Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat

What happens when a Midwestern girl migrates to a haunted Southern town, whose river is a graveyard, whose streets bear the names of Southern slave owners? How can she build a home where Confederate symbols strategically stand in the center of town? Can she sage the chilling truths of her ancestors? What will she do to cope with the traumatizing ghostliness of the present-day South?

Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat is a heart-wrenching reconciliation and confrontation of the living, breathing ghosts that awaken Black women each day. This debut poetry collection summons multiple hauntings—ghosts of matriarchs that came before, those that were slain, and those that continue to speak to us, but also those horrors women of color strive to put to rest. Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat examines the haunting feeling of facing past demons while grappling with sexism, racism, and bigotry. They are all present: ancestral ghosts, societal ghosts, and spiritual, internal hauntings. This book calls out for women to speak their truth in hopes of settling the ghosts or at least being at peace with them.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat pursues agency, selfhood, and disturbing meditations on inhumanity. These poems deliver truth and rage with the precision of a visionary heart and the rancid tears of a poisoned ghost.

This powerful collection bears witness to the fraught overlap between women’s bodies and minds. Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat reframes the black body politic as sacrament, benediction, delicacy, and tenderness.

These verses are timeless refrains sizzling on parched tongues. All praises for the testament of these poems that bring a full communion of blessed assurances to wise women daring oceans to erase our footprints and to wild girls chasing winds that steal the scent of herstory.”
—Jaki Shelton Green, author of I Want to Undie You

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Khalisa Rae ( Author Website )

Publication Date: April 13, 2021

Genre/Imprint: Poetry, Red Hen Press

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ISBN: 9781597098854

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Buy Me Love

In Brooklyn, New York, in 2005, Ellen Portinari buys a lottery ticket on a whim; not long after, she realizes she’s won a hundred-million-dollar jackpot. With a month to redeem the ticket, she tells no one but her alcoholic brother—a talented composer whose girlfriend has died in a terrorist attack abroad—about her preposterous good luck.

As the clock ticks, Ellen caroms from incredulity to giddiness to dread as she tries to reckon with the potential consequences of her win. She becomes unexpectedly involved with a man and boy she’s met at her local gym. While she grapples with the burden of secret-keeping and the tug of a new intimacy, a Brooklyn street artist named Blair Talpa is contending with her own challenges: a missing brother, an urge to make art that will “derange orbits,” and a lack of money.

En route to redeem the lottery ticket, Ellen finds her prospects entwining by chance with Blair’s—which allows Ellen to reimagine luck’s relation to loss, and the reader to revel in surprise.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Buy Me Love is a terrific novel about the eternal confusions of money and our beloved notions of free will—as they play out for one woman with a lottery ticket. It has a superbly believable romance, crooked family histories, and a sneaky double plot. Readers drawn in by its sharpness and originality will find themselves richly rewarded by its striking turns.”—Joan Silber, author of Improvement

“Money—its seductive force, the love of it, its weird immaterial nature, the good it can do, and the risk that having it could obliterate who you are—is everyone’s suave adversary in Martha Cooley’s penetrating novel. She has drawn each of these characters with striking uniqueness. They could all use a bit more money. But it’s the possibility of suddenly having a lot more that fills the story with such danger and hope. If you got everything you wanted, would you still want it? And would you still be you?”—Salvatore Scibona, author of The Volunteer

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Martha Cooley ( Author Website )

