This is the twenty-fifth 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.
Action Books
Fable of an Inconsolable Man by Javier Etchevarren, translated by Jesse Lee Kercheval
106 pages – Action Books/SPD
Ahsahta Press
Objects from a Borrowed Confession by Julie Carr
160 pages – Ahsahta Press /SPD
With Objects from a Borrowed Confession, poet Julie Carr has undertaken an expansive reexamination, amassing a project written over the last ten years that approaches the subject of confession from within the confession itself… A one-sided epistolary novella whose speaker writes to an ex-lover’s ex-lover begins this volume, and Carr charges these unanswered, unanswerable letters with inquiries that permeate the book: How do we understand grief, obsession, the very nature of forgiveness? Why confess? Whom does my confession benefit? For whom do I intend it? Carr’s lyrical prose guides the reader through these questions as each relates to one’s perspective, navigating the relationships these texts arise from, or give rise to, by way of inhabiting shared spaces and experiences—not simply stepping into a different persona with each shift in genre. The poet’s dexterous handling of these shifts between essay, epistolary, poem, and memoir, allows each movement within the book its own unique music––melodies, which, taken in whole, create intoxicating harmonies for the attentive listener. The result is a book emotionally complex and intellectually thrilling, brimming with crystalline prose and formal expertise from one of contemporary poetry’s most distinct voices. –from the Ahsahta Press website
Black Lawrence Press
Retribution Binary by Ruth Baumann
35 pages – Black Lawrence Press/SPD
Perceived Distance From Impact by Kamden Hilliard
33 pages – Black Lawrence Press/SPD
Bottlecap Press
My Parents Were Going to Give Me Your Name If I Was Born a Boy by Shy Watson
Chapbook – Bottlecap Press
City Lights Publishers
Whistleblower at the CIA: An Insider’s Account of the Politics of Intelligence by Melvin A. Goodman
300 pages – City Lights Publishers/Amazon
Civil Coping Mechanisms
Swallow the Fish by Gabrielle Civil
314 pages – Civil Coping Mechanisms/Amazon
The Yellow House by Chiwan Choi
104 pages – Civil Coping Mechanisms/Amazon
A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault edited by Joanna C. Valente
364 pages – Civil Coping Mechanisms/Amazon
One Way Down (Or Another) by Calder Lorenz
180 pages – Civil Coping Mechanisms/Amazon
Wild Heather by Siân S. Rathore
92 pages – Civil Coping Mechanisms/Amazon
“This is a collection that starts with an apology and ends with a goodbye, but everything in between is as scary, wonderful and inexplicable as your own relationships and daily metamorphoses. These are love poems of Communism and physical comedy, murder and beautiful ospreys, witchcraft and striplighting. At times there’s a vertiginous sense that this is an intellect in free-fall determined to take you with it. It’s a good and unsettling feeling. If they are intricate and self-conscious (and I think that vital self-questioning is a prerequisite for real 21st century poetry) they are also forceful, urgent and confessional; it’s a mature voice that can pull that off. The other day I read a time-killing article about a Romanian girl whose late mother had sent her a selfie from beyond the grave. The girl was disturbed and said that the image was hazy and seemed to come from a tear in the fabric between this world and the next. I feel as though that’s where these poems come from, too, a collective unconsciousness where we can literally catch thoughts and show them to one another laughing in recognition, relief and fear.” —Luke Kennard, author of Cain
Coffee House Press
Make Yourself Happy by Eleni Sikelianos
168 pages – Coffee House Press/Amazon
Dzanc Books
All Back Full by Robert Lopez
184 pages – Dzanc Books/Amazon
Featherproof Books
I’m Find, But You Appear to be Sinking by Leyna Krow
188 pages – Featherproof Books/Amazon
Fitzcarraldo Editions
The Doll’s Alphabet by Camilla Grudova
192 pages – Fitzcarraldo Editions
Surreal, ambitious and exquisitely conceived, The Doll’s Alphabet is a collection of stories in the tradition of Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. Dolls, sewing machines, tinned foods, mirrors, malfunctioning bodies – many images recur in stories that are in turn child-like and naive, grotesque and very dark. In ‘Unstitching’, a feminist revolution takes place. In ‘Waxy’, a factory worker fights to keep hold of her Man in a society where it is frowned upon to be Manless. In ‘Agata’s Machine’, two schoolgirls conjure a Pierrot and an angel in a dank attic room. In ‘Notes from a Spider’, a half-man, half-spider finds love in a great European city. By constantly reinventing ways to engage with her obsessions and motifs, Camilla Grudova has come up with a method for storytelling that is highly imaginative, incredibly original, and absolutely discomfiting. –from the Fitzcarraldo Editions website
Graywolf Press
Cinder: New and Selected Poems by Susan Stewart
256 pages – Graywolf Press/Amazon
Encircling by Carl Frode Tiller, translated by Barbara J. Haveland
336 pages – Graywolf Press/Amazon
300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso
104 pages – Graywolf Press/Amazon
