Support independent literary publishers by picking a read from the list below, which features new books forthcoming in September 2025 from CLMP members.
All the Possible Bodies by Iain Haley Pollock
Alice James Books | September 1, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-949944-90-7
According to Afaa M. Weaver, this poetry collection “shimmers with a brilliance that allows the light of honesty and courage to penetrate the dense mass existent in the swirling of race and caste in America.”
The Tide Book by Vivian Faith Prescott
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions | September 1, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-962405-34-8
Prescott’s poems are a “lyrical record of living beside the Pacific Ocean while caretaking for an aging father” as “the daily rhythm of tidal life becomes what sustains her through the waves of life’s hardships.”
Surviving the Eremocene by Chuck Salmons
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions | September 1, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-962405-32-4
This poetry collection “explores and expands upon the meaning of Eremocene, or Age of Loneliness, a term popularized by biologist and naturalist E.O. Wilson.”
Dangerous Insight: A Detective Kaitlin Kruse Novel by Karoline Anderson
Catalyst Press | September 2, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-963511-17-8
In this crime thriller, detective Kaitlyn Kruse has “access to her past lives, the memories just beneath the surface, available to help her solve the latest crime, if only she is able to solve the puzzle.”
Flight Plan by M. Soledad Caballero
Red Hen Press | September 2, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-63628-252-7
The poems in this collection “map the aftermaths of cancer, the varied routes of migration, and the geographies of memory.”
Vine Leaves Press | September 2, 2025
ISBN: 978-3-98832-186-2
In this novel, “conspiracy theorist Theo has a loyal online following, a DIY podcast studio in a pub basement, and a theory that interdimensional vampires are stealing people’s souls.”
On Earth as It Is in Heaven by Vishwas R. Gaitonde
Orison Books | September 2, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-949039-60-3
According to David Heska Wanbli Weiden, the characters in these short stories “struggle to make sense of the customs and traditions of their new homes while also negotiating the passages of their personal and familial relationships.”
Goblin Mode by Caroline Hagood
Santa Fe Writers Project | September 2, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-951631-49-9
In this novel, “the protagonist, who is and is not Caroline Hagood, takes a surreal odyssey through humor, horror, and plague-time Brooklyn.”
Lights in Cold Rooms: A Psychologist Reflects on Family, Aging, Love & Loss by Joan Cusack Handler
CavanKerry Press | September 2, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-960327-15-4
This book chronicles Handler’s “confrontation with 80 years of complex family dynamics and often difficult love, and explores the path she took to work through depression and ultimately return to wellness.”
Green Linden Press | September 2, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-961834-09-5
According to Baron Wormser, Kearney “uses the sonnet to tell a story that is personal and poetic, medical and historical, mortal and fabled, physical and metaphysical” in this collection.
Tulipwood Books | September 2, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9914048-2-2
In this collection of poetry and essays, Lavin “crafts a generous vision of Lake Michigan, Chicago, pacifist Jewish heritage, climate science, sensuality, love, and ethics—all experienced through the senses of an ever-changing body.”
SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide by Cannupa Hanska Luger
Ayin Press | September 2, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-961814-26-4
In this hybrid book, Luger “transforms a 1970s military survival guide through poetic redaction, speculative fiction, and iterative line drawing—deftly surfacing and disrupting the colonial subconscious that haunts this vexed source text.”
Landscapes and Observations by Michael Ratcliffe
Fallen Tree Press | September 2, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9860861-6-3
This poetry chapbook “brings the geographer’s eye for landscape observation together with his interests in spirituality, philosophy, and the ordinary things that make us human.”
Fernwood Press | September 2, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-59498-170-8
“Written in a meditative, identity-based style,” these poems “resemble an urban tapestry, touching on the cost of progress and the fading spirit of community in the early twenty-first century.”