Publication Date: June 1, 2021

Genre/Imprint: Fiction, Red Hen Press

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ISBN: 9781597091206

A Camera Obscura

*HONORABLE MENTION in the 2022 International Latino Book Awards*

From the edge of a singularity and across desert roads at night, A Camera Obscura teleports its readers through deep space nebulae and the constructs of cityscapes to arrive at what it means to “see.” Lovers embrace in sonnets and meditations move through artworks and Hubble Telescope images as these poems employ ekphrastic visions to balance the profound displacements in the most mundane aspects of our lives with science, fact, faith, and song. In the ceremonial blades of Aztec sacrifice and the anonymity of undocumented lives, these poems accrete into a solar system of images seen true, seen askance, seen in error, seen entire. A Camera Obscura is the dark room of the imagination where sīgnum—the sign, the act—becomes the tangible testaments of living.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Carl Marcum takes inspiration here ranging from the gravity of living on Earth to the extremity of contemplating the stars. He writes his way into stunning imaginative identification with ‘Xipe Totec, the Flayed One’ and into science-smart reflection on images gleaned by the Hubble Space Telescope. The reach of the book is gorgeous, all attended to with an appetite for language that seems itself a kind of soul hunger. The ‘smolder and spark’ of Chicago’s cityscape, the word ‘cute,’ the Drake equation ending in Fermi’s paradox, the star called ‘Ojo de Dios’—all seek to ‘unite the mind with the unknown’ in these fine and engaging poems.”—Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of Stairway to Heaven

“Heady and full like a hearty glass of Petite Sirah, this intelligent collection of poems displays the best of ‘American’ fusion. Both aged and fresh, these poems blanket the tongue with their flush of lush language. High and low culture blend with the Native Spanish of the Southwest in this poetry of sanguine saguaros set in the windows of Chicago high-rises and the spoils from academic ivory towers, those ‘robots’ less than human, ‘more than semiotic ghost’—all woven together into A Camera Obscura, which holds ‘every heavenly hypothesis.'”—Lorna Dee Cervantes, author of Sueño

“I have been a fan of Carl Marcum’s work for years. His first book, Cue Lazarus, rented a room in my head for a while. It’s great to have him back in there, kicking the furniture around. Orale, poeta!”—Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels

“Carl Marcum is that rare poet who dares to peer into the darkness and give name to the unknowable (‘the land you could never pronounce,’ ‘the horizon between us’). Like an old Stoic in the age of dark matter, Marcum understands that we are, at our best, ‘a quintessence of dust.’ His is an investigative poetics of the untranslatably profane and sublime: the etymology of cuteness and passion, the spatial logic of Walmart, the mysteries of a José Clemente Orozco mural, indigenous histories and cosmologies, the light of a Chicago autumn and its stone. The poet’s imagination is as ‘synthetic and pervasive / as microchips’ but attuned to the ‘meander of Andromeda’ and the ‘movement of thought against light.’ Marcum claims the physics of poetry and the poetry of physics in a liminal poetics of ‘anisotropic apostrophe’ that values ‘the interval. / What’s between, / what’s missing.’ The in-between here is also Chicago, ‘the prophetic city’ and its speculative fictions: ‘City of the aborted future, shroud of parallax.’ Like a Midwestern, half-Mexicano Whitman, the poet becomes part and particle of the city in a (meta)physics of dérive: ‘Soy tanta cuidad.’ In the spirit of modern poiesis, A Camera Obscura maps how ‘Chaos works through its agenda of dust,’ but it never gives up on a visionary poetics of ‘incantation and renewal,’ where ‘sound is stretched / to color, color stitched to light, light solidifying / to absence.’ You won’t read a smarter book of poetry this light-year! Come for the trippy ‘SciFi-ku’ (‘We should be a space- / faring people, if only / to leave and come back.’). Come for a stunning sonnet and its high-voltage volta (‘of dividing lines and the sun’s far off fusion.’”). Come for the geek-chic hijinks and virtuoso/rasquache world-making (an ‘interruption’ of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a riff on the Drake equation). Then stay for the lovely cosmic blues (‘How does this field escape its naming?’), for a poetry that maps our other-worlds and other-words in the here and now: ‘O, this present tense, this wretched skin. / We are something always to be sketched in.'”
—Urayoán Noel, translator and author of Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico

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Publication Date: June 29, 2021

