Winter 2024 Catalog
Like Love: Essays and Conversations
by Maggie Nelson
Publication date April 2, 2024 nonfiction
A career-spanning collection of inspiring, revelrous essays about art and artists
Like Love is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson’s brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes, and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson’s passion for dialogue and dissent. The range of subjects is wide—from Prince to Carolee Schneemann to Matthew Barney to Lhasa de Sela to Kara Walker—but certain themes recur: intergenerational exchange; love and friendship; feminist and queer issues, especially as they shift over time; subversion, transgression, and perversity; the roles of the critic and of language in relation to visual and performance arts; forces that feed or impede certain bodies and creators; and the fruits and follies of a life spent devoted to making.
Arranged chronologically, Like Love shows the writing, thinking, feeling, reading, looking, and conversing that occupied Nelson while writing iconic books such as Bluets and The Argonauts. As such, it is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson’s own development, and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.
Maggie Nelson is the author of several books of prose and poetry including The Red Parts, Bluets, the National Book Critics Circle Award–winner The Argonauts, and On Freedom. She teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.
Like Love: Essays and Conversations by Maggie Nelson
April 2, 2024
978-1-64445-281-3
Hardcover $32
352 pages 6" x 9"
Brit.: Jonathan Cape Trans., 1st ser., audio, dram.: Janklow & Nesbit Associates
Modern Poetry
by Diane Suess
Publication date March 5, 2024 poetry
An extraordinary new collection by Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Diane Seuss’s signature voice—audacious in its honesty, virtuosic in its artistry, outsider in its attitude—has become one of the most original in contemporary poetry. Her latest collection takes its title, Modern Poetry, from the first textbook Seuss encountered as a child and the first poetry course she took in college, as an enrapt but ill-equipped student, one who felt poetry was beyond her reach. Many of the poems make use of the forms and terms of musical and poetic craft—ballad, fugue, aria, refrain, coda—and contend with the works of writers overrepresented in textbooks and anthologies and those too often underrepresented. Seuss provides a moving account of her picaresque years and their uncertainties, and in the process, she enters the realm between Modernism and Romanticism, between romance and objectivity, with Keats as ghost, lover, and interlocutor.
In poems of rangy curiosity, sharp humor, and illuminating self-scrutiny, Modern Poetry investigates our time’s deep isolation and divisiveness and asks: What can poetry be now? Do poems still have the capacity to mean? “It seems wrong / to curl now within the confines / of a poem,” Seuss writes. “You can’t hide / from what you made / inside what you made.” What she finds there, finally, is a surprising but unmistakable love.
If you are like me, to learn of the gods you must
beg, borrow, or steal. Eavesdrop, as gossip
is sagacity, a word I learned from Emily
Dickinson. Don’t underestimate direct
experience. Ants know earth. Dragonflies
know air. A cobbled mind is not fatal.
You have to be willing to self-educate
at a moment’s notice, and to be caught
in your ignorance by people who will
use it against you. You will mispronounce
words in front of a crowd. It cannot be
avoided. But your poems, with all of their
deficiencies, products of lifelong observation
and asymmetric knowledge, will be your own.
—from “My Education”
Diane Seuss is the author of five books of poetry, including frank: sonnets, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Voelcker Prize, and a finalist for the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Still Life With Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, winner of the Juniper Prize. She was a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2021 she received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Michigan.
Modern Poetry: Poems by Diane Seuss
March 5, 2024
978-1-64445-275-2
Hardcover $26
128 pages 6" x 9"
Brit. trans. audio, dram.: Graywolf Press 1st ser.: Author c/o Graywolf Press
My Heavenly Favorite
by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld; Translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison
Publication date March 5, 2024 fiction
A harrowing, unforgettable masterpiece by the winner of the Booker International Prize
A confession, a lament, a mad gush of grief and obsession, My Heavenly Favorite is the remarkable and chilling successor to Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s international sensation, The Discomfort of Evening. It tells the story of a veterinarian who visits a farm in the Dutch countryside where he becomes enraptured by his “Favorite”—the farmer’s daughter. She hovers on the precipice of adolescence, and longs to have a boy’s body. The veterinarian seems to be a tantalizing possible path out from the constrictions of her conservative rural life.
