The World’s Poorest President Speaks Out
edit. Yoshimi Kusaba, illus. Gaku Nakagawa, trans. Andrew Wong | Enchanted Lion Books | 9781592702893 | August 2020
“The illustrations accompanying the text play with design and perspective, capturing Mujica’s words in ways that give them great immediacy and vividness. An ideal vehicle to engage children in a discussion on the meanings of poverty, having enough, and social justice.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
The Tree and the Vine
Dola de Jong, trans. Kristen Gehrman | Transit Books | 9781945492341 | May 2020
“A careful and muted lament about the sorrow of restraint.”—Wall Street Journal
Skyland
Andrew Durbin | Nightboat Books | 9781643620275 | July 2020
“The book revels in its loose, unfinished quality, weaving tidbits from Guibert’s life and work together with more immediate impressions and anecdotes.”—Harper’s Magazine
The Sprawl
Jason Diamond | Coffee House Press | 9781566895828 | August 2020
“A decade ago, Arcade Fire sang of 1970s childhoods spent in ‘The Suburbs’: Meant nothing at all. Jason Diamond would beg to differ. . . . [He] argues in a series of essays that the suburbs are essential to the development of American art and culture.”—Chicago Tribune
Indigo
Ellen Bass | Copper Canyon Press | 9781556595752 | April 2020
“Reflects the unique perspective of an unusual poetic life and the complex traumas and pleasures of a thoughtful, observant sensibility. Indigo engages the reader with its willingness to face the contradictions of being a human being head-on.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
The Strange Birds of Flannery O’Connor
Amy Alznauer, illus. Ping Zhu | Enchanted Lion Books | 9781592702954 | June 2020
“Like little Flannery, the reader is enveloped by the spaces within these pages. Swathes of green, reds, yellow and blue. We are both in them, and also outside of them, in that often as a reader, we seem to be dwelling in the very mind of Flannery O’Connor herself. Certainly the beautiful paintings in this book, but also the beautiful words vibrate with energy. The pages reveal the vibrancy of this strange woman from Georgia.”—Dappled Things
Toxicon and Arachne
Joyelle McSweeney | Nightboat Books | 9781643620183 | April 2020
“McSweeney remains clever, far cleverer than I, but by the end of this masterful double-text⎯ in which even the unequal parts seem appropriate to staggering grief⎯ any sensitive reader should feel as if they’ve shared in the poet’s singular struggle: that of finding some form, some phrase, that might convey what’s inconceivable.”—Brooklyn Rail
“McSweeney’s poetry collection is a tour de force, forcing us to rethink everything: poetry, loss, language itself.”—Kenyon Review
DMZ Colony
Don Mee Choi | Wave Books | 9781940696959 | April 2020
“The more Choi commemorates the space between languages—that frontier of memory, replication, doubleness, mirrors—the more DMZ Colony’s structure disintegrates and its innovations begin.”—Rain Taxi
God’s Green Earth
Noelle Kocot | Wave Books | 9781950268023 | May 2020
“God’s Green Earth has a wonderful ability to soothe and slow its readers, offering a silent plenitude of spirit and luxuriating in depictions of solitude.”—White Review
Animal
Dorothea Lasky | Wave Books | 9781940696911 | October 2019
“While Lasky has undergone dramatic changes in her five books of poetry—a movement toward simpler, in-phase lineation at the same time that her range of fragmentation and references and masks has grown wider—an unmistakable continuity persists.”—Kenyon Review
Doomstead Days
Brian Teare | Nightboat Books | 9781643620022 | April 2019
“Composed of eight long poems, Doomstead Days is rooted, for the most part, in walking excursions through both natural and built environments… The length and formal intricacy of many of these poems engenders a discursive lyric that is sometimes diaristic, at other times documentary.”—Under a Warm Green Linen
Neotenica
Joon Oluchi Lee | Nightboat Books | 9781643620206 | June 2020
“A totally original narrative that could perhaps only be published by a dynamic, independent press.”— Asian American Literature Fans
Kimono Couture: The Beauty of Chiso
Vivian Li, Christine Starkman, contributions by Riyo Kikuchi and Yukio Lippit | GILES | 9781911282662 | June 2020
“An insightful guide to the intricacy, character, and artistry of kimono design. Kimono Couture embroidery textile art magazine.”—Embroidery: The Textile Art Magazine