Full-length and chapbooks are included in this list. Last updated: 3/1/2021
Airlie Press
Again by Jennifer Perrine (September 1, price $16). Jennifer Perrine is the author of three books of poetry: No Confession, No Mass (winner of the Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Award and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize); In the Human Zoo; and The Body Is No Machine. A fourth book, Again, is forthcoming from Airlie Press in 2020.
Alice James Books
The Voice of Sheila Chandra by Kazim Ali (October, price $15.95). Poet, editor, and prose writer Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom to Muslim parents of Indian, Iranian and Egyptian descent. He received a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Albany-SUNY, and an M.F.A. from New York University. His books encompass several volumes of poetry, including Sky Ward, winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; The Far Mosque, winner of Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award; The Fortieth Day; All One’s Blue; and the cross-genre text Bright Felon. His novels include Quinn’s Passage and The Disappearance of Seth. Ali is an associate professor of Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College. His new book of poems, Inquisition, will be released in the Spring of 2018.
Inheritance by Taylor Johnson (November, price $16.95). Fred Moten writes: “The inheritance of the ones who cannot have and are not one is passed on lyrically, in the terrible arrangements we make with pleasure against pleasure. Knowing all about this runs parallel to poetry before crossing over, going deeper, into the general song of being sung through, of being lengthened beyond what I can know. Taylor Johnson beautifully and miraculously extends that way, ‘So I’m singing.’ I’m singing with them, about them, because of them.”
Amazon
the sun by Alexis Clare (February, $9.99). "i hate that i made myself remember how good it felt to be held by you" the second installment of the sun and the moon series (#2 of 3), focusing on the sun, and the light and the burns it brings. Alexis Clare is a poet, comic, and clearly, a Cancer Venus. They love love, everybody in this world, and television.
Grace Period: A Serial Antipoem by Kenning JP Garcia (Date and price TBD).
Grace Period is a book written in bursts that attempt to convey thoughts and observations in a diaristic and hyperreal approach. The entirety of the book was written in little blocks of time before work or even as work was to begin and thus much of this was written in that acceptable period of lateness that the employer provides for its workers. It is in several ways a tribute to the recently deceased Nicanor Parra as well as David Antin.
Poetry for Milennials by Lauren Hamilton (February 27, $11.55).
Anstruther Press
With Both Hands by Elizabeth Mudenyo (September 23, $10). Elizabeth Mudenyo is a poet, artist and arts organizer in Toronto. She was a fellow of the 2018 Poetry Incubator in Chicago, a participant of the 2020 Hurston/Wright Poetry Weekend with Danez Smith, Diaspora Dialogues Short Form Mentorship Program with Olive Senior, and the DreamYard’s Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium. Her recent publications include Write Magazine, Plenitude Magazine, carte-blanche, HELD magazine and CV2. Her first poetry chapbook,With Both Hands, is available through Anstruther Press.
Augury Books
Who's Your Daddy? by Arisa White (Fall, price TBD). Who’s Your Daddy?, a hybrid memoir combining poetry and creative nonfiction, is a meditation on paternal absences, intergenerational trauma, and toxic masculinity. Who’s Your Daddy? asks us to consider how the relationships we are born into can govern us, even through absence, and shape the dynamics we find and forge as we grow. White lyrically moves across distance and time, from Brooklyn to California to Guyana. Her book enacts rituals that plumb the interior reaches of the heart to assemble disconnected and estranged parts into something whole, tender, and strong.
Autumn House Press
Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer by Eric Tran (March, $16.95). In The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer, Eric Tran contends with the aftermath of a close friend’s suicide while he simultaneously explores the complexities of being a gay man of color. At the intersection of queerness, loss, and desire, Tran uses current events, such as the Pulse nightclub tragedy, pop culture references, and comic book allusions to create a unique and textured poetry debut. He employs an unexpected pairing of prayer and fantasy allowing readers to imagine a world of queer joy and explore how grief can feel otherworldly.
Birds, LLC
Savage Pageant by Jessica Q. Stark (March, price TBD). Savage Pageant recounts the history of the defunct zoo, Jungleland, which housed Hollywood's show animals up until its closure in 1969. In it, Stark explores the concept of US American spectacle and its historic ties to celebrity culture, the maternal body, racist taxonomies, the mistreatment of animals, and ecological violence. With a hybrid, documentary poetics, Savage Pageant reveals how we attempt to narrate and control geographical space and how ghosts (remainders, the sketch, unfinished stories) collapse the tidy corners of our collective, accumulative histories.
Black Lawrence Press
sick by Jody Chan (August, price $16.95). Jody Chan is a writer, organizer, Taiko drummer, and therapist-in-training based in Toronto. They are the poetry editor for Hematopoeisis, a 2017 VONA alum, a member of the Winter Tangerine Workshops Team, and the 2018 winner of the Third Coast Poetry Contest. Their first chapbook is published with Damaged Goods Press. Their work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is published in BOAAT, Looseleaf Magazine, Nat. Brut, The Shade Journal, and elsewhere. They can be found online at www.jodychan.com and offline in bookstores or dog parks.
Bull City Press
Capable Monster by Marlin M. Jenkins (February 18, $12). Capable Monsters moves through entries of the pokémon encyclopedia—the Pokédex—as a way to navigate concerns of identity: otherness, what it means to be considered a monster, how we fit into a larger societal ecosystem. To make space for the validity of oft-dismissed subject material, Marlin M. Jenkins asserts the symbolic, thematic, and narrative richness of worlds like the world of Pokémon: his poems use pokémon as a way to explore cataloguing, childhood, race, queerness, violence, and the messiness of being a human in a world of humans.
Button Poetry
Birthright by George Abraham (April 7, $16). Birthright is a book that balances the weight of place. The pride and shame and worth of homeland. Palestine, a homeland under siege and under scrutiny from a world that doesn’t occupy its borders. It is a book of immense nuance, pulling together all corners of the author’s pride in home, but also a desire to understand the violent cycles of the American machinery of war.
Co-Conspirator Press + Women's Center for Creative Work
The Monumental Misrememberings by Mimi Tempestt (November 13, price TBD) is a meditation on death. It’s a curious insight on the creative and violent ways in which black girls, women, trans women and femmes often become displaced, experience death, and subjugation as a result of patriarchal systems in America. This debut collection of poems by Mimi Tempestt operates through this specific lens, not to romanticize the pain of black femme bodies, but to bring light to this sadistic truth. When we turn on the television, when we log into social media, when we look in the mirror, the normalcy of how often and creatively black women are murdered weighs on our conscience. The Monumental Misrememberings unearths our unwillingness to grapple with these violences, and places front and center the realities faced by black femmes.
Coffee House Press
The Malevolent Volume by Justin Phillip Reed (April 7, price TBD). The Malevolent Volume explores the myths and transformations of black being, on a continuum between the monstrous and the sublime. Subverting celebrated classics of poetry and mythology and examining horrors from contemporary film and cultural fact, National Book Award winner Justin Phillip Reed engages darkness as an aesthetic to conjure the revenant animus that lurks beneath the exploited civilities of marginalized people. In these poems, Reed finds agency in the other-than-human identities assigned to those assaulted by savageries of the state. In doing so, he summons a retaliatory, counterviolent Black spirit to revolt and to inhabit the revolting.
Duke University Press
Dub: Finding Ceremonies by Alexis Pauline Gumbs (February, $24.95). The concluding volume in a poetic trilogy, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's Dub: Finding Ceremony takes inspiration from theorist Sylvia Wynter, dub poetry, and ocean life to offer a catalog of possible methods for remembering, healing, listening, and living otherwise. In these prose poems, Gumbs channels the voices of her ancestors, including whales, coral, and oceanic bacteria, to tell stories of diaspora, indigeneity, migration, blackness, genius, mothering, grief, and harm. Tracing the origins of colonialism, genocide, and slavery as they converge in Black feminist practice, Gumbs explores the potential for the poetic and narrative undoing of the knowledge that underpins the concept of Western humanity. Throughout, she reminds us that dominant modes of being human and the oppression those modes create can be challenged, and that it is possible to make ourselves and our planet anew.
Entre Ríos
Las Confesiones by Fabián O Iriarte trans. by Lawrence Schimel (Fall, price TBD). Fabián O. Iriarte was born in Laprida, in the province of Buenos Aires, in 1963. Since 1979 he lives in Mar del Plata. He holds a PhD in Humanities from the University of Texas in Dallas and teaches comparative literature and English-language Literature at the National University of Mar de Plata. His books of poetry include Guaridas de huir el mundo (Mar del Plata: Melusina, 2000), La intemperie sin fin (Mar del Plata: Melusina, 2001), La mudanza (Mar del Plata: Gogol, 2009), Devoción por el azar (Buenos Aires: Bajo la Luna, 2010), Cuentas por saldar (Buenos Aires: Ediciones en Danza, 2010), Las confesiones (Buenos Aires: Huesos de Jibia, 2012), La Caja P (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Dock, 2012), Litmus test (Santa Fe: UNL, 2013), El punto suspensivo (Batán: Letra Sudaca, 2014) y Las causas del desconcierto (Buenos Aires: Zindo & Gafuri, 2016).
Lawrence Schimel (New York, 1971) writes in both Spanish and English and has published over 100 books in many different genres–including fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and comics–and for both children and adults. He has published two poetry chapbooks written in English: Fairy Tales for Writers and Deleted Names (both from A Midsummer Night's Press) and one written in Spanish, Desayuno en la cama (Egales). He has also edited various anthologies of poetry, including Ells s'estimen. Poemes d'amor entre homes (Llibres de l'Index), Best Gay Poetry 2008 (A Midsummer Night's Press), and De Chueca al cielo. 100 poemas celebrando la diversidad LGTBI (Transexualia). He has won the Lambda Literary Award twice, for PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality (with Carol Queen; Cleis) and First Person Queer (with Richard Labonté, Arsenal Pulp), and has been a finalist for the Lammy 13 other times.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG)
Here is The Sweet Hand by francine j. harris (August 4, $25). The poems in Here is the Sweet Hand explore solitude as a way of seeing. In particular, the speakers in francine j. harris’ third collection explore the mystique, and myth, of female loneliness as it relates to blackness, aging, landscape and artistic tradition. The speakers in these poems are often protagonists. Against the backdrop of numerous American cities and towns, and in a time of political uncertainty, they are heroines in their quest to find logic through their own sense of the world.
