Support small presses and indie bookstores by picking a read from the list below, which features dozens of new books forthcoming in September from CLMP members. (Take a look at last month’s releases as well.)
September 1
Out of Mesopotamia by Salar Abdoh
Akashic Books; September 1, 2020
Abdoh’s novel follows an Iranian journalist in an “unprecedented glimpse into ‘endless war’ from a Middle Eastern perspective.”
My Mother’s Red Ford: New and Selected Poems by Roy Bentley
Lost Horse Press; September 2020
This selection of Bentley’s poetry represents six books from 1986 to 2020 and is, according to Grant Clauser, full of “rich storytelling and family histories.”
3 Hole Press; September 1, 2020
According to Paula Wilson, this book is a “queer post-modern tarot-esque deck that serves up hilarious and sensual fodder for foresight and insight that comes from the often overlooked encounters in life.”
The River People by Polly Buckingham
Lost Horse Press; September 2020
Buckingham’s debut poetry collection is full of “tense lyrics, semi-biographical journeys and glittering elegies, rich with the surreal fabric of nightmare and dream.”
Index of Haunted Houses by Adam O. Davis
Sarabande Books; September 1, 2020
Winner of the 2019 Kathryn A. Morton Prize, Davis’s debut poetry collection is, according to Ilya Kaminsky, “a brilliant book about our ghosts—personal, political, mythic, lyrical, and yet very real.”
Selected Poems/Rogha Dánta by Máirtín Ó Direáin
Wake Forest University Press; September 1, 2020
Edited and translated by Frank Sewell, “Simple in style, but deep in reflection, these poems beautifully convey the dilemmas of a poet of a minority language and traditional culture in a rapidly developing era.”
Tupelo Press; September 1, 2020
Hong’s poetry collection harnesses folktale, fairy tale, and collage to embrace “the great feminist tradition of retelling old tales to imbue them with female subjectivity, speaking to the thoughts, desires, and outrage of contemporary American women.”
Clutter: An Untidy History by Jennifer Howard
Belt Publishing; September 1, 2020
Howard’s latest book is an “expansive assessment of our relationship to the things that share and shape our lives.”
Belt Publishing; September 1, 2020
Edited by Samuel Love, this collection of work from and about Gary, Indiana, “complicates standard narratives about steel, violence, and urban decay, and offers readers the chance to hear from those who are reshaping the city from the bottom up.”
In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays by Rebecca McClanahan
Red Hen Press; September 1, 2020
In her personal memoir about a move to New York City, McClanahan “tracks the heartbeat of New York, finding in each face she meets the cumulative loss, joy, and stubborn resilience of a city that has claimed her for its own.”
Carbon: Song of Craft by Svetlana Lavochkina
Lost Horse Press; September 2020
Told in polyphonic verse, Carbon is “a thriller, a romance, a CV, a rose of historical winds, a song of crafts, an ontology of Eastern-Ukrainian mind in one, Carbon is told in polyphonic verse—a prayer for the beloved, anguished city, Donetsk.”
Rotalever Revelator by Doug Nufer
Sagging Meniscus; September 1, 2020
Featuring art by James Siena, Rotalever Revelator is “a book made from words that spell other words backwards: a giant palindrome that contains poems about geography, dams, swamps, celebrities, eponyms, and the news.”
The Age of Discovery by Alan Michael Parker
Tupelo Press; September 1, 2020
Parker’s latest poetry collection is, according to Randall Mann, “a devastating take on the ways we stave off panic.”
Red Hen Press; September 1, 2020
The poems in Rivkin’s debut collection “ask what it means to be a suitor in the fullest sense–to follow, to pursue, to chase the inexplicable hunger at the heart of desire.”
Yi Sang: Selected Works by Yi Sang
Wave Books; September 1, 2020
Edited by Don Mee Choi and translated by Jack Jung, Don Mee Choi, Sawako Nakayasu, and Joyelle McSweeney, this selection of poems, stories, and essays by “one of the great revolutionary legacies of modern Korean literature” is a “visionary and daring response to personal and national trauma.”
What Came Before by Matthew Schultz
Tupelo Press; September 1, 2020
The essays in What Came Before combine “”myth, essay, and poetry” to explore “subjects as diverse as the death of Moses, the special relationship between gay men and cats, the movie Titanic, rock collections, and the afterlife.”
