By Corinna Kloth
A Compilation of Newly Released Indie Reads.
1. Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower
In her sixth poetry collection, award-winning writer Alison Hawthorne Deming extends her exploration of the meanings of nature into the tensions of our political and ecological moment. Whether traveling to a biological field station in the Canadian Maritimes, ruins of the Temple at Delphi, community gardens in Havana, the Sonoran Desert’s spring bloom, or eruptions of violence in America, she finds in art healing reciprocities between beauty and devastation. The title refers to crops that grow on farmland in North Dakota where our subterranean nuclear missiles await deployment in their silos. The image epitomizes the tensions that underlie our ordinary days. And yet in these poems she finds “light having an edge over darkness.” Poet and naturalist, celebrant and elegist, Deming’s poems pay homage to “every organism’s joy to thrive,” every poem an act of defiance against human cruelty.
Alison Hawthorne Deming is the author of six books of poetry and five books of nonfiction, editor of the anthology The Gift of Animals: Poems in Celebration of Animals & The People Who Love Them. Among her awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, NEA Fellowships, Stanford’s Stegner Fellowship, and the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her writing has been widely published, including in the Norton Book of Nature Writing and Best American Science and Nature Writing. She is Regents Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Grand Manan, NB, Canada.
2. Sonnets for a Missing Key
Still Water Carving Light tenderly navigates the depths of loss and memory, offering a poetic meditation on resilience, love, and transformation. Peggy Shumaker delicately captures the fragility of the human body, the profound bonds between loved ones, and the unpredictable journey of life itself. As seasons shift and bodies age, these poems gracefully explore the ebb and flow of pain and healing, revealing the quiet ways in which grief shapes and reshapes us.
Through intimate snapshots of everyday life, Shumaker crafts moments that feel both deeply personal and universally resonant, inviting readers who have experienced loss to connect with their own emotions. The collection is filled with a reverence for nature, time, and the enduring power of memory, each poem serving as a gentle reminder of life’s impermanence and beauty. With compassionate insight, Shumaker reminds us that while grief endures, it need not define us. Instead, it can be embraced, allowing for profound growth, renewed connections, and a deeper understanding of what it means to carry love forward.
Peggy Shumaker is the daughter of two deserts—the Sonoran desert around Tucson and the subarctic desert of interior Alaska. Shumaker was honored by the Rasmuson Foundation as its Distinguished Artist, served as Alaska State Writer Laureate, and received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the author of nine books of poetry. Her lyrical memoir is Just Breathe Normally.
3. Four Days in Algeria
Clarence Major’s Four Days in Algeria is a poetic feast of travel, taking us to Paris, Florence, Ghana, Algeria, and many other places, immersing us in landscapes both familiar and foreign. We also experience the seasons in fresh and unexpected ways, as Major captures the shifting light, the subtle changes in air, and the rhythms of daily life with striking clarity. Delicious food, too, is laid before us, evoking the sensory pleasures that enrich our journeys. There are quiet moments, as on a houseboat, where the poet is writing poetry, lost in thought yet deeply attuned to the world around him.
Major gives us adventurous encounters with ordinary life, rendered through poems of dazzling agility and fearless bluntness. These are also poems of unfettered Augustan honesty, unafraid to explore the complexities of human experience with both sharp precision and warm lyricism. They radiate with lyrical purity, carrying an undercurrent of discovery and reflection. Allegorical and spontaneous, they are full of holiday energy as the poet passionately affirms life, whether in motion through bustling streets and distant landscapes or in the stillness of quiet moments that offer space for introspection and artistic creation.
Among Clarence Major’s previous sixteen poetry collections are Swallow the Lake (a National Council on the Arts winner), Configurations: New and Selected Poems (a National Book Award Bronze Medal winner), and Sporadic Troubleshooting (2022). He has contributed poetry to the New Yorker, Harvard Review, American Scholar, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Literary Review, Ploughshares, and dozens of other periodicals.
4. Variations in Blue
The poems in Variations in Blue cycle through the traumatic residue of dysfunctional relationships, the complexities of Latinx representation through a series of ekphrastic poems, and reimagine Nicaragua as a homeland set in a volcanic landscape, where memory and identity are in constant motion. Najarro crafts a lyrical space where personal and collective histories intertwine, exploring the tension between belonging and exile, love and loss, silence and expression.
