Susana H. Case
If This Isn’t Love
Broadstone Books, 2023
$18.50
Playlist:
If This Isn't Love suggests we're all on television, themes and plots from an Italian soap opera overlapping with themes and plots from “real-life" relationships. This is a book of lovers, betrayals, sleaze, violence, and comedy, all within the organizing framework of thirteen telenovelas. Meanwhile, Elvis, Zorro, Goya, Cezanne, Einstein, and others, including the poet's parents, make guest appearances.
Poems read:
“Brothel”
“Telenovela 7”
“Something Amiss”
“Fallen”
J. Michael Martinez
Tarta Americana
Penguin Press, 2023
$19.99
Playlist:
Ragged and raging across the spectrums of cognition, race, and desire, Tarta Americana envisions forms of survival outside neuronormative perceptions and histories. Against the recent tide of white nationalism in the United States, Tarta Americana finds a rhinestone in Ritchie Valens, the rock and roll legend, surfacing across time and bodies, genders and sounds, displacing the linear unfolding of desire and biography. Valens, the embodiment of corporeal transcendence, guides Martinez as he expresses his neurodiversity, his struggles and triumphs, interrogating memory, gender, and race, traversing pain in search of compassion and joy.
Kristen Staby Rembold
The Harvesters
FutureCycle Press, 2023
$15.95
Playlist:
The memorable poems of The Harvesters pay close attention to the seasonal miseries and mercies, rigors and rejoicings of rural America. In a feast of sonnet forms, Kristen Staby Rembold culls through the homesteads and farmlands as an anthropologist might sift through a kitchen midden to bring to light the essence of a life that has almost disappeared. With a voice and tone characterized by resonant detail, subtle metaphor, colloquial phrasing, and quiet understatement, this collection marks a significant variant in the pastoral tradition: it strips away the romance as it retrieves the timeless worth. —J.C. Todd
Poems read:
“Carpenter’s Lace”
“What Didn’t Last”
“Grandmother”
“Junk Trees”
“Lament”
“Vacancy”