The Best Southern Books of April 2025 https://ift.tt/dt6zIoJ
We’re already halfway through National Poetry Month and I haven’t picked up even one poetry collection yet — something I plan to address ASAP! I hope you do too, because as Ada Limón says, “I think we’d all be better off if we encountered poetry on a regular basis, because it reminds us to feel.” This month is full of wonderful new releases, both poetry and otherwise, to add to your bookshelves.
West Virginia University Press: “Dispatch from the Mountain State encompasses the trademark themes of a mature poet — death, despair, dread, and the seeming randomness with which all of these come into life. The dispatches provide, if sometimes obliquely, a keen awareness of the troubled times within which we live, whether the flashpoint be race, the recent pandemic, or the reckless onslaught of the Appalachian mining industry… Harshman’s distinctive vision remains both surreal and familiar, whether expressed in a sonnet or the more common free-verse characteristic of most of his work.”
Nightboat Books: “Unsex Me Here is a prayer book tied together by the strings of a corset. Glamorous ramblers, haunted by the sense of another world drawing near, wander in and out of its inexplicable twilight. From a West Texas town with a supernatural past to a stalactite cavern in the birthplace of Aphrodite, from hotel rooms to gardens to the far horizon of a thought, they seek the source of the disturbance in their minds. Heartbreak is not so far from rapture; holy babble is another kind of gossip. Every pilgrimage is as dense with symbolism as it is refined by desire.”
LSU Press: “How close can a person come to home when their family has deserted it? Guided by this question, the poems in Nida Sophasarun’s Novice traverse natural, animal, and dream worlds, seeking intimacy in a snake coming in from the rain, a mother’s body imagined as a house, and the moon serving as both the missing piece and the linchpin in a night sky. Organized by tropical seasons and unfolding in Asia and the American South, Novice proposes that home is monumental and ruined, remembered and forgotten, local and diffuse, peopled and haunted.”
University of Iowa: “At the age of twenty-nine, tired of trying to get along with members of his crew and tired of the money going into somebody else’s pocket, Natch begins working for himself, climbing and cutting down trees in the foothills of north Georgia. He has his truck, ropes, climbing gear, and a rotating selection of secondhand saws he finds at pawn shops and flea markets. He is free to work as he pleases. And he believes he is fine with his life as it is, living alone in an old hunting cabin at the end of a dirt lane, enjoying his habits, exploring his vices, and living, as he puts it, ‘like some wild thing let loose on the world.'”
Hub City Press: “Told entirely in the second person, Plum follows J as she grows from kid to teen in a house ruled by her alcoholic dad and complicit mother. Her older brother is sometimes wonderful, sometimes gross, and he’s her only hope of getting out. J’s world is one of nail polish, above-ground pools, and drive-thrus — and of violence, carelessness, and so many rules… As she stumbles into adulthood with no template to follow, J must figure out how to build a family for herself full of the love she deserves. In her brutally compelling debut, Anderegg turns her singular gaze on the generational patterns of addiction and abuse.”
Tin House: “From the acclaimed author of The Wilds comes an electric story collection that blends folklore, fairy tales, Southern Gothic, and horror, reveling in the collision of the familiar with the wildly surreal. With exuberance, ferocity, and astounding imagination, Julia Elliott’s Hellions jumps from the occult to the comic, from the horrific to the wondrous, presenting earthbound characters who long for the otherworldly.”
BOA Editions: “jump the gun digs deep into the dark undercurrents of grief and gun violence that shadow our daily lives in America. These poems uproot the hidden recesses of life, the stages and struggles of womanhood, and our continual fight against violence, both internal and external, in the U.S. today. To read jump the gun is to witness yourself through the crosshairs. In Malboeuf’s words, ‘What hit you has become you. / Pieces of the bullet embedded / in your skin. Even / that which you come from / will never be the same. / But from violence comes / the tides, the seasons.'”
Alice James: “In her award-winning debut, When the Horses, Mary Helen Callier explores the rich inner terrain of an imaginative childhood through deep and curious poems set against the uncanny beauty of the American South. Like all memories, these moments are fleeting. To read When the Horses is to see something nearly vanished, like trying to remember a dream hours after waking — a dream that haunts a wounded part of you, though you can’t remember which. These are poems of encounter — with place, self, other — and the uncanny beauty that remains after loss.”
Dutton: “The Royal Tenenbaums meets Fleabag in this hilarious and dizzyingly smart debut about an over-the-top evangelical Texan family — and the daughter at its center racing to finish her very important novel before her ex-boyfriend finishes his. Funny, whip-smart, and often tender, Bitter Texas Honey introduces us to the unforgettable and indefatigable Joan West: ambitious, full of contradictions, utterly herself. As she wades through it all — addiction, politics, loss, and, notably, her father’s string of increasingly bizarre girlfriends — we witness her confront what it means to be a person, and an artist, in the world.”
Simon & Schuster: “In this powerful debut reminiscent of Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, two men in Atlanta reconcile their human dignity against the price of their professional ambitions working for a real estate development company displacing Black residents in preparation for the 1996 Olympics. Daily interactions between Jacob and Daniel are a powder keg of sexual tension and uncertainty. A recent Morehouse graduate and Brooklyn transplant, Jacob fears that accepting the truth of his sexuality will disappoint the hopes his parents have for him to lead a respectable life. Grieving the death of his mother while searching for answers about a father he has never known, Daniel, an Atlanta native, has resigned himself to the reality that men who love men don’t have happy endings.”
Sarabande: “Riven by the tension between hagiographies, utopias, belief, longing, and grief, the poems of My Heresies catalog a personal and familial history originating in Bucharest, Romania and landing in Birmingham, Alabama. Whether through sardonic takes on old Bible myths or homage paid to French-Romanian poet Paul Celan, Stefanescu’s poems are laden in subtext, in imagery sometimes abstract and lush, at other times stark and shocking. My Heresies probes the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, and the result is a hauntological mapping of life, love, family, and womanhood.”
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