We here at Philly Poetry Chapbook Review love poetry, whether it’s in chapbooks or full-length collections. We have a hunch that our readers do, too. Every Tuesday, we publish an update about what full-length poetry titles we know are releasing in the following week.
Information, including product descriptions, is provided by the publisher and not a critical judgment. If we cover the book on this site, links will be included.
In Your Nature, Estlin McPhee
Publisher: Brick Books
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
“I delete my history / badly,” writes Estlin McPhee in this searing, witty, lyrical, and elegiac debut collection of poems about intersections of trans identity, magic, myth, family, and religion. The line refers at once to a young person’s browser data that reveals an interest in gender transition; an adult’s efforts to reconcile complicated relationships; a culture’s campaign to erase queerness and transness from the historical record; and a religion’s attempt to pretend that its own particular brand of miraculous transformation is distinct from the kind found in folktales or real life. Populated by transmasculine werewolves, homoerotic Jesuses, adolescent epiphanies, dutiful sisters, boy bands, witches, mothers who speak in tongues, and nonnas who cross the sea, this is a book in which relational and narrative continuity exists, paradoxically, as a series of ruptures with the known.
Estlin McPhee is a writer and librarian who lives on the traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. They hold an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and are the author of the poetry chapbook Shapeshifters (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2018). Estlin’s writing has appeared in journals across North America; their poem “Lupo Mannaro” was named the Poetry Gold Winner in Alberta’s 2020 Magazine Awards. For many years, they co-organized REVERB, a queer reading series in Vancouver. In Your Nature is Estlin’s debut poetry collection.
Familial Hungers, Christine Wu
Publisher: Brick Books
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Bittersweet, numbingly spicy, herbal and milky, Familial Hungers is a lyric feast. Ginger scallion fish, Sichuan peppercorns, ginseng tea, Chinese school and white chefs – the reader’s appetite is satiated with these poems’ complex palate. There are the bubbling expectations for immigrant daughters, the chewy strands of colonial critique, and dissolving crystals of language loss. Wu relentlessly searches the grocery shelves for the hard-to-digest ingredients of identity and belonging, offering us her nourishing honesty and courage pulled from the marrow.
Christine Wu is a Chinese-Canadian poet who was born and raised on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh (Vancouver, BC). She has a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria, a MLIS from Dalhousie University, and a MA in English from the University of New Brunswick. In 2023, she was the winner of the RBC PEN Canada New Voices Award and in 2022, she was shortlisted for the RBC Writers’ Trust Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. She now lives and writes in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, NS) in Mi’kma’ki.
Shadow Price, Farah Ghafoor
Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Borrowing its title from a finance term—“the estimated price of a good or service for which no market price exists”—Shadow Price is a stunning debut that examines the idea of value in a world that burns under our capitalist lens.
What gives life value? How do we serve existing societal structures that determine its cost? Employing both surreal and documentary imagery, Farah Ghafoor’s arresting collection articulates how narrative is used to revise the past and manipulate the future, ultimately forming our present-day climate crisis. Interrogating personal complicity, generational implications, and the shock of our collective disregard for a world that sustains every living thing, Shadow Price captures the complexities of living and writing as a young poet born in the year that “climate change denial” first appeared in print. Mourning the loss of Earth’s biodiversity, from insects to mammoths to trees, these introspective poems invite us to consider the risks and rewards of loving what may vanish in our lifetime.
Shadow Price charges readers to contemplate their power and purpose in the world today, recognizing that there is hope even in the belly of the beast.
Farah Ghafoor is an award-winning poet living on the traditional territory of the Anishnabeg, the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. Her work was awarded the E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize in Poetry, longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, is taught in university courses, and published in The Walrus, the Fiddlehead, Room, and elsewhere. Raised in New Brunswick and southern Ontario, Ghafoor now works in Tkaronto (Toronto) as a financial analyst.
Time Will Tell: Collected Poems, David Middleton
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
From the sandy pine hills and river bluffs of North Louisiana to the cypress swamps and reedy marshes of South Louisiana—from the Ozarks to the Gulf—David Middleton celebrates, in evocative descriptions and compelling stories, the flora and fauna, the history and prehistory, the geography and the people, of his native state. But like Robert Frost’s New England or Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, Middleton’s Louisiana becomes the locale of readily sharable universal human experiences: love, death, war, religion, art, family, and friends.
Taken as a whole, the poems in this volume confirm Middleton as the preeminent inheritor among living poets of the Southern Agrarian Literary Tradition.
In addition to the full poems of Middleton’s previously published works, Time Will Tell includes 50 years of selected, new, uncollected, and previously unpublished poems, written 1973-2023.
David Middleton is Poet in Residence Emeritus at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana. Middleton’s books of verse include The Burning Fields (1991), Beyond the Chandeleurs (1999), The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy: Poems After Pictures by Jean-François Millet (2005), The Fiddler of Driskill Hill (2013); and Outside the Gates of Eden (2023). Middleton’s poems have appeared in The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, and elsewhere. Middleton won The Allen Tate Poetry Prize at The Sewanee Review in 2005. Middleton has served as poetry editor for three national quarterlies and is the literary executor for Alabama poet John Martin Finlay.
Second Nature, Chaun Ballard
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Riddled with the ghostly voices of family and friends, Second Nature is fearless in its wrestling with America’s fractured past and troubled present. In these poems, W.E.B. DuBois and Fredrick Douglass have a conversation, Michael Brown meditates on the nature of the cosmos, Johnnie Taylor’s guitar sings in sonnets, and the road Walt Whitman set out upon comes alive for a new generation.
Through innovative re-imaginings of the sonnet, the pastoral, and the contrapuntal, Ballard engages with popular culture while examining the intricacies of all that is wedded together—form and content, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, husband and wife, and a nation long dependent on created binaries that serve to maintain structures of oppression.