Genre/Imprint: Letras Latinas, Poetry

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ISBN: 9781597094818

American Quasar

*HONORABLE MENTION in the 2022 International Latino Book Awards*

American Quasar is a visual-textual collaboration between poet David Campos and artist Maceo Montoya. What began as an exploration of the precipice of violence evolved into an excavation of self, a deep meditation on how country, family, and trauma affect the ability to love. The images and words build a poetic space where the body is understood in both physical and celestial terms, giving a spiritual dimension to the collection’s larger claim that the political is personal.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“David Campos’ American Quasar is a true force of collaboration that implores a new vision of exegesis with the renowned artist, Maceo Montoya. How can we love what hurts us, and how can we love the things we hurt? Here is a speaker kneeling in reverence to a god, a lover, or a self which we can acutely love and hurt at the same time. Set in the storied landscape of the California Central Valley, this book is an indictment of what America has burned or buried, and a document of all that has nonetheless survived in the ashes: the name of a distant father, the gravity of the past on our chest. Powerfully surreal and imagistic, Campos is a necessary voice both tender and unrelenting, a voice that is both wound and salve. How fortunate we are for the gifts of poet and artist at the height of their powers.”—Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, author of Centzontle

“‘The apocalypse doesn’t have to be violent. // The horsemen are mirrors.’ American Quasar looks in rather than out, registering the catastrophe of our times in the merest activities of our most intimate selves. It’s a book of spiritual exercises, and its ruminations are ragged, memorable, desperate prayers. Notebook-like in the intimacy of their entanglement, the lyrics and images combine in dynamic and tender reflection. Campos’ fierce, direct contemplations turn ordinary anxiety into dramatic and memorable gesture; Montoya’s subtle but searing images frame human thought as embodied activity. Both text and image remind us that we exist vibrantly in those states of ambivalence, grief, and anger that we most fear: ‘What if the wreckage, / the carnage, the catastrophe, was your music?'”—Katie Peterson, author of A Piece of Good News

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David Campos ( Author Website )

Maceo Montoya ( Author Website )

Publication Date: June 22, 2021

Genre/Imprint: Poetry, Red Hen Press

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ISBN: 9781597094481

Singer Come from Afar

This book considers war and peace, pandemic struggles, Earth imperatives, a seeker’s spirit, and forging kinship. The former poet laureate of Oregon, Stafford has shared poems from this book in libraries, prisons, on reservations, with veterans, immigrants, homeless families, legislators, and students in schools. He writes for hidden heroes, resonant places, and for our chance to converge in spite of differences. Poems like “Practicing the Complex Yes” and “The Fact of Forgiveness” offer tools for connection with the self, the community, and the Earth: “It is a given you have failed . . . [but] the world can’t keep its treasures from you.” For the early months of the pandemic, Stafford wrote and posted a poem for challenge and comfort each day on Instagram and published a series of chapbooks that traveled hand to hand to far places—to Norway, Egypt, and India. He views the writing and sharing of poetry as an essential act of testimony to sustain tikkun olam, the healing of the world. May this book be the hidden spring you seek.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Poetry began as song, and in the lyrics of Kim Stafford we still hear the singing. A keen listener to voices human and wild, he writes of prisoners and refugees, toads and wrens, warriors and peacemakers, orcas and rivers. His guiding impulse is compassion. He urges us to defy ‘the camp of anger’ through acts of kindness. He assures us that Nature holds no grudges. Even ‘in the era of stormy weather,’ bees gather nectar, birds weave nests, seeds sprout, and new life emerges. Here is a bard of small creatures and gentle gestures who believes that art can help heal the wounds we’ve inflicted on Earth, our fellow species, and one another, and that conviction shines through every page of this big-hearted book.”—Scott Russell Sanders, author of The Way of Imagination

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Kim Stafford ( Author Website )

