Readers familiar with Lia Purpura’s highly praised essay collections—Becoming, On Looking, and Rough Likeness—will know she’s a master of observation, a writer obsessed with the interplay between humans and the things they see. The subject matter of All the Fierce Tethers is wonderfully varied, both low (muskrats, slugs, a stained quilt in a motel room) and lofty (shadows, prayer, the idea of beauty). In “Treatise Against Irony,” she counters this all-too modern affliction with ferocious optimism and intelligence: “The opposite of irony is nakedness.” In “My Eagles,” our nation’s symbol is viewed from all angles—nesting, flying, politicized, preserved. The essay in itself could be a small anthology. And, in a fresh move, Purpura turns to her own, racially divided Baltimore neighborhood, where a blood stain appears on a street separating East (with its Value Village) and West (with its community garden). Finalist for the National Book Critics Award, winner of the Pushcart Prize, Lia Purpura returns with a collection both sustaining and challenging.

A powerful new collection from poet, essayist, and frequent New Yorker contributor Lia Purpura Lia Purpura has won national acclaim as both a poet and an essayist. The exquisitely rendered poems in this, her fourth collection, reach back to an early affinity for proverbs and riddles and the proto-poetry found in those forms. Taking on epic subjects—time and memory, metamorphosis and indeterminacy, the complicated nature of beauty, wordless states of being—each poem explores a bright, crisp, singular moment of awareness or shock or revelation. Purpura reminds us that short poems, never merely brief nor fragmentary, can transcend their size, like small dogs, espresso, a drop of mercury.

Taste is a lyric meditation on one of our five senses, which we often take for granted. Structured as a series of “small bites,” the book considers the ways that we ingest the world, how we come to know ourselves and others through the daily act of tasting. Through flavorful explorations of the sweet, the sour, the salty, the bitter, and umami, Jehanne Dubrow reflects on the nature of taste. In a series of short, interdisciplinary essays, she blends personal experience with analysis of poetry, fiction, music, and the visual arts, as well as religious and philosophical texts. Dubrow considers the science of taste and how taste transforms from a physical sensation into a metaphor for discernment. Taste is organized not so much as a linear dinner served in courses but as a meal consisting of meze, small plates of intensely flavored discourse.

Somewhere, a Woman Lowers the Hem of Her Skirt is a collection of poems that takes the reader on a journey through life as a woman breaking free from the constraints of a quiet, midwestern life, to fighting battles for equality, to raising boys in a harsh society, to teaching students and making connections in a unjust world. These poems are about hope and happiness and heartache and finding your way home. Every single poem in this gorgeous collection seems to spring whole from a moment of achingly sharp perception. Uttich writes directly into Adrienne Rich's "dream of a common language" - that place where the impossibility of connection is breached by love, and care, and justice. "I want to write a happy poem..." she says... "something that would never/use the words silver-lining" and indeed no easy hope is offered. Something far greater is kindled in her words, though - the precious shimmer of the world as it is in all its violence and unbidden joy. Few poets are natural makers of stunning endings; Uttich is one of them. Her poems never speechify or slip delicately away; rather they offer a vision of the depths possible if one is brave enough to stay close to hard truths, ask - and wait for - wisdom, and witness with awe and tenderness. Lia Purpura, author of four poetry and four essay collections, including It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful (2015) and All The Fierce Tethers: Essays (2019) These poems will take you out, spin you around, and teach you just how important a woman's life is. They'll remind you of the distance between where you grew up and where you live now, and then they'll collapse that distance so you see who you are is everyone you've ever been. And they'll do all that with breathless grace, humor, and compassion. Katherine Riegel, author of two poetry collections: What the Mouth Was Made For (2013) and Castaway (2010) Laurie Rachkus Uttich's collection feels like the best kind of church. I want to shout, "Hallelujah! Amen!" at the end of each poem. Her words rock with hymns of struggle, love, family, community, and "girl power." And while they build us up, they also remind us of our responsibility to call out unjust systems and to walk alongside everyone who crosses our paths. It's an invitation to embrace the authentic in ourselves and others, to love instead of judge. In all of these poems, Uttich's dazzling language avoids sentimentality and captures the raw details of life. These poems are honest, tender, rugged, and unflinching. Terry Ann Thaxton, author of three poetry collections: Mud Song (2017), The Terrible Wife (2014), and Getaway Girl (2011)

