Support independent literary publishers by picking a read from the list below, which features new books forthcoming in December 2025 from CLMP members.
Red Ogre Review | December 1, 2025
ISBN: 9798276797397
This collection is Red Ogre Review’s “fourth yearly anthology of poetry and prose poetry, spanning magazine issues from October 2024 through September 2025.”
Indifferent Cities by Ángel García
Tupelo Press | December 1, 2025
ISBN: 978-1961209329
Indifferent Cities “traverses both distance and time to reconcile the most confounding reality of family: our people, sometimes, are the people we know least.”
The Witness of Nina Mvungi and Other Stories by Esther Karin Mngodo
Translated from the Swahili by Jay Boss Rubin
Hanging Loose Press | December 1, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9913377-5-5
“Whether depicting a world of spirits behind the proverbial curtain, a dystopian future in which the sun is about to expire, or a sweltering-hot present-day fish market,” this short fiction collection “pushes beyond allegory and didacticism into the rich ambiguity of lived experience.”
Marsh Hawk Press | December 1, 2025
ISBN: 9798987617786
In this anthology edited by Susan Terris and Sandy McIntosh, poets “recall how they found their beginnings” in memoirs that contain “essential information about the development of the craft.”
The Other Steve Schrader: New and Selected Writing by Steven Schrader
Hanging Loose Press | December 1, 2025
ISBN: 9798991337731
Schrader’s book of stories “offers a vivid memoir in vignettes that captures both the arc of his own life and the portrait of a shifting 20th century New York.”
Book of Exemplary Women by Diana Xin
YesYes Books | December 1, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-946303-09-7
In this short fiction collection, “a ghost is passed across three generations of women as they navigate unspoken regrets and unfulfilled desires.”
An Anthology of Rural Stories by Writers of Color
EastOver Press | December 2, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-958094-67-9
The stories in this anthology edited by Deesha Philyaw “deftly mine the psychological landscape of their characters and highlight the complicated experiences of those living in the rural parts of the US.”
Orison Books | December 2, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-949039-69-6
The tenth volume of this multi-genre anthology—edited by Luke Hankins, Susanne Paola Antonetta, and Nathan Poole—collects “the finest spiritually engaged writing,” with both new and reprinted work from the preceding year.
Sikodiwa by Carl Lorenz Cervantes
North Atlantic Books | December 2, 2025
ISBN: 9798889842637
In his debut book of nonfiction, Cervantes “draws from Filipino folklore, language, and culture to reorient toward an Indigenous worldview: one that rejects being seen as a passive object in history.”
Some Monologues by Tyler Coburn
Wendy’s Subway | December 2, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9909878-7-6
According to Jill Magid, the monologues in Coburn’s book feature “a shared pursuit: how to locate agency within constraint, and how to turn the administrative or the technological into a site of intimacy.”
Finding Ramanta by Robyn Dabney
Fitzroy Books | December 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781646036219
According to Adriana Allegri, in this YA novel readers “will find enormous inspiration in Klarke’s determination and passionate resolve to uncover the truth despite the personal cost, anguish, and peril.”
Vine Leaves Press | December 2, 2025
ISBN: 978-3-98832-236-4
According to Sara Bolder, this novel “makes the case with passion, spirit and humor, for the full personhood of the elderly and disabled.”
Tributaries: Essays & Verses Flowing From & Celebrating Favorite Poems by Kurt Luchs
Sagging Meniscus | December 2, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-963846-47-8
In this book of poems and essays, Luchs “chooses twenty poems that hold vital meaning for him as a reader and writer—many, but not all, recognized as classics—and pays twofold tribute to them.”
missing e.: Cut-up Poems from Tumblr by Simone Parker
Fernwood Press | December 2, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-59498-177-7
According to Christian Wheeler, this poetry book is “a page-turning tribute to the golden age of Tumblr—infused with fresh depth and emotional clarity.”
