2024 Fall Book Preview
Here’s a taste of the two new poetry collections we’re putting out this fall—our fourth publication season. They’re both debut books, and they’re both pretty wonderful.
COMING SEPTEMBER 24
•
COMING SEPTEMBER 24 •
Songs for the Land-Bound
Violeta Garcia-Mendoza
Violeta Garcia-Mendoza’s luminous debut seeks out ways of coping in a complicated age. Exploring the constraints and anxieties of midlife in the midst of climate breakdown, of motherhood in a period of personal and planetary vulnerability, these poems speak to the persistence of nature, creativity, and love: necessary sources of hope and beauty, the ties that bind us to this shared and sacred place. Here is a lyrical and resonant new songbook for survival, a flight across the uneasy darkness, a shining course through the “wreckage strung with violets.”
Advance Praise
“Violeta Garcia-Mendoza’s Songs for the Land-Bound is lush and painterly, ‘lit with grief and wonder’—a pentimento of personal, national, and global catastrophes. Still, ‘[l]et’s not devote ourselves to devastation,’ Garcia-Mendoza urges. In her hands, ‘each vagrant bird’s a herald’; each load of laundry, each internet search, each television show, each ER visit, each walk and hike and drive, each domestic conversation becomes an opportunity for care, and, therefore, for poetry of the best kind. After all, Garcia-Mendoza reminds us, ‘love isn’t the cathedral but the building of it.’ The result of such devotion is poems that are musical and rhythmic, deftly attuned to form and structure; they are simultaneously gorgeous, unforgettable, and deeply right. They are poems that attest to the best, most tenacious, most hopeful parts of us. ‘Even when no seed is guaranteed survival,’ she writes, ‘we must rewild the world yet.’ Songs for the Land-Bound is a book to love, to share, to return to again and again.”
—Claire Wahmanholm, author of Meltwater
“Violeta Garcia-Mendoza’s Songs for the Land-Bound is a gorgeous spell of a collection, a hushed space where ghosts and grackles are stilled by the poet’s gaze. I felt as if I were reading letters from a wise and honest friend, one attuned to the nuances of winter fog and frogsong, one whose solemn gratitude for the serendipitous good of this world is tempered by the knowledge of its wrongs. Garcia-Mendoza’s virtuosic command of sonic effects links poems about parenting, marriage, chronic illness, and the fragility of the Anthropocene environment. ‘Let’s not devote ourselves to devastation,’ she writes in one poem; in another, ‘Let there be meadow.’ Songs for the Land-Bound is a meadow humming with life, and an incantation for the preservation of wonder.”
—Carolyn Oliver, author of The Alcestis Machine
“‘Think of language as some romance / with the unreliable,’ Violeta Garcia-Mendoza writes, or more accurately, thinks, for the poems in this birdsong- and eco-grief-filled debut are ruminative, brooding, and analytical. When I say that Songs for the Land-Bound is punctuated by doubt and recursion, hesitation and questioning, I mean that Garcia-Mendoza is making her way through the apocalyptic terrain of human life amidst climate catastrophe, and she is doing so with appropriately deep care and attention. Love, lockdown, illness, the joys and terrors of motherhood, the internet’s endless scroll: in these wise poems the way we live is situated squarely in the wounded, beloved world. ‘The planet / spins. Inside the tipping light, I voice memo the wind.’ These are messages worth listening to, right now.”
—Chloe Martinez, author of Ten Thousand Selves
“While we may be land-bound in body, in Violeta Garcia-Mendoza’s radiant debut, the intellect, the spirit, and the imagination are winged and soaring. Caregiving and language alike are ‘[w]onder-drowned’ as we watch the poet traverse children’s hospitals, riverbanks, kitchens, and her own lush memory. At the periphery of this landscape, always: threat and anxiety, a ‘sorrow-widening light.’ At its center: wilderness and survival, ‘the carrion, the carry on, the carrying.’ These are aching, spacious poems. The poet asks, ‘All this love & what’s my problem? I thought I built my mind for shelter.’ Take shelter in this book. Songs for the Land-Bound urges us to live as a sparrow does, briefly, brightly, and singing.”
—Chelsea B. DesAutels, author of A Dangerous Place
Violeta Garcia-Mendoza
Violeta is a Spanish-American poet, teacher, and suburban wildlife photographer. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of literary journals, and in 2022, she received a grant from the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She is a member of the Madwomen in the Attic Writing Workshops at Carlow University. Violeta lives with her husband, children, and pack of rescue dogs on a small certified wildlife habitat in western Pennsylvania.
