Support independent literary publishers by picking a read from the list below, which features new books forthcoming in May 2022 from CLMP members.
American Massif by Nicholas Regiacorte
Tupelo Press | May 1, 2022
According to Christopher Salerno, in this poetry collection “Regiacorte examines with a keen intimacy both the wild and the domestic, weaving a thread from the present moment back to bygone epochs.”
ASTRS by Karinne Keithley Syers
53rd State Press | May 1, 2022
Illustrated by Sara Smith, ASTRS is “a rabbit cosmogony, a libretto to be sung, spoken, and projected, a radio-play-folk-opera-duck-animation-with-dances.”
100 Years of the Los Angeles County Fair, 25 Years of Stories by David Allen
Pelekinesis | May 1, 2022
100 Years of the Los Angeles County Fair, 25 Years of Stories contains Allen’s writings about the fair from 1998 to 2021, including “columns, feature stories, concert reviews, previews of the fair, short items, a blog post, even a news story about a lawsuit.”
The Encantadas by Herman Melville
Wild Lot Press | May 1, 2022
Featuring a new introduction by Elizabeth Hennessy and illustrations by Eric Tonzola, Melville’s novella “records the dawn of the anthropocene as it unfolds amid the teeming, treacherous islands of the Galápagos.”
Good Mom on Paper: Writers on Creativity and Motherhood
Book*hug Press | May 3, 2022
This collection of twenty essays, edited by Stacey May Fowles and Jen Sookfong Lee, “goes beyond the clichés to explore the fraught, beautiful, and complicated relationship between motherhood and creativity.”
Monkey Business by Carleton Eastlake
Red Hen Press | May 3, 2022
According to Lee Goldberg, this is “a raw, jarring, darkly funny primer and philosophical treatise on navigating the politics of television and lust that’s dressed up as a noir novel.”
Ready, Set, Oh by Diane Josefowicz
Flexible Press | May 3, 2022
Set in 1960s Rhode Island, this debut novel ” chronicles the struggles of a man who has just lost his draft deferment, a young pregnant woman with fragile mental health, and a UFO-chasing astronomer.”
Blaze and the Castle Cake for Bertha Daye by Claude Ponti
Translated from French by Alyson Waters and Margot Kerlidou
elsewhere editions | May 3, 2022
In this picture book, “a rabble of soft, golden ‘chicklets’ are awoken one morning to a startling proclamation: they only have ten short days to prepare for their best friend Bertha Daye’s party.”
Diaries of a Terrorist by Christopher Soto
Copper Canyon Press | May 3, 2022
This debut poetry collection “demands the abolition of policing and human caging,” emphasizing “that police violence happens not only to individuals, but to whole communities.”
Dirt Road Home by Alexander Nader
Winding Road Stories | May 3, 2022
In this novel for young adults, “city kid Logan Davis is about to find the family he never knew he was missing at the end of a country road.”
Catalyst Press | May 3, 2022
The fourth book in this series for beginning readers follows Lolo as she “gets an unexpected role in the school play, meets Miss Teen the Beauty Queen, goes on a beach clean-up with Mama’s new friend, and makes beautiful recycled Christmas decorations.”
Down to the River by Anne Whitney Pierce
Regal House Publishing | May 3, 2022
According to Tom Perrotta, Down to the River “is a deeply absorbing family saga that unfolds in the vicinity of Harvard Square during the turbulence of the late Sixties and early Seventies.”
Coach House Books | May 3, 2022
The poems in this collection “bring fresh vehemence to Robertson’s ongoing examination of the changing shape of feminism, the male-dominated philosophical tradition, the daily forms of discourse, and the possibilities of language itself.”
Palace of Flies by Walter Kappacher
Translated from German by Georg Bauer
New Vessel Press | May 3, 2022
This novel “portrays a famed author in a moment of crisis: an aging Hugo von Hofmannsthal returns to a summer resort outside of Salzburg that he visited as a child.”
Translated from Croatian by Mirza Purić
Sandorf Passage | May 3, 2022
Neon South is “an off-the-beaten-path Latin American travel narrative that unfolds like a novel, shadowing locals all too aware of how outside influences, from colonialism to globalism, have changed their lives.”
