Taylor Johnson joins Alice James Books
Alice James Books is thrilled to welcome Taylor Johnson to the press!
Taylor's poetry collection Inheritance will be forthcoming in November 2020. Welcome to AJB, Taylor!
Taylor Johnson is from Washington, DC. Their poems appear in, or will appear in, The Baffler, Indiana Review, Scalawag, and The Paris Review. They've received fellowships from Cave Canem and the Conversation Literary Festival, among other organizations. Taylor lives in southern Louisiana where they listen.
FEATURED TITLES
Iain Haley Pollock
". . . Pollock delivers moments of levity, lyric beauty, and a creeping melancholy that lend his work its distinct atmosphere."
—Publishers Weekly
September 2018
ISBN: 9781938584954
Andrés Cerpa
A Book Riot Must-Read Poetry Collection
Recommended by Foundry Journal
"With fierce despair and wisdom hard won through pain...these experiences have sharpened Cerpa’s stunning, dark observations and sparked chilling lines.”
—Publishers Weekly
January 2019
ISBN: 9781938584978
Mia Ayumi Malhotra
2019 Winner of the Maine Literary Award for Excellence in Publishing
The 2018 Nautilus Gold Award Winner
“At the Empress: An Epithalamium” named the winner of the 2019 Singapore Poetry Contest
One of Electric Lit’s 10 Books of Poetry that Highlight the Diversity of Asian America
One of Entropy Magazine’s 2018 Best Poetry Books
Top Fall Poetry Collection from Library Journal
“By turns delicate and anguished, the poems [in Isako Isako] ask how one can recover—and recover from—experiences that are not one’s own.”
—Publishers Weekly
September 2018
ISBN: 9781938584947
Donald Revell
2018 Balcones Poetry Prize Finalist
“Thoroughly integrating sacred and secular, Revell produces a book of love and rapture.”
—Publishers Weekly
May 2018
ISBN: 9781938584763
Anna Rose Welch
“This is How You Beg” recognized as a special mention in Pushcart Prize XLIII
"Welch digs deep into desire, origin, and the chaos of creation in a debut collection of rich, sensuous poems that juxtapose scriptural material with the sexual."
—Publishers Weekly
April 2018
ISBN: 9781938584756
Monica A. Hand
2019 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Nominee
“DiVida stands as a timeless presence burdened by the injustices of systemic racism. Her power is rooted in black women’s ability, born of necessity, to inhabit their bodies in multiple ways.”
—Publishers Weekly
April 2018
ISBN: 9781938584749
Jennifer Chang
Winner of the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award
Longlisted for the 2018 PEN Open Book Award
A 2017 Poets.org Noted Book of the Year
12th Annual National Indie Excellence Award Winner
2017 Julie Suk Award Longlist Finalist
A 2017 Minnesota Public Radio Best Book of the Year
A 2017 Beltway Poetry Quarterly Best Book of the Year
A Lit Hub Book that Deserved More Attention in 2017
Recommended by the New York Public Library
“Chang is fearless in taking on traditional notions of what poetry can do to the self and to the natural world.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
October 2017
ISBN: 9781938584664
Kaveh Akbar
Winner of the John C. Zacharis First Book Award
2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Gold Winner
2018 Levis Reading Prize Winner
2017 Julie Suk Award Winner
A 2017 Nautilus Silver Award Winner
2017 Florida Book Award Gold Winner
A 2018 First Horizon Award Winner
Winner of the 2018 Eric Hoffer Small Press Award
Shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Award Grand Prize
A 2018 Montaigne Medal Finalist
A 2017 NPR Best Book of the Year
A 2017 Library Journal Best Book of the Year
A 2017 Entropy Magazine Best Book of the Year
A 2017 The Coil Best Book of the Year
A 2017 Sundress Publications Best Book of the Year
A 2017 Indianapolis Monthly Best Book of the Year
A 2017 Largehearted Boy Best Book of the Year
A 2017 Volume 1 Brooklyn Best Book of the Year
A 2017 Interview Best Book of the Year
“A breathtaking addition to the canon of addiction literature, Akbar’s poetry confronts the pain and joy in denying oneself for the sake of oneself…Akbar’s poems offer readers, religious or not, a way to cultivate faith in times of deepest fear.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
September 2017
ISBN: 9781938584671
June Jordan
Edited by Christoph Keller & Jan Heller Levi
A 2017 Poets.org Noted Book of the Year
