Support small presses and indie bookstores by picking a read from the list below, which features new books forthcoming in February 2022 from CLMP members.
The Song Cave | February 1, 2022
Estes’s “achingly personal second collection unfolds to reveal an uncertain past, present, and future that is by turns mysterious and beautiful.”
Poetry Is Life: Writing with Yellow Arrow
Yellow Arrow Publishing | February 1, 2022
Poetry Is Life: Writing with Yellow Arrow is a collection of prompts and poems by Ann Quinn and eight poets from Quinn’s monthly workshop sponsored by Yellow Arrow Publishing.
The River Between Hearts by Heather Mateus Sappenfield
Regal House Publishing | February 1, 2022
According to Todd Mitchell, this middle-grade novel features “a spirited heroine with a voice that leaps off the page, a scenic setting I want to spend time in, vivid characters, adventure, swift page-turning chapters, and heart.”
The Man With Eight Pairs of Legs by Leslie Kirk Campbell
Sarabande Books | February 1, 2022
Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, this collection of short stories “is about the ways our bodies are marked by memory, often literally, and the risky decisions we make when pushed to the extreme.”
Henry’s Chapel by Graham Guest
Sagging Meniscus | February 1, 2022
In Guest’s novel “we watch a film by proxy, through the eyes of a narrator who offers a play-by-play account, complete with probing analysis, of Albarb Noella’s Lawnmower of a Jealous God.”
The King’s Touch: Poems by Tom Sleigh
Graywolf Press | February 1, 2022
The poems in Sleigh’s new collection “are charged with a powerful sense of premonition, as if the future is unfolding before us, demanding something greater than the self.”
Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett
Graywolf Press | February 1, 2022
Petterson’s first novel “features a young Arvid Janssen, who is now twelve, on the verge of his teenage years and beginning to understand more about the world and his place in it.”
Men in My Situation by Per Petterson
Translated from the Norwegian by Ingvild Burkey
Graywolf Press | February 1, 2022
Petterson’s new novel “finds Arvid Jansen in a tailspin, unable to process the grief of losing his parents and brothers in a tragic ferry accident.”
Stories of a Life by Nataliya Meshchaninova
Translated from the Russian by Fiona Bell
Deep Vellum | February 1, 2022
Stories of a Life is a “memoir-novel of one young woman’s experiences growing up around, and despite, men in the post-Soviet malaise of the late ‘90s.”
Translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls
Transit Books | February 2, 2022
This final installment of Jon Fosse’s Septology follows “the lives of the two Asles as younger adults in flashbacks: the narrator meets his lifelong love, Ales; joins the Catholic Church; and makes a living by trying to paint away all the pictures stuck in his mind.”
The Little House on Everywhere Street by F. M. A. Dixon
Regal House Publishing | February 4, 2022
This novel for young readers is “a rip-roaring adventure through time and space and the story of a family—and more specifically, about what makes for a happy family.”
Down the Foggy Streets of My Mind-Portal to Dissociation by Kelliane Parker
Nomadic Press | February 5, 2022
Parker’s poetry collection “is an ode to those of us who live with Dissociative Disorders such as PTSD and DID” and “an unapologetic anthem for survivors of sexual violence to rid themselves of being shamed and blamed in silence.”
fool[ishly optimistic] by Katie Aliféris
Nomadic Press | February 5, 2022
This poetry collection is “a deep-dive into soul-shaking, life-changing love” and “an invitation to own, honor, and process the truths of our bravest and most beautiful feelings of the heart.”
Hell/a Mexican by Kevin Madrigal Galindo
Nomadic Press | February 5, 2022
“An appreciation of the tragicomedy that is existing on American soil with foreign roots,” this poetry collection explores “the boundless experience of living and learning through your identity.”
Nomadic Press | February 5, 2022
Subia’s poetry collection is “an ode to all the simple moments of pleasure that pull us back to the shoreline, that despite our surmounting darkness will always and inevitably find our joy again.”
Hot Thicket by Cassandra Rockwood Ghanem
Nomadic Press | February 5, 2022
According to Kimi Sugioka, this poetry collection “succeeds by exposing and deposing the violation of the feminine that permeates our personal and societal mythologies.”
Loss and the Other Rivers that Devour by Gustavo Barahona-López
Nomadic Press | February 5, 2022
In this poetry collection, Barahona-López “struggles with and is shaped by loss and its many hauntings: toxic masculinity, colonial erasures of language and heritage, and the legacy of the United States’ xenophobic immigration policies.”
Nomadic Press | February 5, 2022
Green’s poetry collection “has many recurring themes—non-binary gender, queer and bi+ sexuality, and childhood and psychiatric trauma.”
Nomadic Press | February 5, 2022
This poetry collection “examines through verse uncontrolled corporate power and executives’ need for more at our Earth’s expense.”
Nomadic Press | February 5, 2022
REVENGE BODY “traces moments in the aftermath of survival and rebuilding toward a more livable future for survivors.”
The Body Has Memories by Adrienne Danyelle Oliver
Nomadic Press | February 5, 2022
In this debut chapbook, Oliver “is very aware that the act of remembering is a much greater collective process. It is the historical dialogues among the ancestors and the living.”
Ripped Away by Shirley Reva Vernick
Regal House Publishing | February 8, 2022
According to Jeff Zentner, this novel for young readers is “a crackingly good, gaslit, time travel mystery packed with rich historical detail.”
Autofocus Books | February 8, 2022
In this memoir, “a distinct mind is constantly working over the absurdity, meaninglessness, and mundanity of contemporary life in ways both laugh-out-loud funny and thoughtfully compelling.”
The Bear Woman by Karolina Ramqvist
Translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel
Coach House Books | February 8, 2022
This novel blending autofiction and the essay “takes us on a journey of feminism and literary detective work that spans centuries and continents.”
