Books Launching in August 2025


Support independent literary publishers by picking a read from the list below, which features new books forthcoming in August 2025 from CLMP members.

 

The Tenderness of Glass by Jodi Lin

new words {press} | August 1, 2025
ISBN: 978-1968528003

According to Eileen Myles, Lin’s debut collection—a “part memoir and part manifesto” featuring narrative verse and prose poetry—is “rapturous, ornate, straight-shooting, dirty and fun, contemporary and ancient.”

 

 

 

Force Drift: An Essay in the Epic by Jeffrey Pethybridge

Tupelo Press | August 1, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-961209-56-5

In this poetry collection, Pethybridge “confronts the ethical disaster of the torture program that the United States used to advance the so-called global war on terror.”

 

 

 

A Map to Mercy by Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

Orison Books | August 5, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-949039-66-5

According to Paul Swanson, Andrew’s “effortless prose carries the reader into the beating heart of contemplative practice, honoring the wisdom of religious traditions that call to her in the hubbub of daily life” in this book-length essay.

 

 

 

Happy New Years by Maya Arad

Translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen
New Vessel Press | August 5, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-954404-34-2

“Comprising five decades of correspondence,” this epistolary novel weaves together its protagonist’s “high hopes and deep disappointments as she navigates relationships, marriage, divorce, single motherhood, financial struggles, and professional ups and downs.”

 

 

 

The Book of Homes by Andrea Bajani

Translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris
Deep Vellum | August 5, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64605-381-0

This novel tells the story of “a man and his friendships, his upbringing, his discovery of sex and poetry, his detachment from a self-destructive family, and his liberation from the furniture that has followed him through 20 years of moves.”

 

 

 

Love & Murder by Katie Christine Bishop

Black Heron Press | August 5, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-936364-46-6

This novel is “a treatise on the nature of humanity (as portrayed by cats) under the stress of environmental degradation.”

 

 

 

And Then Came the Blues: My Journey from Survivor to NYPD Detective First Grade and Beyond by Katrina Brownlee

Akashic Books | August 5, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-63614-236-4

In this memoir, Brownlee tells her story “of self-empowerment, of healing generational trauma, and of turning pain into hope for herself and her community.”

 

 

 

Henrytown by Chris Erickson

Dzanc Books | August 5, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-938603-33-4

This novel is a “promiscuous, hive-minded folklore which speaks in many voices at once, past the human, and knows that every town is its own living breathing superorganism.”

 

 

 

Habitat by Case Q. Kerns

Black Lawrence Press | August 5, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-62557-163-2

This debut novel “invites us to witness a near-future dystopia filled with cloned animals, a sponsorship-based education system, and a subculture obsessed with body transplants as performance art.”

 

 

 

Your Actual Life May Vary by Linda Lenhoff

Santa Fe Writers Project | August 5, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-951631-45-1

This novel “delves into valley life vs. city life, child-stealing, eerie theme parks, and overpriced real estate built on land that basically tends to give way.”

 

 

 

This Eye Is for Seeing Stars by Christine Poreba

Orison Books | August 5, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-949039-59-7

The poems in this collection “offer a mother’s tender ruminations as she watches her child encounter the complexities of the world, moving through cities in the speaker’s present and past, through loss and a child’s imagination.”

 

 

 

Hamburg Noir

Akashic Books | August 5, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-63614-115-2

The stories in this anthology edited by Jan Karsten are “as diverse as the writers’ backgrounds, resulting in a varied depiction of Hamburg as a colorful hodgepodge of people inhabiting a lively city of millions.”

 

 

 

Toward a Living Archive of African Poetry: Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani on the New-Generation African Poets Chapbook Series

Akashic Books | August 5, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-63614-255-5

“Celebrating ten years of their dedication to publishing chapbooks by emerging African poets,” this collection “offers a glimpse into Abani and Dawes’s editorial labor and conceptualization of an inclusive African poetic.”

 

 

 

Saint Consequence by Michael M. Weinstein

Alice James Books | August 5, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-949944-74-7

According to Katie Peterson, this poetry collection is a “book of 21st century transits—out of an iconic American childhood, towards the culture and language of Russia, out of one gender and into another.”

 

 

 

An Interview with Michael Martone by Matt Baker

Bull City Press | August 12, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-949344-45-5

This novel consists of interviews with Michael Martone, who is “either contemporary literature’s most notorious prankster, innovator, or mutineer.”

 

 

 

The Elsewhere Oracle by Michele Battiste

Black Lawrence Press | August 12, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-62557-193-9

This poetry collection tells the story of a “forgotten town: the history of its disappearance, the ghosts that haunt its streets, and the monsters that linger in the woods and the lake.”

 

 

 

Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine by Stanley Crawford

Deep Vellum | August 12, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-62897-562-8

This novel is a “masterpiece of modern domestic life, a comic novel of closeness and difficulty, miscommunication and stubborn resolve.”

 

 

 

Bloomland by John Englehardt

Dzanc Books | August 12, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-938603-34-1

This novel “examines the social roots and community fallout of a shooting at a fictional southern university.”

 

 

 

Bodies Found in Various Places / Cuerpos encontrados en varias partes by Elvira Hernández

Translated from the Spanish by Daniel Borzutzky and Alec Schumacher
Cardboard House Press | August 12, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-945720-37-6

This anthology of poems written between 1981 and 2016 “brings the award-winning contemporary Chilean poet’s work of love, survival, persistence, disturbance, amazement, and delight to a new audience.”

