We here at Philly 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.
Trident: Book One, A.L. Nielsen
Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
Publication Date: September 2026
Format: Paperback
Trident is an unfolding poem whose sections are composed in response to recordings by trios. “Supertrios” and “Trident” listen to recordings of the same name released by McCoy Tyner. “God Is More Than Love Can Ever Be” improvises its melodies with Sun Ra, and is named after what is, to my knowledge, the only piano trio album released by him. “The Life of a Trio” attends the 1989 weekend reunion of Paul Bley, Steve Swallow and Jimmy Giuffre.
The opening “Wave” signals procedures followed throughout. Flotsam and jetsam afloat on this wave were left by Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Jayne Cortez, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Denise Levertov, Jack Kerouac, Nicole Brossard, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, Carla Harryman, Michael Heller, John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, and Dolly Parton, all of whom contribute their grace notes.
A.L. Nielsen was the first winner of the Larry Neal Award for Poetry. Additional awards include the Kayden Prize, the SAMLA Studies Prize, a Gustavus Myers Citation, the Gertrude Stein Award, a Sigma Tau Delta Award for excellence in teaching, The Darwin Turner Award, an American Book Award for his edition of Lorenzo Thomas’s Don’t Deny My Name and a lifetime achievement award from the African American Literature and Culture Society. He is the Emeritus George and Barbara Kelly Professor of American Literature at Penn State University, having taught in the past at Central China Normal University, