Position: Poetry Reader
Issues 11 & 12
About the Contributor
Danielle McMahon is the author of four poetry chapbooks and two micro-chaps. Most recently, her micro-chap rowhouse song is part of the 2025 Ghost City Press Summer Series. Her chapbook irl is forthcoming from Stanchion Books in 2026. She is the Editor of the engine(idling.
Author Website
Books
irl (Stanchion Books, 2026)
irl is a chapbook cast in amber, a series of poems with a nostalgic bent, framed by clips of AOL Instant Messenger conversations. It is a love story and it is also not. It’s about kinship, communication, coming of age, and finding the right person at the right time. The poems of irl are tender without ever being sentimental and capture the agony and ecstasy of being seen as a young person.
Available March 24, 2026
rowhouse song (Ghost City Press, 2025)
This collection is part of the 2025 Ghost City Press Summer Micro-Chapbook Series.
Cold rain in Pittsburgh (Bottlecap Press, 2024)
Pittsburgh is a unique city—an in-between space bridging the Northeast and Midwest of the United States. It is at once a small town and big city. For many onto larger things, Pittsburgh is a blip on the map, a through-town, and yet to those who stay, those whose people have always stayed, their stories are woven into its streets like marrow.
Cold rain in Pittsburgh is a collection of poems exploring the deep connection between one’s home and one’s self. Rooted in themes of identity and family, these poems chart the author’s experience of transience, belonging, and loss. A hometown becomes a testimony, a haven, a snare, and beacon. The story of the self is threaded through this unique regional lens.
The TV Guide (Alien Buddha Press, 2024)
The TV Guide by Danielle McMahon is a channel-surfing odyssey through memory, culture, and the static hum of existence. Following up on her debut collection, The Oracle’s Voicemail (Alien Buddha Press, 2024), McMahon returns with a second offering that deepens her exploration of the surreal and the intimate, flickering between the two with the hypnotic allure of late-night television.
This book remixes the ordinary… hospital rooms, CRT screens, health class skits… into kaleidoscopic meditations on loss, longing, and the absurdity of it all. Her words pulse with the glow of nostalgia and existential ache, weaving through the tender and the jagged with precision. Between the poems, vibrant digital art collages punctuate the experience, their bold textures and colors crackling like signals from a forgotten broadcast, amplifying McMahon’s distinctive voice.
Whether tuning into the whispered confessions of the past or the frenetic noise of the present, The TV Guide is a collection that refuses to sit still. It dares readers to sit close, adjust the rabbit ears, and confront what plays out on the screen of memory.
The Oracle’s Voicemail (Alien Buddha Press, 2024)
In The Oracle’s Voicemail, Danielle McMahon crafts a world where the ordinary cracks open to reveal something more surreal. Here, the mundane is a smokescreen that barely conceals the creeping absurdities beneath. These poems pulse with a low hum, capturing moments when reality buckles under its own weight.
With a voice that’s both detached and intimate, McMahon drags you through the stranded in landscapes that are at once recognizable and disturbingly unfamiliar.
The Oracle’s Voicemail is a collection that dares you to confront the void beneath the surface, and by the end, you’re left wondering if you’ve seen too much—or not nearly enough.
insecure lovesong (Maverick Duck Press, 2024)
Danielle McMahon is a mom of two and occasional poet. Her debut chapbook Cold rain in Pittsburgh is available from Bottlecap Press and her chapbook The Oracle’s Voicemail is forthcoming from Alien Buddha Press. Her poems can be found in various literary journals. She is editor of the engine(idling, an online litmag. She lives in Pennsylvania with her family.
Recent Links
- Hybrid: “Middle Age” (Glint Journal)
- Poem: “the melancholy of nuns, widows, & more ancient maids: a frankenpoem” (Genrepunk Magazine)
- Poem: “Classic Rock Radio” (Moss Puppy Magazine, Page 145)
Contents
“Managing [my husband’s] pain became fraught in the last week of his life when he could no longer swallow the medications that had kept him comfortable…The poem explores the vulnerability and intimacy found in such a crisis.” Read five poems by Amy Riddell, our first biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Reading the Body.”
Chapbook Poem: Aphasia by Robert Allen
“Ultimately this is a poem of love and recognition, of finding the right words for the right listener, to the one who listens and understands.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for January 2026, “Aphasia,” along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: The Egg of Anything by Paula Bohince
“The poem is filled with moments of ‘O’ sounds and ‘Ah’ sounds, mimicking the O of the egg and the Ah of the open jaw. I like that the poem is compact in its little form, also a bit egg-like.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for January 2026, “The Egg of Anything” from A Violence by Paula Bohince, along with a few words from the poet.
Three Poems by Abraham Aondoana
“Instead of providing any solution to the issue, the poem is ready to be open to the ambiguity that can enable doubt, tenderness, and resilience to co-exist. By so doing, it points to survival not as victory, but as endurance…” Read three poems by Abraham Aondoana, our second biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Surviving a Country That is Also a Question.”
Five Poems by Colleen S. Harris
“I am always struck by the juxtaposition of the biology and science of illness versus the life of the person living with it, and how those two spheres constantly interrupt and flow into each other.” Read five poems by Colleen S. Harris, our third biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Inflammation As Girl.”
Chapbook Poem: Offering by Richard Jordan
“In my mind, the narrator recognizes that Harper’s fate could very well have been his own, and I hope that readers can relate, in the sense that we all have done reckless things, especially in our youth…” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for February 2026, “Offering,” along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Passage by Paul Hostovsky
“When she’d call me on the weekends, I was high half the time, impatient with her, and unforthcoming. It’s one of my greatest regrets. The tears well up just thinking about it. I didn’t grieve her properly. I’m grieving her now.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for February 2026, “Passage” from Perfect Disappearances by Paul Hostovsky, along with a few words from the poet.
“The poem captures us both there in the dreaded check up appointment: me clenching crinkling paper, scared of what the lab reports say; him…lab reports in hand like some mysterious document…” Read three poems by Mary Whitlow, our fourth biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Examined.”
February ’26: Section Editors & Staff Wanted
Editor Aiden Hunt begins year three with a call for applications for section editors and other editorial and production staff in this editor’s note.
“I am most comfortable in a chair with a pen looking at nature through a window. And yet nature is something my mind is also totally immersed in…So I think it’s a bit of a paradox.” Poet Lisa Low discusses her latest chapbook in this interview with Contributor Saudamini Siegrist.
“My work has always found a focus in the bodies of women, and watching the mix of strength and fragility in women as they face illness and pain has been a topic that I keep coming back to.” Read four poems by Betty Stanton, our fifth biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Vein Song.”
Chapbook Poem: Found in the African Art Collection… by Rohanna Ssanyu
“It is laborious to hold on to a culture removed, one for which I am a perpetual novice. I do, however, try, and I bring my children with me. … Can this space, this culture, only be ours if cut up and reimagined?” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for March 2026, “Found in the African Art Collection of a New Haven Gallery After the Guard Asks Whether My Son Knows the Rules,” along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Targeted by Frances Klein
“The poem focuses specifically on the way that online algorithms ‘read’ a person’s internet history related to pregnancy or trying to conceive, then deliver the most painful possible ads…” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for March 2026, “Targeted” from Another Life by Frances Klein, along with a few words from the poet.