Interspersed with quotations and inspired by the rich legacy of poets who came before him—including poet Matthew Shenoda who provides an insightful Foreword to the collection—Second Nature is a testament to interconnectedness, a love letter to the deep roots that we come from, and a reminder of the myriad ways in which one’s identity is shaped by community and country.
For Lack of a Dictionary, Rosalind Morris
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In this debut collection, renowned scholar Rosalind Morris spans the lyrical landscapes of personal experience and global political dilemmas. Organized into four distinct sections, each featuring seven poems that vary in style and content, For Lack of a Dictionary reflects the diverse facets of human complexity and the struggle to find a language capable of addressing them. Beginning with a mythopoetic exploration of the self and progressing through varied voices and forms—from the epistolary and the erotic to the elegiac—the collection navigates the absences and presences that shape our interpersonal connections. From Homer’s Iliad to Hobbes’s Leviathan, and from the intimate letters of the Rosenbergs to the television broadcasts of lunar landings, Morris revisits epic figures of classical literature with a contemporary voice, concluding with poignant reflections on personal loss and the seductive allure of magical thinking in times of grief.
In the tradition of Adrienne Rich and Muriel Rukeyser, Morris engages in a dialogue that challenges and enlightens, positioning For Lack of a Dictionary as a profound commentary on the intersections of personal and political realms.
Rosalind Morris, Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, is a prolific writer and scholar. Her recent books include Unstable Ground: The Lives, Deaths, and Afterlives of Gold in South Africa and Accounts and Drawings from Underground, co-created with William Kentridge. Recognized with Rockefeller and Guggenheim fellowships, a Berlin Prize, and residencies at prestigious institutions, as well as film festival prizes, Morris’s academic and creative works traverse disciplinary boundaries with artfulness, courage, and precision. Visit www.rosalindcmorris.com for more.
Myth, Terese Mason Pierre
Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Myth, the much-anticipated debut collection from the multi-talented Terese Mason Pierre, weaves between worlds (‘real’ and ‘imaginary’) unearthing the unsettling: our jaded and joyful relationships to land, ancestry, trauma, self, and future. In three movements and two interludes, the poems in Myth move symphonically from tropical islands to barren cities, from lucid dreams to the mysteries of reality, from the sea to the cosmos. A dynamic mix of speculative poetry and ecstatic lyricism, the otherworldly and the sublime, Pierre’s poems never stray too long or too far from the spell of unspoiled nature: “The palm trees nod / at the ocean / the ocean does / what it always does / trusts the moon completely.”
Friends ‘with benefits’ tour the wonders of Grenada’s landscapes; extraterrestrials visit the Caribbean and the locals don’t seem phased; red birds “saunter airily like tourists,” La Diablesse lures helpless suitors to their dooms. This collection asks: How can myths manifest themselves in our daily lives? What do we actually mean when we say we love ourselves and others? And how do we pursue/create futures that honour our truths, histories and legacies?
Terese Mason Pierre (she/her) is a writer, poet, and editor whose work has appeared in the Walrus, ROOM, Brick, Quill & Quire, Uncanny, and Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her work has been nominated for the bpNichol Chapbook Award, Best of the Net, the Aurora Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Ignyte Award. She is one of ten winners of the Writers’ Trust Journey Prize and was named a Writers’ Trust Rising Star. Terese is the chief programming officer at Augur, a speculative arts nonprofit, and co-director of AugurCon, Augur’s biennial speculative arts conference. Terese lives in Toronto.
Jailbreak of Sparrows, Martín Espada
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Hardcover / eBook
The poems in Jailbreak of Sparrows reveal the ways in which the ordinary becomes monumental: family portraits, politically charged reports, and tributes to the unsung. Espada’s focus ranges from the bombardment of his family’s hometown in Puerto Rico amid an anti-colonial uprising to the murder of a Mexican man by police in California, from the poet’s adolescent brawl on a basketball court over martyred baseball hero Roberto Clemente to his unorthodox methods of representing undocumented migrants as a tenant lawyer. We also encounter “love songs” to the poet’s wife from a series of unexpected voices: a bat with vertigo, the polar bear mascot for a minor league ballclub, a disembodied head in a jar.
Jailbreak of Sparrows is a collection of arresting poems that roots itself in the image, the musicality of language, and the depth of human experience. “Look at this was all he said, and all he had to say,” the poet says about his father, a photographer who documented his Puerto Rican community in Brooklyn and beyond. The poems of Martín Espada tell us: Look.
Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator, including Floaters, winner of the National Book Award, Vivas to Those Who Have Failed, and The Republic of Poetry, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His many honors include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Born in Brooklyn, he now lives in western Massachusetts.
Is This My Final Form?, Amy Gerstler
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Aren’t we all shape-shifters? Is any animal, vegetable, or mineral—even a commonplace object—what it seems to be at any given moment? Who isn’t juggling constant transformations, conflicting roles, changing loyalties, loves, perceptions, and selves, all while being pummeled by shifting devotions, emotions, and obsessions? Do even the dead continue to evolve in surprising ways?
Reveling in these questions, Gerstler’s latest protean poetry collection includes loose sonnets, shapely praise of Mae West, the lament of an actor who can’t shed his costume, dramatic monologues, whiffs of gender slippage, a love lyric to the bride of Frankenstein, and a ten-minute play.
Amy Gerstler is a writer of poetry, art criticism, journalism and plays. She has published thirteen books of poems, a children’s book and several collaborative artists books with visual artists. In 2019, she received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts CD Wright Grant. In 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Scattered at Sea, a book of her poems published by Penguin in 2015 was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her book Bitter Angel won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, The Atlantic, American Poetry Review, Poetry, several volumes of Best American Poetry and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry.