Narrated after the veterinarian has been punished for his crimes, Rijneveld’s audacious, profane novel is powered by the paradoxical beauty of its prose, which holds the reader fast to the page. Rijneveld refracts the contours of the Lolita story with a kind of perverse glee, taking the reader into otherwise unimaginable spaces full of pop lyrics, horror novels, the Favorite’s fantasized conversations with Freud and Hitler, and her dreams of flight and destruction and transcendence.
An unflinching depiction of abjection and a pointed excavation of taboos and social norms, My Heavenly Favorite establishes Rijneveld as one of the most daring and brilliant writers on the world stage.
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld grew up in a Reformed farming family in North Brabant before moving to Utrecht. He is the author of The Discomfort of Evening, which was the first Dutch book to win the International Booker Prize, as well as three poetry collections.
Michele Hutchison is a British writer and translator, mainly of Dutch-language literature. She won the 2020 International Booker Prize for her translation of The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld. She was also awarded the Vondel Translation Prize for her translation of Stage Four by Sander Kollaard.
My Heavenly Favorite: A Novel by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld; Translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison
March 5, 2024
978-1-64445-273-8
Hardcover $28
344 pages 6" x 9"
Brit., trans., dram.: Faber & Faber 1st ser., audio: Graywolf Press
Raised by Wolves: Fifty Poets on Fifty Poems
edited by Graywolf Press
Publication date January 23, 2024
An innovative poetry anthology in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Graywolf Press
Raised by Wolves is a unique and vibrant gathering of poems from Graywolf Press’s fifty years. The anthology is conceived as a community document: fifty Graywolf poets have selected fifty poems by Graywolf poets, offering insightful prose reflections on their selections. What arises is a choral arrangement of voices and lineages across decades, languages, styles, and divergences, inspiring a shared vision for the future.
Included here are established and emerging poets, international poets and poets in translation, and many of the most significant poets of our time. There are extraordinary pairings: Tracy K. Smith on Linda Gregg; Vijay Seshadri on Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robert Bly; Natalie Diaz on Mary Szybist; Diane Seuss on D. A. Powell; Elizabeth Alexander on Christopher Gilbert; Ilya Kaminsky on Vénus Khoury-Ghata, translated by Marilyn Hacker; Mai Der Vang on Larry Levis; Layli Long Soldier on Solmaz Sharif; Solmaz Sharif on Claudia Rankine. In these poets’ championing of others, fascinating threads emerge: Stephanie Burt writes on Monica Youn, who selects Harryette Mullen, who writes on Liu Xiaobo, translated by Jeffrey Yang, who chooses Fanny Howe, who writes on Carl Phillips, who selects Danez Smith, who chooses Donika Kelly, who writes on Natasha Trethewey.
With an introduction by Graywolf publisher Carmen Giménez, Raised by Wolves is an echoing outward of poetry’s possibilities.
Raised by Wolves: Fifty Poets on Fifty Poems edited by Graywolf Press
January 23, 2024
978-1-64445-266-0
Paperback $18
136 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit., trans., audio, dram.: Graywolf Press
The Tree Doctor
by Marie Mutsuki Mockett
Publication date March 19, 2024 fiction
A startling, erotic novel about struggling for life when joy is shadowed by despair and disease
When the unnamed narrator of Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s stirring second novel returns to Carmel, California, to care for her mother, she finds herself stranded at the outset of the disease. With her husband and children back in Hong Kong, and her Japanese mother steadily declining in an assisted living facility two hours away, she becomes preoccupied with her mother’s garden—convinced it contains a kind of visual puzzle—and the dormant cherry tree within it.
