This is the fourth installment of Entropy’s “Month in Books” feature, where we compile the past month’s small press new releases. If you’re a press and don’t see your books here, email dennis@entropymag.org with your forthcoming catalog. Happy reading!
Anomalous Press
Third Person Singular by Rosmarie Waldrop, with art by Keith Waldrop
26 pages – Anomalous
The Anatomy of a Museum by A. Kendra Greene
44 pages – Anomalous
The All-New by Ian Hatcher
44 pages – Anomalous
Drown/Sever/Sing by Lina Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas
112 pages – Anomalous
“The devil doesn’t always dream, and when he does, if he does, he rarely remembers. It’s all colors and fragments. White plastic spiders on blue strings, silver doorknobs and black rats covered in sugar and broken glass. But sometimes, when he stares into the same spot for a very long time, he sees something sort of like a dream that feels more like someone else’s memory. A sinking boat, a sleepy bird in someone’s hands, an ocelot sneaking into a hen house for the very first time. Then something cracks in the fire, or a stalactite breaks, or the devil finally blinks, or is woken by the whistling an accordionist walking up the side of the Treinta mountains.” —Excerpt from Drown/Sever/Sing
Belladonna*
All Is Not Yet Lost by Betsy Fagin
68 pages – Belladonna*/SPD
Black Ocean
At Night by Lisa Ciccarello
72 pages – Black Ocean/SPD
Room Where I Get What I Want by S. Whitney Holmes
96 pages – Black Ocean/SPD
Brooklyn Arts Press
The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom by Noah Eli Gordon
158 pages – BAP/Amazon
A new collection from one of America’s most intriguing poets, this is Noah Eli Gordon’s heftiest book yet, presenting a decade’s worth of honed, tightly-knit lyrics, poetic sequences, and prose experiments. These are beautifully convulsive, boldly contained poems, orchestrating from the musicality of syntax—the underlying allegro and tempo changes in the way we speak, write, and subsequently think—into an enactment, rather than a representation or description, of experience. Operating under Emerson’s assertion that “[e]very word was once a poem,” The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom argues for the necessity of highlighting artifice even in the face of so-called empiricism. Here a sort of intelligent, discursive speed is harnessed from rhetorical arguments swerving at the last moment from expectation. Whether under the influence of the word or the kingdom, one herein is held captive by the joy of continual surprise. —From the BAP website
City Lights Publishers
Women in Public by Elaine Kahn
101 pages – City Lights/Amazon
Coach House Books
Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis
160 pages – Coach House/Amazon
Coffee House Press
The Dig by Cynan Jones
176 pages – Coffee House/Amazon
The Little Free Library Book by Margaret Aldrich
264 pages – Coffee House/Amazon
Coconut Books
Swan Feast by Natalie Eilbert
92 pages – Coconut/Amazon
Motherlover by Ginger Ko
78 pages – Coconut/Amazon
Curbside Splendor
On the Way: Stories by Cyn Vargas
188 pages – Curbside Splendor/Amazon
Cyn Vargas’s debut explores the whims and follies of the heart. When a mother disappears in Guatemala, her daughter refuses to accept she’s gone; a divorced DMV employee falls in love during a driving lesson; a young girl shares a well-kept family secret; a bad haircut is the last straw in a crumbling marriage. —From the Curbside Splendor website
Dalkey Archive
Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, edited by Warren F. Motte Jr.
221 pages – CUP/Amazon
The Great Fire of London: A Story with Interpolations and Bifurcations by Jacques Roubaud, translated by Dominic Di Bernardi
328 pages – CUP/Amazon
The Trick Is to Keep Breathing by Janice Galloway
240 pages – CUP/Amazon
Past Habitual: Stories by Alf MacLochlainn
95 pages – CUP/Amazon
Diglossia and the Linguistic Turn: Flann O’Brien’s Philosophy of Language by Flore Coulouma
240 pages – CUP/Amazon
Telling It Again and Again: Repetition in Literature and Film by Bruce F. Kawin
250 pages – CUP/Amazon
Götz and Meyer by David Albahari, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac
180 pages – CUP/Amazon
A Jewish schoolteacher tells the story of Wilhelm Götz and Erwin Meyer in the process of researching the deaths of his relatives during World War II. These two SS officers were assigned to drive a hermetically sealed truck in which concentration-camp prisoners were slowly asphyxiated. Soon this knowledge overwhelms day-to-day life, and the teacher comes to see past and present merge in a heartbreaking moment of remembrance. Among the best and most haunting novels about the Holocaust to emerge in the final years of the twentieth century, Götz and Meyer is David Albahari’s masterpiece. —From the Dalkey Archive website
Deep Vellum
Sphinx by Anne Garréta, translated by Emma Ramadan
152 pages – Deep Vellum/Amazon
The Indian by Jón Gnarr, translated by Lytton Smith
240 pages – Deep Vellum/Amazon
Dzanc Books
The Crossing by Jon Fink
120 pages – Dzanc/Amazon
The Sorrow Proper by Lindsey Drager
184 pages – Dzanc/Amazon
The Sorrow Proper is a novel-length investigation of the anxiety that accompanies change. A group of aging librarians must decide whether to fight or flee from the end of print and the rise of electronic publications, while the parents of the young girl who died in front of the library struggle with their role in her loss. Anchored by the transposed stories of a photographer and his deaf mathematician lover each mourning the other’s death, The Sorrow Proper attempts to illustrate how humans of all relations — lovers, parents, colleagues — cope with and challenge social “progress,” a mechanism that requires we ignore, and ultimately forget, the residual in order to make room for the new, to tell a story that resists “The End.”
