Support independent literary publishers by picking a read from the list below, which features new books published in September 2024 from CLMP members.
The Autobiography of Rain by Lana Hechtman Ayers
Fernwood Press | September 1, 2024
These poems “explore the healing powers of art and nature in a world that is as rife with grief as it is ripe with beauty.”
The Book of Drought by Rob Carney
TRP: The University Press of SHSU | September 1, 2024
In the poetry collection The Book of Drought, Carney “skips ahead to the ending, setting his unnamed Listen-Recorder in a near-future landscape newly wrecked by drought.”
Third Class Relics by Elizabeth Genovise
TRP: The University Press of SHSU | September 1, 2024
This novel “recalls many Biblical myths, stories in which one person must perish so that those around him might be awakened to their inner darkness but also to their capacity for redemption.”
What Good Is Heaven by Raye Hendrix
TRP: The University Press of SHSU | September 1, 2024
These poems “layer a queer coming-of-age narrative with poems of witness to the difficult realities not only of rural and farm life, but of violent cultural norms based around the patriarchal religious beliefs that the region is steeped in.”
In Praise of Late Wonder by Lee Herrick
Gunpowder Press | September 1, 2024
In this collection, California Poet Laureate Herrick writes “with openness about his adoption from Korea in more than 25 new memoir-like prose poems.”
Come and See: A Verse Translation of the Gospel of John by Eric Hoffman
Dos Madres Press | September 1, 2024
The lyrics in this collection “stand as unadorned as possible, so that each acuminated image and phrase intends, as did the original Greek, to pierce the thin veil between the human and the divine.”
Tupelo Press | September 1, 2024
Lane’s poetry collection allows “the mysteries of Emily Dickinson’s life to blossom into an incisive exploration of feminist poetics, innovation, and the gendered, temporally bound nature of artistic audience.”
Bamboo Ridge Press | September 1, 2024
Lum’s poems imagine life in Honolulu Chinatown circa 1900, giving voice to “the forgotten pioneer generation of sojourners and settlers.”
An Overdose of Meditation by Irene Mitchell
Dos Madres Press | September 1, 2024
In this poetry collection, Mitchell “has devised a formula through which she realizes that thoughtful perception is a vital principle of life.”
The Book of Wounded Sparrows by Octavio Quintanilla
TRP: The University Press of SHSU | September 1, 2024
In his second full-length poetry collection—and its limited-edition, full-color set of broadsides—which was longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award in poetry, Quintanilla “sifts through the wreckage left in the pursuit of the American Dream.”
Woodhall Press | September 2, 2024
A “captivating blend of comedy, romance, and twisted fairy tale,” the novel Grimwell “prompts readers to ponder the profound influence of literature on our lives.”
The Poisoned Fruit: A Topaz Tenkiller Novel by Julie Colacchio
Woodhall Press | September 2, 2024
In this novel, Topaz Tenkiller “finds a secret lab with mutilated Mage corpses and discovers that scientists are harvesting magic.”
Madness and Greatness Can Share the Same Face by Amanda Headlee
Woodhall Press | September 2, 2024
This book is “a collection of thirteen dark fiction tales that spiderweb across space and time to explore the line where, with a step, one can be pitched into the realm of greatness or depths of madness.”
Recalibrating Gravity: A Memoir in Verse by Mary Keating
Woodhall Press | September 2, 2024
Keating’s book “reminds us, no matter how hard life may seem—grace, love, and humor will save us from despair and allow us to live our best life under any circumstances.”
Pardon Power: How the Pardon System Works—and Why by Kim Wehle
Woodhall Press | September 2, 2024
This book “explores the historical context and contemporary challenges surrounding the presidential pardon.”
Unexplained Presence by Tisa Bryant
Wave Books | September 3, 2024
In this reprint of Bryant’s 2007 essay collection, “readers are spectators of mise-en-scènes in which black subjectivity has been distorted and denied within various visual narratives.”
City of Dancing Gargoyles by Tara Campbell
Santa Fe Writers Project | September 3, 2024
“Water and safety are elusive” in this book of speculative climate fiction, “where history books bleed, dragons kiss, and gun-toting trees keep their own kind of peace.”
We’re Alone by Edwidge Danticat
Graywolf Press | September 3, 2024
Danticat’s latest essay collection “asks us to think through some of the world’s intractable problems while deepening our understanding of one of the most significant novelists at work today.”