The poems here are interested in the power of observation. But if there is authority in the individual versus the collective, Here is the Sweet Hand also poses questions about the source of that power, or where it may lead.
Pale Colors in a Tall Field by Carl Phillips (March 3, $23). Carl Phillips’s new poetry collection, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, is a meditation on the intimacies of thought and body as forms of resistance. The poems are both timeless and timely, asking how we can ever truly know ourselves in the face of our own remembering and inevitable forgetting. Here, the poems metaphorically argue that memory is made up of various colors, with those most prominent moments in a life seeming more vivid, though the paler colors are never truly forgotten. The poems in Pale Colors in a Tall Field approach their points of view kaleidoscopically, enacting the self’s multiplicity and the difficult shifts required as our lives, in turn, shift. This is one of Phillips’s most tender, dynamic, and startling books yet.
Four Way Books
Fantasia for the Man in the Blue by Tommye Blount (March 2, $16.95). In his debut collection Fantasia for the Man in Blue, Tommye Blount orchestrates a chorus of distinct, unforgettable voices that speak to the experience of the black, queer body as a site of desire and violence. A black man’s late-night encounter with a police officer—the titular “man in blue”—becomes an extended meditation on a dangerous erotic fantasy. The late Luther Vandross, resurrected here in a suite of poems, addresses the contradiction between his public persona and a life spent largely in the closet: “It’s a calling, this hunger / to sing for a love I’m too ashamed to want for myself.” In “Aaron McKinney Cleans His Magnum,” the convicted killer imagines the barrel of the gun he used to bludgeon Matthew Shepard as an “infant’s small mouth” as well as the “sad calculator” that was “built to subtract from and divide a town.” In these and other poems, Blount viscerally captures the experience of the “other” and locates us squarely within these personae.
The Life Assignment by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado (September, $16.95). Ricardo Alberto Maldonado was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He is the translator of Dinapiera Di Donato’s Colaterales/Collateral (Akashic Press/National Poetry Series, 2013) and author of The Life Assignment, forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2020. He has received fellowships from CantoMundo, Queer|Arts|Mentorship and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He lives in New York City.
Future Poem
Wild Peach by sean d. henry-smith (Date and price TBD). Sean? Sian? Swan? S*an D. Henry-Smith is an artist and writer working primarily in poetry, photography and performance, engaging Black experimentalisms and collaborative practices. S*an received their BA in Studio Art from Hamilton College, and have been awarded fellowships, grants, and residencies from Denniston Hill, Lotos Foundation, and Antenna/Paper Machine. S*an’s words and photographs have appeared in Apogee Journal, FACT, The Felt, The New York Times, Triple Canopy, and elsewhere. S*an collaborates with Imani Elizabeth Jackson as MouthFeel; their forthcoming book Consider the Tongue explores histories of aquatic labor and Black food through poetry, performance, and ephemeral practices. The author of two chapbooks, Wild Peach, S*an’s first full length collection of poems and photographs, is forthcoming on Futurepoem.
Game Over Books
Big Feelings by GiGi Bella (April, $12). GiGi Bella is an award-winning performance poet, artist and social justice advocate. She was ranked 10th in the world at the 2017 Women of the World Poetry Slam. She is a two-time Bronx poetry champion with Project X, a member of the first Project X Bronx Slam team to represent at the 2018 National Poetry Slam, the 2017 Vox Pop Champion and a 2017 Fem Slam Finalist. She was featured on the cover of New Mexico’s favorite free magazine, the Weekly Alibi. She is currently working as the resident Poetry Teaching Artist at the renowned 92nd Street Y and a teaching artist at spoken word hub, Urban Word, in New York City. She recently made her directorial debut with Lin Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights and the first all POC cast in the history of Albuquerque community theater. She was named the 2017 Albuquerque Women’s Slam Poetry Champion. She is a two-time member of the Albuquerque Poetry Slam Team (2013, 2016) and was named a National Semi-Finalist and a Group Piece Champion at the National Poetry Slam in 2013 and 2016, respectively. She spoke on the NM Senate Floor for the 2017 Anti-Racism Day advocating for its first ever Anti-Racism bill, and was a featured speaker at the 2017 Santa Fe Women’s March. Her book, 22, is available through Swimming With Elephants Publications.