This debut novel explores the hypothetical end of the public library system and a young theory in the hard sciences called Many Worlds, a branch of quantum mechanics that strives to prove mathematically that our lives do not follow a singular, linear path. —From the Dzanc website
FC2
Seed by Stanley Crawford
192 pages – FC2/Amazon
Hospice by Gregory Howard
256 pages – FC2/Amazon
O’Hearn by Greg Mulcahy
136 pages – FC2/Amazon
Fitzcarraldo Editions
My Documents by Alejandro Zambra
200 pages – Fitzcarraldo/Amazon
Gauss PDF
Nope Tape by Troppo
GPDF
The Birds by Tim Terhaar
GPDF
Then Air by Mark Francis Johnson
GPDF
Graywolf Press
I Refuse by Per Petterson, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett
224 pages – Graywolf/Amazon
Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes by Per Petterson, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett
128 pages – Graywolf/Amazon
Dark Lies the Island by Kevin Barry
192 pages – Graywolf/Amazon
Jaded Ibis
A Song of Ilan by Jacob Paul
186 pages – Jaded Ibis/Amazon
Without Anesthesia by Pedram Navab
166 pages – Jaded Ibis/Amazon
Devouring the Green: fear of a human planet: a cyborg/eco poetry anthology, edited by Sam Witt, art by Christopher Arabadjis
602 pages – Jaded Ibis/Amazon
Magic Helicopter Press
Wallop by Jordan Stempleman
96 pages – Magic Helicopter/Amazon
An iceberg celebrates, by accident, its birthday. The highway patrol approaches a wet sofa left by the side of the road, discussing later what they could’ve done better with their heat.
Jordan Stempleman’s newest collection crunches through the dirty snow of trying to love when love is gone, heaving from room to room, humming from joke to dark, car to gym, chainsaws and milkweed, bathroom faucets that fall apart in your hands, history private and public, men shaving in the public water fountain. —From the Magic Helicopter website
Melville House
Happiness by Frederic Lenoir, translated by Andrew Brown
208 pages – Melville House/Amazon
33 Days by Leon Werth
224 pages – Melville House/Amazon
The Establishment: And How They Got Away with It by Owen Jones
384 pages – Melville House/Amazon
The Sea Inside by Philip Hoare
384 pages – Melville House/Amazon
Milkweed Editions
Vessel by Parneshia Jones
96 pages – Milkweed/Amazon
The Stuntman by Brian Laidlaw
88 pages – Milkweed/Amazon
Medicine Walk by Richard Wagamese
256 pages – Milkweed/Amazon
New Directions
Fairy Tales: Dramolettes by Robert Walser, translated from the German by James Reidel and Daniele Pantano
128 pages – ND/Amazon
A Hermit’s Guide to Home Economics by Robert Lax
64 pages – ND/Amazon
OR Books
Chameleo: A Strange but True Story of Heroin Addiction, Homeland Security and Invisible Spies by Robert Guffey
280 pages – OR Books
A mesmerizing mix of Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, and Philip K. Dick, Chameleo is a true account of what happened in a seedy Southern California town when an enthusiastic and unrepentant heroin addict named Dion Fuller sheltered a U.S. Marine who’d stolen night vision goggles and perhaps a few top secret files from a nearby military base. —From the OR Books website
Plays Inverse
The Invention of Monsters/Plays for the Theatre by C Dylan Basset
61-card deck – Plays Inverse
Poor Claudia
The Cold by Jaime Saenz, translated by Kit Schluter
Poor Claudia
Press 53
Paradise Drive by Rebecca Foust
114 pages – Press 53/Amazon
Sarabande Books
Three Kinds of Motion: Kerouac, Pollock, and the Making of American Highways by Riley Hanick
288 pages – Sarabande/Amazon
Model of a City in Civil War: Poems by Adam Day
72 pages – Sarabande/Amazon
Semiotext(e)
To Our Friends by The Invisible Committee
240 pages – MIT Press/Amazon
Sidebrow
Valley Fever by Julia Bloch
83 pages – Sidebrow/Amazon
“Valley Fever continues the strange, unsettling pilgrimage Julia Bloch began in her first full-length book, the Lambda finalist Letters to Kelly Clarkson. It’s the Central Valley of Steinbeck and Cherríe Moraga, altered here by Bloch’s own quizzical, dreamy, poetic line and her vision of history as the thing that pins us down at all times, even when we feel most free. California landscape infects all who set foot in it: “Darkening stems / of the lower plants— / you’ll find me listening / for them to collapse in this heat.” Bloch’s “I” is intrepid, valiant even, but even she quails at the beauty that assails her, at the onset of a “fever” at once romantic and bleak, “because most people are not adults.” With her apothegms, her “place-based lie,” and her subject position (as skeptical as it is warm-hearted), Julia Bloch enacts the restless, guilty implicatee as well as, or better than, any American poet.” —Kevin Killian
