Publishing the book just two weeks after his ninetieth birthday, Schrader–a lifelong New Yorker– offers a vivid memoir in vignettes that captures both the arc of his own life and the portrait of a shifting 20th century New York.  Schrader’s autobiographical sketches reveal a writer processing the evolution and moments of resonance in his life, and the changing of a city and world around him.

Rich with autobiographical sketches that will recall those of Annie Dillard in An American Childhood and Tobias Wolff in This Boy’s Life, Schrader traces his journey from a daydreaming child of the 1930s Upper West Side to the anxieties and desires of a postwar adolescence, to the tensions of a creative impulse and a drive to prove himself to his father and brother amid the family clothing business. Schrader crafts an intimate portrait of his tangled relationship with the creative impulse, the making of money, and his family.

The stories Schrader unearths—told with hilarity, tenderness, and an incredible eye for detail—surprise and delight. Readers are treated to memories ranging from the surprising (watching his teenage brother spar with the son of gangster Meyer Lansky at the boxing gym–and then pulling on his legs to help him get tall enough to be admitted to West Point), to the unfortunate (he describes the lifelong regret of having left a 1961 Greenwich Village folk show just before a young Bob Dylan took the stage), to the tender and the heartbreaking.  “Even now my neck turns red at the memory,” he says of an elementary school incident in which he fails to stand up for a bullied classmate.

Girlfriend is a collection of poetic prose, stories about the girls and women who were important in Henning’s life, beginning in childhood through her older years, including mentors, characters and authors whose writing was important to her. The collection of stories is a celebration of her friendships with women. One by one, the story emerges of a working-class girl who loses her mother as an adolescent, becomes a mother herself, as well as a poet, a novelist and a professor. In Henning’s friendship world ––the bohemian communities in Detroit and New York City— one meets artists, poets, fiction writers, literary critics, activists, mothers, yoga practitioners and teachers, among many others.

After the frightening results of the 2016 election, Paula Cisewski adopted a new writing practice and coping mechanism. She would invite a friend over for tea and a tarot reading. Later she would share with them the first draft of a poem inspired by the cards, the conversation, and whatever of the world had leaked in. The practice made space for meaningful communication in an uncertain time.

Portable City is primarily a travelogue composed of introspections on movement through both the physical world and nonlinear timelines. Introducing the concrete and the abstract to one another, it is an endeavor of braided language, some edges sharp and others softened. In its meditations, the collection builds dialogue between image and narrative, between the tangible and the intangible, and between the world at large and its most attentive observers.

Well You Needn’t, Joel Lewis’s seventh volume of poetry, gathers his poems about the music that has occupied him since his teenage years. The prose memoir “My Life as a Jazz Fan” weaves its way through the book as the background story to his particular obsession.

Indran Amirthanayagam’s Seer is a multi-lingual, multi- coastal, multi-dimensional poetic record of a time in our collective history when our potential human demise loomed large and when the only way to save ourselves seemed to be separation and isolation. In this new collection, Amirthanayagam documents—with his evocative imagery and generous lyricism—our fears, hopes and dreams during a dark time.

It Is As If Desire is a collection of occasional poems (poems written for specific occasions) that examine, deconstruct, disrupt, and celebrate love and friendship. The language of these 10-line poems (which one critic has called “foreshortened sonnets”) is taut, while their spirit is open and loose. As the title suggests, these poems see love and desire as often conditional, fragmentary states. In this dialectic between life and love, it is up to the poems themselves to provide the ultimate synthesis.

Award-winning poet, novelist and translator Pablo Medina’s new collection Sea of Broken Mirrors is a book of questions and incantations. Full of lush sonics and surreal yet contemporary imagery, the book offers Medina’s take on biblical canticles. His work is grounded in descriptions of Vermont’s nature —still beautiful despite the ravages of global warming—as well as memories of his youth and family. Born in Cuba and raised there until the age of twelve, Medina infuses his work with Cuban culture. For him, cultural identity is not a static reality, but a vessel riding the sea into the unknown.  The poems explore how the diminishment of self (indeed, its ultimate disappearance) can be a way of engaging with the world, the ultimate essence of which is found in the language of poetry.

Robert Hershon was one of four co-founders of Hanging Loose in 1966; he remained active with the press until his death in 2021. A widely published poet himself and a native Brooklynite, he was part of New York City’s poetry scene for more than a half-century.

He also maintained a close connection with the New York art world, counting many painters among his friends. He brought his passion for the visual arts to Hanging Loose magazine—or perhaps he brought the magazine to the visual arts. Each issue presents a portfolio of paintings and cover art by one artist.

Elizabeth Hershon, Robert’s daughter, is a painter, ceramicist, poet, teacher, and the art editor of Hanging Loose. She lives in the East Village, but grew up in Brooklyn. Robert approached her in 2020 with the idea of doing a book together: her paintings and his poems. The result is Unveiling.

Sundry Abductions by Maria Dylan Himmelman is winner of the inaugural Hanging Loose Press Founders Award. This annual award for a first book of poems honors the memory of three Hanging Loose founders: Ron Schreiber, Emmett Jarrett, and Robert Hershon.