Other Times, Midnight, Andrea Ballou
Publisher: Persea
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
In Other Times, Midnight, her debut collection, Andrea Ballou explores the aftermath of loss—death, divorce, and departures—and asks the toughest questions: how do we contend with grief and remorse, and where does the spirit go to wait out trauma? Ballou’s poems fight our “impulse to not speak,” aware that naming, and that speech itself, is a matter of life and death. Her startling and often humorous images rooted in the fields, forests and domesticity of rural life are juxtaposed with oblique, at times irreverent, adaptations of Celtic and Greek myth and biblical stories. For Ballou, language is both tool and weapon, as useful and durable as a hoe, wheelbarrow, sword, thread. Caught “in the mouth of midnight,” these poems wrestle with the numinous, their voices—cranky and cajoling, always compassionate and vulnerable—urging us toward the fullness of being human, daring us, despite it all, to love again.
Andrea (Read) Ballou’s poems have appeared most recently in Barrow Street, Black Rabbit Quarterly, Copper Nickel, FIELD, Goliad, Lily Poetry Review, Plume, The Missouri Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. She earned her PhD from the University of Chicago in Romance Languages and Literatures and an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she is the recipient of a National Resource Fellowship, a Tinker Foundation Grant, and an Artist’s Fellowship from the Somerville Arts Council. Andrea has taught creative writing and literature at numerous universities and colleges and currently facilitates the Poetry Lab at the VNA Senior Living at Highland in Somerville and serves on the board of the Somerville Arts Council. She divides her time between Somerville, Massachusetts and Brooks, Maine.
I Hate Parties, Jes Battis
Publisher: Nightwood Editions
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Social anxiety runs through I Hate Parties like a current. Recorded on deliberately shaky media, this collection offers the B-side of growing up queer, autistic and nonbinary. From Scruff dates to mix tapes, Jes Battis cruises (and crashes) through wild feelings and minor catastrophes. Dipping readers into a world of missed connections, social disasters and life as a queer party that constantly surprises, Battis uses a light touch and neurodiverse prosody as they chronicle middle-grade queerness and a kind of meandering surreality. From difficult desires, panic attacks and environmental sensitivities, Battis weaves nineties metaphors with current discussions of neurodiversity and trans rights in Canada as they ruminate between past and present like a cat refusing to settle. I Hate Parties guides us through all the best and worst parties of our lives—to the secret room beyond, where being awkward is the one and only dress code.
Jes Battis (they/them) teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Regina. They’ve published poems in The Ex-Puritan, The Malahat Review, The Capilano Review and Poetry Is Dead, among other literary magazines. They’ve also published creative nonfiction in The Los Angeles Review of Books and Strange Horizons. They are the author of the Occult Special Investigator series (shortlisted for the Sunburst Award), the Parallel Parks series and, most recently, The Winter Knight with ECW.
Little Mercy, Robin Walter
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In award-winning poet Robin Walter’s debut collection, Little Mercy, writing and looking—seeing feelingly—become a practice in radical care. These poems pursue moments of shared recognition, when looking up to see a deer across a stream, or when sunlight passes through wingtip onto palm, the self found in other, the river in vein of wrist.
Attuned to the transparent beauty in the natural world, Walter’s poems are often glancing observations unspooling down the page, their delicacies belying their powers of profound knowing. The formal logic of this work is the intricate architecture of a nest. Each line becomes a blade of grass, each dash a little twig, each parenthesis a small feather—all woven together deliberately, seemingly fragile but held fast with surprising strength. In their lyric variations, repetitions, and fragments, employed toward a deep attention to wren, river, and reflection, the human almost falls away entirely, a steady and steadying state of being that is unconscious, expansive.
Written out of a broken landscape in a broken time, Little Mercy is a book of gratitude, one that draws our inner selves to the present and living world, to the ways we can break and mend.
Robin Walter is a poet, book artist, and printmaker. Her writing has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Seneca Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. She teaches at Colorado State University and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Dispatch from the Mountain State, Marc Harshman
Publisher: West Virginia University Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Dispatch from the Mountain State encompasses the trademark themes of a mature poet—death, despair, dread, and the seeming randomness with which all of these come into life. The dispatches provide, if sometimes obliquely, a keen awareness of the troubled times within which we live, whether the flashpoint be race, the recent pandemic, or the reckless onslaught of the Appalachian mining industry, which is masterfully addressed in the long poem, “The Breach.” Harshman’s distinctive vision remains both surreal and familiar, whether expressed in a sonnet or the more common free-verse characteristic of most of his work.
This collection of over forty poems sings with a fluid voice and dazzles with imagery that surprises and rings true, often underlain by and intertwined with the darker threads of our common living and dying as contemporary Appalachians. It is rare to find a poet like Harshman, who is deeply connected to the life of rural America and yet writes poetry untouched by any sentiment for the old ways found there.
Marc Harshman is poet laureate of West Virginia. He has published eight collections of poetry, including the award-winning titles Woman in Red Anorak and Believe What You Can. He is also the author/coauthor of fourteen children’s books. Harshman was recently named the Appalachian Heritage Writer for 2024 by Shepherd University’s Appalachian Studies program. He holds degrees from Bethany College, Yale Divinity School, and the University of Pittsburgh. He lives in Wheeling.
Buzzkill Clamshell, Amber Dawn
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
As a novelist, memoirist, and poet, Amber Dawn regularly lays her heart bare in work that is fiery, raw, and intensely personal. In Buzzkill Clamshell, her third poetry collection, Amber Dawn circumvents the expectations of so-called confessional poetry, offering twisted mythmaking, extreme hyperbole, and lyrical gutter-mouthing that explore themes of sick and disabled queerness, aging, and desire.
With poems populated by severed heads, domme swan maidens, horny oracles, and other horrible purveyors of pleasure, Buzzkill Clamshell reads as if a leather dyke and a demonic goat had a baby―gleefully embracing the perverse while stomping its way through chronic pain and complex PTSD.
Already acclaimed for her candid and often kinky verse, Amber Dawn pushes further into trauma-informed eroticism with self-assured irreverence and uncomfortable abjectivity. Beneath her brilliant, carnivalesque imagery lies a prayer―not for the pain to end, but for finding fantastic new ways to cope with it.
