Happy New Year! Here at Red Hen Press, we’re hoping you’re having a good start to 2022. If you’re looking for something to read in the New Year, Red Hen Press has plenty of releases coming out in the Spring! Check them out here:
The Getting Place by Frank Soos
The stories in The Getting Place spring from the places Frank Soos loved best: the coal hills of southwest Virginia, the coves of coastal Maine, and the rivers and tundra around Fairbanks, Alaska. They ask, “Who can know the why of his own life, the why of what he does?” We join his characters when their lives spin beyond their control, when they face unexpected upheavals that change their lives utterly. By turns quirky, heartbreaking, profound, and witty, these brilliant stories open the hidden rooms inside us.
—Peggy Shumaker
Coming Jan ’22! Click here to purchase.
gossypiin by Ra Malika Imhotep
This harvest of poems is inspired by the plant medicine latent in Gossypium Herbeceum, or Cotton Root Bark, which was used by enslaved Black women to induce labor, cure reproductive ailments and end unwanted pregnancies. Through an arrangement of stories, secrets and memories experienced, read, heard, reimagined and remixed, gossypiin reckons with a peculiar yet commonplace inheritance of violation, survival and self-possession. In this way, Ra Malika Imhotep invites us to lean in and listen good as the text interrupts the narrative silence around sexual harm, sickness, and the marks they make on black femme subjectivity.
Out April ’22! Click here to purchase.
Your Nostalgia is Killing Me by John Weir
John Weir, author of The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, a defining novel of 1980s New York in its response to the global AIDS crisis, has written a story collection that chronicles the long aftermath of epidemic death, as recorded in the tragicomic voice of a gay man who survived high school in the 1970s, the AIDS death of his best friend in the 1990s, and his complicated relationship with his mother, “a movie star without a movie to star in,” whose life is winding to a close in a retirement community where she lives alone with her last dog.
Out April ’22! Click here to purchase.
Epilogue by Frederick Morgan
In Epilogue: Selected and Last Poems, Frederick Morgan reworks and amplifies, in his extraordinary poetic range, the fundamental human themes that preoccupied him—love, death, pain, the nature and transcendence of the Self. In interweaving his many themes, he recaptures the past, the confrontation with the external world of nature and the internal world of dream, the oppositions and ambiguities of body and spirit, and the reduplications of meaning in legend and fable. Assembled from eight previous collections, and including his final poems, this profoundly moving book transcends individual expression to provide a powerful insight into universal human experience.
Out April ’22! Click here to purchase.
Ursula Lake by Charles Harper Webb
Former best friends Scott and Errol meet unexpectedly at Oso Lake, a remote Canadian fly-fishing paradise where, five years before, fresh out of college, they had the time of their lives. Their situations, though, have changed, their high hopes quashed by workaday realities and, in Errol’s case, marriage to Claire, who has come with him trying to stave off divorce. But Oso Lake has changed. The fall before, a woman’s severed head was left in a campfire pit beside the lake. The shadow cast by her murder is darkened further by a fire-scarred white truck driver who claims to be a long-dead Native shaman and has plans to eradicate not only Scott, Errol, and Claire, but all of Western civilization. The beauty of the wilderness becomes, every day, more threatening and perverse. But the worst danger the vacationers face may be themselves.
Out May ’22! Click here to purchase.
Monkey Business by Carleton Eastlake
When William Fox, a TV writer on location in Florida, is dragged by his show’s toxic producers to a “gentleman’s club” that’s just appeared outside town, he meets Nicole, a mysterious dancer who claims to be an anthropologist searching for signs of rational life on Earth.
Enchanted by her both playful and serious ideas exploring love, limerence, power, monkey behavior, paintball combat, creativity, and the dilemma of a rational mind compelled to serve an animal’s body by feeding it fantasies, Will falls in love—and his ever more troubled love-struck behavior and the acidly destructive battles among his producers and network executives during the production of his show soon begin to illustrate Nicole’s theories.
Out May ’22! Click here to purchase.
The Discarded Life by Adam Kirsch
In these moving and meditative poems, Adam Kirsch shows how the experiences and recognitions of early life continue to shape us into adulthood. Richly evoking a 1980s childhood in Los Angeles, Kirsch uses Gen X landmarks–from Devo to Atari to the Challenger disaster–to tell a story of emotional and artistic coming of age, exploring universal questions of meaning, mortality, and how we become who we are.
Out May ’22! Click here to purchase.
These are only a few of the upcoming releases at Red Hen Press. Click here to view the full catalogue of what to expect in 2022! We hope you join us on our journey into the New Year.