2022
The Kitchen of Small Hours Derek N. Otsuji
“Derek N. Otsuji’s The Kitchen of Small Hours is largely an exercise in honoring the dead. Moving lyrics pop off the page, propelled by the momentum of the past.”—Chris McKinney, author of The Tattoo and Midnight, Water City “The Kitchen of Small Hours proves what many fans of Otsuji already knew: he is one of the most talented poets currently writing in Hawai'i. This beautifully crafted book casts an ‘inner light’ on family and food, culture and tradition, death and dreams. Like ‘ink brushed on rice paper,’ these words reveal truths that only poetry ‘gives us eyes to see.’”—Craig Santos Perez, author of Habitat Threshold
Reimagining the elusive American dream Paper: 978-0-8093-3840-5 E-book: 978-0-8093-3841-2 $16.95, 90 pages Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
A BRITTLE SPRIG A sprig of cherry blossoms pressed between the pages of a book—five papery flowers whose pale pink had faded to the soft brown of aging letters locked up in a box. Their discovery was like the discovery of a note written down and then forgotten, never intended for anyone’s eyes —just a note to the self to remember something. No—not a note, but a feeling, pressed with tender urgency between the leaves as if to be put in a book—for safekeeping— as if only in a book it could live.
Learn more and order at www.siupress.com/kitchenhours.
In The Kitchen of Small Hours, Derek N. Otsuji embraces the fragility and endurance of a family of immigrants from two prefectures in Japan: Kagoshima in the south and Okinawa, an island more than four hundred miles from the mainland. In these poems, five generations sing, save, scold, bury, and cook against the culture and history that emerged from the pineapple and sugar cane plantations of mid-nineteenth-century Hawaii, from the bomb-scapes and hatreds of World War II, and from the canning and tourism industry of the twentieth century. Otsuji writes of how his family used stories and rugged cheer to fill the spaces apart from the cane fields and the canning factory. Their recipes, rituals, celebrations, songs, dances, myths, and family stories passed from grandmother to father to son, who folds them into lyrics. Here too are whispers, failures, and traceable absences: a face removed from photos, a love silenced to be acceptable, a dead firstborn housed in an urn. There are things that no one intended to give. Otsuji’s language hungers for them anyway. The haunting reunions between author and ancestor sink just as deep as roots and hold just as fast. The cooking pot, the family photo, the moon recur as images that feed and comfort. Lyrical and warm, Otsuji’s voice sounds out a sinew of words that make the remnants of heritage and home durable. In these poems each new generation seeks to reimagine for itself the elusive American Dream.
Derek N. Otsuji, an associate professor of English at Honolulu Community College, was awarded the 2019 Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He received the Editor’s Choice Award for poems published in the fortieth-anniversary issue of Bamboo Ridge, the longest running independent literary journal in Hawaii. His poems have appeared in Rhino, Missouri Review, Indiana Review, Pleiades, and the Threepenny Review.
The Flesh Between Us Tory Adkisson
“Tory Adkisson’s poems are fervent, vulnerable. He illuminates the ‘wilderness of flesh’ that divides and connects us. I found myself leaning closer to his lyricism, his courage, his inventiveness. The Flesh Between Us is a powerful debut, rich with language that startles, lingers.”—Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine
“Adkisson is a classical poet with a hard style. He can be both funny and dark. I admire his emotionalism when writing about love, lost love and the dangers of loving. His poems mix autobiography with myth as he tries to make sense of the chaos around him. His poems have backbone, and I admire this, too.”—Henri Cole, author of Blizzard and Orphic Paris
Eroticism cut from classical mythology, ritual, and intimacy In The Flesh Between Us the speaker explores our connections to each other, whether they be lovely or painful, static or constantly shifting, or, above all, unavoidable and necessary. Intensely and unapologetically homoerotic in content and theme, The Flesh Between Us sensuously conducts the meetings between strangers, between lovers, between friends and family, between eater and eaten, between the soul and the body that contains it. Pushing the boundaries of what has been traditionally acceptable for gay and erotic content and themes, the poems adapt persona, Greek mythology, Judaism, and classic poetic forms to interrogate the speaker’s relationship to god and faith, to love and sex, to mother and father. Stark and mythical, the imagery draws from the language of animals and nature. Episodes of kink tangle with creatures of forests and lore. In this tumult, the lines of poetry keep a sense of boundary and distance by the seeming incompatibility of their subjects: daybreak and dissection, human and insect, worship and reality. The touch of irreconcilable bodies, in Adkisson’s language, intimates the precise moment of love. The idea of love moves viscerally through rib, lung, throat, and mouth. The poems show how flesh opens in so many ways, in prayers, in bleeds, in ruts. The flesh, opened, begins to swell. If there is guilt in this, Adkisson’s poems refuse the placid satisfaction of confession. Whatever attachments the reader dares to draw must be made with blade or tongue. The reader must commit to the potential violence narrated by these poems.
