Narrative theme: Love & relationships

*Gephyromania was selected as one of the top poetry books of 2014 by Entropy and was listed by Eileen Myles as one of her favorites for 2014 in The Gay and Lesbian Review. Kerri Webster wrote a generous introduction to the book for The Poetry Society of...

"Madnesspays homage to all poets whose work goes underappreciated."-The New York Times FINALIST for the 2023 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature FINALIST for the 2023 Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of...

A novel about a marriage torn apart by a violent secret for fans of Lauren Groff's Fates and FuriesEmilia has it all: a rewarding career as a statistician, a wonderful husband, two healthy young sons, and a house in the countryside. But when a...

By the Colombian author of The Bitch, a 2020 National Book Award Finalist and PEN Awards Winner.Claudia is an impressionable eight-year-old girl, trying to understand the world through the eyes of the adults around her. But her hardworking father hardly...

For fans of Marriage Story and Elena Ferrante's Days of AbandonmentTerri runs off with a lover, abandoning her children and her marriage of twenty-five years. Her husband, David, is left to take care of their two daughters, one of whom is...

A thirty-five-year-old writer decides she wants to have children. Rounds of IVF treatments and several years later, she has two daughters and sits down to write this book. World's Best Mother is a sublime journey - through pregnancy, the mothering of...

A haunting collection that inhabits a disquieting future where fear is the governing body, "the organ and the tissue / and the cell, the membrane and the organelle.""Once there were oarfish, opaleyes, olive flounders. Once the oxbows were not overrun...

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...

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...

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...

John Proctor, about to turn seventy, spies a disconsolate young man eyeing him from outside his remote studio window. Invited inside from the bitter cold and fed dinner, the visitor, who calls himself Eli, implies that he is no stranger to the man,...

The Rumpus Book Club Pick, May 2022Most Anticipated Books of 2022, The Rumpus16 Upcoming Books from Indie Presses You'll Love, BuzzFeedBest Books of the Summer, Powell's Saul doesn't get why he's misunderstood. At his high-tech day job, he hides in the...

When his father leaves town, twelve-year-old Rodney Culver's mother takes up with Otis Dell, a fry cook at the local diner--and a well-known petty thief. While Rodney resists the man's influence at first, Otis soon draws the boy into his small-time...

From the author of Nightwood, Djuna Barnes has written a book that is all that she was, and must still be vulgar, beautiful, defiant, witty, poetic, and a little mad.Told as through a kaleidoscope, the chronicle of the Ryder family is a bawdy tale of...

Commissioned by and for wealthy aristocrats for their private amusements, we introduce you to a selection of stories, poems, limericks, and bon mots assured to delight the most refined of connoisseurs. Complimented by rare erotic lithographs by renowned...

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...

From Kingsley Tufts Award finalist Kathy Fagan comes Bad Hobby, a perceptive collection focused on memory, class, and might-have-beens.In a working-class family that considers sensitivity a "fatal diagnosis," how does a child grow up to be a poet? What...

Selected by Jos Charles as the winner of the 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Return Flightis a lush reckoning: with inheritance, with body, with trauma, with desire-and with the many tendons in between.When Return Flight asks "what name / do you...

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDFINALIST FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARDFrom U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limncomes The Carrying-her most powerful collection yet. Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with...

"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...

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...

Pulitzer Prize winning poet Forrest Gander responds to the provocative photographs of Jack Shear.The elements are timeless and fundamental-a male nude and a piece of black linen-and the photographic results are miraculous. Within Knot are twenty-three...

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...

Reading the poetry of Dan Gerber, we are summoned to this larger truth: Though we live in fraught times, on the tipping point of human self-destruction, we and our planet are still very much alive.In one of his last sonnets, nearly five hundred years...

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...

In Black Swim, Nicholas Goodly casts a spell to transform darkness into perfect darkness. This stunning debut collection is at once "forged from the hurt parts of the ground," and "proof of a miracle," spinning ache and sweat and sweetness into a new...

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...

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...

Intimacies, Received signals agency, as trauma isheld to the light and finally named.In this astonishing second collection by Taneum Bambrick,violence hides in the glint of the carving knife-every intimacy a shadow, everymemory a maze to navigate. Set...

In Shangyang Fang's debut Burying the Mountain, longing and loss rush through a portal of difficult beauty. Absence is translated into fire ants and snow, a boy's desire is transfigured into the indifference of mountains and rivers, and loneliness finds...

"Full of fierce astonishment... Written with the winking intimacy of a Twitter DM, these poems suggest that even aloneness can be a shared experience."-O, The Oprah MagazineAlex Dimitrov's third book, Love and Other Poems, is full of praise for the world...

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...

The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2020's 100 Must-Read Books of 2020NPR's Best Books of 2020National Book Award in Poetry, LonglistFrank Sanchez Book AwardChang writes of "the way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking." These...

The New Yorker, The Best Books of Poetry of 2016 , Critics Pick , Best Books listing , Best LGBTQ Books , Top 100 Books of the Year , Best Books of 2016"There is a powerful emotional undertow to these poems that springs from Mr. Vuong's sincerity and...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 ARCHIBALD LAMPMAN AWARD Poetry that navigates the science of cold waterways to consider the warmth of the poet's Chinese-Mauritian family tiesFire Cider Rainis about the limits to which shared cultural and geographic histories...

"The first taste I had for books came to me from my pleasure in the fables of the Metamorphoses of Ovid. For at about seven or eight years of age I would steal away from any other pleasure to read them, inasmuch as this language was my mother tongue, and...

The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories (1917) is a collection of nine stories by Russian writer Anton Chekhov. Recognized today as foundational for the development of the modern short story, Anton Chekhov has transcended Russian literature to become one...

The new collection from RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award winner Mikko Harvey.Mikko Harvey's new collection invites readers into a world that is and is not the world we know. In poems at once surreal, satiric, and tender, we encounter a cast of surprising...

L'Heureux is a writer of astonishing vision-a master of storytelling and the sentence.A nun crashes her car; an unborn child sings to its mother; a troubled priest is in the market for a London apartment. In The Heart Is a Full-Wild Beast, John L'Heureux...

Winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Award, selected byPulitzer Prize-winner Jericho Brown.Bright Shadeis an appreciation of the wild woods, the rolling hills, the Appalachian air, and the little rivers that were the setting of Chelsea Harlan's...

A stunning debut poetry collection confronting colonialism, relationships, grief and intergenerational wounds.Cut to Fortress considers the possibility of decolonization through a personal lens, urging for a resistance that is tied using cord and...

Body Count focuses on Jamieson's experience with a concussion and post-concussion syndrome and deals with the embodied costs of misogyny, the hostilities and precarities of life under neoliberal global capitalism, connection amidst the proliferation of...

One of Publishers Weekly's Most Anticipated Books for Fall 2016"Cortzar's verse is more traditional than his fiction, but his style and themes are in harmony across genres: eccentric, mystical, full of animals but deeply human. Cortzar is a people's...

Chosen by the Chicago Tribune and Publishers Weekly as one of the Best Novels of 2005, Lily King's new novel is a story about an independent woman and her fifteen-year-old son, and the truth she has long concealed from him. Fifteen years ago Vida Avery...

A masterpiece of Arabic love poetry in a new and complete English translationThe Translator of Desires, a collection of sixty-one love poems, is the lyric masterwork of Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi (1165-1240 CE), one of the most influential writers of classical...

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...