This is the twenty-third installment of Entropy’s small press new releases feature. If you are a small press and would like to see your upcoming titles listed here in the future, please email jenny@entropymag.org with the information you see included for the titles below. This month we offer you excellent present ideas for that cool uncle, artistically inclined niece, or mother who’s just trying to understand the inner workings of your peculiarly wandering mind just a little better.
Black Herald Press
Pensées nocturnes/Night Thoughts by David Gascoyne
156 pages – Black Herald Press
Black Lawrence Press
My Dim Aviary by Gillian Cummings
62 pages – Black Lawrence Press/SPD
“Through the voice of Miss Fernande—Parisian model, prostitute, rumored mistress of Picasso—Gillian Cummings creates a series of exquisite prose poems, thick with longing, loneliness, and corporal beauty. “What color would God clothe me but red?” Cummings asks, offering the body as both wound and source of pleasure, and later, “There is a place the soul goes when the body is a field lost to burning.” My Dim Aviary is that place. Reader, I implore you to visit.” –Allison Benis White
Brooklyn Arts Press
Infinite Record: Archive, Memory, Performance edited by Maria Magdalena Schwaegermann and Karmenlara Ely
202 pages – Brooklyn Arts Press/SPD
City Lights Publishers
and then we become by devorah major
88 pages – City Lights Publishers/SPD
Mephistos and Other Poems by Michael McClure
184 pages – City Lights Publishers
Coach House Books
Baloney by Robert Bock
96 pages – Coach House Books/Amazon
In on the Great Joke by Laura Broadbent
64 pages – Coach House Books/Amazon
In a blend of essayistic poetics, Broadbent wields alchemy, translation and necromancy to bring readers In on the Great Joke. What do you get when you cross Lao Tzu and an application for a university teaching application? What do you get when you give W. G. Sebald and Clarice Lispector the ability to speak from the afterlife? What happens if a girl is stopped at a red light for an entire year? In on the Great Joke is a palace of hybridity, where film structure informs poetry, poetry alters the essay, and the essay recalibrates the joke. Broadbent has lent her ear to the dead, the living, the voiceless, to give us the punchline of what it means to be intellectually alive. –from the Coach House Books website
Coffee House Press
Fish in Exile by Vi Khi Nao
192 pages – Coffee House Press/Amazon
Blindsight by Greg Hewett
112 pages – Coffee House Press/Amazon
Curbside Splendor
Cocktails for Ding Dongs by Dustin Drankiewicz, illustrated by Alexandra Ensign
200 pages – Curbside Splendor/Amazon
Dzanc Books
Barbarossa: Sonnets by Jonathan Fink
96 pages – Dzanc Books/Amazon
El Balazo Press
The Funeral Papers Memoir by Josh Gross
El Balazo Press
Fitzcarraldo
Nocilla Experience by Agustín Fernández Mallo, translated by Thomas Bunstead
200 pages – Fitzcarraldo/Amazon
Somewhere in Spain, Marc, an avid reader of the Philips Agricultural Guide, pegs mathematical formulas to clotheslines on the roof of an 8-storey building. In London, the artist Jodorkovski spends hours painting tiny vignettes on chewing gum stuck to the pavements. In Miami, Harold spends his days devouring every box of Corn Flakes with his ex-wife’s birthday as its sell-by-date. Meanwhile, in Corcubión, Spain, Antón is working on an audacious theory about the shared properties of barnacles and hard disks. These are some of the narrative strands that make up this arborescently structured novel, the second instalment in the Nocilla Trilogy, hailed as one of the most daring experiments in Spanish literature of recent years. Full of references to indie cinema, collage, conceptual art, practical architecture, the history of computers and the decadence of the novel, Nocilla Experience picks up where Nocilla Dream left off, presenting us with a hidden and exhilarating cartography of contemporary experience. –from the Fitzcarraldo Editions website
Gauss PDF
Who Owns Primo’s by Andy Sterling
GPDF
Graywolf Press
Cabo de Gata by Eugen Ruge, translated by Anthea Bell
120 pages – Graywolf Press/Amazon
The Needle’s Eye: Passing Through Youth by Fanny Howe
144 pages – Graywolf Press/Amazon
Lazy Fascist
Starr Creek by Nathan Carson
Lazy Fascist
Glue by Constance Ann Fitzgerald
Lazy Fascist
Rumbullion by Molly Tanzer
Lazy Fascist
Melville House
