Happy Holidays from everyone at The Rupture! To help you decide what to give this holiday season (and what to get for yourself), we’ve put together this handy list of books our contributors published in 2019. Something for everyone!
Short Story Collections
Liz Breazeale, Extinction Events (University of Nebraska Press)
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction. “A myriad of extinction events large and small have ruptured the history of the earth, and so it is with the women of this book, who struggle to define themselves amid their own personal cataclysms and those igniting the world around them. They are a mother watching the islands of the world disappear one by one, a new bride using alien abduction to get closer to her estranged parent, a daughter searching for her mother among the lost cities of the world, a sister trying and failing to protect her mythical continent–obsessed brother.”
Dana Diehl & Melissa Goodrich, The Classroom (Gold Wake Press)
“Eerie and haunting as feral children at play, this brilliant collaborative collection coheres around themes of childhood, technology, consent, and pleasure. Each story concocts a complete world, believable characters steeped in complex ethical dilemmas, at once humorous and disturbing, compassionate and distorted. Parents build children byte by byte; children vanish into subterranean classrooms where recess is their only hope of engineering an uprising; a bee enrolls in school to escape the groupthink of the swarm. I loved reading this sly, edgy collection. It made me look for hidden seams, signs of an imaginary world as dazzling and delirious as this one.” -Carol Guess, author of Doll Studies: Forensics and With Animal
Greg Gerke, Especially the Bad Things (Splice)
“Wry and absurd, pithy and profound, the short fiction of Greg Gerke takes the pulse of couples arriving at the end of something, lovers entering the "unendurable zone." Moments of improbable grace are salvaged from bitter break-ups, prolonged languor is punctuated by bursts of panic and violence, and the acute pain of thwarted hopes dissipates into indifference. In each of these forty stories, Gerke diagnoses the poisons of heartache with results that pull in two directions at once: comical and grotesque, caustic and humane, sharp-tongued and stirringly sincere.”
Elise Levine, This Wicked Tongue (Biblioasis)
“In moments of exile and self-exile, exodus and return, Elise Levine’s uncanny narratives lay bare the secret grammar of their characters’ psyches. An ill-tempered divinity-school candidate refuses to minister to a dying man’s wife; a couple fails to connect as they tour an ersatz cave in the south of France; holy women grieve in medieval England, and a pregnant runaway hitches a ride with a Church leader of dubious intentions. Propelled by their longing for pasts that no longer exist, these reluctant Adams and contemporary Eves confront the unspoken, the maligned, the abject aspects of their inner geographies, mining them for gems that glint and scatter in the light. Uncompromising and honest, lyrical and wry, This Wicked Tongue dares to tell the truth about the places we have come from and the new ones we might find.”
Maryse Meijer, Rag (FSG Originals)
“Meijer’s explosive debut collection, Heartbreaker, reinvented sexualized and romantic taboos, holding nothing back. In Rag, Meijer’s fearless follow-up, she shifts her focus to the dark heart of intimacies of all kinds, and the ways in which isolated people’s yearning for community can breed violence, danger, and madness. With unparalleled precision, Meijer spins stories that leave you troubled and slightly shaken by her uncanny ability to elicit empathy for society’s most marginalized people.”
Kimberly King Parsons, Black Light (Vintage)
Longlisted for the National Book Award. “With raw, poetic ferocity, Kimberly King Parsons exposes desire’s darkest hollows—those hidden places where most of us are afraid to look. In this debut collection of enormously perceptive and brutally unsentimental short stories, Parsons illuminates the ache of first love, the banality of self-loathing, the scourge of addiction, the myth of marriage, and the magic and inevitable disillusionment of childhood.”
Natanya Ann Pulley, With Teeth (New Rivers Press)
“Experimenting with voice, form, and genre, Natanya Ann Pulley crafts a chorus of women voices who are in the process of reclaiming and telling their own stories as they slip through the cracks of our spacial and temporal reality. This collection explores how we tell stories, personally and collectively as a society, as we become stories ourselves. Through turns haunting, playful, tragic, and comedic, Pulley crafts a fever-dream surreal collection that will linger with you long after you finish reading.”
