Resources
From Category: Books
Nameless Boy
By Douglas Goetsch (now Diana Goetsch). Like a Garrison Keillor monologue at the end of an evening, humorous riffs and tender anecdotes prove only partially effective at warding off a deep melancholy in this poet's third full-length collection. You can laugh at light verse such as "Pee on Your Foot", and a few pages later, be slain by the self-lacerating loneliness of "Forgiveness Poem". Sometimes the shift stuns you with surprise in the same poem, as when a tongue-in-cheek tribute to 1989's morning radio mix ends with the questioning of a worker's hopeless endurance, reminiscent of Philip Levine. In their unpretentious way, these narratives hope to heal the deepest wound of ordinary life: that of never really knowing the people close to us, or being known. Both this theme and the title seem to take on an additional significance from Goetsch's post-publication gender transition. The book closes with a delightful, multi-part fantasy about names and whether they determine our destiny, the poem itself a gift for a boy who is named at the end.
Never Let Me Go
This quietly heartbreaking and provocative novel is equal parts British boarding-school story, dystopian science fiction, and Kafkaesque fable about conformity. While the premise (human clones harvested for their organs) seems ripped from the headlines, the absence of plausible science in the plot suggests that the clones are a metaphor for the myriad ways we sacrifice our human potential by failing to question authority.
New Kid
By Jerry Craft. In this engaging and important middle-grade graphic novel, Black 7th-grader Jordan Banks is transplanted from his Washington Heights neighborhood to a mostly white and rich prep school in Riverdale, where he uses humor and cartooning to process the challenges of making new friends and coping with microaggressions from students and teachers.
Nixon Under the Bodhi Tree and Other Works of Buddhist Fiction
Innovative collection of short stories that integrate Buddhist precepts into contemporary settings. Some of the pieces use form as well as content to explore Buddhist concerns with present awareness and change.
No Ashes in the Fire
By Darnell L. Moore. This passionate, eye-opening memoir chronicles the author's coming of age as a black gay man in Camden, NJ, his activism with the Movement for Black Lives, and his maturing understanding of his parents' troubled marriage. Moore places his personal story in the context of structural oppression in Camden's history, and shows the extraordinary resilience and devotion of black families under pressure.
No Loneliness
A sacred quiet permeates this debut poetry collection, winner of the 2009 FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize. Abandoned barns are Cone's churches; the steady rhythms of farm work, his liturgy. The birth of a daughter is both miracle and memento mori, a sweet paradox held together in an extended lyric poem that envisions poetry as a transmission of love across generations.
No Sweeter Fat
The briny tastes and stormy weathers of the Pacific Northwest permeate this first poetry collection, voiced by a woman whose appetites for food and love are more than the world allows. These poems speak honestly of loneliness and pleasure. Winner of the 2006 Autumn House Press Poetry Contest.
Nobody’s Mother
This award-winning author's autobiography in verse is narrated in a likeable voice that will resonate with a wide audience. Themes include feminism, aging, the complexity of mother-daughter relationships, and nostalgia for Jewish culture along with a critique of its patriarchal and warlike aspects. Along the way, Newman offers such delights as an ode to the now-shuttered Second Avenue Deli, and a playfully erotic exploration of middle-aged love.
Not Akhmatova
By Noah Berlatsky. Playful and musical, yet weighty with paradox, this collection pairs freewheeling translations of Russian-Jewish poet Anna Akhmatova and original poems that respond to the fraught question of Jewish loyalties in the diaspora. Berlatsky shows that one doesn't have to believe in God to argue with Him. In these pages, Akhmatova is both present and absent, a figure who epitomizes her people's persecuted dead. The shape of that absence has sometimes seemed to bend Jewish identity around it like a black hole. Berlatsky recognizes that gravitational pull even as he resists it. This serious project is leavened by wry aphorisms about the ephemeral nature of poetry, and indeed life itself—a pessimistic, wisecracking sense of humor that situates Berlatsky firmly within the Judaism with which he wrestles.
Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market 40th Edition
From Writer's Digest, "the 40th edition of NSSWM features hundreds of updated listings for book publishers, literary agents, fiction publications, contests, and more." Includes interviews with bestselling authors and tips for fiction writers.
Now What? The Creative Writer’s Guide to Success After the MFA
Published by Fairfield University's MFA Program, this multi-genre writer's guide features essays from numerous published authors about their postgraduate career paths.