Open Reality: Meeting the Polycrisis Together With All Beings by Shodo Spring
Sea Crow Press | September 2, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-961864-30-6
This environmental book “opens practical possibilities for creating a shared, flexible culture that knows the natural world both as family and as a working partner.”
Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać
Sandorf Passage | September 2, 2025
ISBN: 978-953-351-538-0
This novel follows a widowed woman as she writes “a letter uncovering everything that has happened in her life that has led her to penning this confession to her friend: from discovering bedbugs to workplace romance and familial fallouts.”
Hair on Fire: Afghan Women Poets
Two Lines Press | September 2, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-949641-84-4
Five Afghan poets “wield language to combat the loneliness, absurdity, and claustrophobia of life in a war-torn country and its diaspora” in this anthology.
Translated from the Hebrew by Joanna Chen
Warbler Press | September 3, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-965684-52-8
This novel following a chimpanzee in the US space program is a “deeply moving exploration of friendship, sacrifice, and the uneasy alliance between man and animal.”
Maybe in Heaven by Francesca Penchant
Rachilde & Co. | September 3, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9916634-2-7
This thriller is “the strange, decadent portrait of a lost woman fighting against a bitter little world—in which gender is a performance and love is a con.”
The Winterpoor by George Michelsen Foy
Sea Crow Press | September 5, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-961864-34-4
The protagonist of this novel struggles “for his own sanity and freedom as he tries to care for a mentally challenged and neglected boy while also salvaging the floating studio of a long-dead artist, navigating a doomed marriage, and attempting to make his own art.”
Raven Chronicles Press | September 5, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9914032-1-4
This novel is “a book about birds, a meditation on the deserts of the American southwest, and an unlikely explorer’s account of life on Earth without continued human intervention.”
Positively Uncivilized by Rena Priest
Raven Chronicles Press | September 5, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9914032-3-8
The essays in this collection “emphasize the necessity of community to overcome the damage done by human socioeconomic and political systems designed to isolate and shame those vulnerable to those unfair systems.”
Nearly Roadkill: Queer Love on the Run by Kate Bornstein and Caitlin Sullivan
Generous Press | September 9, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9916428-5-9
“As Scratch and Winc go from anonymous lovers to accidental heroes and gender outlaws, they expose the shadowy Web stretched between technology and capitalist greed” in this novel originally written in the 1990s.
Agency 3: Novellas by Teresa Carmody, Kim Chinquee, and Allison Pitinii Davis
Baobab Press | September 9, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-936097-62-3
The three novellas in this collection each “describe the harrowing, soul-rattling actions and choices made by women in the pursuit of defining their lives.”
Little Neck by Darcie Dennigan
Fonograf Editions | September 9, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-964499-51-2
In this novel, a child is “sent away to live with the town’s tombstone carvers, a pair of embittered sisters,” where she “begins to piece together scraps of the past—and her dark family history begins to possess her.”
Bind Me Tighter Still by Lara Ehrlich
Red Hen Press | September 9, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-63628-280-0
This novel following a siren’s life on land “explores power and hunger, sacrifice and motherhood, and celebrates the fierceness of female strength in a male-dominated world.”
The Franchiser by Stanley Elkin
Dalkey Archive Press | September 9, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-62897-624-3
This novel is a “tragicomic journey across America as one man attempts to create a fast food empire, and a legacy to leave behind.”
University of Pittsburgh Press | September 9, 2025
ISBN: 978-0-8229-6749-1
According to Nate Marshall, this poetry collection “confronts the subject of fatherhood with an honesty and tenderness rarely accorded to the typical secondary parent.”
Sagging Meniscus | September 9, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-963846-45-4
The essays in this collection “search for principle in an age of imposture and, rejecting easy formulas, ask what it might mean to live a considered life when body and body politic both are in a state of perpetual emergency.”
