This is the fifth 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. Enjoy the sun! Read wildly!
Ahsahta Press
This is the Homeland by Mary Hickman
80 pages – Ahsahta/SPD
Mary Hickman’s This Is the Homeland consists of eight poetic sequences written over a ten-year period, begun when she worked as a surgical assistant in open-heart surgeries. The homeland of the title sequence is the body, open upon the steel surgical table; the sequences are linked by an attention to the visceral elements of language and by an exploration of the themes of health, transformation, desire, and identity. Hickman charts the precarious and ecstatic response of consciousness surrendering itself to language and experience, a vertigo in which the self is called back to itself and the world through losing itself. These poems are as much about love as loss, therefore—elegies to times, places, and people whose presences sear and haunt the poems. Using the teeth of language to grapple with the exhilarating passage of time, This Is the Homeland presents the deft maneuverings of a vibrant new poetic intelligence—sensuous, sensitive, and awake. —From the Ahsahta website
Bellevue Literary Press
A Solemn Pleasure: To Imagine, Witness, and Write by Melissa Pritchard
192 Pages – Bellevue/Amazon
Big Lucks Books
Wildlives by Sara Jean Alexander
90 pages – Big Lucks/Amazon
Wildlives is a scrapbook of poems and of short stories, of nightmares and of daydreams, of love letters and of prayer cards. In her debut collection, Sarah Jean Alexander asks (and answers) the hardest questions about love and loneliness and 21st century human survival. Wildlives excavates the depths of heartbreak, hope, and helplessness that can exist between two people in a small, human world. —From the Big Lucks website
Black Herald Press
Cosmographia & other poems by Blandine Longre
70 pages – Black Herald
Dits des xhuxha’i / Tales of the xhuxha’i by Anne-Sylvie Salzman, translated from the French by the author
58 pages – Black Herald
Black Lawrence Press
Far Enough: A Western in Fragments by Joe Wilkins
40 pages – Black Lawrence/Amazon
Civil Coping Mechanisms
The Arson People by Katie Jean Shinkle
106 pages – CCM/Amazon
This Must Be the Place by Sean H. Doyle
102 pages – CCM/Amazon
I come here after my shift at the record store and sit around at picnic tables outside, scribbling into notebooks while drinking shitty coffee and waiting for my girlfriend, Velvet, to get off work so we can go get high. The crowd here is varied: AA people alongside art people and punks alongside dirty Deadheads and downtown casualties. There are many open mic poetry events, usually outdoors at dusk. One night I decide to read. I go to the mic and drop weapons. I go to the mic and read about Kuwait City and southern Iraq. I go to the mic and read about prostitutes and hashish and drinking homemade wine made out of grape juice in the middle of the Indian Ocean. I go to the mic and curse over and over again. Nobody claps. Nobody moves. I am not asked to read again. —Excerpt from “The Willow House, 3rd Ave and McDowell Road, Phoenix, June, 1994”
Antigolf by John Colasacco
180 pages – CCM/Amazon
Spiritual Instrument by M. Kitchell
180 pages – CCM/Amazon
The Rules of Appropriate Conduct by Kirsten Alene
170 pages – CCM
Ohey! by Darby Larson
140 pages – CCM/Amazon
Coach House Books
Asbestos Heights by David McGimpsey
96 pages – CHB/Amazon
Dear Leader by Damian Rogers
96 pages – CHB/Amazon
The Ward edited by John Lorinc, Michael McClelland, Ellen Scheinberg, and Tatum Taylor
320 pages – CHB/Amazon
Theater of the Unimpressed: In Search of Vital Drama by Jordan Tannahill
160 pages – CHB/Amazon
Twenty-One Cardinals by Jocelyn Saucier, translated by Rhonda Mullins
176 pages – CHB/Amazon
With twenty-one kids, the Cardinal family is a force of nature. And now, after not being in the same room for decades, they’re congregating to celebrate their father, a prospector who discovered the zinc mine their now-deserted hometown in northern Quebec was built around. But as the siblings tell the tales of their feral childhood, we discover that Angèle, the only Cardinal with a penchant for happiness, has gone missing – although everyone has pretended not to notice for years. Why the silence? What secrets does the mine hold? —From the Coach House website