 

 

Flowers on a Train by Laurel Benjamin

Sheila-Na-Gig Editions | August 15, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-962405-26-3

This poetry collection “traverses a natural world both real and imagined, where we hunger for something beyond the boundaries of loss.”

 

 

 

A Man Made of Stories by George Franklin

Sheila-Na-Gig Editions | August 15, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-962405-28-7

The poems in this collection “take the reader on journeys through experiences that shape both the literal self—born on one date, dead on another—and the imagined self that continues in the lines of a poem.”

 

 

 

In Search of a Face by Aurélia Lassaque

Translated from the French and Occitan by Madeleine Campbell
White Pine Press | August 15, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-945680-81-6

According to Hélène Cardona, this narrative poem “revisits Homer’s ancient myth through dialogues like intertwined songs between Ulysses and the nameless She, where they echo and haunt one another.”

 

 

Shaking Music from the Angry Air by Michael Dwayne Smith

Sheila-Na-Gig Editions | August 15, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-962405-23-2

The poems in this collection “sling us straight into the American southwest world of a boy-to-man quest through cities, coasts, and deserts.”

 

 

 

If The Train Arrives by Heather Fellin Tierney

Vine Leaves Press | August 16, 2025
ISBN: 978-3-98832-165-7

This novel follows encounters between a “neurodivergent ticketmaster struggling with his ended marriage, a willful teenager searching for truth about her past, and a teacher harboring a painful regret.”

 

 

 

How to Be Unmothered: A Trinidadian Memoir by Camille U. Adams

Restless Books | August 19, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-63206-395-3

“Mapping the fault lines between mother and child,” Adams’s memoir “weaves the Caribbean island’s history of colonial violence with her own family’s legacy of abandonment.”

 

 

 

Whites: Stories by Mark Doten 

Graywolf Press | August 19, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64445-290-5 

The short stories in this collection “spotlight the self-serving logic through which their characters struggle to make sense of, and take control of, the narrative of our time.”

 

 

 

Dwelling by Allison Joseph

Red Hen Press | August 19, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-63628-364-7

In this collection, Joseph is “concerned with the inevitable search for home—as a woman, as a person of color, and as a poet.”

 

 

 

The Science of Understanding by Polly Kronenberger

Catalyst Press | August 19, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-963511-13-0

In this novel, “scientist Rory Greene finds herself playing the part of sleuth, searching for one of her company’s kidnapped primates as the authorities’ disinterest and dragging feet make life unbearable.”

 

 

 

How My Father Became a Boat by John Miller

Fernwood Press | August 19, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-59498-169-2

The poems in this collection “speak to the speaker’s individual loss as well as to the collective grief of recognizing America’s frailties.”

 

 

 

Shedding Season by Jane Morton

Black Lawrence Press | August 19, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-62557-176-2

“With language, image, and narrative always in flux,” the poems in this collection “inhabit the grey areas between desire and disgust, safety and survival.”

 

 

 

The Barefoot Followers of Sweet Potato Grace by Megan Okonsky

Lanternfish Press | August 19, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-941360-89-7

According to Publishers Weekly, “with its humorous, slice-of-life portrayal of rural Texas and sweet sapphic romance,” this novel “is sure to charm.”

 

 

 

Tender Voyeur by Donald Platt

Grid Books | August 19, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-946830-39-5

This novella-in-verse “tells the story of the author’s coming out as bisexual, as related through meditations on the work of Sargent, whom several scholars now think may well have been gay, though closeted.”

 

 

 

In the Evening, We’ll Dance–A Memoir in Essays on Love & Dementia by Anne-Marie Erickson

Holy Cow! Press | August 20, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-66640-695-5

In this memoir, Erickson “lays bare the onset and eventual passing of her husband from dementia.”

 

 

 

The Jicker Man by Ben Mears

Wizard’s Tower Press | August 21, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-917950-04-6

According to Joanne Hall, “a boy and his dog journey across very-far-future Britain, a land crawling with monsters and brimming with magic, in this enthralling and heartfelt novel.”

 

 

 

Dear Vase Already Shattered Against The Fragile Floor by Michael Leong

Black Square Editions | August 25, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9860370-5-9

In this book, Leong’s “surrealist poetry wagers upon an ethics and aesthetics of disorientation.”

 

 

 

The Grand Valley by Morgan Meis

Slant Books | August 26, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-63982-199-0

In this book of art criticism, Meis “explores the art of Joan Mitchell and in particular one of her crowning achievements, the Grand Valley series.”

 

 

 

Serge by Yasmina Reza

Translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman
Restless Books | August 26, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-63206-401-1

In this novel, Reza “masterfully portrays the messiness of family, where affection and resentment intertwine and the weight of a shared past looms large.”

 

 

 

Hothouse Bloom by Austyn Wohlers

Hub City Press | August 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798885740500

This novel “follows a young woman who renounces her painting career and all her human relationships to become one with her late grandfather’s apple orchard.”

 

 

 

The Sea-Stone Sword by Joel Cornah

Wizard’s Tower Press | August 28, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-917950-08-4

According to Joanne Hall, this novel is a “refreshingly unusual take on swashbuckling heroic fantasy.”

 

 

 

Wayward Creatures by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes

Host Publications | August 30, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-7376050-8-9

According to Oliver Baez Bendorf, the poems in this collection “do not flinch from obliteration, chronic illness, or state violence—but they do not end there.”

 

 

 

Scouts’ Honor by Carlos E. Cortés

Inlandia Institute | August 31, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-955969-36-9

In this debut novel, “the death of Boy Scout Harry Vincent would wreak havoc on the lives of those who tried to put the death behind them.”