Books Launching in December 2021


Support small presses and indie bookstores by picking a read from the list below, which features new books forthcoming in December 2021 from CLMP members.

 

Settler by Maggie Queeney

Tupelo Press | December 1, 2021

According to Jenny Molberg, in this poetry collection Queeney “reimagines form, challenging staid ideas of confinement, to gaze toward an edgy horizon.”

 

 

 

Glass Bikini by Kristin Bock

Tupelo Press | December 1, 2021

Chad Sweeney writes that this poetry collection is “a bewitching revelation of what has been hidden so long as to become dangerous, yet strangely beautiful.”

 

 

 

Only Rumour Survives by David Smith

Coverstory books | December 1, 2021

Smith’s fourth poetry collection “sings with melancholy, humour, wistful reflection and evocative insight.”

 

 

 

Two Bolts by Matt Broaddus

Ugly Duckling Presse | December 1, 2021

Broaddus’s debut full-length poetry collection “explores the experience of Black diaspora as a circulatory process.”

 

 

 

Newsflash Under Fire, Over the Shoulder by Jed Munson

Ugly Duckling Presse | December 1, 2021

This debut poetry chapbook “is a dispatch at the end of a coming of age, one shrouded by barely-functioning systems of meaning-making and thought.”

 

 

 

Vice-royal-ties by Julia Wong Kcomt

Ugly Duckling Presse | December 1, 2021

Translated by Jennifer Shyue, “the poems in this chapbook play with binaries: in power, love, language, country, identity.”

 

 

 

Horses Drawn with Blue Chalk by Rocío Ágreda Piérola

Ugly Duckling Presse | December 1, 2021

This poetry collection translated by Jessica Sequeira “is full of ghostly traces, smudged lines from the past turned with care into new forms.”

 

 

 

Dream Pattering Soles by Miguelángel Meza

Ugly Duckling Presse | December 1, 2021

In this poetry collection translated by Elisa Taber, “words are signifiers without hierarchy within the lyric structure that reference the cosmological Mbyá Guaraní narratives.”

 

 

 

The Wayland Rudd Collection

Ugly Duckling Presse | December 1, 2021

The Wayland Rudd Collection “presents artist Yevgeniy Fiks’s archive of Soviet media images of Africans and African Americans—from propaganda posters to postage stamps—mainly related to African liberation movements and civil rights struggles.”

 

 

 

TO STAND AT THE PRECIPICE ALONE AND REPEAT WHAT IS WHISPERED by Aisha Sasha John

Ugly Duckling Presse | December 1, 2021

This poetry collection was “written primarily over the course of four months in the fall of 2018, when Aisha Sasha John spent time in her native Vancouver.”

 

 

 

Kinderkrankenhaus by Jesi Bender

Sagging Meniscus | December 1, 2021

In this work of hybrid playwriting, Bender “explores neurodiversity, the pathologizing of difference, and the complexity of labels in a world where the unspeaking are seen as unthinking.”

 

 

 

The Collected Essays by Mary Butts

McPherson & Company | December 1, 2021

The Collected Essays is “the latest addition to an ongoing project to bring almost all of Mary Butts’s writings into print,” featuring essays and literary reviews mostly written by Butts between 1932 and 1937.

 

 

 

Journey to Mount Tamalpais by Etel Adnan

Litmus Press | December 1, 2021

This second edition, with nine new drawings by Etel Adnan, was originally published in 1986 and “is at once a deep study and a love letter of and to a mountain.”

 

 

 

Punks: New & Selected Poems by John Keene

The Song Cave | December 1, 2021

Keene’s latest poetry collection “is a generous treasury in seven sections that spans decades and includes previously unpublished and brand new work.”

 

 

 

A Sentimental Hairpin by Flower Conroy

Tolsun Books | December 7, 2021

This poetry collection features “a voice nakedly questioning if it is the body or the mind which is more unkind.”

 

 

 

Milongas by Edgardo Cozarinsky

Archipelago Books | December 7, 2021

Translated by Valerie Miles, this essay collection is a “love letter to tango, and the diverse array of people who give it life.”

