MFA Alumni Publications

“A rare feat for any book of poems, let alone a debut, in that the lines, wrought with such deft precision and care, mark the sum total of a life richly lived and felt at the seat of poetry...These poems care, first and foremost, for what they write of and through, which is a much needed—yet increasingly rare—achievement.” -- Ocean Vuong

Engaging the matriarchal structure of the beehive, Amanda Moore explores the various roles a woman plays in the family, the home, and the world at large. Beyond the productivity and excess, the sweetness and sting, Requeening brings together poems of motherhood and daughterhood, an evolving relationship of care and tending, responsibility and joy, dependence and deep love.

The poems that anchor this collection don’t shy away from the inevitability of a hive’s collapse and consider the succession of “requeening” a hive as “a new heart ready to be fed and broken and fed again.” The collapse is both physical—there are poems of illness and recovery—and emotional, as the mother-daughter relationship shifts, the daughter becoming separate, whole, and poised to displace. The liminal spaces these poems traverse in human relationships is echoed in a range of poetic and hybrid form, offering freedom and stricture as they contemplate the way we hold one another in love and grief.

Requeening is a vivid and surprising collection of poems from a winner of the National Poetry Series Open Competition. 

A Boston Globe Book We’re Most Excited About This Summer • An Electric Lit Queer Books You Need to Read this Summer • A Town & Country’s Best Book to Read This July • A Debutiful Noteworthy Debut of July • LitHub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2024

A gripping, provocative, and sensual debut novel about an art historian who journeys to a Greek island in pursuit of a found sculpture and quickly finds herself immersed in a cultural tug-of-war and a complicated love affair.

1999: An island off the southern coast of Greece. Art historian Elizabeth Clarke arrives with the intent to acquire a rare female sculpture. But what begins as a quest for a highly valued cultural artifact evolves into a trip that will force Elizabeth to contend with her career, her ambition, and her troubling history.

Disoriented by jet lag, debilitating migraines, and a dependence on prescription pills, Elizabeth turns to her charming and guileless translator to guide her around the labyrinthine island. Soon, the island’s lushness—its heat and light, its textures and tastes—take hold of Elizabeth. And when she’s introduced to her translator’s inscrutable wife—a subversive artist whose work seeks to deconstruct the female form—she becomes unexpectedly enthralled by her. But once the nude’s acquisition proves to be riskier than Elizabeth could have ever imagined, Elizabeth’s and the statue’s fate are called into question. To find a way out, Elizabeth must grapple with her past, the role she’s played in the global art trade, and the ethical fallouts her decisions could leave behind.

The Nude is an evocative and intense exploration of art, cultural theft, and what it means to be a woman helming morally complicated negotiations in a male-directed world.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION, BROOKLYN PUBLIC LIBRARY BOOK PRIZE, AND THE NEW AMERICAN VOICES AWARD • A BOOKLIST BEST BOOK OF 2023 • Set in the Arab immigrant enclave of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, following three siblings coming of age over the course of one Ramadan, 

“a moving look at family, survival, and celebration” (Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America). 

“A gorgeously written and profoundly intimate debut.” —Etaf Rum, author of New York Times bestseller A Woman Is No Man 

It’s the holy month of Ramadan, and twin sisters Amira and Lina are about to graduate high school in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. On the precipice of adulthood, they plan to embark on a summer of teenage revelry, trying on new identities and testing the limits of what they can get away with while still under their parents’ roof. But the twins’ expectations of a summer of freedom collide with their older brother’s return from prison, whose mysterious behavior threatens to undo the delicate family balance. 

Meanwhile, outside the family’s apartment, a storm is brewing in Bay Ridge. A raid on a local business sparks a protest that brings the Arab community together, and a senseless act of violence threatens to tear them apart. Everyone’s motives are called into question as an alarming sense of disquiet pervades the neighborhood. With everything spiraling out of control, how will Amira and Lina know who they can trust? 

A gorgeously written, intimate family story and a polyphonic portrait of life under the specter of Islamophobia, Between Two Moons challenges the reader to interrogate their own assumptions, asking questions of allegiance to faith, family, and community, and what it means to be a young Muslim in America.

“A touching, inventive novel about belonging and loss” (People) from the critically beloved, New York Times bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife and Inland 

“I marveled at the subtle beauty and precision of Obreht’s prose. . . Read in the context of today’s conflicts and injustices, climate emergencies, and political and racial divisions—together more dystopian than any dystopian novel—the book surprised me most with its undercurrent of hope.”—Jessamine Chan, author of The School for Good Mothers, in The New York Times (Editors’ Choice) 

A LIT HUB AND CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 

There’s the world you can see. And then there’s the one you can’t. Welcome to the Morningside. 

After being expelled from their ancestral home in a not-so-distant future, Silvia and her mother finally settle at the Morningside, a crumbling luxury tower in a place called Island City where Silvia’s aunt Ena serves as the superintendent. Silvia feels unmoored in her new life because her mother has been so diligently secretive about their family’s past, and because the once-vibrant city where she lives is now half-underwater. Silvia knows almost nothing about the place where she was born and spent her early years, nor does she fully understand why she and her mother had to leave. But in Ena there is an opening: a person willing to give the young girl glimpses into the folktales of her demolished homeland, a place of natural beauty and communal spirit that is lacking in Silvia’s lonely and impoverished reality. 

Enchanted by Ena’s stories, Silvia begins seeing the world with magical possibilities and becomes obsessed with the mysterious older woman who lives in the penthouse of the Morningside. Bezi Duras is an enigma to everyone in the building: She has her own elevator entrance and leaves only to go out at night and walk her three massive hounds, often not returning until the early morning. Silvia’s mission to unravel the truth about this woman’s life, and her own haunted past, may end up costing her everything. 

Startling, inventive, and profoundly moving, The Morningside is a novel about the stories we tell—and the stories we refuse to tell—to make sense of where we came from and who we hope we might become.

ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times; Entertainment Weekly; The Christian Science Monitor; The Kansas City Star; Library Journal

In a Balkan country mending from war, Natalia, a young doctor, is compelled to unravel the mysterious circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. Searching for clues, she turns to his worn copy of The Jungle Book and the stories he told her of his encounters over the years with “the deathless man.” But most extraordinary of all is the story her grandfather never told her—the legend of the tiger’s wife.