A 2017 Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
An Oprah.com Editor’s Pick for New Collections by and About Bold, Free-Spirited Poets, Nov. 2017
12th Annual National Indie Excellence Award Winner
“Jordan begs us to trust one another and to tell the truth, to read the world more closely, to learn the wisdom of those who came before, who resisted before, and loved before. She laid a foundation, leaving a revolutionary blueprint for poetry to transform our lives beyond the white gaze and its literary imagination. . . .This book is not just a collection of figurative words; it is a tool for liberation.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review by Aja Monet
September 2017
ISBN: 9781938584350
Alessandra Lynch
Winner of the 2017 Balcones Poetry Prize
2018 UNT Rilke Prize Finalist
2017 L. A. Times Book Prize Poetry Finalist
A 2017 New York Times Best Poetry Book of the Year
“[Lynch] wants to show an act of violence in all its terrible particularity and also in the way it becomes a background against which identity trembles and sometimes fractures. It’s difficult to read this collection without thinking about how timely it is, but its force is in no sense dependent on that congruity.”
—The New York Times Book Review
June 2017
ISBN: 9781938584657
Kristin Robertson
A 2017 Sundress Publications Best Book of the Year
“[Robertson’s] vivid language makes the poems come alive with intense, agonizing images.”
—The Los Angeles Review
May 2017
ISBN: 9781938584343
Jill McDonough
A 2017 Minnesota Public Radio Best Book of the Year
“McDonough works to humanize the technologies that carry out our most dreadful acts and forces us to examine the ways in which we abandon—or, perhaps more accurately, ignore—our agency in order to protect our fragile consciences.”
—Hobart
April 2017
ISBN: 9781938584268
Elizabeth Lyons
“Lyon’s humble and empathetic poems are wrought with tangible emotion.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
April 2017
ISBN: 9781938584336
Monica A. Hand
ForeWord Reviews‘ 2012 Book of the Year Award Finalist
2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Finalist
2014 da Vinci Eye Finalist
“In me and Nina Monica A. Hand depicts, as Nina Simone did, what it is to be gifted and Black in America. She shifts dynamically through voices and forms homemade, received and re-imagined to conjure the music (and Muses) of art and experience. This is a debut fiercely illuminated by declaration and song.”
—Terrance Hayes
January 2012
ISBN: 9781882295906
Donald Revell
“Revell demonstrates his spontaneity and his unmediated, often delighted, relationship to nature …each [poem] is a momentary conjunction of faith with language, addressed with a pellucid power that invites even unprepared readers to join in.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
September 2015
ISBN: 9781938584138
Donald Revell
“In lines that are spare and strange, elegant and sorrowing, witty and linguistically innovative, My Mojave combines an Emersonian sweetness with postmodern practice. As part of a lyric experimental tradition, My Mojave is also balkily anti-lyric, interrupting its most flowing effects on purpose. Drawing on the terms of late modernist enterprise to re-invent and re-use poetic form as an indicator of consciousness, Revell brings to us descriptions of the natural world, songlike fragments, declarations that resemble riddles, and musings on poetry and the soul.” —Brenda Hillman, in her judges’ citation for the Lenore Marshall Prize
April 2003
ISBN: 9781882295401
Donald Revell
2005 LA Times Book Prize in Poetry Finalist
“Donald Revell’s selected poems, Pennyweight Windows, contains some of the most interesting American poems written in the last twenty years. Revell at his best is a writer of unusual intellectual rigor and great lyrical poignancy: his mind is tuned to adages and axioms, pre-Socratic mind-tricks and the gnomic observations of Thoreau; but he has a big, vulnerable heart that tries to live in our world among our entanglements.” —Poetry
Hardcover ISBN: 9781882295517
Paperback ISBN: 9781882295524
Donald Revell
“Revell is one of American poetry’s quiet masters, an aesthetically daring poet who, late in his career, took up religious themes and has created a kind of edgy wisdom poetry. . . The best of these poems are transcendent.”
