Support small presses and indie bookstores this summer by picking a read from the list below, which features dozens of new books forthcoming in July from CLMP members. (Take a look at last month’s releases as well.)
July 1
You Do Not Have to Be Good by Madeleine Barnes
Trio House Press; July 1, 2020
According to Deborah Landau, Barnes’s debut poetry collection is “a beautiful and luminous book of lyrics out of the grit and gristle of lived experience.”
Tupelo Press; July 1, 2020
Dan Beachy-Quick’s latest poetry collection is, according to Bruce Bond, “a bag of gems—intricate, chiseled architectures of light—whose smallness belies their generosities of heart and mind.”
Notes Toward a Pamphlet by Sergio Chejfec
Ugly Duckling Presse; July 1, 2020
Translated by Whitney DeVos, this essay investigates “the pamphlet form as a ‘megaphone’ for the dissemination of ‘views’ bound by ‘a situation of existence’ of a poet who ‘aspired to a voice permanently lowered.’”
Everything Begins Somewhere by Amanda Doster
Slate Roof Press; July 1, 2020
Winner of the Slate Roof Press Chapbook Award, Everything Begins Somewhere “harnesses a deceptively simple narrative with common events to reveal a luminous generosity of spirit.”
One Small Saga by Bobbie Louise Hawkins
Ugly Duckling Presse; July 1, 2020
Originally published by Coffee House Press in 1984, this autobiographical novel has, according to Barbara Henning, “an understated poetic style and an eye especially sensitive to hypocrisy.”
Lake of Urine: A Love Story by Guillermo Stitch
Sagging Meniscus Press; July 1, 2020
Stitch’s first full-length novel is “is a sui generis romp through every fairy-tale convention and literary trope you can think of.”
All the Useless Things are Mine: A Book of Seventeens by Thomas Walton
Sagging Meniscus Press; July 1, 2020
This book of seventeen-word sentences, illustrated by Douglas Miller, is “lofty and lowly… wildly imaginative and strangely intimate.”
July 6
The Purpose of Things by Peter Serchuk and Pieter de Koninck
Regal House Publishing; July 6, 2020
This collaboration between poet Peter Serchuk and photographer Pieter de Koninck pairs “fresh language and images to create a landscape of new possibilities filled with insight and humor.”
July 7
Nightboat Books; July 7, 2020
Durbin’s novella about two writers in search of a lost portrait is, according to Chloe Aridjis, “haunting and beautiful and full of phantoms past and present.”
Long Story Short: Turning Famous Books Into Cartoons by Mr. Fish and Friends
Akashic Books; July 7, 2020
This collection of cartoons, illustrations, and paintings condenses “the complicated narratives of famous books into one-page works of art.”
American Follies by Norman Lock
Bellevue Literary Press; July 7, 2020
The seventh and stand-alone installment in The American Novels series “explores the roots of the women’s rights movement, its relationship to the fight for racial justice, and its reverberations in the politics of today.”
After the Body: Poems New and Selected by Cleopatra Mathis
Sarabande Books; July 7, 2020
Mathis’s New and Selected “charts the depredations of an illness that seems intent on removing the body, piece by piece” and “reflects a brilliant career.”
Can You Smell the Rain? by Patricia Cleary Miller
BkMk Press; July 7, 2020
According to James Engell, this poetry collection demonstrates “compassion, conflict, love, faith, music, grief, history, and an unwavering observation of both a wider world and the recesses of the human heart.”
Cinderbiter: Celtic Poems by Martin Shaw and Tony Hoagland
Graywolf Press; July 7, 2020
Cinderbiter “collects tales and poems originally composed and performed centuries ago in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, when notions of history and authorship were indistinguishable from the oral traditions of myth and storytelling.”
The Psychic Soviet by Ian F. Svenonius
Akashic Books; July 7, 2020
A reissue of Ian F. Svenonius’s debut essay collection, The Psychic Soviet is, according to the New York Times, a “love letter to the good old days of do-it-yourself punk concerts.”