Joe Sacksteder, Make/Shift (Sarabande Books)
“Readers of Make/Shift will find themselves confronting moments in which status and ceremony are shown to be destabilized, contingent--sorting through the suddenly unfamiliar contents of a time capsule, hanging poolside with parents while their hockey player sons devastate a hotel, and wandering the memory palace of a traumatized valedictorian during a commencement address--all while flash vignettes based on corporate slogans saturate the story collection with greater and greater frequency, like the commercials of a TV movie.”
Christian TeBordo, Ghost Engine (Bridge Eight Press)
“Christian TeBordo weaves between narratives in search of the answer in GHOST ENGINE: STORIES, a Bridge Eight Press Fiction Prize Winner. A convicted murderer teaches why the rainbow is the most insidious of all metals. Fashion designer Gordon Gartrelle adapts to his identity as fashion designer Gordon Gartrelle. Frag and Watt take turns with a wrench, hoping to assemble something that just might work, if only for a moment. From scenes of chilling hilarity to an underlying absurdity, GHOST ENGINE keeps the haunt alive long after you've finished reading.”
Novels
Duncan B. Barlow, A Dog Between Us (Stalking Horse Press)
"Duncan Barlow traces the sharpened edge of his flawless language across the living flesh of story in A Dog Between Us, and every page bleeds raw, human feeling. Connection, companionship, compassion, the nature of living itself is excised from the inevitability of death, held up to the harsh light, and examined. All love ends, we find, all of us are flawed, and each of us will return to earth, but there is beauty, and tenderness." -Sarah Gerard, Author of Binary Star and Sunshine State
Melissa Broder, The Pisces (Hogarth)
Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. “Funny and dark, vicious and tender, The Pisces is a sexy and moving portrait of a woman longing for connection and pleasure in our strange and alienating world. I can’t stop thinking about it." -Edan Lepucki, author of Woman No. 17
James Brubaker, The Taxidermist’s Catalog (Braddock Avenue Books)
”The Taxidermist's Catalog is a compelling examination into the disappearance of musician, Jim Toop. Given meticulous attention to obsession, song lyrics, and biographical detail, this rare and carefully evoked novel is both challenging and conspicuously fun: admirers of Pynchon, Borges, and Nabokov will especially love it. "I'm not that different from the conspiracy theorists and mystery hounds," Brubaker's narrator tells us, but it is the conspiracies and mysteries that drive this exciting and ambitious novel. I absolutely loved it.” -Brandon Hobson, National Book Award Finalist and author of Where the Dead Sit Talking
Sarah Rose Etter, The Book of X (Two Dollar Radio)
“The Book of X tells the tale of Cassie, a girl born with her stomach twisted in the shape of a knot. From childhood with her parents on the family meat farm, to a desk job in the city, to finally experiencing love, she grapples with her body, men, and society, all the while imagining a softer world than the one she is in. Twining the drama of the everyday -- school-age crushes, paying bills, the sickness of parents -- with the surreal -- rivers of thighs, men for sale, and fields of throats -- Cassie's realities alternate to create a blurred, fantastic world of haunting beauty.”
Madeline ffitch, Stay and Fight (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
“Delightfully raucous . . . ffitch’s superb comic novel evolves . . . touchingly depicting the tangled and tenacious family bonds that develop in wild places.” -Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
Amanda Goldblatt, Hard Mouth (Counterpoint Press)
"Playfully, poetically unstable . . . What compels a woman to turn to the wilderness? What brings one, after a decade of caregiving, to exchange a terminal parent's final vigil for the company of strangers? Goldblatt poses these questions with great assurance." -Lisa Locascio, The New York Times Book Review
Matthew Kirkpatrick, The Ambrose J. and Vivian T. Seagrave Museum of 20th Century American Art (Acre Books)
“A strange museum, an even stranger curator, the deceased artist who haunts him, and the mystery surrounding the museum founders’ daughter, lost at sea as a child . . . The Ambrose J. and Vivian T. Seagrave Museum of 20th Century American Art is by turns a dark comedy, a ghost story, a romance, a whodunit, a family saga, and an exhibition catalog.”