Amber Dawn is a writer and creative facilitator living on unceded Coast Salish Territories (Vancouver, BC). She is the author of several books, including two novels (Lambda Literary Award winner Sub Rosa and Sodom Road Exit) and two poetry collections (Where the words end and my body begins and My Art Is Killing Me and Other Poems), and the editor of three anthologies.
Applause for a Cloud, Sayumi Kamakura, James Shea (Tr.)
Publisher: Black Ocean
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Sayumi Kamakura juxtaposes a surreal dailiness with a cosmological acuteness, invoking wonder on macro and micro scales. The paradoxical frictions in her work resolve into moments of lucidity just as often as they perplex. Although she writes in the haiku tradition, her poems detour from the conventional parameters for haiku, such as syllabic restrictions and a fixed seasonal reference. Her flexible approach to the long-standing form allows her to explore new emotional frequencies across a range of subject matter. The book’s four sections—everyday life in Japan, experiences in Morocco and Italy, her husband’s cancer diagnosis, and reflections on the pandemic—reveal the preoccupations of a poet invested in rendering her experiences with a mix of traditional and contemporary motifs alongside a subtle wit. The natural world is always close at hand, yet Kamakura does not merely depict phenomena. She creates moments of stillness that usher the reader into her inner world.
Sayumi Kamakura is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Moisture, Cross in the Water, From the Skylight, La La La Goes the Sea, and The Collected Haiku of Sayumi Kamakura. Her work has appeared in dozens of anthologies in Japan and overseas, and she is the only haiku poet featured in Japanese Women Poets: An Anthologyedited by Hiroaki Sato. She is the recipient of the Oki Sango Prize, Modern Haiku Association Prize, and the Azsacra International Poetry Award.
James Shea is the author of two poetry collections, The Lost Novel and Star in the Eye, both from Fence Books. He has received grants from the Fulbright US Scholar Program, Hong Kong Arts Development Council, National Endowment for the Arts, and Vermont Arts Council. He is coeditor of The Routledge Global Haiku Reader and cotranslator of Moving a Stone: Selected Poems of Yam Gong.
The Last Beast We Revel In, Noah Davis
Publisher: CavanKerry Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Noah Davis’s The Last Beast We Revel In coalesces around love for one’s romantic partner, family, community, and the natural world. As the Appalachian Mountains continue to suffer from environmental catastrophes and abuses, the need to discover joy within the human and greater-than-human world is essential. In these poems, we travel with black bears and brook trouts, exploring old tunnel mines, summer rivers, the remains of meth houses, and tasting the sweetness of August tomatoes. Davis’s poems balance revery, mourning, lust, and love while wading the rivers and meandering through the deep hollows of Appalachia’s enduring landscape.
Noah Davis’s first collection, Of This River, won the Wheelbarrow Emerging Poet Book Prize from Michigan State University’s Center for Poetry, and his poems and prose have appeared in The Sun, Southern Humanities Review, Best New Poets, Orion, The Year’s Best Sports Writing, North American Review, and River Teeth among others. He lives with his wife, Nikea, in Missoula, Montana.
Nostalgia for the Future: New and Selected Poems 1984-2023, Gregory Djanikian
Publisher: Green Writers Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Gregory Djanikian’s Nostalgia for the Future: New and Selected Poems, written over several decades, takes for its many subjects romantic love and its difficulties, the horrors of the Armenian genocide of 1915, the é migré experience and the joys and struggles of acculturation, the allure of landscapes and vast distances, the polarity of our material life on earth and our longing for what is ethereal and elusive, all in tones that are humorous, elegiac, contemplative, lyrical, and suffused with a gratitude for the mysteriousness and wonder of life itself.
Born in Alexandria, Egypt of Armenian parentage, Gregory Djanikian came to the United States when he was 8 years old and spent his boyhood in Williamsport, PA. For many years, he was the Director of Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania and is the author of seven collections of poetry from Carnegie Mellon, most recently of which is Sojourners of the In-Between. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, and in many anthologies including Best American Poetry, Good Poems, American Places (Viking), Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem (Knopf), among others.
UNMET, stephanie roberts
Publisher: Biblioasis
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Leaning deliberately on the imagined while scrutinizing reality and hoping for the as-yet-unseen, UNMET is a poetry collection that explores themes of frustration, justice, and thwarted rescue from a perspective that is Black-Latinx, Canadian, immigrant, and female. Drawing on a wide range of poetics, from Wallace Stevens to Tony Hoagland and Diane Seuss, roberts’s musically-driven narrative surrealism confronts such timely issues as police brutality, respectability politics, intimate partner violence, and ecological crisis, and considers the might-have-been alongside the what could be, negotiating the past without losing hope for the future.
stephanie roberts is the author of rushes from the river disappointment, a Quebec Writers’ Federation finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, the winner of The Sixty-Four: Best Poets of 2018, a recipient of the Sage Hill Writing award for Black Excellence, and a Canada Council of the Arts grantee. Her work has been critically praised and featured in well over one hundred periodicals and anthologies, in print and online, throughout Canada, the US, and Europe. She is a citizen of Canada, Panama, and the US, and has lived most of her life in Quebec.
The Mountains of Kong: New and Selected Prose Poems (Bilingual edition), Dag T. Straumsvåg, Robert Hedin (Tr.)
Publisher: Assembly Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
The sixty-one prose poems collected in The Mountains of Kong find magic in the little absurdities of everyday life and are populated by an unpredictable cast that includes kings and codfish and elephants, a couple looking for a surrogate for their tears, and a lemming on the run.
Presented here in both English translations and their original Nynorsk, and with an introduction by acclaimed poet Stuart Ross, Straumsvåg’s poems are a new kind of map that will deliver you to places you’ve never imagined.