Each section contains a series of poetic variations on a theme, weaving a rich tapestry of voices and perspectives that challenge conventional narratives. The poems reverberate and rotate through the indeterminacy of language, embracing its fluidity to reveal the ever-shifting nature of meaning. Najarro’s work is at once deeply intimate and broadly resonant, offering a layered meditation on how experience is shaped, revised, and reinterpreted over time. Variations in Blue insists that the complexities of experience must be understood one version at a time, each distinctly unfolding its unique design, refusing a single interpretation. Through striking imagery and rhythmic exploration, Najarro reminds us that poetry, like memory, is never static—it bends, reshapes, and deepens with each return.
Adela Najarro is a poet with a social consciousness who is working on a novel. She serves on the board of directors for Círculo de poetas and Writers and works with the Latine/x community nationwide, promoting the intersection of creative writing and social justice. She is the author of four poetry collections: Split Geography, Twice Told Over, My Childrens, and Volcanic Interruptions, a chapbook that includes Janet Trenchard’s artwork.
5. Dreams Like Thunder
Dreams Like Thunder unfolds on a small Eastern Oregon farm nestled between Baker and Hells Canyon, where the weight of history hangs heavy over a family caught between past and present. Set over the course of just a few days in 1959, the novel immerses readers in a world where time moves unevenly—where some members of the family seem more rooted in the myth of their pioneer past than in the realities of the 20th century. These myths, however, are as shifting as the land itself, shaped by the perspectives of those who tell them, each version carrying its own truth, embellishment, and erasure.
At the heart of the story is Alberta, a perceptive ten-year-old who stands at the crossroads of inheritance and self-discovery. She is the heir not only to the farm but also to the tangled web of stories that define her family’s legacy. As she listens, questions, and observes, she begins to piece together a more complex and sometimes uncomfortable truth—one that will ultimately shape her understanding of who she is and the kind of future she might claim for herself. With rich, evocative prose, Dreams Like Thunder explores the tension between nostalgia and reality, between the stories we are told and the ones we must uncover for ourselves. It is a novel of memory, identity, and the quiet yet profound transformation that comes with seeing the world—and one’s place in it—more clearly.
Diane Simmons is the author of numerous works of award-winning fiction non-fiction, journalism, and criticism. A former newspaper and magazine reporter in Idaho, Washington, and Alaska, she holds a BA in history, an MA in Creative Writing, and a Ph.D. in English literature. She is Professor Emerita at City University of New York and recently served as a Fulbright Teaching Fellow in the Czech Republic.
6. Stories from the Edge of the Sea
At times humorous and ecstatic, other times poetic and elegiac, the fourteen pieces in Stories from the Edge of the Sea explore love and loss, lust and grief, longing and heartbreak through the lives of Vietnamese immigrants and their children in California.
A younger dancer is haunted by memories of almost dying on a boat when they escaped from Vietnam, a widow processes her husband’s death through frantic Facebook postings, a writer enters an old lover’s home and sees a ghost at twilight. If the human heart is a vast, open-ended terrain, then Andrew Lam’s short stories are its mountains, valleys, and lakes.
Together they seek to chart a barely explored country, revealing the hidden depths of identity, exile, and the search for belonging in a world both familiar and foreign.
Andrew Lam is the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, which won the 2006 PEN Open Book Award, and East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres. Lam is an editor and cofounder of New America Media, an association of over two thousand ethnic media outlets in America. He was a regular commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered for many years, and was the subject of a 2004 PBS documentary called My Journey Home. His essays have appeared in newspapers and magazines such as the New York Times, The LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Baltimore Sun, The Atlanta Journal, the Chicago Tribune, Mother Jones, and The Nation.
7. City of Smoke and Sea
Queenie Rivers was raised by her grandparents in coastal Los Angeles. As she approaches thirty, her erratic lifestyle is forced back on course by a car accident and her grandmother’s intervention. But her recovery is interrupted by a break-in and Gran’s death. Gran’s last act was to set Queenie up with a job at an upscale seaside bistro with a shady reputation—the owner of which, it turns out, was once a close friend. As Queenie digs into Gran’s past for answers about the break-in, the murder, and the unnerving circumstances surrounding the restaurant and her new boss, she discovers that her grandmother, a Romani Holocaust survivor, kept many secrets, some of them otherworldly—secrets that become hers to unravel when she becomes a suspect in Gran’s murder case.
Malia Márquez was born in New Mexico and grew up in New England. She holds a BFA in 3D Fine Arts from Massachusetts College of Art & Design and an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. Her work in translation has appeared in Poetry magazine and her short fiction and essays have been included in various journals and anthologies. She lives with her family in Los Angeles, where she teaches, writes, and wanders around in nature.
