Support independent literary publishers by picking a read from the list below, which features new books forthcoming in February 2023 from CLMP members.
The Palace of Unbearable Feeling by Anne Riesenberg
Lily Poetry Review Books | February 1, 2023
This collection of concrete poetry “explores the materiality of language while addressing personal and collective issues of loss, right action, consciousness, and possible avenues of renewal.”
Downtime Gunpowder Press | February 1, 2023
Soto’s latest book of poetry is a “collection of 47 new poems written during and inspired by the pandemic.”
Artemis Sparke and the Sound Seekers Brigade by Kimberly Behre Kenna
Fitzroy Books | February 2, 2023
In this children’s book, Artemis Sparke “heads to the nearby salt marsh to hang out with the birds, plants and mollusks who don’t make a big deal of her stutter.”
Particles of a Stranger Light by Anthony Sutton
Veliz Books | February 3, 2023
Sutton’s debut poetry collection “employs a wide array of approaches and forms to obsessively dissect issues of memory, identity, culture, and history.”
Reading Berryman to the Dog by Wendy Taylor Carlisle
Belle Point Press | February 7, 2023
Originally published in 2000, Carlisle’s debut collection “explores the weight of memory, the risks of love, and the life that remains possible through loss.”
Meet Me at the Lighthouse by Dana Gioia
Graywolf Press | February 7, 2023
In this poetry collection, Gioia “invites us back to old Los Angeles, where the shabby nightclub of the title beckons us into its noirish immortality.”
Red Hen Press | February 7, 2023
In this memoir featuring artwork by Patricia Wakida, Masumoto discovers “a ‘lost’ aunt, separated from [his] family due to racism and discrimination against the disabled.”
The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier
Translated from the French by Daniel Levin Becker
Transit Books | February 7, 2023
Mauvignier’s novel is “a deft unraveling of the stories we hide from others and from ourselves, a gripping tale of the violent irruptions of the past into the present.”
Falling Hour by Geoffrey D. Morrison
Coach House Books | February 7, 2023
According to Jen Craig, “In Falling Hour, an immensity is condensed into a single day, a single park, a single empty frame.”
The Path Home by A. J. Pellegrino
Read Furiously | February 7, 2023
The sixth novella in Read Furiously’s One ‘n Done series is “a queer reimagining of the classic Persephone and Hades myth filled with magic and true love.”
This Side of the Divide: New Lore of the American West
Baobab Press | February 7, 2023
This Side of the Divide: New Lore of the American West is the second installment in the anthology series “attempting to capture the newness, vastness, territoriality, and sense of transience alive in the American West.”
Insomniac Sentinel by Abraham Smith
Baobab Press | February 7, 2023
Smith’s poetry collection “is a collision of meter, speed, and experience into auditory sensations that range from the elegiac to the ecstatic to the venomous.”
Sterling Karat Gold by Isabel Waidner
Graywolf Press | February 7, 2023
This novel “explores the phantasmagoric nature of contemporary life, especially for nonbinary migrants, and daringly revises how solidarity and justice might be sought and won.”
Game Over Books | February 7, 2023
Weiss’s second full-length collection “explores faith, death, body, queerness, marriage, and blockbuster movies.”
CavanKerry Press | February 7, 2023
Boy is “a sequence of poems that explores how death and loss color memory and influence the ways family members relate to each other and to their shared history.”
The Poetics of Wrongness by Rachel Zucker
Wave Books | February 7, 2023
In her first book of critical nonfiction, Zucker “explores wrongness as a foundational orientation of opposition and provocation.”
The Goddess Fortune: To Proper Is to Die by R. L. Edmondson Vance
Tofu Ink Arts Press | February 9, 2023
The poetry in this collection “is inspired from the found object and the objet d’art: fortune cookies, passing billboards, teenage diaries, made up songs sung around the house, overheard conversations, mistaken musical lyrics from childhood, and all other manner of serendipitous encounters.”
Sex with My Family by Jessica Anne
Long Day Press | February 14, 2023
This lyric essay collection includes “musings on infertility, cows, longing & freedom by an anemic woman in the winter of her 41st year.”
electric infinities by Ashley Cline
Variant Literature | February 10, 2023
This poetry chapbook “grants readers reprieve in a landscape of wildflowers and feral gardens, bites of summer peaches and sips of dandelion wine.”
Translated from the Croatian by Jennifer Zoble
Feminist Press | February 14, 2023
In this short fiction collection, “eleven stories interweave feminist critique and science fiction into an irreverent portrait of our past, present, and future.”
Black Metamorphoses by Shanta Lee Gander
Etruscan Press | February 14, 2023
This poetry collection “explores the Black psyche, body, and soul, through inversion and brazen confrontation of work that has shaped Western civilization.”
August or Forever by Ona Gritz
Fitzroy Books | February 14, 2023
This children’s book is, according to Gayle Brandeis, “a beautiful novel about sisterhood, about art, about hearts broken and hearts mended.”
Sing, Nightingale by Marie Hélène Poitras
Translated from the French by Rhonda Mullins
Coach House Books | February 14, 2023
According to Sonia Sarfati, this novel is “a tale that is both beautiful and cruel, like only fairy tales can be. One that is deep and rich in what is found within and between the lines.”