Johannes Lichtman, Such Good Work (Simon & Schuster)
“Lichtman [is] a remarkable thinker and social satirist…Such Good Work introduces a writer who is willing to openly contradict himself, to stand corrected, to honor both men and women, to ask sincere questions and let them ring unanswered...Jonas finds a companion in his neighbor Anja, one of the more autonomous, intelligent and unpredictable female characters to grace a male novelist’s debut. Lichtman has a terrific ear for the tiny linguistic cues that reveal completely correct English to be nonetheless foreign, and Anja’s dialogue is delivered in sometimes heartbreakingly poignant German-English…The reader feels the potency of a kind of communication between lovers that is non-national, non-hierarchical and pronounced in peace…The novel outgrows its own boundaries, becoming stranger and more robust." -The New York Times Book Review
Norman Lock, Feast Day of the Cannibals (Bellevue Literary Press)
“In the sixth stand-alone book in The American Novels series, Shelby Ross, a merchant ruined by the depression of 1873-79, is hired as a New York City Custom House appraiser under inspector Herman Melville, the embittered, forgotten author of Moby-Dick. On the docks, Ross befriends a genial young man and makes an enemy of a despicable one, who attempts to destroy them by insinuating that Ross and the young man share an unnatural affection. Ross narrates his story to his childhood friend Washington Roebling, chief engineer of the soon-to-be-completed Brooklyn Bridge. As he is harried toward a fate reminiscent of Ahab's, he encounters Ulysses S. Grant, dying in a brownstone on the Upper East Side; Samuel Clemens, who will publish Grant's Memoirs; and Thomas Edison, at the dawn of the electrification of the city.”
David Leo Rice, Angel House (Kernpunkt Press)
“A mind-bending, heartbreaking exploration of small towns and the legions upon legions of ghosts they contain. Elegant, freaky, and visionary--a must read " -Guy Maddin.
Joe Sacksteder, Driftless Quintet (Schaffner)
"An admirably strange and inventive debut novel. Driftless Quintetis about hockey the way End Zone was about football. What the pigskin was for DeLillo, the hockey puck is for Sacksteder: a petri dish full of American paranoia and poison, perfect for measuring our cultures of belligerence, masculinity, sports psychosis, conspiracy theorizing, white supremacy, and empire. Funny, fevered, and unclassifiable, Driftless Quintet perfects the hybrid genre it invents—coming-of-age, small-town conspiracy, postmodern hockey noir—and introduces Sacksteder, like his gumshoe goalie Colton Vogler, as a talent worth scouting." Bennett Sims, Author of White Dialogues
Joseph Scapellato, The Made-Up Man (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
"Scapellato's blend of existential noir, absurdist humor, literary fiction, and surreal exploration of performance art merges into something special. . . . The Made-Up Man is a rare novel that is simultaneously smart and entertaining." Gabino Iglesias, NPR
Pierre Senges, trans. Jacob Siefring, Geometry in the Dust (Inside the Castle)
“Senges’ prose in Geometry is syntactically thick. Sentences, like alleys in a strange city, begin in one place and end up somewhere quite different. The interposition of jostling clauses might cause a reader to lose the subject, to drop the thread or diverge from the path (or pick your metaphor). The effect is sometimes profound, with our narrator arriving at some strange philosophical insight after piling clause upon clause that connects the original subject with something utterly outlandish.” -Edwin Turner, Biblioklept
Yuriy Tarnawsky, The Iguanas of Heat & Warm Arctic Nights (JEF Books)
"By turns reminiscent of Zweig's The World of Yesterday and Kosinsky's The Painted Bird, Yuriy Tarnawsky's WARM ARCTIC NIGHTS is a swift and deeply engrossing fictive memoir of an idyllic childhood whose martial and masculine tenets presage an onslaught of inhumanity and fear. Steeped in subtle irony and the surreal, it is also a sui generis act of remembrance, memorial, and love." -Michael Mejia
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin)
Longlisted for the National Book Award. “A lyrical work of self-discovery that’s shockingly intimate and insistently universal. . . . Not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
Nonfiction
Hanif Abdurraqib, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest (University of Texas Press)
“How does one pay homage to A Tribe Called Quest? The seminal rap group brought jazz into the genre, resurrecting timeless rhythms to create masterpieces such as The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders. Seventeen years after their last album, they resurrected themselves with an intense, socially conscious record, We Got It from Here . . . Thank You 4 Your Service, which arrived when fans needed it most, in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib digs into the group's history and draws from his own experience to reflect on how its distinctive sound resonated among fans like himself. The result is as ambitious and genre-bending as the rap group itself.”
