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.
Black Lawrence Press
Jillian in the Borderlands by Beth Alvarado
200 pages – Black Lawrence Press
“Jillian Guzmán, who is nine years old at the beginning of the book, communicates through drawings rather than speech as she travels with her mother, Angie O’Malley, throughout the borderlands of Arizona and northwestern Mexico. Later she creates survival maps for border crossers and paints murals at the Casa de los Olvidados, a refuge in Sonora run by the traditional healer Juana of God. These darkly funny tales, focusing on Mexican-American, Euro-American, and Mexican characters, feature visionary experiences, ghosts, faith healers, a deer’s head that speaks, a dog who channels spirits of the dead—and a young woman whose drawings begin to create realities instead of just reflecting them.” –from the Black Lawrence Press website
Blue Triangle Press
Bull City Press
Swan Song by Armen Davoudian
40 pages – Bull City Press
“A swan song is a song of departure: after a lifetime of silence, the legend goes, the mute swan breaks into song just before leaving this world for good. Armen Davoudian’s Swan Song chronicles what it’s like to take leave of a home, a country, a past life. In their search for a home in language, these poems combine the formal resources of English and Persian poetry, turning the immigrant’s permanent sense of loss and rootlessness, the gay person’s sense of alienation, into artistic assets—positions of outsiderhood from which to witness and record.” –from the Bull City website
Clash Books
Burial by Jessica Drake-Thomas
90 pages – Clash Books/ Bookshop
“What is buried can return. Those who are dead can still speak. A witch can be burned, but not silenced. When the abattoir is opened, the dead will rise. Burials is the narrative of those whose voices have been taken away—murdered women, witches, ghosts. It’s about speaking one’s truth, and using magic to heal or to banish, even from beyond the grave.” –from the Clash Books website
I’m From Nowhere by Lindsay Lerhman (Limited Edition Hardcover)
170 pages – Clash Books
“A stark and stunning debut, I’m From Nowhere follows Claire as she mourns the sudden death of her husband and comes to terms with the fact of being a woman without a child, a job, or a man. She confronts a dying planet and an emerging sense of self, while men arrive with offers to save her from herself. Lerman refuses easy answers and searches the treacherous depths of desire, pain, and entanglement, asking readers if it is possible for a woman to reclaim her life and set its terms without succumbing to suicide or submission. Told in subtly experimental, sparse prose, and set in the American Southwest of today or ten years from now, I’m From Nowhere is a “breathtakingly honest, subversive” examination of the stories we are told—and the stories we tell ourselves—about identity, permanence, and love.” –from the Clash Books website
Cleveland State University
Arena by Lauren Shapiro
88 pages – CSU Poetry Center
2019 CSU Poetry Center Open Book Competition, Editor’s Choice
“Thoughtfully, painfully, bitterly, lovingly, the poems in Lauren Shapiro’s Arena expose how the limits of the unreal become real when one is forced to interrogate a family member’s attempted suicide. But what is interrogated and assimilated and articulated is not just death, mourning, loss, and absence. Rather, in Shapiro’s Arena, there is a crowd witnessing and absorbing an artwork where atrocity, bureaucracy, history, and spectacle merge to form a performance that we are unable to look away from. Shapiro refuses to soften the most powerful blows that prevent us from filtering out the unspeakable as we struggle to live a quotidian life when all that we know explodes. This is a poignant and stunning achievement.” -Daniel Borzutky
Twice There Was a Country by Alen Hamza
80 pages – CSU Poetry Center
Winner of the 2019 CSU Poetry Center First Book Competition, selected by Brenda Hillman
“Alen Hamza is a lyric poet of the first order, and Twice There Was a Country proves it with poems that alchemize past and present, personal and political, and grief and celebration in a way that leads to absolute stillness: “Silence has a mother in it and summer / refuses to move on.” Throughout this volume, Hamza acts as an Adam of sorts, naming people and places and events with the exactitude that allows him to reclaim all that was ever lost: “Those under us are not dead. / They are dancers. We are the music.” This is a brilliant debut.” –from Jericho Brown
Kenning Editions
The Chilean Flag by Elvira Hernández (Trans. Alec Shumacher)
