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. I can be reached at jacob@entropymag.org.
Arc Pair Press
Particularly Dangerous Situation by Patti White
148 pages – Arc Pair Press/ Amazon
“A devastating tornadic storm hits Alabama after erasing the state of Mississippi. Among the survivors are a distraught weatherman, a woman strapped to a dental chair, a man carrying a dead cat, and a golf-club wielding real-estate agent who encounters the undead. In this experimental novella, White’s poetic prose captures the endless trauma of catastrophe: the physical and emotional disorder, the chaotic and contingent patterns of events. Here, the reader will find no neat resolution. Life after grand-scale destruction and near-death experience is effectively another kind of cyclone: spinning and relentless, a state of free fall through dense and violent clouds.” –from the Arc Pair website
Blue Light Press
Swerve: Poems on Environmentalism, Feminism, and Resistance by Ellery Akers
74 pages – Amazon
“The late W. S. Merwin said Akers’s nature poems are a “joy to discover” because they embody a “lost sense of the living world.” In Swerve, Akers celebrates the wild while facing climate change, extinction, and loss. These poems confront us with the many threats to our world, eventually guiding us through stages of grief towards hope and action. The poems in Swerve give voice to the shock, fear, and desperation many feel about the Trump administration’s life-threatening policies. They meditate on the beauty of the non-human world. They champion women in the #MeToo movement who are empowering themselves and making vital changes. Powerful and compassionate, Swerve is ultimately a call to activism, inspiring readers to “swerve” and demand a better world.”-from Amazon
Book*hug Press
Wave Archive by Emmalea Russo
162 pages – Book*hug Press/ Amazon
“Emmalea Russo’s Wave Archive moves between essay and poetry while also pondering the mind-body connection and the unreliability of thought patterns and histories. Here, Russo invokes her own experiences with seizures, photographs and art-making, archival and indexical processes, brain waves, and the very personal need to document and store while simultaneously questioning the reliability of memory and language. Drawing upon the history of epilepsy in both ancient and modern brain treatments, Wave Archive disrupts and restores the archive over and over again, exploring the very edges of consciousness.” –from the Book*hug Press website
Dzanc Books
My Red Heaven by Lance Olsen
200 pages – Dzanc Books/ Amazon
“Set on a single day in 1927, My Red Heaven imagines a host of characters—some historic, some invented—crossing paths on the streets of Berlin. The subjects include Robert Musil, Otto Dix, Werner Heisenberg, Anita Berber, Vladimir Nabokov, Käthe Kollwitz, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Rosa Luxemburg—as well as others history has forgotten: a sommelier, a murderer, a prostitute, a pickpocket, and several ghosts. Drawing inspiration from Otto Freundlich’s painting by the same name, My Red Heaven explores a complex moment in history: the rise of deadly populism at a time when everything seemed possible and the future unimaginable.” –from the Dzanc Books website
Game Over Books
Sana Sana by Ariana Brown
39 pages – Game Over Books
“After ten years of performing her spoken word poetry, Ariana Brown gathers her favorite poems to return to in Sana Sana. With a tender and critical voice, she explores Black girlhood, the possibilities of queerness, finding your people, and trying to survive capitalism. All are explored as acts of different kinds of love—for self, for lovers, for family, for community. Brown’s collection refuses singularity, insisting on the specificity of her own life and studies. As she writes toward her own healing, Brown asks readers to participate in the ceremony by serving as witnesses. Sana Sana, colita de rana, si no sana hoy, sana en la mañana.” –from the Game Over Books website
The Visible Planets by Aly Pierce
69 pages – Game Over Books
“Space can be a cold abyss, or it can be a tender darkness where we remake what haunts us. “It’s hard to make progress/with old science” but I dare you to tell me Aly Pierce’s poems don’t draw on all the former stories told about the stars to make a new cosmos where every planet or moon is a person we know intimately. These poems circle the unknown until we recognize it as already part of us. I read them & feel smaller than I realized I was, but what a gift to find the known universe granular as it travels through Pierce’s lens, at once exploding & perfected by attention. Here, the vocabulary of particle physics, of math, of medicine, of humility, of grief, of orbit, is a limitless love language we all have in common.” –Emily O’Neill
GobQ Books
25 Poems on the Death of Ursula Le Guin by M.F. McAuliffe
68 pages – GobQ Books/ Amazon
“M. F. McAuliffe (The Crucifixes and Other Friday Poems, I’m Afraid of Americans) was shocked and saddened by the death of Ursula K. Le Guin. Written over the succeeding twelve months, these poems describe an accumulating, multi-layered experience of personal and communal loss.” –from the GobQ Books website
The Lettered Streets Press
Split Series Volume 4 by David Trinidad and Jennifer Moxley
76 pages – Lettered Streets Press
“Before we are the poets we are meant to become, literary friendships prop us up and give shape to our ambitions,” writes Jennifer Moxley in her introduction to David Trinidad’s chapbook. The Split Series Vol. IV features a chapbook each from Moxley and Trinidad, who in diary entries from writing programs and conferences reveal the friendships, connections, and heroes who keep them writing. In My First Visit to the University of Maine, Moxley chronicles the 1996 National Poetry Foundation Conference on the 1950s, where she runs into several Language poets, cheers her partner on, and is inspired by panels on Edwin Rolfe and Thomas McGrath. In Coteries and Gossip, Trinidad records his week teaching at Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program in 2010, hanging out with Joanne Kyger and Anne Waldman, and taking notes on reading and writing advice. Honest and full of poetry gossip, both chapbooks show the writer outside the role of “author”—in a bar, in the classroom, on a moonlit drive, at McDonalds, browsing for gifts, watching TV, and sharing scotch. These entries give a peek into the unique intimacies poets form with each other and serve as a fascinating record of the writer’s life when not writing.” –from the Lettered Streets Press Website