Weaving a brilliant latticework of family legend, loss, and love, Téa Obreht, hailed by Colum McCann as “the most thrilling literary discovery in years,” has spun a timeless novel that will establish her as one of the most vibrant, original authors of her generation.
 

"A breathtaking debut . . . filled with ghosts and demons who lurk in the Canadian north woods." —Andrew Abrahams, People

On the eve of his mother’s death, Stephen comes home to Sawgamet, a logging town where the dangers of working in the cuts are overshadowed by the dark mysteries and magic lurking in the woods. Thirty years after the mythical summer his grandfather returned to town on a quixotic search for his dead wife, Stephen confronts the painful losses in his own life.

Shortlisted for the 2011 Governor General's Literary Award • Shortlisted for The 2011 Center for Fiction's Flahery-Dunnan First Novel Prize • Shortlisted for the 2012 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award • Shortlisted for the 2011 Amazon.ca First Novel Award • Longlisted for the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize • Longlisted for the 2013 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award • Starred Review Publishers Weekly • Starred Review Quill & Quire
 

Maybe it’s the end of the world, but not for Candace Chen, a millennial, first-generation American and office drone meandering her way into adulthood in Ling Ma’s offbeat, wryly funny, apocalyptic satire, Severance.

"A stunning, audacious book with a fresh take on both office politics and what the apocalypse might bring." —Michael Schaub, NPR.org

“A satirical spin on the end times-- kind of like The Office meets The Leftovers.” --Estelle Tang, Elle

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: NPR * The New Yorker ("Books We Loved") * Elle * Marie Claire * Amazon Editors * The Paris Review (Staff Favorites) * Refinery29 * Bustle * Buzzfeed * BookPage * Bookish * Mental Floss * Chicago Review of Books * HuffPost * Electric Literature * A.V. Club * Jezebel * Vulture * Literary Hub * Flavorwire

Winner of the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award * Winner of the Kirkus Prize for Fiction * Winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award * Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel * A New York Times Notable Book of 2018 * An Indie Next Selection

Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. With the recent passing of her Chinese immigrant parents, she’s had her fill of uncertainty. She’s content just to carry on: She goes to work, troubleshoots the teen-targeted Gemstone Bible, watches movies in a Greenpoint basement with her boyfriend.

So Candace barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies cease operations. The subways screech to a halt. Her bosses enlist her as part of a dwindling skeleton crew with a big end-date payoff. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost.

Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a moving family story, a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale, and a hilarious, deadpan satire. Most important, it’s a heartfelt tribute to the connections that drive us to do more than survive.

A National Indie Bestseller
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Story Prize, and a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize
A Best Book of the Year at The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vogue, Houston Chronicle, Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, Mashable, Polygon, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal
A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice

“Uncanny and haunting . . . Genius.” —Michele Filgate, The Washington Post
“Dazzling.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air

What happens when fantasy tears the screen of the everyday to wake us up? Could that waking be our end?

In Bliss Montage, Ling Ma brings us eight wildly different tales of people making their way through the madness and reality of our collective delusions: love and loneliness, connection and possession, friendship, motherhood, the idea of home. A woman lives in a house with all her ex-boyfriends. A toxic friendship grows up around a drug that makes you invisible. An ancient ritual might heal you of anything—if you bury yourself alive.

These and other scenarios investigate the ways that the outlandish and the ordinary are shockingly, deceptively, heartbreakingly alike.

Winner of the 2011 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer's Residency Prize

Jose Perez Beduya’s first book Throng takes us "inside the bright wheel" where selfhood and community whirl along the event horizon of an elusive center—the fused question of the Singular and the Common. Jennifer Moxley, who selected Beduya as the winner of the 2011 Plonsker Emerging Writers Residency, writes that in this book "a shimmering subjectivity—sometimes singular, more often plural—emits an intermittent signal, coming in and out of view like some mysterious lost ‘other’ flashing a pocket mirror against the sun in hope of rescue."

In spare lyrics, evocative of what George Oppen called "the bright light of shipwreck," Beduya searches not just for the meaning of being numerous but how to sustain that numerousness, with "No trace showing / The quickest way back / No light caught / In the hair of the void." The poems are fierce, tensile, and assured, but also display a heartbreaking vulnerability: "Who belongs / To this wounded face / How do we / Extinguish our hands / In prayer." The ethics of beauty in the face of violence contend with and haunt the forms of political desire in this marvelous and unexpected debut.

Finalist: 2013 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

In her first book, Chord Box, Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers envisions a world where each place is best known by its sound. Weaving complex junctions between music, speech, the body, and sexuality, these poems trace the arc of adolescence and early adulthood, rooting themselves in gritty landscapes of the South and Appalachia, China and its borderlands. Part narrative and part lyric, Rogers’s poems make use of the whole field of the page, assembling an innovative poetic vocabulary that includes word, character, and symbol. By calling on figures from the recent as well as the distant past, this coming-of-age collection asks us to consider history, both personal and political. Whether struggling to make vibrato on the guitar or stringing together her first sentences in Mandarin, the speaker of these poems assumes the role of the eager student, edging her way toward an understanding with both fierceness and a sense of humility. Chord Box is exquisitely crafted and rich with feeling, a dazzling debut collection.

In this debut collection, Anne Marie Rooney subverts traditional forms into strange and sexy new shapes. With poems as scary as they are seductive, Rooney reveals the domestic to be a rich, dirty burlesque: two princesses fall in love; fetish is explored through the shackles of sestina; a poet indexes, in stops and starts, her own obsessions.

Basin Ghosts is a chapbook of original poems by Jesse Graves, author of Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine. Many poems in Basin Ghosts address places and themes that resonated in Graves’s first collection, which won both the Weatherford Award and the Appalachian Writers’ Association Book of the Year Award in Poetry. The poems in Basin Ghosts examine life in the rural South, changes that have occurred over generations in communities there, and the ways in which the past lives on through memory and attachment to the land.

In the title story of this collection, Isabela is minding her family’s restaurant, drinking her dad’s beer, when Frida Kahlo and the Virgen de Guadalupe walk in. Even though they’re dressed like cholas, the girl immediately recognizes Frida’s uni-brow and La Virgen’s crown. They want to give her advice about the quinceañera her parents are forcing on her. In fact, their lecture (don’t get pregnant, go to school, be proud of your indigenous roots) helps Isabela to escape her parents’ physical and sexual abuse. But can she really run away from the self-hatred they’ve created?