Red Hen Press | September 3, 2024
In her second poetry collection, Jackson “continues her exploration of the paradoxical meaning of a world where joy and sorrow simultaneously coexist.”
Five-Dog Epiphany: How a Quintet of Badass Bichons Retrieved Our Joy by Marianne Leone
Akashic Books | September 3, 2024
This memoir is “a moving and sometimes surprisingly funny exploration of grief and the mutual healing that can occur between rescue dogs and people who have experienced a soul-crushing loss.”
I Remember Not Sleeping by Sherri Levine
Fernwood Press | September 3, 2024
According to Matthew Dickman, this poetry collection is “good company for anyone who has struggled with mental health, for anyone who has felt alone, for anyone being bounced around in the sea of life.”
Graywolf Press | September 3, 2024
The 15th-anniversary edition of this influential work of 21st-century literature features a new preface by the author and new essays by Saidiya Hartman and Katherine McKittrick.
Visualizing Palestine: A Chronicle of Colonialism and the Struggle for Liberation
Haymarket Books | September 3, 2024
This collection of “more than 200 full-color infographics is a vivid portrait of Israeli settler colonialism and the Palestinian struggle for freedom.”
In a Field of Hallowed Be by Timothy Geiger
Terrapin Books | September 9, 2024
According to Richard Jackson, in this collection Geiger “listens to the songs of the many birds that populate the poems, not simply for their heard song, but for their unheard messages.”
A Very Indian Christmas: The Greatest Indian Holiday Stories of All Time
New Vessel Press | September 10, 2024
The essays, stories, poems, and hymns in this anthology capture “the distinctive flavor of Christmas in India and in the Indian diaspora,” featuring works by Jhumpa Lahiri, Salman Rushdie, Khushwant Singh, Rabindranath Tagore, and more.
Wendy’s Subway | September 10, 2024
Incorporating various genres, the works in Language Arts “touch on themes of music and subculture, African diasporic language, visual art, and more.”
What Is It Like to Be Alive? Fourteen Attempts at an Answer by Chris Arthur
EastOver Press | September 10, 2024
These fourteen essays are “an exercise in seeing beyond the obvious, and finding hidden depth in the places and things we might otherwise take for granted.”
Don’t Forget to Love Me by Anselm Berrigan
Wave Books | September 10, 2024
In Berrigan’s latest collection, he “pivots between semiotic slippage and shrewd assertions, letting the form of each poem take shape as it will, a surprise of sound and sight.”
To Washington Park, With Love: Documentary Photographs from Summer 1987 by Rose Blouin
Haymarket Books | September 10, 2024
The black-and-white photographs in this book capture “the events, people, and landscape of Chicago’s Washington Park during the summer of 1987.”
Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda
Translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches and Heather Cleary
Feminist Press | September 10, 2024
The thirteen women in these linked stories “spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to endure, telling their own stories in bold, unapologetic voices.”
Autobiomythography of by Ayokunle Falomo
Alice James Books | September 10, 2024
According to I. S. Jones, this poetry collection “bends and reimagines the limits of language, blends the Divine with the digital present, contemporary music with the voices of the past while the speaker traverses the friction between their American & Nigerian heritage.”
Stealing Home by Sharon Hashimoto
Grid Books | September 10, 2024
Hashimoto’s debut short story collection is “both an allusion to an American pastime, and a searing condemnation of its history of forced internment.”
Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać
Two Lines Press | September 10, 2024
Croatian journalist and novelist Karakaš “relays an epic in village miniature: the story of a father, a son, a farm, a family dog, and a nation’s descent into fascism.”
Plum Blossom Wine by Li Qingzhao
Translated from the Chinese by Sibyl James and Kang Xuepei
Empty Bowl Press | September 10, 2024
These poems “full of wistful longing resonate across the centuries like a temple bell just rung.”
Baobab Press | September 10, 2024
This debut novel from a fourth-generation Montanan “charts the liminal destruction of society and self, where wild and rural places are encroached upon by more contemporary forces.”
The Girl Who Became a Rabbit by Emilie Menzel
Hub City Press | September 10, 2024
This book-length lyric “pushes the limits of the prose-poetic form to explore how the body carries and shapes grief and what it means to tell a story.”
