Small Press Titles

We are unable to drop ship titles from many of our favorite small presses as we social distance.

You can browse below the list of Small Press Distribution (SPD) titles available for curbside pickup at Ampersand Books. Email ampersand@wab.org for details.
 
For new and forthcoming titles, you're encouraged to browse SPD's full catalog at their website, spdbooks.org, to support them directly. Quarantine measures have changed their circumstances and they are at risk of going out of business.

Poetry from SPD

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Ruined Traveler, by Renee Ashley. The dreamy mix of compressed prose poems, short poems, and long segmented poems stays grounded by a strict commitment to form. Ashley’s collection sheds light on a troubling shadow world for the reader to enter, find a place to stand, and enjoy the show. $12.95 paperback

Advantages of Being Evergreen, by Oliver Baez Bendorf. Poet and essayist Gabrielle Calvocoressi says, “Equal part prayer and potion and survival guide, Baez Bendorf’s book is making a future grammar for the moment all of our vessels are free and held. This is a book of the earth’s abiding wonder. And the body’s unbreakable ability to bloom.” $16 paperback

Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff, by Sara Borjas. A transgressive, yet surprisingly tender confrontation of what it means to want to flee the thing you need most. The speaker struggles through cultural assimilation and the pressure to “act” Mexican while dreaming of the privileges of whiteness. This collection simultaneously reveres and destroys nostalgia, slips out of the story after a party where the reader can find God “drunk and dreaming.” $15 paperback

The Wishbone Dress, by Cassandra Bruner. A debut book that navigates the slippery terrain of gender, faith, illness, law, and loss, serving both an invitation and a declaration that, when reimagined, “the body learns its shape.” $12 paperback

The Paper Camera, poems, art, photography by Youmna Chlala. Loss and longing are interspersed with vignettes of intimacy: family members make salad and go swimming; lovers observe each other with a languorous curiosity; childhood objects resurface. This multilingual, hybrid text explores how the boundaries of a city map themselves onto language and memory, while poetry proposes a new cartography. $18 paperback

Vac Spectra, by Suzanne Doppelt. We look in through the windows: 1655, Dordrecht: Samuel van Hoogstraten built a tiny house that now lives in the National Gallery in London; we look in through the windows, into an inverted architecture, knowing that there where sight exceeds the seer, the house itself begins. $16 paperback

I’m Alive. It Hurts. I Love It. by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza. A debut collection by the most prominent gay trans poet in America is now available for wide distribution. Brimming with darkness and hope, this book artfully balances how difficult being alive can be; the feeling of everything, all at once, crumbling, but also why we all keep doing it. $14 paperback

& more black, by t’ai freedom ford. Her second collection is direct, ingenious, vibrant, alive, queer, & BLACK. By turns tough and sexy, wrapped up in the evolving language and sonics of life, these poems take their cue from Wanda Coleman’s American Sonnets as they rhapsodize and dialogue with such artists as Carrie Mae Weems, Glenn Ligon, and Wangechi Mutu, along with many other musicians, artists, and writers. $18 paperback

Hijito, by Carlos Andres Gomez. Gomez writes of brutality and beauty with the same urgency, and with a truth that burns readily; it is a collection of survival instincts. Called “powerful, truthful, and sublime” by Cornel West. Winner of the 2018 Broken River Prize. $16 paperback

Invasive Species, by Marwa Helal, centers on urgent themes in our cultural landscape, creating space for unseen victims of discriminatory foreign (read: immigration) policy: migrants, refugees–the displaced. Helal transfers lived experiences of dislocation and relocation onto the reader by obscuring borders through language. $16.95 paperback

A Jazz Funeral For Uncle Tom, by Harmony Holiday, looks at the current state of the double and triple consciousness; Blackness in the West demands and situates its varied states and registers as chorus, as music, and call and response. It performs and reinvents a ritual, the Jazz Funeral, while offering a new perspective on letting go and rebirth cycles, a new path from bereavement to reprieve. $18 paperback

Mongrel Tongue, by Megin Jimenez.  A mongrel tongue is a language, like English, made up of words imposed by, borrowed, inherited, pilfered, and misheard from many different languages. A mongrel tongue is a language of the mixed-up descendants of the colonized, the crimson-lipped feminized, the weepy survivors of a fevered nostalgia, and hybrid beasts of the deep. We turn to a mongrel tongue when the stories we’ve been told have calcified into media narratives, advertising, and purebred political campaigns, and we wish to write another story, whose ending is yet unknown. $17 paperback

A Few Microseconds On Earth, by Perrin Langda. In this English debut, French poet Perrin Langda offers poems with equal parts surrealism and satire. Sex, global warming, video games, gentrification, and all the symptoms of late-stage capitalism are illuminated in Langda’s microcosmic poems, composed in ecstatic flashes. $16 paperback

