Books published by Western Michigan University, New Issues Press

Features poetry by: Tom Andrews, James Armstrong, Cullen Bailey Burns, Jackie Bartley, Elinor Benedict, Terry Blackhawk, Gladys Cardiff, Susanna Childress, Patricia Clark, David Cope, Jim Daniels, Mike Delp, Toi Derricotte, Chris Dombrowski, Jack Driscoll, Stuart Dybek, Nancy Eimers, Robert Fanning, and, Mary Jo Firth Gillett, among others.

Told in two alternating timelines, this novel follows a friendship over twenty-five years. Boy Meets Girl is the story of a twenty-five-year friendship between Sammy Browne (young, idealistic, and broke) and Ben Eisenberg (older, jaded, and almost unimaginably rich)--two characters drawn together, and ultimately torn apart, by their differences. This novel tells the story of their relationship over the decades--from youthful flirtation to unrequited love, to long-term friendship that flourishes in middle age, to estrangement and then reunion. The novel unfolds in alternating chapters, toggling back and forth between Ben and Sammy as young people and in middle age, showing everything the characters hoped to become and how things turned out for them. Boy Meets Girl unfolds against the political and social backdrop of the last three decades, with Bill Clinton's election, the events of September 11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even the Trump era providing context and contrast for the personal stories of the main characters.

A collection of poems that delve into the experience of living with bipolar disorder. This collection of poetry explores the disruptive state of psychosis, with all its insights and follies, and the challenges of living life after a departure from the self. These poems reach for an understanding of the ecstasy and tragedy of madness through both lyric and prose forms that mimic the sublime state of mania through their engagement with language. Ordinary life becomes strange in these poems, which are playful and humorous at times and dark at others, as they seek resolution to the question of what happens when the mind overthrows the body.

Poems that acknowledge the existential anxieties of our age while continuing to celebrate the beauty and musicality of language.    In Would We Still Be, James Henry Knippen crafts the anxieties that emanate from human existence‿grief, fear, hopelessness, uncertainty‿into poetic reflections that express a deep reverence for the musicality and incantational capacity of language. Like a moon or a wren, two of the book‿s obsessions, these haunting poems call us to consider beauty‿s connection to the transitory. Among the ghosts that wander these pages‿those of loved ones, those we are, and those we will become‿Knippen asks if image is enough, if sound is enough, if faith is enough. In doing so, these poems seek out the soul‿s communion with voice, encouraging us to sing our fate.

To Zenzi is the extraordinary story of Tobias Koertig's odyssey through the apocalypse of Berlin in 1945. An orphaned thirteen-year-old who loves to draw, Tobias is coerced into joining the German youth army in the last desperate weeks of the war. Mistaken for a hero on the Eastern Front, he receives an Iron Cross from Hitler himself, who discovers the boy's cartoons and appoints Tobias to sketch pictures of the ruined city. Shuttling between the insanity of the Führer's bunker and the chaotic streets, Tobias must contend with a scheming Martin Bormann, a deceitful deserter, the Russian onslaught, and his own compounding despair--all while falling for Zenzi, a girl of Jewish descent (a mischling) who relays secret news of death camps and convinces Tobias to make a treacherous escape to the Americans. With thrilling risks in plotting and prose, with moments of pathos and absurdity, Shuster richly conjures a mad, tragic world.

Thrust into the bizarre labyrinth of DC society, John MacManus struggles to rescue a bankrupt nonprofit while starting a family. Wackiness ensues.

Poetry. "'Not // I Have a dream // A cold, cold feeling' closes Hopper's 'The Good Caucasian;'...these unsettling poems trace Hopper's struggle to make sense of terrible legacies, from racial violence in the name of white female bodies to a father's terminal illness as a site of private and public histories. Hopper's lines halt, knot, interdigitate, and stutter, but they never flinch. She leaves that to the reader. What she doesn't offer us are easy epiphanies, a bid for being a good caucasian, or post-race snake oil. This is difficult work for a time when 'any touch / will bruise.' DARK~SKY SOCIETY insists we reach and be reached anyway."--Douglas Kearney

Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes is a book hell-bent on making sense of a life after divorce, of making sense of the middle years of life, of finding love in the middle of raising a family in the rural North.

In 1980 the McCloud family welcomes Trevor, their third child and the last to be born on Eilean Fior, a small island off the west coast of Scotland.

Fiction. MOTHERLUNGE is an eloquent and irreverent debut novel about first sex, true love, and chronic sibling rivalry; it's about the deepest fear of young (and not-so-young) adulthood: the fear of inheriting a disappointing life. It's motherly advice, too--featuring wigs, dogs, road trips, and medicine--a guide to the essential experiences of being female, "born unto a librarian, named for the goddess of sight," waiting for the future to arrive. With sly wit and surprising joy, MOTHERLUNGE considers the flaws in the family line and celebrates the promise that staggers alongside."[V]oice is where Kirstin Scott astonishes, both in the gutsy yet precise and lyrical voice of her narrator Thea, and in the brilliantly realized voices that Scott bestows on the rest of Thea's family. Here we have a tribe of mothers-gone-wrong and their sidelined, well-meaning, hapless men--and yet, owing to the sheer inventiveness of Scott's prose style, the family portrait that emerges is almost (well, not quite) affirmative. We believe in these characters and even believe that some good--some human equivalent of that ribald, generous and knowing voice--will come out of all this."--Jaimy Gordon