Observatory
Clear-sighted, modest and wise, the narrator of these poems takes us to London, China, Japan, and post-Katrina New Orleans, always with an eye for the moments of common humanity that open up intimacy between strangers.
Odd Mercy
By Gail Thomas. This elegantly crafted, life-affirming chapbook won the 2016 Charlotte Muse Prize from Headmistress Press, a lesbian-feminist poetry publisher. Thomas' verse knits together several generations of women, from her once prim and proper suburban mother descending into Alzheimer's, to her young granddaughter surrounded by gender-bending friends and same-sex couples. She grounds their history in earthy details like the taste of asparagus, locks of hair from the dead, and old newspaper clippings of buildings raised and gardens planted by blue-collar forebears. The centerpiece of the collection, "The Little Mommy Sonnets", poignantly depicts a sort of reconciliation at the end of a thorny relationship, where differences in ideals of womanhood fall away, and what's left is the primal comfort of touching and feeding a loved one.
Off the Yoga Mat
By Cheryl J. Fish. Three New York intellectuals on the cusp of their 40th birthdays fumble toward maturity as Y2K looms. Every environment in this gentle yet deep novel is fully realized—from the anarchy of the "freegans" in Tompkins Square Park, to the domestic rituals of Finnish sauna culture, and the Black community of pre-Katrina New Orleans. The protagonists' lives and loves intersect repeatedly, like complex and shifting yoga poses, hopefully leading to a bit more enlightenment by the time we reluctantly bid them goodbye.
Ojo
By Donald Mengay. In this Joycean novel about queer life in the American West, a young man flees his repressive Cleveland suburb and the ghost of his first lover, to find himself as an artist in a trailer on the edge of the Colorado desert. In the small town of Ojo Caliente, Jake's unlikely family-of-choice comes to include a swinging pastor and his lesbian wife's feminist book club, a construction worker torn between his passion for Jake and his comically fertile wife, and an assertive Latino lover who lives in a household of sharp-tongued trans femmes. This fragile utopia is further riven by the advent of AIDS, yet sensuality and farcical humor leaven the grief. Reading this multivocal, stream-of-consciousness story is like overhearing tantalizing snippets of strangers' conversations on a long train ride. One gradually learns to recognize their voices without context or transitions, and the close attention required to follow the narrative makes its scenes that much more memorable. Ojo is the second book in a planned trilogy that began with The Lede to Our Undoing.
Online Marketing for Busy Authors
By Fauzia Burke. If you're getting lost among all the options for marketing your book, this quick and well-organized guide will give you a helpful overview of the available tools and why to use them (or not). Especially useful are the opening chapters about deciding on your goals and dreams, because you can't figure out the what till you know the why. The advice seems most on-target for writers of commercial nonfiction (business books, self-help, cookbooks), but fiction writers will also find good tips here. Use this book to plan your overall strategy, then supplement it with more detailed guides on the specific topics that are relevant to you. Burke is an online publicist who has worked with bestselling authors such as Deepak Chopra and Sue Grafton.
Operation Memory
Second collection by well-regarded poet and critic is intellectual without being pretentious, full of witty surprises and self-mocking cultural observations. "Many are called and sleep through the ringing."
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
This darkly comical autobiographical novel is narrated with deadpan wit but also a certain tenderness toward her own and her family's eccentricities. Raised by a fervent Pentecostal mother in a provincial British town, the protagonist finds her world shaken to its core when she discovers her attraction to other girls.
Orison Books
Orison Books publishes spiritually-engaged poetry, fiction, and nonfiction of exceptional literary merit. Editors say, "In our view, spiritual writing has little to do with subject matter. Rather, the kind of work we seek to publish has a transcendent aesthetic effect on the reader, and reading it can itself be a spiritual experience. We seek to be broad, inclusive, and open to perspectives spanning the spectrums of spiritual and religious thought, ethnicity, gender identity, and sexual orientation." Anthology proposals and fiction and nonfiction manuscripts are accepted year-round. There is an open reading period for poetry manuscripts in the spring and a contest in the winter with a large cash prize and prestigious judges. See website for online submission guidelines.
Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry
This selection of autobiographical and critical essays by an award-winning poet eloquently explores how the poetic imagination fruitfully problematizes the self, potentially liberating us from fixed identities based on race, class, sexual orientation and personal history.