In the River of Songs by Susan Jackson
CavanKerry Press | May 3, 2022
According to Raechel Bratnick, Jackson’s poetry collection “captures the mystical in the ordinary, making altarpieces out of the sudden moment of seeing.”
Plans for Sentences by Renee Gladman
Wave Books | May 3, 2022
Gladman’s latest book “blurs the distinctions between text and image, recognizing that drawing can be a form of writing, and vice versa: a generative act in which the two practices not only inform each other but propel each other into futures.”
Love, Lyric, and Liberation by Asantewaa Boykin
Nomadic Press | May 7, 2022
Love, Lyric, and Liberation is “a collection of reflections, epiphanies, and warnings for those who find themselves existing in the intersection of blackness, femininity, art, and resistance.”
Red Hen Press | May 10, 2022
This poetry collection “deals with refugees of many kinds—political refugees, refugees from racism, from domestic violence, from environmental destruction and disease, specifically cancer—and their stories of cruelty and courage, hardship, and hope to overcome the most daunting of circumstances.”
The Bar at Twilight by Frederic Tuten
Bellevue Literary Press | May 10, 2022
The fifteen stories in this collection “shift seamlessly between the poignancy of memory into the logic of fairytales or dreams.”
Saint Sebastian’s Abyss by Mark Haber
Coffee House Press | May 10, 2022
In this “darkly comic mediation on art, obsession, and the enigmatic power of friendship…former best friends who built their careers writing about a single work of art meet after a decades-long falling-out.”
In the Lonely Backwater by Valerie Nieman
Regal House Publishing/Fitzroy Books | May 10, 2022
According to Dawn Raffel, “In the Lonely Backwater is not only a page-turning thriller but also a complex psychological portrait of a young woman dealing with guilt, betrayal, and secrecy. “
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
Translated from French by Ros Schwartz
Transit Books | May 10, 2022
Now back in print, I Who Have Never Known Men “is a haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel of female friendship and intimacy, and the lengths people will go to maintain their humanity in the face of devastation.”
The Crocodile Bride by Ashleigh Bell Pedersen
Hub City Press | May 10, 2022
This debut novel “follows eleven-year-old Sunshine Turner and her troubled father Billy as the secrets of their family’s past swirl around them in the one-road town of Fingertip, Louisiana.”
Swallowed Light by Michael Wasson
Copper Canyon Press | May 10, 2022
In his debut poetry collection, Wasson “writes into the gaps left by a legacy of erasure—the wholly American fracture of colonialism—where the indigenous tongue is determined to bloom against its own vanishing.”
Teachers in the Forest by Barry Babcock
Riverfeet Press | May 10, 2022
In this collection of lessons, Babcock “proposes a radical shift in how Americans support our environment and wildlife.”
The Book of Explanations by Tedi López Mills
Translated from Spanish by Robin Myers
Deep Vellum | May 10, 2022
The Book of Explanations is “a hybrid, genre-defying book of essays following the unusual and surprising complexities of everyday life.”
Dalkey Archive | May 10, 2022
According to Mark Haber, this debut novel “questions the role of capitalism in creation, while proving it’s nearly impossible to make art if one thinks about it too much.”
Glyphs by Martina Reisz Newberry
Deerbrook Editions | May 10, 2022
According to Terry Wolverton, in these poems “Newberry employs a deceptively conversational tone to wield resonant insights about the spirit of nature, faith, aging and mortality, and love.”
Akashic Books | May 10, 2022
This collection of nine stories “is an updated exploration of Asian American identity, this time with characters who are presumptive model minorities in the arts, academia, and media.”
Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology
Autumn House Press | May 11, 2022
Edited by Michael Walsh, this anthology featuring more than 200 queer writers “amplifies and centers LGBTQIA+ voices and perspectives in a collection of contemporary nature poetry.”
New Door Books | May 12, 2022
Edited by Ann de Forest, Ways of Walking collects essays by 26 writers “who reflect on walks they have taken and what they have discovered along the way.”
99 Miles From L.A. by P. David Ebersole
Pelekinesis | May 13, 2022
In this novel, “Frank, a frustrated singer-turned-music professor finds himself entangled in a love affair with Shelley, a highly-educated, unhappily married woman.”
