New Pages Summer 2023

Brotherless Night [fiction]
Random House, 2023
From the New York Times Book Review: “The book follows the life of its narrator, Sashikala Kulenthiren, who begins the story as a teenager living in the majority-Tamil city of Jaffna, near the northern tip of Sri Lanka, in 1981. We witness Sashi’s life in the years before and during Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war—a term that imposes a binary divide on a conflict that the book rightly portrays as something far more fractured…. Subjected to the wanton cruelty of both the government and the various militant groups, she is forced to navigate her way through a daily gantlet of obligations and restrictions, both moral and societal…. The narrator of this story is not neutral—she judges, indicts, but based on the entirety of a person’s character. She has no other choice: These are her people, too close to be flattened into moral neatness.”

Suggest Paradise [poetry]
University of New Mexico Press, 2023
From the publisher: “Born and raised in El Paso, Ray Gonzalez returns to Texas and nearby New Mexico to meditate on love, literature, loss, and la línea. The collection offers readers some of the richest and most complex poems that embody the Southwest and the borderlands, including a poignant look at the massacre at the El Paso Walmart. A unique voice of the Southwest, Gonzalez brings his intellect and his well-honed craft to this work and offers readers a nuanced and powerful perspective on poetry and the Border.”

Anne-thology: Poems Re-Presenting Anne Shakespeare [poetry]
Broken Sleep, 2023
From the publisher: “For four centuries Anne Shakespeare, née Hathaway, has been in her famous husband’s shadow. It’s high time she had a book of her own. This bold and ground-breaking volume places her centre-stage and encourages us to re-imagine Anne in her own right, and afresh for our own times. Anne-thology: Poems Re-Presenting Anne Shakespeare brings together 67 newly-commissioned poems, one for each year of Anne’s life. Here, too, are ten poems of the past. Brave, moving, liberating, and witty, Anne-thology brings together Anne’s past and present and is a bold beacon, illuminating the enduring legacy of this remarkable woman for future generations.”

Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear
Macmillan, 2023
From the New Republic: “Wolfish is less invested in an actual wolf like OR-7 and more in the ways the animal we call Canis lupus is vastly different from the metaphoric construct that we call a ‘wolf’: ‘The wolf,’ Berry writes early on, “is a piece of cultural taxidermy, fabricated by humans with parts gathered across time and space, and howling first and foremost in our heads.’ Weaving together ecology and biology, history, anthropology, fairy tale, myth, and journalism, Wolfish sets out to pick apart these parts and examine them for what they are…. Attempting to free the animal from the myths and fears that envelop it, Berry also attempts to untangle her own relationship to fear.”

Ephemera [poetry]
Button Poetry, 2023
From the publisher: “In Sierra DeMulder’s melancholic yet beautifully hopeful poetry collection, she writes with the wisdom of someone who has learned to love and lose. Each poem reads delicately and elegantly, just fleeting memories on the page. Detailing intimate experiences from the painful deaths of family members who clung to life, to passionate love she feels for her own mortal wife… DeMulder ruminates on what will come and what will fade. Despite this impermanent nature, you can feel the tender warmth DeMulder holds for her family in every line, even the moments she wishes she could forget.”

I Think I Know You [poetry]
FutureCycle Press, 2023
From the Star Tribune: “The author—a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Superior—sent me this collection of prose poems because she wanted to share one about a dog, which I loved so much I have it almost memorized. But I went on to read the other poems, too, and I liked them all, firmly grounded in place—mostly northern Minnesota.... They are vivid and irresistible, from stitched-together snippets of conversations overheard in a coffee shop to a list of items offered at a garage sale at the home of late poet Louis Jenkins. The final section consists of 51 texts that Gard sent to herself, one each morning. Despite the darkness in many of these poems, she ends with cautious hope, ‘and anyone who wants to understand can enter our house at the edge of what's coming.’”

The Night in Question (Agathas Mystery Series 2) [young adult fiction]
Delacorte, 2023
From Kirkus Reviews: “Inseparable teen sleuths snark and squabble their way through a second whodunit infused with the spirit of the Queen of Mystery. Investigating a brutal assault that leaves a widely disliked classmate in a medical coma leads unlikely friends Alice and Iris to the mysterious deaths of a budding starlet and her secret beau 74 years ago, in 1949. The authors enthusiastically shovel clues, or things that look like clues, into nearly every one of their short, alternately narrated chapters on the way to a violent climax. In a strong continuing subplot, the friendship between the two teenagers sometimes looks more like war as they come from different social circles in a similarly divided small California town, and their characters, values, and expectations also frequently clash. A delight for teen Poirots, chock-full of puzzling clues and swirling tensions.”