Tory Adkisson’s work has been featured in anthologies such as Best New Poets and Queer Nature. His poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, the Adroit Journal, Los Angeles Review, Boston Review, and Cimarron Review.
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HOMOSEXUALITY
Paper: 978-0-8093-3842-9 E-book: 978-0-8093-3843-6 $16.95, 92 pages Crab Orchard Series In Poetry
Desire, I drape over my chest so you know what flag I bear, what nation I want to land on when the rescue workers & newscasters have pulled me from the dark, allowing me to rinse my foliate feathers, shed my oily skin—& with wings steeped in fire, they won’t be able to look at me—the light would burn pinholes in their pupils— & what they will ask as they kneel is How long does the bridge run in your heart, how deliberately dark is the birdcage. I will give them an answer & after they’ve kissed my feet, I will give them a pair of sunglasses, so when I sit down to eat they’ll be able to see clear through my throat to the window behind it & wait their turn to bring a knife & fork to the table.
Fieldglass Catherine Pond
“The poems in Fieldglass are astonishing in their honesty, and I devoured their fearlessness greedily. Pond charts fantasy, family, and the painful trust and powerful abandonments that teach us what love is. Concise, lyrical, and rife with compelling turns, this book brings the world close and helps you see it, helps you know it, helps you bear its truths.”—Traci Brimhall, author of Rookery and Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod “With this single breathtaking debut, Catherine Pond has earned her place among the most powerful, visionary, and inventive poets of her generation. Her poetry, with its visceral lyric grace and nuanced modulations, recalls the work of a young Louise Glück in its naked disquiet, its sense of imagistic reflection, and its arresting beauty. Often gestural, elliptical, and devastating, Pond’s poems assemble into luminous constellations of echoing loss. Gripping Fieldglass in your hands, it is impossible ever to look away.”—David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour: Selected and New Poems
Paper: 978-0-8093-3814-6 E-book: 978-0-8093-3815-3 $16.95, 90 pages Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
DEER IN BRIGHT SNOW Deer in bright snow. Darkness like a centrifuge spins, pulls everything toward the edges. The trick is not to care when she kisses me. Not to touch the death drive passing back and forth between us. Any day now. Heat rises under my eyes. In the restaurant neon signs face outward advertising beer. Genesee, Schaefer. In another life she leaves him. We kiss until the windows gleam with rain or night empties into the soft whoosh of cars along the state road.
Sexual identity, female friendship, and queer experiences of love Fraught with obsession, addiction, and unrequited love, Catherine Pond’s Fieldglass immerses us in the speaker’s transition from childhood to adulthood. A queer coming-of-age, this collection is a candid exploration of sexual identity, family dynamics, and friendships that elude easy categorization, offering insight on the ambiguous nature of identity. Saturated by her surroundings and permeated by the emotional lives of those close to her, the speaker struggles with feelings of displacement, trauma, and separateness. She is perpetually in transit, with long drives, flights, and train rides—moving most often between the city and the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. As the collection unfolds, the speaker journeys toward adulthood, risking intimacy and attempting to undo her embedded impulses toward silence and absorption. Reflective, graceful, and understated, Pond’s images accumulate power through restraint and suggestion. Deeply personal and intense, searching and yearning, associative and lyric, Fieldglass is a confessional about growing up, loving hard, and letting go.