Sana Sana by Ariana Brown (January 20, $15). Ariana Brown is a queer Black Mexican American poet based in her hometown of San Antonio, Texas. Ariana holds a B.A. in African Diaspora Studies and Mexican American Studies from UT Austin as well as an MFA in Poetry from the University of Pittsburgh. She is the recipient of two Academy of American Poets Prizes and a 2014 national collegiate poetry slam champion. An alum of Brave New Voices, Ariana's work has been featured in PBS, Huffington Post, For Harriet, and Remezcla. Ariana, who has been dubbed a "part-time curandera," has performed across the U.S. at venues such as the San Antonio Guadalupe Theater, Harvard University, Tucson Poetry Festival, and the San Francisco Opera Theatre. When she is not onstage, she is probably eating an avocado, listening to Ozuna, or validating Black girl rage in all its miraculous forms. Her work is published in Nepantla, Muzzle, African Voices, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and ¡Manteca!: An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets from Arte Público Press. Follow Ariana on Twitter and Instagram @arianathepoet.
Cut Woman by Dena Igusti (August 24, $15 pre-order, $18 when released) is a poetry collection navigating grief, loss, and anticipated mourning as a queer non-binary Muslim Indonesian survivor of female genital mutilation. George Abraham says, "From “night // fall” to “day//break,” Igusti’s speaker forces readers to linger in the spaces both within and between words, bodies, and countries, even when those spaces do not yet exist: “altar of my body did i give you // a forever // i could not promise? // …// an altered kind of grief?” These poems slice, piece, project only to gut open. These poems remember despite Memory: “i purposely forget // the prayer for when someone dies // inna-illahi-something // i always remember how to start // grieving // but // never when or how to let it out of my mouth.” Dena Igusti is a poet of undying urgency - this is a bold, heart-shattering chapbook debut.”
Glass Poetry
Self-Portrait as Yurico by Bailey Cohen (May, price TBD). Bailey Cohen is a queer Ecuadorian-American poet studying at NYU. He was a finalist for the 2018 Boulevard Contest for Emerging Poets as well as the runner-up for the 2018 Raleigh Review Laux / Millar Poetry Prize. Besides these publications, his work appears in or is forthcoming from journals such as The Shallow Ends, Noble / Gas Quarterly, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Okay Donkey, and more. He serves as a reader for Frontier Poetry and as contributing editor and founder of Alegrarse: A Journal of Close Readings. He loves everyone Latinx.
Golden Antelope
To All the Yellow Flowers by Raya Tuffaha (March, $16). To All the Yellow Flowers is a narrative poetry collection that tells a story of healing and understanding. It’s about learning to rebuild, to rekindle. Raya Tuffaha’s poetry mostly focuses on parallels: those we cannot fully draw, those we do not wish to see, and all the ones between. She tackles questions of Palestinian-American and Muslim identity, mental illness, queerness, femininity, diaspora, belonging, heritage, and the language we use to discuss it all. Most importantly, Tuffaha strives to honor those who came before her as she writes her own future into existence.
Graywolf Press
Guillotine by Eduardo C. Corral (August 4, $16). Guillotine traverses desert landscapes cut through by migrants, the grief of loss, betrayal’s lingering scars, the border itself—great distances in which violence and yearning find roots. Through the voices of undocumented immigrants, border patrol agents, and scorned lovers, award-winning poet Eduardo C. Corral writes dramatic portraits of contradiction, survival, and a deeply human, relentless interiority. With extraordinary lyric imagination, these poems wonder about being unwanted or renounced. What do we do with unrequited love? Is it with or without it that we would waste away?
Catrachos by Roy Guzmán (May 5, $16). A name for the people of Honduras, Catrachos is a term of solidarity and resilience. In these unflinching, riveting poems, Roy G. Guzmán reaches across borders—between life and death and between countries—invoking the voices of the lost. Part immigration narrative, part elegy, and part queer coming-of-age story, Catrachos finds its own religion in fantastic figures such as the X-Men, pop singers, and the “Queerodactyl,” which is imagined in a series of poems as a dinosaur sashaying in the shadow of an oncoming comet, insistent on surviving extinction. With exceptional energy, humor, and inventiveness, Guzmán’s debut is a devastating display of lyrical and moral complexity—an introduction to an immediately captivating, urgently needed voice.
Honeysuckle Press
Autobiography of the boi Venus by kiki nicole (Date and price TBD). kiki nicole is a multimedia artist/writer currently based in Charlotte, North Carolina. They are a 2016 Pink Door Fellow, a 2018 Fellow of The Watering Hole, & a 2018 Winter Tangerine Fellow. In 2017, they wrote for the Trans Day of Resilience campaign spearheaded by non-profit organization, Forward Together. They work to explore a Black, queer, femme & genderless universe that un/bodies, un/genders, & re/news, with a focus on identity & mental illness. They are a co-curator & collaborator of Portland-based experimental film & new media arts project, the first and the last, which seeks to archive, uplift, & nourish new media & experimental work from black women, femmes, & non-men through film screenings & skill shares. kiki hopes to lend a voice for the void in which Black femmes not only exist in plain view, but thrive.