“The book I wish I'd had growing up.” -Chanel Miller, author of Know My Name Best Books of 2019: Esquire O, The Oprah Magazine Variety Lit Hub Book Riot Electric Literature Autostraddle Finalist: NBCC John Leonard First Book Prize Lambda Literary Award New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Selection Paste Best Memoirs of the Decade Elle Best Books of the Season Washington Post Best Books of the Month Indie Next Pick Indies Introduce Pick "A fearless debut." -New York Times "[A] gorgeous reckoning." -Washington Post "Flat out breathtaking." -Lit Hub "Gripping and gloriously written." -Elle "Utterly unforgettable." -NYLON "Unnervingly satisfying." -Oprah Magazine "Deeply compassionate." -NPR.org "Truly stunning." -Cosmopolitan Acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden's raw and redemptive debut memoir is about coming of age and reckoning with desire as a queer, biracial teenager amidst the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where she found cult-like privilege, shocking racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hiding in plain sight. As a child, Madden lived a life of extravagance, from her exclusive private school to her equestrian trophies and designer shoe-brand name. But under the surface was a wild instability. The only child of parents continually battling drug and alcohol addictions, Madden confronted her environment alone. Facing a culture of assault and objectification, she found lifelines in the desperately loving friendships of fatherless girls. With unflinching honesty and lyrical prose, spanning from 1960s Hawai'i to the present-day struggle of a young woman mourning the loss of a father while unearthing truths that reframe her reality, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is equal parts eulogy and love letter. It's a story about trauma and forgiveness, about families of blood and affinity, both lost and found, unmade and rebuilt, crooked and beautiful. One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year: Entertainment Weekly, Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, The Millions, Nylon, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Refinery29, and many more

The word “terroir” refers to the climate and soil in which something is grown. Natasha Sajé applies this idea to the environments that nurture and challenge us, exploring in particular how the immigrant experience has shaped her identity. She revisits people and literature across her life, including her experiences as the child of European refugees in suburban New Jersey, taken under the wing of a widowed neighbor; a winter spent waitressing in Switzerland; her marriage to a Jamaican man in Baltimore; and finally her marriage to a woman in Salt Lake City. This memoir-in-essays combines poetic lyricism with incisive commentary on nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and class. Reminding us that change is constant in our lives, Sajé asks how terroir creates identity. Throughout, the English language is her most fertile ground.

WINNER OF THE ORANGE PRIZE • Set in 1828 on a Louisiana sugar plantation, this novel from the bestselling author of Mary Reilly presents a “fresh, unsentimental look at what slave-owning does to (and for) one's interior life.... The writing—so prised and clean limbed—is a marvel" (Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved). Manon Gaudet, pretty, bitterly intelligent, and monstrously self-absorbed, seethes under the dominion of her boorish husband. In particular his relationship with her slave Sarah, who is both his victim and his mistress. Exploring the permutations of Manon’s own obsession with Sarah against the backdrop of an impending slave rebellion, Property unfolds with the speed and menace of heat lightning, casting a startling light from the past upon the assumptions we still make about the powerful and powerful.

"Gut-wrenching force...A majestic, fiery epic. The Given Day is a huge, impassioned, intensively researched book that brings history alive." - The New York Times Dennis Lehane, the New York Times bestselling author of Live by Night—now a Warner Bros. movie starring Ben Affleck—offers an unflinching family epic that captures the political unrest of a nation caught between a well-patterned past and an unpredictable future. This beautifully written novel of American history tells the story of two families—one black, one white—swept up in a maelstrom of revolutionaries and anarchists, immigrants and ward bosses, Brahmins and ordinary citizens, all engaged in a battle for survival and power at the end of World War I.

A young queen in peril.A city under siege. An elven mercenary with a dark desire. Nineteen-year-old Eris Telari was never supposed to rule Brucia. She's always been more interested in swordplay than courtly intrigue. After her brother's assassination, however, Eris has no choice but to take up the crown and defend her city against an invasion led by an undefeated elven warlord. With Brucia's forces decimated, and a siege looming, Eris needs help. Who better to repel the elven invaders than a band of elven mercenaries? Their leader, Ruith, is as charming as he is deadly, and used to getting what he wants. Six thousand swords strong, his Crows have a reputation for winning against impossible odds. He won't take a fight he can't win, and now he has his sights set on Eris?Is it her kingdom he wants? Or her? With assassins and traitors still lurking around every corner, and an army nearly twenty thousand strong at her gates, Eris cannot afford to turn away the Crows' assistance. Even with their help, the battle for Brucia will be hard-won. And the most dangerous threat may already be inside her walls and vying for a place at her side?

"This essay first appeared in The Georgia Review (Fall 2015 issue), copyright 2015 by Lia Purpura, used by permission of author. It was also awarded a Pushcart Prize in 2016."