David Martinez is like an algebra problem invented by America--he's polynomial, and fractioned, full of identity variables and unsolved narrative coefficients. . . . Hustle is full of dashing nerve, linguistic flair, and unfakeable heart.--Tony Hoagland

David Tomas Martinez has published in San Diego Writer's Ink, Charlotte Journal, Poetry International, and has been featured in Border Voices. A PhD candidate at the University of Houston, Martinez is also an editor for Gulf Coast.

A coming-of-age narrative, Leaving Biddle City details one Filipina American speaker's experience of growing up amid a white, Midwestern suburbia mythologized as Biddle City. Through prose poems, pantoums, ballads, flattened haikus, and thematic autobiographies, Chan maps a territory of intergenerational conflict, racial alienation, and memory and forgetfulness. What's achieved is a work of play and meticulous beauty, a collection that reframes how we may understand ourselves, our histories, and the places where we are from.

An anthology edited by acclaimed poets Kaveh Akbar and Paige Lewis.

Contributors: Samuel Ace, Chase Berggrun, Sherwin Bitsui, Sophie Cabot Black, Jericho Brown, Anthony Ceballos, Marianne Chan, Jos Charles, Brendan Constantine, Cynthia Cruz, Steven Espada Dawson, Megan Denton Ray, Martín Espada, Megan Fernandes, Sarah Gorham, Joy Harjo, Mary Karr, Sophie Klahr, Michael Klein, Dana Levin, Ada Limón, Zach Linge, Layli Long Soldier, Sharon Olds, Airea Dee Matthews, Joshua Mehigan, Tomás Q. Morín, Erin Noehrem, Joy Priest, Dana Roeser, sam sax, Diane Seuss, Natalie Shapero, Katie Jean Shinkle, Jeffrey Skinner, Bernardo Wade, Afaa M. Weaver, The Cyborg Jillian Weise, Phillip B. Williams, Ocean Vuong

Written with tremendous urgency and ferocious candor, the prose poems of Book of Potions captures a woman caught in the middle of life: no longer young, not yet old, trapped between generations, locked in stereotyped roles and stultifying social norms, confined by other people's expectations and their projections of what a woman should be.

By turns enraged, funny, frustrated, astute and joyful, these short hybrid pieces (potion = poem + fiction) combine the lyric compression of poetry with the narrative expansiveness of prose. Readers will meander, spellbound, through a wildly imaginative dream world of fairy-tale landscapes, allegorical insights, social satire, thought experiments and vivid surreal imagery, scenes of otherworldly strangeness and haunting beauty. These potions are elixirs in language, some healing, some poisonous, all magical.

You read Lydia Davis to watch a writer patiently divide the space between epiphany and actual human beings by first halves, then quarters, then eighths, and then sixteenths, into infinity, says The Village Voice. Indeed, Lydia Davis is mathematician, philosopher, sculptor, jeweler, and scholar of the minute. Few writers map the process of thought as well as she, few perceive with such charged intelligence.

The Cows is a close study of the three much-loved cows that live across the road from her. The piece, written with understated humor and empathy, is a series of detailed observations of the cows on different days and in different positions, moods, and times of the day. It could be compared to some sections of Wallace Stevens' Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird or to Claude Monet's paintings of Rouen Cathedral.

Forms of play: head butting; mounting, either at the back or at the front; trotting away by yourself; trotting together; going off bucking and prancing by yourself; resting your head and chest on the ground until they notice and trot toward you; circling each other; taking the position for head-butting and then not doing it.

In a cultural moment where folks are stripped of the their dignity or shed it willingly, the figures in this book wonder at the utility of maintaining their own. There's a touch of Hamlet's question in there along with some I Ching. Can monkeys pray? Are we better off living in the real world or a speculative one?

Through an essay, a novella, and short and flash fiction pieces, A Terrifying Brush with Optimism is at once leaping, thoughtful, diverse, comic, and brooding.

Must-Read Poetry: October 2019 by Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions

Best Books of 2019, Book Riot

This astonishing, self-assured debut leads us on an exploration to the stars and back, begging us to reconsider our boundaries of self, time, space, and knowledge. The speaker writes, ...the universe/is an arrow/without end/and it asks only one question;/How dare you?

Zig-zagging through the realms of nature, science, and religion, one finds St. Francis sighing in the corner of a studio apartment, tides that are caused by millions of oysters gasping in unison, an ark filled with women in its stables, and prayers that reach God fastest by balloon. There's pathos: When my new lover tells me I'm correct to love him, I/realize the sound isn't metal at all. It's not the coins rattling/ on concrete, but the fingers scraping to pick them up. And humor, too: ...even the sun's been sighing Not you again/when it sees me. After reading this far-reaching, inventive collection, we too are startled, space struck, our pockets gloriously filled with space dust.

Online, month by month, I watched it happen: a new genre of poem was emerging, but I had no clue who was responsible. These brainy poems didn't wait to spout off trivia, historical and scientific--'Pavlov Was the Son of a Priest' (a characteristically quotable title) recalls that 'the moon smells like spent gunpowder, ' then divulges some smoldering self-knowledge: 'I'm sorry/I couldn't hide my joy when you said lonely.' . . . [T]hese poems were fluent in funniness, retweetably jokey: 'I'm//the vice president of panic, and the president is/missing.' But once the play subsided, you found yourself moved--unaccountably, almost, until you discovered, reading back up the poem, that even the zaniest elements had several parts to play. What looked like a genre, I soon realized, was all the handiwork of one poet. Their name is Paige Lewis. . . . Don't doubt them.---Christopher Spaide, Poetry

Imagine a space where cities and municipalities are delineated only by letters. A place in flux, a freewheeling confluence that does not commit to being American, Korea, or even Korean American. This is where God-Disease takes place. Strange things happen here. Identities warp and shift; sometimes they vanish altogether. In the titular story, a museum insect curator returns to her birth town, J Municipality, feeling empty and searching for answers to her mother's absence; was it insanity that plagued her, or was it shin-byeong--god-disease?