What God in the Kingdom of Bastards by Brian Gyamfi
University of Pittsburgh Press | September 9, 2025
ISBN: 978-0-8229-6757-6
This collection is a “poetic exploration of grief, memory, Blackness, and the haunting legacy of familial trauma by way of colonialism, told through the lens of two brothers: Lot, the elder, who is flesh and alive, and Frank, the younger, a ghost navigating his post-suicide existence.”
The American Poetry Review | September 9, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9875852-3-8
Winner of the 2025 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, this poetry collection “reimagines Cain and Abel as they navigate the dense geography of girlhood into young womanhood to explore violence, love, sex, faith, and man’s dominion over the earth.”
Book*hug Press | September 9, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-77166-950-4
Jong’s memoir “documents the slow unravelling of her connection to her faith and the tragic history of her fractured family, shining a light into the dark corners of memory that have haunted her well into adulthood.”
Translated from the German by Max Lawton
Deep Vellum | September 9, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64605-382-7
In Schattenfroh, “interruptions, breaks, and annotations both buoy and deceive, and endless historical references, literary allusions, and wordplay construct a baroque, encyclopedic quest.”
That Very Place by Mary Ann McGuigan
Unsolicited Press | September 9, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-963115-46-8
According to Sonja Livingston, McGuigan “masterfully explores the tender space between connection and estrangement, the cost of words unspoken, and the reverberating legacy of parents who abandon and abuse their children” in this short story collection.
Writing as a Way of Life: A Book About Art, Craft, and Devotion by Brian Morton
Black Lawrence Press | September 9, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-62557-177-9
“Drawing on a rich and varied career as a writer and teacher,” Morton “provides writers with a guidebook for finding the psychic equipment they’ll need to remain committed to their craft over the long haul.”
Satan Says 45th: Anniversary Edition by Sharon Olds
University of Pittsburgh Press | September 9, 2025
ISBN: 978-0-8229-4897-1
According to Ada Limón, this poetry collection originally published in 1980 is “more than a book; it is the original mother plant where all the seeds have come from.”
The Unnumbered Anniversaries by Kurt Olsson
Fernwood Press | September 9, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-59498-171-5
These poems are a “testament to the ordinary, those fragments of time and place, of people and things, that distance and reflection somehow transform into the extraordinary.”
Betweenness by Varun Ravindran
Baobab Press | September 9, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-936097-60-9
According to Samiya Bashir, the poems in this collection “swell and recede across generations and geographies: from Madras to the Oregon coast, from the echo of a grandfather’s voice to the hush of a lover’s breath.”
Goat, Goddess, Moon by Catherine Strisik
Holy Cow! Press | September 9, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-66640-697-9
According to Leslie Ullman, this poetry collection is a “singing through the body and through place, of identifying with, and returning to an imprint of origin; that of ancestral northern Greek villages, diaspora, and the sublime mythical labyrinth that is Crete.”
The Animal on the Rock by Daniela Tarazona
Translated from the Spanish by Lizzie Davis and Kevin Gerry Dunn
Deep Vellum | September 9, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64605-397-1
“Through the course of her grief, the protagonist’s body, her instincts, and her perception, begin to experience a transformation as unexpected as it is natural” in this novel.
Wilderness of Mirrors by Olufemi Terry
Restless Books | September 9, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-63206-398-4
This debut novel “captures the heady abandon of early adulthood in an Africa still reeling from the lasting effects of colonialism and racial Partition.”
Creek Water: New & Selected Poems by Edward Harkness
Empty Bowl Press | September 12, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-991740-04-3
This collection spanning five decades of Harkness’s work “reminds us that history and our lives are made of moments that when witnessed deeply and generously can transform.”
Night of the Manhattans by Jennifer Juneau
Pink Trees Press | September 12, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9898695-9-6
This poetry collection “guides the reader through life experienced within vibrant and ceaseless energy” and “unspools with reckless yearning as it reaches for the sublime.”
Perugia Press | September 15, 2025
ISBN: 978-0-9978076-9-1
This debut poetry collection “explores Mormon girlhood, the American West, matriarchal lineage, indoctrination, estrangement, and the lingering ramifications of being raised within a repressive and patriarchal American religious ideology.”
