This is the twelfth installment of Entropy’s “Month in Books” feature. A full year! Hot diggedy dog! If you are a small press and would like to see your books represented, email Jenny (jenny@entropymag.org) with info on your upcoming releases. Otherwise, have yourself a happy new year, and read one of these glorious books. Amen.
Big Lucks Books
Pink Museum by Caroline Crew
166 pages – Big Lucks
Black Lawrence Press
Twister by Genanne Walsh
400 pages – Black Lawrence Press/SPD
Blackbirds in September: Selected Shorter Poems by Jürgen Becker, translated by Okla Elliott
Black Lawrence Press
The Soul Hunters by Christopher Torockio
Black Lawrence Press
Bloof Books
Days of Shame and Failure by Jennifer L. Knox
92 pages – Bloof/Amazon
Greetings from My Girlie Leisure Place by Sharon Mesmer
116 pages – Bloof/Amazon
Boss Fight Books
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Shadow of the Colossus by Nick Suttner
194 pages – Boss Fight Books
A massive, open world, brimming with mystery. A gauntlet of giants to overcome, living levels that must be destroyed… but to what end? Since its 2005 release, Fumito Ueda’s minimal-yet-epic masterpiece, Shadow of the Colossus, has often been hailed as one of the greatest video games of all time. But why is Shadow still utterly unique over a decade later? Nick Suttner examines this question and others while journeying across Shadow’s expanses—stopping along the way to speak to developers about the game’s influence, examine the culture around its unfinished mysteries, and investigate the game’s colossal impact on his own beliefs about games, art, and life. –from the Boss Fight Books website
Bull City Press
Memoranda by Michael Martone
40 pages – Bull City/Amazon
Calamari Press
The Gotham Grammarian by Gary Lutz
118 pages – Calamari/SPD
City Lights Publishers
The Beats Abroad: A Global Guide to the Beat Generation by Bill Morgan
262 pages – City Lights/Amazon
Pictures of the Gone World: 60th Anniversary Edition by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
48 pages – City Lights/Amazon
Civil Coping Mechanisms
The Daydream Society by Evan Retzer
234 pages – Civil Coping Mechanisms/Amazon
You and Other Pieces by Corey Zeller
182 pages – Civil Coping Mechanisms/Amazon
I/O: A Memoir by Brian Oliu
222 pages – Civil Coping Mechanisms/Amazon
Rules of Appropriate Conduct by Kirsten Alene
224 pages – Civil Coping Mechanisms/Amazon
Nothing But the Dead and Dying by Ryan W Bradley
272 pages – Civil Coping Mechanisms/Amazon
Curbside Splendor
My Kind of Sound: the Secret History of Chicago Music by Steve Krakow
300 pages – Curbside Splendor/Amazon
Dalkey Archive
Chimera by John Barth
320 pages – Dalkey Archive/Amazon
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Concerto for Sentence: An Exploration of the Musico-Erotic by Emiliya Dvoryanova, translated by Elitza Kotzeva
144 pages – Dalkey Archive/Amazon
Subtitled “An Exploration of the Musico-Erotic,” this novel is an experiment in blurring the boundaries between the syntax of music and that of poetry. The sentences in question are elliptical, resembling a musical score, and tell the story of a violinist embarking upon a potentially dangerous affair with an admirer and fellow musician as their spouses, audiences, teachers, friends, and colleagues listen and wonder. –from the Dalkey Archive website
Dzanc Books
The City at Three P.M. by Peter LaSalle
280 pages – Dzanc/Amazon
Gauss PDF
Welcome to My Book by Rebecca Beauchamp
GPDF
Hillary Clinton’s Private Emails and Memos as Read by Debbie Harry at the Benghazi Hearing compiled by Cammisa Buerhaus
GPDF
H_NGM_N
Nearly Yes, Only You by Catherine Blauvelt
Chapbook – H_NGM_N
Kenning Editions
MacArthur Park by Andrew Durbin
Chapbook – Kenning Editions
Melville House
Philip K. Dick: The Last Interview and Other Conversations by David Streitfeld
160 pages – Melville House/Amazon
The Visitors by Simon Sylvester
368 pages – Melville House/Amazon
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Sophia by Michael Bible
128 pages – Melville House/Amazon
Reverend Maloney isn’t the world’s greatest spiritual advisor. He drinks gin out of his coffee cup and has sex dreams about the Holy Ghost. His best friend Eli isn’t perfect either, but he’s a chess genius, which has to count for something. So Maloney decides that they should hit the road: Eli can win major chess tournament after chess tournament; Maloney can pocket Eli’s winnings while getting away from, well, certain situations. Thus begins a grand adventure story, with the Reverend and Eli racing out of the South, pursued by Eli’s girlfriend and a blind head-hunter named, naturally, Jack Cataract, toward New York City–sin city, chess heaven, and a location with a blessed amount of places to . . . hide. –from the Melville House website