Outlaw Marriages: The Hidden Histories of Fifteen Extraordinary Same-Sex Couples
This compendium of brief, lively biographical sketches of 19th and 20th century American innovators showcases the unsung contributions of their same-sex partners. In addition to well-known duos like Stein and Toklas, the book gives "the rest of the story" for luminaries such as the president of Bryn Mawr and the founder of the field of interior design. Some of the profiles could have benefited from more discussion of how the unconventional relationship passed muster in an era when homosexuality was not only stigmatized but illegal. Overall, the anthology is an entertaining and upbeat read that whets the appetite for reading longer biographies of these notable figures.
Pastoralia
Enter the deranged theme park of this unique writer's imagination, in surreal tales that exaggerate the insincere cheer of mass-media corporate culture to show the ruthlessness beneath. Beneath Saunders' manic wit lies a fierce compassion for misfits waging a losing battle for authenticity in a world of manufactured messages.
Places in the Dark
Brooding, poetic tale of two brothers whose love is shattered by their passion for the same woman. Cook exploits the conventions of the Gothic thriller to build up expectations that he constantly reverses with his surprising plot twists, ultimately producing a wise commentary on storytelling itself and how it both inspires and entraps us.
Playing By the Book
By S. Chris Shirley. This funny, heartfelt, and enlightening YA novel follows a Southern preacher's kid on his journey to accept his sexuality without losing his faith. When 17-year-old Jake ventures outside his Alabama small town for a summer journalism program at Columbia University in New York City, he learns that the world is more complex than he imagined, and maybe God is too. Refreshingly, he doesn't reject his family and traditions, but instead takes on the adult responsibility of teaching and transforming them.
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
By Toni Morrison. This slim volume of three essays is adapted from lectures that the celebrated novelist delivered at Harvard in 1990. She asks an incisive question that will turn your traditional high school and college reading material on its head: how was the presence of a subjugated Black population a necessary foil for the development of an American literary identity of innocence, rugged individualism, and white masculinity? Rather than debating whether Twain and Hemingway should be "cancelled", so to speak, Morrison is more interested in what all texts can tell us about whiteness as a self-concept. In that way, even (or especially) problematic representation of Black characters is valuable to illuminate occluded power relations, for a key feature of whiteness is that it positions itself as universal, as the absence of race.
Poems to See By: A Comic Artist Interprets Great Poetry
By Julian Peters. Understand classic poems in a new way through this artistic dramatization of 24 works by Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Carl Sandburg, Maya Angelou, Seamus Heaney, and many others.
Poet’s Market 34th Edition
Published by Writer's Digest, this is a leading directory of journals, magazines, book publishers, chapbook publishers, websites, grants, and contests. "These listings include contact information, submission preferences, insider tips on what specific editors want, and—when offered—payment information." Helps you find publishers who are looking for your kind of work.
Poetry Previews
Reviews important contemporary poets and makes it easy to order their books.
Position Papers
By Andrea Lawlor. This chapbook of prose-poems is a playful and uplifting manifesto for a future society where resources are shared and identities and property are held lightly. Published by Factory Hollow Press in 2016 and now out of print, it is free to download as a PDF from their website.
Prayers & Run-On Sentences
By Stuart Kestenbaum. This affable, Buddhist-inflected poetry collection invites gratitude for the daily rhythms of life. As if through the imaginative, unbiased eyes of a child, Kestenbaum's poems find wonder in ordinary things like clotheslines, oil slicks, and even a plastic trash bag left in the woods.
Pretty Tilt
This debut poetry collection effervesces with teen-girl sexuality, its narrator unapologetic in her desire to inhabit this body, this stage of life, this cultural moment, without weighing it down with analysis. Feminism makes a token appearance as a source of self-criticism that she's thrown aside like a bikini top at the beach. Her self may be socially constructed out of crusty panties and My Little Pony hair, but unlike the Gurlesque poets to whom she's been compared, Murphy doesn't seem angry or anxious about the impossibility of some Modernist "authenticity"; for her characters, girlhood holds thrills but no serious dangers. Read it for her fantastic language and perceptiveness about the emotions of this time of life.
