Support independent literary publishers by picking a read from the list below, which features new books forthcoming in February 2024 from CLMP members.
If All the World and Love Were Young by Stephen Sexton
Wake Forest University Press | February 1, 2024
In this debut poetry collection, “the video games of his childhood are once again a way to slip through the looking glass; to be in two places at once; to be two people at once.”
Cheryl’s Destinies by Stephen Sexton
Wake Forest University Press | February 1, 2024
This poetry collection is a “thrillingly strange exploration of the comfort of the fantastical when the real is hard to bear.”
Studio of the Voice by Marcia Aldrich
Wandering Aengus Press | February 1, 2024
In these essays, Aldrich “invites readers along for a personal exploration of women’s lives, the complicated love of mothers for daughters and of daughters for mothers, slinky blue dresses and sultry red lipstick, Hollywood beauties and the stories we tell about them.”
Translated from the Spanish by Denise Kripper
Veliz Books | February 1, 2024
This debut novel “explores daughterhood and unearths a family’s intricate past and secretive present.”
Veliz Books | February 1, 2024
This poetry collection “explores motherhood, the dissolution of a marriage, and grief through the lens of a shrinking pandemic space.”
A Domestic Lookbook by JoAnne McFarland
Grid Books | February 6, 2024
In this multimedia collection, McFarland “writes in conversation with the text of Malinda Russell’s A Domestic Cook Book, the first known cookbook published by a Black woman in the United States.”
That Pinson Girl by Gerry Wilson
Regal House Publishing | February 6, 2024
Wilson’s novel is “told against the backdrop of the deprivation of World War I, the tragedies of the influenza epidemic, and the burden of generations of betrayal.”
Midwatch by Jillian Danback-McGhan
Split/Lip Press | February 6, 2024
In this debut short fiction collection, “women service members confront a world that treats their military service as spectacle.”
Glitter Road by January Gill O’Neil
CavanKerry Press | February 6, 2024
These poems “reclaim the vulnerable, intimate parts of a life in transition and celebrate womanhood through awakenings, landscapes, meanders, and possibilities.”
The Bones That Map Us by Maggie Rue Hess
Belle Point Press | February 6, 2024
This poetry chapbook “embodies an intimate yet understated world of grief.”
Home Movies by Michael Wheaton
Fonograf Editions | February 6, 2024
This debut chapbook “is an essay about the day-to-day realities and unrealities of its author’s hypermediated consumer life as a teacher and parent in Orlando, Florida.”
Bellevue Literary Press | February 6, 2024
In James’s novel, “a son’s collapse pulls his two mothers together and apart.”
Corey Fah Does Social Mobility by Isabel Waidner
Graywolf Press | February 6, 2024
Waidner’s novel “is about coming into one’s own, the labor of love, the tendency of history to repeat itself, and what ensues when a large amount of cultural capital is suddenly deposited in a place it has never been before.”
Songs for All Souls by Norbert Krapf
Fernwood Press | February 6, 2024
Krapf’s poems “become a source of solace, a conduit for unburdening sorrow, hurt, and even anger, fostering a profound sense of peace and joy through the act of prayer.”
Sweet Malida: Memories of a Bene Israel Woman by Zilka Joseph
Mayapple Press | February 6, 2024
In these poems Joseph “launches on an imaginative journey, delving into the history, especially the food and culinary customs of this small community of Indian Jews.”
Pale Shadows by Dominique Fortier
Translated from the French by Rhonda Mullins
Coach House Books | February 6, 2024
This novel tells “the story of the trio of women who brought the first collection of Emily Dickinson’s poems out of the shadows.”
Fling Diction by Frances Cannon
Green Writers Press | February 7, 2024
Fling Diction is “a book about the vulnerability of desire; these poems explore different styles of relationships, including queer love, polyamory, familial drama, dog and human companionship, and longing in isolation.”
Full of Eyes Within by Jaye Nasir
The Fabulist | February 8, 2024
Full of Eyes Within is “a haunting parable of society’s brutal neglect of the precious and sacred in our midst.”