Year of the Murder Hornet by Tina Cane
Veliz Books | May 15, 2022
The poems in Cane’s new collection “navigate the uneasy terrain of the self amid an increasingly tumultuous and fragmented world.”
Plan B: A Poet’s Survivors Manual by Sandy McIntosh
Marsh Hawk Press | May 15, 2022
In this writing memoir, McIntosh “reassures us that it is possible to have a successful career as a poet while holding down day jobs that make us better writers.”
Marsh Hawk Press | May 15, 2022
Edited by Susan Terris, this is “an innovative anthology of essential information about the development of the writing craft—memoirs and interviews of outstanding poets from diverse backgrounds who recall the ways by which they made their start as writers.”
A Convergence of Solitudes by Anita Anand
Book*hug Press | May 17, 2022
This debut novel “presents the lives of two families across the Partition of India, Vietnam’s Operation Babylift, and two Quebec referendums.”
Ursula Lake by Charles Harper Webb
Red Hen Press | May 17, 2022
According to Ivy Pochoda, in this novel “Webb uses his poet’s voice to weave a haunting tale that marries the latent horrors of the natural world to the dark hearts of the humans who inhabit it.”
Translated from Spanish by Jessica Sequeira
Seven Stories Press | May 17, 2022
This novel “tells the story of the Deliuskin family’s secret interventions in music, mysticism and revolutionary thought over the course of three centuries, spanning six generations.”
Dear Selection Committee by Melissa Studdard
JackLeg Press | May 17, 2022
The poems in this collection framed as a job application “shift among registers of loss, desire, and joy as they wrestle with issues such as climate change, addiction, modern distractions, gender presentation, religious questioning, and the nature of pain.”
Reading the Signs: and other itinerant essays by Stephen Benz
Etruscan Press | May 17, 2022
In these travel essays, Benz “ventures around town, across country, and overseas in search of forgotten, overlooked, or misunderstood stories.”
Smoking the Bible by Chris Abani
Copper Canyon Press | May 17, 2022
Abani’s poems “reveal the personal story of two brothers—one elegizing the other—and the larger story of a man in exile: exile of geography, culture, and memory.”
Salka Valka by Halldór Laxness
Translated from Icelandic by Philip Roughton
Archipelago Books | May 17, 2022
This novel is “a feminist coming-of-age tale, an elegy to the plight of the working class and the corrosive effects of social and economic inequality, and a poetic window into the arrival of modernity in a tiny industrial town.”
All Rise: Resistance and Rebellion in South Africa by Richard Conyngham
Catalyst Press | May 17, 2022
This graphic history, illustrated by Dada Khanyisa, “revives six true stories of resistance by marginalized South Africans against the country’s colonial government in the years leading up to Apartheid.”
What Disappears by Barbara Quick
Regal House Publishing | May 17, 2022
What Disappears is “a gripping multi-generational tale that begins in 1880s Tsarist Russia and ends in Paris at the start of World War I.”
Little Brother by Sallie Bingham
Sarabande Books | May 17, 2022
In this memoir, Bingham writes her brother’s “short history with obvious affection and tenderness, along with more than a dash of survival guilt.”
The Scent of Light by Kristjana Gunnars
Coach House Books | May 17, 2022
According to Kazim Ali, Gunnars’s five collected novellas are “comprised of a scintillating blend of fiction, autobiography, literary theory, and philosophy.”
A Song by the Aegean Sea by Mohamed Metwalli
Translated from Arabic by Gretchen McCullough
Laertes Books | May 17, 2022
According to Jennifer Horne, Metwalli’s poems “are set in the ancient coastal city of Izmir and peopled by lovers, tourists, fishermen, prostitutes, construction workers, musicians, gypsies, card players, lunatics, and ghosts.”
God in a Can by Robert Scotellaro
Bamboo Dart Press | May 17, 2022
God in a Can is “a collection of flash and micro fictions that looks at life through a surreal, and often humorous lens, at various societal behaviors, perceptions at a slant, and unusual scenarios.”
The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali by Uzma Aslam Khan
Deep Vellum | May 17, 2022
This novel “set in the Andaman Islands over the course of oppressive imperial regimes… is a complex, gripping homage to those omitted from the collective memory.”
