What Books

Suzanne Lummis on the mark, Aug 9!

Never park your car in a dream. You'll never find it. Never put you stuff down. You won't find it again. You'll never make it home.

REMINDER: The deadline for submissions to the Gronk Nicandro First Book Prize is June 30. The competition is open to residents of California who have not yet published a first book of poetry. Please check it out here:

Contests ​ To mark the occasion, we are excited to announce the inaugural Gronk Nicandro First Book Prize. ​ This prize is offered in honor of and with gratitude to the renowned artist known simply as...

This is a GREAT way to spend 20 minutes.

What Books Press with Katharine Haake — Bibliocracy Radio What Books Press with Katharine Haake

What Books author and KPFK radio host Andrew Tonkavich interviews What Books editor/author Katharine Haake in this just released broadcast. It's a great way to learn our history and the kinds of books we love to publish.

What Books Press with Katharine Haake — Bibliocracy Radio What Books Press with Katharine Haake

Please join us for a reading this Friday at Beyond Baroque. Newly published WBP poets, Ash Good and Jan Wesley, will be joined by Gail Wronsky and Gronk for an evening of poetry and art, in a combination of in-person performance and youtube. We hope to see you there.

What Books
WBP poet Elena Karina Byrne, along with Mark Irwin, read from their work next Friday at Beyond Baroque. Hope to see you there!

AWP begins March 8th, one week from today, in Seattle, and What Books Press will be there! Come see us at our table, , to peruse and purchase our latest titles as well as some of our best books from our 15-year history. Two of our authors will be at the table signing their books. Ash Good will sign her poetry collection, us clumsy gods, from 2:30 to 4:30 on Thursday the 9th, while Forrest Roth will sign, his book of prose poems, Skeletal Lights From Afar, on Saturday from 10 t0 11 am.

The Southern California Poetry Festival is coming up this weekend. On Sunday at 2pm three of our What Books Press poets will participate. RSVP to Beyond Baroque, and we hope to see you there!

One week from tonight: our annual launch reading at Skylight. Please come meet our new authors and their books!

AT SKYLIGHT: WHAT BOOKS FALL LAUNCH EVENT | Skylight Books Join us for a special launch event for What Books Press' fall publications! Featuring readings by Jan Wesley, Forrest Roth, Ash Good and Henry Elizabeth Christopher. Only So Much (What Books Press) Jan Wesley is the author of Living in Freefall, a book of poems, and has two published chapbooks. On...

We're thrilled to be part of this year's LitLit book fair at Hauser & Wirth LA, this coming weekend. Come by to see our newest titles, and much more.

LITLIT: The Little Literary Fair – Hauser & Wirth Hauser & Wirth was founded in 1992 in Zurich by Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth and Ursula Hauser, who were joined in 2000 by Partner and President Marc Payot

"Philosophy or personal revelation, pilgrimage or reminiscence, each essay raises its own questions, shines its own light on the human dilemma." Janet Fitch takes a tour of “Ways of Walking,” a collection of essays edited by Ann de Forest. https://loom.ly/xuN7ziU

Today is World Oceans Day, dedicated to conservation and education about problems facing the oceans.

Today why not revisit Norwegian author Frøydis Sollid Simonsen's "Every Morning I Crawl Out of the Ocean," in which she talks about the largest concepts like space and the ocean in the context of love. "Each new life begins again in water," she writes, expanding on the conceptual link between who we are today and the primordial soup from which we came. https://tinyurl.com/25ztrx3u

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17QTPDnXpXI
"There's no wealth but life" John Ruskin

A Tree Walk Through Ruskin Park with John Ruskin Ruskin Park is a beautiful green space in South London on the border of Camberwell and Herne Hill. In this short film, presenters from across the local commu...

Tomorrow night: a reading with What Books authors Gail Wronsky, Elena Karina Byrnes, and Maureen Alsop, together with Yun Wang. Register now and see you there in person!