You Can Keep That to Yourself by Adam Smyer
Akashic Books; September 1, 2020
This alphabetized list of things white people should avoid saying to Black people is, according to Publishers Weekly, “designed to strip away the hypocrisy and half-truths of these cultural exchanges by laughing at them.”
Mountain and Flower: Selected Poems by Mykola Vorobiov
Lost Horse Press; September 2020
Translated from the Ukrainian by Maria G. Rewakowicz, this poetry collection spans more than fifty years of Vorobiov’s poems, which “hover around the issues of existence on all possible levels—plants, animals, humans, inanimate objects, and the universe.”
September 3
Fables, Foibles & Other ‘Merican Sins by Amoja Sumler
Aquarius Press/Willow Books ; September 3, 2020
According to Matt Sedillo, this poetry collection is “revolutionary, intersectional, internationalist, insurrectionary and above all unapologetically opposed to any and all threats to Black life.”
September 8
We Were Lucky with the Rain by Susan Buttenwieser
Four Way Books; September 8, 2020
The stories in Buttenwieser’s debut collection follow characters who “stand at the margin of society, often perched on the knife’s edge of economic disaster.”
Transit Books; September 8, 2020
The first title in Transit Books’s new narrative nonfiction series, Undelivered Lectures, is “a song for the forgotten art of the lecture.”
The Newest Employee of the Museum of Ruin by Charlie Clark
Four Way Books; September 8, 2020
Clark’s poetry collection “interrogates masculinity, the pastoral, the lasting inheritance of one’s lineage, and the mysterious every day.”
How to Carry Water by Lucille Clifton
BOA Editions; September 8, 2020
Selected and introduced by Aracelis Girmay, this selection of Clifton’s poems “celebrates both familiar and lesser-known works by one of America’s most beloved poets, including 10 newly discovered poems that have never been collected.”
Four Way Books; September 8, 2020
Dempster’s follow-up to his poetry collection Topaz explores “the highs and lows of fatherhood” and the speaker’s “struggles to care for his young and ailing child.”
Red Hen Press; September 8, 2020
The stories in Erlich’s debut collection “are unified by girls and women who cross this threshold seeking liberation from family responsibilities, from societal expectations, from their own minds.”
Between Lakes by Jeffrey Harrison
Four Way Books; September 8, 2020
According to Jessica Greenbaum, Harrison’s sixth poetry collection “has the magic elasticity to show the wide elliptical orbit of a lifetime’s relationship between growing son and aging father.”
Literaturhaus; September 8, 2020
The latest volume from Literaturehaus features interviews and essays with various contributors.
You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love by Yona Harvey
Four Way Books; September 8, 2020
The poems in Harvey’s collection “follow an unnamed protagonist on her multidimensional, Afro-futuristic journey”; this character’s story “stretches the boundaries normally constraining a black, female body like hers.”
Copper Canyon Press; September 8, 2020
Kooser’s new poetry collection “strives to reveal the complex beauties of the ordinary, of the world that’s right under our noses.”
The Life Assignment by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado
Four Way Books; September 8, 2020
According to Emily Skillings, Maldonado’s bilingual debut poetry collection “asks us to consider how we as readers and citizens reconcile self and state, body and landscape, desire and capital, language and communication.”
New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set (Saba)
Akashic Books; July 28, 2020
An African Poetry Book Fund project edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani, this collection of chapbooks features Michelle Angwenyi, Afua Ansong, Adedayo Agarau, Fatima Camara, Sadia Hassan, Safia Jama, Henneh Kyereh Kwaku, Nadra Mabrouk, Nkateko Masinga, Jamila Osman, and Tryphena Yeboah.
Milkweed Editions; September 8, 2020
According to Kiese Laymon, Nezhukumatathil’s essay collection “lingers in a world where power, people, and the literal outside wrestle painfully, beautifully.”
September 10
Blue Cactus Press; September 10, 2020
According to Kim Stafford, this debut poetry collection “delivers the visceral, highly–textured terrain of experience on home ground with all the fierce affection and honesty true residence requires.”
September 15
Catalyst Press; September 15, 2020
Winner of the 2015 German Crime Writing Prize, Annas’s novel is translated by Rachel Hildebrandt Reynolds and “an explosive mixture of psychological thriller and Neo-western with a political subtext.”