Equal parts Southern Korean Gothic and slipstream, the collection is a meditation on language, identity, and names, and how deceptively fragile they can be.

Bright: A Memoir, the first full-length essay collection from acclaimed poet Kiki Petrosino, is a work of lyric nonfiction, offering glimpses of a life lived between cultural worlds. Bright, a slang term used to describe light-skinned people of interracial American ancestry, becomes the starting point for an extended meditation on the author's upbringing in a mixed Black and Italian American family. Alternating moments of memoir, archival research, close reading and reverie, this work contemplates the enduring, deeply personal legacies of enslavement and racial discrimination in America. Situated at the luminous crossroads where public and private histories collide, Bright asks important questions about love, heritage, identity and creativity.

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Book Riot, 15 Excellent 2023 Short Story Collections by Asian Authors

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Electric Literature, Recommended Reading

Storizen, 9 Short Story Collections by Asian Authors in 2023 by Saurabh Chawla

Texas Monthly, The Best Books, Film, TV, Art & More Coming to Texas This Winter

The stories in A New Race of Men from Heaven move elegantly between the ache of loneliness and the grace of connection, however fleeting. --Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections

A New Race of Men from Heaven is a collection of stories about characters who wander but are never truly lost. A lonely man on a business trip finds himself in the middle of a search party for a missing boy; a grieving widow leaves India to join family in the United States; a writer finds renewed success when an unknown imposter begins publishing under his identity. In these quiet yet deeply knowing stories of migration, power, and longing, A New Race of Men from Heaven offers us, above all else, stories of enduring love and hope.

Beginning with Yuka, a 39,000 year old mummified woolly mammoth recently found in the Siberian permafrost, each of the 16 essays in Animals Strike Curious Poses investigates a different famous animal named and immortalized by humans. Modeled loosely after a medieval bestiary, these witty, playful, whipsmart essays traverse history, myth, science, and more, bringing each beast vibrantly to life.

Elena Passarello is an actor, a writer, and recipient of a 2015 Whiting Fellowship in nonfiction. Her first collection with Sarabande Books, Let Me Clear My Throat, won the gold medal for nonfiction at the 2013 Independent Publisher Awards. She lives in Corvallis, Oregon.

This is a book of tragicomic gurlesque word-witchery inspired by the Kate Bush cosmos. Campily glamorous, darkly funny, obsessively ekphrastic, boozily baroque, psychedelically girly & musically ecstatic, 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse dazzles as Karyna McGlynn's third collection.

BOMB Magazine, 2023 Small Press Gift Guide

Autostraddle, 45 Queer and Feminist Books You Need to Read in Early 2017

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Harvard Book Store Staff Recommendation

These sensuous poems explore love, desire, ecology, queerness in the 'natural' world, loss, and LGBTQ lineage and community.

Sinuous and sensual, the poems of In Full Velvet interrogate the nuances of desire, love, gender, ecology, LGBTQ lineage and community, and the tension between a body's material limits and the forms made possible by the imagination. Characterized by formal poise, vulnerability, and compassion, Johnson's debut collection is one of resounding generosity and grace.

In this chapbook, Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky offer a translation of Lesyk Panasiuk's remarkable account of living in Bucha, Ukraine, during the apex of war and brutality at the hands of the Russian military. The result is a tremendous work that The Guardian describes as embodying the idea of the rupture of language through the physical collapse of signs and lettering on buildings hit by missiles. This slim book bears great weight.

Petrosino is a canny, wide-ranging and formally nimble writer with a magician's command of atmosphere.
--The New York Times, The Best Poetry of 2017

Witch Wife is back in a brand new paperback edition, featuring a reader's guide and writing prompts from the poet herself.

The poems of Witch Wife are spells, obsessive incantations to exorcise or celebrate memory, to mourn the beloved dead, to conjure children or keep them at bay, to faithfully inhabit one's given body. In sestinas, villanelles, hallucinogenic prose poems and free verse, Kiki Petrosino summons history's ghosts--the ancestors that reside in her blood and craft--and sings them to life.

The debut collection from Simon Shieh, Master is a stark, surreal, and imagistic reckoning with a traumatic past. Master follows the speaker's struggle with masculinity from a martial arts school in upstate New York to a boxing academy in Beijing. Language emerges in this collection not as a neutral witness to a boy's subjugation, but as the very tool of hegemony, though one which also holds the key to its own undoing, and therefore to freedom. As much as Master is the story of pain, it is also a journey to healing, illuminating that while violence can be our patrimony, it does not have to be our destiny.

Reader, I draws its title from the conclusion to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre: Reader, I married him. Spanning the first years of a marriage, the speaker in Reader, I both courts and eschews nuptial myths, as its speaker--tender and callous, skeptical and hopeful, daughter and lover--finds a role for herself in marriage, in history, in something beyond the self. While these poems burn with a Plathian fire, they also address and invite in a reader who is, as in Jane Eyre, a confidant. Steeped in a world of husbands and fathers, patriarchal nations and power structures, Reader, I traverses bowling alleys and hospital rooms, ancient Troy and public swimming pools, to envision domestic life as a metaphor for civic life, and vice versa.