Title

Spring 2022 Catalog

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VOICE OF THE FISH: A LYRIC ESSAY

by Lars Horn

Publication Date June 07, 2022 Nonfiction

Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, a lyric essay on transmasculinity and the oceanic world

Lars Horn’s Voice of the Fish, the latest Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize winner, is an interwoven essay collection that explores the trans experience through themes of water, fish, and mythology, set against the backdrop of travels in Russia and a debilitating back injury that left Horn temporarily unable to speak. In Horn’s adept hands, the collection takes shape as a unified book: short vignettes about fish, reliquaries, and antiquities serve as interludes between longer essays, knitting together a sinuous, wave-like form that flows across the book.

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MOTHER COUNTRY

by Jacinda Townsend

Publication Date May 03, 2022 Fiction

A transnational feminist novel about human trafficking and motherhood from an award-winning author

Saddled with student loans, medical debt, and the sudden news of her infertility after a major car accident, Shannon, an African American woman, follows her boyfriend to Morocco in search of relief. There, in the cobblestoned medina of Marrakech, she finds a toddler in a pink jacket whose face mirrors her own. With the help of her boyfriend and a bribed official, Shannon makes the fateful decision to adopt and raise the girl in Louisville, Kentucky. But the girl already has a mother: Souria, an undocumented Mauritanian woman who was trafficked as a teen, and who managed to escape to Morocco to build another life.

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ANIMAL JOY: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation

by Nuar Alsadir

Publication Date August 02, 2022 Nonfiction

An invigorating, continuously surprising book about the serious nature of laughter

Laughter shakes us out of our deadness. An outburst of spontaneous laughter is an eruption from the unconscious that, like political resistance, poetry, or self-revelation, expresses a provocative, impish drive to burst free from external constraints. Taking laughter’s revelatory capacity as a starting point, and rooted in Nuar Alsadir’s experience as a poet and psychoanalyst, Animal Joy seeks to recover the sensation of being present and embodied.

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TURN UP THE OCEAN

by Tony Hoagland

Publication Date July 12, 2022 Poetry

The final book of poems by Tony Hoagland, “one of the most distinctive voices of our time” (Carl Dennis)

Over the course of his celebrated career, Tony Hoagland ventured fearlessly into the unlit alleys of emotion and experience. The poems in Turn Up the Ocean examine with an unflinching eye and mordant humor the reality of living and dying in a time and culture that conspire to erase our inner lives. Hoagland’s signature wit and unparalleled observations take in longstanding injustices, the atrocities of American empire and consumerism, and our ongoing habit of looking away. In these poems, perseverance depends on a gymnastics of skepticism and comedy, a dogged quest for authentic connection, and the consolations of the natural world. Turn Up the Ocean is a remarkable and moving collection, a fitting testament to Hoagland’s devotion to the capaciousness and art of poetry.

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SLEEPING ALONE

by Ru Freeman

Publication Date June 07, 2022 Fiction

Wide-ranging, vibrant stories from the acclaimed author of On Sal Mal Lane

Sleeping Alone is a collection of rich and evocative stories about what it means to cross borders, both real and imagined. These stories look closely at the experiences of people as they try to make sense of new places ranging from Maine to Sri Lanka, and from Dublin to Philadelphia. The families who inhabit these stories—husbands and wives, brothers and sisters—must find their way among the unfamiliar; forced to reconcile the homes and identities that they left with the lives they live now. At once sprawling and intimate, Sleeping Alone asks: What is the toll of feeling foreign in one’s land, foreign to others, or foreign to oneself?