In the Good Years by Laura Cresté
Four Way Books | September, 15 2025
ISBN: 978-1-961897-56-4
In these poems, Cresté “fixes her scrupulous gaze on the interwoven threads of this distressed anthropocene era, taking in the whole cloth of our globalized societies.”
Someone Else’s Hunger by Isabella DeSendi
Four Way Books | September 15, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-961897-58-8
“Poised between her Cuban matrilineage and her first-generation adolescence in America, between assimilation and reclamation,” DeSendi’s poems “dissect our human obsession with beauty and the body.”
Four Way Books | September 15, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-961897-64-9
In this poetry collection, Grubin “shapes language and silences into a bridge that holds us between longing and understanding, between effort and the holy ground of that unattainable destination.”
All Calm Beyond by Stephen Knauth
Four Way Books | September 15, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-961897-50-2
The poems in this collection “chart the path between acute mourning to the beginning of recovery, asking what it looks like to continue despite the permanence of loss.”
Raven on the Moaners’ Bench by Gary Copeland Lilley
Four Way Books | September 15, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-961897-62-5
This poetry collection “locates itself within the oceanic canon that grapples with loss and within the rich history of Black letters, marking a staggering achievement in both.”
Four Way Books | September 15, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-961897-48-9
This collection of poetry cataloguing whale species by common name and behaviors “defies pathetic fallacy even as it sings the similarities between homo sapiens and the marine mammoths that have long captured our fascination.”
Four Way Books | September 15, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-961897-52-6
In this collection of short stories, Mountford “invites readers with a balance of humor, sensuality, and compassion while spanning continents, offering intimate portraits of flawed characters caught in the crosshairs of personal and political upheavals.”
The Birth of Undoing by Emily Patterson
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions | September 15, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-962405-30-0
In this poetry collection, Patterson “offers a clear-eyed portrayal of the complexities of becoming and being a parent in our world.”
Four Way Books | September 15, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-961897-60-1
Pourciau’s book is a “collection of brief yet meticulously elaborated stories that deconstruct daily living as his characters see it by diving beneath their skin and surveying the electric heat bristling below.”
Burn Me Back by Peggy Robles-Alvarado
Four Way Books | September 15, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-961897-66-3
“At the cross section of Puerto Rican and Dominican diasporas,” the speaker of these poems “refuses to abandon what resists translation, makes the space she needs, and transforms objects as she names them.”
Philomel, Whose Reputation Precedes Her by Danielle Ryle
Lit Fox Books | September, 15 2025
ISBN: 979-8992232912
This poetry collection “measures the distance between a poetic form and a form to fill out” as “the figure of Philomela asks you to remember, not what happened, but who she is.”
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Matthew Tuckner
Four Way Books | September 15, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-961897-54-0
According to Catherine Barnett, “reading this collection is like listening to someone record the apocalypse happening in real time in language so charged and with images so vivid you might forget the apocalypse is here.”
Guest Privileges by Gaar Adams
Dzanc Books | September 16, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-938603-30-3
“Weaving memoir with unprecedented reportage,” this book is a “decade-long journey of discovery through the clandestine queer communities of the Gulf States, and into the very nature of home and belonging.”
Aunonomic Reasoning by Will Alexander
Black Sun Lit | September 16, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9863664-6-3
According to Brenda Iijima, this book of essays is “of paramount importance for the spells it casts, for the decolonial guide it is,” and “for the sheer life force it extends to all comrades in fortified kinship.”
Traceable Relation by Kimberly Alidio
Fonograf Editions | September 16, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-964499-42-0
This book is a “collection of linked essays and poems concerned with the vitality of art and writing in the wake of grief.”
