Narrative theme: Love & relationships Books

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...

Rumi, one of the most celebrated mystics of all time, chose poetry to communicate his deep spiritual experiences. His language, that of love in its purest form, speaks to us today as it did seven hundred years ago, surpassing time and bridging cultures...

Think you know your neighbors? Think again.When actress Allison Langley leaves her former rockstar husband in the middle of the night, her sudden departure becomes the talk of upmarket Oak Hill. But the relentless gossip comes to an abrupt halt when...

A love song between an angel and an accountant in the suburbs of London from Man Booker shortlisted LevyShe is a shimmering, melancholy angel, flown from Paradise to save him from the suburbs of hell. He an accountant, dreaming of a white Christmas, a...

A love story in the slow lane, a road novel from Stoke-on-Trent to Wales, a stolen caravan, and a salesman who kidnaps the love of his life - this is a journey of self-discovery for an odd couple of 60-somethings: childhood sweethearts reunited in later...

A career-spanning volume drawn from forty years of work and a selection of new poems.Stephen Corey's work is intelligent, moving and engaging. Poem after poem is beautiful, effortless, and thought-provoking. The range of style and subject matter, the...

Winner of the 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Award for poetryWinner of the Wren Poetry Prize selected by Ada Limn, Caitlin Scarano's collection wrestles with family violence, escaping home, unraveling relationships, and the complexity of sexuality.The...

Recent books translated by the translators have won or been finalists for the Man Booker International Prize, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the PEN Poetry in Translation Award, the Northern California Book Award, and other notable prizes...

Anne Stevenson's Collected Poemsmajor American and British poet.Rooted in close observation of the world and acute psychological insight, her poems continually question how we see and think about the world. They are incisive as well as entertaining,...

Spanning twenty years and five collections, Brenda Shaughnessy's Liquid Flesh: New & Selected Poems introduces new readers to one of America's most capacious and thrilling poets.Since debuting with the sexy swagger of 1999's Interior with Sudden Joy,...

This highly accomplished debut collection explores what it means to belong, what it means to be on the margins. This is poetry written in praise of family and community and those qualities which make us human: love, language and, most of all, resilience...

These intimate, visceral and often wickedly funny poems journey through the darker days of new parenthood, teasing out the anxieties which plague us when night falls.Violence against women, the destruction of our environment, the poisons and pitfalls of...

Clare Shaw's fourth collection Towards a General Theory of Love shows that poetry can say as much as about who we are and especially how we feel as psychology. They also feed each other.Harry Harlow's famous experiments on baby monkeys changed the course...

Louis de Paor is one of Ireland's leading Irish-language poets.This new selection is drawn from two other books, Cpla Siamach an Ama / The Siamese Twins of Time and Gr fiar / Crooked Love. His narrative skill and inventiveness come together in the...

This new collection from one of Britain's most innovative poets is an exploration of identity in the face of loss. At its heart is a series of poems about the desolation of miscarriage. These poems try to understand the many different means we use to...

Ana Blandiana is one of Romania's foremost poets, a leading dissident before the fall of Communism. Her numerous international awards include the Lgion d'Honneur in 2009 and the Griffin Trust Lifetime Recognition Award in 2018 (she traveled to Canada to...

In Witness Back at Me, Weyman Chan continues to explore themes of dislocation and belonging by drawing on biography, myth, science, and the everyday. Chan's poetry is suffused with a collage-like immersion of stream-of-conscious voices, approximating the...

Winner of the 2023 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize An outrageously comic novel documents a middle-aged writer and mother's grappling with mid-life crisis-her husband's and her own.Preoccupied with her fledgling literary career, intent on the...

Set in the 90s, alternating between the storied quads of Oxford University and the dank recesses of London pubs given over to public displays of queer BDSM, Learned chronicles poet and Rhodes Scholar Carellin Brooks' extreme explorations of mind and body...

Visceral and playful, tend reflects the intimate awkwardness of modern life. Hargreaves' latest collection explores feelings of being distanced from loved ones, physically and emotionally; striving to be better (at chores, at intimacy); and tending to...

Powerful Up Lit: Kim Hooper is a powerful presence in the "up lit" market, and Ways the World Could End is sure to appeal to her ever-growing fanbase. This moving novel captures the joys (and pains) of adolescence for both the teen and the parent. It is...

Ivan and Phoebe otherwise known as the Revolution on Granite or the First Maidan and investigates the difficulties and absurdities of a society swiftly shifting from subjugation to revolution to post-Soviet rule.Married couple Ivan and Phoebe grapple...