Publication Date: April 6, 2021

Genre/Imprint: Poetry, Red Hen Press

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ISBN: 9781597098885

Gone to Earth

Gone to Earth brings to light, late in the long, distinguished career of poet Eleanor Wilner, her early uncollected poems—an unveiling of the first stages of a vital, imaginative process, in whose evocative, imagistic landscapes is enacted a drama of emergence from entrapment. In the often-painful drama of new birth, from the deadly strictures and oppressions of the older social forms, come the living forces undermining them—new life seeded out of a decaying order: “a wet nose / breaks the earth, and sniffs the river air.” Written during the poet’s immersion in the civil rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam War, an inner liberating struggle is tuned to a collective channel where communal memory and vision are undergoing transformation.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“The distinguished poet Eleanor Wilner is widely celebrated for the chiseled elegance of her verse and the breadth of her vision. Wilner can sizzle with outrage as she exposes the sordid roots of violence and greed, or distill the substance of critical mythopoesis into essential poetry. We see qualities in the early poetry collected in this volume—the profound ethical sensibility, the meticulous observations of nature and society, the stringent wit—that will come to define this great poet’s mature work. In these sparkling poems, we discover her fierce compassion in incipient form. And in the trenchant personal poem (‘What do myths have to do with the price of fish?’), we glimpse the patronization that an aspiring young poet coming of age in the middle of the last century confronted as she made her way. Gone to Earth is a beautiful gift of a book!”
—Cynthia Hogue, author of In June the Labyrinth

“Haunted by history, grounded by mountains and rivers, irradiated by myth, torn between rage and the love of life, made enchanting by the voluptuous music of its language, Wilner’s early poetry is lit with insight from within. In a poem defending the uses of myth, there’s a scene where ‘silent / women in outdated robes walk slowly, / as figures move through centuries, / like the memory of patience.’ Oh, but there’s Marianne Moore, and a bit to her left, there’s Muriel Rukeyser. Wilner is factual, prophetic, and a shaman for our times.”
—Alicia Ostriker, author of Waiting for the Light

A black and white painting of a woman sitting in a chair in front of a lake with black script that reads Gone to Earth early and uncollected poems 1963-1975 by Eleanor Wilner.

Publication Date: May 11, 2021

Genre/Imprint: Crooked Hearts Press, Poetry

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ISBN: 9781597099226

A Gypsy’s Book of Revelation

A Gypsy’s Book of Revelation is a collection of stories with an astonishing range of styles and subject matters. A woman visits her cremation from inside the body of her dead self, a competitive couple trains as free-divers, a mother leaves her son behind on top of a mountain, a very pregnant woman experiences a peculiar relationship with a priest-to-be: these stories are full of surprising experimentation that strikes a deeply compelling balance between the real and the bizarre. Embodying unusual premises and worlds, these stories are also fearlessly nontraditional in their structure and approach. These voices haunt, tease, and dare while never providing fully fledged answers. Each story is its own unique thing, a small but profound nod to the human condition.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“This collection has an astonishing range of styles and subject matters—it seems that there’s no character or situation the author is afraid to explore, and the stories are full of surprising experimentation and a balance between realism and the weird that I found deeply compelling. Readers who, like me, are fans of Jim Shepard and Carmen Maria Machado will find much to admire here: like Shepard, these stories vividly embody surprising and unusual premises and worlds; like Machado, they are fearlessly nontraditional in their structure and approach. But they are also their own unique thing, sui generis, each story imbued with authority and wisdom. I’m super excited about this author’s future work.”—Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will

A photograph of a woman with a cigarette in her mouth carrying a female child with white script that reads A Gypsy’s Book of Revelation by Cecile Barlier.

Cécile Barlier ( Author Website )

Publication Date: April 6, 2021

Genre/Imprint: Red Hen Press, Short Stories

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ISBN: 9781888996876

Abracadabra, Sunshine

Abracadabra, Sunshine is a series of ever-turning letters written to lovers, friends, and family as a testament to human perseverance and to art-making as a continuous defiance against the often overwhelming complexities and hardships of existence. Darting from the Czech Republic to the Andromeda Galaxy, from the films of Godard to the tales of the Brothers Grimm and the Terracotta Army of Qin Shi Huang, these poems foreground our animal need for love and connection against the background of our historical obsession with destruction. By turns dour and deeply hopeful, Booth’s poems extol the communal and healing powers of vulnerability and love.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Witchy in its uncanny imagery, seering, and searing, Dexter Booth’s Abracadabra, Sunshine is an intricately woven spell, a “mating of letters” with “the magic of anatomy.” This book’s—this body’s—beauty, exactitude, and unflinching witness—haunt, as “some truths burn like houses and the people who run into them.” Here, lyric utterance as address and artifact takes shape through a kaleidoscope of returning phrases, images, and narratives: Booth’s is lyricism as chrysalis.”—Shira Dentz, author of Sisyphusina

