Imagine if most anticipated books lists didn’t grossly resemble each other. Imagine if they didn’t simply privilege books from the so-called Big Five (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster) and their many subsidiaries. Imagine if mainstream magazine and newspaper editors and publishers paid substantial attention to the marvelous books published by small presses every year. Imagine if they regularly spotlighted books that are smart, innovative, imaginative, and beautifully strange. Imagine if every critic, reviewer, interviewer, podcaster, etc., did the same. Imagine if everyone who cared about literature did everything to could to promote the best words in the best order. Et cetera ad astra.
Below you’ll find the 2020 books I’m most excited about, which all happen to be published exclusively by small presses, which always do the heavy lifting in publishing. You’ll find I’m partial to the unruly, difficult, provocative, anomalous, transgressive, innovative, disruptive, heterodox, unnameable.
Rift Zone, by Tess Taylor (Red Hen Press, April 7, 2020): From the press: “Taylor’s ambitious and masterful poems read her home state’s historic violence against our world’s current unsteadinesses—mass eviction, housing crises, deportation, inequality. They also ponder what it means to try to bring up children along these rifts. What emerges is a powerful core sample of America at the brink—an American elegy equally tuned to maternal and to geologic time. At once sorrowful and furious, tender and fierce, Rift Zone is startlingly observant, relentlessly curious—a fearsome tremor of a book.”