These inter-related stories, mostly set in East Los Angeles, uncover the lives of a conflicted Mexican-American community. In “Sábado Gigante,” Bernardo drinks himself into a stupor every Saturday night. “Aquí no es mi tierra,” he cries, as he tries to ease the sorrow of a life lived far from home. Meanwhile, his son Gustavo struggles with his emerging gay identity and Maritza, the oldest daughter, is expected to cook and clean for her brother, even though they live in East LA, not Guadalajara or Chihuahua. In “Powder Puff,” Mireya spends hours every day applying her make-up, making sure to rub the foundation all the way down her neck so it looks like her natural color. But no matter how much she rubs and rubs, her skin is no lighter.

Estella Gonzalez vividly captures her native East LA in these affecting stories about a marginalized people dealing with racism, machismo and poverty. In painful and sometimes humorous scenes, young people try to escape the traditional expectations of their family. Other characters struggle with anger and resentment, often finding innovative ways to exact revenge for slights both real and imagined.  Throughout, music—traditional and contemporary—accompanies them in the search for love and acceptance.

”Linguistically dexterous and formally astute, Mao’s tight and textured debut [Mad Honey Symposium] conjures an absurd, lush, occasionally poisonous world and the ravenous humans and animals that travel through it. . . . With echoes of Glück and Plath, Mao generates stunning landscapes where the flora and fauna reflect her presence and strength of voice. ”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Sally Wen Mao is the author of Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014). Her second book, Oculus, is out from Graywolf Press in January 2019. Her work has won a 2017 Pushcart Prize and is published or forthcoming in A Public Space, Poetry, Black Warrior Review, Guernica, The Missouri Review, Tin House, The Best of the Net 2014 and The Best American Poetry 2013, among others. The recipient of fellowships and scholarships from Kundiman, the New York Public Library Cullman Center, and Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Mao holds an M.F.A. from Cornell University. She was the 2017-2018 Jenny McKean Writer in Washington at the George Washington University.

NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2022 BY VULTURE, BUZZFEED, AND OPRAH DAILY

“Manifoldly clever…brilliant… ‘Glory’ is its own vivid world, drawn from its own folklore. This is a satire with sharper teeth, angrier, and also very, very funny.” —Violet Kupersmith, The New York Times Book Review

“Genius.”—#1 New York Times bestselling author Jason Reynolds

NoViolet Bulawayo’s bold new novel follows the fall of the Old Horse, the long-serving leader of a fictional country, and the drama that follows for a rumbustious nation of animals on the path to true liberation. Inspired by the unexpected fall by coup in November 2017 of Robert G. Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president of nearly four decades, Glory shows a country’s imploding, narrated by a chorus of animal voices that unveil the ruthlessness required to uphold the illusion of absolute power and the imagination and bulletproof optimism to overthrow it completely. By immersing readers in the daily lives of a population in upheaval, Bulawayo reveals the dazzling life force and irresistible wit that lie barely concealed beneath the surface of seemingly bleak circumstances.

Ten-year-old Darling and her friends navigate their shantytown with the exuberance and mischievous spirit of children everywhere. But they are shadowed by memories of Before. Before their homes were destroyed by paramilitary policemen, before the schools closed, before their fathers left for dangerous jobs abroad. When Darling escapes to suburban America, she finds that—far from the comforts of her childhood community—America’s abundance is hard to reach, and she reckons alone with the sacrifices and mixed rewards of assimilating.

Channeling the rhythm and vibrancy of the storytellers who raised her in Zimbabwe, Bulawayo tells a potent story of displacement and arrival, at once disarmingly playful and devastatingly candid, with a power all its own.

The New York Times bestselling classic of a young woman’s journey in work, love, and life

“In this swinging, funny, and tender study of contemporary relationships, Bank refutes once and for all the popular notions of neurotic thirtysomething women.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Truly poignant.” —Time

Generous-hearted and wickedly insightful, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing maps the progress of Jane Rosenal as she sets out on a personal and spirited expedition through the perilous terrain of sex, love, relationships, and the treacherous waters of the workplace. Soon Jane is swept off her feet by an older man and into a Fitzgeraldesque whirl of cocktail parties, country houses, and rules that were made to be broken, but comes to realize that it’s a world where the stakes are much too high for comfort. With an unforgettable comic touch, Bank skillfully teases out universal issues, puts a clever new spin on the mating dance, and captures in perfect pitch what it’s like to come of age as a young woman.

“This book is perfect.” —Hadley Freeman, The Guardian

A funny, tender, and wickedly insightful look at a young woman’s forays into love, work, and friendship over the course of 25 years

Nothing comes easily to Sophie Applebaum, the black sheep of her family trying to blend in with the herd. Uneasily situated between two brothers, Sophie first appears as the fulcrum and observer of her clan in “Boss of the World.” Then, at college, in “The Toy Bar,” she faces a gauntlet of challenges as Best Friend to the dramatic and beautiful Venice Lambourne, curator of “perfect things.” In her early twenties, Sophie is dazzled by the possibilities of New York City during the Selectric typewriter era—only to land solidly back in Surrey, PA after her father’s death.

The Wonder Spot follows Sophie’s quest for her own identity—who she is, what she loves, whom she loves, and occasionally whom she feels others should love—over the course of 25 years. In an often-disappointing world, Sophie listens closely to her own heart. And when she experiences her ‘Aha!’ moments—her own personal wonder spots—it’s the real thing. In this tremendous follow-up to her runaway bestseller, The Girls’ Guide To Hunting And Fishing, Bank returns with her signature combination of devilishly self-deprecating humor, and again shares her vast talent for capturing a moment, taking it to heart, and giving it back to her readers.

Like the smog that forms the subject of an acclaimed photographic exhibition, Inland Empire is what it isn’t.The novel isn’t about a young landscape photographer who leaves the concrete vistas of his California suburb for a community college teaching post in Oklahoma. A deeply evocative tableaux, Inland Empire does what only the best art can: it resists classification.

A trenchant collection of barbed odes to the hipster world utilizes the meters of haiku to offer a look inside the obsessions, fetishes, insecurities, and characteristics of hipsterdom.

“A gripping, atmospheric, heart-breaking, almost-ghost story. Not since Stephen King’s Overlook has a hotel hiding a secret been brought to such vivid life.” —Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State

Thirty-one years after workers first broke ground, the magnificent Hotel Neversink in the Catskills finally opens to the public. Then a young boy disappears.

