Support independent literary publishers by picking a read from the list below, which features new books forthcoming in February 2026 from CLMP members.
How to Disappear and Why by Kyle Minor
Sarabande Books | February 1, 2026
ISBN: 978-1956046144
“Considering a wide scope of cultural, historical, spiritual, and philosophical figures and ideas,” this book “assembles a collection of essays centered on the concept of disappearance.”
Foofaraw Press | February 1, 2026
ISBN: 9798901110034
Montemayor’s science fiction novelette delves into “pop stardom, social media influencers, and the lengths people will go for fame or to walk in someone else’s shoes.”
A Holy Dread by R. A. Villanueva
Alice James Books | February 1, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-949944-86-0
According to Publishers Weekly, this poetry collection “threads Greek myth, Christian iconography, and family history into a frank exploration of mortality.”
Yellow Arrow Publishing | February 3, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-967202-01-0
In this poetry collection, Evans “revisits significant and complicated moments from America’s past to spark necessary and challenging conversations about the future of humanity.”
Orison Books | February 3, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-949039-70-2
In this debut collection, Hodges’s “sonically impactful lines are brash and honest in addressing God, and these poems viscerally situate spirituality in the everyday world, whether in Burger King or the back yard.”
(inner work)ing by Rowan Stuart Lay
Gnashing Teeth Publishing | February 3, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-966075-11-0
This poetry collection “documents jagged and sharp edges of a broken spirit and the cultivation of hopes, dreams, and love that smooth a healing heart.”
Graywolf Press | February 3, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-64445-371-1
According to Literary Hub, this collection of all of Levis’s poetry—edited by David St. John—is “necessary for every poetry library … as reference, tour, and, as bonus, touching document of the depths of poetic friendships.”
Singing from the Deep End by Rebecca Hart Olander
CavanKerry Press | February 3, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-960327-17-8
“Rooted in the rocky coastline of Gloucester, Massachusetts,” the poems in this collection “thrum with music, mirrors, granite quarries, the Atlantic, potholder looms, feathered hair, and repurposed garments.”
Autobiography of Cotton by Cristina Rivera Garza
Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Graywolf Press | February 3, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-64445-369-8
In this novel, Rivera Garza “chronicles the way cotton transformed the borderlands by reconstructing the cotton workers’ strike and reveals how cycles of deprivation and ecocide persist across generations.”
black frag/ments by Lolita Stewart-White
Hub City Press | February 3, 2026
ISBN: 9798885740654
Stewart-White’s debut collection is a “breathtaking series of narrative-lyric poems about the fragmentation of the Black body, family, and community facilitated by the historic and ongoing racism in the US healthcare system.”
Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best by Jane Zwart
Orison Books | February 3, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-949039-68-9
Zwart’s poetry “insists on the links between congruous and incongruous things: the rusting moon and a katydid, Eden and Yugoslavia, blackbirds and imaginary numbers—not to mention between any two people.”
A Compass On the Navigable Sea: 100 Years of World Literature
Restless Books | February 3, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-63206-413-4
“A global chorus from the archives of World Literature Today,” this anthology edited by Daniel Simon “brings together powerful poetry, visionary lectures, and urgent reflections to comprise a literary beacon for a rapidly changing world.”
Finishing Line Press | February 6, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-89990-348-9
According to Brooke Herter James, these poems inspired by Remedios Varo’s painting of the same name “explore the liminal space between surreal and real and the power of memory to rise like music and carry us home.”
Kindlings by Rachel Linnea Brown
Finishing Line Press | February 6, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-89990-349-6
“Small, wry, quick to light, and eager to burn,” the poems in this collection “elevate the ephemeral, exposing the white-hot intensity roiling within.”
Living Badly by Walter Cummins
Serving House Books | February 6, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-947175-97-6
The twenty-one stories in Cummins’s short fiction collection feature characters who “don’t know how to cope with their circumstances and end up making faulty decisions.”