Catherine Pond is a cofounder, with Julia Anna Morrison, of the online literary magazine Two Peach. For four years, she was the assistant director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, The Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest, and Salmagundi, among others.
Learn more and order at www.siupress.com/fieldglass
Hinge
Molly Spencer “Through legend and landscape, in her lush and razor-sharp lines, Molly Spencer’s newest collection, Hinge, navigates mothering and the passage of time in the throes of chronic illness. Her poems illuminate what it means to inhabit a body turning on itself, to come to knowledge by loss and by absence. These are poems that exquisitely tend to the work of living.”—Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, author of Water & Salt
“In Hinge, Molly Spencer speaks to us from both sides of a door ajar. As observer and observed, mother and patient, the poet recounts her constant movement between deep interior darknesses and the thin winter light outside. Tender and profound, Hinge’s powerful portrait of survival offers us a thing with feathers—a hope that flits between rooms, from shadow to light, before settling down to stay. What an extraordinary collection, every line fueled by a resilient, remarkable heart.”—Jennifer Richter, author of No Acute Distress and Threshold
Finding joy and beauty in the face of suffering Readers enter “a stunted world,” where landmarks—a river, a house, a woman’s own body—have become unrecognizable in a place as distorted and dangerous as any of the old tales poet Molly Spencer remasters in this elegant, mournful collection. In myth and memory, through familiar stories reimagined, she constructs poetry for anyone who has ever stumbled, unwillingly, into a wilderness. In these alluring poems, myth becomes part of the arsenal used to confront the flaws and failures of our fallible bodies. Shadowing the trajectory of an elegy, this poetry collection of lament, remembrance, and solace wrestles with how we come to terms with suffering while still finding joy, meaning, and beauty. Spencer alternates between the clinical and the domestic, dis-orientation and reorientation, awe and awareness. With the onset of a painful chronic illness, the body and mental geography turn hostile and alien. In loss and grief, in physical and psychological landscapes, Spencer searches the relationship between a woman’s body and her house—places where she is both master and captive—and hunts for the meaning of suffering. Finally, with begrudging acceptance, we have a hypothesis for all seasons: there is suffering, there is mercy; they are not separate but are for and of one another.
Molly Spencer’s poetry has appeared in Blackbird, Copper Nickel, FIELD, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. She is a poetry editor at Rumpus. Her debut collection, If the House, won the 2019 Brittingham Prize, selected by Carl Phillips.
Paper: 978-0-8093-3797-2 E-book: 978-0-8093-3798-9 $16.95, 96 pages Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
IDIOPATHIC These rooms never have windows. You’re alone and waiting, still dressed in the endless blue of their gowns. Outside this room, your whole life swallows hard. Your husband paces the waiting room, flinting his fists. You wait like a cold house waits for a fire to make it warm, wait while the sky goes down to an early dusk, mending boundaries and gaps by failing to reveal them. You wait because you can’t unfold, can’t rise up, can’t ignore the ladder you climb every day just to stand on your feet. When you hear the tap-tap on the door, try to straighten, try to smile, try to forget the splayed heart flapping in your chest.
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Then listen, nod, murmur your thanks, and turn again toward the ransacked room of your body.
