The debut chapbook by Brooklyn poet Gerald Wagoner explores the early pandemic lockdown in a poem for every day of April 2020.
Claim your copy on our Kickstarter.

During the month of April 2020, Gerald Wagoner took long nighttime walks around his Gowanus Canal community in Brooklyn, notebook in hand, as he jotted down his observations of people, places, and things in the eerie quiet of that first pandemic spring.  “The only other people out were the occasional dog walkers,” Gerald told me. “The silence was palpable.” Gerald’s notes were highly sensory and observational. Each entry had a date, a time, and reference to the weather. The result is A Month of Someday, a collection made up of a poem for every day from April 1 to May 1, 2020.

Gerald Wagoner is the quintessential Indolent Books author. I started Indolent Books in 2015 as a home for poets over 50 without a first book. Indolent also publishes non-first books, and books by poets under 50. But the founding mission was, and remains, around poets over 50 without a first book. 

What makes someone the quintessential Indolent author? Our poets over 50 without a first book tend to be people who have always been poets at heart, and were even poets in fact, but did not publish a book in their (relative) youth because life intervened in one way or another. In Gerald’s case, he loved language, literature, and poetry, and he also loved the visual arts. Gerald earned a BA in creative writing at the University of Montana, and followed that up with an MFA in sculpture from SUNY Albany.

In 1982, Gerald moved to Brooklyn, where he exhibited widely and soon became a teaching artist with Studio in a School, a visual arts organization that sends working artists into the New York City public schools. In 1988, Gerald went to work for the NYC Board of Ed, teaching high school English until he retired in 2017. That’s when he started writing poetry again. 

As is clear to anyone who looks at one of his massive plate steel sculptures, Gerald is not one to shy aways from a challenge. In a few short years, he honed his poetic craft, and started racking up journal publications. In 2018, as part of a residency from the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club, Gerald partnered with longtime friend and fellow artist, Robert Gould, on an installation called On the Tides of Time, pairing Gould’s large-scale paintings with Gerald’s poems about the life, death, and rebirth of the Superfund-sited Gowanus Canal. 

Gerald Wagoner is, you might say, an emerging poet with a vengeance. His incubation has been long, but he has now burst forth from his poetic chrysalis with deftness and elan. A Month of Someday will not be Gerald’s last poetry collection—not by a long shot! But you have the opportunity to make it his first, and to bring it into the world with the power and gusto it so richly deserves. 

Praise for A Month of Someday

Because A MONTH OF SOMEDAY doesn’t waste a word, I’m tempted to quote lavishly from these wry, economical, limpidly attentive urban observations recorded during the most frightening month early in the pandemic. But I won’t. Every poem here merits quoting—and rereading. Gerald Wagoner’s eye misses nothing; his quiet voice is a chorus of one that reaches beyond self to his city. This is a book that remembers, and also a book to remember. Read it.

—Rachel Hadas

Strolling daily through altered and stunned Brooklyn neighborhoods in A MONTH OF SOMEDAY, Gerald Wagoner is our perceptive weatherman and curious guide to the monstrous first April of New York City’s pandemic, where “Mary Shelley, anime monster in her pocket, gathers fresh flowers to toss down a well.” Wagoner maps the missing city and its transformed condition that includes us, in reverent lyrics and vivid micro narratives, with a keen and attentive negative capability.

—Amy Holman

Joseph Osmundson’s Capsid: A Love Song was announced today as a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography. You can learn more about Joseph Osmundson’s  Capsid: A Love Song and purchase your copy here. This is Indolent’s first appearance on the Lammy finalist list and comes in our first year submitting titles from our inaugural spring 2016 list.

The finalists of the 29th Annual Lambda Literary Awards—the “Lammys,” as they are affectionately known—were announced this morning in a press release by Lambda Literary, the nation’s oldest and largest literary arts organization advancing LGBTQ literature.

The finalists were chosen from nearly 900 submissions and over 300 publishers. The winners will be announced at a gala ceremony on Monday evening, June 12, 2017 in New York City.