This mysterious vanishing—and the ones that follow—will brand the lives of three generations. At the root of it all is Asher Sikorsky, the ambitious and ruthless patriarch whose purchase of the hotel in 1931 set a haunting legacy into motion. His daughter Jeanie sees the Hotel Neversink into its most lucrative era, but also its darkest. Decades later, Asher’s grandchildren grapple with the family’s heritage in their own ways: Len fights to keep the failing, dilapidated hotel alive, and Alice sets out to finally uncover the murderer’s identity.

Told by an unforgettable chorus of Sikorsky family members—a matriarch, a hotel maid, a traveling comedian, the hotel detective, and many others—The Hotel Neversink is the gripping portrait of a Jewish family in the Catskills over the course of a century. With an unerring eye and with prose both comic and tragic, Adam O’Fallon-Price details one man’s struggle for greatness, no matter the cost, and a long-held family secret that threatens to undo it all.

“First marvel; then record.” This tempered revision of Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry as a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion recollected in tranquility serves as a useful guide to Emily Rosko’s Weather Inventions. The poems in Rosko’s third collection capture an enduring sense of wonder in the face of nature alongside the scientific impulse to observe and measure. At turns evasive and earnest, erudite and unguarded, researched and unbooked, the poems in Rosko’s Weather Inventions chart humanity’s enduring attachments to weather in science and art. Weather is the creative force here, inspiring a search for objective and reflective truths about our lives on this planet.

Winner of the 2011 Akron Poetry Prize

“Art is about something the way a cat is about the house,” says Allen Grossman. This is abundantly true of Emily Rosko’s poems in Prop Rockery, a condition she defines with a quote from King Lear: “a looped and windowed raggedness.” And while this condition is “pretend,” and these poems are indeed virtuoso performances, the despair, loneliness, lies, and miscommunication they examine are as real as anything in art. Parataxis and fragments meet rhyme and chewy-on-the-tongue Anglo Saxon diction at the axis of postmodern irony. Prop Rockery explodes in your mouth-no sugar, plenty of bite.
—Natasha Sajé, author of Bend and Red Under the Skin

Emily Rosko continues to deepen her lively and intelligent tour of the allusive and investigative imagination that she began in Raw Goods Inventory, to wonderful effect. Shakespeare is here, several times, as instigating muse, and where she takes this inspiration is a wild boat ride of language and image spanning much of the last 500 years. To this journey she brings a confidence that is up to the large task of holding these disparate threads together, leaving just enough space between them to dance. As she writes: “I was shaken as salt. I was / as industrial as a drill. Oh pity-poor // fractured me, brain-way-sided, boring / through and through, full of ballas and glue.” It’s a lovely book, worthy of attention.
—John Gallaher, author of The Little Book of Guesses and Map of the Folded World

Difficult Fruit grapples with personal experience—with naming and claiming the “fruits” of Alleyne’s specific journey into womanhood, which includes coming to terms with violence and loss, celebrating love and connection, as well as standing witness in the world that shaped the journey. It is a collection of poems about self-knowledge—of fighting for and winning personhood as a woman. The speaker understands that “maybe older and wiser is just learning / how to put yourself in your own good hands.” The poems of age scattered throughout the manuscript both chronicle and disrupt time—they look back into the speaker’s past as a way to understand the present, as well as to find something that the speaker needs in order to move forward. The many elegies within consider the ultimate price of life, which is death, and as the poem “How It Touches Us” comes to realize, “all laws of matter must hold true”. The poems are a movement through fracture—both necessary and unwarranted—toward wholeness and transformation.

2018 Green Rose Prize

“These poems love. Prophesize. Return us to our beginnings. To days that we want to remember. Or forget. But don’t. Thus in our sister’s memory, we survive in the luxury of dying. The courage of loving. The re-imagining of our souls for another generation. Thank you, my dear sister for your words saluting our living, our lives.” —Sonia Sanchez

“In exquisitely crafted poems of heart-accelerating candor and clarity, Lauren K. Alleyne says to all the black bodies slain by hatred and militarized fear, “Nothing I say will save you, but how can I say nothing?” Honeyfish is an elegy for all the countless lost, and a praise song for the many black lives that persist in their wish to give and receive love.”—Tracy K. Smith

“Even in the places we think of as most beautiful, the endless gong of the body being broken and defiled will find us. How can we see the sun and the ocean and the clear blue sky as anything other than a kind of cruel joke in the face of so much suffering? The extraordinary gift of Lauren K Alleyne’s, Honeyfish is that she shows the world in all its brutality and loss and somehow lets us mourn within the poems, which in turn allows us to begin some kind of healing. These are poems whose elegy is ongoing, whose elegy need never happened but for hatred. The waves go in and out and so many people keep being killed. And here is this extraordinary poet, making a heaven that is freedom, that is the dream of being welcomed and loved and tended to. This is a book for our times and for the day when these times are over and we can rejoice.”—Gabrielle Calvacoressi

“After Trayvon Martin, after Tamir Rice, after Sandra Bland, after Charlottesville and Charleston, after, after: Lauren K. Alleyne’s poems answer the alarm. In Honeyfish, there is no end to elegy: the poet “can’t stop counting/the bodies,” nor tallying “our numbered days.”  Moving between the United States and Greece, yanked between agony and anodyne, Alleyne gathers the evidence, then offers us the proof of herself and the graceful testimony of her poems.”—Christopher Bakken

“Honeyfish is a remarkable, timely and timeless collection. Awake and unflinching, it bears witness to our difficult current moment—Tamir Rice, Charlottesville, the Charleston church shooting—and yet, in the face of horror and injustice, the poems celebrate the resilience and persistence of beauty and love, the languages we have lost, the grief unburied, the dream remembered. Lauren K. Alleyne comes into her own here as a voice we must reckon with, and her lyrical powers attest to a necessity we find only in our most valued poets.”—David Mura

“In poems spun from seemingly effortless language, Lauren K. Alleyne’s piercing voice emerges. Honeyfish sounds a litany of grief for home, country, and lives in danger of being erased from personal and collective memory. Naming the victims of racism and police brutality—Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland…—Alleyne places their stories alongside her own, as a black woman and immigrant to the US. The task of remembering the poet shoulders is replete in the forms the poems often take: the elegy and ars poetica. Alleyne bears witness to the ‘world ruthless with beauty,’ and her poems are a singular act of resistance and power. “Who will sing you?” the poet asks, at one point—which is another way to ask, who will see and honour those who are gone? The answer is found in these compassionate, impassioned, and clear-eyed poems: This poet. This book.” — Shara McCullum

