Books published by Tupelo Press

Waldrep's seventh collection begins where his prior collection, feast gently, left off: "This / is how the witness ends: touch, withdraw; touch again," according to the opening poem in The Earliest Witnesses. If these are poems of witness, then they are also testators to the craft of seeing: eye-proofs of an epiphenomenal world. "Can you see this," the ophthalmologist in "A Mystic's Guide to Arches" asks over and over again. Sight becomes both the facilitator and impediment of desire, in collusion with language itself. "She said, When you say pear, I see p-e-a-r for a second before I see, in my mind's eye, a pear," Waldrep carefully records in "[West Stow Orchard Poem (II)]." The desire-poems in The Earliest Witnesses want the thing itself, its image of the mind, and the language that transmutes both thing and image into song.

The bodies of this book are supplicant yet seething-they want nothing more than to survive... but illness is one of the masters of this book.... The female bodies of Master Suffering want power; power to control and to correct the suffering they both witness and withstand.

Alan Michael Parker's latest collection, The Age of Discovery, is a work of enduring beauty, filled with his signature tenderness and surprise. Parker's interests range from the Psalms to the Internet, from a woman stepping out her window to die to two men trying to learn how to live as they argue in a row-boat. With an eye on some of the greatest love poets (Amichai, Mistral, Neruda), Parker delivers a collection deep in empathy, rigorously attentive, and formally inventive.

An actress. A thinker. A filmmaker. Built of archives and the imagination, the three fictive women narrating Blood Feather articulate a feminist philosophy of art-making and life-making for our fractured world.

The essays in What Came Before say without saying. Combining and blurring the genres of myth, essay, and poetry, these small works explore subjects as diverse as the death of Moses, the special relationship between gay men and cats, the movie "Titanic," rock collections, and the afterlife.

What happens when a central part of life as we know it does not exist? Noah Falck's latest collection answers this question in a playfully gloomy way that reveals the strange edges of our reality. Anyone who has experienced that rug-pulling sensation of change, of strangeness, will relate to Noah Falk's Exclusions. Each lyric poem "excludes" a common subject, including topics such as fiction, modern technology, answers, government, and romance. By setting these subjects against a backdrop of obscurity and strangeness, Falck skillfully keeps readers invested and off-balance. Exclusions brings readers into a world where "the wind is nothing more than a brilliant collection of sighs" and "the sun flattens into a sort of messy bruise over the lake." Even excluding many of the things we take for granted, Falck's lyric poetry includes so much: death, smoke, shadows, sadness, history. This collection will leave readers with a changed perspective on what is necessary, and how to deal with immense change. A 2020 Believer Book Awards Finalist, Exclusions has been praised for its ability to "[keep readers] off balance, stumbling forward, and absolutely alive with both the inventive possibilities of lyric poetry and that rare experience of watching the genre redefine itself in a pair of this art's most capable hands." This is a genre-defining book of poetry that allows us to look into the past, present, and future to understand "the foundations of sadness beginning with the needs of children."

Delving into dark desire and mystery, Slick Like Dark pierces through the noise of aimless reality. These collected poems are haunting and passionate, honest and vivid, asking who bears the blame as they scatter us about the South. Poet Meg Wade carefully crafts an examination of the Southern body and the experience of a woman living in it. Depicting relationships, personal struggles and religion, lines such as "A wasp/nest, gristled angels/it's strange, how scared/I am-quick write/down" show the complexities of creativity. Wade brings us into the intensity of this strangely relatable life while reflecting on the darker sides of what could be done or what could have been. In her characteristic, poignant style, Wade writes "This could have been a place where I would love him like a woman/who wants to have babies would", leaving open the harsh possibilities of love unredeemed. As thrilling as they are contemplative, these poems bring us to realizations we would have shied from before.

America that island off the coast of France speaks to the impossibility of emigration, of ever being the citizen of only one country. Born in France, raised in Florida, Kercheval now divides her time between the U.S. and Uruguay. The poems hurtle across literary and linguistic borders toward a lyricism that slows down experience to create a new form of elegiac memoir. Against the backdrops of Paris, Montevideo, and Florida, the poems explore citizenship and homelessness, motherhood and self, family and freedom, turning over and over again the very meaning of the word home, as the poems, like the poet, make the fraught journey back and forth between America and France. As Kercheval wonders in her poem "The Red Balloon," "is leaving / ever painless? Is returning?"