King's Bishop: A Fictional History [fiction]
Calumet Press, 2023
From the publisher: “The dramatic story of the quarrel between Henry, King of England, and Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, has echoed down through the ages. Sometimes told as a close friendship gone bad, sometimes told as a morality tale of pride, sometimes as one of jealousy. History supports many versions of the story. But two things are clear: The king forced his chancellor and favorite, Thomas Becket, to also become Archbishop of Canterbury. And at that point, Thomas switched his allegiance from the king to the church. In recounting this tale with a fresh view, Judith Koll Healey explores the friendship and the ensuing conflict of these two men as humans, not just giants in history.”

A Sleight of Shadows (The Unseen World 2) [fiction]
Saga Press, 2023
From Kirkus Reviews: “In this sequel to An Unkindness of Magicians (2017), the House of Shadows is rebuilding itself. Sydney sacrificed her magic to destroy it in the last Turning, but it’s coming back. And what’s worse, there are some in the Unseen World who want it back—some who believe the world was better when magic was easier, even if it meant anonymous magicians had to suffer and die in the House of Shadows to pay the price. Like An Unkindness of Magicians, this novel is fast-paced, slick, and cinematic, packed full of dramatic imagery. This sequel offers more of the first book’s strengths: dark, desperate magic in a glittering world of wealth and power.”

Creating Identity: The Popular Romance Heroine's Journey to Selfhood and Self-Presentation
Indiana University Press, 2023
From the publisher: “Jayashree Kamblé examines the romance genre, with its sensile flexibility in retaining what audiences find desirable and discarding what is not, by asking: ‘Who is the romance heroine, and what does she want?’ To find the answer, Kamblé explores how heroines in ten novels reject societal labels and instead remake themselves on their own terms with their own agency. Kamblé combines gender and sexuality, Marxism, critical race theory, and literary criticism to survey various aspects of heroines' identities, such as sexuality, gender, work, citizenship, and race. Creating Identity highlights a genre in which heroines do not accept that independence and strong, loving relationships are mutually exclusive but instead demand both, echoing the call from the very readers who have made this genre so popular.”

The Wild Hunt Divinations: A Grimoire [poetry]
Wesleyan University Press, 2023
From the publisher: “A stunning second collection from National Poetry Series winner Trevor Ketner. Comprised of 154 sonnets, each anagrammed line-by-line from Shakespeare's sonnets, the book refracts these lines through the thematic lens of transness, queer desire, kink, and British paganism. Centered on love and desire in the English canon, this collection speaks to the ever-emerging and beautiful manifestations of queer love and desire. Relentless, excessive, wild, and tender, The Wild Hunt Divinations: A Grimoire sets itself to chanting from beginning to end.”

The Big Sugar [young adult fiction]
University of Minnesota Press, 2023
From Publishers Weekly: “Logue’s enticing second Brigid Reardon adventure finds the young Irish heroine arriving in Cheyenne, Wyo., in 1881 with family friend Padraic. Cheyenne is a wild and violent town surrounded by ruthless cattle barons—called ‘big sugars’—who will stop at nothing to acquire land. Brigid and Padraic acquire a small but beautiful plot, and while working the property one day, Brigid finds neighbor Ella hanging from a tree. Vowing to find out who killed Ella puts her at odds with several dangerous men who have little fear of the law and even less of a woman—but they don’t know Brigid…. Readers will feel like they’re out in the harsh frontier territory and hardscrabble town, and gladly follow Brigid wherever she goes.”

Complicated Warding [poetry]
Independently published, 2023
From the Superstition Review: “Ambitious in its form and message, a captivating examination of history through a contemporary lens. As described by Matthees, it’s an ‘inmate case file stuffed with assorted poems, images, and historical texts about institutionalization at the turn of the last century.’ Old photographs and state records are interspersed between Matthees’ poignant poems, which shine as imaginings of what the people in the pictures might have been thinking, and current musings…. Her words spark delightfully in the past, the present, and the ties between the two. She contemplates life, violence, and death with the precision of a surgeon: 'you’ve just begun to pick at the scab of / your very own demise.’”

If I Could Give You a Line [poetry]
University of Akron Press Akron Poetry Prize, 2023
From the publisher: “If I Could Give You a Line cultivates the strangeness of presence in motherhood when the self is hyper-aware of its erasure. The collection explores its obsession with the physicality of visual art, down to the line, asserting and creating a voice that longs to be as present as a waver in the line of an Agnes Martin painting. A line that pulls you in to see the hand that made it. For Oeding’s speakers, to look at art as mothers gives them permission to make it. Through humor, provocation, and uncertainty, this associative work builds momentary worlds of looking and connecting.” 

Anxiety in the Wilderness: Short Stories [fiction]
Independently published, 2023
From the publisher: “Anxiety in the Wilderness examines the human capacity to worry about everything from forgetting to leave water out for a pet to the possibility of a bear attack. Each short story reflects on what it means to dance the crazy dance of worry and still be able to appreciate the music. It explores the human feelings of fear, dread, and uneasiness in the American landscape, as a cast of characters find their way through life, one day at a time.”

