Support small presses and indie bookstores by picking a read from the list below, which features dozens of new books forthcoming in October from CLMP members. (Take a look at last month’s releases as well.)
October 1
We Got the Beat by Charlotte Caffey
Akashic Books; October 1, 2020
This installment in the Lyric Pops series is “an exuberant celebration of dance and play in picture book form, based on Charlotte Caffey’s joyful classic made famous by the Go-Go’s.”
Tupelo Press; October 1, 2020
In this long poem, three women narrators “articulate a feminist philosophy of art-making and life-making for our fractured world.”
Living with Wolves by Anne Haven McDonnell
Split Rock Press; October 1, 2020
The poems in this chapbook are inspired “by interviews, encounters, and experiences that inhabit different perspectives of the complex collisions when wolves and people co-exist.”
The Last Glacier at the End of the World by Vivian Faith Prescott
Split Rock Press; October 1, 2020
The poems in Prescott’s chapbook “act as glacial bandings marking time and place, imagining a near future in the Anthropocene.”
The Sky Weeps for Me by Sergio Ramirez
McPherson & Company; October 1, 2020
Translated from the Spanish by Leland H. Chambers with Bruce McPherson, this novel explores “a maze of deception, corruption, and murders” and “a dangerous, international conspiracy.”
October 5
Catchlight by Brooke Adams Law
Woodhall Press; October 5, 2020
Winner of the 2019 Fairfield Book Prize, this novel follows four grown children caring for their mother, who has Alzheimer’s, and wrestling with “the secret that threatens their family’s very identity.”
October 6
Shifting the Silence by Etel Adnan
Nightboat Books; October 6, 2020
Adnan’s latest book is “a heart-rending meditation on aging, grief, and the universal experience of facing down death.”
Move the Crowd by Eric Barrier and William Griffin
Akashic Books; October 6, 2020
This picture book in the LyricPop series, illustrated by Kirk Parrish, “brings the iconic song ‘Move the Crowd’ to life for the first time.”
BOA Editions; October 6, 2020
Bell’s poetry collection is, according to Aracelis Girmay, “a breathtaking and mythical account of the complex, everyday, and porous realms of death and birth.”
Red Hen Press; October 6, 2020
Winner of the Red Hen Press Novella Award, High Skies “recounts the collision of devastating weather, Cold War suspicion, tense race relations, and the unintended consequences of good intentions in a small West Texas town in the 1950s.”
Copper Canyon Press; October 6, 2020
Daye’s second poetry collection “traces the South’s burdened interiors and the interiors of a black male protagonist attempting to navigate his many departures and returns home—a place that could both lovingly rear him and coolly annihilate him.”
Frantz Fanon and Emancipatory Theory: A View from the Wretched
Haymarket Books; October 6, 2020
Edited by Dustin J. Byrd and Seyed Javad Miri, “this comprehensive volume discusses Frantz Fanon’s enduring impact on revolutionary movements and thinking across the world.”
These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ by Lee Hazlewood
Akashic Books; October 6, 2020
Illustrated by Rachel Moss for the LyricPop series, “Lee Hazlewood’s tough-talkin’ hit song (popularized by Nancy Sinatra) is adapted into a playful children’s book about the inner life of a jealous cat.”
Things to Do in Hell by Chris Martin
Coffee House Press; October 6, 2020
This poetry collection “asks how we go about living in the tension between protesting lunatic politicians and picking up the kids from school, mourning a dying Earth and making soup, combating white supremacy and loving our dear ones.”
Akashic Books; October 6, 2020
In this LyricPop picture book, “Otis Redding’s classic song ‘Respect’—as popularized by Aretha Franklin—becomes an empowering picture book exploring the concept of mutual respect through the eyes of a young girl.”
That Was Now, This Is Then by Vijay Seshadri
Graywolf Press; October 6, 2020
Seshadri’s fourth poetry collection “takes on the planar paradoxes of time and space, destabilizing highly tuned lyrics and elegies with dizzying turns in poems of unrequitable longing, of longing for longing, of longing to be found, of grief.”
The Piano Student by Lea Singer
New Vessel Press; October 6, 2020
Translated by Elisabeth Lauffer, this novel explores “an affair between one of the 20th century’s most celebrated pianists, Vladimir Horowitz, and his young male student, Nico Kaufmann, in the late 1930s.”