Don’t Pity the Desperate by Anna B. Moore
Unsolicited Press | September 10, 2024
Moore “knits together all the feelings and realities of trying to emerge from addiction–the pathos, the gallows humor, the family difficulties, the regeneration of self–into a compulsively readable novel constructed of lovely sentences and electric scenes.”
An Unexpected Light by José Saramago
Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa
Seven Stories Press | September 10, 2024
Nobel Prize winner Saramago’s work focuses “on two glorious days when he helped his uncle take some piglets to the market in Santarém.”
Now You Owe Me by Aliah Wright
Red Hen Press | September 10, 2024
According to Jessica Jiji, this debut novel is “a crisply written, fast-paced thriller with meaning layered so deftly into the entertainment, you get a double bonus of social commentary and spine-chilling twists.”
Everything Happens to Me by Peter Cherches
Pelekinesis | September 12, 2024
This episodic novel “chronicles the trials and tribulations of Peter Cherches, an obscure Brooklyn writer who suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous tormentors, most notably his next-door neighbor.”
The Goodbye Kit by Daneen Bergland
Airlie Press | September 15, 2024
Bergland’s poems about girlhood, marriage, parenthood, aging, and nature “explore ecologies of intimacy made tangible through both experience and witness.”
even my dreams are over the constant state of anxiety by Irene Cooper
Airlie Press | September 15, 2024
This poetry collection is “bound by pulse and impulse, bent on giving body to the amorphic, and buoyed by the insistent beauty of a damaged planet.”
The Devil’s Library by Joachim Glage
JackLeg Press | September 15, 2024
According to Andrew Tonkovich, this is a “funny, subversive, and authoritatively anti-authoritarian” short fiction collection in which Glage “finds no tradition unassailable or otherwise invulnerable to his joyful repurposing.”
FlowerSong Press | September 16, 2024
According to GJV Prasad, this is a “collection for our times–from four women poets who have taken on Shakespeare, and their love, during the pandemic.”
Translated from the Greek by Peter Bien
Laertes | September 16, 2024
According to Ewa Chrusciel, this novel is “framed by two funerals: the protagonist’s father and a murdered woman. It is also marked by more invisible griefs, the grief of linguistic dislocation, displacement, and internalized exile.”
Terminal Maladies by Okwudili Nebeolisa
Autumn House Press | September 16, 2024
Winner of the 2023 CAAPP Book Prize, this poetry collection “serves as an intimate exploration of the relationship between a mother and son and their emotional journey during her battle with cancer.”
New Moon: Day One by Thanassis Valtinos
Translated from the Greek by Jane Assimakopoulos and Stavros Deligiorgis
Laertes | September 16, 2024
According to Nicholas Gage, this novel “tells a coming-of-age tale of two boys who struggle to deal with their emerging sexual impulses as they try to survive the brutalities of a vicious civil war.”
The Hungry and the Haunted by Rilla Askew
Belle Point Press | September 17, 2024
Set primarily in eastern Oklahoma during the 1970s, these short stories are a “testament to young women and other outsiders navigating relationships, social change, and the power of place during increasingly precarious times.”
Blood on the Brain by Esinam Bediako
Red Hen Press | September 17, 2024
Blood on the Brain is “a novel about the complications of family, romance, and culture—and how coming of age can feel like a blow to the head.”
Blue Flare: Three Haitian Poets
Translated from the Haitian Kreyòl and French by Danielle Legros Georges
Zephyr Press | September 17, 2024
In this trilingual anthology, poets Marie-Célie Agnant, Maggy de Coster, and Évelyne Trouillot “illuminate the complexity of life in Haiti and its diaspora in the 21st century, particularly for women.”
The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies by Maggie Cooper
Bull City Press | September 17, 2024
The stories in Cooper’s collection grapple with “the role of gender and the body in creating and maintaining communities” and “dream of worlds where we can all escape our narrow orbits.”
Want, the Lake by Jenny Factor
Red Hen Press | September 17, 2024
Factor’s second poetry collection “spans twenty years of life—accumulated wisdom, images, and desires—with a dedication to craft that has been honed and clarified by time.”
Seven Stories Press | September 17, 2024
This anthology contains more than 30 speeches spanning five decades and “sheds light not just on Castro’s mighty role in Latin America’s past, but also on his legacy for the future.”
