The texts in this list are curated through my personal interest and recommendations from publishing companies, authors, and publicists. Please contact me with upcoming releases. Understand that I will only include two texts per publishing company. Amazon and Bookshop are affiliated links and qualifying sales help to sustain Entropy. I can be reached at jacob@entropymag.org.
C&R Press
A Family is a House by Dustin Pearson
72 pages – C&R Press/ Amazon
“Pearson’s debut introduced us to a master transmogrifier. In this surreal follow-up collection he investigates the architectural implications of inheritance—how the human body houses the violence of its forebears. A Family Is a Houseis a blueprint, a guide to the logical structures and spaces we build in our minds: sometimes to keep our secrets in, sometimes to keep the horrors out. Pearson offers us an answer to the toughest question: what happens when our secrets are our horrors? We build, compartmentalize, and quarantine. We refract, reflect, demolish, and burn. This is a book about the oldest partition—that thin wall between the dark and the light. This is a book about bravery, about severing oneself from a lineage of abuse. When the hands that feed us also beat us, we must beat them back with the gifts we’ve been given. Through Pearson, we relearn that language can be weaponized into a kind of magic that saves us.” -from the C&R Press website
the Internet is for real by Chris Campanioni
550 pages – C&R Press/ Amazon
“The Internet is for real inverts the autobiography in the age of dis-integration, calling into question all narratives of national belonging. ‘Right? So that the universe could eat me & send traces everywhere, this book or the backroom countertop audio of the same scene.’ Sifting through—and re-writing—the films of Godard, the novels of Henry James, Twin Peaks, VR fantasies, Internet ephemera, and his father’s dreams of Cuba, Chris Campanioni reveals the materiality of our spaceless encounters, and forces us to reckon with the violence hidden below the sleek 4G surface. As he revisits his parents’ migration to the United States and his own first-generation dislocation through a blur of poetry, prose, and screen-play, Campanioni shows us that in a culture of self-dissemination and unlimited arrivals, we are all exiles under the sign of a mythical return.” –from the C&R Press website
Dynamo Verlag
Daughters of Monsters by Melissa Goodrich
250 pages – Dynamo Verlag
“In the seventeen short stories that comprise Daughters of Monsters, a toxic cloud sweeps west to east across the country, devouring all in its path. Past versions of a man show up at the birthday party he’s thrown himself. A lonely trucker delivers two-headed angels as part of a money-making scheme. And, in the title story, a daughter of monsters awaits her coming-of-age.” –from the Dynamo Verlag website
Fonograph Editions
Stray: A Graphic Tone by Shannon Ebner, Susan Howe, and Nathaniel Mackey
Fonograph Editions
“A collaborative release with the visual artist Shannon Ebner, Stray: A Graphic Tone features the poems of Susan Howe and Nathaniel Mackey. Produced and collated by Ebner Stray: A Graphic Tone juxtaposes historic and recent material from Howe and Mackey between 1991 – 2018. The work brought together specifically examines the two writers’ lifelong preoccupation with subjects adrift in dispossessed narratives both real and imagined. A gatefold LP, the liner notes for the album feature excerpts of original interviews, as well as reproductions of the poets’ published materials. According to Ebner, ‘Stray: A Graphic Tone is the full-length version of what I started in 2016 when I began seeking exchanges with these two poets. I was drawn to their works for their experiments with poetic form – for their politics of poetic form, to be exact – for their poems’ stray figures and stray errant marks.'” –from the Fonograph Editions Website
Gaudy Boy
Autobiography of a Horse: A Poem by Jenifer Sang Eun Park
94 pages – Amazon
“Autobiography of Horse documents Jenifer Sang Eun Park’s obsessive and parasitic relationship with the horse. At one point a muse, the horse is transformed into a vessel used to travel the volatile hollows of memory, selfhood, depression, and loss. To make this journey, the horse mutates from an image into a companion, a projection, and a reflection that, as Wallace Stevens wrote in ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,’ injects imagination with ‘the strength of reality.’ Presented in lyrical prose, diagrams, photos, and conceptual excerpts from imagined texts, Autobiography of Horse pieces together a true story spurred by a tormented, pathological, and, ultimately, redemptive imagination. ” -from the Gaudy Boy website
The Experiment of the Tropics: Poems by Lawrence Lacambra Ypil
72 pages – Amazon
