Recommended because it is a unique perspective on pregnancy and motherhood that expands typical ideas of bodies and responsibility.

CHP authors in the 1990s became like a “who’s who” of contemporary writing for me. I love Red Beans, and it remains one of my favorite CHP poetry collections to this day. It’s his poems in this volume that hit me the hardest, particularly his versions of Basho in Spanish which I teach regularly. There’s a thousand lessons to be learned in that single poem. If you haven’t read Red Beans before, you should definitely grab yourself a copy and read it now.

K-Ming Chang excels at portraying the heartbreak and surreal nature of queer longing. Her prose is so hypnotic that I was fully sucked into the narrator’s obsessiveness with Cecilia.

A field guide to your future funeral. It takes a village to raise a child, and become a person, and say goodbye.

I have loved this poet and these poems for three decades! I published a few of Allison’s early poems that would appear in this book in XCP, and we quickly became lifelong friends. I adore all her books with Coffee House Press, including Look At This Blue (a finalist for the National Book Award!), and this book was the foundation of that ardor of Allison’s work for me.

A small, visually unique novel for the autofiction era. A young narrator tries to make sense of her relationships—to people in her life and people who are missing - using logic diagrams, charts, and tree rings. This book highlights unexpected possibilities of the form, as well as being a pleasure to read.

Hieu’s poems about family, desire, and loneliness are essential reading in Vietnamese-American literature. I read them to remind me of why I write.