COMING OCTOBER 22
•
COMING OCTOBER 22 •
Certain Shelter
Abbie Kiefer
Abbie Kiefer’s debut collection is a clear-eyed portrait of an aging mill town and a larger reflection on memory, making, and the significance of home. What sources of solace and stability remain amid the ruins of industry, after the death of a parent, while raising children in an uncertain time alongside the ghosts of the past? How do we reconcile ourselves to the inevitability of change and protect what remains? A transcendent exploration of breakdown and renewal, of vulnerability and endurance, of personal and communal responses to loss, this book takes up the question of how to find shelter and make one’s way in an altered world.
ADVANCE PRAISE
“This is the book of poems I needed to read this year, the year my own mother died. And this is the book I needed to read this summer, when the river is high and the water and words come rushing and cold. Abbie Kiefer’s poems brim with a practical tenderness. She wields a Yankee sensibility with language—every word perfectly chosen, every line a clean break. In this book, factories close down and people sew their own sutures. The garden blooms another season. Another year approaches and we fret. But there is something beautiful waiting in the soil, too. Read this book if you are a daughter or a son or a parent or if you are someone who has lost something, because this book will help you find something. There’s something for you on every page.”
—Christina Olson, author of The Anxiety Workbook
“A book about generations of women, about childhood landscape, about loss. . . . Kiefer rises far above sentimentality with a strong focus on craft, on objects, and on centering the reader in time and space through surprising references to pop culture (like Hot Lips Houlihan, Bob Ross, and Jeopardy) that show the beauty and absurdity of losing a parent who is a collection of memories and scaffolding. Kiefer tells us, ‘Oh, I’m tender / toward relics.’ Indeed, here are the relics of childhood, threaded through the mother and into the woman who is now a mother, in the setting of small-town Maine, which reflects the internal crumbling and displacement in its economic decline and later revitalizations.”
—Sara Moore Wagner, author of Lady Wing Shot
“In this collection, Abbie Kiefer has made for us a kind of shelter without shelter, a kind of certainty without certainty. During and after the loss of a parent and the loss of a hometown, and through the pleasures and sadnesses of contemporary life, these well-crafted poems offer all kinds of ways of standing in and out of the rain. ‘Because it is solace to say it plainly,’ Kiefer writes. These poems are a love letter to so many things, including parts of Maine that have been going away for decades now. ‘Ground that shakes,’ she writes, ‘can also shelter.’”
—Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, author of Deke Dangle Dive
“Certain Shelter by Abbie Kiefer is an exquisite collection that weaves together personal loss and the enduring spirit of a place and people grappling with ruin. These poems praise in the aftermath. They praise in the minor key. And the effect is dazzling. Kiefer is an immense lyrical storyteller and philosopher. Mother-loss parallels both a mill town’s and a poet daughter’s desire for wholeness in what crumbles—bodies, worlds. Here is a saltbox crafted with care, a shelter of pinewood, and a speaker who, when everything else falls away, will hold even ‘empty space.’ Built with such spare, deft architecture, these poems brim with tenderness, irony, and heart.”
—Jennifer Givhan, author of Belly to the Brutal
AN EARLY REVIEW
Poet Meghan Sterling reviewed Certain Shelter for in MER (Mom Egg Review) in a July piece titled “Contending with Ghosts: The Tapestry of Place and Loss in Abbie Kiefer’s Certain Shelter,” saying this about the book:
“Like Kiefer, I am a middle-aged mother with aging parents. Like Kiefer, I want poems to help me bridge my losses—and these poems do. These poems hit hard, but as much out of gentleness as ferocity. Like torn leaves tossed into the Kennebec River, these poems tender their touch—the losses they render rise as blossoms, as ghosts, as ashes from fire. I was left breathless.
… How do we straddle the line between having and losing? How do we embrace life as we experience loss? How do we pay tribute to periods, places, and people who are gone? Certain Shelter is an exquisite poetry collection that explores love and joy when all is uncertain.”
Abbie Kiefer
Abbie is a poet and freelance copywriter based in New Hampshire. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Boulevard, The Cincinnati Review, The Common, Copper Nickel, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, West Branch, and other places. She has twice been a semifinalist in the 92Y Discovery Contest and is on the staff of The Adroit Journal.
Visit our book catalog for full details about these and the rest of our titles.