Deus Ex Nigrum by Jasmine Reid (January, price TBD). Jasmine Reid is a twice trans poet-child of flowers. A 2018 Poets House Fellow and MFA candidate at Cornell University, her work has been published or is forthcoming in Muzzle Magazine, Yemassee Journal, WUSGOOD?, and WATER. Also a finalist for the 2018 Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes Poetry Prize, Jasmine was born and raised in Baltimore, MD, and is currently based in Brooklyn, NY.
MCD x FSG
dayliGht by Roya Marsh (March 31, $16). In her stunning debut, written in protest to an absence of representation, Marsh recalls her early life and the attendant torments of a butch Black woman coming of age in America. In lush, powerful, and vulnerable verses, dayliGht unpacks traumas to unearth truths, revealing a deep well of resilience, a cutting sense of irony, and an astonishing fresh talent. This is a dazzling debut from a necessary new voice, at once a clarion call for stories of Black women and a rebuke of broken notions of sexuality and race.
Milkweed Editions
The Galleons by Rick Barot (February, $16). These poems are engaged in the work of recovery, making visible what is often intentionally erased: the movement of domestic workers on a weekday morning in Brooklyn; a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, fondly sharing photos of his dog; the departure and destination points of dozens of galleons between 1564 and 1815.
Nightingale and Sparrow Press
you were supposed to be my friend by Ashley Elizabeth (June, price TBD). Friendships between men and women don’t always last forever… not without someone wanting more. At least, it’s harder not to. It is easy to fall for someone you spend most of your time talking to. This chapbook explores when a relationship turns from friendship to friends with benefits to someone falling in a love that may not be reciprocated. Ten years is a long time to intertwine two souls. From middle school to early adulthood, we survived a lot. For having such searing physical and emotional chemistries, our communication skipped heartbeats with lies and potholes. We’ve been friends for too long. Of course feelings got in the way. Of course I fell for you, and of course I lied about it. Who wouldn’t? I lost you anyway.
Noemi Press
Bareback Nightfall by Joshua Escobar (March 4, price TBD). Bareback Nightfall is a four part experimental erotica composed by different personas--DJ Ashtrae, the Ides of Arcana, Doctor Electronic, and little piñatas. Each section engages different aspects of pleasure, pain, intimacy, torment, social knowledge, and the body. The book includes 7 different typefaces, a violent gay relationship later abandoned, emotional back-and-forth between queer friends, an unfinished medical exposé about corruption in the health care industry, and a rave thrown by piñatas. Bareback Nightfall is set in a dystopia where there is no difference between nightlife and the day-to-day. Joshua Escobar is the author of the chapbooks Caljforkya Voltage and xxox fm. He was a 2019 Shandaken: Storm King Fellow, the Dean's Fellow in Writing at the MFA Program at Bard College, and a Merit Fellow at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. He is a Regional Chair (California) for CantoMundo, and an Assistant Professor of Composition and Literature at Santa Barbara City College.
Nomadic Press
to love and mourn in the age of displacement by Alán Peláez López (January, $12). Alán Peláez López is an AfroIndigenous poet, installation, and adornment artist from Oaxaca, México. They are the author of Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien (The Operating System, 2020) and to love and mourn in the age of displacement (Nomadic Press, 2020). Their poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and “Best of the Net,” as well as selected to appear in Best New Poets (University of Virginia Press, 2020) and Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University Press, 2020). Peláez López’s work is published (and/or forthcoming) in POETRY, The Georgia Review, Puerto Del Sol, Everyday Feminism, Rewire News, Splinter News & elsewhere. They have received fellowships and/or residencies from Submittable, the Museum of the African Diaspora, VONA/Voices, and UC Berkeley. They live in Oakland, CA.
Oni House Press
a black woman a surrealist by Sandra T (Fall, price TBD). a black woman as a surrealist is the exploration of blackness through dreams, through the uncanny, through the fantastic, and the divine. This is Sandra T's personal journey through spirituality and her identity as a surrealist and her marrying of the two.
Poetry Society of America
Here I am O My God by Dujie Tahat (Winter, $8). Fady Joudah says, Here I am O My God is a spiritual text laden with swerves, gravity, and tragicomedy. It’s an echo of the Abrahamic contract with the divine concerning the eternally elemental we each carry within."
Red Hen Press
After Rubén by Francisco Aragón (May 5, $17.95). After Rubén unfolds as a decades-long journey in poems and prose, braiding the personal, the political & the historical, interspersing along the way English-language versions & riffs of a Spanish-language master: Rubén Darío. Whether it’s biting portraits of public figures, or nuanced sketches of his father, Francisco Aragón has assembled his most expansive collection to date, evoking his native San Francisco, but also imagining ancestral spaces in Nicaragua. Readers will encounter pieces that splice lines from literary forebearers, a moving elegy to a sibling, a surprising epistle from the grave. In short: a book that is both trajectory & mosaic, complicating the conversation surrounding poetry in the Americas—above all as it relates to Latinx and queer poetics.
Self-Published
Leaky Faucets by Jacob Lasher (January 18, price TBD).