Grace Period by Maria Judite de Carvalho
Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa
Two Lines Press | September 16, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-949641-82-0
In this novel, a man “has returned to sell his childhood home so he can send his longtime girlfriend—whom he now realizes he may have never loved—on a trip to the Acropolis before her cancer kills her.”
My Father is Calling the Neighbors Names by Alan Humm
Vine Leaves Press | September 16, 2025
ISBN: 978-3-98832-167-1
In these poems, Humm takes readers through “a wide variety of topics—love; parenthood; foreign travel; David Bowie; Charlie Chaplin; his drunken father; pop music; Donald Trump; D-Day—in an impressive variety of styles.”
Stolen: Love And Loss In The Time Of Covid-19 by Elizabeth Jaeger
Unsolicited Press | September 16, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-963115-49-9
This memoir is a “raw and gripping diary account of the battle Jaeger’s dad endured with COVID-19 in New York City.”
Lullaby for the Grieving by Ashley M. Jones
Hub City Press | September 16, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-88574-058-6
In this poetry collection, Jones “studies the multifaceted nature of grief: the personal grief of losing her father, and the political grief tied to Black Southern identity.”
Pandora’s Kitchen by Ron Koertge
Red Hen Press | September 16, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-63628-293-0
According to Amy Gerstler, Koertge transforms fairy tales, Bible stories, Greek myths, horror movies, and more “into poems rich with contradictions, role reversals, juicy ambiguities, and as Emily Dickinson put it, ‘truth’s superb surprise.’”
The Nightmare Sequence by Omar Sakr and Safdar Ahmed
Nightboat Books | September 16, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64362-297-2
This illustrated book of poetry is an “extraordinary collaboration by an award-winning duo—poet Omar Sakr and visual artist Safdar Ahmed–that bears witness to the genocide in Gaza.”
Small Scale Sinners by Mahreen Sohail
A Public Space Books | September 16, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9859769-1-5
In her debut short story collection, Sohail asks “how—in the midst of grief or betrayal, against a backdrop of war, or even just workaday suffering—being good matters.”
Tree Spirits Around the World by Louise Wannier
Red Hen Press | September 16, 2025
ISBN: 978-0-9909976-7-2
This illustrated children’s book “helps children explore and appreciate the diversity our planet has to offer, and the spirits that tie us together.”
Marginalia: An Autobiography by Naomi Washer
Autofocus Books | September 16, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-957392-39-4
“Comprised of a decade’s worth of notes made in the margins of other writers’ books,” Washer’s writing “accumulates into an essay that interrogates both its own form and its author’s sense of self.”
The Double Nest by Rhett Watts
Fernwood Press | September 16, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-59498-172-2
In this poetry collection, Watts celebrates “a seventy-year-old albatross, the friendship of a wolf with a bear, a medieval monk’s attempt at flight, and the brother she could not save.”
trace press | September 18, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-77525-678-6
Edited by Nedra Rodrigo and Geetha Sukumaran, this experimental collection features editors, poets, and translators reflecting “on Tamil’s trajectory through classical poems, labour songs, feminist and Dalit poetry and poems of war and displacement.”
June Road Press | September 23, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9874328-6-0
“Based on her experience as a wilderness guide for women in a substance-abuse treatment program,” Ardery’s debut poetry collection is for “those who have been affected by addiction and all who have ever sought solace or redemption in nature.”
Lifting the Island by David Eggleton
Red Hen Press | September 23, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-63628-290-9
This poetry collection is a “kind of lyrical word map of the South Pacific, built up through a lush epic catalog of flora, fauna, and artifacts.”
A History Of Handthrown Walls by Adele Evershed
Unsolicited Press | September 23, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-963115-56-7
This novella consists of “interconnected flash fiction pieces with the timeless presence of hand-built walls scattered across Connecticut.”
Cyan Magenta Yellow Black by Kevin Fenton
Black Lawrence Press | September 23, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-62557-196-0
This novel “lovingly summons the Minneapolis Saint Paul of December of 1993, just before the internet changed everything.”