75 literary professionals, including booksellers, book reviewers, librarians, authors, academics and previous Lammy winners and finalists volunteered countless hours of reading, critical thinking, and invigorating discussion to select the finalists in 23 categories.

“Never in my lifetime have LGBTQ stories felt so important as a means of being recognized and counted, as a form of resistance to this dangerous political climate we find ourselves in,” said Lambda Literary Executive Director Tony Valenzuela. “The Lammys are a celebration of great queer literature, and this year they’re also a reminder that our community of writers, publishers, and readers is not only strong, but part of a vital pathway to asserting our humanity.”

The awards ceremony on June 12, 2017, will be held at the NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts (566 LaGuardia Pl, New York, NY 10012). For more information and to buy tickets, please visit Lambda’s website.

If you want to support the mission and work of Indolent Books, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

These Women You Gave Me, by Antoinette Brim

Coming in 2017 from Indolent Books

Antoinette Brim’s These Women You Gave Me brings front and center Biblical mythology and legend to prove a truth that can only be proven through poetry. Brim’s poems sing of the ability women have always had to love and thrive in spite of the most oppressive odds, or as Brim herself would say, “His heavy breath filled her ears. She awakened beneath.” This is really gorgeous work.

—Jericho Brown

In These Women You Gave Me, Antoinette Brim weaves her persona poems of Lilith, Eden and Eve into a collection that is intimate and powerful. Her sensual, precise poems take root and resonate with the feminine in each of us. “Amidst the waters of the firmament:/ male and female float; as only indigo shadows/stitched to the depths with light can do….”Antoinette Brim’s poetry is evocative, risky and true.

—Suzanne Frischkorn

In These Women You Gave Me, Antoinette Brim employs a meticulous, lyric sensibility to remind readers of the first women of the Bible and the roles women in the Judeo-Christian tradition have occupied since. This is a bold symphony to Lilith, the first woman, who “has read the Book and found her name erased.” Eve, the second wife, submits; Lilith owns her name, her reflection, her body, and soul. Brim counters the erasure with a brilliant light and language that empowers all women, that gives cause for each reader to consider that the story is often not fully told.

—Georgia Popoff

Indolent Books is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of These Woman You Gave Me, a chap-length collection of poems by Antoinette Brim. Speaking in the voices of Lilith and Eve in dialogue with Adam, with God, and with each other, these poems are also in dialogue with the Torah, the Talmud, the Prophets, and The Alphabet of Ben Sira, as well as a range of social, historical, and cultural intertexts.

Antoinette Brim is the author of the poetry collections Icarus in Love (Main Street Rag, 2013) and Psalm of the Sunflower (Willow Books, 2009). She is a Cave Canem Foundation fellow, a recipient of the Walker Foundation Scholarship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies. A printmaker, Brim recently exhibited both poetry and monoprints in Jazz: An exhibition of Poetry, Prints and Photography at the Sumner McKnight Crosby Jr. Gallery in New Haven. Learn more about Antoinette at antoinettebrim.com.

We look forward to giving you sneak peaks at These Woman You Gave Me in the coming months and making the book available for pre-order in early 2017 here on indolentbooks.com as well as at AWP in Washington, DC, February 8–11, 2017.

We are thrilled to share Indolent author Robert Carr’s latest journal publication, “Sleeping Apart,” on The Good Men Project. Robert is the author of the 2016 Indolent Books title Amaranth, available for purchase in our online bookstore.

We have added a new bookstore to the Indolent Books website.

Come check it out!

The new bookstore lets you browse titles and add books to your shopping cart, so you can purchase multiple titles in one order. When you’re done shopping, you can review your shopping cart and check out. It’s that simple!

Here you can find our new titles by Lisa Andrews, Michael Broder, Robert Carr, Joseph Osmundson, and Sarah Sarai.

Shopping for books is so much fun. You love it. You know you want to. Don’t resist. Give in to those consumerist urges. Visit our new bookstore now.