The Weird Sister Collection: Writing at the Intersections of Feminism, Literature, and Pop Culture
Feminist Press | February 13, 2024
Edited by Marisa Crawford, this collection features essays that “link contemporary feminism to literature and pop culture.”
Study in Hysteria by Kathleen Collins
Vine Leaves Press | February 13, 2024
The protagonist in this novel “contends with a clandestine and unlikely friendship, a worrisome health scare, a domineering and philandering psychiatrist husband or her own distant daughter.”
Song of My Softening by Omotara James
Alice James Books | February 13, 2024
Song of My Softening “studies the ever-changing relationship with oneself, while also investigating the relationship that the world and nation has with Black queerness.”
Big Mall: Shopping for Meaning by Kate Black
Coach House Books | February 13, 2024
According to Ziya Tong, “Big Mall is a smart, sentimental, and perspective-shifting look at the outsized role that big malls play in modern life.”
A Dangerous Country: An American Elegy by Ron Kovic
Akashic Books | February 13, 2024
Kovic “completes his Vietnam Trilogy with this poignant, inspiring, and deeply personal elegy to America.”
Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit by Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Graywolf Press | February 20, 2024
Sloan’s book is “an electric essay collection about Blackness, art, and dreaming of new possibilities in a time of constriction.”
This New Dark by Chase Dearinger
Belle Point Press | February 20, 2024
This debut novel “explores the haunted, broken hills of eastern Oklahoma, where over the course of just two cold days in November, the residents of Seven Suns will each face their own kind of weird.”
The Maroons by Louis Timagène Houat
Translated from the French by Aqiil Gopee and Jeffrey Diteman
Restless Books | February 20, 2024
The only known novel by Black abolitionist and political exile Louis Timagène Houat, The Maroons is “a fervid account of slavery and escape on nineteenth-century Réunion Island.”
Keith Althaus: New & Selected Poems by Keith Althaus
Grid Books | February 20, 2024
According to John Skoyles, Althaus’s “moral center, perfect ear and ability to summon the infinite from the everyday, are in full display here in poems that show the range and depth of his career.”
She Who Sees The World by Christine Morro
Middle Creek Publishing | February 20, 2024
In this chapbook, Morro “weaves words of landscape, flora & fauna to encapsulate the experience, the eternal wisdom that a place of such raw beauty can confer on the human psyche and spirit.”
Traces: Sand and Snow in Symbiosis
Translated from the French and Arabic by Max de Montaigne and Mohamed Abdellahi Ould BABAH E. Horma Abdeljelil
Middle Creek Publishing | February 20, 2024
Edited by Jeffrey A. Lockwood and Mohamed Abdellahi Ould BABAH E. Horma Abdeljelil, this collection features ekphrastic poetry by various Anglophone and Arabaphone poets “to capture the ephemeral yet enduring essence of our passage.”
Translated from the French by Jordan Stump
Two Lines Press | February 20, 2024
Gisler’s debut novel, “set against our increasingly disjointed world, welcomes readers into a home of shut-ins as cozy as it is claustrophobic.”
Blue Notes by Anne Cathrine Bomann
Translated from the Danish by Caroline Waight
Book*hug Press | February 22, 2024
This novel is “a literary thriller about grief, love, science, and societal norms.”
Survived By: An Atlas of Disappearance by Stephanie Niu
Host Publications | February 24, 2024
These poems “collect fragments of memory to shape an archive of things lost—from the fleeting raptures of childhood to the species nearing and beyond extinction.”
Falcon in the Dive by Leah Angstman
Regal House Publishing | February 27, 2024
For this novel’s protagonist, “the French Revolution is a catalyst for bringing down the corrupt aristocracy and avenging her fallen family, until she unwittingly befriends a high-ranking military nobleman.”
Autumn House Press | February 27, 2024
In his second collection, Barnett “traces a Black man’s lineage through time and space in contemporary America, navigating personal experiences, political hypocrisies, pop culture, social history, astronomy, and language.”
When the Ocean Flies by Heather G. Marshall
Vine Leaves Press | February 27, 2024
In this novel, “what begins as a short trip back to Scotland for a funeral soon becomes a journey that puts adoption, sexuality, and identity on a collision course.”