Sibling Rivalry Press
original kink by Jubi Arriola-Headley (October 20, $18). Jubi Arriola-Headley is a blacqueer poet, storyteller, & first-generation United Statesian born to Bajan (Barbadian) parents. His first collection of poems, original kink, is forthcoming (October 2020) from Sibling Rivalry Press. Jubi’s a 2018 PEN America Emerging Voices fellow, a 2nd year MFA candidate in poetry @ the University of Miami, & an alumnx of the VONA & Lambda Literary writing communities. Jubi & his husband split their time between South Florida & Guatemala, where he hopes to pick up enough Spanish to figure out what his in-laws are saying about him.
More Than Organs by Kay Ulanday Barrett (March 12, price $18). A love letter to Brown, Queer, and Trans futures, Kay Ulanday Barrett’s More Than Organs questions “whatever wholeness means” for bodies always in transit, for the safeties and dangers they silo. These poems remix people of color as earthbenders, replay “the choreography of loss” after the 2015 Pulse shooting, and till joy from the cosmic sweetness of a family’s culinary history. Barrett works “to build / a shelter // of / everyone / [they] meet,” from aunties to the legendary Princess Urduja to their favorite air sign. More Than Organs tattoos grief across the knuckles of its left hand and love across the knuckles of its right, leaving the reader physically changed by the intensity of experience, longing, strength, desire, and the need, above all else, to survive.
Connor & Seal by Jee Leong Koh (March 10, $15). Inspired by Rita Dove's groundbreaking Thomas and Beulah, Connor & Seal: A Harlem Story in 47 Poems is a masterful queering of poetic lineage. With oracular grace and whimsy, these poems innovate the public and private axes of gay love in a tumescent future. Jee Leong Koh is the author of Steep Tea (Carcanet), named a Best Book of the Year by UK's Financial Times and a Finalist by Lambda Literary in the USA. Jee Leong Koh is the author of Steep Tea (Carcanet), named a Best Book of the Year by UK's Financial Times and a Finalist by Lambda Literary in the USA. He has published three other books of poems, Payday Loans (Poets Wear Prada Press, Math Paper Press), Equal to the Earth (Bench Press), and Seven Studies for a Self Portrait (Bench Press), and a collection of zuihitsu, The Pillow Book (Math Paper Press, Awai Books), which was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize. His work has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Malay, Russian, and Latvian. Jee lives in New York City. He is the founder of the literary non-profit Singapore Unbound, which organizes the biennial Singapore Literature Festival in New York City and the monthly Second Saturdays Reading Series, and publishes works of poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction through the Gaudy Boy imprint, and book reviews and artist interviews on SP Blog.
Skull & Wind Press
Dear Dorothy: A Home Grown Fairytale by Suzi F. Garcia (September, $9). Dear Dorothy: A Home Grown Fairytale is an chapbook that engages with The Wizard of Oz, a reimagining of coming home after being in a magical land with a girl you love. These poems connect the original fable with ideas of sexuality, mental illness, Latinidad, and more.
Itinerario del olvido / Itinerary of Forgetting by Nelson Simón trans. by Lawrence Schimel (March, $9). Nelson Simón, born in Pinar del Río, Cuba in 1965, is the award-winning author of nine books of poetry and a collection of short stories. He has won the Premio de la Crítica Literaria, awarded annually by the Cuban Book Institute, seven times, as well as other prizes both within Cuba and abroad, including the Premio UNEAC de Poesía, the Premio La Edad de Oro in poetry and was first runner up in the Casa de las Américas Poetry Prize. He is the author of the poetry collections: Ciudad de nadie, El peso de la isla, Criatura de isla, Con la misma levedad de un naúfrago, Para no ser reconocido, A la sombra de los muchachos en flor, De la mala memoria y el verano, Las viles Maniobras, and El humano ejercicio de las conversaciones.
Lawrence Schimel (New York, 1971) writes in both Spanish and English and has published over 100 books in many different genres–including fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and comics–and for both children and adults. He has published two poetry chapbooks written in English: Fairy Tales for Writers and Deleted Names (both from A Midsummer Night's Press) and one written in Spanish, Desayuno en la cama (Egales). He has also edited various anthologies of poetry, including Ells s'estimen. Poemes d'amor entre homes (Llibres de l'Index), Best Gay Poetry 2008 (A Midsummer Night's Press), and De Chueca al cielo. 100 poemas celebrando la diversidad LGTBI (Transexualia). He has won the Lambda Literary Award twice, for PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality (with Carol Queen; Cleis) and First Person Queer (with Richard Labonté, Arsenal Pulp), and has been a finalist for the Lammy 13 other times.
Spork Press
Chinese Girl Strikes Back by Dorothy Chan (Date and price TBD). Dorothy Chan is the author of Chinese Girl Strikes Back (Spork Press, forthcoming), Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, March 2019), Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold (Spork Press, 2018), and the chapbook Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017). She is a 2019 recipient of the Philip Freund Prize in Creative Writing from Cornell University, a 2014 finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, The Cincinnati Review, Quarterly West, The Offing, and elsewhere. Chan is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and Poetry Editor of Hobart. Chan received her PhD in poetry at Florida State University, her MFA in poetry at Arizona State University, and her BA in English (cum laude) with a minor in History of Art at Cornell University.