Translated from the German by Damion Searls
Dorothy, a publishing project | September 17, 2024
According to Luke Kennard, this novel is a “bizarre and beautiful psychodrama about hospitality, control, and domination” that “seems to take place half in the ‘real world’ and half in a Leonora Carrington painting.”
The Changing of Keys by Carolyn Jack
Regal House Publishing | September 17, 2024
In The Changing of Keys, “a gifted, fourteen-year-old pianist finds himself sent away from his Caribbean home against his will, to study classical music in the U.S. with a family friend he’s never met.”
From Almeda to Zilphia: Arkansas Women Who Transformed American Popular Song by Stephen Koch
Et Alia Press | September 17, 2024
This book of 30 portraits and profiles features “a wide cross-section of inspirational creatives with the common thread of ties to a state in the American South with a deep musical heritage.”
Seven Stories Press | September 17, 2024
This novel is about what it means to “‘contain multitudes’—to love both men and women, to defend your mixed-race family in the American South, to care for someone who experiences the world in fundamentally different ways than you do.”
Brooklyn Family Album by Margaret Montet
Read Furiously | September 17, 2024
In this memoir, Montet “walks in the footsteps (and roller coaster tracks) of her family to learn more about their connection to the earliest days of New York City and to her.”
The Song Cave | September 17, 2024
Coupled with the poet’s line drawings, “these questioning and conversational poems operate on the sidelines of reason, dictated by human instinct.”
The Unsignificant: Three Talks on Poetry and Pictures by Srikanth Reddy
Wave Books | September 17, 2024
This collection—a selection of Reddy’s lectures from the 2015 Bagley Wright Lecture Series—is “concerned with what it’s not about—not significance, or insignificance, but ‘unsignificance.'”
Dark Days: Fugitive Essays by Roger Reeves
Graywolf Press | September 17, 2024
This debut work of memoir, theory, and criticism builds “a profound vision for how to see and experience the world in our present moment, and how to strive toward an alternative existence in intentional community underground.”
Los Cedros: a Tejana Memoir by Dorotea Reyna
FlowerSong Press | September 17, 2024
In her memoir, Reyna “attempts to recover the wholeness she felt as a child from the violence and demagoguery of today’s political discourse.”
Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim by Jacob Wren
Book*hug Press | September 17, 2024
Wren’s novel is “an intricate study of our complicity in violent global systems and a celebration of the hope that underpins the resistance against them.”
Briefcases from Caracas by Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez
Translated from the Spanish by Barbara Riess and Suzanne Corley
Black Square Editions | September 20, 2024
In this novel, Mendez Guédez’s Caracas is “the sinking ship at the center of this twenty-first century transnational Stevensonian Caribbean tale of shifting conflicts, loyalties, and surprising treasures.”
A Hunger With No Name by Lauren C. Teffeau
University of Tampa Press | September 20, 2024
This novel is “a powerful story of survival—personal, ecological, and cultural—in the presence of overwhelming technological power.”
We Walked On by Thérèse Soukar Chehade
Regal House Publishing | September 24, 2024
Set during Lebanon’s civil war, Chehade’s novel “immerses readers in the landscape of war, weaving political unrest into everyday life.”
Translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter, Iris Nuțu, Gene Tanta, Diana Manole, Monica Cure, Adam J. Sorkin, Andreea Iulia Scridon, and Gabi Reigh
Two Lines Press | September 24, 2024
Featuring eight Romanian poets, including Moni Stănilă, Elena Vlădăreanu, and Constantin Acosmei, this anthology is “a stunning portrait of all our lives in the 21st century—the cycles of outrage, boredom, and ecstasy—as we get to see ourselves from an entirely new viewpoint.”
The Invisible World by Matt Daly
Unsolicited Press | September 24, 2024
Daly’s poetry collection “began as a conversation with a troubling and troublesome ancestor whose writings and speeches were influential in the early history of what would become the United States.”
Drowning Girl by Kurt Cole Eidsvig
Unsolicited Press | September 24, 2024
According to Michael Davis, the writing in Eidsvig’s experimental debut “synthesizes the aesthetics of pop art with street-level romantic minimalism, bound together in a worldview apprenticed at once to visual arts, poetry, fiction, and screenwriting.”