Unsung Canaan Ballads by Chyrel J. Jackson
Prolific Pulse Press | February 6, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-962374-68-2
This poetry collection is a “love letter to Black people living in an imperfect and whitewashed world” that “celebrates the poetically lyrical sisterhood, Black poets, and Black writers.”
Finishing Line Press | February 6, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-89990-347-2
The poems in this collection “work to locate the present moment within an unfolding series of violences beginning with, or significantly informed by, the turn of the ‘new millennium.’”
Finishing Line Press | February 6, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-89990-344-1
This debut poetry collection “illustrates the art of resilience” as Kramer “explores the process of transcendence over loss, grief, and violence.”
Sweet Blisters by Phyllis St. George
Finishing Line Press | February 6, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-89990-350-2
“With the voices of child, teenager, lover, lesbian, and writer,” St. George’s poems “take us on a journey through her life and how writing saved her.”
Finishing Line Press | February 6, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-89990-346-5
This poetry collection “begins with a single poem unfolding into a series of 17 watercolor paintings and then again into notes, sub-notes, and footnotes.”
Hindsight 20/40 by Liz Whiteacre
Finishing Line Press | February 6, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-89990-345-8
This poetry collection acts as a “conversation between your past, present, and future selves—reminding you that every version of you still matters.”
Futurepoem Books | February 8, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-9889439-5-2
According to Ronaldo V. Wilson, this poetry collection is a “powerful document of senses and sense-making where estrangement and ugliness meets longing and beauty.”
The Tavern at the End of History by Morris Collins
Dzanc Books | February 10, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-938603-52-5
This novel is “a deeply felt exploration of grief, love, and identity in the long shadow of twentieth-century calamity.”
dementia lyrics by Dennis Hinrichsen
Green Linden Press | February 10, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-961834-11-8
According to Rachel Hadas, the poems in this collection “convey related laments—for two friends diminished and finally felled by dementia, but also for the poisoned rivers and wounded cities the poet isn’t alone in experiencing.”
Translated from the Polish by Kate Webster
Two Lines Press | February 10, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-949641-91-2
In these short stories set “in a village in the remote countryside of southern Poland,” characters “share, with the sincerest care and honesty, a local—yet so clearly universal—story of ruin and hope.”
Her Womanhood of Mine by Haley Hutchinson
Green Writers Press | February 10, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-9923988-9-2
The poems in this collection “sing with the blue messiness of coming into one’s self, the growing and waning of relationships, and the appreciation for simplicity.”
Pinkie’s Turnabout by Sue Lloyd-Davies
Fitzroy Books | February 10, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-64603-689-9
According to Dorian Cirrone, “readers will be rooting for Pinkie as she discovers a long-held family secret and learns that things aren’t always how they seem on the surface” in this middle-grade novel.
Esquire Ball, Stories from the Great Black Swamp by Lisa Slage Robinson
Black Lawrence Press | February 10, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-62557-180-9
The short stories in this debut collection are centered on “a fictional law firm and a young female attorney navigating ambition and power in a traditionally white male sphere.”
Etruscan Press | February 10, 2026
ISBN: 979-8990767843
Seibles’s collection celebrating his seventieth year “strides, sprints, gavottes, and tiptoes through a life work of forging imagination into unforgettable tableaus.”
Vine Leaves Press | February 10, 2026
ISBN: 978-3-98832-228-9
This book comprising eight different narratives is a “droll, insightful, and often tender novel of rural life in Australia in the late 1990s.”
Krackle’s Last Movie by Chelsea Sutton
Split/Lip Press | February 10, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-952-897-48-1
“When underground documentarian Minerva Krackle mysteriously disappears after an interview with the ‘Modern-Day Mummy of San Bernardino County,’ her assistant Harper is left with a mess of footage and a tight deadline” in this mystery novella.
Finishing Line Press | February 13, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-89990-355-7
This collection features prose poems “telling the story of a sixteen-year-old boy’s attempt to sift through the fallout of an older woman’s hoarding issues over the course of one summer.”
