Wichita, the first novel from Thad Ziolkowski, Director of the Writing Program at Pratt Institute, is a postmodern take on the false binary of the country and the city.

Kingdom Animalia, the second book of poetry by Aracelis Girmay, begins where Teeth (Curbstone Books, 2007) left off. Its gentle movements between all scales of devastation and absorbing, tenable visions of hope as a relation—linguistic, bodily, historical—also, perhaps improbably, takes Darwin’s Origin of Species as a point of departure.

Andrew Mueller’s hopscotch travelogue, I Wouldn’t Start From Here: The 21st Century and Where It All Went Wrong, is driven by an attempt to discover why the world’s most discordant nations won’t stop being such hotheads. A London-based, Australian-born rock critic and travel writer, he moves from serious to witty to occasionally hilarious.