Now in Color by Jacqueline Balderrama
Perugia Press; September 15, 2020
Balderrama’s debut poetry collection “explores the multigenerational immigrant experience of Mexican-Americans who have escaped violence, faced pressures to assimilate, and now seek to reconnect to a fragmented past. “
The Nancy Reagan Collection by Maxe Crandall
Futurepoem Books; September 15, 2020
Miguel Gutierrez calls this performance novel “a virtuosic experiment where the all too harrowing reality of the Reagan era and its discontents (AIDS, Iran-Contra, the beginning of the end of the progressive American dream) meets a phantasmagorical interlocution with its strangest protagonist—Nancy Reagan.”
Bellevue Literary Press; September 15, 2020
Translated from the French by Richard Sieburth and Howard Limoli, this novel portrays “the aesthetic adventures of a mad mycologist.”
Collected Ghazals by Jim Harrison
Copper Canyon Press; September 15, 2020
This posthumous collection “gathers all of Harrisons’s published ghazals into a single volume, accompanied by an afterword by poet and noted ghazal writer Denver Butson.”
A World Between by Emily Hashimoto
Feminist Press; September 15, 2020
Hashimoto’s debut novel “follows two strikingly different but interconnected women as they navigate family, female friendship, and their own fraught history.”
Akashic Books; September 15, 2020
Mootoo’s new book is “a seductive and tension-filled novel about Priya and Alex, a lesbian couple who left the big city to relocate to a bucolic countryside community.”
Akashic Books; September 15, 2020
Edited by Lee Child, this collection of stories about smoking features new work from Joyce Carol Oates, Hannah Tinti, Christopher Sorrentino, and more.
We Need to Talk: A Memoir About Wealth by Jennifer Risher
Red Hen Press; September 15, 2020
Risher’s debut memoir “explores the hidden impact of wealth on identity, relationships, and sense of place in the world.”
Aquarius Press/Willow Books; September 15, 2020
According to poet and literary activist E. Ethelbert Miller, this poetic biography—which is endorsed by the Martin Luther King, Jr. Estate—“has given us words that capture the thunder and sounds of protest.”
Hotel Almighty by Sarah J. Sloat
Sarabande Books; September 15, 2020
Sloat’s debut poetry collection, “visually arresting and utterly one-of-a-kind,” is a mixed-media book-length erasure of pages from Misery by Stephen King.
Wild Peach by S*an D. Henry-Smith
Futurepoem Books; September 15, 2020
This poetry- and photography-based project is “a multisensory roaming of landscape and interior, often (but not always) in near stillness and varying light.”
Pretzel, Houdini & Olive by Deborah Thompson
Red Hen Press; September 15, 2020
The eleven interconnected essays in this memoir are “told from the perspective of a self-identified ‘crazy dog lady’” and follow Thompson’s life with five dogs.
BOA Editions; September 15, 2020
Waters’s new poetry collection features “passionate poems about sin, obsession, and mortality.”
September 17
under the aegis of a winged mind by makalani bandele
Autumn House Press; September 17, 2020
Selected by Cornelius Eady as winner of the 2019 Autumn House Poetry Prize, this debut poetry collection is “inspired by the life and times of the jazz composer and pianist Earl ‘Bud’ Powell.”
His Feathers Were Chains by Denise K. Lajimodiere
North Dakota State University Press; September 17, 2020
The third volume in the Contemporary Voices of Indigenous Peoples Series, this poetry collection is an “is overt criticism of settler society… subtle, approachable, and grounded in Ojibwe knowledge and customs.”
Circle / Square by T. J. McLemore
Autumn House Press; September 17, 2020
In this chapbook, McLemore “renders the language of physics and theoretical science into poetry to illuminate the mysterious ways we experience reality.”
Hallelujah Station and Other Stories by M. Randal O’Wain
Autumn House Press; September 17, 2020
O’Wain’s debut short story collection “introduces readers to a wide and diverse cast of characters struggling with and responding to changes and loss.”
Autumn House Press; September 17, 2020
This poetry collection is “centered on the recovery and preservation of ancestral knowledge and on the exploration of black motherhood.”
Further News of Defeat: Stories by Michael X. Wang
Autumn House Press; September 17, 2020
Winner of the 2019 Fiction Prize, selected by Aimee Bender, Wang’s debut short story collection “interrogates personal and political events set against the backdrop of China that are both real and perceived, imagined and speculative.”
Skull Cathedral: A Vestigial Anatomy by Melissa Wiley
Autumn House Press; September 17, 2020
Winner of the 2019 Nonfiction Prize, selected by Paul Lisicky, Wiley’s essay collection uses “the slow evolution and odd disintegration of vestigial organs to enter the braided stories of the lives we establish for ourselves.”
