Titles Available for Review
If you would like to review for Terrapin Books, send an email briefly telling us a bit about yourself. Once you receive confirmation, please select a title from the following list of new titles. We will then send you a pdf of the book. Once your review has been placed, we will send you a complimentary hard copy of the title you reviewed or any other Terrapin book of your choice as long as we have it in stock. Writing reviews is a valuable service for the poetry community. It is also excellent training for those who wish to eventually have their own poetry books.
Our poets are also happy to be interviewed for journals and blogs.
Our poets are also happy to be interviewed for journals and blogs.
Available Titles |
Terrapin recently published or is about to publish the following wonderful new titles. Each entry includes one blurb and a link to the poet’s Terrapin page where you can see bio, cover, and link to the poet’s website: Timothy Geiger, In a Field of Hallowed Be Once in a while, a poetry collection arrives that feels like a companion. The latest of these rare arrivals is Timothy Geiger’s In a Field of Hallowed Be, which, like its title, combines traditions of prayer and calendar with wild, earthly inventions, from the ecstatic to the elegiac. Solitary agrarian meditations merge with memories of a youth roving towards “the milkweed of the west pasture, / where I am asking this field to show me how to live.” Part Wendell Berry and part Shane McGowan, Geiger’s latest collection pulls us through scapes of land and garlic and thought. It may be that there are many ways to die and few to live; this book is written by those latter paths, littered with human longing, hungry hogs, and the many names of birds, meadowgrass, and illumination. —Katie Hartsock, Wolf Trees www.terrapinbooks.com/timothy-geiger.html Jackie Berger, Left at the Ruin These poems, these words, they are quiet fires, every one. Palpable feeling comes out of these lines, rendering an intimacy melancholy but celebratory too in their constant acts of self-discovery. These poems are in immediate conversation with the reader, speaking—never shouting—their startling news of the everyday uncovered, or recovered, in stunning moments of feeling: “the sheer joy of being a body, / keeping it up all night.” The poems live true to their insights, traversing some imaginary line: “Give desire a boundary / and it sails across.” Those words speak for the book, but they come with a quiet kind of sadness as well: “All of my ages swarm / against the mismatch of time.” We may know that sensibility ourselves intellectually, but in these poems we are made to truly feel it. —Alberto Rios, Not Go Away Is My Name www.terrapinbooks.com/jacqueline-berger.html Hayden Saunier, Wheel Part of our Redux series and Hayden's third title with Terrapin Books Hayden Saunier’s Wheel contains much wisdom, much humor, many quiet reveries, lots of farm and house chores, much regret and gratitude. For all its constant motion, it’s a tight collection governed by theme and voice, but also by powerful formal means, especially repeated music and imagery, marked out in something like sonata form. Wheel all but refuses to be read silently; readers may find themselves unknowingly slipping into recitation. This is the work of a poet at full throttle, full voice, persuading us to join her as she stands in a winter suit of hand-me-downs amid a storm of beauty, loss, and bright abundance, feet in rubber boots, wheeled round, firmly grounded in chastening, gladdening splendor. —John Timpane www.terrapinbooks.com/wheel.html J.L. Conrad, A World in Which The arresting poems of J.L. Conrad mesmerize as they turn on dislocation and disjunction, the spaces in which we lose footing. Here the ordinary shifts, the daily set askew at unexpected angles. I felt the top of my head taken off in poem after poem as the poet worked her Dickinsonian magic. Zoo animals escape to run through the streets. People do not heal, but miraculously severed heads still sing. The world the poet inhabits rests on a foundation of potential doom, of hushed anxieties, yet “love keeps unfolding.” And though “we make our way out not knowing the way back,” a faith of sorts calls out to us, assuring us “what you have will not be everything / but will be enough.” For this, we should give thanks. —Todd Davis, Coffin Honey https://www.terrapinbooks.com/conrad.html Tom C. Hunley, The