Milkweed Editions
Beutiful Zero by Jennifer Willoughby
96 pages – Milkweed Editions/Amazon
Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray
294 pages – Milkweed Editions/Amazon
New Directions
The Quarry by Susan Howe
224 pages – New Directions/Amazon
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The Birth-mark by Susan Howe
208 pages – New Directions/Amazon
Susan Howe reads our intellectual inheritance as a series of civil wars, where each text is a series of battlefields on which a strange lawless author confronts interpreters and editors eager for settlement. Howe approaches Anne Hutchinson, Mary Rowlandson, Cotton Mather, Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, and Emily Dickinson—as a poet-scholar. Her insights, fierce and original, are rooted in her seminal textural scholarship in examining the editorial histories of landmark works. In the process, Howe uproots settled institutionalized roles of men and women as well as of poetry and prose. The Birth-mark, first published in the mid-1990s and now published in tandem with her new selected essays, The Quarry, joins the New Directions canon of a dozen Susan Howe titles. –from the New Directions website
Open Letter Books
Loquela by Carlos Labbé, translated by Will Vanderhyden
192 pages – Open Letter/Amazon
OR Books
Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers on Palestine edited by Ru Freeman
452 pages – OR Books/Amazon
Publishing Genius
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Nobody Dancing by Cheryl Quimba
78 pages – Publishing Genuis/Amazon
“…Nobody Dancing is a language world of gorgeous sound and perception. These are poems of intimacy and estrangement, lyric tenderness. Yes, the world is ending and beginning all at once: each line an aubade to one moment, an elegy to another, beautiful lines crafted like flaming phoenixes decaying and renewing, decaying and renewing. Cheryl Quimba is a wise poet, reporting back on the glorious oddball beauty of being alive.” –Kaia Sand
Queen’s Ferry Press
Camouflage Country by Ryan Ridge and Mel Bosworth
Queen’s Ferry Press
The Song Cave
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M by Hannah Brooks-Motl
96 pages – The Song Cave/SPD
Swinging between examination and revelation, Hannah Brooks-Motl’s second collection of poems, M, holds a unique place in contemporary poetry, written almost as a document to chart the act of a writer reading. By transposing lines directly from the essays of Michel de Montaigne with her own, she creates a shimmering mirage that enables two distinct voices to blend with confidence and to question the steps we take to make sense of the world. That degree of ambition requires great care and thoroughness, the ability to see the past clearly in order to invent a skillfully considered and electric present. –from the Song Cave website
Timeless, Infinite Light
Black Lavender Milk by Angel Dominguez
136 pages – Timeless, Infinite Light/SPD
Ugly Duckling Presse
A Science Not for the Earth: Selected Poems and Letters by Yevgeny Baratynsky, translated by Rawley Grau
640 pages – Ugly Duckling/SPD
221 Acres of Fun by Steve Muhs
Chapbook – Ugly Duckling
Or, the Ambiguities by Karen Weiser
96 pages – Ugly Duckling/SPD
Hair by Amy Narneeloop
Chapbook – Ugly Duckling
Hit Parade: The ORBITA Group by Kevin Platt, Artur Punte, Vladimir Svetlov, Sergej Timofejev, and Semyon Khanin
272 pages – Ugly Duckling/SPD
Sor Juana and Other Monsters by Luis Felipe Fabre, translated by John Pluecker
Chapbook – Ugly Duckling
6X6 #33: *A Bottle is Perfectly Beautiful by Amanda Berenguer, translated by Gillian Brassil & Alex Verdolini
Chapbook – Ugly Duckling
Missing Witness by Ulrike Almut Sandig, translated by Bradley Schmidt
Chapbook – Ugly Duckling
Enigmas by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, translated by Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal
Chapbook – Ugly Duckling
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Aim at the Centaur Stealing Your Wife by Jennifer Nelson
88 pages – Ugly Duckling/SPD
In the United States and Europe in the early twenty-first century, a person of mixed ethnicity finds herself questing inside old European art and ideas. Terrible as these things often are, she enjoys recalibrating them, and she is optimistic. –from the Ugly Duckling Presse website