New Releases
New in Hardcover
Tender the River captures in verse the history and legacy of the Merrimack River Valley, from the Pennacook, Wamesit, Algonquin, and other indigenous tribes who settled there first, to the European settlers who came with guns and their god to supplant them, to being the birthplace of America’s industrial revolution and first labor movements, to becoming a center of continued immigration, of entrenched nativism, and even multicultural celebration. The Merrimack River begins with the confluence of the Pemigewasset and Winnipesaukee rivers spilling from the White Mountains in New Hampshire, then travels down through mill towns like Manchester, Lowell, and Haverhill to finally spit out violently into the Atlantic in the old port (now posh) town of Newburyport. In its journey between those points and as well across the centuries, the Merrimack River Valley has been America in microcosm, many of the nation’s democratic successes and demagogic sins being seeded there.
New in Hardcover
A Wake with Nine Shades (Hardcover) is an exploration of grief and culpability, a Dantean descent through contemporary midlife crisis. Populated by ghosts and children, lovers and amputations, bodies of water, insomnia, debt and domestic violence, Steinorth measures what is broken against the white space of the page, paying homage to the Great Lakes and snowscapes her poems inhabit and the vacancies, denials, and drains they circle. Formally inventive and musically obsessive, the book’s unconventional formal construction and lyric wit contribute what Eleanor Wilner deems the essential “Lightness” described by Italo Calvino, noting Steinorth’s “ability to treat weighty subjects with a mastery of style . . . a liveliness of imagination and intelligence that lightens, without denial, what would otherwise be unbearable. . . .”
Signature Series Limited Edition
Sophie has managed to keep herself clean for a full year. Now, against her sponsor’s advice, she’s agreed to a road trip with her boyfriend Sid, who sees the journey as a chance to recapture their past. As they make their way from Houston across Texas and the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona, Sophie quickly learns that it’s not easy being sober trapped in a car with someone who’s living the life you’re fighting to leave behind. Bar brawls, automatic weapons, and hidden stashes of liquor complicate things even further as Sophie struggles to discover who she’s supposed to be in this new beginning. As they move farther from home, the few lifelines she has left become strained, and even phone calls to her sponsor don’t seem to be enough to squelch the chaos. Sophie’s new life is in danger of collapse, and with Sid around to pour gas on the fire there doesn’t seem to be anything she can do to stop it—unless she can learn what it means to get better. The Light Here Changes Everything is a story of addiction—to alcohol, to people, to patterns—that, at its heart, seeks to understand why we stay in situations that no longer serve our needs.
Signature Series Limited Edition
Bledsoe is an extended narrative poem that centers on a mute Appalachian man named Durant Bledsoe. Specifically, the poem takes place in the mountains of Yancey County, North Carolina, in an early part of the 20th century. Durant Bledsoe’s mother is dying with a brain tumor and he must take care of her, all the while coming to terms with the fact that she, in her suffering, has asked him to take her life. The book focuses much on landscape and on Bledsoe’s complex psychology and perceptions of the world, specifically as they apply to culture, family, religion, and identity.
Reviews
GHOST :: SEEDS, by Sebastian Merrill, reviewed by Daniela Naomi Molnar for LEON Literary Review.
“Sebastian Merrill’s powerful, elegant debut, GHOST :: SEEDS, offers us the opportunity to share a complicated, beautiful place with the wide, manifold consciousness of a speaker who is many speakers at once. Likewise, the place this book makes is many places at once, reminding us of the teeming hauntedness of our world, the way all places are dense with histories and mythologies. It reminds us that time is thick and fluid, a medium we’re always wading through.”
Daniela Naomi Molnar, LEON Literary Review
Landlock X, by Sarah Audsley, reviewed by Lizzy Beck for LEON Literary Review.
“The self that multiplies. The self that becomes. Audsley’s collection explores—in the most multifaceted, complex, open-hearted, and probing ways I can imagine—the poet’s identity and personal history, including her identity as a Korean American adoptee, as a rural New Englander, and as an artist.”
Lizzy Beck, LEON Literary Review
Her Read by Jennifer Sperry Steinorth reviewed by Lisa Huffaker in The Georgia Review.
“All erasure is by nature a transgression.… The voice of Her Read knows that by creating art at all, a female artist transgresses cultural norms, and much of history. To ‘deface,’ to erase the very book that codifies that culture and history, is a transgression indeed. Steinorth, consciously representing a class of people excluded from the history and the meaning of Western art, breaks, enters, and transforms. And she undertakes that transgression as an act of civil disobedience.”
Lisa Huffaker, The Georgia Review
Testament by Luke Hankins was reviewed by Tina Kelley in Presence
“Thank you, Luke Hankins, for writing haunting poems that are approachable, funny, and sticky. […] [H]e’s profound, and quietly so. […] If only all poets could testify so clearly.”
-Tina Kelley, Presence
Interviews
Sarah Audsley discusses Landlock X in “Writing into Negative Space (Absence): Tiana Nobile interviews Sarah Audsley” for The Common.
“In Landlock X, the X shifts roles and can stand in for a pronoun, a speaker, an individual, an adoptee, the poet-speaker, or a collective. It tries to define itself, to solve for X, but only comes up with more questions. I wanted to push against my own personal adoption experience and to gesture to the larger adoption industrial complex.”
The Common
Luke Hankins, poet and editor of Orison Books, reflects on his latest book, Testament, plus shares advice on poetry manuscripts, in an interview with Rhada Marcum for Poet to Poet.
Testament combines some of my long-standing themes—theological and philosophical musings and questions—but also looks outwards at social/political events and issues that are contemporary, that implicate a broader landscape than just the self—gun violence and racism and far-right politics. They may show up in quieter ways in some of these poems, but they’re present.
Poet to Poet
Sarah Kain Gutowski, author of The Familiar, and Annmarie Kelly discuss the ache of literary ambition, how parenthood divides us from ourselves, and how Moonstruck is one of the best movies of all time on the Wild Precious Life.
…but when we talk about the multiplicity of selves, I feel like this is pretty much where it sprung from… I felt like even within my career(s) I had multiple lives.
Features and More
Landlock X, by Sarah Audsley, featured in Debutiful’s “20 MUST-READ RECENT DEBUT POETRY COLLECTIONS”
Cody Smith, author of Gulf, had his poem “A Friend Tells Me His Grandfather is Dying as I Write a Note to Jonathan Johnson About His Latest Memoir” featured on Terrain.org.
Chloe Chun Seim read from Churn at the Publishing Triangle Finalists Readings!
Octavio Quintanilla, author of The Book of Wounded Sparrows, celebrated during National Poetry Month and featured in the San Antonio Report.
The Frontextos exhibition at the Mexican Cultural Institute opened Wednesday and runs through April 30.
Our Lady of the Lake University’s Sueltenfuss Library opened its Frontextos exhibition on April 9, with a public reception at 4 p.m. on April 23. The show runs through April 30.
And Quintanilla — along with Vega, Sanderson and many others — participated in Urban-15’s annual Mega Corazón poetry event, viewable online through April 30.
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