8. The Burning Heart of the World
In vivid, poetic prose, Nancy Kricorian’s The Burning Heart of the World tells the story of a Beirut Armenian family before, during, and after the Lebanese Civil War. Returning to the fabular tone of Zabelle, her popular first novel, Kricorian conjures up the lost worlds and intergenerational traumas that haunt a family in permanent exile. The novel captures the deep fractures of war, displacement, and survival, illuminating the resilience of those who carry history within them.
Leavened with humor and imbued with the timelessness of a folktale, The Burning Heart of the World is a sweeping saga that takes readers on an epic journey from the mountains of Cilicia to contemporary New York City. Kricorian masterfully weaves together intimate moments of everyday life with the broader sweep of political and historical upheaval, showing how personal and collective histories intertwine. Through lyrical storytelling and unforgettable characters, she crafts a narrative that is both deeply specific and universally resonant, exploring what it means to hold onto identity in a world that is constantly shifting.
Nancy Kricorian, who was born and raised in the Armenian community of Watertown, Massachusetts, is the author of four novels about post-genocide Armenian diaspora experience, including Zabelle, which was translated into seven languages, was adapted as a play, and has been continuously in print since 1998. Her essays and poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Guernica, Parnassus, Minnesota Review, The Mississippi Review, and other journals. She has taught at Barnard, Columbia, Yale, and New York University, as well as with Teacher & Writers Collaborative in the New York City Public Schools and for the Palestine Writing Workshop in Birzeit.
9. Blood Wolf Moon
In her riveting sixth poetry collection, Blood Wolf Moon, Elise Paschen explores the story lines of her Osage heritage. The core of the book grapples with a dark period of American history, “The Reign of Terror,” when outsiders murdered individual members of the Osage for their oil headrights. Paschen searches her cultural past and family history in poems about the land, ancestors, childhood, loss, nature, transformation, flight, and language.
In this cinematic book, she builds drama in overlapping narratives, reinventing ways to approach the line on the page. Described by poet Timothy Donnelly as “one of today’s most formally astute poets,” Paschen opens Blood Wolf Moon with the long poem, “Heritage,” a bracelet of crown poems, then shifts registers to formal poems and prose sequences. Poet and editor Esther Belin calls the concluding poems with their use of Osage language, “significant leaps into literary sovereignty.” Blood Wolf Moon captivates with its emotional intensity and unrelenting quest for the translation of identity. It’s a book you can’t put down.
Elise Paschen is the author of The Nightlife, Bestiary, Infidelities (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize), and Houses: Coasts. As an undergraduate at Harvard, she received the Garrison Medal for poetry. She holds M.Phil. and D.Phil. degrees from Oxford University. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker and Poetry, among other magazines, and in numerous anthologies.
10. The Sea Gives up the Dead
The Sea Gives Up the Dead is a collection of stories sprinkled into the soil of fairy tale, left to take root and grow wild there. A lovesick nanny slays a dragon. The devil tries to save her mother. A girl drowns and becomes a saint. Three kids plot to blow up their dad, a grieving mother sails the sea to find her son’s grave, a scientist brings a voice to life, and a mermaid falls into the power of a witch. Here, historical fiction, horror, and fantasy tangle together in a queer garden of love, grief, and longing.
AWARDS AND DISTINCTIONS
Winner of the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction
Indies Introduce Selection from the American Booksellers Association
Molly Olguín is a queer writer, educator, and monster aficionado. She has stories in magazines like Quarterly West and the Normal School. She was the recipient of the Loft Mentor Series Fellowship in 2019. With Jackie Hedeman, she is the creator of the audio drama The Pasithea Powder. She teaches English and creative writing to high school students in Seattle, Washington.
11. The Re in Refuge
The re in refuge is a collection of linked essays that investigate ideas of refuge, broadly defined, from the intimacies of romance to the promises of the nation-state. Written over the span of a decade, the collection shapes experiences and events that interrogate their larger political and social contexts. The emerging European refugee crisis, yet to become headline news, frames the opening essays, with stories of those lost in their passage across the Mediterranean. In 2014, Italy and the United Kingdom end funding for naval rescue operations in the Mediterranean Sea, and the influx of refugees into Greece reconfigures some of Athens’ neighborhoods. A once-abandoned school building becomes a squat where Kalfopoulou and other volunteers engage with refugee communities that include families from Afghanistan, Syria, and Kurdistan. As Kalfopoulou notes in “The Parts Don’t Add Up,” a visual essay, “embedded in the word refugee is refuge,” suggesting that the vectors of shelter have as much to do with what one carries of culture and place as they are about a tangible home.