Caren Beilin, Blackfishing the IUD (Wolfman Books)
"'Love does leave you open, ' Caren Beilin proves in this heart-breaking, book-breaking work. Beilin opens her memoir of illness to the voices of others harmed by the IUD, a medical device that makes the writer's daily living and thinking into a story of autoimmune disease. Beilin and others who know the risks of being heard and treated as women include us in their generous acts of rage, empathy, gratitude, and information. Reading and writing are witchwork, transforming the isolation of suffering into a tender and common ground. This book reminds us that our bodies are sites of language we can trust and love and offer in forms more radical than we know." -Hilary Plum
Paul Crenshaw, This One Will Hurt You (Mad Creek) & This We’ll Defend: A Noncombat Veteran on War and Its Aftermath (University of North Carolina Press)
“You’ll find no romanticizing or myth-building here. This One Will Hurt You is a devastating and necessary book, frequently heartbreaking in its examination of the bad humans can do to one another—but full of redemptive acts of goodness, too.” -Holly Goddard Jones, author of The Salt Line
Denise Duhamel & Julie Marie Wade, Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (Noctuary Press)
“THE UNRHYMABLES {COLLABORATIONS IN PROSE} is a dual female reading experience that navigates the social clock, desire across the gendered spectrum, marriage, divorce, fertility/non-motherhood, violence, and body image with humor, poignancy, thoughtful reflection, and striking narrative scenes. Duhamel (b. 1961) and Wade (b. 1979) harmonize their unique voices that bracket Generation X.”
Greg Gerke, See What I See (Splice)
“See What I See is the very brew needed in these parched times. Greg Gerke’s generous, thoughtful reflections on the beguiling experience of art are full of uplift and reverence for the illuming efforts of writers and filmmakers: Louise Glück, William H. Gass, and William Gaddis, Stanley Kubrick and Paul Thomas Anderson, to name but a few. And he does not stint intimate experience, the riches of the examined life, and the possibility of “engaging with the work and then each other.” Take up this wonderful book and “drink and be whole again beyond confusion.” -Christine Schutt
BJ Hollars, Midwestern Strange: Hunting Monsters, Martians, and the Weird in Flyover Country (University of Nebraska Press)
“Part memoir and part journalism, Midwestern Strange offers a fascinating, funny, and quirky account of flyover folklore that also contends with the ways such oddities retain cultural footholds. Hollars shows how grappling with such subjects might fortify us against the glut of misinformation now inundating our lives. By confronting monsters, Martians, and a cabinet of curiosities, we challenge ourselves to look beyond our presumptions and acknowledge that just because something is weird, doesn’t mean it is wrong.”
Kathryn Scanlan, Aug 9—Fog (MCD Books)
"[Scanlan's] project will certainly compel strong reaction, but the product is absolutely fascinating. Its poetic identity comes from its epigrammatic structure; its imagistic touch. A dream-like narrative emerges here, as if from the titular fog . . . A terribly melancholic book that somehow manages to carry affirmation; perhaps it is in the transcendence of the old woman’s voice, its dogged survival to our digital present." -Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions
Poetry
Hanif Abdurraqib, A Fortune for Your Disaster (Tin House Books)
“In his much-anticipated follow-up to The Crown Ain't Worth Much, poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew. It's a book about a mother's death, and admitting that Michael Jordan pushed off, about forgiveness, and how none of the author's black friends wanted to listen to "Don't Stop Believin'." It's about wrestling with histories, personal and shared. Abdurraqib uses touchstones from the world outside—from Marvin Gaye to Nikola Tesla to his neighbor's dogs—to create a mirror, inside of which every angle presents a new possibility.”
