Coffee House Press: 122 books

A legendary work of literary wizardry in which the author reckons with Christopher Columbus, America, myth, and his great-grandfather Herman Melville.   First published in 1965, Genoa is Paul Metcalf’s literary masterpiece in which he attempts to purge the burden of his relationship to his great-grandfather...

Praise for Raymond McDaniel: "Raymond McDaniel's language trains every particle of your attention on the surface and what stirs beneath." -C.D. Wright From "Projection Box": Light is not light. Light is only one way things radiate, so light is an object falling...

“Powerful” essays exploring the experience of the writer—and the nature of experience itself (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). Shortlisted for the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Award in Nonfiction Jenny Boully’s essays are ripe with romance and sensual pleasures, drawing connections...

Following Pulitzer Prize finalist Ron Padgett's 2013's Collected Poems (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the William Carlos Williams Prize) Alone and Not Alone offers new poems that see the world in a clear and generous light. From "The World of Us": Don't go...

“The veteran Port Townsend author explores love, violence, dreams, fairy tales and other things in her collection of essays.” ―The Seattle Times Within the writer’s life, words and things acquire power. For Borges it is the tiger and the color red, for Cortázar a pair of amorous lions,...

The seventh novella in the National Book Award Finalist I Hotel, following San Francisco’s Asian-American community through the civil rights era.   Centered around the International Hotel, a historic low-income residence in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the ten novellas of Karen Tei Yamashita’s...

“Dark, surreal, and imaginative, Lincoln Michel’s short story collection Upright Beasts is full of surprises at every turn.” —BuzzFeed Children go to school long after all the teachers have disappeared, a man manages an apartment complex of attempted suicides, and a couple navigates...

Selected Poems charts Mark Ford's growing complexity as a writer and his mastery and use of form. John Ashbery calls Ford's work "refreshing" and it's that exuberance and goodwill that animates the poems, giving them their spontaneity and leavening the grim with comic élan and joy. Myth, history,...

Split This Rock Recommended Poetry Books of 2014Praise for Allison Adelle Hedge Coke:"These are the songs of righteous anger and utter beauty."-Joy HarjoFrom "Carcass":Split skin stretched over marrowless cage,encased dry tomb, like those strewnthrough this loess reach, cradling pastever...

From "Art History":Someone comes alonggives that tedious old thinga new twist orbreaks its neckthe old questionsdon't change:what do you want me to say?what do you want me to do?Anselm Hollo (1934–2013) authored more than forty books and was an award-winning translator. Born in Helsinki,...

Praise for Lightsey Darst: "This is a vital poetry of the Deep South ripe with bones, blood and bogs, Snow Whites, Gretels and debutantes all stirred into a harrowing stew of lust, dusk and summer." -New York Times "A terrific collection. . . . Full of horror, bleak humor,...

“A****work of epic vision” reflecting our fraught contemporary moment of racial and gendered hatred, mass migration, global war, and terror (New York Journal of Books).   Waldman appropriates the idea of William Blake’s unborn spirit of Thel to explore artists’ and activists’ roles during...

“This book, about ballet and beauty, philosophy and family, reinforces Amy Fusselman’s status as one of our best interrogators of how we live now.” —Dave Eggers   Leaping from ballet to quilt making, from The Nutcracker to an Annie-B Parson interview, Idiophone is a strikingly original...

“David Foster Wallace meets Gabriel Garcia Marquez” in this novel set in a dystopian Los Angeles from a National Book Award finalist (Publishers Weekly). Irreverently juggling magical realism, film noir, hip hop, and chicanismo, Tropic of Orange takes place in a Los Angeles where the homeless,...