Some indie books for your list

This week in the U.S. academic calendar involves a lot of reflection on and (less rewardingly) grading of student writing. I always sift and contemplate of my own year’s work, too, looking over what I’ve read and written, considering what I want to do next, or do better. I wasn’t surprised to see poet-blogger Ann E. Michael’s recent post “Other forms of gleaning“–although she’s writing about rereading poem drafts from a longer span of time–because there’s just something about December, even when one has retired from academic life. It’s not only the calendrical accident of the official year’s end, when winter issues of magazines are published and tiny royalty checks arrive. Long nights, short days, and vanished greenery make many of us feel introspective and mortal.

What have I written in 2023 besides committee reports and recommendation letters? A modest sprig of poems; an essay draft; and revisions to my novel Grievous, about which I’ve begun to query agents. Also some framing text and questions for this interview that just appeared in Whale Road Review: “Ominous But Bright: A Conversation with Jeannine Hall Gailey and Cynthia Hogue.” (Read it–they’re so wise and humane.) Of the dozen poems and two essays I published in 2023, the latest just appeared in Pleiades, pictured below. It’s worth noting that “Menopausal Existential Peri-Aubade” was my first appearance in that excellent magazine after sending them 24 poem batches since 2003. Take heart! A poet can get better over time, and maybe, with persistence, lucky!

I’ll blog around New Year’s with more about my 2023 in reading, but inspired by Jeannine Hall Gailey’s recent list, I offer from this year’s literary travels a few powerful indie-press candidates for year-end shopping:

• For your witchy friends: Erin Coughlin Hollowell’s poetry collection Corvus and Crater; a fantasy series by Laurie Marks that starts with Fire Logic; Jennifer Givhan’s novel of brujería, River Woman, River Demon.
• Poetic meditations on persistence despite illness, climate change, grief, and the violence of this world: Jeannine Hall Gailey’s Flare, Corona; Cynthia Hogue’s instead, it is dark; Lucien Darjeun Meadows, In the Hands of the River; Robert Wood Lynn’s Mothman Apologia; Ann E. Michael’s The Red Queen Hypothesis; Ann Fisher-Wirth’s Paradise is Jagged; Jennifer Givhan’s Belly to the Brutal; Evie Shockley’s Suddenly We; Walt Hunter’s Some Flowers; the anthology Dear Human at the Edge of Time.
• Retakes of literary classics: Jane Satterfield’s The Badass Brontës; T. Kingfisher’s response to Poe, What Moves the Dead (if Tor counts as indie?).
• Motherhood and reproductive freedom: Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s Forty Weeks; Lauren Slaughter’s Spectacle. I’m currently reading two other exciting books on these themes: Erin Hoover’s poetry collection No Spare People and Raven Belasco’s story anthology Adventures in Bodily Autonomy.

And partaking in all of the above categories because the topics are pretty much my obsessions: my own poetry collection The State She’s In and novel Unbecoming, neither of which sold so well because of the pandemic–they could use a little more love if that’s within your means! I did better at sharing the news about my memoir of reading, Poetry’s Possible Worlds, but I’ll add that it might be a good pick for the poetry-curious people in your life.

More to come, including some favorites from the big presses–most of my novel reading and some of the poetry is from that better-funded zone, probably because, like everyone else, I hear more buzz about them.

I continue to read avidly, but I don’t feel like much a writer, lately, and I’m a little down about it. I’m hoping to focus on writerly stuff as soon as the new issue of Shenandoah launches (Friday December 15th!). Further ahead: a teaching-intensive winter; a breather in May; plus I just set up a June 27th reading in Edinburgh, Scotland as part of a work-and-pleasure travel plan I’m cooking up.

Peace to all of us this season, and good words, and maybe a few cookies–