This is the fourteenth installment of Entropy’s small press new releases feature, and the final list Jenny will compile. It’s been a blast composing this every month, and I’ve loved hearing from so many small presses. If you are a press and would like to see your upcoming titles listed here in the future, you can now contact our new Assistant Small Press Editor Jacob Singer at jacob@entropymag.org with the information you see included for the titles below. Kindly send title information within the first three weeks of the new month to guarantee inclusion.
Ahsahta Press
What’s Hanging on the Hush by Lauren Russell
88 pages – Ahsahta Press/SPD
What’s Hanging on the Hush wrestles with concerns that range from race, gender and sexuality to loneliness, madness and grief, and nothing escapes questioning, least of all the position of the poet herself. With humor and slightly off-kilter introspection, these poems disrupt even their own speaking, frequently singing “I.” Collectively, they demonstrate the underlying restlessness of a subjectivity never quite at ease, like the solitary cats who meander across these pages and disappear only to turn up where they are least expected. Operating in a range of modes, from tight lyrics to sprawling, fragmented texts to language experiments, What’s Hanging on the Hush is a tightly constructed interrogation of construction itself. At its heart is an exploration of solitude and a feminist’s existential reckoning—the struggle of being/making in the world. –from the Ahsahta Press website
Bottlecap Press
A Good Leave by George Sawaya and Devin Kelly
Bottlecap Press
Coach House Books
If Clara by Martha Baillie
160 pages – Coach House Books/Amazon
Haircuts by Children and Other Evidence for a New Social Contract by Darren O’Donnell
140 pages – Coach House Books/Amazon
Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race by Naben Ruthnum
144 pages – Coach House Books/Amazon
Curry is a dish that doesn’t quite exist, but, as this hilarious and sharp essay points out, a dish that doesn’t properly exist can have infinite, equally authentic variations.By grappling with novels, recipes, travelogues, pop culture, and his own background, Naben Ruthnum depicts how the distinctive taste of curry has often become maladroit shorthand for brown identity. With the sardonic wit of Gita Mehta’s Karma Cola and the refined, obsessive palette of Bill Buford’s Heat, Ruthnum sinks his teeth into the story of how the beloved flavour calcified into an aesthetic genre that limits the imaginations of writers, readers, and eaters. Following in the footsteps of Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands, Curry cracks open anew the staid narrative of an authentically Indian diasporic experience. –from the Coach House Books website
Coffee House Press
Little Boxes: Twelve Writers on Television edited by Caroline Casey
208 pages – Coffee House Press/Amazon
Strange Blood Good Stock by Dawn Lundy Martin
144 pages – Coffee House Press/Amazon
Dzanc Books
Late One Night by Lee Martin
336 pages – Dzanc Books/Amazon
Darkansas by Jarret Middleton
216 pages – Dzanc Books/Amazon
Gauss PDF
Top Blocker by Eric Conroe
GPDF
Graywolf Press
A Doll for Throwing by Mary Jo Bang
88 pages – Graywolf Press/Amazon
Beast by Paul Kingsnorth
184 pages – Graywolf Press/Amazon
Beast plunges you into the world of Edward Buckmaster, a man alone on an empty moor in the west of England. What he has left behind we don’t yet know. What he faces is an existential battle with himself, the elements, and something he begins to see in the margins of his vision: some creature that is tracking him, the pursuit of which will become an obsession. This short, shocking, and exhilarating novel is a vivid exploration of isolation, courage, and the search for truth that continues the story set one thousand years earlier in Paul Kingsnorth’s bravura debut novel, The Wake. It extends that book’s promise and confirms Kingsnorth as one of our most daring and rewarding contemporary writers. –from the Graywolf Press website
Inlandia Books
Traces of a Fifth Column by Marco Maisto
110 pages – Amazon
“There’s nothing that doesn’t belong and no two things that can’t be combined in Marco Maisto’s explosive world of percussive potential, and yet every word is curated; his choices are deliberate, often surprisingly delicate, and always informed by his excellent ear and inventive exuberance. His astonishing linguistic agility juggles through a found journal and an old video tape, through collapsing lions and finch-colored echoes—all within a recurrent address to a you somehow too close to be clearly seen, and thus rendered limitless. Such a radical proliferation of possibility is ultimately contagious—Who are you not? he asks at one point, and the fact that we have no answer is everything.” –Cole Swenson, author of Gravesend
Les Figues
Irradiated Cities by Mariko Nagai
144 pages – Les Figues/SPD
“Writing in the long shadow of history and social progress following atomic bombings in Japan, the poet admits that ‘suffering is photogenic’ and so is its aftermath. Hauntingly and almost rhythmically juxtaposed, these poems, full of critical to devastated voices opening out into other voices, and images—shadowy, stark, implicit and adumbrative, foregrounding casual scenes and objects to shattered edifices, hinting of past and present trauma and resiliences—document not only the horrific squalor of previous suffering, but also the subtler ironies, painful contradictions and social ambivalences surrounding contemporary encounters with nuclear energy.” –Cyril Wong, author of The Lover’s Inventory