Slant Books | December 2, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-63982-208-9
Schaap’s memoir details his father’s journey “from Minnesota’s Young Farmer of the Year to financial failure in the farm crisis to a bed in the neurology wing of Mayo Clinic.”
Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery by Vera Hadzic
Anvil Press | December 5, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-77214-252-5
The poems in this debut collection “strive to mediate the inside and the outside of the self, probing at the anxious impulses to contain oneself and, at the same time, break open.”
Nothing But Time: Conversations with Peter Mettler on Life and Cinema by José Teodoro
Anvil Press | December 5, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-77214-253-2
According to Atom Egoyan, this book of conversations between Teodoro and filmmaker Peter Mettler is “a unique cinematic/literary achievement, combining the two forms with a fascinatingly harnessed alchemy.”
So We Blush Less When the Phone Rings by Mark Wagstaff
Anvil Press | December 5, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-77214-251-8
This novel imagines a future world “where differences hinge on whether we’re organic or customised, whether we’re physical creatures or a controlled visualisation.”
Insert Coin by Joshua Zelesnick
Finishing Line Press | December 6, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-88838-834-1
According to Bradley J. Fest, Insert Coin is “indelibly shaped by the atrocities committed by the United States during its interminable War on Terror while meditating on the structures that underlie that violence, including the cultural form of the video game.”
Fernwood Press | December 9, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-59498-181-4
In this poetry collection, “confessional poetry, fictional characters, and lyric essay interweave in cosmic force, as the author learns what it means to be a mother.”
Emergent Dharma: Asian American Buddhist Feminists on Practice, Identity, and Resistance
North Atlantic Books | December 9, 2025
ISBN: 9798889842330
The essays in this anthology edited by Sharon A. Suh “reclaim a vibrant feminist Dharma against whitewashing, patriarchy, and model-minority stereotypes.”
All We Are Given We Cannot Hold by Robert Fanning
Dzanc Books | December 9, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-938603-50-1
According to Diane Seuss, the poems in this book “get at both the source and antidote to loneliness, to an unlocking of the soul that the rare lyric poem can articulate and forge.”
Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir by Molly Gaudry
Rose Metal Press | December 9, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-941628-37-9
According to Melanie Rae Thon, in this hybrid-genre book Gaudry “exposes the illimitable unknowability of her astonishing selves, the endless potential for reinvention, and the strange gifts of isolation and fracture.”
Skylighting by Charles Hansmann
Regal House Publishing | December 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781646036301
In this novella, narrator Nick Nacht “finds himself adrift, seeking emotional renewal among strangers in unfamiliar places” after his wife’s death.
Black Ocean | December 9, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-965154-09-0
This poetry collection “pays exquisite attention to the sounds of life, attuned to the musicality of living and the unspoken poems that present themselves to those who exercise a poet’s attention.”
PHX Oasis Press | December 10, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9937406-0-7
This anthology featuring fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from twenty-five Arizona writers explores “what we chase, what we flee from, and what slips through our fingers despite our best efforts.”
Purple Ink Press | December 11, 2025
ISBN: 9798989279364
This collection of haikus and food photography is “a love letter—to the poet’s girlfriend, her Japanese heritage, and to the act of mindful eating itself.”
The Insulted Plays by Andrei Kureichik
Translated from the Russian by John Freedman
Laertes | December 11, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-942281-32-0
According to Valleri Robinson, “these plays evoke the horrors of the 21st century while maintaining a belief in our capacity for hope and love.”
YesYes Books | December 15, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-946303-10-3
Ko’s poetry collection is a “tribute to Korean diaspora, the inheritance of storytelling, and the enduring survival of lineage that is both searing and tender.”
Summer of the Oystercatchers by Bryana Joy Beaird
Fernwood Press | December 16, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-59498-188-3
Beaird’s debut poetry collection “speaks to the historic and contemporary suppression of women’s experiences and the roles religion and tradition have played in perpetuating those norms.”
