Support small presses and indie bookstores by picking a read from the list below, which features new books forthcoming in September 2021 from CLMP members. (Take a look at last month’s releases as well.)
Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful by Rohan Chhetri
Tupelo Press | September 1, 2021
Winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, this poetry collection is, according to Kristina Marie Darling, “a work in which poetic technique is brought to bear on lingering questions of identity, artistic tradition, and the cruelty implicit in language itself.”
Wings in Time by Callie Garnett
The Song Cave | September 1, 2021
In this debut poetry collection, Garnett’s experiences are “transcribed, recorded, rewound, shared and edited over emails, and nearly float contextless, full of the desire to touch the immaterial and the dematerialized.”
Tupelo Press | September 1, 2021
Winner of the Dorset Prize for Poetry, this poetry collection is, according to Mary Jo Bang, “covertly grounded in metaphysical questions… Vast categories and fluid distinctions are fractured and then woven back together.”
In the Neighborhood of Normal by Cindy Maddox
Regal House Publishing | September 1, 2021
In this novel, “eighty-two-year-old Mish Atkinson from Fair Valley, West Virginia, is determined she’s going to make something of the time she has left on this earth.”
Open Secrets: The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Your Book
Tupelo Press | September 1, 2021
This handbook from an independent publisher “will prepare you to take the lead in executing your own publicity plan. It is designed to guide you, step-by-step, through the process of making a success of your book.”
LUPERCALIApress | September 1, 2021
According to Taylor Byas, this debut poetry collection “is a story of grief and abuse nestled into the space between the sensual and the grotesque.”
Donuts in Space by Jerica Taylor
Gasher Press | September 1, 2021
A series of linked flash pieces, Donuts in Space “is about a stress-baking human and her new life after the catastrophic crash of her ship from Earth.”
Sparks by David Michael Slater
Regal House Publishing | September 4, 2021
According to Alex Poppe, this novel for young adults “pushes the limits of creative imagination, illuminating what it means to be different in a world consumed with conformity.”
I Was a Bell by M. Soledad Caballero
Red Hen Press | September 7, 2021
In this poetry collection, Caballero “imagines how memory frames and reshapes the present, how memory illuminates and limits the stories of ourselves, and how, despite the passage of time, primal moments in the past are the ghosts and echoes of our present.”
AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect, Extinct, Vibration by CAConrad
Wave Books | September 7, 2021
The poems in AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration “reach out from a (Soma)tic poetry ritual where CA flooded their body with the field recordings of recently extinct animals.”
Insignificance by James Clammer
Coach House Books | September 7, 2021
This lyric novel is “a day-in-the-life of a plumber whose troubles are all coming to a head.”
Pickles Tails: The Hijinks of Muffin and Roscoe, Vol. 1 by Brian Crane
Baobab Press | September 7, 2021
Pickles Tails is Crane’s first collection “dedicated to the beloved Pickles family pets, Roscoe and Muffin, and their wily ways.”
Imminence by Mariana Dimópulos
Transit Books | September 7, 2021
According to J. M. Coetzee, this novel translated from the Spanish by Alice Whitmore is, “with its caustic vignettes of male vanity and its subtle self-mockery… playful on the surface, dark and disturbing in its depths.”
Disruption: New Short Fiction from Africa
Catalyst Press | September 7, 2021
In this genre-spanning anthology edited by Jason Mykl Snyman, Karina M. Szczurek, and Rachel Zadok, “new and emerging writers from across Africa investigate many of the pressing issues of our time: climate change, pandemics, social upheaval, surveillance, and more.”
How to Walk with Steve by Robert Fromberg
Latah Books | September 7, 2021
According to Patricia Eakins, Fromberg’s “poignant memoir details the painful ordinariness of misery—even for the bright scion of an artistic family.”
The Memory Monster by Yishai Sarid
Restless Books | September 7, 2021
This short novel is “a harrowing parable of a young historian who becomes consumed by the memory of the Holocaust.”
Bebikaan-ezhwebiziwinan Nimkii: The Adventures of Nimkii by Stacie Sheldon
Hidden Timber Books | September 7, 2021
This illustrated book shows children the world “through the joyful eyes of Nimkii, a fun, nature-loving dog who will teach them a whole new language: Ojibwemowin, a language spoken by the indigenous tribes in parts of Michigan, Ontario, northern Minnesota and Wisconsin, and Alberta.”