I’m Always so Serious by Karisma Price
Sarabande Books | February 14, 2023
This debut poetry collection, anchored in New Orleans and New York City, “is an extended meditation on Blackness, on family, on loss.”
The Views from Mount Hunger by Marjorie Ryerson
Green Writers Press | February 14, 2023
The poems in this collection “look in a broad array of directions, with subject matter that covers topics ranging from the natural world to climate change, from reflections on the past to healing, hope, and humor about the present.”
Subterranean Address: New & Selected Poems by Judith Skillman
Deerbrook Editions | February 14, 2023
According to David Kirby, this poetry collection “is a guide to everything we could possibly know and see in this beautiful, crazy cosmos.”
Texas Review Press | February 15, 2023
Audsley’s debut poetry collection examines “the consequences of the international transracial adoptee experience—her own” and “finds more questions than solid answers.”
Texas Review Press | February 15, 2023
This poetry collection “bears witness to traumas—cultural, personal, and spiritual—as well as moments of revelatory transport.”
Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers by Kelly McQuain
Texas Review Press | February 15, 2023
McQuain’s poems “are far roaming in setting and far ranging in style, depicting the richness of a rural West Virginia upbringing as well as contemporary adulthood in the big city and abroad.”
The Ice Sings Back by M Jackson
Green Writers Press | February 20, 2023
Jackson’s debut novel is “a story of how four women make sense of the everyday extraordinary traumas that contour their lives, and how their individual strengths come together to sing a fierce hymn of survival.”
Belle Point Press | February 21, 2023
In this poetry chapbook, “the wildness of the Arkansas Ozarks comes vividly to life” and “motherhood becomes a song tinged with grief.”
Until All You See Is Sky by George Choundas
EastOver Press | February 21, 2023
This essay collection is “a report from the front lines of a first-generation American life: growing up as the outsider, parenting without a clue, and persevering in plague times.”
What’s Next? Short Fiction in Time of Change
Green Writers Press | February 21, 2023
This short fiction anthology, edited by Sharyn Skeeter, asks, “‘what’s next’ in our relationships, environment, societies, politics, and everything else that touches our lives.”
Accidental Garden by Catherine Esposito Prescott
Gunpowder Press | February 21, 2023
According to Emma Tresses, Prescott “assembles a glowing collection of poems that seam the quotidian with the ethereal; for this poet, they are one and the same.”
At the Hour between Dog and Wolf by Tara Ison
Ig Publishing | February 21, 2023
According to Robert Olen Butler, this is “a deeply resonant work of art driven by the central yearning in the greatest literary narratives: the yearning for a self, for an identity, for a place in the world.”
Return to Latvia by Marina Jarre
Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein
New Vessel Press | February 21, 2023
In this “part travelogue, part memoir, part ruminative essay,” Jarre “looks for traces of her murdered father whom she never bid farewell.”
God’s Ex Girlfriend by Gloria Beth Amodeo
Ig Publishing | February 21, 2023
According to Anne Nelson, God’s Ex-Girlfriend is “a wry, poignant, and unflinchingly honest memoir that unveils the cult-like operations of Campus Crusade for Christ.”
Divination with a Human Heart Attached by Emily Stoddard
Game Over Books | February 21, 2023
The poems in this debut collection “challenge the space between the divine and the stories we invent—or inherit—about what to believe and why.”
In the Fall They Leave by Joanna Higgins
Regal House Publishing | February 21, 2023
In the Fall They Leave is “a wartime story of moral courage. It is also a love story in which two children figure as well as a beloved teacher, a German lieutenant, and a piano.”
The World Itself: Consciousness and the Everything of Physics by Ulf Danielsson
Bellevue Literary Press | February 21, 2023
In The World Itself, an acclaimed theoretical physicist “makes a lucid and passionate case that it is nature, full of beauty and meaning, which must compel us.”
Voyager: Constellations of Memory by Nona Fernández
Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer
Graywolf Press | February 21, 2023
In this lyric essay inspired by the mission of the Voyager spacecrafts, “Fernández finds a new container for her profound and surreal reckonings with the past.”
Fonograf Editions | February 21, 2023
Early Works “collects Alice Notley’s first four out of print poetry collections, along with 80 pages of previously uncollected material.”
The Speak Angel Series by Alice Notley
Fonograf Editions | February 21, 2023
The Speak Angel Series “is composed of six full-length books in various forms but towards the achievement of a unifying epic narrative in which the poet, as character, leads all the souls of all the living and dead to a point zero where the remaking of the cosmos can be performed.”
Autumn House Press | February 24, 2023
The characters in this short fiction collection “stand ready with their dogs (or memories of them), to take the next step.”
Moments in Place by Paul B. Roth
Rain Mountain Press | February 27, 2023
In this collection of prose poetry, Roth “threads the reader right through the eye of his natural surroundings, where he not only allows us to witness nature but become part of it.”
A House Called Tomorrow: 50 Years of Poetry
Copper Canyon Press | February 28, 2023
This anthology, edited by Michael Wiegers and celebrating Copper Canyon Press’s 50th anniversary, “is a collection of beloved poems from books spanning half a century.”