These are the Names by Tommy Wieringa
240 pages – Melville House/Amazon
David Bowie: The Last Interview and Other Conversations by David Bowie
220 pages – Melville House/Amazon
Oliver Sacks: The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Oliver Sacks
220 pages – Melville House/Amazon
Milkweed Editions
Not of the Last Day, but on the Very Last by Justin Boening
80 pages – Milkweed Editions/Amazon
Mothers masquerading as witches and sepulchral bellhops who reveal themselves to be fathers: in Justin Boening’s debut collection of poems, selected for the National Poetry Series by Wayne Miller, nothing is as it seems. Peopled by figures both uncanny and tragic—lionesses who dance and cry, surgeons who carry with them the trauma of past lives, an opera singer whose notes go awry—Not on the Last Day, but on the Very Last uses the language of dreams and of fairy tales to deliver a keenly felt exploration of family, grief, regret, and belonging. Here everything stands for something else. But though the Freudian mother and father lurk behind every sequined costume, continue to strip away the masks, Boening suggests, and you’ll find an even more primal absence at the center—Nobody, No One, mortality, death. Beyond that, we find, lies only the truth of our relationships with each other. –from the Milkweed Editions website
New Directions
The Attraction of Things by Roger Lewinter
128 pages – New Directions/Amazon
Memoirs of a Polar Bears by Yoko Tawada
288 pages – New Directions/Amazon
Sebald Set: The Emigrants, The Ring of Saturn, and Vertigo by W.G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse
New Directions/Amazon
The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald
240 pages – New Directions/Amazon
The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse
304 pages – New Directions/Amazon
Vertigo by W.G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse
272 pages – New Directions/Amazon
Open Letter Books
Justine by Iben Mondrup, translated by Kerri A. Pierce
218 pages – Open Letter Books/Amazon
Stylistically provocative, Justine tells the story of a young female artist whose life is upended when her house burns down with all of the artworks for her upcoming exhibit inside. With little time left to recreate every-thing she’s lost, Justine embarks on a series of sexual escapades with a sort of doomed intensity that foreshadows the novel’s final, dark twist. Through flashbacks and fragmented memories, we see Justine as a student at the Art Academy first discovering the misogynistic order that rules the Danish art world, and later on as she constantly challenges its expectations—both in the studio and in bed. A personal meditation on artistic identity, creative process, and the male-dominated art scene, the novel veers between the erotic and the savage, resulting in a spellbinding read from one of Denmark’s edgiest contemporary feminist writers. –from the Open Letter Books website
OR Books
The Candidate: Jeremy Corbyn’s Improbably Path to Power by Alex Nunns
406 pages – OR Books
Other Press
When Memory Comes by Saul Friedländer, translated by Helen R. Lane
208 pages – Other Press/Amazon
Where Memory Leads by Saul Friedländer
304 pages – Other Press/Amazon
Penny-Ante Editions
Defiant Pose by Stewart Home
304 pages – Penny-Ante Editions
Platypus Press
Plainspeak, WY. by Joanna Doxey
80 pages – Platypus Press
Plays Inverse
Exit, Pursued by Dalton Day
85 pages – Plays Inverse/SPD
A one-act play in which apologies must be made to Chekhov. A one-act play in which there is a blueprint, & that blueprint is ignored entirely. A one-act play in which a decision is made, but it is unclear by or for whom. A one-act play in which the wind has the smallest hands, no, even smaller than that. Over the course of 41 one-act plays—most of them starring the characters ME and YOU—Dalton Day investigates grief, love, anxiety, and loss in this stunning collection of dramatic poetry. –from the Plays Inverse website
Rescue Press
Watchfires by Hilary Plum
204 pages – Rescue Press/SPD
Images for Radical Politics by Vanessa Jimenez Gabb
116 pages – Rescue Press/SPD
Diving Makes the Water Deep by Zach Savich
184 pages – Rescue Press/SPD