Restless Books; July 7, 2020
Translated from the Spanish by David Frye, this novel from the beloved Cuban science fiction author follows “a positronic robot detective on the hunt for some extra-dangerous extraterrestrial criminals.”
July 14
The Names of All the Flowers by Melissa Valentine
Feminist Press; July 14, 2020
The Names of All the Flowers is, according to Emily Raboteau, “heartfelt memoir of losing her brother expresses the grief of being a black woman left behind when a black man dies to gun violence, and the specific condition of growing up mixed race in Oakland.”
July 15
The Migrant States by Indran Amirthanayagam
Hanging Loose Press; July 15, 2020
The poems in Amirthanayagam’s new poetry collection are, according to Terence Winch, “hellos and goodbyes, obituaries, salutations, and celebrations addressed to his children, his friends and heroes.”
The First Books of David Henderson and Mary Norbert Korte: A Research by Iris Cushing
Ugly Duckling Presse; July 15, 2020
According to MC Hyland, “Bringing together archival scholarship, interviews with key figures, and reflections on her own small-press publishing activities, Cushing models a powerful mode of embedded historical scholarship.”
Reincarnating Marechera: Notes on a Speculative Archive by Tinashe Mushakavanhu
Ugly Duckling Presse; July 15, 2020
This installment in the 2020 Pamphlet Series interprets Dambudzo Marechera’s death in 1987 “as a moment of radical praxis in the Zimbabwean imaginary, mining three overlapping archives—Marechera’s own writings, his historical and theoretical legacy, and an imaginative archive that responds creatively to gaps in the first two.”
Phong Nha, the Making of an American Smile by Tammy Nguyen
Ugly Duckling Presse; July 15, 2020
Nguyen’s pamphlet “moves through autobiography, politics, geology, and philosophy, it reveals fissures in the notion of shared truth while illuminating how stories, true or not, often serve as moral compasses.”
The Close Chaplet by Laura Riding
Ugly Duckling Presse; July 15, 2020
First published in 1926, Laura Riding’s first book demonstrates her “early desire to depart from ‘the close and well-tilled ground’ of traditional lyric poetry.”
July 21
This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar’s Tale by Subimal Misra
Open Letter Books; July 21, 2020
Translated by V. Ramaswamy, this collection of two “anti-novels“ is the first of Misra’s work to appear in the United States.
Iridescent Guest by Sarah White
Deerbrook Editions; July 21, 2020
According to Karen Garthe, this poetry collection “pays homage to the art gods, the kitchen gods, and to the children.“
July 23
Not Far From The Junction by Will Ashon
Open Pen; July 23, 2020
This novelette is an edited transcript of a day spent by the author “hitching around the motorways and ‘A’ roads of England, chatting to whoever picked him up about their lives, dreams, aspirations, fears and favourite foods.”
July 28
The Five Books of (Robert) Moses by Arthur Nersesian
Akashic Books; July 28, 2020
Nersesian’s latest novel is a “dramatic, playful, brutal, sweeping, and always entertaining reimagining of New York City history.”
New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set (Saba)
Akashic Books; July 28, 2020
An African Poetry Book Fund project edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani, this collection of chapbooks features Michelle Angwenyi, Afua Ansong, Adedayo Agarau, Fatima Camara, Sadia Hassan, Safia Jama, Henneh Kyereh Kwaku, Nadra Mabrouk, Nkateko Masinga, Jamila Osman, and Tryphena Yeboah.
A Grave is Given Supper by Mike Soto
Deep Vellum; July 28, 2020
Soto’s debut poetry collection “follows the converging paths of two protagonists through El Sumidero, a fictional US/Mexico border town where an ongoing drug war is raging.”
July 31
Hunting Teddy Roosevelt by James Ross
Regal House Publishing; July 31, 2020
This debut work of historical fiction follows Teddy Roosevelt across Africa in 1909.