In an I by Popahna Brandes
162 pages – Sidebrow/Amazon
Siglio Press
Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera by Richard Kraft, with interpolations by Danielle Dutton and a conversation with Ann Lauterbach
64 pages – Siglio/Amazon
Suite Vénitienne by Sophie Calle
96 pages – Siglio/Amazon
Soho Press
Visions and Revisions by Dale Peck
240 pages – Soho/Amazon
Solid Objects
Think Tank by Julie Carr
96 pages – Solid Objects/Amazon
“It’s still dark / Then, a door,” begins Julie Carr’s beautifulThink Tank. We are invited to step through it, into a space both interstitial and marked, always, with the parts that don’t adhere: “streaks of water between panes of glass,” “shores . . . [like] garnets, as vital as they are coarse,” a “[p]inching and elliptical grammar . . . slightly tipped at the horizon.” This is where pleasure lies—in its tilted reality and luminous curiosity that resembles, so much, childhood imaginaries of loss, landscape and becoming. In connecting to these other qualities of consciousness, Carr opens apertures and seams of different kinds, in a complex, delicate, durational writing that could be both things: the mouth that releases its load of blood when it opens to speak, or something else—a way to get to the next part of life. “At the doorway: endlessness,” Carr writes. And we follow her gaze until it breaks: “glinting and wet.” —Bhanu Kapil
Tin House Books
Adult Onset by Ann-Marie MacDonald
400 pages – Tin House/Amazon
Tupelo Press
gentlessness by Dan Beachy-Quick
112 pages – Tupelo/Amazon
The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison by Maggie Smith
65 pages – Tupelo/Amazon
Ugly Duckling Presse
Wolfman Librarian by Filip Marinovich
104 pages – UDP / Amazon
The Green Ray by Corina Copp
104 pages – UDP/Amazon
The Green Ray is relentless—in its syntactical and almost kaleidoscopic subversion of univocal emotion, its contrapuntal speed and delay, intimacy and pretense, security of sources and formal promiscuity. The poems both sense and want to, enacting a rigorous aesthetic engagement that never quite achieves synthesis, instead posing writing itself as dialogic longing. It is Corina Copp’s first full-length collection of poems. —From the UDP website
Unnamed Press
The Fine Art of Fucking Up by Cate Dicharry
256 pages – Unnamed/Amazon
Wakefield Press
A Dilemma by Joris-Karl Huysmans, translated by Justin Vicari
96 pages – Wakefield/Amazon
Wave Books
Surrounded by Friends by Matthew Rohrer
112 pages – Wave/Amazon
24 Pages and Other Poems by Lisa Fishman
96 pages – Wave/Amazon
A Roll of the Dice by Stéphane Mallarmé, translated by Jeff Clark and Robert Bononno
96 pages – Wave/Amazon
A translation by Robert Bononno and book designer Jeff Clark of one of Stéphane Mallarmé’s most well-known and visually complex poems into contemporary English language and design. The book is composed in an elaborate set of type and photography to both honor the original and be an object of delight. Includes the original preface by Mallarmé. Bilingual edition. —From the UDP website
Superior Packets by Susie Timmons
200 pages – Wave/Amazon
Touche by Rod Smith
112 pages – Wave/Amazon
YesYes Books
North of Order by Nick Gulig
YesYes
some planet by John Mortara
YesYes
and the front porch buckles into teeth / the basement salivates like the nile / derek clutches to an empty keg and floats desperate up the stairs / his guitar becomes an oar / jake scales the shelves trying to catch flies with his jaws / sings: nobody knows the trouble / the chimney boards itself closed / the fire groans and chokes / colin writes suicide letters on the bathroom mirror / threatens to hang himself from the lip of the gutters / tyler says farewell and mark says nothing / you and i hide the ladder and find the last bowl of chili waiting in the kitchen / it speaks after weeks of growing its own being and a taste for riddling: / what is a home but not your home? / not the cupboard filled with starving / the walls aching under pressure / the two of us toss around in the stomach of your bedroom like we are rotten / like this house is sick enough to spit us out / like the sink still dripping / i cannot help myself —Excerpt from YesYes website
