Narrative theme: Death, grief, loss Books

A timely reissue, the typographical experiments of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven make visible the hidden experience of chronic pain and illness. During uninsured and ineffectual medicalization, Teare turns to the work of writer and abstract...

FINALIST for the 2023 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature A kaleidoscopic debut collection of poems performing queer excess and lyric ecstasy.This flirty collection traces unruly paths of becoming; its sprawling poems build...

Finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize in PoetryAn incisive poetic sequence that tracks the relationship between migration and complex traumas in this unsparing critique of the unjust conditions that brought us the global pandemic.Ante body is a poetics...

Shifting the Silence does just that, breaks the social taboo around writing and speaking about our own deaths. In short unrelenting paragraphs, Adnan enumerates her personal struggle to conceptualize the breadth of her own life at 95, the process of...

Mama Phife Represents is an arresting document of the body's lowest depth of hurt, from a poet and mother who suddenly loses her son to Type 1 diabetes at the height of his musical career. It is a love letter from a grieving mother to her child.

Finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry A New York Times Book Review "New & Noteworthy Poetry" Selection A Library Journal "Poetry Title to Watch 2021" A Chicago Review of Books "Poetry Collection to Read in 2021" A Reader's Digest "14...

Sara Eliza Johnson's much-anticipated second collectiontraces human emotion and experience across a Gothic landscape of glacial and cosmic scale.With a mind informed by physics, and a heart yearning for sky burial, Vapor's epic vision swerves from the...

A devastating, vulnerable collection tracing high-risk pregnancy and new motherhood amid grief."All my life all I've wanted was to be myself / and someone else," writes Elizabeth Metzger. From the shadowy perspective of confinement, where the presence of...

In A Fire in the Hills, Afaa focuses on one of the central threads in his body of work. His ongoing project of an articulation of self in relation to the external landscape of the community and the world and the writing of spirit through those...

Following her husband's massive heart attack, Cynthia Hogue began writing poems based on dreams and memories that he, born during WWII in occupied France, had as a child growing up in a time of vast postwar food shortages. Hogue embarked on a quest to...

Eloise Klein Healy's A Brilliant Loss is a poetic journey into the loss of language and the reclaiming of it. Healy had Wernicke's aphasia in 2013 when she was the first poet laureate of the City of Los Angeles, and the virus hit her the night of her...

2023 Eric Hoffer Book Award Finalist! Kim Dower's poetry has been described by the Los Angeles Times as "sensual and evocative . . . seamlessly combining humor and heartache," and by O Magazine as "unexpected and sublime." Acclaimed for combining the...

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...

Poet Emily Wall began collecting birth stories after the birth of her third child, Lucy. She realized that women were always quietly sharing their stories-in living rooms with a mug of tea, or whispered at the preschool playground. She saw the intensity...

Somewhere between elegy and memoir, poetry and prose, Ed Pavli's Call It in the Air follows the death of a sister into song.Pavli's collection traces the life and death of his elder sister, Kate: a brilliant, talented, tormented woman who lived on her...

Winner of the 2022 Levis Reading Prize Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's 2021 John Leonard Prize for Best First Book "Top Ten Pick" for Fall 2021 Poetry Titles "Poetry Title to Watch" for 2021 "Must-Read Book of September 2021"Selected by...

Kathryn Cowles's Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World is a collection that lingers in memory and place, in the unsettled distance between reality and its transcriptions. "I take seven photographs turning / in a circle, a panorama, / but how will I...

"Wesley McNair, an unassuming, avowedly regional pastoral poet from Western Maine, is writing the best poetry of his life-poetry uniquely capable of, and interested in, addressing our larger moment."-Los Angeles Review of BooksWesley McNair's story-like...

"Old Poets is an indispensable jewel." -Washington Post"An astonishing array of encounters...Hall's observations are shrewd and generous." -Boston GlobeIntimate portraits of great poets in old age, giving new insight into their work and their lives, and...

Part poetry collection, part soundscape, Village uses dark humor and keen observation to explore the roots of memory, grief, and estrangement.In propulsive and formally inventive verse, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs examines how trauma reshapes lineage,...