“Mysterious, lovely, and written with sensitivity and craftsmanship, Dexter L. Booth’s second book is about what it means to care for one another is a world where “sorrow is often camouflaged by the body.” Booth’s genius is that he is able, through perfectly constructed images of imaginative depth, to relay a pervasive sense of compassion, clarity, and awe.”—Sandra Simonds, author of Atopia

A blue painted flower with colorful paint drops dripped around the border with white text on top that reads Abracadabra Sunshine poems by Dexter L. Booth.

Dexter L. Booth ( Author Website )

Publication Date: July 20, 2021

Genre/Imprint: Poetry, Red Hen Press

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ISBN: 9781597094474

Strange Children

In a polygamist commune in the desert, a sixteen-year-old boy and a twelve-year-old girl fall in love and consummate that love, breaking religious law. They are caught, and a year later, she gives birth to his father’s child while the boy commits murder four hundred miles away—a crime that will slowly unravel the community.

Told by eight adolescent narrators, this is a story of how people use faith to justify cruelty, and how redemption can come from unexpected places. Though seemingly powerless in the face of their fundamentalist religion, these “strange children” shift into the central framework of their world as they come of age.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Sadie Hoagland’s vast imaginative compassion gives her uncanny access to the minds and bodies of eight strange children, their histories of abuse and longing for transcendence. I fell in love eight times, bearing the children’s pain, witnessing their afflictions. Through their mesmerizing, gorgeously lyrical language, the reader shares the joyful mysteries of spiritual desire, the ecstasies of secret faith, and the terrifying thrill of subversive reinvention. Harrowing and tender, this fiercely intense, exquisitely composed novel transports us from an isolated polygamist community in the wild desert of southern Utah to the bewildering buzz and glitter of urban streets in Salt Lake City, from the raptures of adolescent love to the violent extremes of sexual obsession. If we are biased, if we cling to comfortable misconceptions about people who live beyond our experience, these magnificently beautiful children will pierce and transfigure us.”
—Melanie Rae Thon, author of Silence and Song

“A spellbinding, symphonic marvel of a novel. It could not be stranger, darker, or more illuminating. I found it impossible to put down.”
—Rikki Ducornet, author of The Deep Zoo and The Jade Cabinet

“I admire Strange Children for its mythic grandeur, its intoxicating cadences. This is a novel about a world unraveling, a desert place illuminated by the vulnerable young who belong to it—a place of child brides and murder, predation and exile, solace and exultation. Sadie Hoagland’s heart is spacious and her sentences are marvelously lush.”—Noy Holland, author of Bird

Strange Children Dark purple script that reads Strange Children a novel by Sadie Hoagland surrounded by a design of white and orange flowers.

Sadie Hoagland ( Author Website )

Publication Date: May 18, 2021

Genre/Imprint: Fiction, Red Hen Press

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ISBN: 9781597091169

How to Feed a Horse

How to Feed a Horse is a manuscript in three parts: One, “Ranch Poems,” activities, contemplations, awareness of the creek environment. Two, “Numerology,” disparate poems that invite us to consider the absurd in our language, politics, history, and human relationships. Three, “Her(e),” conversations with a network of women, some imagined, some historic, some intimate. The author’s preoccupations with climate change and our deteriorating planetary environment surface as she gives herself over to be witness to the landscape, its decline and perseverance, its glory and rich legacy. The poems are also love poems; they show the ecstasy and shock of the now.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“What a deep delight to discover the poetry of Janice Dewey—a distinctive voice with attitude—wry, original, resonant; hairpin turns of phrase: ‘journey looking for the carnal door to weightlessness again;’ inner and outer magically confounded: ‘her head out in the hurricane of consciousness.’ Her poems uncannily trans-scribe—writing feelingly across the arbitrary border between humans and the rest of nature: ‘prone on the ground an event of sincere gratitude,’ and, with the coyote: ‘ears prickled, giant sound receptors for desert wisdom.'”—Eleanor Wilner, recipient of the Robert Frost Medal and the MacArthur Fellowship