Poetry Night! Elena Karina Byrne, Yun Wang, Gail Wronsky, & Maureen Alsop A poetry reading for Elena Karina Byrne's launch of If This Makes You Nervous, with Yun Wang, Gail Wronksy, & Maureen Alsop

A reminder that two of our authors, Amy Uyematsu and Chuck Rosenthal, read tonight via Beyond Baroque. In addition, we recently conducted an interview with Amy about her career and her new collection.

Amy Interview ​ An Interview with Amy Uyematsu In celebration of her What Books Press title published in spring of 2022 and as a promotional notice during National Poetry Month, members of the press and its...

What Books Press and its imprint, Giant Claw Press, are excited to announce the launch of two new titles this month. First is That Blue Trickster Time, by LA poet Amy Uyematsu, Second is Chuck Rosenthal's new novel, Let's Face the Music and Dance. They will both read from their new work on Thursday, April 7th, courtesy of Beyond Baroque. Please join us on zoom to hear excerpts from these two wonderful publications.

An Online Reading of New Works From Amy Uyematsu & Chuck Rosenthal Join us with L.A's What Books Press and Giant Claw for a virtual reading of newly published works from Amy Uyematsu and Chuck Rosenthal.

Just received from Craftliterary.com: a very nice review of our recently published novel, The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival, including an interview with the book's author, Rebecca Kuder. For a bit more on book & author, as well as purchasing links, check us out at whatbookspress.com
https://www.craftliterary.com/2022/03/08/hybrid-interview-rebecca-kuder/

Hybrid Interview: Rebecca Kuder - CRAFT   Essay by Jahzerah Brooks • The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival is, at its core, a story about tearing down and building up. In this debut novel set against the backdrop of a working carnival and a wartime munitions factory,…

An interview with Gail Wronsky, an editor of What Books Press and Member of the Glass Table Collective

Gail Wronsky teaches creative writing and women’s literature at Loyola Marymount University. She is an author, coauthor, or translator of sixteen books of poetry and prose. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Boston Review, Antioch Review, Denver Quarterly, Poetry International, Guesthouse, and Volt. She is the recipient of an Artists Fellowship from the California Arts Council. She lives in Topanga Canyon, California.

Upon publication of her new book Under the Capsized Boat We Fly: New & Selected Poems, this interview was conducted via email in February 2022 and has been edited for brevity.

Could you describe the process of putting together a New and Selected Edition?

It was terrifically fun to put the book together. It meant going back and really spending time with my older work—seeing which poems have held up over the years, seeing which poems still speak to me and for me—trying to separate the profound from the merely clever.

Looking back over a few decades of writing, what have you learned about yourself as a poet?

That I’m better when I’m bolder. One of my strengths as a poet is leaping—taking surprising and wild leaps between lines, between images; going in unexpected directions in a poem. I also saw consistencies in my work over the years—a commitment to both surrealism and feminism, for starters. A questioning of the status quo of the art form. A voice that is kind of melancholy and kind of badass.

Why was it important for you as a writer to compile this New and Selected?

Well, I reached a certain age, and began to feel that I wanted to put my life’s work until that point into some kind of order, to try to make sense out of the career of my writing. I wanted to find out what it was I’d been doing all these years, to come to terms with my poetic “voice,” with who I am as a poet. Historically I’ve been the kind of poet who writes a poem and then moves on; it was time to go back and take stock. And I’m really glad I did. It freed me, in a way, allowed me to continue writing, and to move on in new directions.

If your New and Selected poems were only three poems long, which would they be?

“Twenty-three,” the first poem in the collection; “The Earth as Desdemona, which was a real stylistic breakthrough for me;” and “An Autobiography,” the last poem in the collection.

Are the writers that you admire today the same ones you admired thirty years ago?

Some are and some aren’t. I still love Lorca, for example, but am less infatuated with James Wright and Pablo Neruda. I still love Sylvia Plath and Robert Desnos, but I’ve also discovered other writers, like Rene Char and Paul Celan who have both taught me a lot about the language one can use in a poem. Then there are all of the writers who weren’t around back then—writers like Ocean Vuong and Terrance Hayes, Kaveh Akbar, Yun Wang, and Valerie Mejer Caso.