Stephen D. Gutierrez's essays and stories recreate the Mexican-American culture of Fresno and the working-class East LA of his youth in the 1970s, offering memories as both poignant and sharp, painful and funny. The Mexican Man in His Backyard is the third and culminating volume in Gutierrez's trilogy of essays and stories, which also includes Elements (winner of the Nilon Award) and Live from Fresno y Los (winner of an American Book Award sponsored by the Before Columbus Foundation). Writer Alejandro Murguia praises the book: "Stephen Gutierrez captures the mood, language, and unexplainable sadness of places we all know. Sometimes essays, sometimes fiction, sometimes both: Modern and postmodern, these pieces paint a vivid picture of Fresno and LA and offer sharp portraits of Chicano poets and others, laced with irony and beauty."

“Gutierrez breaks hearts with Captain Chicano and its superhero “wearing his chones on the outside of his tights like they all do” while delivering heroism the way we most need it right this very damn minute. Here is today’s reality in all its viciousness mixed with a supreme, kind, hilarious truth. Gutierrez’s wry and savvy humor makes the righteous medicine of Captain Chicano’s wisdom go down like whiskey—including the kick. In Captain Chicano every page reverberates so strongly with the dangerous pulse of the American Dream, it makes you think it could still be alive.” —Tupelo Hassman, gods with a little g

“Captain Chicano Draws a Line in the American Sand is not only about America (as you might guess from its title), but also about writing, ethnicity, love, belief, and, as a bonus, includes a channeled Edgar Allan Poe. All this is miraculously held together by a narrator who manages to remain cheerful, amiable, disheveled, and deadly serious even as he tackles his real subject: The Human Condition. To paraphrase Gutierrez’s own words: ‘This vato can sling a gun’ (or a sentence, or a paragraph) ‘like Shane in a heartbeat.’”  —Jim Krusoe, author of The Sleep Garden

“Captain Chicano Draws a Line in the American Sand is mad, unruly magic. It’ll blow your mind and change the way you view the world, one wildly inspired line at a time.”  —Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Dog of the North

"If you read one book of stories this year, make it this one. LIVE FROM FRESNO Y LOS kicks out the jams, and takes no prisoners. Enjoy, and tell a friend"--Virgil Suarez. 

"Stunning. Really, a lovely and loving collection of stories, nicely balanced between the vernacular and the literarily eloquent"--Lamar Herrin. "There is an ineradicable sweetness to these stories, accompanied by the crisp and happy bemusement of a genuine voice--the sound of one person speaking directly to another, and not from the head, but from that most mysterious of mouths, the human heart"--Jim Krusoe.

Finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award
A Boston Globe Best Book of the Year

“Tongues make mistakes / and mistakes / make languages.” And Benjamin Garcia makes a stunning debut with Thrown in the Throat. In a sex-positive incantation that retextures what it is to write a queer life amidst troubled times, Garcia writes boldly of citizenship, family, and Adam Rippon’s butt. Detailing a childhood spent undocumented, one speaker recalls nights when “because we cannot sleep / we dream with open eyes.” Garcia delves with both English and Spanish into how one survives a country’s long love affair with anti-immigrant cruelty. Rendering a family working to the very end to hold each other, he writes the kind of family you both survive and survive with.

With language that arrives equal parts regal and raucous, Thrown in the Throat  shines brilliant with sweat and an iridescent voice. “Sometimes even a diamond was once alive” writes Garcia in a collection that National Poetry Series judge Kazim Ali says “has deadly superpowers.” And indeed these poems arrive to our hands through touch-me-nots and the slight cruelty of mothers, through closets both real and metaphorical. These are poems complex, unabashed, and needed as survival. Garcia’s debut is nothing less than exactly the ode our history and present and our future call for: brash and unmistakably alive.

Can words hold a note? Can language foam like a mouth? In Ar:range:ments, Esther Kondo Heller creates textual & visual language that escapes the page to utter and speak past the record, the archive, and the document. What arrangements exist between a mother and child? In listening to Black queer life in Berlin, Mombasa, and London, the action of arranging becomes a means of sounding out a collective utterance of Black survival with joy amidst grief, colonialism, medical racism, and loss.

Ar:range:ments collectively thinks with, amongst others, the works of Audre Lorde, May Ayim, Fred Moten, NourbeSe Philip, Harryette Mullen, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Marvin Gaye, Taylor Johnson, and Gabrielle Octavia Rucker.

No one believes Marta can get better—not her sister, not her father—and she doesn’t care. But when a troubled, enigmatic acquaintance from her therapy group goes missing, Marta discovers what she does care about:  finding Thomas.

For twenty-six-year-old Marta, group counselling is just a distraction from her dead-end job as a janitor and her serious vocation of smoking weed. She’s been living with depression, numbness, and apathy for years.

In a rare act of engagement, she helps Thomas, a fellow patient who can’t wash the dishes because of the man in his sink. When Thomas disappears shortly afterward, Marta feels compelled to find the person nobody else seems to care about.

Through a hard Nova Scotia winter, Marta embarks on a quest that takes her to doctors’ offices, psychiatric institutions and the darker side of Halifax, where the homeless—the “Crazytown people of Sanity City”—dwell.

Is Thomas alive or lying dead under the snow? And is Marta really living or forever lost in the hypozone?

