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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
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.”