Coffee House Press
Mr. and Mrs. Doctor by Julie Iromuanya
288 pages – Coffee House/Amazon
Alone and Not Alone by Ron Padgett
84 pages – Coffee House/Amazon
Coconut Books
Self-Portrait in Plants by James Sanders
116 pages – Coconut Books/SPD
CAROLINE WHO WILL YOU PRAY TO NOW THAT YOU ARE DEAD by Caroline Crew
Coconut Books
The Rest is Censored by K. Lorraine Graham
102 pages – Coconut Books/SPD
“Lay the pieces of languaged life of your, next to one another, they were moved from, they moved, me. If I don’t misunderstand you, KLG, you are coding these pieces of languaged, life, as poetry. It is very good poetry. I think, of poets who bring a day, into the poem—Leslie Scalapino, Larry Eigner, Joanne Kyger—Lorraine Graham on a bus in California—and I am given pause, is changing, misunderstanding can, get to, life through, this.” —Catherine Wagner
Curbside Splendor Publishing
Almost Crimson by Dasha Kelly
300 pages – Curbside/Amazon
Dalkey Archive
The Old Man and the Bench by Urs Allemann, translated by Patrick Greaney
105 pages – Dalkey Archive/Amazon
Atavisms by Raymond Bock, translated by Pablo Strauss
230 pages – Dalkey Archive/Amazon
The Key by Máirtin Ó Cadhain, translated by Louis de Paor and Lochlainn Ó Tuairisg
200 pages – Dalkey Archive/Amazon
On Wing by Róbert Gál, translated by Mark Kanak
112 pages – Dalkey Archive/Amazon
Behind the Station by Arno Camenisch, translated by Donal McLaughlin
100 pages – Dalkey Archive/Amazon
Deep Vellum
Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories by Mikhail Shishkin
180 pages – Deep Vellum/Amazon
Drunken Boat
The Ground I Stand On Is Not My Own by Collier Nogues
76 pages – SPD
A hybrid of poetry and digital art, THE GROUND erases historical documents related to the development and aftermath of the Pacific War. The book uses QR codes to link to online interactive versions of the poems. For a preview, visit “Dear Grace” in its interactive version at Pangyrus, or three flat poems at At Length. —From the SPD website
Dzanc Books
The Guild of Saint Cooper by Shya Scanlon
414 pages – Dzanc/Amazon
Between Here and the Yellow Sea by Nic Pizzolatto (Reissue Edition)
228 pages – Dzanc/Amazon
Featherproof Books
The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic by Jessica Hopper
250 pages – Featherproof/Amazon
With this premiere volume, spanning from her punk fanzine roots to her landmark piece on R. Kelly’s past, The First Collection leaves no doubt why the New York Times has called Hopper’s work “influential.” Not merely a selection of two decades of Hopper’s most engaging, thoughtful and humorous writing, this book serves as a document of the last 20 years of American music making and the shifting landscape of music consumption. Through this vast range of album reviews, essays, columns, interviews, and oral histories, Hopper chronicles what it is to be truly obsessed with music, the ideas in songs and albums, how fantasies of artists become complicated by real life, and just what happens when you follow that obsession into muddy festival fields, dank basements, corporate offices or court records. —From the Featherproof website
Gauss PDF
First Thought Worst Thought: Collected Books 2011-2014 by Tom Comitta
GPDF
Natural Gestures by Silvio Lorusso
GPDF
5 4 by Carly Dashiell
GPDF
Greying Ghost Press
Orphans Burning Orphans by Gene Kwak
Greying Ghost
“All hail the sailing from the top rope. That’s where Orphans Burning Orphans launches from, an elbow pointed at wisdom’s huevos, a bag of buffalo nickels perched on its head and bloody exclamation marks tattooed across its knuckles. These stories pray to Geronimo, Superman, and Michael Jordan. Myth and mess and frail screaming in your house slippers, starbursts of tragedy, Starburst-rotten teeth. Gene Kwak is true guts, and this is his intro music.” —Mike Young
Graywolf Press
Selfish: Poems by Albert Goldbarth
184 pages – Graywolf/Amazon
Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight by Margaret Lazarus Dean
240 pages – Graywolf/Amazon
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
160 pages – Graywolf/Amazon
Lazy Fascist
Sucker June by Sean Kilpatrick
83 pages – Amazon
Cult of Loretta by Kevin Maloney
146 pages – Amazon
The Narrator by Michael Cisco
456 pages – Amazon
Les Figues
Leave Your Body Behind by Sandra Doller
134 pages – Les Figues/SPD
Memory is a faulty showcase, whether expressed as confession or nostalgia. In Leave Your Body Behind, Sandra Doller forges a new space for remembrance as she actively relives, revives, and revamps her own memories. With anarchic shifts from reverie to citation, from criticism to play, from Madame Bovary in a gold lamé onesie to Bob Dylan hanging out with a side ofScience and Memory, Doller feeds us a slush of images and prose that she trusts us to properly mutilate and misconstrue. Construction and demolition become inseparable as we are brought to the realization that the child you were is the one you kill and the person you are now is never the one you once knew. Or did you mishear yourself in the first place? —From the Les Figues website
Melville House
The Ghost Network by Catie Disabato
288 pages – Melville House/Amazon
Milkweed Editions
The World Is On Fire by Joni Tevis
304 pages – Milkweed/Amazon
River House by Sally Keith
96 pages – Milkweed/Amazon
These are poems of absence. Written in the wake of the loss of her mother, River House follows Sally Keith as she makes her way through the depths of grief, navigating a world newly transfigured. Incorporating her travels abroad, her experience studying the neutral mask technique developed by Jacques Lecoq, and her return to the river house she and her mother often visited, the poet assembles a guide to survival in the face of seemingly insurmountable pain. Even in the dark, Keith finds the ways we can be “filled with this unexpected feeling of living.” —From the Milkweed website
New Directions
Counternarratives by John Keene
320 pages – ND/Amazon
Blue Fasa by Nathaniel Mackey
160 pages – ND/Amazon
Day Of The Locust by Nathanael West
160 pages – ND/Amazon
Antigonick (Sophokles) by Anne Carson
178 pages – ND/Amazon
OR Books
@heaven: The Online Death of a Cybernetic Futurist, edited by Kim Hastreiter
220 pages – OR
Watchlist: 32 Short Stories by Persons of Interest, edited by Bryan Hurt
372 pages – OR
A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the “Mexican Drug War” by Carmen Boullosa and Mike Wallace
258 pages – OR
Penny-Ante Editions
What Gets Kept by Lynne Tillman
10-track vinyl LP – Penny-Ante
Penny Ante Editions is pleased to announce the release of What Gets Kept, the first vinyl LP recorded by renowned author and arts critic Lynne Tillman. Recorded in Brooklyn in June 2014, ten excerpts are featured on the LP read by Tillman. Collapsing context and time, lacing earlier works with more recent, the body of work unfurls the intricacy and idiosyncrasy which lives within Tillman’s masterful repertoire. Carefully pieced by the editors at Penny-Ante, What Get Kepts mingles the reappearing motifs of Marilyn Monroe, Freud, time and space that have appeared in Tillman’s work since her first novel Haunted Houses was published in 1987. The LP is limited to 500 copies and features artwork by German painter Peter Dreher, whom Tillman dedicated an essay toward in her most recent book What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (Red Lemonade, 2014), now nominated for a 2014 National Book Critics Circle award. —From the Penny-Ante website
Rescue Press
On Hours by Marc Rahe
60 pages – Rescue Press/Amazon
Toughlahoma by Christian Tebordo
120 pages – Rescue Press/Amazon