Her keen ear for language makes the poems sing, occasionally in formal verse or even rhyme. These poems demand multiple readings.--15 Bytes Book Award for Poetry

Rain Scald is an invitation to witness the familiar and unfamiliar terrain of what is sacred of life and death. . . . It is a collection that the reader will read more than once, each time diving farther into the gorge, each time standing in the rain a bit longer.--Concho River Review

Her work is perhaps more profoundly grounded in Western landscapes, histories, and traditions than any other work you might pick up, whether Native or non-Native.--Writing Westward Podcast
The silence surrounding trauma lies at the heart of Rain Scald, the shattering first collection by poet Tacey M. Atsitty.--Broadsided Press

Surprising inventions of syntax and subjectivity serve a poetics at once visionary and imbued with the grit of existence. Tempered by hardship, seasoned with experience, this brilliant book witnesses a world Atsitty knows intimately and, in doing so, offers courageous testimony to suffering and spiritual resilience. I can think of no poet writing today whose work is more gorgeous or moving, no one who brings more heart or brains to the page.--Alice Fulton, author of Barely Composed: Poems

'How long had my hands / been scalded in dishwater, grabbing for knives or forks,' writes Tacey Atsitty in this marvelous debut collection. Steeped in Navajo culture, Tacey Atsitty writes a poetry where rain, expected to be nourishing, is also a torrent, burning with sensation. Her poetry, formally resourceful and resonant, suffuses elegy with insight and prayer.--Arthur Sze, author of Compass Rose

Narrative, lyric, and deeply human, Tacey's poems open to a world of folk and spirit where so few of us have ever dwelled. Her songs waste no words. Her stories are the stuff of hallowed ground. It is with a wonder of word and image that she shows us the strength and beauty of the Diyin Diné'é way.--Jim Barnes, author of The American Book of the Dead: Poems

A Booklist Top 10 First Novels of 2012 pick
A Bookpage Best Books of 2012 pick

“A richly emotional portrait of a family that had me spellbound from page one.”—Cheryl Strayed, bestselling author of Wild

The night before Janie’s sister, Hannah, is born, her grandmother tells her a story: Since the Japanese occupation of Korea, their family has lost a daughter in every generation, and Janie is told to keep Hannah safe. Years later, when Hannah inexplicably cuts all ties and disappears, Janie goes to find her. Thus begins a journey that will force her to confront her family’s painful silence, the truth behind her parents’ sudden move to America twenty years earlier, and her own conflicted feelings toward Hannah.

Weaving Korean folklore within a modern narrative of immigration and identity, Forgotten Country is a fierce exploration of the inevitability of loss, the conflict between obligation and freedom, and a family struggling to find its way out of silence and back to one another.

From the days of her childhood in the 1950s Midwest, Katherine knows she is different, and that her parents are not who they seem. As she matures from a girl of rare intelligence into an exceptional mathematician, traveling to Europe to further her studies, she must face the most human of problems—who is she? What is the cost of love, and what is the cost of ambition? These questions grow ever more entangled as Katherine strives to take her place in the world of higher mathematics and becomes involved with a brilliant and charismatic professor.

When she embarks on a quest to conquer the Riemann hypothesis, the greatest unsolved mathematical problem of her time, she turns to a theorem with a mysterious history that may hold both the lock and key to her identity, and to secrets long buried in Germany during World War II. Forced to confront some of the most consequential events of the twentieth century and rethink everything she knows of herself, she finds kinship in the stories of the women who came before her, and discovers how seemingly distant lives and ideas are inextricably linked to her own.

The Tenth Muse is a gorgeous, sweeping tale about legacy, identity, and the beautiful ways the mind can make us free.

“In Ezra Dan Feldman’s luminously postmodern Habitat of Stones, “omens are aerial,” clouds thicken—in a deliciously precise observation—“like marble cake,” and “the arrogant man” (having “Mistaken a bathtub for a grave”) discovers that love’s true catastrophe is when it brings equanimity. He hopes, in a line that gives this brilliant collection its title, “to restore the natural habitat of stones.” And thus is the poetry in this startling debut collection—clear, without giving up its mystery, ferociously whimsical, the wry and gorgeous language taking us places we’d never imagine without Feldman’s bold and capacious vision.”
—Cynthia Hogue, author of Revenance

“Exposing patriarchal and capitalistic practices that often cripple society, Ezra Dan Feldman’s Habitat of Stones reveals the symptoms of living in a post-industrial and illusional, high-tech world: “He’s taken the world for a machine, a baby for a doll, a gun for a candy bar, which he offered to everyone. He once mistook a hammer for his own hand. Once he made love to a wall.” Finally, Habitat of Stones directs us back to the natural world that recharges the human psyche, where a limb touched “touches you back / electrically; you’ll feel it moving in itself ten billion times / faster than a continental shelf.””
—Mark Irwin

\What does a woman in her seventies make of her life on the other side of blindness? Relic Light is a story told by Beatrice, whose reality is upended when she loses her ability to see. While her mathematician husband is away at work at Columbia or visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she wanders through their empty house north of New York City and allows her mind to drift into unexpected and painful places. There are solid guideposts for her along the way—remembered paintings and novels to contemplate; memories of her husband, children, and parents; her close friendship with a neighbor—but her fragmented thoughts often carry her in a dozen directions, offering an intimate and original portrait of a mind in motion. Blindness has isolated Beatrice, removed her from what she can verify with her own eyes, but it also may offer her a gateway into new possibilities—a “re-visioning” of her world.

I have never read a novel that makes legible what I have always felt: that the art we have consumed over the course of our lives—novels, films, paintings, theater—is as important as the rituals of living. Through his unforgettable protagonist, a refreshingly female flaneur, now out of the city and without her sight, Brennen Wysong shows us, in gorgeous and elegant prose, that art imprints upon our lives as significantly as history. It is our history. Relic Light is a beautiful and unforgettable debut.
—Jennifer Gilmore, author of Golden Country and The Mothers

When I turned the last page, the character of Bea—a profoundly cultured woman who has lost her sight—stayed with me. I walked with her. I breathed with her. And I still do. Her rich inner life of books and art, of memory and family is given to us. And it is precious. To carry off such an endeavour is a literary feat. Relic Light is full of heart—a book that renders a whole human being, saving it from darkness, cannot be anything else.
—Catherine de Saint Phalle, author of Poum and Alexandre and The Sea & Us

Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan said that without a clear sense of space, we would not have a linear sense of time. Brennen Wysong’s novel explores this idea, re-constellating the events of a life after their order has been shaken by blindness. It is a meditation on memory and forgetting, on what the darkness loses, but also what it gains. The result is a truly compelling—I have read nothing quite like it.
—Patrick Holland, author of The Mary Smokes Boys and Oblivion

For fans of Oppenheimer, a riveting investigation into the modern nuclear weapons landscape.

Nuclear weapons are, today, as important as they were during the Cold War, and some experts say we could be as close to a nuclear catastrophe now as we were at the height of that conflict. Despite that, conversations about these bombs generally often happen in past tense.

In Countdown, science journalist Sarah Scoles uncovers a different atomic reality: the nuclear age’s present.