70 pages – Kenning Editions/ Small Press Distribution
“La bandera de Chile narrates the vicissitudes of the Chilean flag during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) evoking the fate of victims of political violence. The Chilean flag is a protagonist divested of agency, a national emblem subjected to the whims of political exigency, a body tortured by those who profess their allegiance to her. She is at the same time a flag, the nation, and woman, especially the mother-spouse figure who the military regime believed should be seen, but not heard. In the end the flag is used as a gag; her only act of resistance is to declare her silence. Written in 1981, the book became a potent symbol in opposition to the dictatorship and was passed around in mimeographed copies until it was formally published in 1991. Poets at the time had to read and write in secret, self-publishing works in order to avoid the censors and secret police. María Teresa Adriasola wrote under the pen name Elvira Hernández upon the insistence of a friend to avoid being detained for the nature of her poetry. Her work has recently received renewed attention, being awarded the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Prize and the Jorge Tellier National Poetry Prize both in 2018. Despite the uniquely Chilean context of the work, this poem contains an urgent message for readers today as rising nationalist movements mobilize patriotic discourse in order to silence dissenting voices. The Chilean Flag continues to speak of silence, and through silence, speaks.” –from the Kenning Editions website
KERNPUNKT Press
Tight Little Vocal Cords by Loie Rawding
145 pages – KERNPUNKT
Loie Rawding’s debut novel is a prismatic journey into the depths of one young person’s chaotic psychic and physical awakening. Part fiction, part poetry, part cabaret, Rawding sketches a surreal world that is at once historical and hauntingly modern; a place where to deep dive into love can save, and to stay silent will most certainly destroy.” –from the KERNPUNKT Press website
Lavender Ink/Diálogos
Agadir by Mohammed Khair-Eddine (Trans. Pierre Joris and Jake Syersak)
134 pages –Lavender Ink/Diálogos
“Agadir is loosely based on the earthquake which devastated the Moroccan city of the same name in 1960, and Khaïr-Eddine’s experience as a civil servant assigned to investigate the aftermath of the cataclysm between 1961 and 1963. An unnamed narrator sent to the city “in order to sort out a particularly precarious situation” tells the story of a veritably razed Moroccan epicenter and a citizenry begging for reconstruction and reimagination. In a surreal, polyphonic narration that explodes into various tesserae of fiction, autobiography, reportage, poetry, and theatre, the narrator quickly discovers that in exhuming the city’s physical remnants he cannot help but exhume the complex social, political, cultural, and historical dynamics that make up postcolonial Moroccan society. The mysterious narrator, increasingly besieged by hallucinations of the past and visions of the future, comes to incarnate what Albert Memmi once called “the role of the colonized,” and to suffer “a magnified vision of all the ambiguities and impossibilities of those colonized.” To which Khaïr-Eddine appends his envisioned role of the writer: one who uses his magnified vision to transform his very life into “an investigation, a fight against all forms of oppression and repression” until his “literature is a beautiful weapon.” –from the Lavender Ink/Diálogos website
PANK Books
The Umbrian Sonnets by Jay Deshpande
31 pages – PANK Books
“Set against the stark terrain of the Italian countryside, Jay Deshpande’s The Umbrian Sonnets animates and amplifies age-old questions—on the charge and catastrophe of beauty, on the vexing nature of witness, on “the discomfort of great comfort” —with a keen lyrical intelligence, and deep reserves of care. Here lies the capacity of the sonnet to hold, and to empty: the clean edges of fourteen lines, severities that accommodate simultaneously the sudden blooms of pleasure alongside the pains of the unutterable. These sonnets seek “the best way to speak the necessary,” and enthrall us with their speaking and what they cannot say.” – Jenny M. Xie
The Yellow Book by Sam Cha
114 pages – PANK Books