Adrianne Kalfopoulou is the author of three poetry collections, most recently A History of Too Much, and three prose collections including On the Gaze: Dubai and its New Cosmopolitanisms. Her work has appeared in journals, chapbooks and anthologies including The Harvard Review online, World Literature Today, Slag Glass City, Hotel Amerika, Dancing Girl Press and Futures: Poetry of the Greek Crisis. A collection of poems in Greek Ξένη, Ξένο, Ξενιτιά was translated into English with Katerina Iliopoulou.
12. Optional Practical Training
Told as a series of conversations, Optional Practical Training follows Pavitra, a young Indian woman who came to the US for college from Bangalore, India, and graduates in 2006 with a degree in physics. Her student visa grants her an extra twelve months in the country for work experience—a period known as Optional Practical Training—so she takes a position as a math and physics teacher at a private high school near Cambridge, Massachusetts.
What Pavitra really wants, though, is the time and space to finish a novel—to diverge from what’s expected of her within her family of white-collar professionals and to build a life as a writer. Navigating her year of OPT—looking for a room to rent, starting her job—she finds that each person she encounters expects something from her too. As her landlord, colleagues, students, parents of her students, friends of her family, and neighbors talk to and at her, they shape her understanding of race, immigration, privilege, and herself.
Throughout the book, Pavitra seems to speak very rarely; and yet, as she responds to the assumptions, insights, projections, and observations of those around her, a subtle and sophisticated portrait emerges of a young woman and aspiring artist defining a place for herself in the world.
Shubha Sunder is the author of Boomtown Girl, a story collection set in her hometown of Bangalore, India, that won the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts, with her family.
13. Like Love
Like Love is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson’s brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes, and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson’s passion for dialogue and dissent. The range of subjects is wide—from Prince to Carolee Schneemann to Matthew Barney to Lhasa de Sela to Kara Walker—but certain themes recur: intergenerational exchange; love and friendship; feminist and queer issues, especially as they shift over time; subversion, transgression, and perversity; the roles of the critic and of language in relation to visual and performance arts; forces that feed or impede certain bodies and creators; and the fruits and follies of a life spent devoted to making.
Arranged chronologically, Like Love shows the writing, thinking, feeling, reading, looking, and conversing that occupied Nelson while writing iconic books such as Bluets and The Argonauts. As such, it is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson’s own development, and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.
Maggie Nelson is the author of several books of prose and poetry including The Red Parts, Bluets, the National Book Critics Circle Award–winner The Argonauts, and On Freedom. She teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.
14. Dysphoria Mundi
In Dysphoria Mundi, Paul B. Preciado, best known for his 2013 cult classic Testo Junkie, has written a mutant text assembled from essays, philosophy, poetry, and autofiction that captures a moment of profound change and possibility. Rooted in the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and taking account of the societal convulsions that have ensued, Preciado tries to make sense of our times from within the swirl of a revolutionary present moment.
The central thesis of this monumental work is that dysphoria, to be understood properly, should not be seen as a mental illness but rather as the condition that defines our times. Dysphoria is an abyss that separates a patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist order hurtling toward its end from a new way of being that, until now, has been seen as unproductive and abnormal but is in fact the way out of our current predicament.
Paul B. Preciado is the author of Can the Monster Speak?, Countersexual Manifesto, and Testo Junkie, among other books, and wrote and directed the film Orlando, My Political Biography. He lives in Paris.
14. My Heavenly Favorite
A confession, a lament, a mad gush of grief and obsession, My Heavenly Favorite is the remarkable and chilling successor to Lucas Rijneveld’s international sensation, The Discomfort of Evening. It tells the story of a veterinarian who visits a farm in the Dutch countryside where he becomes enraptured by his “Favorite”—the farmer’s daughter. She hovers on the precipice of adolescence, and longs to have a boy’s body. The veterinarian seems to be a tantalizing possible path out from the constrictions of her conservative rural life.
Narrated after the veterinarian has been punished for his crimes, Rijneveld’s audacious, profane novel is powered by the paradoxical beauty of its prose, which holds the reader fast to the page. Rijneveld refracts the contours of the Lolita story with a kind of perverse glee, taking the reader into otherwise unimaginable spaces. An unflinching depiction of abjection and a pointed excavation of taboos and social norms, My Heavenly Favorite “confirms Rijneveld’s singular, deeply discomforting talent” (Financial Times UK).
Lucas Rijneveld grew up in a Reformed farming family in North Brabant before moving to Utrecht. He is the author of The Discomfort of Evening, which was the first Dutch book to win the International Booker Prize, as well as three poetry collections.
Continue Reading:
Article originally Published in the Spring 2025 Issue: Genres in Bloom.