Mercy [young adult fiction]
Independently published, 2023
From the publisher: “When Sadie was twelve years old, her mother got an itch for gambling, and she scratched it more often than she should have. Often forced to parent herself, Sadie’s life is full of empty promises and big responsibilities. The book opens when Alice and her boyfriend drop off Sadie at her uncle’s farm in South Dakota so they can go south to look for work and a new place to live. Sadie meets her Uncle Charlie for the first time, a reclusive Vietnam vet who raises and boards horses. Sadie and Charlie discover that family can come in all shapes and sizes. Mercy is a coming-of-age story that reverberates with the basic human need to be loved.”

All Women Are Born Wailing [poetry chapbook]
Nomadic Press Acentos Book Prize, 2023
From the publisher: “Nen G. Ramirez's All Women Are Born Wailing confronts myriad forms of violence against Latinas. Drawing on personal and family experiences with mental illness, the poet challenges the ‘crazy Latina’ stereotype and examines the ways it has been used to belittle and dehumanize people who deserve treatment and care. Unflinching in their critique of sexist and racist tropes, in these poems Ramirez experiments with persona and familial history, including the murder of a cousin, in order to imagine more hopeful futures.”

Wild Things: A Trans-Glam-Punk-Rock Love Story [memoir]
Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2023
From the publisher: “In the 1970s, Lynette Reini fell in love with a fascinating, talented man named Steve Grandell. They married in 1983; five years later, Steve came out to her as transgender. Through the following decades, as her spouse developed a public persona as Venus de Mars and fronted the band All the Pretty Horses, the couple struggled to stay together. They navigated an often hostile, anti-trans environment; fractures grew between them as Venus pushed the band toward success. Against the backdrop of the art, literary, and indie rock worlds of Minneapolis and New York in the 1990s and early 2000s, through hard work and love, they invented a way of being who they truly are.”

The History of a Difficult Child [fiction]
Viking Books, 2003
From Booklist [starred review]: “‘I want my heart to be the headquarters of my stories.’ So declares Selam Asmelash, a preternaturally gifted observer of her Ethiopian family and community during the socialist revolution of the 1970s and ’80s. Narrating initially from the womb, Selam chronicles the tempestuous marriage of her parents—her passive father, Asmelash, scion of a respected land-owning family, and mother, Degitu, a fierce upstart who fights a lifetime of losing battles with her husband—as well as the gossiping women of her village and her country’s leaders…. As Selam comes of age, her ferocious resistance to the world’s absurd cruelty leads her to defy controlling brothers, petty politicians, and village lunkheads, even taking up arms against God.... Sibhat tells Selan’s tale with verve, offering a vibrant panorama of Ethiopian society in all its complexity with an unforgettable protagonist at the center.”

Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History
University Press of Kentucky, 2023
From the Star Tribune: “Emily Strasser's debut book begins with a photograph, one that hung in her grandparents' lake house: It's of her grandfather George (who died before Strasser was born), standing in front of a mushroom cloud made by a nuclear blast…. And so begins this beautiful, nimble excavation of a family photograph and the fallout of its legacy. George lived and worked as a scientist in Oak Ridge, Tenn., one of three cities secretly built to develop the atomic bomb…. Strasser's prose reaches beyond the straits normally reserved for academic presses in which this book was published, and her patience against some of the biggest ethical questions humans face is a thing of great strength. A profound debut of memory, research, and imagination that mines conflicts of heart and intellect.”

The Primitive Accumulation of Realness [poetry chapbook]
Dead Mall Press, 2023
From the publisher: “A collection of (anti-) lyric and visual poetry, the writing in this chapbook collides relentlessly with the possibilities of life under racial capitalism. The language moves through a kaleidoscope of registers and modes, from citation to illustration to a damaged and vital lyricism. At its core is a sustained examination of gender, of how we theorize it, and of the irreducibility of transgender life.”

Wail Song: or wading in the water at the end of the world [poetry]
Wave Books, 2023
From Literary Hub: “In an astonishing and provocative textual performance, Wail Song offers an extended meditation on blackness in two sections, ‘Wail Song’ and ‘Wading.’ As the preface says, ‘Wail Song is an attempt at care….’ Whether writing against Melville in a series of movie pitches featuring Pip; engaging with such theorists as Franz Fanon and Saidya Hartman; or juxtaposing textual records of children’s deaths in the Middle Passage with the waterbirth of the speaker’s child, Webster shapes a transcendent conceit with the whale, ‘Wherein the belly of the whale is misnomer, / the belly of the world.’”

A Cage to Welcome [poetry]
Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2023
From poet Éireann Lorsung: “A calendar of the ordinary events and attentions that, day after day, become what changes our lives forever. Sisters and parents, DNA and zygotes, birch trees and white-nosed bats, plums and the wrong turn hiking a canyon: at any moment we might double, shift, or metastasize. In these poems, human babies are born into being-with an animal- and plant-rich place, a world of relation where spines and strands tie us to one another…. In these poems, the everyday work of looking, housemaking, thinking shows us that hope is an act and not a feeling. Hope is the practice of continuing to live together, while writing and germinating, growing and changing.”