None So Fit to Break the Chains by Dan Swain
Haymarket Books; October 6, 2020
In this book, Swain “offers an interpretation of Marx’s ethics that foregrounds his commitment to working-class self-emancipation and argues for the continued relevance of this principle for contemporary politics.”
October 10
Etruscan Press; October 10, 2020
In this trilogy of sonnet sequences, Bond “explores trauma and self-alienation and the power of imaginative life to heal.”
October 13
Black Ocean; October 13, 2020
The poems in this collection are “stories of blackness, of queerness, of womanhood, and of all the identities we hold externally and internally that create the tapestry of who we are and who we want to be.”
Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture by Anaïs Duplan
Black Ocean; October 13, 2020
Through this series of researched lyric essays, interviews, and ekphrastic poetry, Duplan explores “the aesthetic strategies used by experimental artists of color since the 1960s to pursue liberatory possibility.”
How We Go Home: Voices from Indigenous North America
Haymarket Books; October 13, 2020
Edited by Sara Sinclair, this anthology “shares contemporary Indigenous stories in the long and ongoing fight to protect Native land and life.”
Vibratory Milieu by Carrie Hunter
Nightboat Books; October 13, 2020
Hunter’s work of lyric collage is “a study of identity and its abstraction, formation, and analysis through interaction with texts of all kinds: poems, film, music, dream, and friendship.”
Beautiful and Useless by Kim Min Jeong
Black Ocean; October 13, 2020
Translated from the Korean by Soeun Seo and Jake Levine, this poetry collection “exposes the often funny and contradictory rifts that appear in the language of everyday circumstance.”
Wave If You Can See Me by Susan Ludvigson
Red Hen Press; October 13, 2020
In this poetry collection, Ludvigson “explores the illness and death of her husband, along with her own ventures into the visual arts.”
BOA Editions; October 13, 2020
According to Margaret McMullan, “Michael Martone’s clever, hilarious prose soars in this faux biography of a real person, Art Smith, an early Fort Wayne aviator who invented skywriting.”
Ramifications by Daniel Saldaña París
Coffee House Press; October 13, 2020
Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, Ramifications is “an emotionally rich anti-coming-of-age novel that wrestles with the inherited privileges and atrocities of masculinity.”
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: A Day in the Life by Ricardo Piglia
Restless Books; October 13, 2020
Translated from the Spanish by Robert Croll, this final volume in Piglia’s autobiographical trilogy “picks up the thread of Piglia’s life in the 1980s until his death from ALS in 2017.”
The New World by Kelly Schirmann
Black Ocean; October 13, 2020
Schirmann’s hybrid collection of poetry and prose “follows the attempts, failures, and re-attempts at understanding and articulating an era of immense social upheaval, political corruption, and environmental consequence.”
The Regal Lemon Tree by Juan José Saer
Open Letter; October 13, 2020
Translated from the Spanish by Sergio Weisman, this novel focuses on “a couple in the north of Argentina who lost their only son six years prior.”
October 14
53rd State Press; October 14, 2020
This monologue, which weaves together the voice of the narrator and that of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, is “at once a coming-of-age story, a horror story, and a highly theatrical experiment in radical empathy.”
October 15
Notes on Mother Tongues by Mirene Arsanios
Ugly Duckling Presse; October 15, 2020
Arsanios “meditates on the relationships between mother tongues, motherhood, and colonialism” in this pamphlet from the 2020 Pamphlet Series.
Until They Catch Fire by Deborah Cummins
Deerbrook Editions; October 15, 2020
According to David Jauss, this poetry collection is “a gallery of stunning mind-paintings, many of them about the heart-rending loss of her brother and mother.”
Eulalia Books; October 15, 2020
Translated from the Spanish by Olivia Lott, Katabasis is the winner of the 2017 Bogotá Poetry Prize and the first full collection of poetry by a Colombian woman to be translated into English.
Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country by Cristina Rivera Garza
Feminist Press; October 15, 2020
Translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker, Grieving is a “hybrid collection of short crónicas, journalism, and personal essays on systemic violence in contemporary Mexico and along the US-Mexico border.”
Persephone in the Late Anthropocene by Megan Grumbling
Acre Books; October 15, 2020
In this poetry collection, Grumbling “vaults an ancient myth into the age of climate change.”