Drawing from years of on-the-ground reporting at the nation’s nuclear weapons labs, Scoles interrogates the idea that having nuclear weapons keeps us safe, deterring attacks and preventing radioactive warfare. She deftly assesses the existing nuclear apparatus in the United States, taking readers beyond the news headlines and policy-speak to reveal the state of nuclear-weapons technology, as well as how people currently working within the U.S. nuclear weapons complex have come to think about these bombs and the idea that someone, someday, might use them.

Through a sharp, surprising, and undoubtedly urgent narrative, Scoles brings us out of the Cold War and into the twenty-first century, opening readers’ eyes to the true nature of nuclear weapons and their caretakers while also giving us the context necessary to understand the consequences of their existence, for worse and for better, for now and for the future.
 

An anthropological look at the UFO community, told through first-person experiences with researchers in their element as they pursue what they see as a solvable mystery—both terrestrial and cosmic.

More than half a century since Roswell, UFOs have been making headlines once again. On December 17, 2017, the New York Times ran a front-page story about an approximately five-year Pentagon program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The article hinted, and its sources clearly said in subsequent television interviews, that some of the ships in question couldn’t be linked to any country. The implication, of course, was that they might be linked to other solar systems.

The UFO community—those who had been thinking about, seeing, and analyzing supposed flying saucers (or triangles or chevrons) for years—was surprisingly skeptical of the revelation. Their incredulity and doubt rippled across the internet. Many of the people most invested in UFO reality weren’t really buying it. And as Scoles did her own digging, she ventured to dark, conspiracy-filled corners of the internet, to a former paranormal research center in Utah, and to the hallways of the Pentagon.

In They Are Already Here we meet the bigwigs, the scrappy upstarts, the field investigators, the rational people, and the unhinged kooks of this sprawling community. How do they interact with each other? How do they interact with “anomalous phenomena”? And how do they (as any group must) reflect the politics and culture of the larger world around them?

We will travel along the Extraterrestrial Highway (next to Area 51) and visit the UFO Watchtower, where seeking lights in the sky is more of a spiritual quest than a “gotcha” one. We meet someone who, for a while, believes they may have communicated with aliens. Where do these alleged encounters stem from? What are the emotional effects on the experiencers?

In Petty Theft, Nicholas Friedman cultivates the strangeness of daily life and turns an unsentimental eye to joy, catastrophe, and the myriad stations in between. The poems often set us wandering: to the busked streets of Assisi; to a burning circus tent in Hartford, Connecticut; to a stone circle in England; to the poet’s native Upstate New York; and to his adoptive California, where a wealthy neighbor “lives behind a massive hedge, four-square/ like a curtain wall/ that keeps us here, him there.”

The “theft” of this collection’s title lurks on every page, luring faith to doubt, love to loss, and appearance to illusion. Yet these poems never lapse into hopelessness. Even where failure and tragedy precede human understanding, Petty Theft suggests the possibility of sustenance and recompense. Both confident and questioning, this debut collection announces Friedman as an important new voice in American poetry.

An undocumented Mexican family living in South Texas is torn apart when a son inadvertently becomes involved with narcotraficantes in Daniel Pena's debut novel that explores contemporary issues of immigration, border life and international drug smuggling.

A book-length sequence of linked poems, The Adjacent Possible centers on problems of consciousness, inter-subjective relation, theories of emergence, and Buddhist philosophy. These thematic concerns emerge through the dialogic exchange between two abstract figures, as they range across a variety of landscapes and poetic forms, including free verse, hybrid forms, and the traditional Japanese forms of haibun, tanka, and renga. The questions The Adjacent Possible explores are these: How does consciousness emerge into being, and how does one subject, human or otherwise, connect with another? How might poetry—as aural, visual, and elemental matter—catalyze these forms of relation?

This “claustrophobic and dark” sci-fi thriller debut is “full of twisting ship corridors and unreliable characters” as it explores AI ethics and the effects of climate change (Kirkus Reviews).

Aboard a ship manned by humans and androids, one doctor must discover the source of her crew’s madness—or risk succumbing to it herself.

Misanthropic psychologist Dr. Grace Park is placed on the Deucalion, a survey ship headed to an icy planet in an unexplored galaxy. Her purpose is to observe the thirteen human crew members aboard the ship—all specialists in their own fields—as they assess the colonization potential of the planet, Eos. But frictions develop as Park befriends the androids of the ship, preferring their company over the baffling complexity of humans, while the rest of the crew treats them with suspicion and even outright hostility.

Shortly after landing, the crew finds themselves trapped on the ship by a radiation storm, with no means of communication or escape until it passes—and that’s when things begin to fall apart. Park’s patients are falling prey to waking nightmares of helpless, tongueless insanity. The androids are behaving strangely. There are no windows aboard the ship. Paranoia is closing in, and soon Park is forced to confront the fact that nothing—neither her crew, nor their mission, nor the mysterious Eos itself—is as it seems.

Acerbic, moving, and formally astonishing, Michael Prior’s second collection explores the enduring impact of the Japanese internment upon his family legacy and his mixed-race identity.

Canada-Japan Literary Award, Winner
Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, Winner
Raymond Souster Award, Shortlist

Amid the record-breaking wildfires that scorched British Columbia in 2015 and 2017, the poems in this collection move seamlessly between geographical and psychological landscapes, grappling with cultural trauma and mapping out complex topographies of grief, love, and inheritance: those places in time marked by generational memory “when echo crosses echo.”
    Burning Province is an elegy for a home aflame and for grandparents who had a complex relationship to it–but it is also a vivid appreciation of mono no aware: the beauty and impermanence of all living things. “The fireflies stutter like an apology,” Prior writes; “I would be lying to you / if I didn’t admit I love them.”

Renia White’s debut poetry collection strikes up a conversation, considering what’s being said, what isn’t, and where it all come from. From her vantage point of Black womanhood, White probes the norms and mores of everyday interactions. In observations, insights, and snippets of speech, these poems look to the unspoken thoughts behind our banter, questioning the authority of not only the rule of law but also of our small talk itself—the concepts we have accepted and integrated without pause.

Casual Conversation imagines a new way of knowing, a way that encourages us to think through how we structure and stratify ourselves, inviting something strange and other to spill out. White challenges us to question whether there is anything casual about this life, even as she invites us to consider other logics and to think alongside each other. This book gives space to hold what we fear out of formality: consequence, embarrassment, anger. It plays, it tarries, it disrupts. It pulls apart what seems sound in an effort to see: what did we make here? How’s it going?