Got Some River In Us by Nancy Dafoe
Finishing Line Press | February 13, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-89990-353-3
This poetry collection centered on the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta delves into “the art and culture of the region; the natural world and the Delta; and commentary on the grave faults and extraordinary gifts of the Delta and its peoples.”
Nothing Good Will Get Away by Chelsea Dodds
Finishing Line Press | February 13, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-89990-354-0
“From the Adirondack Mountains in New York to Steinbeck Country in California and back to the East Coast,” these poems “explore love, longing, loss, and what it means to let oneself be truly vulnerable.”
Red Death, Purple Dark by Thalia Geiger
Thirty West Publishing House | February 13, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-9987727-2-6
This debut poetry collection “cycles through seasons, centering the rot of all forms: tending to dying plants in the garden, debilitating depression in the mind, broken politics of the world, and suffering sickness in the home.”
What’s It Like To Be Old? by John Maynard
Finishing Line Press | February 13, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-89990-352-6
“In this broad consideration of the topic of old age,” Maynard’s poems “use a variety of poetic types and voices, from monologues, satires and comic poems, to meditations, prayers, and myth.”
Finishing Line Press | February 13, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-89990-356-4
The poems in this debut collection are “rousing meditations on subjects ranging from moons to miscarriages, gum trees to Georgia O’Keeffe skulls.”
Kitchen Table Midwife of the Dispossessed by Ruth Mota
Finishing Line Press | February 13, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-89990-357-1
According to Magdalena Montagne, Mota’s poems “hold the reader as close as the embrace of domesticity while taking us to locations as diverse as the Yuma Border Facility, Brazil and the Amazon.”
Why Would You Leave Me? by Leslie Harper Worthington
Finishing Line Press | February 13, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-89990-351-9
In this memoir in verse, Worthington “recounts her childhood shaped by the discovery of painful truths about her parentage and the tumult of adolescence without adult guidance.”
Time and the Temple by Luigi Giussani
Translated from the Italian by Sofia Carozza
Slant Books | February 17, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-63982-214-0
This book “collects a series of meditations given by Father Luigi Giussani, the founder of the Catholic lay movement Communion and Liberation.”
Map of a Heart by Jacque Gorelick
Vine Leaves Press | February 17, 2026
ISBN: 978-3-98832-226-5
In this memoir, Gorelick “must advocate for her comatose husband’s life while caring for their newborn, navigating tenuous family dynamics, and confronting the ghosts of her past.”
A Woman In Pink by Megan A. Schikora
Regal House Publishing | February 17, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-64603-693-6
In this novel, “an unnamed woman recounts her deeply intertwined relationship with Dutch, a man she meets in her twenties and immediately loves.”
Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl by Mandy-Suzanne Wong
Graywolf Press | February 17, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-64445-373-5
This book of essays collects “Wong’s reminiscences, dreams, investigations, and experiments in being with small invertebrates whose vulnerability and creativity inspire radical reimaginings of Earthlinghood.”
Beastly: An Anthology of Shapeshifting Fairy Tales
Clockwork Editions | February 17, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-941360-93-4
In this anthology, editor Jennifer Pullen “selects fourteen classic tales that explore the boundary between the human and the beastly, showing how their telling and retelling reflects a constant longing for–and terror of–what seems to be ‘other.’”
TRP: The University Press of SHSU | February 18, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-68003-452-3
Camp’s poetry collection “begins in heritage and harmony then breaks apart into the strange world and tautly stretched emotions that accompany dementia.”
Berceuse Parish by Burnside Soleil
TRP: The University Press of SHSU | February 18, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-68003-454-7
“Through discovered letters, poems, clippings, and ephemera,” these poems follow “Gus Babineaux as he pieces together the lives of a family rooted in Acadiana, Sicily, and the Philippines.”
