From Transit Books | Motherhood and Its Ghosts by Iman Mersal, translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger | Nonfiction | 158 pages | ISBN 9798893380170 | US$17.95

What the publisher says: “Sifting through the archives of motherhood, including journal entries, photographs, and the writings that have informed her own poetic practice, Mersal privileges questions over answers, drifting over arriving, allowing a form of motherhood to exist in these pages unbounded.”

What Clancey D’Isa at Chicago Review of Books says: “By embracing rather than resolving these disruptions, Motherhood and Its Ghosts offers a vision of motherhood that emerges both with and against familiar archetypes of motherhood, suggesting an altogether different dissonance between represented motherhood—in photographs, literature, and cultural memory—and the lived experience of maternal ambivalence, love, and loss.”

What I say: “The modern woman is denied the gift of calm, besieged as she is by knowledge of what will happen to her pregnant body day by day,” Iman Mersal writes early on in this book. The juxtaposition of her own mother’s death in childbirth with Mersal’s experiences as a mother would be powerful enough on its own, but Mersal adds a lot of resonant literary analysis into the mix, including insightful explorations of the works of J. M. Coetzee, Adrienne Rich, Susan Sontag, and Roland Barthes.

From Parthian Books | This Room Is Impossible to Eat by Nicol Hochholczerová, translated from the Slovak by Julia and Peter Sherwood | Fiction | 154 pages | ISBN 9781917140416 | US$28.00

What the publisher says: “In this minimalist, poetic novella with autobiographical elements, Nicol Hochholczerová weaves a story of obsession and power and how both can lead to damage and separation. Rich with symbolism, its explosive themes—of eating disorders, abusive control, and family dysfunction—are delicately handled with honesty and intelligence.”

What Gosia Buzzanca at Buzz says: “By definition a weighty read, being a book about child sexual abuse, This Room [Is Impossible to Eat]  is however written so skillfully it’s impossible to pause reading it. The effect is an overwhelming, creeping disgust and confusion—and then a sadness that remains for long after it ends.”

What I say: There’s an unsettling tension that runs throughout This Room Is Impossible to Eat that goes beyond its unsettling subject matter. Some of that comes from the use of language here, where familiar phrases take on sinister new contexts: “I woke up in the morning and cut off my room but couldn’t eat it up,” for instance. This book left me both devastated and eager to read more from Julia and Peter Sherwood on how they translated it into English.

From Ugly Duckling Presse | Phantom Limbs by Lee Min-ha, translated from the Korean by Jein Han | Poetry | 224 pages | ISBN 9781946604354 | US$20.00

What the publisher says: “First published in Korean in 2005, Phantom Limbs is Lee Min-ha’s debut book of poetry. Critically lauded for its visceral imagery and world-building through wordplay, this collection of surreal and fabulistic poems reminds readers that poems are spells and incantations.”

What Rebecca Morgan Frank at Literary Hub says: “Imaginative, quick in wit and pace: these are poems that will slow you down. This left me looking forward to more Lee Min-ha collections in translation and more Jein Han translations.”

What I say: Sometimes elliptical and sometimes direct, the work in Phantom Limbs includes both starker verse and sections that approach prose poetry. There’s a lot here that reckons with the experience of living in a body, as this collection’s title suggests—and it’s hard to resist lines like this one from “Nocturnal”: “A horn has sprouted on my chest. The horn has spread like a plague.”

From Black Square Editions | Speaking Skin by Sabine Huynh, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell | Poetry | 60 pages | ISBN 9798986037028 | US$20.00

What the publisher says: “The dense texts in Speaking Skin—small squares, like beds, or jewel caskets—explore the intimacy of language: the book begins with the narrator having lost her voice, her language, as well as her connection to her own body . . .”

What I say: This is a slim book composed of relatively short works, but there’s no shortage of phrases and images that stand out. Consider “there are doors under the skin which our caresses push” or “our two rogue waves capsize the cargo of boredom.” It’s a subtly powerful book that abounds with personality and deft uses of language.

From Balestier Press | Diablo’s Boys by Yang Hao, translated from the Chinese by Michael Day and Nicky Harman | Fiction | 244 pages | ISBN 9781913891527 | US$16.99

What the publisher says: “Suwei is a teenage hermit with an overprotective mother and an addiction to video games. One day, another young man penetrates Suwei’s hermetically sealed existence, and the two wander deep into the labyrinth of Diablo’s virtual world.”

What Emily Jones at Paper Republic says: “This is a linguistically innovative, thematically rich work on the bleeding edge of contemporary concerns such as gaming culture, youth culture, and rapidly transforming family relations.”

What I say: Some coming-of-age novels follow a familiar pattern. Diablo’s Boys is not one of those novels; in between ruminations on aging, an unsettling cartography of parental hopes and youthful rebellion, and an acute awareness of class differences, it also throws philosophical reflections on video games and some dizzying twists into the mix. A haunting character study with a lot to say about thwarted ambitions and failed connections.

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