14 New Titles From Four Way Books in 2020
Four Way Books is thrilled to publish 14 new, amazing books of poetry and fiction this year:
You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love by Yona Harvey (September 2020)
The poems of award-winning poet Yona Harvey’s much anticipated You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love follow an unnamed protagonist on her multidimensional, Afro-futuristic journey.
Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry by John Murillo (March 2020)
A reflective look at the legacy of institutional, accepted violence against Blacks and Latinos and the personal and societal wreckage wrought by long histories of subjugation.
The Life Assignment by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado (September 2020)
In his electric debut collection, Maldonado bends poems through bilingual lyrics that present spartan observation as evidence for its exacting verdict, “We never leave when life is elsewhere. The clemency of men disappears / as does the light, tarring the roofs.”
Fantasia for the Man in Blue by Tommye Blount (March 2020)
Blount orchestrates a chorus of distinct, unforgettable voices that speak to the experience of the black, queer body as a site of desire and violence.
Let It Be Broke by Ed Pavlić (March 2020)
Pavlić’s lyric lines are equal parts introspection and inter-spection, a term he coins for the shared rumination that encourages a collective “deep think” about the arbitrary boundaries that perpetuate racial and geographic segregation and the power of words to transcend those differences.
Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful by Matthew Lippman (March 2020)
Lippman’s poems are wildly inventive yet grounded in the 21st century dailyness of parenting and dinner parties and Dunkin Donuts, all of which serve as launch pads into perennial questions of mercy and trust.
Guidebooks for the Dead by Cynthia Cruz (March 2020)
Cruz returns to a familiar literary landscape in which a cast of extraordinary women struggle to create amidst violence, addiction, and poverty.
The Wendys by Allison Benis White (March 2020)
“Because it is easier to miss a stranger / with your mother’s name,” Allison Benis White instead writes about five women named Wendy as a way into the complex grief that still lingers after the death of a sixth Wendy, the author’s long-absent mother.
We Were Lucky with the Rain by Susan Buttenwieser (September 2020)
The characters inhabiting Buttenwieser’s debut story collection stand at the margin of society, often perched on the knife’s edge of economic disaster.
Seize by Brian Komei Dempster (September 2020)
These poems consider how one becomes the parent of another when their own uncertainties, their own wounds — intergenerationally from war, from strained race relations, from constantly being denied a place to belong — are still healing.
Between Lakes by Jeffrey Harrison (September 2020)
Whether observing nature with steadfast precision or sensing the presence of his absent father while doing chores, Harrison sings the songs of experience in late middle life.
I Live in the Country & other dirty poems by Arielle Greenberg (March 2020)
Greenberg hauls out what has previously been stored under dark counters and labeled deviant—kink, fetish, and bondage— and moves it into the sunshine of sex-positivity and mutual consent.
The Newest Employee of the Museum of Ruin by Charlie Clark (September 2020)
In this collection, poet Charlie Clark interrogates masculinity, the pastoral, the lasting inheritance of one’s lineage, and the mysterious every day.
The Land of the Dead Is Open for Business by Jacob Strautmann (March 2020)
An extended elegy for Strautmann’s home state of West Virginia and its generations of inhabitants sold out by the false promise of the American Dream.
Learn more about Four Way Books here.