 

 

 

penny candy by Jonathan Norton

Deep Vellum | December 7, 2021

This play “follows one family as they seek to balance their responsibilities to their community and to one another.”

 

 

 

 

Rip Tales: Jay DeFeo’s Estocada and Other Pieces by Jordan Stein

Soberscove Press | December 7, 2021

This book traces the material history of a large-scale painting, “sharing previously unpublished archival material and contextualizing the work’s evolution within DeFeo’s artistic practice.”

 

 

 

Firewatch by Jan Verberkmoes

Fonograf Editions | December 7, 2021

This debut poetry collection “lives in the porous recesses of recollection and the uncertainty felt when re-entering traumatic psychological and physical territories.”

 

 

 

Jack Ruby and the Origins of the Avant-Garde in Dallas by Robert Trammell

Deep Vellum | December 7, 2021

In this short fiction collection, “Jack Ruby mythos loops between fact, fiction, and spectacle to satirize Dallas’ place on the world stage.”

 

 

 

Flowers as Mind Control by Laura Minor

BkMk Press | December 7, 2021

In this John Ciardi Prize for Poetry–winning collection, Minor “meditates on consumption, vice, homesickness, memory, family, and the landscape.”

 

 

 

This Is Not Your Country by Amin Ahmad

BkMk Press | December 7, 2021

Winner of the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize, this short story collection follows Indian immigrants as they “discover that the journey to real belonging is much stranger than they had ever imagined.”

 

 

 

How I Married Michele by Gary Gildner

BkMk Press | December 7, 2021

According to Maureen McCoy, in these fifteen personal essays Gildner “engages this world with both a storyteller’s and a poet’s heart.”

 

 

 

Luminous Blue Variables and Other Major Poems by Michelle Boisseau

BkMk Press | December 7, 2021

This collection gathers major poems from Boisseau’s previous collections, as well as uncollected poems and interview excerpts.

 

 

 

Bower Lodge by Paul J. Pastor

Fernwood Press | December 10, 2021

In this debut full-length poetry collection, “each poem speaks with uncommon tenderness toward that which we too often avoid—the demands of love, the heart of a friend, the beauty of the uncontainable wild.”

 

 

 

Epiphany of a Middle-Aged Pilgrim, Essays in Lieu of a Memoir by Peter Wortsman Pelekinesis | December 10, 2021

In his short personal essays, Wortsman considers “childhood fear, chronic insomnia, ironing a shirt, getting a haircut, having a skin cancer removed, travel at home and abroad,” and more.

 

 

 

An Impossible Love by Christine Angot

Archipelago Books | December 14, 2021

Translated by Armine Kotin Mortimer, this novel “describes the inevitable encounter of two young people at a dance in the early 1950s: Rachel and Pierre, her mother and father.”

 

 

 

Paws and His Beautiful Day by Stephany Jenkins

Riverfeet Press | December 14, 2021

Paws is an illustrated children’s book “meant to help parents, educators, therapists, and others teach children about emotions and big feelings.”

 

 

 

April On Olympia by Lorna Dee Cervantes

Marsh Hawk Press | December 15, 2021

According to Camille T. Dungy, Cervantes’s latest poetry collection is “a keenly observed, politically charged, uncompromising tour of the poet’s mind and our world.”

 

 

 

The Solitude of Memory by Michael Miller

Passager Books | December 15, 2021

Of this collection, Miller writes, “At eighty, I hope this new volume becomes a distillation of war, love, and blindness.”

 

 

 

The Wild Language of Deer by Susan Glass

Slate Roof Press | December 25, 2021

According to Alison Luterman, “This book, with its exquisite woodcuts and a poem in Braille translation, will subtly reorient your relationship to our world.”

 

 

 

ASTRS by Karinne Keithley Syers

53rd State Press | December 31, 2021

This pre-middle play by 53rd State Press’s founding editor “is set in the 53rd State of the Union, zone of the sixth chrysanthemum.”