Careen , by Grace Shuyi Liew. Any hunger for inclusion calls back to a long history of displacement. Then, “eventually, every color careens into its own lack,” and the carte blanche of whiteness that envelopes a racialized nation is deftly overturned. On a journey in search for a home, Careen is a love note plunging headlong into its objects of unattainable desire. $15 paperback

Piece of Cake, by Bernadette Mayer & Lewis Walsh. This collection recounts the quotidian details of daily activities, negotiating the exigencies of young, married-with-children life, the artistic path and citizenship. $24 paperback

All That Beauty, poems by Fred Morten. This path breaking new collection combines Moten’s penchant for lyrical prosody, radical thought, and African American theory to produce writing unlike any other poetry in the world: “What is it to reside without settling? Is that is or is that ain’t like being stuck in sweetness, held in life?” $20 paperback

The Last Innocence/The Lost Adventures, by Alejandra Pizarnak. These early poems blend the real and the imaginary, demonstrating the inner torment, deep solitude and acute vulnerability that would plague Pizarnik throughout her short life. This edition includes new English-language translations of both books, along with an introduction by poet, translator, and Pizarnik scholar Ana Becciu. $15 paperback

Where The Paths Do Not Go, by Rainer Maria Rilke. In this groundbreaking bilingual edition, award-winning translator Burton Pike captures the music, power, and unerring precision of some of Rilke’s best-known poems. These renderings offer bold new insights that redefine our understanding of one of modern literature’s most celebrated voices. $16 paperback

Beast Meridian, by Vanessa Angelica Villarreal. Narrated by a first-generation Mexican American girl, these poems track the experiences of institutional racism and sexism that disproportionately punishes brown girls in crisis. This collection challenges American notions of “healing” from trauma, and acknowledges sadness, mourning, and memory as necessary for forging a “way back” toward a broader healing of earth, time, body, history. $15 paperback

Fiction from SPD

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The Big Red Herring, a novel by Andrew Farkas. Wallace has just awakened, and there’s a dead body under his couch. It’s his girlfriend’s husband, “Senator” Kipper Maris. Meanwhile, a radio narrator, who’s been forced to adopt the name Edward R. Murrow, reads Wallace’s story. He hates it. He wants to change it. The problem: Murrow is not a writer, and the penalty for altering a manuscript is death. Luckily for Murrow, his boss, “Senator” Kipper Maris, was recently murdered. So maybe no one will notice. Or maybe there’s a reason for the rule. But you can’t find out what’s in Pandora’s box until it’s opened, right? $19.99 paperback

Irreversible Things, a novel by Lisa Van Orman Hadley, follows three decades in the life of author-qua-narrator Lisa and her charismatic Mormon family. From a young girl grappling with early friendships, first crushes, and a beloved neighbor’s shocking murder, to a young woman beginning her own family, dealing with infertility, and caring for a father with Alzheimer’s, this work expands our understanding of the novel form, weaving together memoir, fiction, and the fiction of remembering. $18 paperback

A Handbook For Beautiful People, a novel by Jennifer Spruit. Marla finds herself unexpectedly pregnant and facing an uncertain future with her boyfriend, Liam; constant danger from her drug-addicted roommate, Dani; and the needs of her younger brother, Gavin. Her courage transforms everyone around her, proving to those who had doubted her that having a fetal alcohol spectrum disorder does not make a person any less noble, wise, or caring. $22.95 paperback

The Hanky of Pippin’s Daughter, a novel by Rosemarie Waldrop. This haunting work, superbly intelligent, evocative and strange, reverberates in the memory for a long time, a song for the dead, a judgment. $16 paperback

Anthologies from SPD

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Obsidian’s Speculating Futures: Black Imagination and the Arts, a multigenre anthology edited by Duriel E. Harris and Sheree Renée Thomas. “When you choose to alter the history and ideology that has and continues to oppress you, you choose the path of a creator,” writes guest editor Sheree Renée Thomas in her introduction. “Under the powerful lens of Afrofuturism, the impossible is possible. It is creative alchemy.” This issue includes fiction, poetry, criticism, essays, scripts, visual art and more from African writers and artists around the world, including Sofia Samatar, Tochi Onyebuchi, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Walidah Imarisha, Nisi Shawl, Isiah Lavender III, Krista Franklin, and Sheree Renée Thomas, among many others. $24.99 paperback

Graffiti, multigenre anthology edited by Palavi Dhawan, Devi S. Laskar, and Tamika Thompson. This anthology was born of a special challenge: to write in a way that centers neither “whiteness” nor “anti-whiteness” and that is not limited by their struggle, their oppression, or how their characters will be received by the white imagination. The results are joyous and mind-expanding. $16.95 paperback

Small Press Distribution (SPD) forges a pathway to the book marketplace for independently published literary voices often excluded from and underrepresented in the culture at large. Reaching underserved readers with writing from a broad coalition of authors contributes to the vibrancy of our communities, and helps literature to prosper as an evolving and vital artform. Through book distribution, events, and public advocacy, SPD provides small presses and their authors with the reliable and professional network they need.