“By braiding the music of anthropology with the intimacy of the lyric, Lawrence Ypil explores history’s archives and excavates a city, both real and imagined, that is constituted by the shimmer of petal and porch, coral and brass—a river-refrigerator where women catch their reflections on the sheen of magazines and men lean against the walls of old houses and beckon, come here. So, we approach. The Experiment of the Tropics is a meditation on the nature of cities, the revelatory power of photography, and the startling capacity of poetry to cut into the violent but redemptive parts of history.” -from the Gaudy Boy website
Hanging Loose Press
Anne: A Novel by Paal-Helge Haugen (Trans. Julia Johanne Tolo)
96 pages – Small Press Distribution/ Amazon
“One of the most exciting books from Scandinavia that I’ve read in recent years. Permeated with darkness, Anne is a strange and compelling novel. Cinematic, each page feels like an intimate snapshot into another kind of life in Norway at the turn of the last century. As Haugen writes: ‘Pale, they are frail images, perhaps I can erase them with my hand.’ Documentary fragments break up Haugen’s tactile verse and make for a spellbinding mosaic narrative that I want to return to again and again. Julia Johanne Tolo’s translation is stunning.” — Katrine Øgaard Jensen
Kenning Editions
Juana I by Ana Arzoumanian (Trans. Gabriel Amor)
176 pages – Kenning Editions/ Small Press Distribution
“Poetry. Drama. Literary Nonfiction. Hybrid Genre. Latinx Studies. Women’s Studies. Translated from the Spanish in a bilingual edition by Gabriel Amor. Inspired by the tale of Juana the Mad, Queen of Spain, JUANA I is Ana Arzoumanian’s first full length publication in English. A hybrid genre prose work of experimental, critical historiography, Lila Zemborain describes the book thus: ‘This book opens with a mantra, ‘What I need is a mouth.’ Yet the text emits many voices, imagining the circumstances that surrounded the figure of Juana the Mad, the legitimate Queen of Spain in the first half of the XVI century, who was declared insane then silenced and confined to a convent. Ana Arzoumanian subsumes us in a dense and powerful atmosphere in which the liberated mouth unveils with an abject heroism that could be called feminine, the tensions that historical circumstances impose over bodies.'” –from the Small Press Distribution website
KERNPUNKT Press
The Skinned Bird by Chelsea Biondolillo
165 pages – KERNPUNKT Press/ Amazon
“Literary Nonfiction. Women’s Studies. From award-winning essayist Chelsea Biondolillo, The Skinned Bird is about all the ways we break our own hearts. In lyric, fragmented essays–full of geological, ornithological and photographic interventions, with landscapes, loss, and longing–Biondolillo travels the terrain of leaving and finding home while keeping her sights fixed firm on the natural world around her. Includes ‘How to Skin a Bird,’ winner of the Carter Prize for the Essay, and the Best American Essays 2014 notable, ‘Phrenology.'” -from the KERNPUNKT Press
The Lettered Streets Press
Setting the Wire: A Memoir of Postpartum Psychosis by Sarah C. Townsend
136 pages – The Lettered Streets Press
“Setting the Wire is a memoir of postpartum psychosis and a meditation on containment: what we hold and what holds us together. A lyric exploration of motherhood, mental illness, and familial ties, Sarah C. Townsend’s debut work weaves together personal anecdote, film, music, visual art, and psychology. Setting the Wire is a visceral reflection on the experience of fragmentation as a young psychotherapist and new mother.” –from The Lettered Streets Press website
Orison Books
As One Fire Consumes Another by John Sibley Williams
86 pages – Orison Books/ Amazon
Winner of The 2018 Orison Poetry Prize
“What happens when metaphysics and social critique meet? Poetry that has to find a new form to express the tension it embodies. John Sibley Williams’ newspaper-like columns in As One Fire Consumes Another do just that. Here, transcendent vision and trenchant social insight meet, wrestle, and end up revitalizing one another.” –from the Orison Books website
Paloma Press
The Good Mother of Marseille by Christopher X. Shade
174 pages – Paloma Press/ Amazon