SurVision Books
Liminal Zenith by Clayre Benzadón (Date TBD, €6.99). Clayre Benzadón is currently a second-year MFA student at the University of Miami and Broadsided Press’s Instagram editor. She has been published by The Acentos Review, HerStory, Rat’s Ass Review, and other literary magazines / journals. Additionally she has had the opportunity of attending The Miami’s Writer’s Institute and The Ashbery Home School, a week-long poetry writing workshop/conference in Miami.
Tammy Journal
So Dark the Gap by Rob Colgate (February, $13). Rob Colgate is a poet from Evanston, Illinois. His work appears in Duende, Bomb Cyclone, and Burning House, among others; he is the author of the chapbook So Dark the Gap, forthcoming from Tammy in early 2020. He holds a degree in psychology from Yale University and is currently pursuing his MFA in poetry with the New Writers Project at UT Austin.
Tarpaulin Sky
Descent by Lauren Russell (June 2, $18). In 2013, poet Lauren Russell acquired a copy of the diary of her great-great-grandfather, Robert Wallace Hubert, a Captain in the Confederate Army. After his return from the Civil War, he fathered twenty children by three of his former slaves. One of those children was the poet’s great-grandmother. Over several years of research, Russell would seek the words to fill the diary’s omissions. The result is Descent, a hybrid work of verse, prose, images, and documents traversing centuries as its author investigates relationships to race and legacy in this era of Confederate flag controversies, police brutality, Black Lives Matter, and the ascent of a President Trump. She also imagines the voice of her great-great-grandmother, Peggy Hubert, a black woman silenced by history. Descent is at once an investigation, a reclamation, and an insistence on making history as a creative act.
Texas Review Press
Special Education by Caroline M. Mar (October 1, price $19.95) is a new teacher’s journey to understanding herself, her students, and her world through the hard lessons her work life offers up. Questions of identity, failure, family, and connection surface as Mar’s primary speaker (a queer, neurotypical, Asian American woman) navigates the shifting divides of race, class, gender, and disability. Caroline Mei-Lin Mar is a high school health educator and poet. A San Francisco local, Carrie is doing her best to keep her gentrifying hometown queer and creative. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, an alumna of VONA, and a member of Rabble Collective. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, New England Review, CALYX, and Anomaly, among others. She has been granted residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Ragdale, and is a member of the board of Friends of Writers.
The Operating System
Hoax by Joey De Jesus (Date and price TBD). Joey De Jesus is candidate for New York State Assembly District 38 in Queens (Ridgewood, Glendale, Liberty Park, Forest Park and Woodhaven). PRIMARY JUNE 23! Hoax is a collection in four parts: a book, a scroll, a deck of talismans and a map by which to read them. Each talisman corresponds to a star in the sky. The whole is a book of divination forthcoming with The Operating System in 2020. Joey lives in Ridgewood. Joey is the author of NOCT- The Threshold of Madness (The Atlas Review, 2019) and co-author, alongside Sade LaNay, of Writing Voice into the Archive vol. 1, edited by Jennifer Tamayo with support from UC Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender. Joey received the 2019-20 BRIC ArtFP Project Room Commission and 2017 NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship in Poetry. Poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Artists Space, Barrow Street, Bettering American Poetry, The Brooklyn Rail, Brooklyn Magazine, The Newtown Literary Review, The New Museum and elsewhere. Joey is an adjunct lecturer at Borough of Manhattan Community College and a member of the Ridgewood Tenants Union. Joey is on hiatus from Apogee Journal, a literary non-profit committed to uplifting the voices of writers at the peripheries of literary inclusion and sits on the advisory board of No, Dear Magazine.
Rose Sun Water by Angel Dominguez (November, price TBD). Angel Dominguez is a Latinx poet and performance artist of Yucatec Mayan descent; the author of Desgraciado (Econo Textual Objects, 2017), and Black Lavender Milk (Timeless Infinite Light, 2015). His work can be found in Berkeley Poetry Review, Brooklyn Magazine, FENCE, NY Tyrant, Queen Mobs Teahouse, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @dandelionglitch or irl the redwoods, or ocean.
intergalactic travels: poems from a fugitive alien by Alán Peláez López (February, $24). Alán Peláez López is an AfroIndigenous poet, installation, and adornment artist from Oaxaca, México. They are the author of Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien (The Operating System, 2020) and to love and mourn in the age of displacement (Nomadic Press, 2020). Their poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and “Best of the Net,” as well as selected to appear in Best New Poets (University of Virginia Press, 2020) and Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University Press, 2020). Peláez López’s work is published (and/or forthcoming) in POETRY, The Georgia Review, Puerto Del Sol, Everyday Feminism, Rewire News, Splinter News & elsewhere. They have received fellowships and/or residencies from Submittable, the Museum of the African Diaspora, VONA/Voices, and UC Berkeley. They live in Oakland, CA.