Agitprop for Bedtime: Polemic, Story Problems, Kulturporn and Humdingers by Charles Holdefer
Sagging Meniscus; October 15, 2020
This volume of short prose is, according to Jesi Buell, “a taut, fast-paced collection of short stories that explore what it is to be as American as the (seeming) collapse of our civilization.”
Ugly Duckling Presse; October 15, 2020
Part of Ugly Duckling Presse’s 2020 Pamphlet Series, this essay “examines notions of epiphany, closure, excess, and economy.”
The Understudy’s Handbook by Steven Leyva
Washington Writers’ Publishing House; October 15, 2020
Winner of the 2020 Jean Feldman Poetry Prize, this poetry collection “reveals a sensibility forged by a growing awareness of race and class: child’s joy and bafflement, a black Baltimore father’s worry.”
Ugly Duckling Presse; October 15, 2020
In this installment of the 2020 Pamphlet Series, La Rocco “weaves fragile threads of acquaintanceship and intimacy into a chamber piece of voices, attitudes, and gestures of attention, spurred on by the restless interplay of present, past, and page.”
The Rest of the World by Adam Schwartz
Washington Writers’ Publishing House; October 15, 2020
This short story collection features “studies of characters in crisis-delivered by a writer whose empathies illuminate the longings of teens and young adults forced to navigate complex moral choices.”
The Beforeland by Corinna Vallianatos
Acre Books; October 15, 2020
Vallianato’s novel, set in the Mojave Desert and Southern California, “moves swiftly among characters caught between the deprivations of the past and the mysteries of the future.”
Being Human Is an Occult Practice by Magdalena Zurawski
Ugly Duckling Presse; October 15, 2020
In this pamphlet, Zurawski “argues that studying and sharing literature can function as a means of enriching the impoverished definition of ‘human’ created by capitalist social relations.”
October 20
Woodhall Press; October 20, 2020
DeBartolo’s latest novel is “a poignant story about friendship and love, art and music, and how these pursuits can save us from ourselves.”
On the Origin of Species and Other Stories by Bo-Young Kim
Kaya Press; October 20, 2020
The first translation of Kim’s work into English, this short story collection features “strikingly original, thought-provoking work teems with human and non-human beings, all of whom are striving to survive through evolution, whether biologically, technologically or socially.”
Graywolf Press; October 20, 2020
The conclusion to Kingsnorth’s The Wake, this novel follows “perhaps the world’s last human survivors” a thousand years in the future.
Crushing It by Jennifer L. Knox
Copper Canyon Press; October 20, 2020
The poems in Knox’s latest collection “unearth epiphanies in an unbounded landscape of forms, voices and subjects―from history to true crime to epidemiology―while exploring our tenuous connections and disconnections.”
Fugitive Atlas by Khaled Mattawa
Graywolf Press; October 20, 2020
Mattawa’s latest poetry collection is “a sweeping, impassioned account of refugee crises, military occupations, and ecological degradation, an acute and probing journey through a world in upheaval.”
Popol Vuh: A Retelling by Ilan Stavans
Restless Books; October 20, 2020
Illustrated by Gabriela Larios and introduced by Homero Aridjis, this is “an inspired and urgent prose retelling of the Maya myth of creation.”
Creature Publishing; October 20, 2020
This debut novel “explores the ways rape culture can permeate intimate relationships, making us question our agency in our own lives and the world at large.”
Akashic Books / Black Sheep; October 20, 2020
This novel for young adults follows a fourteen-year-old boy “caught up in the most significant slave rebellion in Jamaican history, paying homage to freedom fighters all over the world.”
October 23
McPherson & Company; October 23, 2020
Renato! features “three sequential novels about the poignant and comical misadventures of an artist, Renato Stillamare, which have now been revised and assembled into a magnum opus.”
October 27
We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics
Nightboat Books; October 27, 2020
Edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel, this anthology features “poems that pursue the particular and multiple trans relationships to desire, embodiment, housing, sex, ecology, history, pop culture, and the working day.”
October 28
David Tung Can’t Have A Girlfriend Until He Gets Into An Ivy League College by Ed Lin
Kaya Press; October 28, 2020
Lin’s first novel written for young adults is “a heartfelt and hilarious look into the complexities of being Asian American.”
