Narrative theme: Love & relationships Books

Not Here is a flight plan for escape and a map for navigating home; a queer Vietnamese American body in confrontation with whiteness, trauma, family, and nostalgia; and a big beating heart of a book. Nguyen's poems ache with loneliness and desire and the...

A sweeping family saga set against the backdrop of a Sikh wedding.On the morning of his nephew's wedding, Devinder Gill is certain the delicate balance of his life will not be upset. Dev is married to Kuldip, and together they are raising two young...

A sweet and spicy multiculturalromantic comedythat that blends the rich tapestry of Filipinocourtship ritualswith the modern complexities of love, family, and cultural expectations, written by #1 New York Times bestselling author Melissa de la Cruz.Evan...

A twisting new thriller from the author of The Replacement: Is the man she married in trouble-or is he just trouble?Kate and Jake agreed when they got married that they would always give each other space. But lately, Jake seems to want a lot more space...

Soul Feast is a companion to the hugely popular poetry anthology Soul Food, offering up a further feast of thoughtful poems to stir the mind and feed the spirit, bringing hope and light in dark, uncertain times.The original Soul Food anthology (2007)...

A record of daily bewilderments and accidental concessions to hope after a momentous loss. In this follow-up to her award-winning collection, Toxicon and Arachne, Joyelle McSweeney proposes a link between style and survival, even in the gravest of...

Cultural shifts of the late twentieth century reveal dark secrets at an elite prep school, in this posthumously discovered novel by the author of "Our Crowd."Located in bucolic Connecticut, the Crittenden School has long held a venerable reputation as...

A moving novel about the devotions of friendship and the power of love to heal, American Sycamore celebrates the American experiment and the importance of giving a damn.Rob Barrow's devotion to the American experiment has never wavered. For forty years...

Beforelight explores queer childhood as a site of rupture and queer coming-of-age as a process of both becoming and unbecoming. With wisdom and grace, the speaker in these poems confronts the impacts of fragmented relationships and trauma on his nascent...

Competition for a bridal magazine cover unleashes mayhem, forcing a mastermind maid of honour to stop being a people pleaser and start figuring out what she wants out of life. A hilarious, smart coming-of-age story.Olivia 'Liv'...

A meditation on art's longevity and the brevity of human life from the highly acclaimed, award-winning author of Frail-Craft and Inmost.Jessica Fisher brings "the faraway close," through ruthless yet tender interrogations of possibility and permanence...

A pitch-perfect exploration of modern married life, Jessica Saunders's deliciously readable novel embraces the truth that some old flames can't be snuffed out, no matter how many years go by.Rachel Miller is a lawyer and mother of two who's just as...

In her award-winning debut collection Kaycee Hill frankly explores coming of age as a woman and the intricacies of connection and memory against an urban-pastoral landscape. Raging with vivid, smoky lyricism and full-blooded imagery, Kaycee Hill's poems...

From church barn to apple orchard, from snow-covered pasture to secret moonshine cabin, Manning's Snakedoctor reinvigorates the Kentucky pastoral through poems that find light in shadow, good in evil, love in a father's stinging blow.Maurice Manning...

Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit explores disability, storytelling, and the process of mythologising trauma. Jen Campbell writes of Victorian circus and folklore, deep seas and dark forests, discussing her own relationship with hospitals - both as a...

As labyrinthine as its namesake, Dorothea Lasky'sThe Shiningis an ekphrastic horror lyric that shapes an entirely unique feminist psychological landscape.Here, Lasky guides us through the familiar rooms of the Overlook Hotel,both realized and imagined,...

Hot on the heels of her previous collection Men Who Feed Pigeons, Selima Hill's Women in Comfortable Shoes is the 21st book of poetry from "the UK's Emily Dickinson".This collection presents eleven contrasting but well-fitting sequences of short poems...

Burmese poet Maung Day's ninth book of poems but his first full-length collection written in English, Death in Summer is a haunting, surreal series of prose poems and original ink drawings that delivers defiant social commentary on the atrocities of...

In this playful and aching short novel, an unnamed trans woman is on an epic journey to find the place where she belongs.As she navigates her many realities, she must wrestle with anxieties and fears about the world. Her son and her ex live in another...

An addictive love story told in reverseDan and Anya Moorcroft have decided to get a divorce. Together, they've done it all. Two kids, three owned houses, four rented flats, fifty-something holidays, and one affair apiece. Now, after fifteen years...

Confessional and immersive, Michael V. Smith's latest collection is a broad tapestry that explores growing up queer and working class, then growing into an urban queer life.In these poems, we are immersed in the world of a young Smith as he shares the...

Twenty-five-year-old Anthony Patch appears to have it all: a Harvard education, an apartment in New York City, memberships at all of the best clubs, and a generous trust fund to draw from. Sure, his grandfather is not happy with Anthony's lack of...

From the acclaimed storyteller, a propulsive tale of desire, betrayal, duty, and infidelity-and the explosive consequences of a buried passionThe newsman in Luke Blackburn shuns the spotlight when he and his old friend, now the county mayor in Key West,...

An uncanny blend of the external and the intimate has been a hallmark of Simon West's poetry for nearly twenty years. In this new collection, the Australian poet and Italianist delights in the transforming and endlessly varied powers of naming and...

