Book cover for Analog Days: a novella by Damion Searls (Coffee House Press): Acclaimed translator (whose translation of A New Name was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize) Damion Searls's exuberant debut novella navigates the bittersweet tug-of-war between nostalgia and living life meaningfully in a world buzzing with information overload. https://coffeehousepress.org/products/analog-days
Book cover for The Dead & The Living & The Bridge by MC Hyland, ill. by Jeff Peterson (Meekling Press): In the tradition of Montaigne’s Essais and Anne Carson’s Short Talks, MC Hyland’s poem-essays weave together the conceptual and the material, leaving a trace of thought-in-flight. Originating from a moment (pre- and mid-pandemic) when Hyland taught canonical British literature as a contingent university worker, the essays in The Dead and the Living and the Bridge take up the topics of grief, gender, art materials, capitalism, and close reading. “What I loved,” Hyland writes, “was the dead and the living and the bridge my voice sometimes made between the two.” This voice casts spells to summon clarity against institutional failures and personal and global losses, while placing thinking in its proper context: conversation, shared worldbuilding, and a love that touches both the living and the dead. https://meeklingpress.com/deadlivingbridge/
Book cover for The Wanderers by Mphuthumi Ntabeni (Catalyst Press): Ruru’s father, a South African freedom fighter, was exiled to Tanzania before she was born, leaving Ruru and her mother to fend for themselves in the township they called home. So when a fatal bus accident claims her mother’s life, Ruru is adrift. Haunted by her mother’s absence, another loss sits heavy on Ruru’s heart: that of her father, who never returned to the family, or country, he claimed to love. When she learns of his passing, Ruru grieves for the man she never knew, and the answers she would never find. She seeks solace in Tanzania, where she strikes up an unlikely friendship with her father’s widow. https://www.catalystpress.org/all-content/the-wanderers
Book cover for Wrecks by Erin L. McCoy (Noemi Press): Wrecks is a collection of poems inspired by the great auk, a flightless seabird driven to extinction in the mid-1800s. The last two known members of the species were killed on Eldey Island, Iceland, in 1844. The auk was repeatedly described by those who killed the bird as making human-like gestures and sounds, including sighs. Wrecks investigates how the human–nonhuman binary and the dehumanization it enables makes space for violence—against animals and the environment, but also against other humans. It explores the colonial systems that drive extinction, and the hierarchical structure by which hegemonic powers decide what is—and what is not—human. It engages the author’s experience of dehumanization as an atheist growing up in the conservative South; it also interrogates her complicity in systems of structural racism, and her inheritance as the descendant of colonizers. https://www.noemipress.org/catalog/poetry/wrecks/
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