Magic Helicopter Press
When There Is No One and There Is Everyone by Rex Renée Leonorwicz
180 pages – Magic Helicopter Press/SPD
“There is no wish you were here / without you wish,” say the friends keeping the sun in each other. Little church of lost accents coming back in unison, bay to river to aubade. A collage-like mixtape of techniques and influences, When There Is No One and There Is Everyone explores how to story a self to life in an unjust world, where gentrification and intersecting oppressions play themselves out in the intimate geographies of bodies, minds, and cities. Rex Renée Leonowicz’s debut collection of poems and illustrations is a celebration of friendship, freakdom, and what it means when people on the margins come together to rough it out in tough times. –from the Magic Helicopter Press website
Melville House
The Talented Ribkins by Ladee Hubbard
304 pages – Melville House/Amazon
Doll Funeral by Kate Hamer
336 pages – Melville House/Amazon
Antifa: The Anti-Facist Handbook by Mark Bray
288 pages – Melville House/Amazon
Milkweed Editions
Body of Water: A Sage, A Seeker, and the World’s Most Alluring Fish by Chris Dombrowski
240 pages – Milkweed Editions/Amazon
New Directions
Sea, Land, Shadow by Kazuko Shiraishi, translated by Kazuko Tsumura
64 pages – New Directions/Amazon
21 Poems by George Open, edited by David B. Hobbs
64 pages – New Directions/Amazon
Across the Vapour Gulf by Will Alexander
64 pages – New Directions/Amazon
Blue Pearl by Lesley Harrison
64 pages – New Directions/Amazon
Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash by Eka Kurniawan, translated by Annie Tucker
160 pages – New Directions/Amazon
Vivid and bawdy, here is the new novel by the Indonesian superstar Eka Kurniawan (Beauty is a Wound). Told in short, cinematic bursts, Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash is gloriously pulpy. Ajo Kawir, a lower-class Javanese teenage boy excited about sex, likes to spy on fellow villagers in flagrante, but when he witnesses a savage rape, he is deeply traumatized and becomes impotent. His efforts to get his virility back all fail, and Ajo Kawir turns to fighting as a way to vent his frustrations. He is hired to kill a thug named The Tiger, but instead Ajo Kawir falls in love with Iteung, a gorgeous female bodyguard who works for the local mafia. Alas, the course of true love never did run smooth…. Fast-forward a decade. Now a truck driver, Ajo Kawir has reached a new equanimity, thinking that his penis may be trying to teach him a lesson: he even consults it in many situations as if it were his guru—and love may triumph yet. –from the New Directions website
Open Letter Books
Island of Point Nemo by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès
450 pages – Open Letter Books/Amazon
OR Books
The Lost Tetrads of Marshall McLuhan by Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan
270 pages – OR Books
Other Press
Leona: The Die is Cast by Jenny Rogneby
464 pages – Other Press/Amazon
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Others by Sara Bakewell
464 pages – Other Press/Amazon
Publishing Genius
Irksome Particulars by Matt Cook
108 pages – Publishing Genius/SPD
Sagging Meniscus Press
First, the Raven: A Preface by Seth Rogoff
210 pages – Sagging Meniscus Press/SPD
Sarabande Books
A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause by Shawn Wen
136 pages – Sarabande Books/Amazon
Tin House Books
Dying: A Memoir by Cory Taylor
152 pages – Tin House/Amazon
At the age of sixty, Cory Taylor is dying of melanoma-related brain cancer. Her illness is no longer treatable: she now weighs less than her neighbor’s retriever. As her body weakens, she describes the experience―the vulnerability and strength, the courage and humility, the anger and acceptance―of knowing she will soon die. Written in the space of a few weeks, in a tremendous creative surge, this powerful and beautiful memoir is a clear-eyed account of what dying teaches: Taylor describes the tangle of her feelings, remembers the lives and deaths of her parents, and examines why she would like to be able to choose the circumstances of her death. –from the Tin House Books website
Ugly Duckling Presse
Kholin 66: Diaries and Poems by Igor Kholin, translated by Ainsley Morse, Bela Shayevich
96 pages – Ugly Duckling Presse/SPD
Before Lyricism by Eleni Vakalo, translated by Karen Emmerich
144 pages – Ugly Duckling Presse/SPD
I Remember Nightfall by Marosa di Giorgio, translated by Jeannine Marie Pitas
320 pages – Ugly Duckling Presse/SPD
A Piece of Work by Annie Dorsen
192 pages – Ugly Duckling Presse/SPD
Unnamed Press
Crumb-sized by Marlena Chertock
80 pages – Unnamed Press/Amazon
Marlena Chertock grew up crumb-sized, with a rare bone disorder. She uses this skeletal dysplasia and chronic pain as a bridge to scientific poetry, often exploring the rich images in science and medicine, threading genetics, space, and nature into her work.With frank humor, Chertock takes on varied and critical aspects of identity―femininity, gender, sexuality―as they relate (or don’t relate) to her disability, somehow succeeding in making them familiar and universal. Her poetry is one that challenges us to see our limitations, not as individuals but as people together, all of us, ultimately, crumb-sized. Born in 1991, Chertock’s is an exciting and contemporary voice―brutally honest, deeply humane and ultimately triumphant. –from the Unnamed Press website
Upper Rubber Boot Books
Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation edited by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland
253 pages – Upper Rubber Boot Books