In Christopher X. Shade’s The Good Mother of Marseille, it’s the summer of 2013, in the year of Marseille’s designation as the European Capital of Culture. Readers get a taste of this dangerous, impoverished yet seductive port city of France as they follow the interwoven stories of Americans who have come to wander and sightsee. Noémie, an anthropology student, wants to make the gritty graffiti-covered neighborhood of Cours Julien her home, but she’s running out of time, money, and her university sponsor’s patience. Noémie watches over Corey, from New Jersey, who is an earlier version of her: also an anthropology student, he’s just getting started. But what he wants is very different. He searches the Marseille streets for what he needs from someone to love. In the old port, the wife of a small-town Alabama couple presses to see all the sights while her husband is losing his vision to an eye disease. Noémie intersects with everyone—has she stolen their passports? A Colorado man with late-stage cancer and fear of the unexpected falls in love with a French woman he meets at a café on the old port. In Marseille and then in Paris, a woman helps her journalist husband figure out what is happening in his head as he experiences a peculiar stress disorder. Hovering on the fringe are the Marseillais, the shopkeepers, artists, café waiters. Who among them will save Noémie? To the rhythm of European street life, each American puts a Marseille experience in the context of their own histories. It’s a love letter to the turbulence of Marseille, and to the turbulence to be found under the surface of each of us, the pounding hearts and jarring fears.” –from the Paloma Press website
Press 53
The Book of Jeremiah: A Novel in Stories by Julie Zuckerman
202 pages – Press 53/ Amazon
“One of the characters in Julie Zuckerman’s novel in stories, The Book of Jeremiah, refers to the biblical book of the same title as ‘all doom and gloom,’ but Zuckerman’s book about Jeremiah Gerstler and his family is anything but. It contains considerable loss, trouble, sorrow, and suffering, but its thirteen stories are also laced with love, forgiveness, hope, optimism, and even what we might call salvation. It is a book that acknowledges the darkness while leading the Gerstlers, and us, toward the light—and toward each other. Reading these wise and moving stories, you’ll feel like a long-lost relative who’s returned home just in time for the family reunion.” -from David Jauss
Stalking Horse Press
A Dog Between Us: Novel by Duncan B. Barlow
248 pages – Stalking Horse Press/ Amazon
“Duncan B. Barlow delivers tender shocks and the profundity of mercy in this poignant, delicate novel of loss and love. A Dog Between Us holds the reader between what can be said and what is unspeakable in our most vital relationships. this is an unforgettable novel of beauty and delirium.” –the Stalking Horse Press website
“Early on, the narrator of Duncan Barlow’s moving A Dog Between Us offers a rule to live by: never state the important things. Lucky for us readers, this is a rule broken on every single page of this beautiful novel, a book haunted by the details of dying and grief, by the ways in which every once-hidden mote of a lost life’s minutiae can, once revealed, be made to shine, to glow, give back fresh heat and new light.” —Matt Bell
University of Hell
This Never Happened: A Memoir by Liz Scott
300 pages – University of Hell/ Amazon
“Like an archaeological dig, Liz Scott’s memoir This Never Happened goes in search of the answers to the mysteries of her family. In her relentless quest to uncover the truth, she mines photographs and letters, leaving no one, including herself, unexamined. This is a spare work… alternatively heartbreaking and darkly comic. In the end, it is about the struggle to clear away pain to make room for compassion, and the challenge of making peace with questions that will never be answered.” –from the University of Hell website
Whisk(e)y Tit
The Book of the Last Word by Jesi Bender
174 pages – Whisk(e)y Tit/ Amazon
“Chimera Aoki is a 20-something New Yorker, easy in love and working on a book of famous last words. Arthur Noyes is older, secretive, existential. They meet through Chimera’s girlfriend, and are brought together and flung apart through a cosmic collision of coincidence and deceit. Heavily interwoven with Abrahamic religious influences, The Book of the Last Word culminates with Chimera discovering Arthur’s secret and having to decide if what Arthur has done is either immensely beneficial or horrifically damaging.” -from the Whisk(e)y Tit website
11:11 Press
Gut Text by Mike Corrao
154 pages – 11:11 Press/ Amazon
“You are holding a living organism. Gut Text feels fear, pain, and desire. Within, you will follow four distinct personas as they form on the page, each seeking to transcend the limitations of their existence as they speak to you directly. In his newest release, Mike Corrao has created a challenging and unsettling exploration of identity, and the ways we see it manifest in the physical world. Each persona carries with it a similar desire, but a different means of striving towards it. Slowly, the text begins to move, begins to change, correct its mistakes, and adjust to its restrictive ontology. Gut Text is not only alive, it is growing and learning. Witness the text creating itself, a parthenogenetic conception.” –from the 11:11 Press website