The Moon’s Tear: A Desert Night’s Dream by Sophie Sheppard
Baobab Press | September 7, 2021
Illustrated by the author, this picture book “follows Raven in his journey to find a companion for the Moon, who is traveling alone across the empty night sky.”
The Accommodation by Jim Schutze
Deep Vellum Publishing | September 7, 2021
Reissued with a new foreword by John Wiley Price, this classic of Dallas history “examines the violent and suppressed history of race and racism in the city, from slavery through the Civil Rights Movement, and the city’s desegregation efforts in the 1950s and ‘60s.”
Pip Pip Toodle Doo by Lisa Sobiak
Baobab Press | September 7, 2021
Illustrated by Paula L. Robison, this picture book “follows Pinky the bird as she sings her playful song, dives through the clouds, and meets new friends.”
Children of Dust by Marlin Barton
Regal House Publishing | September 10, 2021
This is a novel “about the relationship between two women, allied against a formidable and violent man with secrets of his own, and it is also a complex look at race, violence, and the ways in which stories get passed down to future generations.”
Nightboat Books | September 14, 2021
Abi-Karam’s second poetry collection “foments political action in public spaces, and indexes the various emotional states, such as rage, revelry, fear, grief, and desire to which queers must tend during protest.”
In Madison’s Cave by Douglas Anderson
Frayed Edge Press | September 14, 2021
This experimental epistolary novel “considers early American history, government & politics, education, race relations, and other themes that still resonate in modern American life.”
Red Hen Press | September 14, 2021
Following a scientist with the power to influence Earth’s natural forces, this novel “explores how we might become more attuned to the Earth and act more collaboratively to solve the enormity of our climate problem.”
A Line of Driftwood: The Ada Blackjack Story by Diane Glancy
Turtle Point Press | September 14, 2021
Glancy’s retelling of a 1921 Arctic expedition—of which a young Inupiat woman named Ada Blackjack was the lone survivor—is “the story of a woman facing danger, loss, and unimaginable hardship, yet surviving against the odds where four ‘experts’ could not.”
Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body by Megan Milks
Feminist Press | September 14, 2021
This novel “reimagines nineties adolescence—mashing up girl group series, choose-your-own-adventures, and chronicles of anorexia—in a queer and trans coming-of-age tale like no other.”
Book*hug Press | September 14, 2021
Namir’s “warm, free-verse poems document the journey that he and his husband took to have a child.”
New Vessel Press | September 14, 2021
The sixth volume in the Very Christmas series “transports readers to the Emerald Isle with stories and poems sure to bring holiday cheer.”
Among Elms, in Ambush by Bruce Weigl
BOA Editions | September 14, 2021
This new poetry collection “follows the celebrated poet and Vietnam War veteran as he explores combat, survival, and PTSD in brief prose vignettes.”
Tolstoy Together: 85 Days of War and Peace with Yiyun Li by Yiyun Li
A Public Space | September 14, 2021
In Tolstoy Together: 85 Days of War and Peace, Yiyun Li “invites you to travel with her through Tolstoy’s novel—and with fellow readers around the world who joined her for an online book club and an epic journey during a pandemic year.”
Four Way Books | September 15, 2021
From the political to the erotic and everywhere in between,” the poems in Adamshick’s latest collection “take us on a sometimes sober, sometimes raunchy ride.”
A Midwestern Poet’s Incomplete Guide to Symbolism by Erica Anderson-Senter
EastOver Press | September 15, 2021
“Equal parts visual dictionary, cryptogram, and Rosetta Stone,” this poetry collection “reads like a map through a Midwestern landscape of love, heartache, and enduring grief.”
The Blank Page by Iván Argüelles
Sagging Meniscus | September 15, 2021
According to Carl Landauer, Argüelles “fills his Blank Page with astounding poetry, bringing us through Homeric, Dantesque, and Vedic worlds as well as the Americana of his youth in beautifully constructed lines with imaginative juxtapositions that would be the envy of André Breton or Paul Éluard.”
Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow by Natalka Bilotserkivets
Lost Horse Press | September 15, 2021
This poetry collection from an active participant in Ukraine’s Renaissance of the late-Soviet and early independence period “still speaks about movement and restricted movement, even symbolic movement.”
Sagging Meniscus | September 15, 2021
Of this anti-theatrical adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, Cohen writes, “I wrote this play as a compensation for being poor, more than half deaf, and growing up in Brooklyn with poor parents.”