Dag T. Straumsvåg was born in 1964 in Kristiansund, a city on the western coast of Norway, and grew up in the nearby Tingvoll county. He has been employed as a farmhand, sawmill worker, librarian, and sound engineer for a radio station in Trondheim, where he has lived since 1984. He is the author and translator of nine books and chap of poetry, including A Bumpy Ride to the Slaughterhouse (2006), The Lure-Maker from Posio (2011), both from Red Dragonfly Press, Nelson (Proper Tales Press, 2017), and But in the Stillness (Apt. 9, 2024). His work has appeared in a wide variety of journals in Norway, Canada, and the United States.
Born and raised in Red Wing, Minnesota, Robert Hedin is the author, translator, and editor of two dozen books of poetry. The recipient of many honours and awards for his work, he has taught at the University of Alaska, the University of Minnesota, St. Olaf College, and Wake Forest University. He is co-founder and former executive director of the Anderson Center at Tower View, a residential artist retreat in Red Wing.
Into the Hush, Arthur Sze
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Hardcover
Like wind on a lake, Arthur Sze’s twelfth book of poetry, Into the Hush, extends a language that ripples and stills, widens and deepens. Through an earned and profound simplicity, these poems move with imaginative power and emotional force and gather a startling array of contrasts—from wildfires to a sprig of sunrise, from gunshots to a spirit evoked by swaying candles—to address the challenges of our nuclear age. Here, poems shadow sonnets and appear as haibun and ekphrasis, pantoum and segmented zuihitsu. They borrow the voice of an eraser and the voice of a jaguar. Even the aspen leaves speak. Sze harnesses a range of innovative forms to respond to the challenges of climate change, exploring what it means to live on an endangered planet. Written at the height of his powers, Into the Hush is a landmark publication. Sze enacts a thrilling journey from silence into sound, from emptiness into the rich panoply of existence.
Arthur Sze is a poet, translator, and editor. He is the author of twelve books of poetry, including The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021), selected for a 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Prize; Sight Lines (2019), for which he received the National Book Award; Compass Rose (2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist; The Ginkgo Light (2009), selected for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award; Quipu (2005); The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998 (1998), selected for the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Asian American Literary Award; and Archipelago (1995), selected for an American Book Award. He has also published The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry (2024) and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (2010). Another collection, The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems, is forthcoming from the Museum of New Mexico Press in spring 2025. A recipient of the 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, and a Howard Foundation Fellowship, as well as five grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, Sze was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, where he lives with his wife, the poet Carol Moldaw. A chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was the 2023–2024 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University. His poetry has been translated into fifteen languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Goalie, Ben von Jagow
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
The poems in Goalie follow our narrator’s journey as he progresses throughout his hockey career, from novice all the way to retirement. These poems explore topics such as role models, relationships, ambitions, failure, and the minutiae of everyday Canadian life in as genuine and authentic a way as possible between these pages.
Ben von Jagow’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Canadian Literature, Prairie Fire, The Antigonish Review, EVENT, The Fiddlehead, Queen’s Quarterly, Newfoundland Quarterly, filling Station, and the Literary Review of Canada, among other publications. His debut poetry collection, Goalie, is forthcoming from Guernica Editions.
Water Guest, Caroline M. Mar
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Lake Tahoe: home of the Washoe Tribe, a shining blue jewel that crowns the Sierra Nevada, and a beloved American vacation destination made accessible by the transcontinental railroad built largely by Chinese laborers. This gorgeous location forms the site from which Caroline M. Mar’s stunning collection, Water Guest, attempts to reconcile issues of identity, ownership, and place. The poems wander through Mar’s attempts to locate herself geographically, genealogically, and etymologically. A direct ancestor was a railroad laborer; is that why her love for the land feels older than herself? Or is it the siren call of the deep, clear water?
Raising questions of inheritance, the conundrum of land ownership, and the violence of history, Mar gives voice to the lost writing of Chinese laborers and silent communion to those of us still here—immigrant and Indigenous, settler and resister. This beautiful collection finds acceptance, if not resolution, through the questions themselves.
Caroline M. Mar is the great-granddaughter of a railroad laborer and the author of Special Education and the chapbook Dream of the Lake. A high school health educator in her hometown of San Francisco, she is getting to know her new home of Oakland. A member of Rabble Collective, she has been granted residencies at Storyknife, Ragdale, and Hedgebrook, among others.
Interstitial Archaeology, Felicia Zamora
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Water permeates this stunning collection—ocean, lake, saliva, tears, sweat, blood—and the deeper Felicia Zamora excavates, the sheerer it becomes. Revisiting her childhood as a Latina living in poverty in the United States, Zamora explores racial trauma, estrangement from inherited culture and language, and the instinct to retreat into the body as a space of understanding. Grounded in the specificity of her history, her body, and her life, these poems find the universal threads that constellate hummingbirds to whales, Galapagos tortoises to Matt Groening cartoons, family photographs to joy and heartache, and an insistence on human connectivity.
Felicia Zamora is the author of six books of poetry, including Quotient; I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; Body of Render, Benjamin Saltman Award winner; and Of Form & Gather, Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner. She won the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize from the Georgia Review, a Tin House Next Book Residency, and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. She is an associate professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and a poetry editor for the Colorado Review.
Cemeteries and Galaxies, John Koethe
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
John Koethe, one of our most philosophically sophisticated poets, has written a book of pithy, contentious, witty poems about our perennial, never-satisfied search for meaning.
The silent mysteries of the stars and the mute beauty of human graves have deep similarities that Koethe probes in these poems with a wondering, wandering gimlet eye that will delight the reader when they don’t terrify them.
Cemeteries and Galaxies is an extraordinarily provocative and, perhaps surprisingly, consoling book.
John Koethe has published eleven books of poetry and has received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and the Frank O’Hara Award. He has also published books on Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosophical skepticism, and poetry, as well as the recent essay collection Thought and Poetry. He is Distinguished Professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.