“How to Feed a Horse conjures the extraordinary beauty of a certain diminishing but surviving West. Dusty hills, canyon wrens, scurrying quail, horses, ‘biting flies,’ the ranch, the tree, the sky—all are memorialized in these meticulously observed, beautifully crafted poems. Dewey’s remarkable first book is a testimony to the power of the lyric to ‘crack . . . language alive with memory holes,’ to make us look again and think again at what we may be losing, what may already be lost. So smart, so moving! Brava Janice!”
—Karen Brennan, author of little dark

A green and blue abstract design with yellow script on top that reads How to Feed a Horse poetry by Janice Dewey.

Publication Date: May 11, 2021

Genre/Imprint: Crooked Hearts Press, Poetry

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ISBN: 9781597098663

Extremely Lightweight Guns

In this bold debut collection, Nikki Moustaki explores femininity in contexts that grapple with violence, mental illness, loss, love, and relationships. She investigates these themes through a variety of provocative narratives, settings, and forms: from a prose poem about a gun shop owner ranting about the Second Amendment, to more intimate lyrical poems, to the intense stamina of three long poems that anchor the book in three striking and imaginative settings—the disintegration of an abusive relationship in a backdrop of often-surreally connected narratives; diary-like entries featuring three generations of superstitious women living without men in a strange world of their own creation; and a dressmaker trying to make sense of his changing world while dealing with his ill wife. This nuanced work is intense and articulate, crafted largely by shattering traditional poetic elements, creating new forms, and driving language that never surrenders.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“A tooth-paste blue Chevy Nova,” “the red bird of misfortune,” a rooster with “bronzy dino-feet”—Extremely Lightweight Guns is a riot of colorful birds, electric passions, and lyric panache. There is an incendiary delight to these poems, which threaten to burst into linguistic and narrative flame on nearly every page. Hypnotic and dramatic, Nikki Moustaki writes with the kind of assurance that lets you know she is a voice to be reckoned with.
—Campbell McGrath, author of Nouns & Verbs: New and Selected Poems

“I stand in awe and praise of this ambitious collection, possessed by an ardent determination to challenge our assumptions about what a poem is, or ought to be, and meant to dare us to rethink poetry and all its possibilities. Moustaki’s pure reverence and fascination for experimentation gives rise to poems that recast language, narrative, and voice, leaving us suspended, entranced, enraptured by the genius of her pure, undoubtable imagination.”
—Richard Blanco, Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of How to Love a Country

Three blue hands pointed towards the center script that reads Extremely Lightweight Guns poems by Nikki Moustaki.

Nikki Moustaki ( Author Website )

Publication Date: March 16, 2021

Genre/Imprint: Poetry, Red Hen Press

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ISBN: 9781597091138

The Playwright’s House

*SILVER MEDALIST for the 2022 International Latino Book Awards in Best Popular Fiction – English*

Happily married, backed by a powerful mentor, and with career prospects that would take him abroad, Serguey has more than any young Cuban lawyer could ask for. But when his estranged brother Victor appears with news that their father—famed theater director Felipe Blanco—has been detained for what he suspects are political reasons, Serguey’s privileged life is suddenly shaken.

