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.
Arc Pair Press
Let it be Our Ruin by Lee Tyler Williams
186 pages – Arc Pair Press
“Crisscrossing through the small towns of Argentina to find a rare rock album, a middle-school teacher from Texas is forced to confront his understanding of the past. Through the language of music, Let It Be Our Ruin examines the myths of identity and historic realities. Rumors about a musician whose fame peaked during the Argentine Dirty War and teenage gossip about a high-school friend harmonize with the stories of nations to create a composition about grief, the multiple ways of speaking truth, and the blues. ” –from the Arc Pair website
Black Lawrence Press
Many Restless Concerns by Gayle Brandeis
130 pages – Black Lawrence Press/ Amazon
“Many Restless Concerns reanimates the stories and bodies of young women who were tortured to death by Hungarian Countess Bathory in the early 1600’s. A breathtaking restoration and reckoning. A tour de force chorus built from the voices of women who refuse silence. A body resistance song for all times.” —Lidia Yuknavitch
Coffee House Press
Social Poetics by Mark Nowak
288 pages – Coffee House Press/ Amazon
“Social Poetics documents the imaginative militancy and emergent solidarities of a new, insurgent working class poetry community rising up across the globe. Part autobiography, part literary criticism, part Marxist theory, Social Poetics presents a people’s history of the poetry workshop from the founding director of the Worker Writers School. Nowak illustrates not just what poetry means, but what it does to and for people outside traditional literary spaces, from taxi drivers to street vendors, and other workers of the world.”
Temporary by Hilary Leichter
208 pages – Coffee House Press/ Amazon
“In Temporary, a young woman’s workplace is the size of the world. She fills increasingly bizarre placements in search of steadiness, connection, and something, at last, to call her own. Whether it’s shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, assisting an assassin, or filling in for the Chairman of the Board, for the mythical Temporary, “there is nothing more personal than doing your job.” This riveting quest, at once hilarious and profound, will resonate with anyone who has ever done their best at work, even when the work is only temporary.” –from the Coffee House Press website
Dzanc Books
Don’t You Know I love You by Laura Bogart
264 pages – Dzanc Books/ Amazon
“The last place Angelina Moltisanti ever wants to go is home. She barely escaped life under the roof, and the thumb, of her violent but charismatic father, Jack. Yet home is exactly where she ends up after an SUV plows into her car just weeks after she graduates from college, fracturing her wrist and her hopes to start a career as an artist.
Angelina finds herself smothered in a plaster cast, in Jack’s obsessive urge to get her a giant accident settlement, in her mother Marie’s desperation to have a second chance, and in her own stifled creativity – until she meets Janet, another young artist who inspires her to push herself into making the dynamic, unsettling work that tells the story of her scars, inside and out. But excavating this damage, as relations with her father become increasingly tense, will push Angelina into making a hard choice: will she embrace her father’s all-consuming and empowering rage, or find another kind of strength? ” –from the Dzanc Books website
Eden Press/Ugly Duckling Presse
In Salem by Catherine Corman
48 pages – Small Press Distribution
“In Salem is a collection of collage poems and original photographs by Catherine Corman, inspired by the Salem Witch Trials. She has assembled fragments of text from the trial testimony of accused witches to form haunting, desperate pleas of innocence; fantastical, urgent, false confessions; and blunt laments of resignation from blameless women condemned to death. Accompanying the text are twenty-one photographs retracing their lives across the farms, homes, ponds and cemeteries where they endured their ill-fated lives, pastoral and commonplace until overtaken by hysteria.” –from the Small Press Distribution website
Kelsay Books
Birthright by Erika Dreifus
90 pages – Kelsay Books/ Amazon
“The poems in Birthright embody multiple legacies: genetic, historical, religious, and literary. Through the lens of one person’s experience of inheritance, the poems suggest ways in which all of us may be influenced by how we perceive and process our lives and times. Here, a poet claims what is hers as a child of her particular parents; as a grandchild of refugees from Nazi Germany; as a Jew, a woman, a Gen Xer, and a New Yorker; as a reader of the Bible and Shakespeare and Flaubert and Lucille Clifton. This poet’s birthright is as unique as her DNA. But it resonates far beyond herself.” –from the Kelsay Books website
KERNPUNKT Press
Ceremonials by Katharine Coldiron
140 pages – KERNPUNKT Press/ Amazon
“CEREMONIALS is a twelve-part lyric novella inspired by Florence + the Machine’s 2011 album of the same name. It’s the story of two girls, Amelia and Corisande, who fall in love at a boarding school. Corisande dies suddenly on the eve of graduation, but Amelia cannot shake her ghost. A narrative about obsession, the Minotaur, and the veil between life and death, CEREMONIALS is a poem in prose, a keening in words, and a song etched in ink.” -from the KERNPUNKT Press website
Nightboat Books
The Blue Absolute by Aaron Shurin
104 pages – Nightboat Books/ Amazon
“The Blue Absolute’s prose poems are hot boxes of lyrical language combusting with daily life. People move and think amidst a flurry of dots and dashes in a constant shift of perspective and action—urban and pastoral, highly figured and fragmented, grieving and dreaming—each poem a compressed but fluid zone of almost psychedelic intensity. The book closes with “Shiver,” an American epic, at once a lament for and vision of a great city on the edge: San Francisco past, present, and future.” –from the Nightboat Books website
Paul Dry Books
Wilder Good: Silverbelly by S.J. Dahlstrom
182 pages – Paul Dry Books/ Amazon