Caught between tending to an unwell parent and the weight of obligation to her distant daughters and husband, she becomes isolated and unmoored. She soon starts a torrid affair with an arborist who is equally fascinated by her mother’s garden, and together they embark on reviving it. Increasingly engrossed by the garden, and by the awakening of her own body, she comes to see her mother's illness as part of a natural order in which things are perpetually living and dying, consuming and being consumed. All the while, she struggles to teach (remotely) Lady Murasaki’s eleventh-century novel, The Tale of Genji, which turns out to resonate eerily with the conditions of contemporary society in the grip of a pandemic.
The Tree Doctor is a powerful, beautifully written novel full of bodily pleasure, intense observation of nature, and a profound reckoning with the passage of time both within ourselves and in the world we inhabit.
Marie Mutsuki Mockett is the author of a previous novel, Picking Bones from Ash, and two books of nonfiction, American Harvest, which won the Nebraska Book Award, and Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye, which was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award.
The Tree Doctor: A Novel by Marie Mutsuki Mockett
March 19, 2024
978-1-64445-277-6
Paperback $17
256 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit., trans., dram.: Trident Media Group 1st ser., audio: Graywolf Press
Corey Fah Does Social Mobility
by Isabel Waidner
Publication date February 6, 2024 fiction
A novel that celebrates radical queer survival and gleefully takes a hammer to false notions of success
This is the story of Corey Fah, a writer who has hit the literary jackpot: their novel has just won the prize for the Fictionalization of Social Evils. But the actual trophy, and with it the funds, hovers peskily out of reach.
Neon-beige, with UFO-like qualities, the elusive trophy leads Corey, with their partner Drew and eight-legged companion Bambi Pavok, on a spectacular quest through their childhood in the Forest and an unlikely stint on reality TV. Navigating those twin horrors, along with wormholes and time loops, Corey learns—the hard way—the difference between a prize and a gift.
Following the Goldsmiths Prize–winning Sterling Karat Gold, Isabel Waidner’s bold and buoyant new novel is about coming into one’s own, the labor of love, the tendency of history to repeat itself, and what ensues when a large amount of cultural capital is suddenly deposited in a place it has never been before.
Isabel Waidner is the author of Sterling Karat Gold, We Are Made of Diamond Stuff, and Gaudy Bauble. They are the winner of the Goldsmiths Prize and cofounded the event series Queers Read This. They live in London.
Corey Fah Does Social Mobility by Isabel Waidner
February 6, 2023
978-1-64445-269-1
Paperback $16
160 pages 5" x 8"
Brit.: Hamish Hamilton Trans. dram: The Wylie Agency 1st ser., audio: Graywolf Press
Bitter Water Opera
by Nicolette Polek
Publication date April 16, 2024 fiction
An electrifying debut novel about art, solitude, family, and faith in a world without it
In 1967, the dancer Marta Becket and her husband were traveling through Death Valley Junction when they came across an abandoned theater. Marta decided it was hers. She painted her ideal audience on its walls and danced her own dances until her death five decades later.
In the present day, Gia has ended a relationship and taken a leave from her job in film studies at a university. She is sleeping fifteen hours a night and ignoring calls from her mother. In a library archive, she comes across a photo of Marta Becket and decides to write her a letter. Soon Marta magically appears in her home.
Gia hopes Marta Becket will guide her out of her despair. But is Marta—the example of her single-minded, solitary life—enough? Through precise, vivid vignettes, Bitter Water Opera follows Gia as she resists the urge to escape into herself and struggles to form a lasting connection to the world. Her search has her reckoning with a set of terrifying charcoal drawings on her garage walls, a corpse in the middle of a pond, a crooked pear sapling, and other mysterious entities before bringing her to Marta’s theater, the Amargosa Opera House. There in the desert, Gia finds one answer.
In this brief, astonishing novel, Nicolette Polek describes an individual awakening to faith while exploring our deepest existential questions. How do we look beyond ourselves? Where do words go? What is art for?