Tupelo Press
Salat by Dujie Tahat (Winter, $12.95). Kaveh Akbar says, "Dujie Tahat’s Salat is a book of poems written in a compelling new form of the poet’s own invention that participate, fully — they praise, weep, spit, beg, laugh, choke, sing. In this murderous age it is increasingly unconscionable to be inert, in one’s living or in one’s art. Tahat tells us: “There’s a river in heaven, and I am the star that belongs to it.” Salat is boisterously, resoundingly alive."
Unsolicited Press
Even the Milky way is Undocumented by Amy Shimshon-Santo (September, $20). Amy Shimshon-Santo's Even the Milky way is Undocumented is a testament to the lost, the loved, the courageous. Each poem is the past and the future. Each page turns for those built by families that span political borders -- families that see borders as nothing more than lines drawn by an invisible hand that's long forgotten that we belong to the earth and not the other way around.
Ursus Americanus Press
dogteeth by Levi Cain (October 7, $12). Levi Cain is a queer writer from the Greater Boston Area who was born in California and raised in Connecticut. Further examples of their work can be found in Lunch Ticket, Red Queen Literary Magazine, and other publications.
Weslyean University Press
Un-American by Hafizah Geter (September 8, $35). Dancing between lyric and narrative, Hafizah Geter's debut collection moves readers through the fraught internal and external landscapes—linguistic, cultural, racial, familial—of those whose lives are shaped and transformed by immigration. The daughter of a Nigerian Muslim woman and a former Southern Baptist black man, Geter charts the history of a black family of mixed citizenships through poems imbued by migration, racism, queerness, loss, and the heartbreak of trying to feel at home in a country that does not recognize you. Through her mother's death and her father's illnesses, Geter weaves the natural world into the discourse of grief, human interactions, and socio-political discord. This collection thrums with authenticity and heart.
Wolsak & Wynn
Cephalopography 2.0 by Rasiqra Revulva (Spring, price TBD). Rasiqra Revulva is a Toronto-based poet, multi-media artist, editor, musician, and performer. She was recently awarded second place in the 2017 Blodwyn Memorial Prize for Emerging Writers; and is in the process of completing an Emerging Writers Mentorship with Diaspora Dialogues for a full-length collection inspired by the city of Toronto. Her debut chapbook of poetry and glitch-art illustration titled "Cephalopography" was published by words(on)pages press in October of 2016. Her band The Databats has recently signed to Slice Records, Australia, commencing with a re-release of their album "Chiropteratronic" in April of 2017.
YesYes Books
The Lion's Tamer Daughter by kemi alabi (August, $12). kemi alabi was born on a sunday in july. their poems and essays appear in the rumpus, guernica, catapult, boston review, best new poets 2019, the breakbeat poets vol. 2 and the illustrious elsewhere. kemi’s debut collection, the lion tamer’s daughter (yesyes books, august 2020), was selected as a boaat press, button poetry, and vinyl 45 chapbook prize finalist. they lead echoing ida, a forward together community of black women and nonbinary writers. find them in chicago or on the internet.
Salt Body Shimmer by Aricka Foreman (April, $18). Lyrical and rife with utterance, Salt Body Shimmer asks of the violence we inherit: who speaks from “the threshold throat” inside “the dark’s dark”? Interior driven and intimately political, Foreman invites us into a world where the evanesced and the living—tethered by a shared mythology—refuse scription. What lies beyond the body’s fragile question is troubled and reclaimed through horror, magic, repetition, and music. And what’s left is a cosmic dance floor, a sharp needle to the groove; the crackle beneath a voice embattled but not broken, lamenting What// is the body for if not this/ black writhe of being alive?
Ungovernable by Christina Olivares (October, $18). Christina Olivares is the author of No Map of the Earth Includes Stars (2015), winner of the 2014 Marsh Hawk Press Book Prize, and of the chaplet Interrupt (2015), published by Belladonna* Collaborative. Her chapbook DSM/Partial Manual, winner of the 2014 Vinyl 45s Chapbook Contest, is forthcoming. She is the recipient of two Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grants (2014 and 2010), and she has participated in the CantoMundo (fellow), VONA, Frost Place (fellow), and Bread Loaf Writers Conferences. She is the recipient of a 2015-2016 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Residency. She is a 2016 and 2017 AWP panelist. She was a visiting faculty member in the Rutgers-Newark poetry MFA program. Olivares is a queer Cubanx-American poet and K-12 educator from the Bronx in New York City. She earned an MFA from CUNY Brooklyn College in Poetry. She moves with Black Lives Matter and is a poverty abolitionist.
Moon Colony by Lily Zhou (October, $12). Lily Zhou is a freshman at Stanford University. Her work appears or is forthcoming in POETRY, Best New Poets 2017, Tin House, Sixth Finch, Vinyl, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and The Adroit Journal. She has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize.
*All writers have agreed to be on this list. If you want to recommend someone for this list, please email Luther the author name, title, price, press (self-published is fine), drop date. If recommending someone other than yourself, please include contact information. Email Luther at luther@shadeliteraryarts.org.