Poetry. Women's Studies. Winner of the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, chosen by Timothy Donnelly. DIURNE is a procedural project, a line each hour of waking / a poem each day of making, that explores how poetry is durational rather than inspirational, work rather than epiphany. It is part autobiography, part journalism, part theory, and part apology for not being traditional poetry. Whip-smart, allusive, aphoristic, cheekily instructive...shot with lyricism, endlessly playful, intimate, anxious, and often laugh-out-loud funny, DIURNE achieves with great grace and relative efficiency what the best examples of its subgenre have to offer: it limns a sense of consciousness through whatever's at hand as it places the noteworthy on equal footing with the banal.--Timothy Donnelly

With funky tempos and stretched, staggering lines, Matt Donovan's poetic sequence interrogates the ways our daily lives teem with beauty and loss, featuring figures engrained in our culture to portray collisions of pleasure with tragedy, including Scott Joplin, John Singer Sargent, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Babe Ruth, and John Coltrane.

What happens when the imagined life and the stories we tell ourselves become terrifying, given our human ability to inhabit both mental and physical worlds? Bertram's third full-length collection of poems shows how the factual is tinted and stylized, filtered through a self grappling with the difficulty of knowing what is "real."

Poetry. Winner of The Berkshire Prize, Tupelo Press's First / Second Book Award, chosen by Dan Beachy-Quick. Kristina Jipson's HALVE peels away the layers of orderly narrative with which we try and tame the chaos of mourning. At once frank and elusive, Jipson's poems resist the pull of storytelling and personal confiding, instead using formal variation to embody emotion and memory. These poems lay bare the experience of losing a brother and evoke the haunting that results as language fails to contain either grief or the love that precedes such a loss.

In this unprecedented anthology, acclaimed poets from around the world select poems from their countries of origin, poems all in English but springing from widely varied voices, histories, and geographies. Readers will find eloquence, urgency, and enchantment. These poems confirm English to be vital and evolving, deployed by revered and emerging poets in Aotearoa/New Zealand (selected by Hinemoana Baker) and Australia (by Les Murray), Canada (by Todd Swift), the Caribbean (by Ishion Hutchinson and five other Caribbean poets), Ghana (by Kwame Dawes), India (by Sudeep Sen), and South Africa (by Rustum Kozain).

Both a cyber-thriller and a simmering romance, MY IMMACULATE ASSASSIN raises disturbing and timely questions about the technology and morality of "idealistic" murder.

Poetry. Award-winning poet Jennifer Militello's third full-length collection, A CAMOUFLAGE OF SPECIMENS AND GARMENTS, casts a smokescreen of selves. Fragmentary letters addressing illness and struggle are interspersed with ventriloquisms in the voices of mythological heroes and long-dead composers, ancient goddesses and murdered girls. Intricate "dictionaries" offer multi- layered definitions that, like layers of clothing or ancient amulets, are meant to provide shelter from a world that cannot be controlled. This captivating book stitches together a plethoric identity so as to examine the disguises we all wear.

Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the French by Nancy Naomi Carlson. "Early Surrealist, resistance fighter, anti-nuclear activist, and exquisite poet, Rene Char is at the heart of 20th century French poetry.... Carlson gives English-language readers a real sense of Char's depth and breadth. And her masterful translations catch the barely contained drama that gives Char's work such tension and presence"--Cole Swensen.

Poetry. Stitching a seam. Sweeping a floor. First light after working the all- night shift. These are small moments in everyday jobs, but surprisingly luminous. In his tenth book, Michael Chitwood describes hard, often dangerous labor, but renders also the quietude of housekeeping and office routines. We call this "making a living," the way we move through our days, to pay for the roof over our heads. Raking autumn leaves or drilling a dynamite hole to clear rock for a house foundation, we construct our lives. Chitwood knows that what we do today roots us in the past and becomes our future. Here is praise, as Gerard Manley Hopkins said, for all our gear and tackle.

Poetry. Fascinated by what emerges from unlikely sources when absorbed into memory, Gale Marie Thompson's poems delight in what remains: John Wayne, Bewitched, turnip fields, camellias and canned figs, and--of course--kitchens. SOLDIER ON uses the light of the kitchen as a starting (and ending) point to explore remembered spaces, which take on new facets and textures in a flood of associations and the mind's endless cross-indexing. Inside a world of objects, people, and artifacts, SOLDIER ON constructs the language in which we love and lose love.