This stunning keepsake comprises more than 30 love poems by world-renowned poets. Poems of Love will be counterbalanced by Poems of Hate-a collection of poems on wrath, jealousy, revenge, and hatred-which is publishing simultaneously.

An elevated, gifty anthology of love letters from history's most passionate romantics. This beautiful volume features love letters from a variety of people throughout history, including Heloise and Abelard, Henry VIII, Margaret of Valois, Napoleon...

In a country where violence and the threat of violence is a constant weather for queer Black people, where can the spirit rest?With lush language, the meditative poems in the Isabella Gardner Award-winning Tenderness examine the fraught nature of...

At times scorching, at times brimming with awe and desire, this debut book of poems resonates with a brilliant new voice.When Justine Chan worked as a park ranger at Zion National Park, she chose to retell a Southern Paiute folktale for her weekly...

WINNER OF THE 2024 LAMDA LITERARY AWARD FOR LESBIAN POETRYAn autohistoriography of felt time that arises from subversive hearing practices and the emotional prosody of a mother tongue one does not understand but activates in another poetic language...

Abandoned by her husband, marooned by an epic snowstorm, a mother gives birth to her third child. Her sense of entrapment turns into a desperate rage in this unblinking portrait of a woman whose powerlessness becomes lethal.Lojman tells, on its surface,...

Rediscover Joyce Mansour, the most significant Surrealist poet to emerge from 1950s Paris."You know very well, Joyce, that you are for me-and very objectively too-the greatest poet of our time. Surrealist poetry, that's you."-Andr BretonJoyce Mansour, a...

Five Fifty-Five quizzical poems concerned with time and mortality which ask fundamental questions about our lives, such asWhere have you gone?andWho were you anyway?In her first new collection since The Silveringtries to find out through conversations...

For readers of Marilynne Robinson, Elizabeth Strout, and Katie Kitamura, the indelible journey of a quiet young woman-the "silent person" in the Seder-finding her way. Hailed as "radiant and transporting" (Margot Livesey), The Promise of a Normal Life is...

"I'm Always so Seriousis brilliant."Lighthead Karisma Price's stunning debut collection is an extendedmeditation on Blackness, on family, on loss. Anchored in New Orleans and NewYork City, these poems braid personal and public histories into a...

Fence poetry editor and rising star Michael Chang's Almanac of Useless Talents is a must-read for poetry lovers and newbies alike.This is a useless Almanac. There's no seasonal data, only poems good for leaving the club in haute couture with mid-level...

Comprised of four heroic crowns of sonnets, Alicia Mountain's Four in Hand is both formal and experimental, ranging from lyric romantic and familial narratives to blank verses of reconfigured found text pulled from financial newsletter emails. Language...

Traveling the nation, Matt Donovan examines the paradox of a country plagued by gun violence yet consumed with protecting the right to bear arms.Matt Donovan's The Dug-Up Gun Museumconfronts our country's obsession with guns to explore America's...

Nestled against the backdrop of Seattle's flora, fauna, and cityscape, Luther Hughes' debut poetry collection wrestles with the interior and exterior symbiosis of a gay Black man finding refuge from the threat of depression and death through love and...

Barbara Jane Reyes answers the questions of Filipino American girls and young women of color with bold affirmations of hard-won empathy, fierce intelligence, and a fine-tuned B.S. detector.The Brown Girl of these poems is fed up with being shushed, with...

"some ekphrastic evening, this'll be both criticism and poetry and failing that fall somewhere that seem like in between."So writes poet, critic, theorist, and MacArthur fellow Fred Moten in his latest poetry collection perennial fashion presence falling...

In Michael Earl Craig's sixth book, poems resonate with an inscrutable logic that feels excitedly otherworldly and unsettlingly familiar.Whether he be writing about the cadaver that Hans Holbein the Younger used as a model, Montana as the "Italy of God,"...

In her latest book,New Life, Lambda Awardwinning poet Ana Boievi writes, "For my birthday I want a cake/revealing the color of my soul." Never saccharine, these poems are by turns cheeky and heartfelt, grounded and wistful, and above all-surprising. New...

Sandra Simonds's Triptychs is a brilliant intersection of poetic form and the passage of time.Crafted initially in strips handwritten on rolls of receipt paper obtained at a dollar store, then assembled into three textual columns that sit side-by-side on...

In her new collection, renowned publisher and poet Rebecca Wolff voyages in the myopia of American consumer consciousness-erotic regard, spiritual FOMO, gentrification, branding-without destination.Labyrinthine in their paradoxical musings and incisive...

Hoa Nguyen's latest collection is a poetic meditation on historical, personal, and cultural pressures pre- and post-"Fall-of-Saigon" and comprises a verse biography on her mother, Diep Anh Nguyen, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-woman Vietnamese circus...

Lee Soho's debut collection of poems is an experimental lyric bildungsroman that confronts dynamics of abuse as it challenges poetic form. Catcalling exposes and ridicules the violences that the speaker-protagonist Kyungjin encounters as she navigates a...

Soliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile explores the role of silence in a time of war.The war Hussain Ahmed accounts here is both physical and psychological, and the survivor within these poems uses his voice as a way to tell the stories of those who were lost...

Long-awaited debut collection from an author known for his many chapbooks. His poetry chapbookthelucid upward ladderwas afinalistfor the2015 Toma alamun Prize (Verse Magazine). Boston-based author who is well situated to promote the book. The book was...