Loneliest Whale in the World These poems are prayers, at times to God, at times to whoever might need what they offer. They are at once profound and quotidian, and the tension humming between those two poles is named compassion. It is hard-won, this compassion, yet Hunley wears it like a loose garment, which is one of the pleasures of this book. In the end these poems are a way to remind us that we are not alone, that there is a world inside this world, and it is beautiful. —Nick Flynn, low https://www.terrapinbooks.com/hunley.html Heather Swan, Dandelion In beautifully lyrical language, Heather Swan evokes both the broken human world of self-inflicted damage (pesticides, herbicides, “the noise of industry and ego”) and the healing natural world of replenishment and repair (rock, bird, water, animal, plant, air). If, for Swan, the human body is “a desert drilled for petroleum,” “a trout stream dying,” “a splinter pulled from a tree,” it is also “an astral body,” “a celestial body,” “a body of light.” Whether lamenting the death of a beloved father or the loss of an endangered species; meditating speculatively on the post-apocalyptic thoughts of Noah’s wife; riffing on the likes of Kermit the Frog, Wile E. Coyote, or Piglet and Winnie the Pooh; or simply delighting in the freshness and vividness of experience, Swan illuminates the depths of our daily lives. For a reader, gifted with such honest, clear-eyed, evocative and restorative poems as these, there is “Nothing left to say but, / thank you. / Thank you.” —Ron Wallace, For a Limited Time Only https://www.terrapinbooks.com/swan-dandelion.html Saba Husain, Elegy for My Tongue In Saba Husain’s Elegy for My Tongue, the everyday is always in conversation with the enormous—with the complexities of immigration, national identity, mortality, language and faith. The simplicity of a grandmother helping her grandson study for a test becomes a meditation on family history, discovering how “paper remembers a steaming cup of black tea/ with cardamom and milk, / and the glide of a fountain pen.” Or a clothesline whipping in the wind, “flinging clothes stiff from the sun/ into the air like/ mammoth butterflies,” leads to the knowledge of the private self within the enormity of family and history, the self that almost wants to be revealed. This book spans nations and languages, generations, and the tiniest moments of insight and discovery. Saba Husain writes with musical intelligence, with grace and clarity that seem almost effortless. This is a terrific book, one that I will return to with pleasure. —Kevin Prufer https://www.terrapinbooks.com/saba.html Helena Mesa, Where Land Is Indistinguishable from Sea Helena Mesa’s Where Land Is Indistinguishable from Sea takes readers on a profound journey of self-discovery, personal growth, and transformation in the aftermath of grief. The poems in the collection address the risk of forgetting, recognizing the darkness that threatens to consume anything lost. Despite this uncertainty, the poems remind us that we are a sanctuary of memories, begging to be loved and cherished, even if we must eventually let go. Mesa confronts a world that is constantly divided. Masterfully composed, these poems are full of light, radiating with a “wild joy,” for the living that longs to shine and be remembered. —Ruben Quesada https://www.terrapinbooks.com/mesa.html Kathy Nelson, The Ledger of Mistakes “Why remember the dead?” poet Kathy Nelson begins this sobering meditation, a descent and rise through what’s lost and sometimes found again, her keen eye on the natural world, her mother in the Bardo and in life, both trouble and love restored, unshakable grief, regret, triumph, mystery… And why exactly? Because we need these poems as lens, as touchstone. And such lovely, startling interventions of language and image! Vivid detail, layer upon layer—say, a “landscape stitched with fencerows,” or to hold a breath “until someone unlocks the door.” That someone is this most remarkable poet. “Last night,” Nelson writes, “I found a hidden stairway leading down/into a maze of rooms …” And what a rewarding gift for all of us, to follow her there. —Marianne Boruch https://www.terrapinbooks.com/ledger.html Andrea Hollander, And Now, Nowhere But Here "Hollander's impeccable conversational diction does just what a poem should do; it raises the hairs on the nape of your neck."