Maps for Migrants and Ghosts Luisa A. Igloria
“In the face of injustice, these poems urge us to ‘say danger and defiance. / Not shoulder shrug, not fold over.’ . . . These poems are adamantine—dazzling and diamond-strong. In language at once keen and lulling, muscular and sumptuous, Igloria gives us a book of losses as well as recuperations.”—Claire Wahmanholm, author of Wilder “Restlessly transiting between the past and the present, homeland and diasporic home, consciousness and conscience, Luisa Igloria is our poet of the lyric cusp. In poems that deconstruct memory into its parts—complex nostalgia, bittersweet love—Maps for Migrants and Ghosts is at once gorgeous and painful. I read this book with intensity, feeling, in the words of one poem, ‘ecstatic and furious.’”—Rick Barot, author of The Galleons
Paper: 978-0-8093-3792-7 E-book: 978-0-8093-3793-4 $16.95, 110 pages Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
HALF-LIFE If I count the time I’ve spent living in this body minus the years spent trying to summon the fragments it left behind, I wind up with string the color of smoke, a plume dark as a dream of birds rowing the air, silvering the night with their cries— What kind of promise is it to say everything’s made beautiful and sleek by effort, though it never arrives? My desire is also perpetually disheveled by desire. Yet if I count the morsels of bread and meat that touched my tongue, they would only be proof of my shame— Who can tell what the gods throw in the water for sport, and how to fashion a net to bring it back? How could I thrive in this body while my other body, my heart, rocked itself to sleep in a silent house? Read more and order at www.siupress.com/mapsformigrants
Language as key and map to places, people, and histories lost In this poetry collection, Igloria brings together personal and family histories, ruminates on the waxing and waning of family fortunes, and reminds us how immigration necessitates and compels transformations. Simultaneously at home and displaced in two different worlds, the speaker lives in the past and the present, and the return to her origins is fraught with disappointment, familiarity, and alienation. Language serves as a key and a map to the places and people that have been lost. This collection folds memories, encounters, portraits, and vignettes, familiar and alien, into both an individual history and a shared collective history—a grandfather’s ghost stubbornly refusing to come in out of the rain, an elderly mother casually dropping YOLO into conversation, and the speaker’s abandonment of her childhood home for a second time. The poems in this collection spring out of a deep longing for place, for the past, for the selves we used to be before we traveled to where we are now, before we became who we are now. A stunning addition to the work of immigrant and migrant women poets on their diasporas, Maps for Migrants and Ghosts reveals a dream landscape at the edge of this world that is always moving, not moving, changing, and not changing.
Luisa A. Igloria is the author of fourteen books of poetry, most recently The Buddha Wonders If She Is Having a Mid-Life Crisis; and the recipient of many awards including the May Swenson Prize and the Resurgence Poetry Prize, the world’s first major ecopoetry award. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, Poetry, Poetry East, Shenandoah, Crab Orchard Review, Lantern Review, and Cha.
Unearth
Chad Davidson “‘I’d love a revelation,’ says Chad Davidson, and the poems in Unearth unroll illumination after illumination as he contemplates his mother’s death, Pluto, comets, family life, Italy, and the bombs going off all over the world. Davidson is equally adept with a microscope and a telescope as he moves through the tenuous fabric of his days, taking his readers into the beauty and heartbreak of the twenty-first century. A gorgeous book.”—Barbara Hamby, author of Bird Odyssey “What if the end were as colorless as real / estate?” the speaker asks in Unearth. Poet Chad Davidson’s latest collection takes a hard look at our world as it collapses under numerous trials and tribulations. Fashioned mostly of elegiac poems, Unearth charts the way in which personal grief ripples out to meet and mirror larger systems of loss. The first section deals with local traumas and bereavements—the loss of pets, the disintegration of a friend’s marriage. These tragedies combine with more ominous, larger breakdowns in the second section until, in the final section, grief boils over into historical wickedness, institutionalized violence, and state-sanctioned wrath. Ultimately, “Even the mouth / of a volcano, from far away, / is beautiful.”
Chad Davidson has published three previous books of poetry, including From the Fire Hills (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), and two poetry textbooks: Analyze Anything and Writing Poetry. His work has previously appeared in 32 Poems, Kenyon Review, Gettysburg Review, and AGNI, among others. He teaches at the University of West Georgia.