Diving Makes The Water Deep is a memoir about cancer, teaching, and poetic friendship. Alternately wise and wild, humorous and moving, Savich writes of illness and illness narratives, the present moment, pain, memory, desire, and poetry’s oft-debated capacity to matter: “Justify why you have an eye. How come nursery rhymes, how come tulips and clouds, fear and bread, insight without immediate application.” In the tradition of previous poet-teacher treatises—Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey, Richard Hugo’s Triggering Town—this book’s inquiry embraces the reader as correspondent, collaborator, and confidant. Diving Makes The Water Deep, Savich’s second book of nonfiction, is a huge-hearted, riotous memoir—one that will inspire those who love poetry and those who hate it toward further escalation, care, and entanglement. –from the Rescue Press website
Restless Books
Captivity by György Spiró, translated by Tim Wilkinson
832 pages – Restless Books/Amazon
The Winterlings by Cristina-Sánchez-Andrade, translated by Samuel Rutter
240 pages – Restless Books/Amazon
Rose Metal Press
The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová: A Biographical Collage by Kelcey Parker Ervick
348 pages – Rose Metal Press/SPD
Artistic, rebellious, and unapologetically intelligent, Božena Němcová defied every convention for a woman in mid-nineteenth-century Bohemia: she was active in nationalist politics, she smoked cigars, she took a series of lovers, and she laid bare her ideas and emotions in her letters and stories. The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová is a biographical collage of found texts, footnotes, fragments, and images by and about the Czech fairy tale writer, whom Milan Kundera calls the “Mother of Czech Prose.” Kelcey Parker Ervick’s innovative collage form, with its many voices and viewpoints, questions the concept of biographical “truth” while also revealing a nuanced and spellbinding portrait of Němcová. Inspired by Němcová’s letters, the book’s second section, “Postcards to Božena” is Parker Ervick’s epistolary memoir of her own failing marriage and her quest for a Czech typewriter, as well as a meditation on reading, writing, and happy endings. The two sections combine to create a book as defiant, enchanting, and complex as its namesake. –from the Rose Metal Press website
Sagging Meniscus Press
The Yalta Stunts by Alvin Krinst
74 pages – Sagging Meniscus Press/SPD
Solar Luxuriance
Murderdrone by Claire Cox, Peter Galvin, and Nathaxn Walker
Pamphlet – Solar Luxuriance
The Song Cave
A Chronology by Robin Cameron
Chapbook – The Song Cave
Spurl Editions
Monsieur de Bougrelon by Jean Lorrain
128 pages – Spurl Editions/SPD
Tin House Books
The Long Room by Francesca Kay
304 pages – Tin House Books/Amazon
Pieces of Soap: Essays by Stanley Elkin
416 pages – Tin House Books/Amazon
Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots by William Wallace Cook
480 pages – Tin House Books/Amazon
In the 1920s, dime store novelist William Wallace Cook painstakingly diagramed and cataloged his personal writing method―“Purpose, opposed by Obstacle, yields Conflict”―for the instruction and illumination of his fellow authors. His effort resulted in an astonishing 1,462 plot scenarios, and Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots was born. A how-to manual for plot, hailed by the Boston Globe as “First aid to troubled riters,” Plotto influenced Erle Stanley Gardner, author of the Perry Mason books, and a young Alfred Hitchcock. At first glance, Plotto operates with a machinelike logic, but from its endless amalgamations writers will find inspiration for narratives with limitless possibility. Open the book to any page to find plots you may never have known existed–from morose cannibals to gun-wielding preachers to phantom automobiles. –from the Tin House Books website
Truth Serum Press
Deer Michigan by Jack C. Buck
Truth Serum Press
Two Lines Press
Trysting by Emmanuelle Pagano, translated by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis
220 pages – Two Lines Press/Amazon
Ugly Duckling Presse
Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad by Polina Barskova, Gennady Gor, Dmitry Maksimov, Sergey Rudakov, Vladimir Sterligov, and Pavel Zaltsman, edited by Polina Barskova
160 pages – Ugly Duckling Presse/SPD
Unnamed Press
In Plain View by Julie Shigekuni
246 pages – Unnamed Press/Amazon
Nineveh by Henrietta Rose-Innes
226 pages – Unnamed Press/Amazon
Upper Rubber Boot Books
Floodgate Poetry Series Vol. 3
150 pages – Upper Rubber Boot Books/Amazon