Prime: Poetry & Conversation
Edited by Jericho Brown, this essential anthology brings together a new generation of black gay poets: Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Saeed Jones, Rickey Laurentiis, Phillip B. Williams, and L. Lamar Wilson. The book begins with a selection of poems from each author, after which they interview one another about poetic mentoring, influences, and identities. Publisher Sibling Rivalry Press is known for supporting LGBT literature.
Priya’s Shakti
This graphic novel is a collaboration between poet and playwright Vikas K. Menon, artist Dan Goldman, and filmmaker Ram Devineni. The provocative story portrays an Indian female super-hero who fights against sexual violence in a Hindu-inspired mythic reality. The comic's creation was prompted by the December 2012 gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old student in Delhi. The story can be downloaded for free from the website, which also features videos and information about supporting anti-rape activism.
Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006
Intricate lyrics from the poet's eight collections marry austere classicism to sensual passion. Eros, for Phillips, is always shadowed by loss, yet for that very reason also points to a radiant, barely describable landscape beyond death, as the speaker of these poems renounces all illusions about the cost of his devotion to another man.
Red
Lesbian poet's first collection moves easily between the erotic and the elegiac in a voice that is fresh and wide-open as her Cape Cod landscape. Braverman invites the reader into a community of friends and lovers who embrace life despite the risk of loss. Elegantly designed by Perugia Press, this book won their 2002 contest as well as the Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Poetry Prize.
Requiem for David
By Patrick T. Reardon. Plain-spoken and poignant, this memoir in verse pays tribute to a brother who committed suicide, and ponders the unanswerable question of why some survive a loveless upbringing and others succumb. Pat and David were the eldest of 14 children born in the 1950s-60s to an Irish-Catholic family in Chicago. Immersion in the church trained the author to search for sacred beauty in times of suffering and mystery, yet the weight of parental and religious judgments overwhelmed his brother. The collection is illustrated with archival family photos that prompt the poet's hindsight search for clues to their fate.
Rhyheim
By Vikram Kolmannskog. Subtitled "A porn poem," this lyrical and erotic chapbook is a meditation on scenes from Black gay adult performer Rhyheim Shabazz's videos. Slow-motion, stream-of-consciousness descriptions of sexual encounters transform into moments of spiritual oneness with concepts from Hindu mysticism. As a queer man of color in predominantly white Norway, Kolmannskog finds inspiration and self-acceptance in Rhyheim's multi-racial intimate couplings. Publisher Broken Sleep Books is a small press in Wales with a working-class orientation and an interest in social justice.
Riddley Walker
Imagine the Bhagavad-Gita as a Punch-and-Judy show. What do the legend of St. Eustace and particle physics have in common? In this unique novel, part mystical treatise and part fantasy-horror fiction, two millennia have passed since a nuclear war knocked Britain back to the Iron Age, and a semi-nomadic civilization has preserved only degraded fragments of our science through oral tradition in the form of puppet shows. Our narrator, 12-year-old Riddley, at first joins forces with a shifting (and shifty) cast of politicos and visionaries who hope to bring the human race back to its former glory by rediscovering the recipe for gunpowder. But soon he's on the track of bigger game: the nature of reality, and the causes of sin. Which is more fundamental, unity or duality? Why does Punch always want to kill the baby?
Rocks in the River
By John Ollom. Part artists' self-help guide, part memoir of overcoming attachment wounds from his homophobic and alcoholic family, Rocks in the River is an invitation to enjoy our own creative powers without self-judgment or comparison to others. As a classically trained dancer and then an innovative choreographer, Ollom understands how the rate of a movement affects the emotions it manifests. He encourages readers not to push ourselves in a punishing way, either to heal or to make "better" art, whatever that means. Instead, we can explore towards the next stepping-stone, and the next after that, with curiosity and patience. The book is illustrated with his intuitive drawings that express the flow of pain and joy within the healing body/mind.
Roman Lives: Coriolanus, Pompey, Caesar, Cicero, Brutus, Mark Antony
This Naxos Audiobooks abridgment dramatizes key episodes in the Roman Republic's transition to dictatorship, with lessons about pride, honor, and worldly vanity that are still relevant today. Plutarch pioneered the genre of biography in the West with his lives of Greek and Roman leaders.
Roots
Masterful saga of seven generations of an African-American family, beginning with Haley's Gambian ancestor who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the 18th century. Haley's fictionalized re-creation of their lives is rich with drama, humor, tragedy, political outrage, and love that defies the odds.