"...a dazzling portrait of a man who lives up to his name, and of those who love him. A wonderful novel." -Margot Livesey, author of The Boy in The FieldMirth chronicles the struggles of a writer, Harrison Mirth, a romantic man who writes about love and...

Following the shocking death of a teenage boy, Barrett and Amelia are moved to revisit the passing of their own daughter, Edi, which occurred in the same small town nearly a decade earlier. Amelia finds herself caring for the recently deceased boy's...

A book in two halves, Kissing Other People or the House of Fame opens with a sequence of poems that roam the grotty, sublime streets: patting rats, reading pamphlets, enduring labour, acquiring falafel, waving to friends. Then the book flips on a seam...

An arch, precise collection of poems that casts world-historical hierarchies in an aspic mold and serves them back to us on a warped platter.Reading Prescribeeis not dissimilar to the experience of coming across a recipe in a vintage American cookbook:...

FINALIST for the 2023 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature A kaleidoscopic debut collection of poems performing queer excess and lyric ecstasy.This flirty collection traces unruly paths of becoming; its sprawling poems build...

2023 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST!An epistolary sequence about sex, exchange and social space set along the Northeast Corridor.In A Queen in Bucks County, our protagonist Turner, who both is and is not the writer, makes his pleasurable way through...

A collection of poems that explores the radical love inherent in revolutionary work through cultural objects, adolescent affect, and queerness from within the fall of empire.Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta croons in the voice of a lovesick teenaged folklorist...

Finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize in PoetryAn incisive poetic sequence that tracks the relationship between migration and complex traumas in this unsparing critique of the unjust conditions that brought us the global pandemic.Ante body is a poetics...

*Gephyromania was selected as one of the top poetry books of 2014 by Entropy and was listed by Eileen Myles as one of her favorites for 2014 in The Gay and Lesbian Review. Kerri Webster wrote a generous introduction to the book for The Poetry Society of...

"Madnesspays homage to all poets whose work goes underappreciated."-The New York Times FINALIST for the 2023 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature FINALIST for the 2023 Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of...

A novel about a marriage torn apart by a violent secret for fans of Lauren Groff's Fates and FuriesEmilia has it all: a rewarding career as a statistician, a wonderful husband, two healthy young sons, and a house in the countryside. But when a...

By the Colombian author of The Bitch, a 2020 National Book Award Finalist and PEN Awards Winner.Claudia is an impressionable eight-year-old girl, trying to understand the world through the eyes of the adults around her. But her hardworking father hardly...

For fans of Marriage Story and Elena Ferrante's Days of AbandonmentTerri runs off with a lover, abandoning her children and her marriage of twenty-five years. Her husband, David, is left to take care of their two daughters, one of whom is...

A thirty-five-year-old writer decides she wants to have children. Rounds of IVF treatments and several years later, she has two daughters and sits down to write this book. World's Best Mother is a sublime journey - through pregnancy, the mothering of...

A haunting collection that inhabits a disquieting future where fear is the governing body, "the organ and the tissue / and the cell, the membrane and the organelle.""Once there were oarfish, opaleyes, olive flounders. Once the oxbows were not overrun...

Finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry A New York Times Book Review "New & Noteworthy Poetry" Selection A Library Journal "Poetry Title to Watch 2021" A Chicago Review of Books "Poetry Collection to Read in 2021" A Reader's Digest "14...

A devastating, vulnerable collection tracing high-risk pregnancy and new motherhood amid grief."All my life all I've wanted was to be myself / and someone else," writes Elizabeth Metzger. From the shadowy perspective of confinement, where the presence of...

Following her husband's massive heart attack, Cynthia Hogue began writing poems based on dreams and memories that he, born during WWII in occupied France, had as a child growing up in a time of vast postwar food shortages. Hogue embarked on a quest to...

John Proctor, about to turn seventy, spies a disconsolate young man eyeing him from outside his remote studio window. Invited inside from the bitter cold and fed dinner, the visitor, who calls himself Eli, implies that he is no stranger to the man,...

The Rumpus Book Club Pick, May 2022Most Anticipated Books of 2022, The Rumpus16 Upcoming Books from Indie Presses You'll Love, BuzzFeedBest Books of the Summer, Powell's Saul doesn't get why he's misunderstood. At his high-tech day job, he hides in the...

When his father leaves town, twelve-year-old Rodney Culver's mother takes up with Otis Dell, a fry cook at the local diner--and a well-known petty thief. While Rodney resists the man's influence at first, Otis soon draws the boy into his small-time...