A Midsummer Night’s Press
Tracing the Unspoken by Milan Šelj (trans. Milan Šelj and Harvey Vincent)
69 pages – A Midsummer Night’s Press/ Amazon
“In Tracing the Unspoken, Milan Šelj has compiled a ledger of obsession: by applying language to shapeless silence, the individual tries to make sense of desire. In these fragments of narrative, the tacit, the implicit, the unspoken and the unspeakable are all eventually given voice. Passion is blocked by indifference, indifference unblocked by passion. And somehow love, once put into words, survives to thrive. The process is compelling, the expression eloquent.” –Gregory Woods
Kelsay Books
Lambflesh by Caroline Shea
59 pages – Kelsay Books/ Amazon
“Lambflesh is author Caroline Shea’s debut poetry collection. The chapbook investigates and complicates traditional narratives of girlhood and coming of age through lush, lyrical language. Poet and novelist Jenn Givhan writes: “Lambflesh crackles with stark and magic-stung survival songs (…). These poems are dark and potent and mythheavy; they unbandage the stigma from mental health issues and sing ‘as refusal of erasure.’” Shea’s poems are fascinated by the pleasures and betrayals of the body, constantly reaching towards an equilibrium where both joy and pain can coexist, even if that balance is ‘always / a negotiation.’ Editor of Best American Poetry 2019, Major Jackson writes of the collection: “I confess: I am drawn to poems that break me into a tenderness I’d never known. Caroline Shea’s Lambflesh does it over and over.” This chapbook introduces a unique and ranging poetic voice that will quickly captivate readers with its empathy and attentive eye for detail.” –from the Kelsay Books press release
The Operating System
High Tide of the Eyes by Bijan Elahi (Trans. Rebecca Ruth Gould and Kayvan Tahmasebian)
80 pages – The Operating System
“The hermit-poet of modern Persian literature, Bijan Elahi (1945–2010) was a modernist poet, a prolific translator of Eliot, Rimbaud, Michaux, Hölderlin, and the founder of Other Poetry, the leading avant-garde movement within Persian modernism. Elahi passed the last three decades of his life in seclusion in his house in Tehran. He stopped publishing poems and never appeared in public following his official retreat. However, a new generation of Iranian poets revived Elahi’s legacy as a poet and a translator as part of their search for new modes of expression and experimentation with language. High Tide of the Eyes translates Elahi’s most important poems, as gathered together in two posthumously published volumes, Vision (2014) and Youths (2015), into English. ‘High Tide of the Eyes’ will be the first to introduce a key voice in Persian literary modernism to an Anglophone audience.” –from the Operating System website
Publishing Genius Press
$50,000 by Andrew Weatherhead
116 pages – Publishing Genius Press
“$50,000 is a long poem that allows Andrew Weatherhead the space to search everything—his cubicle, his relationships with coworkers and friends, and the worlds found in literature, sports, economics, and history—for something more meaningful than mere facts. What arises in these 116 pages is the pure drama of life: the unrelenting passage of time, the inevitable need to make a living, and the foreboding beauty of numbers, names, and friendship. In hundreds of standalone lines that align with Mike Tyson’s peek-a-boo style, this long poem moves like prose but sticks with all the weight and heft of poetry.” –from the Publishing Genius Press website
Rescue Press
The Usual Uncertainties by Jonathan Blum
344 pages – Rescue Press/ Amazon
“The Usual Uncertainties—Jonathan Blum’s highly anticipated first collection—is storytelling at its finest. In precise, elegant prose, these stories follow characters and communities often consigned to the edge of the frame: a community college dropout, a geriatric care manager, a square dance bar mitzvah, a Scrabble club, an entrepreneurial Thai immigrant, and a South Florida country club. With echoes of Leonard Michaels, Mavis Gallant, and Lore Segal, Blum explores the ways our divergent histories tether us together and at times push us completely apart. The Usual Uncertainties revels in the persistent human struggle to love with abandon and marks a radiant voice in American short fiction.” -from the Rescue Press website
where bells begin by Tessa Micaela
86 pages – Rescue Press/ SPD Books
“Declaration provides solace of structure for o, the book’s enigmatic but adamant speaker who navigates the seams of reality and dream in Tessa Micaela’s where bells begin. In a landscape where “the mist rises from the chemicals bubbling on the surface,” meaning emerges from conditions and point of view. Tense in its strain against the impossibility of building a world from props or propositions alone, this collection enriches a sterile reality with mystic longing. o embodies the lyric gesture, at once feral and epiphanic, while clinging to tactility and community—moving towards a we. These poems deny chronology, completion, or sure footing; the reader must continually recalibrate their understanding of o’s circumstances even as o insists on o’s own vulnerability, fear, invisibility, and becoming-ness. The conviction to observe, record, and deconstruct the abstractions of an over-policed, over-graphed world is not only o’s ars-poetica, but an ethical imperative for readers seeking to re-sensitize the soul.” –from the Rescue Press website