As gradual as a cloud passing or a blossom opening, this is the story of a woman very slowly dying, accompanied by her husband and an astonishing number of offspring, from infants to young adults. David Huddle's nineteenth book explores how children grieve, and shows how the wit and courage of even the littlest brothers and sisters can be a source of resilience. Familial conversation composes an intimate requiem, transforming loss into comprehension. Only one of our finest writers could manage this delicate material. THE FAULKES CHRONICLE is subtle, and autumnal novel - made of momentary details yet with an encompassing grandeur.

Poetry. Honorable Mention, Berkshire Prize for First or Second Book, chosen by the Tupelo Press Editors. Each poem in THE INFANT SCHOLAR is an homage to those born brilliant and vulnerable, those who carry around with them a great comprehension at odds with their age. These poems are built upon facts and observations unearthed while panning the world for gold: diamonds sewn into the Romanov corsets that deflected bullets, or a lift-off in some early space flight to the moon, with a chimpanzee at the helm; Iphigenia saying goodbye to her beloved daylight, and Edward R. Murrow describing what soldiers heard as they entered prison camps at the end of World War II: "the handclapping of babies."

"Natasha Sajé's new book Bend divulges the spirit of a sensualist and the habits of a contemplative; sometimes vice versa. Colors are separated with the veracity of paint. Shifts in temperature are registered and background noises distinguished, not only for texture's sake but for their essential contribution to the poems' substance. . . . For company Sajé summons a curious assortment of lettered forbears including Cotton Mather, Henry Vaughan, Nietzsche, Proust, Gertrude Stein, and Mary Shelley. A virtuous and subtly depraved book is Bend." -C.D. Wright

Literary Nonfiction. Life in Art Series. Poet and essayist Peter Stitt describes not a perfect life achieved, but his search for that ideal, writing of books he has loved and of the often difficult lives of writers, including his teachers John Berryman and James Wright. Generous and alert in his fascinations, Stitt explores the quest for freedom in thought and action among the Amish, the French partisans, and the "heretical" Cathars, and he offers a fresh perspective on parenting, meditating on the life of an adopted stepdaughter. "THE PERFECT LIFE is no miscellany. Its very personal narrator is a wanderer in time as well as place--from the mysteries of childhood to the failures of an adult; from the American Midwest and Gettysburg to enclaves in Sonoran Mexico and the region of the Languedoc. All the pieces here are of a piece. Along the way there are poignant portraits of some of our most significant poets and precise meditations on examples of war. What connects the disparate parts of Stitt's journey is a lyric intelligence unafraid of self-analysis, in stories that do not turn away and in prose that does not yield."--Stanley Plumly "This deviously serious stealth memoir cum literary whodunit is light as a feather."--Suzannah Lessard

The astonishing second book by a lively and inventive American poet of Filipina-Indian descent. Naomi Shihab Nye says of this book, "Aimee Nezhukumatathil's poems are . . . ripe, funny and fresh. They're the fullness of days, deliciously woven of heart and verve, rich with sources and elements-animals, insects, sugar, cardamom, legends, countries, relatives, soaps, fruits-taste and touch. I love the nubby layerings of lines, luscious textures and constructions. . . . She knows that many worlds may live in one house. . . ."

"Karen An-hwei Lee's third book is a beautiful and sustained meditation on the impermanence of humanity's essential components: memory, spirituality, emotion, thought....Contemplative and linguistically sophisticated,Phyla of Joy is simply exquisite -'ink and stanza / flow like wind on grass.'" - Rigoberto GonzálezThere's an undeniable audacity in a poet using the word "joy" in our beleaguered world. In her new book, Karen An-hwei Lee combines scientific precision and an appetite for far-flung vocabularies with a fascination for the sources of rapturous emotion.In poems that roam from the intimacy of prayer to the art of brewing tea, from bamboo-related famine to quasars, the globe's minor seas, and the nuptial flight of ants, Phyla of Joy reaches toward ecstasy.

Poetry. Using the metaphor of a "flight cage," where birds are held captive, as physical manifestation of the space from which her speakers address us, Dunham reinvigorates the persona poem. Instead of "performing" historical figures such as Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, Anna Akhmatova, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she invites them to inhabit her, flickering in and out of sight, refusing an easy artifice. "In her second collection of poetry, Rebecca Dunham, with stunning formal innovation, parses the blessings and afflictions of womanhood, of motherhood. These poems, brilliant on their surfaces, dark and grave in their depths, will startle the reader with their radiance, and haunt--ghost-ridden as they are--with their otherworldly gravity"--Eric Pankey.