Little Universe, Natalie Ann Holborow
Publisher: Parthian Books
Publication Date: April 3, 2025
Format: Paperback
The poems in Natalie Ann Holborow’s Little Universe are an exploration of tumultuous human emotions and nature’ s ever-present rhythms. Lives bustle within a busy hospital’ s walls, humming against the Gower landscape that stretches beyond its windows. The tiny worlds of a wide cast unfold as they deal with their own emergencies, losses, recoveries, hopes and histories. Medical students stride the length of the corridor in rubber shoes, scars running the lengths of their lives. A janitor is crying in the Gents’ , watching the flowers at the hospital entrance shrug themselves back into earth. The biblical Lilith offers knowledge from one woman to the other. And somewhere in the distance, a bunker dissolves into gold upon Pennard’ s shoulder, dusk folding to sleep on Rhossili. The characters in this book are all bound by the undying pulse of existence ? yet their stories serve as a reminder that despite these stark contrasts, life persists.
Natalie Ann Holborow is a winner of the Terry Hetherington Award and the Robin Reeves Prize and has been shortlisted and commended for the Bridport Prize, the National Poetry Competition, the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, and the Cursed Murphy Spoken Word Award among others. Her writing residencies with the British Council, Literature Wales and Kultivera have seen her writing and performing poetry in Wales, Ireland, Sweden and India. She is the author of the poetry collections And Suddenly You Find Yourself and Small – both listed as Best Poetry Collections of the Year by Wales Arts Review – and, with Mari Ellis Dunning, the collaborative poetry pamphlet The Wrong Side of the Looking Glass. Little Universe is her third full collection. Natalie lives in Swansea, is a proud patron of local charity The Leon Heart Fund, and runs marathons to raise funds.
Born Sacred: Poems for Palestine, Smokii Sumac
Publisher: Roseway Publishing
Publication Date: April 3, 2025
Format: Paperback
In October 2023, upon witnessing the escalation of Palestinian genocide, Ktunaxa poet Smokii Sumac began writing poems reflecting on the stories of Palestinians in Gaza who were risking their lives to share news of the genocide of Palestinian culture, literature, and life. These 100 poems offer a witnessing of the escalation of colonial violence, both current and historical, across oceans, lands, cultures, and people, and the reckoning one has in the face of a genocide.
Vulnerable, eloquent, compassionate, and enduring, Born Sacred is an in-time reflection honouring the shared histories of Indigenous Peoples of North America and of the people in Palestine. Sumac offers this collection as a small piece of life dedicated to Palestinians and resounds the collective call for solidarity in our shared liberation.
Smokii Sumac (they/he) is a Ktunaxa two-spirit poet and emerging playwright. Their first book, you are enough: love poems for the end of the world won an Indigenous Voices Award. Indigenous sovereignty and centring our own knowledges is deeply important to Smokii’s creative work. He believes in the power of storytelling and has featured Indigenous writers and musicians on The ʔasqanaki Podcast, a limited podcast series that Smokii created and hosts. Their first play, Seven and One Heart, was workshopped in Montreal and developed in Toronto during the 2024 Weesageechak Begins to Dance festival. Smokii will be also releasing a Canada Council–funded spoken word album in spring 2025. Smokii is happy to live in his home territories of ʔamakʔis Ktunaxa, near the banks of the Kootenay River, with his husband, their cats, chicken, and a “big ole rez dog” named Kootenay Lou.
Novice, Nida Sophasarun
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: April 3, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
How close can a person come to home when their family has deserted it? Guided by this question, the poems in Nida Sophasarun’s Novice traverse natural, animal, and dream worlds, seeking intimacy in a snake coming in from the rain, a mother’s body imagined as a house, and the moon serving as both the missing piece and the linchpin in a night sky. Organized by tropical seasons and unfolding in Asia and the American South, Novice proposes that home is monumental and ruined, remembered and forgotten, local and diffuse, peopled and haunted.
Nida Sophasarun is from Atlanta, Georgia, and holds degrees from Wellesley College and the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She has lived and worked in Bulgaria, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Myanmar, and Taiwan. Her poems appear in New England Review, Prairie Schooner, 32 Poems, wildness, and elsewhere.
Strange Hymn, Carlene Kucharczyk
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Publication Date: April 4, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
“I’ll tell you everything I know. Though there might not be much to tell,” confesses the speaker in Strange Hymn by Carlene Kucharczyk, in a meticulously crafted lyrical journey exploring morality and humanity. The poems here grapple with understanding physical loss: “I wanted / to know at once and definitively our animal bodies / were not all we were. It is shameful to be this fragile.” They also engage with the more abstract slipping away of memory and time: “Since I was born, I have been forgetting. Forgetting what I have wanted to remember.” Kucharczyk’s insightful poems blur the lines between history and myth, love and grief, song and silence.
Caught between lamenting the passage of time and rejoicing in small beauties, she writes, “I tell you, I wish we could stay here longer / in this hotel of lost grandeur, this palace of interesting disarray, / and stay here with these pieces of the impersonal past / that have somehow not yet outlasted their small lights.” Each moment reflects on our ephemeral lives from musings on art and nature to reflections on the self, asking “Is a mirror a sort of glass house? / And, is there a way to see ourselves besides through the glass?”
As readers traverse this collection, they learn how the body sings, the many iterations of Mary, what sirens truly think of Odysseus, how a Morning Glory unfurls, and lessons in orthodontics, but most importantly, how to live with absence. Kucharczyk is a master of manipulating time and space through her dynamic use of form, creating a narrative that begs, “After I’m gone, don’t bury my body— / Burn it, and turn it into song.”
Carlene Kucharczyk’s writing has appeared in literary journals such as Poetry Northwest, Mid-American Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Green Mountains Review, and Conduit, and has received a Pushcart nomination.