Paper: 978-0-8093-3771-2 E-book: 978-0-8093-3772-9 $16.95, 78 pages Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
All the Great Territories Matthew Wimberley
“Matthew Wimberley’s deeply intimate and lyrical collection All the Great Territories maps a son’s journey through the landscapes of loss—through empty towns and black mountains and snow-covered fields. Forged by tender observations, these poems seek to uncover personal histories half-buried under layers of dirt and ash. They burn bright with elegy and longing for a father, a home, a memory of a life left behind.”—Vandana Khanna, author of Train to Agra In 2012 Matthew Wimberley took a two-month journey, traveling and living out of his car, during which time he had planned to spread his father’s ashes. By trip’s end, the ashes remained, but Wimberley had begun a conversation with his deceased father that is continued here in his debut collection. All the Great Territories is a book of elegies for a father as well as a confrontation with the hostile, yet beautiful landscape of southern Appalachia. In the wake of an estranged father’s death, the speaker confronts that loss while celebrating the geography of childhood and the connections formed between the living and the dead. The narrative poems in this collection tell one story through many: a once failed relationship, the conversations we have with those we love after they are gone. In an attempt to make sense of the father-son relationship, Wimberley embraces and explores the pain of personal loss and the beauty of the natural world.
Matthew Wimberley received his MFA in poetry from New York University. His poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Missouri Review, Poem-a-Day, diode, Pleiades, Shenandoah, and River Styx, among others.
Paper: 978-0-8093-3773-6 E-book: 978-0-8093-3774-3 $16.95, 84 pages Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
The River Where You Forgot My Name Corrie Williamson Paper: 978-0-8093-3747-7 E-book: 978-0-8093-3748-4 $15.95, 94 pages
Even the Dark Leslie Williams Paper: 978-0-8093-3749-1 E-book: 978-0-8093-3750-7 $15.95, 80 pages
The Gospel according to Wild Indigo Cyrus Cassells Paper: 978-0-8093-3660-9 E-book: 978-0-8093-3661-6 $15.95, 112 pages
View from True North Sara Henning Paper: 978-0-8093-3685-2 E-book: 978-0-8093-3686-9 $15.95, 88 pages
Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Live Monica Berlin Paper: 978-0-8093-3683-8 E-book: 978-0-8093-3684-5 $15.95, 88 pages
Vanishing Acts Brian Barker Paper: 978-0-8093-3727-9 E-book: 978-0-8093-3728-6 $15.95, 72 pages
Objects of Hunger E. C. Belli Paper: 978-0-8093-3725-5 E-book: 978-0-8093-3726-2 $15.95, 88 pages
Egg Island Almanac Brendan Galvin Paper: 978-0-8093-3607-4 E-book: 978-0-8093-3608-1 $18.95, 80 pages
Dots & Dashes Jehanne Dubrow Paper: 978-0-8093-3609-8 E-book: 978-0-8093-3610-4 $18.95, 88 pages
Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing Charif Shanahan Paper: 978-0-8093-3577-0 E-book: 978-0-8093-3578-7 $15.95, 92 pages
Instructions, Abject & Fuming Julianna Baggott Paper: 978-0-8093-3573-2 E-book: 978-0-8093-3574-9 $15.95, 88 pages
Terra Nova Cynthia Huntington Paper: 978-0-8093-3575-6 E-book: 978-0-8093-3576-3 $15.95, 112 pages
Gold Bee Bruce Bond Paper: 978-0-8093-3532-9 E-book: 978-0-8093-3533-6 $15.95, 96 pages
Hijra Hala Alyan Paper: 978-0-8093-3540-4 E-book: 978-0-8093-3541-1 $15.95, 88 pages