Dreams For Earth by Fatima-Ayan Malika Hirsi
Deep Vellum | September 23, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64605-399-5
In her debut poetry collection, Hirsi “chronicles experiences from quarantining in Dallas, to being the sole Black person in an Oregon ecovillage, to building relationships with land and water on Vancouver Island.”
This Single Road: Postcards and Notebooks from Kyoto by Alan Chong Lau
Entre Ríos Books | September 23, 2025
ISBN: 978-0-9600457-8-5
In this book, Lau “opens his Kyoto journals to us—inexpensive pocket notebooks filled with quick sketches, poems, and fragments of daily life.”
Starry Starry Night by Shani Mootoo
Book*hug Press | September 23, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-77166-956-6
This novel set in 1960s Trinidad is a “portrait of a child who, despite her privileged appearance, must ultimately fend for herself because her safety depends on it.”
SOAP Notes by Frannie O’Callaghan
Vine Leaves Press | September 23, 2025
ISBN: 978-3-98832-169-5
“With years of experience as a Registered Veterinary Technician,” O’Callaghan “offers an unapologetic window into the daily encounters of the humans who take care of pets” in this memoir.
The Presence of One Word by Andrea Potos
Fernwood Press | September 23, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-59498-173-9
According to Marge Piercy, Potos’s poems are “powerful in their well-crafted expression of love—for her mother, grandmother, friends, places that moved her in Ireland or Greece or just her own or her grandmother’s house.”
Translated from the Spanish by Helen Lane
Open Letter Books | September 23, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-960385-43-7
In this novel, Saer “weaves a hypnotic tale of deception, exile, and the search for meaning in a world where nothing is as it seems.”
Nightboat Books | September 23, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64362-291-0
According to Natalie Shapero, these poems “spin absurdist nightmares of art and history, of links and screenshots and mediated engagement with atrocity, of the genocide against Palestinians and the many attendant erasures.”
The Dead Dad Diaries by Erin Slaughter
Autofocus Books | September 23, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-957392-40-0
“Part true-crime story, part poetic meditation on seeking to know a parent posthumously,” this memoir “confronts the impact of domestic violence and hereditary addiction on a family lineage, and questions the extent to which we can trust the stories we tell ourselves.”
Green Linden Press | September 23, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-961834-07-1
This poetry collection “captures the experience of living between the domestic and the absurd, the lyrical and the narrative, oscillating between these states as a reflection of day-to-day existence.”
Translated from the Mandarin by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
Zephyr Press | September 23, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-938890-35-2
The poems in this posthumous collection “span Zhang Zao’s short career, beginning with ‘Mirror,’ one of his earliest and best known works, and ending with ‘Lantern Town,’ written less than two months before his death.”
Hands in Clay by Mildred Kiconco Barya
Serving House Books | September 25, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-947175-99-0
According to Bruce Smith, in this poetry collection Barya “has a discourse with the spirit world in dreams and receives messages from ancestors, phantom children, and the dead.”
The Apoptotic Era by A. G. Valentine
Thirty West Publishing House | September 26, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9895422-9-1
In this debut novella “the page has turned on humanity’s utopian appetites, and a new chapter is underway—one of hunger turned inward; of collective anxiety, auto-consumption, and quantum mechanics run amok.”
Motion Dazzle by Jocelyn Jane Cox
Vine Leaves Press | September 30, 2025
ISBN: 978-3-98832-171-8
Cox’s memoir explores how she uses “performance and distraction as coping strategies while demonstrating a capability we all have: to find moments of celebration alongside pain.”
God-Damned Eden by James Daniels
Bull City Press | September 30, 2025
ISSN: 1932-6149
This poetry chapbook depicts its setting, Selma, as a “community that, despite its pain, holds a depth of spirit that deserves love and care, a place where redemption is sought through the resilience of its people.”