Save the Village by Michele Herman
Regal House Publishing | February 11, 2022
Herman’s novel is “at once a love story about Greenwich Village and a reflection on a changing world.”
More or Less: Essays from a Year of No Buying by Susannah Q. Pratt
EastOver Press | February 15, 2022
The essays in this collection “explore how contemporary Americans have come to be defined by their possessions.”
Pollak’s Arm by Hans von Trotha
Translated from the German by Elisabeth Lauffer
New Vessel Press | February 15, 2022
Set in 1943 in the Vatican, this novel “illuminates the chasm between civilization and barbarism by spotlighting a little-known figure devoted to knowledge and the power of artistic creation.”
Voodoo Libretto: New and Selected Poems by Tim Seibles
Etruscan Press | February 15, 2022
Seibles’s latest poetry collection “is in many ways a book of memories, a chronicle of both the personal and the political sensibility of a black baby-boomer.”
Desgraciado: (The Collected Letters) by Angel Dominguez
Nightboat Books | February 15, 2022
The epistolary poems in this collection “exorcise and explore the material violence and generational trauma of colonization and systemic racism stored within queer Latinx memory.”
Television, a memoir by Karen Brennan
Four Way Books | February 15, 2022
Television, a memoir is “a hybrid collection of autobiographical pieces, tragi-comic in spirit, that depict a woman’s life evolving through time and culture in fragmentary glimpses.”
The World That the Shooter Left Us by Cyrus Cassells
Four Way Books | February 15, 2022
Cassells “explores, in his most fearless book to date, the brutality, bigotry, and betrayal at the heart of current America.”
Four Way Books | February 15, 2022
In this poetry collection, Redel “interrogates the idea of paradise within the historical context of borders, exile, and diaspora that brought us to the present global migration crisis.”
Hotel Oblivion by Cynthia Cruz
Four Way Books | February 15, 2022
Cruz’s poetry collection “chronicles the subject’s repeated attempts at locating an exit from capitalist society via acts of negative freedom and through engagement with the death drive, whose aim is complete destruction in order to begin all over again.”
Four Way Books | February 15, 2022
Aunt Bird is “an astonishing, hybrid poetry of witness that observes and testifies to social, political, and historical realities through the recovery of one life silenced by the past.”
PLEASURE by Angelo Nikolopoulos
Four Way Books | February 15, 2022
Nikolopoulos’s PLEASURE is “a book-length poem which muses on the phenomenology of solitude in a pastoral landscape, written in a diaristic, lyric mode, where the queer ‘I’ alternately savors the decadence of isolation and stands at the precipice of despair.”
indecent hours by James Fujinami Moore
Four Way Books | February 15, 2022
In this debut poetry collection, “sensual, political, and imagined worlds collide, tracing a history of diaspora and trauma that asks: what do we do in the aftermath of violence, and why do we long to inflict it?”
Four Way Books | February 15, 2022
This posthumous collection gathers “the poems written by beloved science editor and journalist David Corcoran in the latter part of his life.”
Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking by C. T. Salazar
Acre Books | February 15, 2022
In this debut poetry collection, “the speaker is situated in the tradition of Southern literature but reimagines its terrain with an eye on the South’s historic and ongoing violence.”
Systems Thinking with Flowers by Krystal Languell
Fonograf Editions | February 15, 2022
In two sections, this poetry collection “chronicles the complex emotional gymnastics required for existence in male-dominated and colonialist environments, such as professional sports, museums, and other institutions.”
The Almond in the Apricot by Sara Goudarzi
Deep Vellum | February 15, 2022
This debut novel “follows a woman and a young girl a world apart from each other whose paths cross in the most unusual of ways.”
A Circle of Birds by Mark Givens
Bamboo Dart Press | February 16, 2022
According to Susan I. Weinstein, A Circle of Birds is “a gentle children’s book, beautifully illustrated, which tells the story of young Brightful, a bird born into a life of protective feathers.”
No Time for Death by Harris Gardner
Červená Barva Press | February 16, 2022
Gardner’s fourth poetry collection “is divided into three sections: An Argument with Time; Contemplating Mortality Instead of My Navel; and Negotiating for An Afterlife.”
Regal House Publishing | February 18, 2022
This novel “burns with the urgency of its young narrator who bears witness to a world of desperate people flailing inside a broken system.”
On Earth As It Is by Michael Todd Steffen
Červená Barva Press | February 20, 2022
This poetry collection “upholds the wonders of life on our lonely blue planet, bringing new inflections to the voice of eco-poetry, while formal and topical surprise from poem to poem defies genre.”
Siglio Press | February 21, 2022
This “unconventional, illuminated biography, told in the first person in Saint Phalle’s voice and her own hand, dilates large and small moments in Saint Phalle’s remarkable life as an artist who pointedly challenged taboos.”
City of Incurable Women by Maud Casey
Bellevue Literary Press | February 22, 2022
According to Sigrid Nunez, this novel “is a brilliant exploration of the type of female bodily and psychic pain once commonly diagnosed as hysteria—and the curiously hysterical response to it commonly exhibited by medical men.”
Ultramarine by Wayne Koestenbaum
Nightboat Books | February 22, 2022
Ultramarine “distills four years of Koestenbaum’s trance notebooks (2015–2019) into a series of tightly-sewn collage-poems, filled with desiring bodies, cultural touchstones, and salty memories.”
Painting the Streets: Oakland Uprising in the Time of Rebellion
Nomadic Press | February 26, 2022
Painting the Streets: Oakland Uprising in the Time of Rebellion “features a selection of Oakland murals that emerged between May and October 2020 in tandem with the inter/national protests against the police brutality/murder of Black people and systemic-institutional racism in the U.S.”