The Hard Life of a Stone by Marvin Cohen
Sagging Meniscus | September 15, 2021
This collection of stories “centers around philosophical themes: the awareness of existence and experience, of reality and truth, and the relativity of time and place.”
Tongue of a Crow by Peter Coyote
Four Way Books | September 15, 2021
This debut poetry collection “takes us on a whirlwind tour of an eclectic and exciting life as an actor and Zen Buddhist priest, meandering from love affairs to marriage to divorce to the Sixties to psychedelic spirituality and beyond.”
Restless Books | September 15, 2021
Featuring an introduction by Rebecca Mead and illustrations by Keren Katz, this new edition “presents George Eliot’s masterpiece of Victorian fiction in an appealing new light.”
Four Way Books | September 15, 2021
According to Josh Bell, this debut poetry collection is “a book of heaven that has not forgotten the body nor the shadow cast by the body, nor how hunger leads you to the slaughterhouse and is love.”
It Isn’t a Ghost if It Lives in Your Chest by Joan Houlihan
Four Way Books | September 15, 2021
Houlihan’s sixth poetry collection “reflects upon the persistence of what is lost and the accidental ruptures of trauma that allow re-entry into our world.”
Lost Horse Press | September 15, 2021
The poems in this collection “are drenched in silence and wonderment, miseries and mysteries, and the stubborn cargo of our collective and individual histories.”
Texas Review Press | September 15, 2021
“A depiction of the cycles of abuse and trauma in a prolonged end-time,” this novel “examines the ways in which our pasts envelop us.”
Gentefication by Antonio de Jesús López
Four Way Books | September 15, 2021
This debut poetry collection “nuances Latinidad as not just an immigration question, but an academic one” and “deals with Latinx death not as the literal passing of bodies, but as first tied with language.”
Four Way Books | September 15, 2021
In this new poetry collection, Mohabir “creates a form migrated from Caribbean chutney music in order to verse the precarity of a queer Indo-Caribbean speaker in the newest context of the United States.”
Antique Densities; Modern Parables & Other Experiments in Short Prose by Jefferson Navicky
Deerbrook Editions | September 15, 2021
According to Kristen Case, this short fiction collection “is a joyful counter-spell to the curse of disenchantment, a long, beautiful string of unforeseeable sentences.”
Our Cancers: Poems by Dan O’Brien
Acre Books | September 15, 2021
In this poetry collection, O’Brien “chronicles the year and a half during which both he and his wife were treated for cancer.”
Through a Red Place by Rebecca Pelky
Perugia Press | September 15, 2021
Written in English and Mohegan, this story-in-poems “assembles the author’s research into her Native and non-Native heritage in the land now known as Wisconsin” and “relates narratives of people who converged on and impacted this space in myriad ways.”
Four Way Books | September 15, 2021
The characters in Pourciau’s short stories “inhabit a world dominated by interior voices revealing fragmented selves.”
Texas Review Press | September 15, 2021
This poetry collection is “a book about ethos and mythos, about the creation of a character and the investigation of voice.”
In Light of Stars by Bruce Willard
Four Way Books | September 15, 2021
The poems in Willard’s collection “rise up (much like the clouds over his oft-traversed Rockies), as the speaker throws his attention to earth and sky, better to understand his own dynamic and shifting inner weather.”
Lost Horse Press | September 15, 2021
Masquerade is “a jazz-inflected, lyric-narrative sequence of poems, a “memoir in poetry” set principally in pre-Katrina New Orleans and in Seattle, involving an interracial couple, artists and writers.”
Apricots for Donbas by Lyuba Yakimchuk
Lost Horse Press | September 15, 2021
Translated from the Ukrainian by Oksana Maksymchuk, Max Rosochinsky, and Svetlana Lavochkina, this poetry collection offers “intimate glimpses into the story of a woman affected by a life-altering situation beyond her control.”
Black Steel Magnolias in the Hour of Chaos Theory by James Cagney
Nomadic Press | September 18, 2021
Cagney’s poetry collection, presented in a second edition, “examines the complexities of intimacy for an adopted person trying to find balance between two families—one rattled by age and illness; the other, holding space for a son that doesn’t exist.”
Three, Walking by Nikia Chaney
Bamboo Dart Press | September 20, 2021
This chapbook of short fiction explores “three worlds in which three brave women push against the external structures of their strange worlds that almost work the same way as ours.”
