.”

 

 

 

Cover of The Law of Conservation by Mariana Spada, featuring an abstracted, watercolored, multi-colored bird in flight.The Law of Conservation by Mariana Spada

Translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers

Deep Vellum | August 22, 2023

Spada’s poetry “pays subtle, incisive attention to the inextricable relationship between transformation and conservation: transformation toward the experience of honoring and protecting our deepest and most abiding truths.”

 

 

 

Cover of Evidence of Fire by Jennifer Maloney, featuring red text and an image of a section of a woman's face, in red and gold scribbles, with her eyes downturned.Evidence of Fire by Jennifer Maloney

Clare Songbirds Publishing House | August 25, 2023

This poetry collection “is an unfiltered look at the rawness of life and love, and how to keep going no matter what.”

 

 

 

Cover of Sister Rebel by Theresa Bonpane, featuring a black-and-white image of a num and an image of an older white woman holding a sign with a peace sign above the word "now."Sister Rebel by Theresa Bonpane

Red Hen Press | August 29, 2023

This memoir “charts Bonpane’s journey from a young Irish American woman, to a Maryknoll sister working in Chile, to a dedicated peace activist and director of the Office of the Americas.”

 

 

 

Cover of The Book of Light: Anniversary Edition by Lucille Clifton, featuring a stained glass–style image of a Black man in white robes with his hands outstretched and a Black girl with a braid and a red hood with her fist in the air.The Book of Light: Anniversary Edition by Lucille Clifton

Copper Canyon Press | August 29, 2023

This special anniversary edition of The Book of Light, with an introduction by Ross Gay, “offers new meditations and insights on one of the most beloved voices of the 20th century.”

 

 

 

Cover of Bon Courage: Essays on Inheritance, Citizenship, and a Creative Life by Ru Freeman with a black silhouetted figure of a woman in a knee-length dress and a high hairdo on an orange background.Bon Courage: Essays on Inheritance, Citizenship, and a Creative Life by Ru Freeman

Etruscan Press | August 29, 2023

Freeman’s essay collection “encompasses the big questions of our time: what we mean by courage, how we define our world, how we choose to exist in it.”

 

 

 

Cover of Standing: One Man's Odyssey During the Turbulent '60s by Ernest McMillan, with a black-and-white photograph of a group of Black people in the 1960s linking arms and singing or speaking.Standing: One Man’s Odyssey During the Turbulent ’60s by Ernest McMillan

Deep Vellum | August 29, 2023

This memoir “of one man’s coming-of-age through the Civil Rights movement follows his childhood innocence of white supremacy during the 50s to his awakening as a full-time organizer in the deep south, and the petrifying costs he was bound to pay.”

 

 

 

Cover of Mid/South Sonnets, edited by C.T. Salazar and Casie Dodd, featuring a map of a city along a river with different sections numbered and colored in blue, yellow, pink, and green.Mid/South Sonnets

Belle Point Press | August 29, 2023

Edited by C.T. Salazar and Casie Dodd, this anthology includes “many conventional and experimental approaches to the sonnet form,” by poets from across the American South.

 

 

 

Cover of Rx by Josh Sapan, with the title in a warped black script with warped overlapping blue and grey shapes on a white background.Rx by Josh Sapan

Red Hen Press | August 29, 2023

In this poetry collection, Sapan “guides us through a lifetime of love and loss as he navigates death—of loved ones, of crickets, of houseplants—in an American landscape teeming with wonder and the promise of rebirth.”

 

 

 

Cover of Until Tender by Sam Slupski, featuring illustrations of celery, onion, garlic, pumpkin, beans, and herbs on a beige background.Until Tender by Sam Slupski

Game Over Books | August 29, 2023

In this poetry collection, Slupski “abundantly offers nuance to their own narrative—one day, despite the salt we are born from, we can learn to lavishly enjoy good food and better company.”

 

 

 

Cover of Hellfinder by Paula Stokes, featuring an illustration of a human figure in a blue, icicle-ed cave looking out at an orange mountain and orange sky.Hellfinder by Paula Stokes

Regal House Publishing | August 29, 2023

In this YA novel, “Winter Break turns deadly when Rory Quinn and her treasure-hunter grandmother travel to Iceland in search of an enchanted artifact.”