Do we call Toughlahoma the satire we all deserve, a monstrously true fable of the late days of capitalism? We could say, for instance, that Toughlahoma crosses Vico’s early sociological theories with Hobbes’s and Locke’s conflicting notions of the state of nature to tell the story of one civilization’s failed attempts to become civilized. Or we could say that Toughlahoma is simply a first account of the Toughlahomans and what they did and do: Jesus went to the End and back before inventing Uglahoma. Ishmael kicked ass and said taglines all over Roughlahoma. Good Dad mostly stayed put. The rest of them hang around the Community Center chewing their Necro Wafers and just being themselves—bicepsual, troublesexual, and martially artistic—in case they ever get to have a war. Let’s call Toughlahoma a history, a scripture, a goddamn dithyramb, and a public relations campaign all in one. —From the Rescue Press website
Sarabande Books
Hurry Please I Want to Know: Stories by Paul Griner
168 pages – Sarabande/Amazon
Semiotext(e)
When the Word Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature by Paolo Virno, translated by Giuseppina Mecchia
264 pages – MIT Press/Amazon
Psychoanalysis and Transversality: Texts and Interviews 1955–1971 by Félix Guattari, translated by Rosemary Sheed and Ames Hodges
336 pages – MIT Press/Amazon
Originally published in French in 1972, Psychoanalysis and Transversality gathers all the articles that Félix Guattari wrote between 1955 and 1971. It provides a fascinating account of his intellectual and political itinerary before Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), the ground-breaking book he wrote with Gilles Deleuze, propelled him to the forefront of contemporary French philosophy. —From the MIT Press website
Soho Press
Burning Down George Orwell’s House by Andrew Ervin
288 pages – Soho/Amazon
The City Son by Samrat Upadhyay
256 pages – Soho/Amazon
Tin House Books
Trompe l’Oeil by Nancy Reisman
352 pages – Tin House/Amazon
During a vacation in Rome, the Murphy family experiences a life-altering tragedy. In the immediate aftermath, James, Nora, and their children find solace in their Massachusetts coast home, but as the years pass the weight of the loss disintegrates the increasingly fragile marriage and leaves its mark on each family member. Trompe l’Oeil seamlessly alternates among several characters’ points of view, capturing the details of their daily lives as well as their longing for connection and fear of abandonment. Through the turbulence of marriage, the challenges of parenthood, job upheavals, and calamities large and small, Trompe l’Oeil examines family legacies, the ways those legacies persist, and the ways they might be transcended. Nancy Reisman is a master of psychological acuity, creating characters who are wholly unique and yet express our own longings and anxieties. Trompe l’Oeil haunts not only with its story but also with the beauty of its insight into hopes, desires, and fears. —From the Tin House website
Two Lines Press
The Game for Real by Richard Weiner, translated by Benjamin Paloff
256 pages – Two Lines/Amazon
Called “The Man of Pain” by the sci-fi author Karel Čapek (who popularized the word “robot”), Richard Weiner is one of European literature’s best-kept secrets. The Game for Real marks the long overdue arrival of his dreamlike, anxiety-ridden fiction into English. —From the Two Lines website
Ugly Duckling Presse
Alien Abduction by Lewis Warsh
136 pages – UDP/SPD
Unnamed Press
The Paper Man by Gallagher Lawson
256 pages – Unnamed/Amazon
Wakefield Press
Massacre of the Innocents by Giambattista Marino, translated and with an introduction by Erik Butler
244 pages – Wakefield/Amazon
A finely crafted epic and literary monstrosity from the seventeenth-century “poet of the marvelous”: the harrowing account, in four bloody cantos, of King Herod and his campaign to murder the male infants of his kingdom to prevent the loss of his throne to the prophesied King of the Jews. The book starts in the pits of Hell, where the Devil stokes the flames of Herod’s paranoid bloodlust in his troubled sleep, and concludes in the heights of Heaven where the “unarmed champions” march on to eternal glory. In between is an account of physical and political brutality that unfortunately holds too clear a mirror to world events today. The Massacre of the Innocents describes unbelievable cruelty while championing the nobility of suffering, all brilliantly translated and presented in ottava rima. —From the Wakefield website