Nicolette Polek is the author of Imaginary Museums (Soft Skull Press, 2020). She is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, and her work has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, BOMB, New York Tyrant, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Maryland, and a masters from Yale Divinity School. She is from Northeast Ohio.
Bitter Water Opera by Nicolette Polek
April 16, 2024
978-1-64445-283-7
Paperback $16
128 pages 5" x 7.5"
Brit., trans., 1st ser., dram.: Sanford J. Greenburger Associates Audio: Graywolf Press
Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit
by Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Publication date February 20, 2023 nonfiction
An electric essay collection about Blackness, art, and dreaming of new possibilities in a time of constriction
This collection of innovative, penetrating, and lively essays features swimming pools and poets, road trips and museums, family dinners and celebrity sightings. In a voice that is at once piercing, mournful, and slyly comic, Aisha Sabatini Sloan inhabits several roles: she is an art enthusiast in Los Angeles during a city-wide manhunt; a daughter on a road trip with her father; a professor playing with puppets in the wilds of Vermont; an interloper on a police ride-along in Detroit; a collector of the dreams of scientists at a biostation. As she watches cell phone video recordings of murder and is haunted in her sleep by the news, she reflects on her formative experiences with aesthetic and spiritual discovery, troubling those places where Blackness has been conflated with death.
Sloan’s lively style is perfectly suited to the way she circles a subject or an idea before cinching it tight. The curiosity that guides each essay, focusing on the period between the 2016 election and the onset of the pandemic, is rooted in the supposition that there is an intrinsic relationship between the way we conceptualize darkness and our collective opportunity for awakening.
Aisha Sabatini Sloan is the author of The Fluency of Light, Borealis, and Captioning the Archives. Her work has appeared in Guernica, the Paris Review, and the New York Times, among other places, and she teaches at the University of Michigan.
Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit: Essays by Aisha Sabatini Sloan
February 20, 2023
978-1-64445-251-6
Paperback $18
160 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit., trans., 1st ser., dram.: Janklow & Nesbit Associates Audio: Graywolf Press
Blue Mimes
by Sara Daniele Rivera
Publication date April 2, 2024 poetry
Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, selected by Eduardo C. Corral
Sara Daniele Rivera’s award-winning debut is a collection of sprawling elegy in the face of catastrophic grief, both personal and public. From the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election through the COVID-19 pandemic, these poems memorialize lost loved ones and meditate on the not-yet gone—all while the wider-world loses its sense of connection, safety, and assurance. In those years of mourning, The Blue Mimes is a book of grounding and heartening resolve, even and especially in the states of uncertainty that define the human condition.
Rivera’s poems travel between Albuquerque, Lima, and Havana, deserts and coastlines and cities, Spanish and English—between modes of language and culture that shape the contours of memory and expose the fault lines of the self. In those inevitable fractures, with honest, off-kilter precision, Rivera vividly renders the ways in which the bereft become approximations of themselves as a means of survival, mimicking the stilted actions of the people they once were. Where speech is not enough, this astonishing collection finds a radical practice in continued searching, endurance without promise—the rifts in communion and incomplete pictures that afford the possibility to heal.
My mom asked if a memorial poem
had to be sad. Adjective with tiny wings.
Maybe a memorial poem is the way
we document the sky to each other, saying, Look,
today the light breaks in five places and it is
so specific, so compositional, that it has to be
the person I lost the voice I lost the person
I lost speaking to me
in a new third tongue.
—From “Fields Anointed with Poppies”
Sara Daniele Rivera is a Cuban Peruvian American artist, writer, translator, and educator. Her writing has appeared in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Solstice, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Blue Mimes: Poems by Sara Daniele Rivera
April 2, 2024
978-1-64445-279-0
Hardcover $27
72 pages 7" x 9"
Brit., trans., audio, dram.: Graywolf Press 1st ser.: Author c/o Graywolf Press