Thunderbird Inn by Collin Callahan
Conduit Books & Ephemera | May 18, 2022
According to Matthew Rohrer, in this poetry collection “there is a magic to the close observation that redeems what is often squalid.”
On My Papa’s Shoulders by Niki Daly
Catalyst Press | May 18, 2022
This picture book is “a sweet ode to fatherhood and the special relationships children share with each member of their family.”
Accidental Hymn by Dawn Potter
Deerbrook Editions | May 20, 2022
In this poetry collection, Potter “masterfully demonstrates how opposites can be counterparts and how poetry can rise from that tension/partnership.”
Copper Canyon Press | May 24, 2022
Marvin’s fourth poetry collection “exists just outside of calamity” and asks, “at what point do we disappear into our experiences? How do we come out on the other side?”
Questions from Outer Space by Diane Thiel
Red Hen Press | May 24, 2022
This poetry collection “explores fresh and often humorous perspectives that capture the surreal quality of our swiftly changing lives on this planet.”
Grotesque Weather and Good People by Solah Lim
Translated from Korean by Olan Munson and Oh Eunkyung
Black Ocean | May 24, 2022
The poems in this collection “explore the simultaneous intimacy and alienation of everyday life in urban Seoul.”
Journey to the Parallels by Marcie Roman
Regal House Publishing/Fitzroy Books | May 24, 2022
This middle-grade novel “reminds us that everyone, including mathematically-challenged tweens with friend and family issues, has within them the power to effect change.”
Translated from Croatian by Matt Robinson
Sandorf Passage | May 24, 2022
Set in World War II Yugoslavia, Radio Siga “transmits the story of Kalman Gubica, a hard-drinking, but well-meaning, layabout who is forever changed after being struck by lightning.”
My Life at the Bottom: The Story of a Lonesome Axolotl by Linda Bondestam
Translated from Swedish by A. A. Prime
Restless Books | May 24, 2022
This picture book is “a new kind of climate change story, narrated by an adorable axolotl who is—possibly—the last of its kind.”
Nomadic Press | May 28, 2022
This handbook outlines the principles and practices of the Fierce Vulnerability Network, “a constellation of direct action teams positioned at the intersection of racial healing and climate justice.”
The Discarded Life by Adam Kirsch
Red Hen Press | May 31, 2022
Kirsch’s poetry collection “richly evoke a Gen X childhood in Los Angeles, exploring how our early recognitions shape our lives.”
Seven Stories Press | May 31, 2022
In this novel, McBay “toggles between the years 2028 and 2051 to give us the experience, with breathtaking realism, of what might happen in the span of just one generation to a society that is already on the brink of collapse.”
Moldy Strawberries by Caio Fernando Abreu
Translated from Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato
Archipelago Books | May 31, 2022
In this collection of eighteen stories, Abreu “navigates a Brazil transformed by the AIDS epidemic and stifling military dictatorship of the ’80s.”
DEAR GOD. DEAR BONES. DEAR YELLOW. by Noor Hindi
Haymarket Books | May 31, 2022
According to Zeina Hashem Beck, “Hindi’s searing poems navigate memory, violence, and inheritance with a candid and critical eye. Filled with heartache, tenderness, love, anger, and humor, they interrogate what it’s like to be woman, Palestinian, and American in today’s world.”
Love Poems in Quarantine by Sarah Ruhl
Copper Canyon Press | May 31, 2022
Ruhl’s latest book “is—in free verse and form, lamentation and meditation—a book of days, a survival kit for spiritual malady.”
Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf by Sina Queyras
Coach House Books | May 31, 2022
This memoir “offers a peek into the defining spaces a young queer writer moved through as they found their way from a life of chaos to a life of the mind.”
Clandestinity by Antonio Moresco
Translated from Italian by Richard Dixon
Deep Vellum | May 31, 2022
Each of the four stories in this suite “features the central character at a different time of his life: childhood, adolescence, young adulthood.”
Nightboat Books | May 31, 2022
Ante body is “an incisive poetic sequence that tracks the relationship between migration and complex traumas in this unsparing critique of the unjust conditions that brought us the global pandemic.”