Mother Minotaur by Sarah Ahrens
Finishing Line Press | February 20, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-89990-359-5
According to Roger Gilbert, Ahrens’s poems interweave “medical crises, disability, the challenge of parenting neurodivergent children—with the tale of the minotaur, whom Ahrens boldly recasts as a mother helping to guide her young through and from the maze of her own being.”
Urban Trout by Jevin Lee Albuquerque
Finishing Line Press | February 20, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-89990-364-9
According to Jennifer Lagier Fellguth, “free verse interwoven with images drawn from nature, scenes from universal experience, and familiar emotions make this an appealing, well-organized, and attractively presented” poetry collection.
What I Didn’t Give to Goodwill by Ginger Graziano
Finishing Line Press | February 20, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-89990-362-5
In this poetry collection, Graziano “relates the suffering of her son, dying from brain cancer, the strength she secured from a proud, Italian immigrant family, and her renewal of spirit.”
Learning How to Drown by Joseph Kerschbaum
Finishing Line Press | February 20, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-89990-363-2
“Rich in narrative texture and lyrical introspection,” these poems “move through grain silos and third-shift factories, train trestles and back-porch folklore.”
sample.spring by Margaret LeMay
Finishing Line Press | February 20, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-89990-361-8
LeMay’s poetry collection is a “meditation on interiors and exteriors, stability and visibility, and how these impact identity and agency.”
A Harvest of Days by Alex Missall
Finishing Line Press | February 20, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-89990-360-1
According to Jennifer Jennings, Missall’s poetry collection is a “meditative exploration of existence where the boundaries between inner and outer worlds dissolve, through vivid encounters with the natural landscape, forest trails, shifting rivers, and quiet campsites.”
Finishing Line Press | February 20, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-89990-358-8
These poems follow Smith “through a bucolic 1950’s childhood, to college in the 1960’s, then to war in Southeast Asia, and a long life trying to understand it all.”
HTF Publishing | February 24, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-963452-28-0
In this novel set in 1890s Yorkshire, Eliza Kingwell “gathers a feisty group of working-class women to form a choir—and sets her sights on a cash prize that could change her life forever.”
The Hungering Years by Summer Farah
Host Publications | February 24, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-9905483-4-3
“Through intimate conversations with fellow Arab-American writer and literary ancestor Etel Adnan,” this poetry collection “finds the courage to ask: What is art? An escape? A reflection? Another unhealthy attachment?”
Taking Liberties by Leontia Flynn
Wake Forest University Press | February 24, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-943667-19-2
“Whether at home in Belfast, in arts centers or in public squares,” Flynn’s poems “attempt to locate themselves amid the disorienting ‘tyranny of the present, incessant discourse.’”
A Body Made Home by K. Marshall Green
The Feminist Press | February 24, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-55861-322-5
“Laced through his accounts of traversing discrimination, misunderstanding, and abuse from family, society, and academia,” Green’s memoir features “experiments in letter writing and biomythography, continuing in the literary tradition of Audre Lorde.”
The Invisible Years by Rodrigo Hasbún
Translated from the Spanish by Lily Meyer
Deep Vellum | February 24, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-64605-415-2
In this novel, two estranged friends reunite and begin “picking open long scabbed-over wounds from their upper-class adolescence in 1990s Bolivia and the scandal that ripped them apart.”
Backyard Alchemy: on life with other creatures in a time of salvage by J. D. Ho
River River Books | February 24, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-9926116-2-5
This collection of environmental essays “transforms the loss of climate stability, relationships, health, and ecological integrity into sites of repair and restoration.”
Worth Burning by Mickie Kennedy
Black Lawrence Press | February 24, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-62557-181-6
According to Cyrus Cassell, “in detailing the speaker’s progress from bullying and abuse to empathy, commitment, and same-sex joy, these searing, X-ray poems puncture the family romance in breathtaking fashion.”