“What if everything you thought about deer hunting was wrong? That the biggest deer wasn’t always the best one. Wilder is back on his grandad’s ranch in West Texas and a run-in with his dangerous neighbor, Saul, spins Wilder’s head like the blizzard that hits the ranch the day before Thanksgiving. Along with his sister, Molly, Wilder must rethink his ideas about what a trophy is, and how he relates to the wild landscape around him.” –from the Paul Dry Press website
Press 53
Drowning in the Floating World by Meg Eden
80 pages – Press 53/ Amazon
“Drowning in the Floating World by Meg Eden immerses us into the Japanese natural disaster known as 3/11: the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, and subsequent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Relentless as the disaster itself, Eden seizes control of our deepest emotional centers, and, through insightful perspective, holds us in consideration of loss, helplessness, upheaval, and, perhaps most stirring, what to make of, and do with, survival. Her collection is also a cultural education, sure to encourage further reading and research. Drowning in the Floating World is, itself, a tsunami stone—a warning beacon to remind us to learn from disaster and, in doing so, honor all that’s lost.” –from the Press 53 website
Sagging Meniscus Press
When Sleep Comes: Shillelagh Songs by Jack Foley
200 pages – Sagging Meniscus Press
“Jack Foley’s latest poetry selection reveals the master in a wild and varied display of poems that entertain the reader with his many styles and preoccupations—from the depths of grief to love to the heights where light has its source. We might turn the title into a question: When sleep comes, can light be far behind? And the answer would be a resounding Exclamation Mark! This bouquet of Shillelagh songs comes from Foley’s Irish core, and might be considered an extension of Humphry Chimpden Earwicker, dormant protagonist of Finnegans Wake, whose sleep encompasses all the known and unknown Universes. The diversity of forms and themes these “poems” assume amply demonstrates Foley’s concept of mind as being not one but multiple, a dark cinematic chamber peopled with many voices and masks.” –from the Sagging Meniscus Press website
Saint Julien Press
Seven Stories Press
Our Land to Our Land by Luis J. Rodriguez
224 pages – Seven Stories Press/ Amazon
“A collection of 12 essays that focus on overarching themes of race, culture, and the tenuous construction of identity, From Our Land to Our Land explores how these concepts have evolved, often by colonialist force, in the volatile history of the United States. Rodriguez has a distinctly inspiring passion and wisdom in his approach. As he reminds us in the first essay, “The End of Belonging,” “I’m writing as a Native person. I’m writing as a poet. I’m writing as a revolutionary working class organizer and thinker who has traversed life journeys from which incredible experiences, missteps, plights, and victories have marked the way… I belong anywhere.” From Our Land to Our Land captures this same fantastic energy and wisdom found in all of Rodriguez’s work, inspiring not only discussion of acceptance and belonging, but offering an antidote to the harsh binaries found in a culture shaped by xenophobia and intolerance.” –from the Seven Stories website
On Diversity: The Eclipse of the Individual in a Global Era by Russell Jacoby
240 pages – Seven Stories Press/ Amazon
“Diversity. You’ve heard the term everywhere—in the news, in the universities, at the television awards shows. Maybe even in the corporate world, where diversity initiatives have become de rigueur. But what does the term actually mean? Where does it come from? What are its intellectual precedents? Moreover, how do we square our love affair with diversity with the fact that the world seems to be becoming more and more, well, homogeneous? With a lucid, straightforward prose that rises above the noise, one of America’s greatest intellectual gadflies, Russell Jacoby, takes these questions squarely on. Discussing diversity (or lack thereof) in language, fashion, childhood experience, political structure, and the history of ideas, Jacoby offers a surprising and penetrating analysis of our cultural moment. In an age where our public thinkers seem to be jumping over one another to have the latest correct opinion, Jacoby offers a most dangerous, and liberating, injunction: to stop and think.” -from the Seven Stories Press website
Two Dollar Radio
Virtuoso by Yelena Moskovich
272 pages – Two Dollar Radio/ Amazon
“As Communism begins to crumble in Prague in the 1980s, Jana’s unremarkable life becomes all at once remarkable when a precocious young girl named Zorka moves into the apartment building with her mother and sick father. With Zorka’s signature two-finger salute and abrasive wit, she brings flair to the girls’ days despite her mother’s protestations to not “be weird.” But after scorching her mother’s prized fur coat and stealing from a nefarious teacher, Zorka suddenly disappears. Meanwhile in Paris, Aimée de Saint-Pé married young to an older woman, Dominique, an actress whose star has crested and is in decline. A quixotic journey of self-discovery, Virtuoso follows Zorka as she comes of age in Prague, Wisconsin, and then Boston, amidst a backdrop of clothing logos, MTV, computer coders, and other outcast youth. But it isn’t till a Parisian conference hall brimming with orthopedic mattresses and therapeutic appendages when Jana first encounters Aimée, their fates steering them both to a cryptic bar on the Rue de Prague, and, perhaps, to Zorka.” –from the Two Dollar Radio website
University of Nebraska
Skin Memory by John Sibley Williams
96 pages – University of Nebraska/ Amazon
“A stark, visceral collection of free verse and prose poetry, Skin Memory scours a wild landscape haunted by personal tragedy and the cruel consequences of human acts in search of tenderness and regeneration. In this book of daring and introspection, John Sibley Williams considers the capriciousness of youth, the terrifying loss of cultural identity and self-identity, and what it means to live in an imperfect world. He reveals each body as made up of all bodies, histories, and shared dreams of the future. In these poems absence can be held, the body’s dust is just dust, and though childhood is but a poorly edited memory and even our well-intentioned gestures tend toward ruin, Williams nonetheless says, “I’m pretty sure, everything within us says something beautiful.” –from the University of Nebraska Press website