What would you recommend someone who has a difficult time understanding poetry do to understand the poems in your New and Selected?

I’d say what I always say to my students which is to read for pleasure, to read for the language and imagery and imagination in a poem and not to worry about what the poem “means.” Poems mean so many different things at once, and I think people really get bogged down by trying to figure out what a poem is saying, as if it’s reducible to one thing. Read to enjoy the entanglements and complexities, the surprising word-choices, the leaping. People don’t go to museums to look at abstract paintings and ask what the painting means—they simply enjoy and admire the way the painter has used certain colors and strokes, that particular color of blue next to that particular yellow, for example. That’s how I want them to read my poems.

This interview was conducted by Michaela Shirley, a What Books Press student intern from Middle Georgia State University.

Under the Capsized Boat We Fly: New & Selected Poems Under the Capsized Boat We Fly: New & Selected Poems

We're pleased to report that author Rebecca Kuder will read from her recently published What Books Press novel, The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival, this Wednesday, Groundhog Day, February 2nd. Check it out:

February 2…Online Author Visit… Photo courtesy of Lauren Shows/Yellow Springs News On February 2, Robert Freeman Wexler and I will emerge from hibernation to read from our recent “genre-defying books.” Maybe we will s…

Our just published anthology, What Falls Away is Always, gets a wonderful review on Barrelhouse Magazine.

Jessica Goodfellow Reviews an Anthology of Writers on Aging — BARRELHOUSE What I found instead was comfort: comfort in the company of writers who go before me.

One week from tonight! Our annual new titles launch reading, courtesy of Skylight books in Hollywood. This virtual event is scheduled for Friday, November 12th, and will feature the authors of our three newest books, each of them joining in from their respective homes around the globe. You are cordially invited!

LIVE ON CROWDCAST: WHAT BOOKS PRESS READING! | Skylight Books Join us for the virtual launch of three What Books Press titles! RSVP here to join live or watch the replay.  The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival by Rebecca Kuder A tornado drops a young woman near the Eight Mile Suspended Carnival, with no memories and no name. The carnies adopt her and call her Mim...

We're very excited to showcase our newest authors next month, courtesy of Skylight Book's virtual readings series:

LIVE ON CROWDCAST: WHAT BOOKS PRESS READING! | Skylight Books Join us for the virtual launch of three What Books Press titles! RSVP here to join live or watch the replay.  The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival by Rebecca Kuder A tornado drops a young woman near the Eight Mile Suspended Carnival, with no memories and no name. The carnies adopt her and call her Mim...

It's that time of year... four brand new titles to announce! Official release date is one week from today, but here's a sneak preview:

Today & tomorrow: chat with our new authors!
AWP is entirely virtual this year, but if you have registered, you'll be pleased to know that each of our four new authors is appearing online for conversation with readers and fans. Here is the schedule:

Elena Karina Byrne, author of No, Don’t (poems)
Thursday, March 4, 2021, 5:00-5:30 EST
https://awp21.pathable.co/meetings/virtual/vptJjnEvdB7Qzhqyd

Stella Hayes, author of One Strange Country (poems)
Thursday, March 4, 2021, 5:30-6:00 EST
HTTPS://AWP21.PATHABLE.CO/MEETINGS/VIRTUAL/HS566MSPBERASRGY5

Andrew Tonkovich, author of Keeping Tahoe Blue and Other Provocations (prose)
Friday, March 5, 2021, 5:00-5:30 EST
https://awp21.pathable.co/meetings/virtual/6skN4eE2g3p8r4xxY

Daniel Krause, author of Remembering Dismembrance: A Critical Compendium (prose)
Friday, March 5, 2021, 5:30-6:00 EST
https://awp21.pathable.co/meetings/virtual/LeFriN4T4GEi5mPyp

awp21.pathable.co