Books published by Western Michigan University, New Issues Press

Fiction. Winner of the AWP Prize for the Novel, judged by Jim Shepard. Follow four friends as they move from The Brady Bunch to Seinfeld, from junior high to middle management. There is Quint, whose rebellion frays into self-destruction; Slow, who struggles to become the world's first teenage father figure; Chimes, who fears losing his friends while picking up a 7-10 split; and Barb who escapes the conformity of Minnisapa only to find herself returning by dark of night. You will feel as if you've always lived in Minnisapa, Minnesota. And you will never underestimate nice kids from the Midwest again. "MERIT BADGES is hilarious, painful, lovely, nostalgic, generous and true. Kevin Fenton creates an unforgettable group of characters, in whose lives and thoughts and actions readers will often recognize themselves. This is a very funny, very moving, and wonderful book"--Julie Schumacher.

In the wake of a thwarted career as a concert pianist and the accompanying emotional fallout, Gin accepts a marriage proposal from the peculiar Mr. Toad. But nothing from the albino Gin Toad's upbringing in the bourgeois drawing rooms of Perth has prepared her for a hardscrabble existence on a subsistence farm in the Australian outback.

"These poems love. Prophesize. Return us to our beginnings. To days that we want to remember. Or forget. But don't. Thus in our sister's memory, we survive in the luxury of dying. The courage of loving. The re-imagining of our souls for another generation. Thank you, my dear sister for your words saluting our living, our lives." --Sonia Sanchez, winner of the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of American Poets "In exquisitely crafted poems of heart-accelerating candor and clarity, Lauren K. Alleyne says to all the black bodies slain by hatred and militarized fear, 'Nothing I say will save you, but how can I say nothing?' Honeyfish is an elegy for all the countless lost, and a praise song for the many black lives that persist in their wish to give and receive love." -- Tracy K. Smith, Poet Laureate of the United States of America "Even in the places we think of as most beautiful, the endless gong of the body being broken and defiled will find us. How can we see the sun and the ocean and the clear blue sky as anything other than a kind of cruel joke in the face of so much suffering? The extraordinary gift of Lauren K Alleyne's, Honeyfish is that she shows the world in all its brutality and loss and somehow lets us mourn within the poems, which in turn allows us to begin some kind of healing. These are poems whose elegy is ongoing, whose elegy need never happened but for hatred. The waves go in and out and so many people keep being killed. And here is this extraordinary poet, making a heaven that is freedom, that is the dream of being welcomed and loved and tended to. This is a book for our times and for the day when these times are over and we can rejoice." -- Gabrielle Calvacoressi, author of Rocket Fantastic

Just as radio favorites like Marvin Gaye, Donny Hathaway, and Pink Floyd characterize loss, loneliness, addiction, and denial with their voices, these poems' chorus of speakers transform moments of intimacy and humor into spontaneous music.

"The poems in 2nd Chance are written in the voice of a doctor; the speaker often imagines he is talking to students, residents, patients, families--anyone who is ill or has witnessed illness and suffering. The poet, Daniel M. Becker, has been a physician for over thirty years, working in general medicine, geriatric clinics, and addiction clinics, supervising medical students and residents, and more. With poems such as "Goals of Care," "Before Flu Season," and "Advance Directives," 2nd Chance covers the full spectrum of medical care--birth, death, and all the surprising moments in between. Written with warmth and empathy for the human condition, these poems attempt to understand, share, and honor what both patients and medical professionals experience. Serious matters are approached with intelligence, humility, and humor, making this collection an affecting entry into the growing field of medical poetry.'--

"Eryn Green's new collection of poetry BEIT is a lyric examination of the idea of home, and how it intersects with the essential human experiences of love, attachment, and loss. Filtered through a Hebrew sense of the letter Bet-the second letter of the Aleph-Bet, and the root of the Hebrew word for home-BEIT explores the connection between the internal and external worlds of poetic expression and spiritual inhabitation. The collection includes poems addressing the vast constellation of concerns inherently built into a home-family, romance, protection, loss, tenderness, the fear of violence, and one's place within the natural world-while asking probing questions of how attentive, poetic care might help us to see our shared spaces more clearly. How does the microcosm of the home relate to the broader macrocosmic physical world? Where does language factor into the relation between the self, the spirit, the other, and the planet? And what can poetry do to assuage our grief at the loss of the people and spaces we love in a universe of unavoidable change? BEIT wants to know just how big the walls of the home might prove to be, how unexpectedly porous and mercurial, and what tessellated universes can be discovered under their aegis. An ecocritical text, the collection looks with wonder and worry at the landscapes which extend and encroach upon the myriad realms of the self and the world, especially the desert. BEIT is always looking at the world with both feet firmly planted in the dirt, and eyes thrown to the heavens"--

""Insofar" is a collection of poems dedicated to analogical reasoning, seeking to remember basic terms of relation and proportion. Archival in mood, it works with and against the idea of an A-Z filing system. This alphabet is akin to a damaged rosary or abacus-an accounting system that carries on in the midst of physical or spiritual impairment. While the poems proceed alphabetically, there are gaps in representation, and redundancies. The poems get stuck in certain alphabetic registers and elide over others. Four of the poems share the same title, "Insofar," as if transfixed by the relational reasoning set up by that adverbial phrase. The collection as a whole is cast in an adverbial mood, exploring disposition as a vital qualifier to thought and action. Its theology, insofar as it finds one, is earth-based, pluralistic, and cyclical. Its fondest prayer is that we come to our senses"--

In Flyshoals, Georgia, karma is writ small enough to witness. When Doreen Swilley discovers that her boss and lover of thirty years intends to fire her to placate his dying wife, she devises a plan to steal his business from him. Her plan just might work too, if she is not thwarted by a small town's enmeshed histories and her family's own dark secrets. Set during the 2009 recession, The Nature of Remains rests at the intersection of class, gender, education and place. Through extended geological metaphor, readers witness the orogeny, crystallization, and weathering of the human soul. Doreen's journey reveals the ways even a woman's most precious connections--her children, her grandchildren, her lover--operate within larger social structures capable of challenging her sovereignty.

Poems that confront the violence of war that is inflicted on the female body and the landscape.

This striking new collection explores identity, race, and history with a lively and intelligent music

"Employing Manhattan fire alarm dispatcher transcripts, 911 transcripts, and the language of postindustrial environments, Let the House of the Body Fall explores individual narratives of bodily trauma. Through this, many elements and themes are brought into play: figures of physically disabled bodies, infrastructural and environmental degradation, the way we name, order, and understand each of these elements through language. While Let the House of Body Fall addresses brokenness or incompleteness, it also addresses persistence and evolution--the persistence of the non-normative body, the evolution of postindustrial and chemical landscapes, as well as the existence of human life beyond carbon-economies."--Amazon.com.

A work of rupture and repair, what occurs after healing, and the irreparable--on individual and planetary levels