Fatimah Asghar & Safia Elhillo, eds., The Breakbeat Poets, Vol. 3: Halal if You Hear Me (Haymarket Books)
“The collected poems dispel the notion that there is one correct way to be a Muslim by holding space for multiple, intersecting identities while celebrating and protecting those identities. Halal If You Hear Me features poems by Safia Elhillo, Fatimah Asghar, Warsan Shire, Tarfia Faizullah, Angel Nafis, Beyza Ozer, and many others.”
Reginald Dwayne Betts, Felon (W. W. Norton)
“Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration in fierce, dazzling poems—canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace—and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of postincarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person’s life.”
Anders Carlson-Wee, The Low Passions (W. W. Norton)
'If you don’t live it,' Charlie Parker said of his own music, 'it won’t come out of your horn.' Anders Carlson-Wee is a balladeer who has certainly lived his song. The Low Passions makes a Walden Pond of the railyard and cornucopias of every dumpster behind a strip mall. It paints portraits akin to those of James Agee, but to be captivated by them solely is to risk overlooking the urgency of experience in this debut collection. As terror drives the sublime and duende keeps one cold foot in the grave, these poems are as chilling as they are electrifying. Yet the perils of life off the grid are relieved by the light of inexplicable kindnesses discovered along the way. Through it all is the ever-loving American landscape, divine and brutal as Dillard’s Tinker Creek.” -Gregory Pardlo, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Digest
Sean Thomas Dougherty, ed., Alongside We Travel: Contemporary Poets on Autism (NYQ Books)
“ALONGSIDE WE TRAVEL is the first literary anthology to gather over two dozen poets from Canada, the United States, the UK and Israel whose lives are intertwined or affected by the autism spectrum. Included in this anthology are poems from tutors and teachers, aunts and grandmothers, friends and siblings, and from poets with autism themselves. Most of the work here is by highly accomplished poet-parents of autistic children written in a variety of traditional and experimental forms. But be warned. Much of the work articulates the despair, guilt, anger, as well as the joy that arises from engagement with such a complicated and diverse disability."
Camonghne Felix, Build Yourself a Boat (Haymarket Books)
Longlisted for the National Book Award. “This is about what grows through the wreckage. This is an anthem of survival and a look at what might come after. A view of what floats and what, ultimately, sustains. Build Yourself a Boat redefines the language of collective and individual trauma through lyric and memory.
Carmen Gimenez Smith, Be Recorder (Graywolf)
Finalist for the National Book Award. “With an urgency propelled by largely unpunctuated language and nimble lines, Giménez Smith careens between devastating accounts of racial and xenophobic violence . . . while taking on gentrification and border walls, white feminism and late capitalism, Giménez Smith manages to frame a queer, Latinx, immigrants’ daughter, motherhood poetics that’s entirely her own.”—The New York Times Book Review
Christine Gosnay, The Wanderer (Beloit Poetry Journal - Chad Walsh Chapbook Prize)
“Gosnay’s wide-ranging and incisive imagination draws from realms as varied as mythology, astronomy, and epistemology to dramatize the efforts of a sharp and hungry mind to cope with grief. In so doing, she offers up a vivid, wise, and innovative chapbook that provides immediate readerly pleasures and rewards our finest attention.”
Amorak Huey, Boom Box (Sundress Publications)
“If poems are magic, then the poems of Boom Box are rife with the magic of childhood in guitar-solo riffs of splendor and nostalgia. Amidst sweeping narratives, the past stands as a monument to be worshiped instead of forgotten. The sorrow, the thrill, the sex, the music, the awkwardness, are all captured as if in time capsules—these are poems of loss and marrow and place, of time and the wars it wields. They are profound in their honesty: bittersweet, heartbreaking, yet redemptive.” —Chelsea Dingman
Jessica Jacobs, Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books)
“I’m totally certain Jessica Jacobs’ book is going to save someone’s life. . . . An honest, activist, real world dream of a book. A treasure.” —Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Marream Krollos, Sermons (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press)
“Sermons espouses the holiness and sanctity of our own physical being, holding the human experience in a supernatural light and questioning its existence with both agnosticism and piety. Krollos' examinations of the earthbound condition beg us to believe in ourselves.”