River River Books | February 24, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-9926116-0-1
“Meditating on acts of care, science, light, translation, girlhood, and Korean-American identity,” Kim’s poetry acts as “a safeguard against forgetting, a hedge against devastation.”
Bellevue Literary Press | February 24, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-954276-46-8
“Told in incantatory prose set to the rhythm of human breath,” this book is “an elegiac novel of men lost in a coal mining disaster and the boy who survives to tell the story.”
Between Sea and Sky by Heather G. Marshall
Vine Leaves Press | February 24, 2026
ISBN: 978-3-98832-224-1
The stories in this collection are “tales of outsiders, of survivors connecting deeply with the natural world—with seas and skies and what lies between.”
Eskatos & the Stretched Necks of Stillness by Mats Söderlund
Translated from the Swedish by Olivia Olsen
Restless Books | February 24, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-63206-415-8
“In a sweeping but intimate blend of ecopoetry, mythology, and political verse,” this poetry collection “communes with Sweden’s primeval woodlands during an age of transformation.”
House of Myth and Necessity by Jennifer A Sutherland
River River Books | February 24, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-9926116-3-2
Sutherland’s poetry collection “throws open the shutters of language as it is built around the concepts of girlhood, marriage, myth, and law.”
River River Books | February 24, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-9926116-1-8
In this poetry collection, Sylvia “engages French colonialism, the extractive sugarcane trade, gendered labor, and the language of flight and escape—asking who can fly, and who can escape.”
April and Back Again by Claire Taylor
Publishing Genius Press | February 24, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-945028-73-1
Taylor’s collection is an “an intimate portrait of loving and living against a backdrop of existential dread.”
Fifty Mothers by Preeti Vangani
River River Books | February 24, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-9881378-9-4
This poetry collection “weaves narrative and elegy around the figure of a mother, the poems unfolding in the speaker’s Bombay home.”
The Visible Field by Zoë Ryder White
River River Books | February 24, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-992611-6-49
“Traversing Emily Dickinson’s flowers, the inevitability of potholes, the many uses of nitrogen, and other subjects,” this debut poetry collection “approaches the world with an unending sense of marvel.”
Gone Before You Knew Me by Renate Wildermuth
Fitzroy Books | February 24, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-64603-684-4
“Told through a series of redacted confessions recorded by a secret agency,” this young adult novel tells “the story of Talya—a girl who’s equal parts Katniss Everdeen and Harriet the Spy.”
Addiction Apocalypse by Remi Recchia
TRP: The University Press of SHSU | February 25, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-68003-416-5
“Weaving between drunkenness and grace, loss and desire,” this poetry collection “chronicles the speaker’s journey with alcoholism, gender identity, and faith.”
Girl Filling the Sky by Melissa McEver Huckabay
Cider Press Review | February 26, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-930781-68-9
According to Cecily Parks, this poetry collection “charts a tender reckoning with a childhood shaped by absence, following its echoes through the sensuous spaces of a woman’s life.”
The Last Plastic Fork and Other Green Epiphanies
Habitat Press | February 26, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-0682703-3-8
This environmental fiction anthology edited by Rananda Rich “gathers up highlights from the Green Stories Project flash fiction competition on the theme of ‘epiphanies’—turning points where a character changed for the greener.”
Finishing Line Press | February 27, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-89990-365-6
“The result of an extended trip to Morocco John took with his sister Susan in 2023,” Delaney’s poetry collection “examines the everyday culture and prominent sites of the country with poems inspired by photographs.”
What Flowers May Come by Sarah Durrand
Finishing Line Press | February 27, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-89990-366-3
This poetry collection “projects dreamy meaning onto the surrounding landscape, revealing the unspoken, biggest meanings behind a life’s smallest moments.”
Finishing Line Press | February 27, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-89990-333-5
According to Keith Flynn, in these poems Stockdale “navigates the reader around the real Bronxville neighborhood that he survived, and the mythical one that has grown prominently in the redemptive forces of his memory and imagination.”