The Wet Hex is Sun Yung's fourth book of poetry with CHP. She is beloved and respected for her own award-winning writing as well as for her work as the editor of several anthologies, including A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota (Minnesota...

Winner of the 2018 US National Book Award for PoetryIntricate, intimate, difficult, and confrontational poems that push at the boundaries of selfhood, skin, culture, sexuality, and blood. Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and...

Praise for Greg Hewett:2010 Lambda Literary Award Finalist in Poetry2003 Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry WinnerIn poems that are full of wit, touching, and introspective, as well as formally inventive, we find the poet losing his...

Witty and glam, Skeletons is a prismatic collectionwhich shrugs off even the most disillusioned nihilist with humor and intimacy.Existentialism takes on a glamorous flair in Deborah Landau's dazzling new collection. Through a series of poems preoccupied...

An expansive, lyric testament to the formidable mystery of love, spanning several previous volumes all in dedication to the beloved.For more than a decade, Gregory Orr has been writing toward "the Book:" an imagined tome containing every poem and song...

With poems that contemplate the everydayerrands, gardening, dog walksor confront the white-body supremacy of local sunbathers, Cate Marvin reckons with the hurt of our patriarchal world, facing her own past, toxic relationships and pondering what we can...

New York Times "100 Notable Books of 2022"NPR "Best Books of 2022""Levin's luminous latest reckons with the disorientation of contemporary America. . . . Through the fog of doubt, Levin summons ferocious intellect and musters hard-won clairvoyance...

A lover of strict form, best-selling poet Victoria Chang turns to compact Japanese waka, powerfully innovating on tradition while continuing her pursuit of one of life's hardest questions: how to let go.In The Trees Witness Everything, Victoria Chang...

Written during the trial for a close friend's murder, Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod exposes that the whimsical, horrible, and absurd all sit together. In this ambitious fourth collection, Traci Brimhall corresponds with the urges of life and...

"Bitsui's poetry returns things to their basic elements and voice in a flowing language rife with illuminating images. A great reading experience for those who like serious and innovative poetry." -Library JournalDrawing upon Navajo history and enduring...

A posthumous collection of poetry from Patrick Lane, compiled and edited by Lorna Crozier.In this final collection, Patrick Lane cultivates the quiet of living in a body amongst so many other bodies-the trout in the lake, geese arriving with the wind, a...

The long-awaited second collection by award-winning poet Gillian Jerome, about rediscovery and reconnection in the centre of urban Vancouver.Nevertheless is a book of walking poems and odes. Poet Gillian Jerome roams into ordinary places inside and...

"Sovereignty, vulnerability, honesty." -Ms. Magazineit was never going to be okay is a collection of poetry and prose exploring the intimacies of understanding intergenerational trauma, Indigeneity and queerness, while addressing urban Indigenous...

This book is a page turner. The story's emotional charge brings the reader to a specific historical moment, keeps the pace of a mystery, and tells a larger narrative. A Quilt for David will appeal to a wide-range of readers as Reigns' prose-poetry...

This is our lead title of the season. In early 2021, Tongo was named the 8th Poet Laureate of San Francisco, which garnered major media coverage and involves high profile public events through 2023. This book will be prominently featured in all settings...

First major publication by beloved NYC-based poetA good comparable (older) title is American Dream by SapphireA very accessible and compelling "poetic memoir," in which Pamela Sneed traces her life from a small suburb in Massachusetts to Boston and then...

Shortlisted for the 2018 Griffin International Poetry PrizeWinner of the 2018 California Book Award - Poetry2018 NCIBA Book of the Year - PoetryThe much-awaited second book by a truly revolutionary poet, in the lineage of Gil Scott-Heron, Allen Ginsberg,...

Allen Ginsberg's Kaddish, along with the more celebrated Howl, is one of the most important and influential American poems of the twentieth century. This deluxe hardcover fiftieth-anniversary edition of Kaddish and Other Poems features an illuminating...

Her travelling poetrics are striking in the way that shedefies the borders of "narrative" and "lyric"; she combinesthe two seamlessly, an enviable gift.--Sacramento News & Review. Thesepoems move through love and death, sadness and euphoria, and...