Futures: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab Theater
Translated from the Arabic by Hisham Ben Khamsa, Jonas Elbousty, Caline Nasrallah, and Clem Naylor
53rd State Press | December 16, 2025
ISBN: 979-8986581491
According to Hilary Plum, these six plays by Yasser Abu Shaqra, Wael Kadour, Arzé Khodr, Rim Mejdi, Sami Nasr, and Leila Toubel “are preparing their audience, with love and imagination and lucid horror, for our own futures, grabbing our hands as the train picks up speed.”
As I Was Saying by Cecilia Konchar Farr and Janie Sisson
Dalkey Archive Press | December 16, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-62897-458-4
This scholarly reading companion to Stein’s novel The Making of Americans is “proof that The Making of Americans is not unreadable as charged, and offers accessible entry to the experimental writing Stein valued and promoted most—the original modernist novel.”
A Century in the Making: A Hundred-Year Journey from Refugee to American by Peter Lindenfeld
Catalyst Press | December 16, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-963511-32-1
Lindenfeld’s memoir “unfolds the story of immigration, assimilation, destruction and rebirth of home and relationships in post war North America.”
The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein
Dalkey Archive Press | December 16, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-62897-466-9
In this novel, Stein “sets out to tell ‘a history of a family’s progress,’ radically reworking the traditional family saga novel to encompass her vision of personality and psychological relationships.”
Hand Over Hand Over the Edge of the World by Patrick Swaney
YesYes Books | December 16, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-946303-01-1
In these prose poems, “characters often navigate situations that seem built on a fundamental misunderstanding as they try to make sense of their place in a reality misaligned to their intentions.”
fwp 2025: an anthology of queer writing
fifth wheel press | December 17, 2025
ISBN: 9781969406010
This anthology features works by Rosie Accola, Rayne Alarcio, Chaia Alford, Stephanie Anderson, sterling-elizabeth arcadia, and more—all originally published in fifth wheel press’s online anthologies, brainrot and effervescent.
What’s After Making Love by Sharon Charde
Fernwood Press | December 18, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-59498-183-8
According to Alison Powell, in this poetry collection Charde “mines the depths of private grief to show how such experiences lend a kind of clarity to daily living.”
Finishing Line Press | December 22, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-89990-276-5
According to Nabila Lovelace, Prakash’s collection “puts memory under a microscope, equally asking how one lives with the map memory makes of our lives, forgetting’s barren land, and time’s oscillating hand.”
Broken Blossoms by Maryann Hurtt
Fernwood Press | December 23, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-59498-190-6
According to Laura Pritchett, this poetry collection “considers the ability to find wholeness from broken bits, solace in grief, and sincere joy in the wondrous blossoms offered to us each day.”
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions | December 30, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-962405-58-4
“With narratives and lyrics of self-discovery and ecstatic intimacy, of love, loss, and public mourning,” this poetry collection “invites the reader on expeditions where motion tends toward stillness, and stillness toward a deepening.”
The Ordering of Stars by Kersten Christianson
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions | December 30, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-962405-52-2
This poetry collection “invites readers to follow where language leads and glimpse the good fortune hidden in the shimmer of the natural world.”
buck naked is the opposite of hate by Joe Cottonwood
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions | December 30, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-962405-60-7
According to Roderick Bates, in this collection Cottonwood “finds, embraces, and shares with us that bit of the sacred which is woven into the ordinary.”
Black Square Editions | December 30, 2025
ISBN: 9798986037066
According to Albert Mobilio, this collection of prose poetry “soars aloft in an audioscape of dictions—noirish deadpan, cowboy professor, surrealist graffiti, hermeneutical slang, and lonely late-night radio preaching.”
Frost Warning by Kristine Williams
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions | December 30, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-962405-58-4
The poems in this collection “linger in the rhythms of cooking, gardening, cleaning, marriage, and motherhood, while also opening to the changed bond with a newly widowed father.”