BOA Editions | September 21, 2021
Winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, this poetry collection “uplifts communal spaces as sites of resistance and healing, wonders at the restorative powers of art and erotic love, and celebrates the capaciousness of friendship.”
Beauty Salon by Mario Bellatin
Deep Vellum Publishing | September 21, 2021
Bellatin’s novel, translated from the Spanish by David Shook, is an “earth-shattering allegory of plague that brought him to his cult status as auteur of Latin America’s most singular literary vision.”
Student Resistance in the Age of Chaos, Books 1 & 2 by Mark Edelman Boren
Seven Stories Press | September 21, 2021
This “all-encompassing history of today’s global student activism movement” goes “continent by continent, country by country, to show us the contours of the new frontlines of resistance.”
Book*hug Press | September 21, 2021
Brewer’s debut novel “shares three interweaving stories of artists tearing themselves open to make art.”
BOA Editions | September 21, 2021
This novella-in-verse is a “poetic retelling of Noah’s Ark set in the near future… that recounts a post-apocalyptic journey aboard a container ship.”
634 Ways to Kill Fidel by Fabián Escalante Font
Seven Stories Press | September 21, 2021
This book is “a disturbing portrait of how US tax dollars fund campaigns to stifle dissent and attempt to rupture movements in the Global South fighting for sovereignty, justice, self-determination, and ultimately a better world.”
Last Words on Earth by Javier Serena
Open Letter | September 21, 2021
Translated from the Spanish by Katie Whittemore, this novel “looks at the price—and haphazard nature—of fame through the lens of a Bolaño-esque writer who persevered just long enough to be transformed out of obscurity into a literary legend right at the end of his life.”
Autumn House Press | September 23, 2021
Winner of the 2020 Chapbook Prize, selected by Danusha Laméris, this debut poetry chapbook “directs a keen eye on everyday occurrences and how these small events shape us as individuals.”
Under the Broom Tree by Natalie Homer
Autumn House Press | September 23, 2021
Drawing inspiration from the story of the prophet Elijah, this debut poetry collection “is a trek through the wildernesses of the heart and of the natural world.”
The Animal Indoors by Carly Inghram
Autumn House Press | September 23, 2021
Winner of the 2020 CAAPP Book Prize, selected by Terrance Hayes, this poetry collection explores “the day-to-day experiences of a Black queer woman who is ceaselessly bombarded with images of mass-consumerism, white supremacy, and sexism.”
Check Engine and Other Stories by Jennifer Companik
Thirty West Publishing House | September 24, 2021
This debut short fiction collection features ten stories exploring “duality in gender roles & expectations, married and unmarried, ghosts and death.”
Girlz ‘n the Hood by Mary Hill-Wagner
Regal House Publishing | September 25, 2021
This memoir is “the unsentimental, moving, and surprisingly humorous account of a girl and her ten siblings who grew up in one of the roughest neighborhoods in Los Angeles.”
The Other Place by Brendan Cleary
Red Hen Press | September 28, 2021
Through this series of love letters and poems, Cleary “explores the ghosts of his past and what it means to experience a loss.”
Deep Vellum/Phoneme | September 28, 2021
Translated from the Dutch by David Colmer, Habitus is “a collection full of thrilling sensory images, lines in turn grim and enchanting which move from the Caribbean island of Curaçao to the immigrant experience of the Netherlands.”
I embrace you with all my revolutionary fervor: Letters, 1947-1967 by Ernesto Che Guevara
Seven Stories Press | September 28, 2021
Edited by Maria del Carmen Ariet Garcia and Disamis Arcia Munoz, Guevara’s letters in this collection “give us Che the son, the friend, the lover, the guerilla fighter, the political leader, the philosopher, the poet.”
Painting Is a Supreme Fiction: Writings by Jesse Murry, 1980–1993
Soberscove Press | September 28, 2021
Edited and with an introduction by Jarrett Earnest and a foreword by Hilton Als, this collection presents the writings of artist and poet Jesse Murry (1948-1993).8-1993).
Seven Stories Press | September 28, 2021
Translated by Sheila Fischman, this novel about two siblings “born into the havoc of the Vietnam War” is “a poetic story steeped in history, about those most impacted by the violence and their later accomplishments.”
It’s OK, Slow Lizard by Yeorim Yoon
Yonder: Restless Books for Young Readers | September 28, 2021
In this picture book illustrated by Jian Kim and translated from the Koren by Chi-Young Kim, “animal friends discover the advantages of living slowly.”