September 20
The Last Orgasm by Nin Andrews
Etruscan Press; September 20, 2020
Andrews’s poetry collection “presents a fresh and often humorous look at the themes of sexuality, womanhood, and beauty by giving the orgasm its own platform to speak for itself.”
September 21
Belt Publishing; September 21, 2020
This collection of essays and poems “offers locals and visitors a closer look at compelling private and public spaces in an attempt to articulate what defines Louisville beyond—but also inclusive of—its most recognized cultural exports.”
September 22
Wendy’s Subway & CCS Bard; September 22, 2020
Edited by Julie Niemi, Perfidia is a collection of poetic writings by filmmaker Sky Hopinka; “each brief text swirls together to form an image of multiple landscapes that bid us remember: the past has come and gone, and the future is told through traces of nostalgic lore.”
The Disappearing Ox by Lewis Hyde
Copper Canyon Press; September 22, 2020
Created in collaboration with painter Max Gimblett, this poetry collection is “a modern American version of the twelfth-century Chinese ‘Oxherding Series’ that combines Chinese text, visual art, and multiple English translations.”
David Tung Can’t Have A Girlfriend Until He Gets Into An Ivy League College by Ed Lin
Kaya Press; September 22, 2020
Lin’s first novel written for young adults is “a heartfelt and hilarious look into the complexities of being Asian American.”
The Nightgown & Other Poems by Taisia Kitaiskaia
Deep Vellum; September 22, 2020
Kitaiskaia’s debut poetry collection is “ripe with mythic awareness and dark, fairytale-turned-feminist humor.”
The Horse Who Bears Me Away by Jim Peterson
Red Hen Press; September 22, 2020
Peterson’s latest poetry collection “challenges readers to consciously embrace the dark side of their American psyche and to reach past it to a new way of being at peace with both the known and the unknown, which is called freedom.”
Letters to a Young Brown Girl by Barbara Jane Reyes
BOA Editions; September 22, 2020
Reyes’s latest poetry collection “answers the questions of Filipino American girls and young women of color with bold affirmations of hard-won empathy, fierce intelligence, and a fine-tuned B.S. detector.”
Coach House Books; September 22, 2020
Translated by Pablo Strauss and winner of the Horizons Imaginaires speculative fiction award and the City of Quebec book award, this collection of “lush and bracing linked climate fictions depict a world gorgeous and terrifying in its likeness to our own.”
September 29
Black Power Afterlives: The Enduring Significance of the Black Panther Party
Haymarket Books; September 29, 2020
Edited by Diane Fujino and Matef Harmachis, Black Power Afterlives is “the first book to comprehensively examine how the Black Panther Party has directly shaped the practices and ideas that have animated grassroots activism in the decades since its decline.”
The Brother You Choose by Susie Day
Haymarket Books; September 29, 2020
In this book with an afterword by Ta-Nehisi Coates, former Black Panthers Paul Coates and Eddie Conway “discuss lives, politics, and their friendship that helped Eddie survive decades in prison.”
Haymarket Books; September 29, 2020
By the Debt Collective and with a foreword by Astra Taylor, this book is, according to Rep. Rashida Tlaib, “an important campaign to help build the mass movement we need to resist and abolish student debt.”
Nightboat Books; September 29, 2020
Winner of the 2019 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, Machado’s second poetry collection interrogates “our entanglement in the irresistible threads of language, history, and money.”
Stranger Faces by Namwali Serpell
Transit Books; September 29, 2020
In this essay collection—the second installment of the Undelivered Lectures series—Serpell “probes our contemporary mythology of the face.”
Red Hen Press; September 29, 2020
This novel is “an exploration of what home is, how we live with loss, who belongs in the city and to whom the city belongs, and the possibilities and power of love.”
The Essential Ruth Stone by Ruth Stone
Copper Canyon Press; September 29, 2020
Edited by Bianca Stone, this selection of Ruth Stone’s poetry “bears witness to a vivid fifty-year career of one of America’s most influential and pioneering poets.”
The Post-Pandemic Liberal Arts College: A Manifesto for Reinvention by Steven Volk and Beth Benedix
Belt Publishing; September 29, 2020
This timely book considers “what a new, transformative culture would look like, from how students are admitted and faculty hired, to the economics that would permit all these college to admit students without regard to financial need.”