—Publishers Weekly
September 2012
ISBN: 9781882295975
Franny Choi
A Book Riot Top Queer Poetry Collections to Read During National Poetry Month
Paris Review Staff Pick
A Book Riot Must-Read Poetry Collection
Recommended by Buzzfeed News
A Rumpus Book Club Pick
One of Nylon’s Best Books to Read in 2019
One of Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2019
". . . Choi creates an exhilarating matrix of poetry, science, and technology."
—Publishers Weekly
April 2019
ISBN: 9781938584992
Kenji C. Liu
"Liu relishes the absurd and the happenstance, that 'tornado gorgeous' that becomes possible with a non-utilitarian approach to language."
—Publishers Weekly
April 2019
ISBN: 9781938584985
Ilyse Kusnetz
"A beautifully rendered meditation on living while dying. . ." —Library Journal
May 2019
ISBN: 9781948579001
Jane Mead
"Mead ... wrote clean, spare, often elegiac lines"
—The New York Times
August 2019
ISBN: 9781948579018
Shara McCallum
Winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Poetry Prize
Winner of the 2018 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize
“Sorrow” selected for the 2017 Best of the Net Anthology
“. . . McCallum beautifully incorporates the patois of her native Jamaica and employs myth as a way to deal with the mistakes and hurts of the past. [Her] striking poems take the madwoman out of her attic so that she may walk and speak among the living.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
January 2017
ISBN: 9781938584282
francine j. harris
2017 Winner of the Lambda Literary Awards
2017 Winner of the Publishing Triangle Award
2017 Nominee for 2017 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry
“francine j. harris’s poems are tenderized: they not only insist upon their embodiment, they punch, howl, beat, and bleed their way into being.”
—Boston Review
April 2016
ISBN: 9781938584251
Phillip B. Williams
Recipient of a 2017 Whiting Award for Poetry
2017 Lambda Literary Awards Winner
Nominated for the 2017 NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry
2017 Etching Press Whirling Prize Winner
2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award Winner
2016 INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalist
2017 Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award Finalist
2017 Eric Hoffer Book Award Finalist
2017 Nominee for 2017 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry
Shortlisted for Chicago Review of Books Award in Poetry
One of BET’s “12 Must-Read Books for 2016”
“[Williams] sings for the vanished, for the haunted, for the tortured, for the lost, for the place on the horizon where the little boat of the human body disappears in a wingdom of unending grace.”
—The Best American Poetry
January 2016
ISBN: 9781938584176
Jamaal May
2014 Notable Book Award from the American Library Association
2013 NAACP Image Award Nominee
2013 The Boston Globe’s Best Books of 2013 List
2013 Silver IndieFab Award Winner
2013 ForeWord Book of the Year Award Finalist
2012 Beatrice Hawley Award
“The Detroit of Jamaal May’s debut collection, Hum, is littered with broken glass, shattered vials, and discarded syringes. Noting the empty shells of grand colonials lining the streets and battered cars sitting on cinder blocks, May argues against romanticizing urban decay.”
—Boston Review
November 2013
ISBN: 9781938584022
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Jane Mead
“With each of her books, Jane Mead develops a more economical, unique language for grief, and for the yearning toward wholeness. Confessional detail and philosophical argument are reduced to traces, but their resonance from underneath leaves no doubt that this work is serious. This is a book I will be living with for a long time to come.”
—Alan Williamson
May 2008
ISBN: 9781882295692
Jane Mead
“Despite its concern with the environment, the most fundamental and interesting preoccupation of Money Money Money | Water Water Water may be with the kind of darkness that grows not from the outside but from within.”
—West Branch
April 2014
ISBN: 9781938584046
Kevin Goodan
“[Anaphora has] heart-searing intensity. . .”
—Library Journal
October 2018
ISBN: 9781938584961