Dream State, Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse
Publisher: The Unnamed Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Hardcover
The poems of Dream State arise from the poet’s experience living and working in Iraq, not as a soldier or journalist, but as a writer, translator, teacher, and preservationist of Kurdish culture. In a stunning act of cogenerative imagination, Levinson-LaBrosse’s poetic voice emerges alongside the voices of others with whom she has collaborated. Together with her poems, these translated memories, testimonies and stories form an interdependent environment bridging time and perception.
As a book, Dream State resists categorization. And yet it is fundamentally accessible in its humanity. People come together in understanding, and break apart just as quickly. Fictions shatter and endure, while national imaginations always seem to be at risk. And everywhere the poet turns, she learns that peace is never self-sustaining. True peace is an enduring act of courage, and one that must be lived everyday.
As the 2003 Iraq invasion reached its twentieth anniversary (2023) and the Islamic State’s attempted genocide in Shingal reaches its tenth (2024), Dream State attempts to sit with other people’s experiences, rather than extract details to exploit them; amplifies the work around the poet, rather than supplant it; and trusts that listening to individual perspectives will lead to common understanding.
Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse is a poet, translator, and assistant professor at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS). She earned her PhD in Kurdish Studies at the University of Exeter, specializing in nineteenth-century poetry, and holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College as well as an MEd from the University of Virginia. Her writing has appeared in Poetry, Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today, In Other Words, Plume, Epiphany, Sewanee Review, The Iowa Review, and Words Without Borders. Her book-length works include Kajal Ahmed’s Handful of Salt (2016), Abdulla Pashew’s Dictionary of Midnight (2019), Nali’s My Moon Is the Only Moon (2021) and Farhad Pirbal’s The Potato Eaters (2024). She was a 2022 NEA Fellow, the first ever working from the Kurdish. She serves as the Founding Director of Kashkul and was the Founding Director of the Slemani UNESCO City of Literature. She lives near the Tomalas Bay in Northern CA.
Pigs in Delirium, Jorge Carlos Fonseca, David Shook (tr.)
Publisher: Insert Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
First published in Cabo Verde in 1998, Jorge Carlos Fonseca’s Pigs in Delirium (Porcos em Delírio) charted and continues to chart a new vision not just for Cabo-Verdean poetry, but for all of Lusophone poetry. Pigs in Delirium begins with a 10-page biographical timeline of the allegedly deceased author’s life, compiled by an old enemy turned posthumous admirer. The grandiose, surreal, and self-deprecating document includes recognizable elements from Jorge Carlos Fonseca’s known biography alongside a fantastical and metaphysical one. Spicerian in tone, it recounts the poet’s strange birth, several body parts at a time, over the course of his first 19 years; a 27-day argument with René Char, already long dead, over the best title for the book; and even a failed heist of the Louvre.
Paginated in reverse, Fonseca’s poems sprawl across multiple pages, sometimes crossed out by large Xs. Though they read from top to bottom their typesetting from the bottom margin upward suggests levitation or the rising of a tropical mist. As these innovations suggest, Porcos em Delírio is not an “easy” book. Fonseca delights in difficulty—Joyce being another influence cited by fellow poet Arménio Vieira—and reflects this pleasure in a playful intellectualism that can at times approach the abstruse. Indeed, a perfect understanding of the poems may not be merely impossible but beside the point. And yet the book remains as legible as it is imagistic, lyrical, and hyper-referential.
In this, the strangest book of Lusophone African literature, the poet devours and regurgitates influences from Breton to Buñuel, Ginsberg to Garbarek, with a recurring fondness for Archie Shepp, occasional incursions of Kriolu wordplay, and a talent for mimicking (and skewering) the language of postcolonial island politics. This searing skepticism of overwrought political language is run through with Utopian faith in the power of poetry. Pigs in Delirium marks the English-language debut of an essential postcolonial African voice.
Jorge Carlos Fonseca is a politician, jurist, academic, and writer born in Mindelo, Cabo Verde, in 1950. A former freedom fighter, he served two terms as president of Cabo Verde, from 2011-2021. He has written over 20 books, primarily focused on issues of jurisprudence. His literary output includes the collections Silence Accused of High Treason and Incitement to Public Bad Breath (1995), Pigs in Delirium (1998), and a book of selected poems, My Nights’ Seductive Inks (2019), as well as a novel, The Spanish Hostel (2017).
Shook is a poet and translator in California. Their translations from Portuguese include Conceição Lima’s selected poems, No Gods Live Here, for which they were a 2017 NEA Translation Fellow, and Jorge Lauten’s Bury My Heart on Mt. Ramelau.
The Dead & The Living & The Bridge, MC Hyland
Publisher: Meekling Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
In the tradition of Montaigne’s Essais and Anne Carson’s Short Talks, MC Hyland’s poem-essays weave together the conceptual and the material, leaving a trace of thought-in-flight. Originating from a moment (pre- and mid-pandemic) when Hyland taught canonical British literature as a contingent university worker, the essays in The Dead and the Living and the Bridge take up the topics of grief, gender, art materials, capitalism, and close reading. “What I loved,” Hyland writes, “was the dead and the living and the bridge my voice sometimes made between the two.” This voice casts spells to summon clarity against institutional failures and personal and global losses, while placing thinking in its proper context: conversation, shared worldbuilding, and a love that touches both the living and the dead.
MC Hyland (she/they) is the founding editor of DoubleCross Press, a poetry micropress, and the author of over a dozen poetry chapbooks/artist books and two previous full-length books of poems: THE END (Sidebrow 2019) and Neveragainland (Lowbrow Press 2010). Holding MFAs in book arts and creative writing from the University of Alabama and a PhD in English literature from NYU, MC is a teacher, scholar, artist, and arts administrator, and lives in St. Paul, MN with her partner, Jeff, and cat, Dakota.