A return to his childhood home in Havana’s decaying suburbs—a place filled with art, politics, and the remnants of a dissolving family—reconnects Serguey with his troubled past. He learns of an elusive dramaturge’s link to Felipe, a man who could be key to his father’s release. With the help of a social media activist and his wife’s ties with the Catholic Church, Serguey sets out to unlock the mystery of Felipe’s arrest and, in the process, is forced to confront the reasons for the hostility between him and Victor: two violent childhood episodes that scarred them in unforgettable ways. On the verge of imprisonment, Serguey realizes he must make a decision regarding not just his father, but his family and his own future, a decision which, under the harsh shadow of a communist state, he cannot afford to regret.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“The Playwright’s House is a bighearted novel, intricately embedded in the politics and daily life of contemporary Cuba. It is also a family story of love, sibling rivalry, courage, and redemption. Suarez writes with energy, exuberance, and psychological acuity. The straightforward prose adds gravity and earnestness to this remarkable novel.”
—Ha Jin, National Book Award winner and author of War Trash

“The Playwright’s House is a thrilling and compassionate story of brotherhood, surveillance culture, the provocative power of theater, and the persistent ways past ghosts can haunt the present. Dariel Suarez animates the singularly complex and contradictory landscape of contemporary Havana with immense precision and insight. This is a stunning and vital novel.”—Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel

A painting of a theater stage with the lights on and the crowd seats empty with yellow text in the center that reads The Playwrights House a novel by Dariel Suarez.

Dariel Suarez ( Author Website )

Publication Date: June 15, 2021

Genre/Imprint: Fiction, Red Hen Press

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ISBN: 9781597091145

Lexicon

Lexicon is a worthy successor to Allison Joseph’s award-winning breakthrough, Confessions of a Barefaced Woman. This time around, this self-professed “barefaced woman” is setting her sighs/sights on language and what it does for and with and to her. Joseph loves language, making it her slippery passion in poems about childhood griefs and fashion faux pas, movie musicals and empty airports, “rules” for writing and rules for reading. Though Joseph loves language, it doesn’t always love her back—but in her wise, readable, and imaginative way, she persists while documenting the minefields of racism and sexism. Joseph finds joy in the most unlikely of places, and in Lexicon, her adoration for the written word lets us see those places in sharp and evocative relief. All hail this bounty, this Lexicon!

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Lexicon is an investigation of form rendered in a uniquely sensual, sensory exploration of language whose depth and breadth encompass a multitude of poetic, lyric, and linguistic traditions that reflect the dialects, cultures, and communities in which Allison Joseph is fluent. The iambic beat of the English language is at the heart of her verse whose fluidity and sonic play deliver a cornucopia of lines grounded in a meditation on embodiment, class, race, gender, sexuality, time, and place. Food metaphors abound in a sexy, sense-laden feast of images served with an exuberant yet intellectually meticulous command of forms such as villanelles and sestinas whose recursiveness mirrors the poet’s relationship with time and memory. In Joseph’s capable hands, the oft-maligned and often dusty ars poetica sings with a fresh music and emotional candor that marries formal and narrative lyrical poetry. In this remarkable collection, the poet is at the height of her powers.”—Wendy Chin-Tanner, author of Anyone Will Tell You

“Allison Joseph’s Lexicon is poetic celebration, elegy, and most of all, song. Exploiting tensions between content and form, body and body image, women and misogyny, race and stereotype, these are poems that thrum and churn within their own well-wrought urns—’bodies pushing words beyond the real’—frequently calling out the histories and hypocrisies of their own formal embodiments. The poems in Lexicon hum, croon, and belt out their refrains with heartbreaking candor, shimmer, and sashay—revealing a poet so deft with form that she can easily code-shift between violence and ecstasy, side-eye and wit, lyric torch song and funk. Allison Joseph is a poet whose skilled craft and remarkable voice combine to make a remarkable music, and this book is both powerhouse and pleasure.”—Lee Ann Roripaugh, author of tsunami vs. the fukushima 50

A purple and orange cover with a graphic design of a woman’s face in the center and white script that reads Lexicon poetry by Allison Joseph.