“The Yellow Book, a cross-genre meditation on what it means to be Korean/American and write, begins with a moment of doubt, in which the speaker, forced into speech by his interlocutor, is no longer sure he is who he is: “You sure you’re not Jackie Chan? […] Honestly, I say, I don’t even know.” The speaker opts for camouflage, transformation, and evasion. The book, similarly, aims to elude identification, to contradict itself. It moves broken-tongued, between memoir and essay and poem, between body and footnote, between Korean memory and English utterance, between remembrance and forgetfulness, between history and fiction. Populated by a varied cast of characters—a god, a bear, a tiger, Mr. Miyagi, Jack London, a fictionalized version of Civil War general Franz Sigel, and a non-fictitious chihuahua—The Yellow Book is a travelogue, a picaresque, a mythology, a catalog of grievances, an act of revenge, an apology, a joke book, a defiance, an obeisance, a performance, a slander, a love letter, a manifesto, a refutation.” –from the PANK books website
Rescue Press
Bright Archive by Sarah Minor
172 pages – Rescue Press
“In Sarah Minor’s adventurous and investigatory debut collection of essays, Bright Archive, place and space are inextricably linked through an imaginative exploration of the patterns, shapes, and systems that alternately organize and disrupt our ordinary intimacies. From a recollection of a summer spent working in an Italian commune to the business of mollusks in Minor’s grandparents’ hometown in Iowa; from the history of the mapping of the Mississippi River to the mythologies of the image of “the lean”; from studies of soffits and hidden spaces to the freedom found at the top of an island birch tree, these essays reach beyond the classically confined trajectories of literary nonfiction. Using elements of memoir, concrete poetry, archival research, interview, performance, and design in a radiant kaleidoscope of storytelling, the essays in Bright Archive delight in challenging the reader’s habits of interaction with the page and its possibilities.” -from the Rescue Press website
Gravity Well by Marc Rahe
94 pages – Rescue Press
“In Gravity Well, Marc Rahe’s incisive third collection, the poems beckon readers through an ever-shifting series of landscapes, drawing our gaze across a dynamic tableau—an octopus wearing a sweater, a white sky over the bridge we’re standing on, flowers pressed into a forgotten book—as a means of revealing the most particular thrills and anxieties of the human condition. Unafraid and unwavering, careful and concerned, Gravity Well propels its reader through the imagined apertures of the universe one striking image at a time, leaving us ocularly magnified in a world now seen anew. A singular voice in American poetry, Rahe deftly centers the body in relation to ailments such as love, decay, aging, friendship, and grief. His powerful, meditative plea is resounding: “Earth, turn me.” –from the Rescue Press website
Rose Metal Press
The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction (Ed. Zoë Bossiere and Dinty W. Moore)
276 pages – Rose Metal Press
“How much of the human experience can fit into 750 words? A lot, it turns out. Since its founding in 1997, Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction has published hundreds of brief nonfiction essays by writers around the world, each within that strict word count. Over the past 20 years, Brevity has become one of the longest-running and most popular online literary publications, a journal readers regularly return to for insightful essays from skilled writers at every stage of their careers. Featuring examples of nonfiction forms such as memoir, narrative, lyric, braided, hermit crab, and hybrid, The Best of Brevity brings you 84 of the best-loved and most memorable reader favorites, collected in print for the first time. Compressed to their essence, these essays glint with drama, grief, love, and anger, as well as innumerable other lived intensities, resulting in an anthology that is as varied as it is unforgettable, leaving the reader transformed. With contributions from Krys Malcolm Belc, Jenny Boully, Brian Doyle, Roxane Gay, Daisy Hernández, Michael Martone, Ander Monson, Patricia Park, Kristen Radtke, Diane Seuss, Abigail Thomas, Jia Tolentino, and so many more, The Best of Brevity offers unparalleled diversity of style, form, and perspective for those interested in reading, writing, or teaching the flash nonfiction form.” -from the Rose Metal Press website
Sagging Meniscus
Agitprop for Bedtime: Polemic, Story Problems, Kulturporn and Humdingers by Charles Holdefer
94 pages – Sagging Meniscus
“A portable collection of polemical bedtime stories for adults, addressing such timely topics as: erectile dysfunction during the national anthem, what happens when Nancy Pelosi comes calling, and what Model A Fords say under certain conditions.” –from the Sagging Meniscus website