Ropeless
Ropeless is a comic, poignant story about an old-fashioned Jewish mama, her mentally disabled son, and a dutiful daughter learning to follow her dreams. Told from multiple first-person perspectives, every character's voice is pitch-perfect. Koretsky is the winner of a dozen literary awards and has received three Pushcart Prize nominations. Fans of Wally Lamb will enjoy this new author.
sad boy/detective
By Sam Sax. In this innovative, sensual chapbook about a possibly-neurodivergent queer boy's coming of age, the central metaphor of "the boy detective" expresses the protagonist's separateness from, and scandalous curiosity about, human bodies and the social world they inhabit. Phenomena that everyone around him take for granted are a fascinating mystery to him. The sadness comes from the paradox that as he tries to get under the world's skin and see what it's made of, he pushes it farther away, because his probing has violated social conventions. Winner of the Spring 2014 Black River Chapbook Competition from Black Lawrence Press.
Safekeeping
By Jessamyn Hope. This many-layered debut novel, set on a kibbutz (Israeli commune) in 1994, brings together an unlikely community of troubled souls whose fates intersect in surprising ways. At the heart of the story is a priceless brooch crafted by a medieval Jewish goldsmith, preserved by his descendants through centuries of anti-Semitic massacres and international migration. Adam, a drug addict from Manhattan, seeks to atone for the damage he has done to his family, by bringing the brooch to the mysterious woman his late grandfather loved when he was a Holocaust refugee on the kibbutz. His arrival stirs up painful memories for the kibbutz founder, who sacrificed her personal happiness to a utopian project that is now in danger of being disbanded. Meanwhile, his fellow volunteers are on their own desperate quests for redemption and freedom, which sometimes help and sometimes hinder Adam's mission. The novel raises profound questions about the trade-offs between individual fulfillment and collective survival.
Said and Done
The stories in this collection from Black Lawrence Press explore the nuances of feeling and the power dynamics of intimate moments between family members, lovers, and strangers, in a way that is deeply insightful without over-explaining. Morrison's vision of human nature contains shades of Shirley Jackson and Flannery O'Connor, though written in a more restrained style. These stories always leave the reader with the sense that there is more to the characters than the chosen anecdote can reveal.
Saint X
By Caroline Cabrera. Winner of the Hudson Prize from Black Lawrence Press, this poetry collection creatively explores the traumas and strengths of emerging womanhood by "answering" questions from a science textbook in ambiguous and offbeat ways. Later poems about religion shed light on the initially cryptic title, positioning the book as a kind of talkback to the catechism format. The mystery of "X" is an experience to savor, not an equation to solve.
Scattered Risks
Like a modern St. Francis, this poet is a sister to all the beasts and plants that grace her southwestern landscape, and unfailingly finds the perfectly textured and surprising words to bring them to life for the reader. Uschuk is a prophet of the wilderness that we are fast destroying; few poems pass without a reminder of the human warfare and greed that lurk at Eden's edge. She invites us to feel the "velvet shoulders" of the bat rays in the aquarium's touch pool, then to question our right to have "these benign inmates confined to concrete/ entertaining us with their lives." Totemic illustrations by James G. Davis enhance this volume from Wings Press, Texas' oldest small press.
Scattershot: My Bipolar Family
This memoir of mental illness stands out for its lyricism, humility, tenderness, and deeply sane sense of humor about how the author and his family have romanticized their affliction. Lovelace is a poet and the son of a notable evangelical theologian. Both of his parents are bipolar, as are the author and his brother. With refreshing honesty, he traces mania's connection to spiritual and artistic creativity, yet concludes that the private ecstasies of madness lead to incoherence, not a deeper truth.
Searching for the Spring: Poetic Reflections of Maine
Plain-spoken, meditative poems bring to life the culture and terrain of rural Maine, and demonstrate the spiritual rewards of love and attention to one's native landscape.
Send $19.99 for Supplements and Freedom: The Chapbook
By Noah Berlatsky. This satirical chapbook of found-poetry and hybrid texts includes a pantoum based on Joe Rogan's right-wing talk radio rants, absurd diagrams and multiple-choice questions mashing up the Graduate Record Exam with The Artist's Way, and a Swinburne double sestina featuring Jordan Peterson's pronouncements about masculinity and lobsters. It's like scrolling social media while dropping acid.