—Maxine Kumin, US Poet Laureate, 1981-1982 "Andrea Hollander knows what to hold back as she lets us in. And so we willingly bring ourselves into her subtly registered emotional world. There's a lovely blend of qualities-an unsparing eye, and a heart that humanizes what that eye sees."—Stephen Dunn, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 2001 "Some days, I think that hope is such a long way away, and then I read a poet like this-and life is in full gear."—Grace Cavalieri, Poet Laureate of Maryland, 2019 "I wish that other people would write about personal experience the way Hollander does: there's so much wisdom and depth in her poems that I'm forced more deeply into my own life, and I emerge knowing things I didn't know, or didn't know I knew."—Martha Collins, William Carlos Williams Award, 2022 https://www.terrapinbooks.com/hollander.html Mildred Barya, The Animals of My Earth School In the compassionate, playful, fable-like poems of The Animals of My Earth School, Mildred Kiconco Barya awakens us to the vividly singing, fully alive, non-human communities surrounding us. These poems demonstrate poetry’s unique ability to prick us from our self-involved numbness and awaken us to wonder. There is great solace, tenderness, and innocence here—the kind of innocence capable of apprehending the creatures of the world—and thus the world itself—afresh. Like a literary Noah’s ark of song, The Animals of My Earth School provides a place where all may dance and thrive. These poems provide pleasure and a glimmer of hope. —Michael Hettich https://www.terrapinbooks.com/mildred-barya.html Rachel Custer, Flatback Sally Country Rachel Custer’s Flatback Sally Country is hard-hitting and harrowing and almost hypnotically beautiful in its deft singing of the stories of America’s vast middle, of the flyover land pinned beneath the derision of coastal elites. Personas like Tommy Two Fingers, Old Maid, and Flatback Sally herself tell us of lives “lived alone behind / the turned back of the world,” nursing “the desperate shame // of broken teeth, of ugliness / that can’t afford disguise.” Think holler; think burnt-out, spit-out coal town; think meth; think whole communities sunk into the grave-deep rut of poverty. Violence is done in this book, to factory workers’ bodies “feeding [them]selves in pieces to machines” to keep America’s shelves stocked, and to women, especially those kinds of women, like Sally, so often hooked and gutted by men’s wants and needs. Flatback Sally Country is a timely, vitally important book by one of the most gifted young poets writing today. —Francesca Bell https://www.terrapinbooks.com/rachel-custer.html Ann Fisher-Wirth, Paradise Is Jagged In this extraordinary collection, Ann Fisher-Wirth looks levelly at mortality, grief, and memory, and reckons with what it is to be urgently alive, bringing her incisive nuance to subjects ranging from the loss of a beloved sister to Mississippi’s Parchman Penitentiary to our imperiled natural world to the comforts of marital love. In “Wooden Comb,” Fisher-Wirth writes, “I cannot reconcile how the world is sweet, how the world is burning.” Paradise Is Jagged is too wise a book to promise impossible reconciliation. Instead it offers a benediction of sorts: Walk with me through this difficult and tender place, it says. Willingly, gratefully, we do. —Catherine Pierce, Danger Days, 2021-2025 Mississippi Poet Laureate https://www.terrapinbooks.com/paradise.html |
Journals That Publish Reviews |
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Atticus Review, The Chattahoochee Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Washington Independent Review of Books, American Poetry Journal, Broadkill Review, Broad Street Review, Escape into Life, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Mom Egg Review, Sabotage, Wordgathering, Emrys Journal, The Lit Pub, North of Oxford, Pedestal Magazine, Bone Bouquet, New Letters, Pleiades, Compulsive Reader, The Collagist, Connotation Press, Rhino Poetry, Whale Road Review, The Adirondack Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Poet Lore, Cider Press Review, The Literary Review, Literary Matters, Empty Mirror, The Rupture, Neon Literary Magazine, The Hopper, Under a Warm Green Linden, The Rupture, Broad Street Review, Pedestal, Calyx, Philadelphia Stories, Page & Spine, The Poet (UK), Michigan Quarterly Review, The Minnesota Review, Cafe Review, Sugar House Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Harbor Review, and World-Architects. |