Allison Joseph ( Author Website )

Publication Date: April 27, 2021

Genre/Imprint: Poetry, Red Hen Press

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ISBN: 9781597097178

Snake IV: Original Grace

Original Grace is the last book in the Snake Quartet. In it, the journey from destruction leads through the darkened rooms of an enormous house where occasionally outside the windows creatures past, present, and future appear—asking for help or solace or trying to break the glass to get in. But the house is made of poetry and is unassailable unlike those who live in it.

By this time, Snake has undergone the transformations from sole survivor into the mythic voice of the collective with all their throats open and in full song. She has undergone the movement from original gender into all genders. The rough linguistic artifacts left from the first book—the dialects and fogginess she experienced living both in and out of a dream—slowly become more coherent as she learns to filter the collective voices back into her personal speech. Original Grace is not just the end of what was but the beginning of what comes next. The sun has gone down. The long wait for a new sunrise is nearly over.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“In Original Grace, the amazing conclusion to the Snake Quartet, Gary Lemons has found a deep syntactical pulse in the language that mixes witnessing with hallucination—arching across this series of books, I have to observe that the imagination working here is not only compassionate but weeps for us all. And yet the passage through imagination lifts us in just the way Blake intended when he took a large rake to the King’s messenger. I love these insurrections of mind. Taken as one book or as a whole the Snake Quartet is a relevant and signal accomplishment. Praise no blame!”
—Norman Dubie, author of Quotations of Bone

A colorful graphic design of the planet earth with a snake wrapped around it, with black script on towards the top that reads Original Grace poems by Gary Lemons.

Gary Lemons ( Author Website )

Publication Date: May 25, 2021

Genre/Imprint: Poetry, Red Hen Press

$16.95 Tradepaper

Shop: Red Hen, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble

ISBN: 9781597091152

Touching Creatures, Touching Spirit

Touching Creatures, Touching Spirit illustrates with true stories that we live in an interactive, aware world in which the creatures around us in our neighborhoods know us and sometimes reach across to us, empathically and helpfully. Implications are that all beings live in a possible “common mind” from which our mass culture has disconnected, but which is only a heartbeat and some concentrated attention away. This mind encompasses microbial life and insects as well as creatures and extends to nonmaterial intelligence as well—that is to say, spirit.

Creatures as varied as a collaborating dragonfly, ants rescuing each other, a sympathetic lizard, an empathic coyote, gift-giving squirrels, crazed birds, and lots of very mysteriously smart cats inhabit the stories.

Precognition, dreams, paranormal experiences with birds, psychic communications with cats, visitations from ghosts with messages, rolling earth spirits—not supernatural, they seem natural enough but not visible to everyone.

The intention of this book is to help people catch interactions they themselves experience with nonhuman and even disembodied beings, and who could use some support for recalling since these interactions make clear we live in a sentient world.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Invoking the marvels of nature, these pages reveal an open secret: that the web of consciousness in which we all live is not produced by human beings alone, but by the plants and trees and animals and birds that surround us. We are in communion with dragonflies and ravens and otters and redwood trees. Read this book for its beauty and insight and because it will help us to listen more closely, which just might save us all.”
—Susan Griffin, author Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her

“With a poet’s deep inquisitiveness, Judy Grahn dares to study, imagine, and document the ways creatures communicate across species as well as the nature of consciousness itself. An enticing mix of nonfiction, fiction, and philosophy, Touching Creatures opens into a wide realm of storytelling that can only be reached with a big heart and a vast curiosity. These courageous stories insist on asking the biggest questions and bear witness to the beauty and connectedness of all creatures.”
—Lucy Jane Bledsoe, novelist and science writer, winner of two fellowships from the National Science Foundation

A graphic design of a black cat inside strawberry bush with black text towards the top that reads Touching Creatures Touching Spirit stories and essays by Judy Grahn.

Judy Grahn ( Author Website )

Publication Date: May 25, 2021

Genre/Imprint: Non-Fiction, Red Hen Press

$16.95 Tradepaper

Shop: Red Hen, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble

ISBN: 9781597091183