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THE TRIBE: PORTRAITS OF CUBA

by Carlos Manuel Álvarez

Publication Date June 21, 2022 Nonfiction

A dizzying portrait of contemporary Cuba as it has rarely been seen, by an up-and-coming Cuban novelist

Teeming with life and compulsively readable, the pieces gathered together in The Tribe aggregate into an extraordinary mosaic of Cuba today. Carlos Manuel Álvarez, one of the most exciting young writers in Latin America, employs the crónica form—a genre unique to Latin American writing that blends reportage, narrative nonfiction, and novelistic techniques—to illuminate a particularly turbulent period in Cuban history, from the reestablishment of diplomatic relations with the United States, to the death of Fidel Castro, to the convulsions of the San Isidro Movement.

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WONDERLANDS: ESSAYS ON THE LIFE OF LITERATURE

by Charles Baxter

Publication Date July 12, 2022 Nonfiction

Searching and erudite new essays on writing from the author of Burning Down the House

Charles Baxter’s new collection of essays, Wonderlands, joins his other works of nonfiction, Burning Down the House and The Art of Subtext. In the mold of those books, Baxter shares years of wisdom and reflection on what makes fiction work, including essays that were first given as craft talks at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
 

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CIVIL SERVICE

by Claire Schwartz

Publication Date August 02, 2022 Poetry

A study in complicity with crushing state violence, an invitation to an otherwise—a chilling, remarkable debut

While the spectacle of state violence fleetingly commands a collective gaze, Civil Service turns to the quotidian where political regimes are diffusely maintained—where empire is not the province of a few bad actors, but of all who occupy and operate the state. In these poems populated by characters named for their occupations and mutable positions of power—the Accountant, the Intern, the Board Chair—catastrophic events recede as the demands and rewards of daily life take precedence. As a result, banal authorizations and personal compromises are exposed as the ordinary mechanisms inherent to extraordinary atrocity. Interwoven with bureaucratic encounters are rigorous studies of how knowledge is produced and contested. One sequence imagines an interrogation room in which a captive, Amira, refuses the terms of the state’s questioning. The dominant meanings of that space preclude Amira’s full presence, but those conditions are not fixed. In a series of lectures, traces of that fugitive voice emerge as fragmentary declarations, charging the reader to dwell beside it and transform meaning such that Amira might be addressed.

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LINE AND LIGHT

by Jeffrey Yang

Publication Date May 03, 2022 Poetry

A multifaceted collection by Jeffrey Yang, whose poetry is “flexible, expansive, sonorously clever” (The Millions)

In Jeffrey Yang’s vision for this brilliant new collection, the essence of poetry can be broken down into line and light. Dispersed across these poems are luminous centers, points of a constellation tracing lines of energy through art, myth, and history. These interconnections create vast and dynamic reverberations. As Yang asks in one poem, “What vitality binds a universe?”  

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WATER OVER STONES

by Bernardo Atxaga

Publication Date August 16, 2022 Fiction

A perceptive, moving novel about life and death in the Basque Country, from the author of Nevada Days

Bernardo Atxaga’s Water over Stones follows a group of interconnected people in a small village in the Basque Country. It opens with the story of a young boy who has returned from his French boarding school to his uncle’s bakery, where his family hopes he will speak again. He’s been silent since an incident in which he threw a stone at a teacher for reasons unknown. With the assistance of twin brothers who take him to a river in the forest, he’ll recover his speech. As the years pass, those twins, now adults, will be part of a mining strike in the Ugarte region, and so take up the mantle of the narrative, just as others will after them.

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SUCH COLOR: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS

by Tracy K. Smith

Publication Date August 16, 2022 Poetry

Now in paperback from Tracy K. Smith, former Poet Laureate of the United States

Celebrated for its extraordinary intelligence and exhilarating range, the poetry of Tracy K. Smith opens up vast questions. Such Color: New and Selected Poems traces an increasingly audacious commitment to exploring the immense mysteries and conundrums of human existence. Each of Smith’s four collections moves farther outward: when one seems to reach the limits of desire and the body, the next investigates the very sweep of history; when one encounters death and the outer reaches of space, the next bears witness to violence against language and people from across time, delving into the rescuing possibilities of the everlasting. 

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