Songs for the Land-Bound by Violeta Garcia-Mendoza
June Road Press | September 24, 2024
This debut poetry collection explores “the constraints and anxieties of midlife in the midst of climate breakdown, of motherhood in a period of personal and planetary vulnerability.”
Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms by Joan Kwon Glass
Perugia Press | September 24, 2024
Kwon Glass’s latest collection is “part lamentation and part hymn—an illumination of diasporic hungers, hauntings, absence, and resilience.”
Seven Stories Press | September 24, 2024
In this historical fiction novel, Graves “continues the fictionalized account of the adventures of Sergeant Roger Lamb, an Irish soldier who fought for the British during the American Revolutionary War.”
Village Voices: A Memoir of the Village Voice Bookshop, Paris, 1982–2012 by Odile Hellier
Seven Stories Press | September 24, 2024
This memoir is “a celebration of the legacy of the Village Voice bookshop in Paris, founded by Odile Hellier in 1982.”
The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy
Feminist Press | September 24, 2024
According to Nino Cipri, Killjoy’s novel is “a reminder that fantasy can be a vehicle for so much: interrogations of power, knowledge, ethics, an exploration of how to live in the world.”
Keeping Quiet: Sixteen Essays on Silence by Adriana Páramo
Red Hen Press | September 24, 2024
These essays cover “a wide range of angles and experiences, from an exploration of IBM’s anechoic chamber—the world’s quietest place—to stories of incest, marriage, sexual harassment, social justice, and first-person accounts of life in the emirate of Qatar.”
Come by Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia’s Geechee Coast by Neesha Powell-Ingabire
Hub City Press | September 24, 2024
In her debut memoir, Powell-Ingabire “chips away at coastal Georgia’s facade of beaches and golden marshes to recover undertold Black history alongside personal and family stories.”
What Monsters You Make of Them by Christian Teresi
Red Hen Press | September 24, 2024
Teresi’s poems “interrogates ecology and injustice through shifting landscapes and ancient cities.”
No Ship Sets Out to Be a Shipwreck by Joan Wickersham
EastOver Press | September 24, 2024
Wickersham’s hybrid collection is “a poetic and philosophical meditation ignited by a beautiful, frightening, mysterious object: the seventeenth-century Swedish warship Vasa, which sank only minutes into its maiden voyage.”
FlowerSong Press | September 27, 2024
Inspired by the ancient Greek tragedies, PUTINOIKA is a “multi-genre epic about frenzy and plague in the era of Putin and Trump.”
Treaties, Lies & Promises: How the Métis and First Nations Shaped Canada by Tom Brodbeck
Ronsdale Press | September 27, 2024
This nonfiction account “of the links between the Red River Resistance and the numbered treaties explores a largely unknown part of Canadian history.”
If I Were God I Would Also Start with Light by Gardner Dorton
Thirty West Publishing House | September 27, 2024
According to Taylor Byas, Dorton’s poetry collection “undertakes the sizable quest of finding alternative role models in order to reconstruct the desire that has been long denied.”
Kimono with Young Girl Sleeves by Jill Hoffman
Box Turtle Press | September 28, 2024
According to David Lehman, Hoffman’s poems “surprise and delight with their candor and with the skillful irony that permits the poet to translate autobiography into poetry.”
From Immigrant to Ambassador: My American Journey by Eduardo Aguirre
Arte Público Press | September 30, 2024
Aguirre’s memoir “recalls his carefree, happy childhood in Cuba, the onset of the revolution and his parents’ painful decision to send him alone to the United States after his involvement in a counterrevolutionary youth movement jeopardized his safety.”
The Garden-Variety Grimoire: A Literary Anthology
The Words Faire | September 30, 2024
Edited by Tobi Brun, this anthology of multi-genre speculative works features writing by Grace Gibbons, Eliza Scudder, Isabella Bromberg, and more.
The Last Client of Luis Montez by Manuel Ramos
Arte Público Press | September 30, 2024
The third novel in Ramos’s Luis Montez Mystery series “leads readers on a breathless chase through Colorado and west to California as the activist and attorney finds himself running from the law.”
Beware the Bantam Fighter by David I. Santiago
Arte Público Press | September 30, 2024
In this collection of interrelated stories, Santiago “braids together one Puerto Rican family’s experiences on the mainland and the island to create an engaging look at their cultural heritage and its effect on assimilation and daily life.”