Secret Work, Meredith Mason
Publisher: Lost Horse Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
In Meredith Mason’s breathtaking collection Secret Work, work takes on a range of meanings. The work of mothering, the work of daughtering, retail work, poetic work. What unites these all is her clear, deep intellect, her remarkable imagination, and her ability to craft speakers that readers will follow anywhere whether it be to a talent show or a big box store’s break room. Anyone who reads these poems will quickly come to understand that Mason is one of the true talents of her generation. —Jackson Holbert, Final Judge for the Idaho Prize 2024
Meredith Mason lives and writes poems in a small Wisconsin city. Recent poems have appeared in Rattle, fsm, Peregrine, UpNorth Lit and Rattle: Poets Respond. She works in the Public Services department of her local library and spends most of her time raising two sons. She is a graduate of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
If I Had Said Beauty, Tami Haaland
Publisher: Lost Horse Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
If I Had Said Beauty, Tami Haaland’s fourth collection of poetry, is dedicated to “known and unknown” ancestors. It explores the possible narratives and distant origins of what lies behind a sense of self-including recent and ancient DNA, recessive and dominant traits, mitochondrial underpinnings, and an intricate microbiome. Luminous and spare, the poems seek to unravel and speculate, document and lament what happens in a life and what might have been. While probing for definition in the mysteries of deep time, the poems are nevertheless grounded in encounters with wild and domestic life, intimate moments of loss and family connection, all of which intertwine to expand the meaning of “autobiography.”
Tami Haaland is the author of two previous books of poetry, When We Wake in the Night and Breath in Every Room, winner of the Nicholas Roerich First Book Award from Story Line Press. Her poems have appeared in High Desert Journal, Consequence, Ascent, The Ecopoetry Anthology, and many other publications. Her work has also been featured on The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and American Life in Poetry. Haaland received an Artist Innovation Award from Montana Arts Council in 2012 and served as Montana’s Poet Laureate from 2013 to 2015. She teaches at Montana State University Billings.
Ecstasy, Alex Dimitrov
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Alex Dimitrov embraces a life on the edge in New York and the finely wrought poetry that can come out of it as he explores sex, drugs, parties, pleasure, and God in the 2020s, and looks back to a coming-of-age in the 1990s that still informs who his generation is and will be. His unabashed and drivingly musical poems are a call against repression, a rebuke of cultural norms and shame, and a celebration of human authenticity—even if to live under such philosophies is dangerous. In “Today I Love Being Alive,” we find the poet naked in his kitchen, eating a banana and obsessed with a new lover, declaring “I don’t care about being remembered. / I care about . . . Strong men. Beautiful sentences. Italian leather;” in “Poppers,” he stands lightheaded in the bathroom at a bar, “thinking of what to do / with the rest of my life,” and issuing a warning to himself and us: “Poetry / is not a self-help book.”
Dimitrov is an iconographer of contemporary life, able to pin profound and timeless meaning to a fleeting encounter in the street. Ecstasy also engages with the poet’s Christian upbringing, interrogating faith as both an enemy and valve of catharsis, and a bedfellow of what this book celebrates and courts: profound human ecstasy.
Alex Dimitrov is the author of four books of poems, including Love and Other Poems, as well as the chapbook American Boys. His work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and Poetry. He was the former senior content editor at the Academy of American Poets, where he edited Poem-A-Day and American Poets. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University, Columbia University, and Barnard College, among other institutions. With Dorothea Lasky, he is the co-author of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac. Dimitrov lives in New York City.
Anything and Its Shadow, Lucie McKee
Publisher: Green Writers Press
Publication Date: April 3, 2025
Format: Paperback
In Anything and Its Shadow, Vermont poet Lucie McKee writes from a place of patience and continual curiosity, both for her own presence in the world and for the nuances of the vastness that lies beyond her intimate awareness. Here is a collection of astute observation and keen awareness and in the opening poem, “If Only,” the poet invites the reader on her journey: “I can’t get / over that we’re alive— / now, this second / which is already gone. / If only I could pick / a bunch of wild / seconds in the field / and hand them / to you in a jelly jar…” At ninety-one years of age, McKee reflects on a life spent soaking in every spice and tasting note of delight, sadness, and frustration. She demands the ability to keep listening and learning from interactions, memories, and the spaces she finds herself in. As readers, we are transported to a place of welcome contemplation. We join McKee at her table in the evening light, recognizing our own stories in the scope of a much greater expanse that is the sky, the people, the birds, the light, the tastes and smells, enveloping us all.
Lucie McKee has lived in Bennington, Vermont, most of her life. Retired now and writing full-time, she graduated from Smith College with a B.A. in 1954. She has an MFA in poetry from Bennington College. She worked as an occupational therapist for many years after training for it at the Boston School of Occupational Therapy. Her poems have been published in The Southern Review, The TLS, Poetry Review, and many other magazines.
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Contents
Book Excerpt: The Prize of Québec by Jennifer Nelson
“I tend to lean into the transconstitutory powers of ekphrasis. … Only in poetry can one go to the moon in a way that critiques the quest for the moon.” Read a poem from Jennifer Nelson’s new collection from Fence Books, On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies.
Chapbook Poem: This Is How They Teach Us How to Want It . . . by Shanta Lee
“This poem explores the levels of our participation in handing ourselves over, often to the people, places, or things that deserve no such delight.” Read a #poem from Shanta Lee’s new book from Harbor Editions, This Is How They Teach Us How to Want It . . . The Slaughter.
Three Poems by Jonathan Fletcher
“Instead of having to choose between religion or the LGBTQ community (which I know many member of the latter feel they have to do), I think it is possible (and maybe even biblical) to integrate both into one’s life.” Read three original poems from Jonathan Fletcher, along with words from the author.
What Happened? On You are Leaving the American Sector by Rebecca Foust
“Rebecca Foust’s new chapbook of poems has a strange prescience. … Foust isn’t alone in making the obvious connection between Trump’s first term and Orwell’s dystopia.” Read the full chapbook review by new contributor Rick Mullin.
‘What if we started creating together? What if we looked at who we are from the side and saw a much more complete and honest perspective?” Read four poems by poet Sarah E N Kohrs, along with words from the poet.