No Acute Distress Jennifer Richter Paper: 978-0-8093-3482-7 E-book: 978 -0-8093-3483-4 $15.95, 80 pages
The Primitive Observatory Gregory Kimbrell Paper: 978-0-8093-3480-3 E-book: 978-0-8093-3481-0 $18.95, 80 pages
USA-1000 Sass Brown Paper: 978-0-8093-3446-9 E-book: 978-0-8093-3447-6 $18.95, 104 pages
Errata Lisa Fay Coutley Paper: 978-0-8093-3448-3 E-book: 978-0-8093-3449-0 $15.95, 88 pages
Incarnate Grace Moira Linehan Paper: 978-0-8093-3389-9 E-book: 978-0-8093-3390-5 $15.95, 88 pages
Salt Moon Noel Crook Paper: 978-0-8093-3387-5 E-book: 978-0-8093-3388-2 $15.95, 80 pages
Zion TJ Jarrett Paper: 978-0-8093-3356-1 E-book: 978-0-8093-3357-8 $16.95, 88 pages
Millenial Teeth Dan Albergotti Paper: 978-0-8093-3353-0 E-book: 978-0-8093-3354-7 $15.95, 80 pages
Abide Jake Adam York Paper: 978-0-8093-3327-1 E-book: 978-0-8093-3328-8 $15.95, 96 pages
From the Fire Hills Chad Davidson Paper: 978-0-8093-3323-3 E-book: 978-0-8093-3324-0 $15.95, 88 pages
Seam Tarfia Faizullah Paper: 978-0-8093-3325-7 E-book: 978-0-8093-3326-4 $16.95, 80 pages
Glaciology Jeffrey Skinner Paper: 978-0-8093-3273-1 E-book: 978-0-8093-3274-8 $18.95, 80 pages
The Laughter of Adam and Eve
Tongue Lyre Tyler Mills Paper: 978-0-8093-3222-9 E-book: 978-0-8093-3223-6 $15.95, 80 pages
Sympathetic Magic Amy Fleury Paper: 978-0-8093-3224-3 E-book: 978-0-8093-3225-0 $15.95, 80 pages
In the Absence of Clocks Jacob Shores-Arguello Paper: 978-0-8093-3103-1 E-book: 978-0-8093-3104-8 $18.95, 72 pages
Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love Wally Swist Paper: 978-0-8093-3099-7 E-book: 978-0-8093-3100-1 $15.95, 96 pages
Heavenly Bodies Cynthia Huntington Paper: 978-0-8093-3063-8 E-book: 978-0-8093-3064-5 $15.95, 88 pages
Lacemakers Claire McQuerry Paper: 978-0-8093-3061-4 E-book: 978-0-8093-3062-1 $15.95, 88 pages
Smith Blue Camille T. Dungy Paper: 978-0-8093-3031-7 E-book: 978-0-8093-8633-8 $16.95, 88 pages
The Black Ocean Brian Barker Paper: 978-0-8093-3028-7 E-book: 978-0-8093-8631-4 $15.95, 80 pages
Rookery Traci Brimhall Paper: 978-0-8093-2997-7 E-book: 978-0-8093-8579-9 $16.95, 96 pages
Jason Sommer Paper: 978-0-8093-3278-6 E-book: 978-0-8093-3279-3 $15.95, 88 pages
Red Clay Suite Honoree Fanonne Jeffers Paper: 978-0-8093-2760-7 E-book: 978-0-8093-8758-8 $18.95, 88 pages
Circle Victoria Chang Paper: 978-0-8093-2618-1 E-book: 978-0-8093-8833-2 $16.95, 80 pages
Fabulae Joy Katz Paper: 978-0-8093-2444-6 E-book: 978 -0-8093-8921-6 $15.95, 72 pages
Spitting Image Kara van de Graaf Paper: 978-0-8093-3662-3 E-book: 978-0-8093-3663-0 $15.95, 80 pages
Year of the Snake Lee Ann Roripaugh Paper: 978-0-8093-2569-6 E-book: 978-0-8093-8884-4 $16.95, 80 pages
On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year Lee Ann Roripaugh Paper: 978-0-8093-2929-8 E-book: 978-0-8093-8675-8 $16.95, 92 pages
Strange Valentine A. Loudermilk Paper: 978-0-8093-2661-7 E-book: 978-0-8093-8854-7 $18.95, 104 pages
Always Danger David Hernandez Paper: 978-0-8093-2691-4 E-book: 978-0-8093-8790-8 $18.95, 104 pages
Lizzie Borden in Love Julianna Baggott Paper: 978-0-8093-2725-6 E-book: 978-0-8093-8812-7 $15.95, 88 pages
American Flamingo Greg Pape Paper: 978-0-8093-2622-8 E-book: 978-0-8093-8825-7 $15.95, 104 pages
If No Moon Moira Linehan Paper: 978-0-8093-2761-4 E-book: 978-0-8093-8752-6 $15.95, 88 pages
Cinema Muto Jesse Lee Kercheval Paper: 978-0-8093-2895-6 E-book: 978-0-8093-8645-1 $14.95, 96 pages