New Titles from Black Lawrence Press
We at Black Lawrence Press are so delighted to participate in the 2020 Virtual Boston Book Fest! Although we can’t be there in person this year, we’d like to celebrate our new and forthcoming titles by authors in the Boston area.
The Actual World by Jason Tandon (Farmington)
If you’d like to know how to hold the wide world in your heart, this book is a beginning. Jason Tandon does not offer broad brushstrokes to explain our days, but sharply cut lyrics. I love his sensibility. I love his spirit. —Richard Jones
When My Body Was A Clinched Fist by Enzo Silon Surin (Lynn)
In this full-length debut, Enzo Silon Surin traverses the turns of coming of age in the New York of the 1990s. In these sonically-packed stanzas, Surin draws scenes where hip hop and Haiti flow through the borough of Queens. He elegizes a friend named Frankie, and interrogates how masculinity is so often flexed like the knuckles of an ever-ready fist, even when vulnerability pulses underneath. —Tara Betts
Women in the Waiting Room by Kirun Kapur (Amesbury)
In astonishing lyrics that give us more than intimate negotiations of memory, the poems in Women in the Waiting Room work an entrancing weave of Hindu mythology, ravishing songs, and the language of crisis hotlines as a means of limning the fate of women’s bodies and psychological distress.. I call this life on the page, one you’ll be happy to encounter. —Major Jackson
Fingerspell by Lindsay Illich (Milton)
Lindsay Illich’s Fingerspell is not only a book of elegy, motherhood, and eros; it’s also a book of astonishing, idiosyncratic seeing—in which knee caps are like “stone fruit,” the city of Washington DC represents “the remains of an idea,” grief is an accumulation of snow “into which / the heart sinks,” the act of waiting is “a splint // my body’s wrapped against,” and the sound of a running vacuum is evidence of love. —Wayne Miller
The Shape of the Keyhole by Denise Bergman (Cambridge)
In 1650, in Massachusetts, a woman was falsely accused of killing her friend’s child. She was immediately tried and soon hanged. The Shape of the Keyhole examines a community’s fear-driven silence and envisions the innocent woman’s days as she awaits her execution.
Lost Letters and Other Animals by Carrie Bennett (Somerville)
“Bennett’s touch is light but cuts deeply into the impermanence that marks our lives. A beautiful collection.” —Barbara Hamby
Are you looking for a good home for your manuscript? We’re currently accepting submissions for The Black River Chapbook Competition. And we’ll hold our next open reading period in November.
Do you have a manuscript that could use an expert eye? Check out our consultation program for fiction and poetry.