Spaceboy Books
The Death of the Cyborg Oracle by Jordan A. Rothacker
184 pages – Spaceboy Books
“It’s 2220 and climate catastrophe has made most of the earth uninhabitable. In this future, domed Atlanta, solar energy has ended want, but socialism would be more fun if the guilt of capitalism’s role in the destruction of earth wasn’t inherited by its descendants. Out of this void all goddesses and gods are reborn for worship, monotheism is verboten, and crime is divided into Sacred and Profane. Meet Assistant Sacred Detective Edwina Casaubon, she’s just transferred from Profane and working with the legendary Sacred Detective Rabbi Jakob “Thinkowitz” Rabbinowitz. And not a moment too soon, someone has murdered the Oracle of Delphi.” –from the Spaceboy Books website
Tin House
Bright and Dangerous Objects by Anneliese Mackintosh
240 pages – Tin House
“Commercial deep-sea diver Solvig has a secret. She wants to be one of the first human beings to colonize Mars, and she’s one of a hundred people shortlisted by the Mars Project to do just that. But to fulfil her ambition, she’ll have to leave behind everything she’s ever known—for the rest of her life. As the prospect of heading to space becomes more real, thirty-seven-year-old Solvig is forced to define who she really is. Will she come clean to James, her partner, about her plans? Or will she turn her back on the project, and commit to her life on Earth? Maybe even try for a baby, like James is hoping? Is there any way she can start a family and go to Mars? Does she even want both things? Intimate and captivating, Bright and Dangerous Objects explores the space between ambition and obligation, grappling with questions women have faced for centuries while investigating a future that humanity is only beginning to think about. In frank, honest, and moving prose, author Anneliese Mackintosh moves from sea to sky, head to heart, and present to future, asking all the while what it means when our wildest dreams begin to come true.” –from the Tin House website
Two Lines Press
Harmada by João Gilberto Noll (Trans. Edgar Garbelotto)
168 pages – Two Lines Press
“Like an Edenic Adam birthed from the clay, our narrator rises to his feet from the muck—reborn, or something like that. Unbeknownst to him, he’s on a desperate search for Harmada, the capital city of an unnamed nation and the land of his former glory. Told using Noll’s characteristic fragmented logic and spirited prose, Harmada traces the life of this nameless man on a voyage that takes him from aimless outcast to revered director of avant-garde theater, from asylum patient to father to God, conjuring along the way essential questions about the power of art and storytelling, the vanity of glory, and the meaning of freedom. A mythic tale of art and displacement nimbly translated from Portuguese by Edgar Garbelotto, Harmada serves as yet another reminder of João Gilberto Noll’s sublime literary power: generous in its mystery; earthbound in its essential urges; and entirely unpredictable.” –from the Two Lines Press website
Wave Books
Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From by Sawako Nakayasu
160 pages – Wave Books
“In Sawako Nakayasu’s first poetry collection in seven years, an unsettling diaspora of “girls” is deployed as poetic form, as reclamation of diminutive pseudo-slur, and as characters that take up residence between the thick border zones of language, culture, and shifting identity. Written in response to Nakayasu’s 2017 return to the US, this maximalist collection invites us to reexamine our own complicity in reinforcing literary convention. The book radicalizes notions of “translation” as both process and product, running a kind of linguistic interference that is intimate, feminist, and playfully jagged.” –from the Wave Books website
Yi Sang: Selected Works by Yi Sang
256 pages – Wave Books
“Formally audacious and remarkably compelling, Yi Sang’s works were uniquely situated amid the literary experiments of world literature in the early twentieth century and the political upheaval of 1930s Japanese occupied Korea. While his life ended prematurely at the age of twenty-seven, Yi Sang’s work endures as one of the great revolutionary legacies of modern Korean literature. Presenting the work of the influential Korean modernist master, this carefully curated selection assembles poems, essays, and stories that ricochet off convention in a visionary and daring response to personal and national trauma, reminding us that to write from the avant-garde is a form of civil disobedience.” –from the Wave Books website