Black Lawrence Press | September 30, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-62557-165-6
“With short prose pieces, lyric essays, and praise poems for G-tubes, nurses, and coworkers,” Frey’s chapbook “invites readers into a wakeful circle of suffering and small heroic gestures of care.”
Hello Wife by Lisa K. Friedman
Santa Fe Writers Project | September 30, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-951631-53-6
In this novel, Friedman “explores sisterly bonds, the strength of families, and the devastating impact of opioid abuse in modern America.”
Nightboat Books | September 30, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64362-294-1
“Against the backdrop of the anti-trans panic,” this poetry collection is an “exercise in turning private experience into shared consciousness and illicit desire into common cause.”
Perfect Happiness by You-Jeong Jeong
Translated from the Korean by Sean Lin Halbert
Creature Publishing | September 30, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-951971-33-5
“With unparalleled psychological precision,” Jeong’s novel “weaves a domestic nightmare centered on Yuna Shin: wife, mother, sister—and covert narcissist.”
The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam by Lana Lin
Dorothy, a publishing project | September 30, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-948980-29-6
“Situated between memoir, social criticism, and conceptual art,” this book is an “incisive response to a modernist classic and an affecting exploration of the poetics and politics of our times.”
Child of These Tears by Molly McNett
Slant Books | September 30, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-63982-202-7
In this novel set in the early eighteenth century, “the settlers living in the hamlet of Hartfield Falls in ‘English America’ face the looming threat posed by historical and political forces beyond their control.”
Silent Cauldron by E. B. Moore
Frayed Edge Press | September 30, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64251-064-5
This historical novel based on true conditions in Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary “explores the tensions a girl experiences when she wants wider horizons than what the prevailing society deems appropriate.”
Whiskey for the Holy Ghost by Edward Mullany
Publishing Genius Press | September 30, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-945028-72-4
“Across urban and rural landscapes, mundane routines and spiritual searching,” Mullany’s short story collection “captures the quiet moments and fleeting insights that outline our hyper self-conscious experiences.”
Monster Monologues by Patricia Nelson
Fernwood Press | September 30, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-59498-175-3
According to John Sibley Williams, this poetry collection “investigates the sharper edges of interpersonal relationships, family, loss, and transformation in a series of exciting, accessible poems that focus on our shared myths, fables, and monsters.”
Jump Cuts: Essays on Surrealism, Film, Music, Culture, and Other Utopian Topics by Mark Polizzotti
The Song Cave | September 30, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9912988-3-4
This collection of essays explores a broad range of subjects “to map the creative act as it strains to fulfill our eternal, unrequited yearning for transcendence.”
Interlocutor Goddess by Jasmine Reid
Autumn House Press | September 30, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-63768-111-4
This debut poetry collection “challenges societal norms, particularly the family as a political construct, while reflecting on the trans experiences of a queer Black woman.”
The Mean Ones by Tatiana Schlote-Bonne
Creature Publishing | September 30, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-951971-30-4
According to Nat Cassidy, this novel is “heartbreaking and infuriating, full of delightfully ghoulish, garish imagery,” and “makes the wilderness as frightening as memories of cruel adolescent laughter . . . and vice versa.”
Regal House Publishing | September 30, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64603-619-6
According to Clare Beams, the events in this novel are “as vast in scope as the division and reunification of Germany, and as particular and human as the struggles and misunderstandings between husband and wife, brother and sister, parent and child.”
Soundtrack: A Lyric Memoir by Michael V. Smith
Book*hug Press | September 30, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-77166-949-8
In this poetic memoir “guided by the music of the era,” Smith “catalogues social prejudices, court rulings, and medical breakthroughs, alongside personal devastations, triumphs, and the search for community.”
A Revisionist History of Loving Men by Lena Ziegler
Autofocus Books | September 30, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-957392-41-7
This memoir is a “personal and critical exploration of the sexual scripts that exist between women and men, and the normalization of sexual violence as a routine part of heterosexual relationships in the landscape of American rape culture.”