Kenji C. Liu, Monsters I Have Been (Alice James Books)
“Using an invented poetry method called frankenpo (frankenstein poetry), Liu takes existing texts and remixes them, creating multi-faceted poems that investigate the relationship between toxic masculinity and forms of violence plaguing our modern society. It also explores the male-male erotic and marginalized masculinities that are urgently needed as a counterweight to today's dominant hypermasculinity.”
Sally Wen Mao, Oculus (Graywolf)
“There are eyes everywhere in Oculus, but not all of them are blessed with sight. Some are all-seeing, panoptic; others are yearning and blinkered, unable to return the gaze they attract. These poems are haunted by images of human faces staring out from all kinds of screens, faces that are themselves screens upon which the world projects its fantasies and anxieties. . . . The poems in Oculus are rangy, protean, contradictory. They offer an alternative to the selfie, that static reduction of a person to her most photogenic poses.”—The New Yorker
Rainie Oet, Porcupine in Freefall (Bright Hill Press)
"There are a lot of young writers with talent but Rainie Oet has a strange and mature vision as well, which dwells in a convergence of clarity and swerve, comedy and disquiet, privacy and sociability, tenderness, and something just a touch hard. PORCUPINE IN FREEFALL is no mere concept album, though it has got a rather original driving concept. Combining the authentic feel of seeming autobiographical narrative with surrealistic, whimsical, sometimes lyric, sometimes anti-lyric adventures, this debut is a curiosity and a delight." -Daisy Fried.
Martin Ott, Fake News Poems (BlazeVOX Books)
"William Carlos Williams famously wrote that 'it is difficult to get the news from poems, ' but poets like Martin Ott keep proving the limits of Williams' vision. In his wildly strange FAKE NEWS POEMS, Ott chronicles the first year of the Age of Trump that a series of stranger-than-fiction poetic news stories, each of which come to speak to the wider apocalyptic rumblings of a society--and a planet--seeming to come apart at the seams. As we run toward the singularity, sex robots, edited embryos, self-driving cars, spying dolls redefine the Anthropocene, but don't stop us from swaddling guns, or cockroaches from sneaking into brains, or woodpeckers from cracking our car mirrors. We haven't yet seen what we've become. We need poets like Ott to pay attention to the way in which the future is staring us in the face, and waiting for us to wake up." --Philip Metres, Author of Sand Opera
Michelle Peñaloza, Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire (Inlandia Institute)
“Ambitious and emotionally complex, Michelle Peñaloza's debut poetry collection, Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire, explores grief and violence, the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, and the complications of desire. Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire won the 2018 Hillary Gravendyk National Prize. Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Oceanic, calls Peñaloza's book remarkable and says ‘Of this I am certain: I'll be celebrating this poet for many years to come.’"
Lalbihari Sharma, trans. Rajiv Mohabir, I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (Kaya Press)
“Award-winning Indo-Caribbean poet Rajiv Mohabir (born 1981) brings his own poetic swagger and family history to a groundbreaking translation of Lalbihari Sharma's Holi Songs of Demerara, originally published in India in 1916--the only known literary work written by an indentured servant in the Anglophone Caribbean. Sharma, originally from Chapra in the current Indian state of Bihar, was bound to the Golden Fleece Plantation in British Guyana. His poems about the hardships of "coolie" life on the island were originally published in the Bhojpuri dialect as a pamphlet of spiritual songs in the style of 16th-century devotional poetry. I Even Regret Night brings Mohabir's new translation of Sharma's text together with a contextualizing introduction by Gaitra Bahadur, who found the manuscript in the British Library, and an afterward by Mohabir exploring the role of poetry in resisting the erasure of this often-overlooked community.”
Emily Jungmin Yoon, A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco)
“The poems...are miracles of clarity and precision that are all the more miraculous because their strength, piercing lyricism, and transparent humanity never quaver or falter or step back for a second.” —Vijay Seshadri
(Please consider ordering through the links above (i.e., via Indiebound); it helps us, and it helps your local independent bookseller. If you are a contributor with a book out in 2019 that doesn’t already appear on this list, please get in touch: rupture.editor@gmail.com. We’d love to add your book to the list.)