Support small presses and indie bookstores by picking a read from the list below, which features dozens of new books forthcoming in January from CLMP members. (Take a look at last month’s releases as well.)
Master Suffering by CM Burroughs
Tupelo Press | January 1, 2021
According to Simone Muench, this poetry collection “often employing the epistolary as a form of elegy… investigates the labyrinthine dimensions of desire, mourning, faith, and misogyny.”
The Earliest Witnesses by G.C. Waldrep
Tupelo Press | January 1, 2021
According to Rachel Galvin, Walrep’s latest poetry collection “possesses Waldrep’s characteristic spirituality and keenly seeing eye, but these poems show a new vulnerability, a wrestling with mortality and the ubiquity of war.”
A Looking-Glass for Traytors by Edward Foster
Marsh Hawk Press | January 1, 2021
The poems in Foster’s latest collection, according to Brooklyn Rail, “suspend themselves just above language.”
Something Like Hope & Other Stories by William Cass
Wising Up Press | January 1, 2021
The stories in this collection of short fiction follow characters who are “in ways large and small constantly making and remaking their commitment to hope, or something far more like it than not.”
Here Lies a Father by McKenzie Cassidy
Akashic Books / Kaylie Jones Books | January 5, 2021
This debut novel “examines the long-term effects shameful secrets have on a family, and how difficult it is for a young man to reconstruct his own sense of right and wrong.”
Planet Claire: Suite for Cello and Sad-Eyed Lovers by Jeff Porter
Akashic Books / Gracie Belle | January 5, 2021
Porter’s memoir about his wife’s death “challenges the traditional solemnity that characterizes nonfiction books of grief, loss, and sorrow.”
SERGEANT SALINGER by Jerome Charyn
Bellevue LIterary Press | January 5, 2021
This novel about J. D. Salinger, “grounded in biographical fact,” follows “a devastated young man on his way to becoming the mythical figure behind a novel that has marked generations.”
Wave Books | January 5, 2021
Beckman’s collection of “carefully assembled poetic fragments seeks to elucidate the synthetic reality of being sick and being medicated.”
Sarabande Books | January 5, 2021
According to Jenny Xie, this debut poetry collection features “poems of dark lyricism, ones commanding our attention to the body at risk: its hidden danger zones, its collisions and impacts, its relentless hurtle forward.”
the she said dialogues: flesh memory by Akilah Oliver
Nightboat Books | January 5, 2021
This reprint of Oliver’s 1999 poetry collection “investigates the non-linear synapses between desire, memory, blackness (as both a personal identity and a non-essentialist historical notion), sexuality and language.”
Vibratory Milieu by Carrie Hunter
Nightboat Books | January 5, 2021
This work of lyric collage is “a study of identity and its abstraction, formation, and analysis through interaction with texts of all kinds: poems, film, music, dream, and friendship.”
The God of Nothingness by Mark Wunderlich
Graywolf Press | January 12, 2021
Wunderlich’s fourth poetry collection is, according to Ada Limón, “an argument not for beauty but for a clear-eyed resilience.”
Feminist Press | January 12, 2021
Edited by Cynthia R. Greenlee, Kemi Alabi, and Janna A. Zinzi, this book features community reporting from a writing collective of Black women and nonbinary writers, covering “reproductive justice and abortion politics; new and necessary definitions of family; trans visibility; stigma against Black motherhood; Black mental health; and more.”
W-3: A Memoir by Bette Howland
A Public Space Books | January 12, 2021
First published in 1974, Howland’s groundbreaking memoir is “an extraordinary portrait of the community of Ward 3, the psychiatric wing of the Chicago hospital where she was admitted.”
Sweeter Voices Still: An LGBTQ Anthology from Middle America
Belt Publishing | January 12, 2021
Edited by Ryan Schuessler and Kevin Whiteneir, Jr., this anthology features “queer voices” from “the middle of America—the Midwest, Appalachia, the Rust Belt, the Great Plains, the Upper South.”
Divine Justice by Joanne Hichens
Catalyst Press | January 12, 2021
According to David Swinson, this novel set in South Africa is “a no-nonsense, walloping thriller, with an intoxicating and smart protagonist.”
Visit to an Extinct City by Teresa Carson
Deerbrook Editions | January 20, 2021
First in the series The Argument of Time and presented in English and Italian, this Ostian poem “holds a fresh, personal lens to a seldom-seen, venerable ghost-town and archaeological site.”
Cooking As Though You Might Cook Again by Danny Licht
3 Hole Press | January 25, 2021
Licht’s debut cookbook “invites us to cook with our senses and to work with the passage of time.”
The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void by Jackie Wang
Nightboat Books | January 26, 2021
This debut poetry collection is a “personal index of dreams with its scenes of solidarity and resilience, interpersonal conflict and outlaw jouissance.”
Valtinos: Early Works by Thanassis Valtinos
Laertes Books | January 27, 2021
Translated by Jane Assimakopoulos and Stavros Deligiorgis, this volume “collects two groundbreaking novellas that altered the trajectory of Greek fiction, together with two autobiographical short stories.”