Good Omens meets The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet in Ryka Aoki's Light From Uncommon Stars, a defiantly joyful adventure set in California's San Gabriel Valley, with cursed violins, Faustian bargains, and queer alien courtship over fresh-made donuts.

Hugo Award Finalist
A National Bestseller
Indie Next Pick
New York Public Library Top 10 Book of 2021
A Kirkus Best Book of 2021
A Barnes & Noble Best Science Fiction Book of 2021
2022 Alex Award Winner
2022 Stonewall Book Award Winner

Shizuka Satomi made a deal with the devil: to escape damnation, she must entice seven other violin prodigies to trade their souls for success. She has already delivered six.

When Katrina Nguyen, a young transgender runaway, catches Shizuka's ear with her wild talent, Shizuka can almost feel the curse lifting. She's found her final candidate.

But in a donut shop off a bustling highway in the San Gabriel Valley, Shizuka meets Lan Tran, retired starship captain, interstellar refugee, and mother of four. Shizuka doesn't have time for crushes or coffee dates, what with her very soul on the line, but Lan's kind smile and eyes like stars might just redefine a soul's worth. And maybe something as small as a warm donut is powerful enough to break a curse as vast as the California coastline.

As the lives of these three women become entangled by chance and fate, a story of magic, identity, curses, and hope begins, and a family worth crossing the universe for is found.

An action-packed basketball series from author LJ Alonge set on the courts of Oakland, CA.

Justin has a list of goals stashed under his mattress. Number 1 is “figure out life plans.” Number 5 is “earn Zen Master rating in WoW.” Nowhere on that list is “play the crew from Ghosttown,” but that’s the type of trouble that always seems to finds him.

The debut title from LJ Alonge’s new basketball series pulses with action on and off the court. With wit, humor, and honesty, Justin unfolds over one hot summer.

An action-packed basketball series from author LJ Alonge set on the courts of Oakland, CA.

Janae works every day at her Granny’s Strange Goods Superstore, selling lucky rabbits’ feet and other useless junk. And every night, after closing up shop, she dominates the courts with her boys.

When the chance comes around to take her game to the next level, she knows she’ll make the cut. It’s all about skill—luck’s got nothing to do with it. Right?

An action-packed basketball series from author LJ Alonge set on the courts of Oakland, CA.

Frank’s not great at staying out of trouble. He’s also not great at driving cars. After his joyride ends in a crash, he’s stuck with a court-appointed Community Mentor for the summer.

But it’s not too bad. Officer Appleby’s all right. And if anyone can handle a basketball team, a police officer, and a new girl on the horizon, it’s Frank Torres.

A street-smart, action-packed basketball series with action on and off the court.

Toni isn’t Coach Wise’s favorite player on Team Blacktop. Honestly, she’s not even in his top five. And if she’s being real, her own teammates keep siding with him during practice.

But this isn’t the first time she’s been on her own, and it won’t be the last. If you can’t count on yourself, who can you count on?

In this exquisitely written and emotionally charged young adult debut, critically acclaimed author Jennifer Gilmore explores how sometimes the wounds you can’t see are the most painful.

Did you know your entire life can change in an instant?

For sixteen-year-old Lizzie Stoller, that moment is when she collapses out of the blue. The next thing she knows, she’s in a hospital with an illness she’s never heard of.

But that isn’t the only life-changing moment for Lizzie. The other is when Connor and his dog, Verlaine, walk into her hospital room. Lizzie has never connected with anyone the way she does with the handsome teenage volunteer.

But the more time she spends with him and the deeper in love she falls, the more she realizes that Connor has secrets and a deep pain of his own . . . and that while being with him has the power to make Lizzie forget about her illness, being with her might tear Connor apart.

Acclaimed author Jennifer Gilmore’s intimate and achingly beautiful novel deftly explores the role that chance and choice play in shaping the lives of two teenagers who are separated by sixteen years, but whose lives are intertwined.

*Two Starred Reviews!*

"This emotional, visceral novel haunted me in the best ways. Jennifer Gilmore has written something of real depth, which will leave readers thinking for a long time about the lives that other people lead, as well as the ones they might have led. If Only is gripping and shiveringly beautiful; a true achievement.”—Meg Wolitzer, bestselling author of The Interestings and Belzhar

BEFORE: When Bridget imagined her life at sixteen, it didn’t look like this. She didn’t think that her boyfriend would dump her for another girl. And she certainly didn’t think that she would be pregnant.

With just a few months until she gives birth, Bridget must envision an entirely new future—one for her baby. But as she sifts through the many paths and the many people who want to parent her child, she can’t help but feel that there is no right decision.

AFTER: Ivy doesn’t know much about her birth mother. She knows that she is now the same age Bridget was when she placed Ivy for adoption. She knows that Bridget was the one who named her. And she knows that fifteen years ago Bridget disappeared from Ivy’s and her adoptive moms’ lives.

Ivy wants to discover more about herself, but as she goes to find Bridget, she can’t help but feel that the risks might far outweigh the benefits of knowing where she comes from and why her birth mother chose to walk away.

“Gilmore brings special yet subtle artistry to her interwoven story, weaving motifs and even seemingly extraneous people through the different iterations to keep each version connected with the others.”—BCCB (starred review)

“Gilmore’s gritty multigenerational tale not only seeks to ask adoption’s toughest questions, but dares to offer no easy answers: Not to be missed.”—Kirkus (starred review)

“Gilmore’s writing is emotionally raw yet beautiful, touching upon some traditional Y.A. themes…with an almost mystical feel.”—New York Times Book Review

“An utterly exquisite debut.”—Emily Fridlund, author of History of Wolves

In eleven stories, The World With Its Mouth Open follows the inner lives of people in Kashmir as they walk the uncertain terrain of their days, fractured from years of war. From a shopkeeper’s encounter with a mannequin, to an expectant mother walking on a precarious road, to a young boy wavering between dreams and reality, to two dogs wandering the city, these stories weave in larger, devastating themes of loss, grief, violence, longing, and injustice with the threads of smaller, everyday realities that confront the characters’ lives in profound ways. Although the stories circle the darker aspects of life, they are—at the same time—an attempt to run into life, into humor, into beauty, into another person who can offer refuge, if momentarily.

Zahid Rafiq’s The World With Its Mouth Open is an original and powerful debut collection announcing the arrival of a new voice that bears witness to the human condition with nuance, heart, humor, and incredible insight.