A “Proustian minimalist on the order of Lydia Davis” (Kirkus Reviews), Sarah Manguso is one of the finest literary artists at work today. To read her work is to witness acrobatic acts of compression in the service of extraordinary psychological and spiritual insight. 300 Arguments, a foray into the frontier of contemporary nonfiction writing, is at first glance a group of unrelated aphorisms. But, as in the work of David Markson, the pieces reveal themselves as a masterful arrangement that steadily gathers power. Manguso’s arguments about desire, ambition, relationships, and failure are pithy, unsentimental, and defiant, and they add up to an unexpected and renegade wisdom literature. –from the Graywolf Press website
Hobart
Person/A by Elizabeth Ellen
616 pages – Hobart
Melville House
Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto by Jessa Crispin
240 pages – Melville House/Amazon
Milkweed Editions
Love’s Last Number by Christopher Howell
128 pages – Milkweed Editions/Amazon
New Directions
A Simple Story: The Last Malambo by Leila Guerriero, translated by Frances Riddle
128 pages – New Directions/Amazon
Every year, at the height of summer, the remote Argentine village of Laborde holds the national malambo contest. Centuries old, this shatteringly demanding traditional gaucho dance is governed by the most rigid rules. And this festival has one stipulation that makes it unique: the malambo is danced for up to five minutes. That may seem like nothing, but consider the world record for the hundred-meter dash is 9.58 seconds. The dance contest is an obsession for countless young men, who sacrifice their bodies and money as they strive to become the champion, knowing that if they win—in order to safeguard the title’s prestige—they can never compete again. When Leila Guerriero traveled to Laborde, one dancer’s performance took her breath away, and she spent a year following him as he prepared for the next festival. The result is this superlative piece of journalism, told with tremendous economy and power. –from the New Directions website
Other Press
A Brief Stop on the Road From Auschwitz by Göran Rosenberg, translated by Sarah Death
336 pages – Other Press/Amazon
Generation Revolution: On the Front Line Between Tradition and Change in the Middle East by Rachel Aspden
272 pages – 272 pages – Other Press/Amazon
Platypus Press
Mannish Tongues by jayy dodd
112 pages – Platypus Press
Plays Inverse
Medea by Catherine Theis
109 pages – Plays Inverse/SPD
Through a mix of sound-poems, dance, and traditional scenes, Catherine Theis attempts to jostle Medea from her traditional, male-defined narrative in this modern retelling set in the mountains of Montana. A 2015 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers finalist, MEDEA features a Chorus of Flames, choreography for The Milky Way, and a collection of palate-cleansing satyr plays to be performed after. Grappling with both love and language, Theis’ Medea “wants to join with the world, to meld with it. Let’s let her do that—see what falls away.” –from the Plays Inverse website
Restless Books
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
208 pages – Restless Books/Amazon
Sagging Meniscus Press
The Rituals of Mummification by Joseph D. Reich
200 pages – Sagging Meniscus Press/SPD
Hoptime by J. F. Mamjjasond and Fafnir Finkelmeyer
330 pages – Sagging Meniscus Press/SPD
Sarabande Books
In Full Velvet by Jenny Johnson
72 pages – Sarabande Books/Amazon
Animals Strike Curious Poses by Elena Passarello
200 pages – Sarabande Books/Amazon
Beginning with Yuka, a 39,000 year old mummified woolly mammoth recently found in the Siberian permafrost, each of the 16 essays in Animals Strike Curious Poses investigates a different famous animal named and immortalized by humans. Modeled loosely after a medieval bestiary, these witty, playful, whipsmart essays traverse history, myth, science, and more, bringing each beast vibrantly to life. –from the Sarabande Books website
Sundress Publications
Big Thicket Blues by Natalie Giarratano
Sundress Publications/Amazon
Tin House Books
There are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce by Morgan Parker
80 pages – Tin House Books/Amazon
Swimming Lessons by Claire Fuller
356 pages – Tin House Books/Amazon
Ugly Duckling Presse
6X6 #35: They Say Triangle by Ted Dodson, Judith Goldman, Anna Gurton-Wachter, Kim Hunter, Katy Lederer, and Bridget Talone
52 page – Ugly Duckling Presse
Spiral Staircase: Collected Poems by Hirato Renkichi, translated by Sho Sugita
208 pages – Ugly Duckling Press/SPD
To Grieve by Will Daddario
48 pages – Ugly Duckling Presse
What does it mean to grieve rightly? Might there be such a thing as an ethics of grief, a practice of turning my full attention to the specificity of each loss so as to carry such loss in me and to become, in the words of Gilles Deleuze, worthy of what has happened to me? To Grieve answers these questions through the author’s personal and philosophical ruminations following the sudden deaths of his son, father, step-father, friend, grandmother, and cat. Attending specifically to the ways in which grief-space appears, grief-time imposes itself, and grief-language bends itself around the emotional acuity of the wound, this long-form essay nestles up against the unnamable and pauses to measure its heft. –from the Ugly Duckling Presse website
Unnamed Press
Experience Mexican Jail! by Prisionero Anonimo
128 pages – Unnamed Press/Amazon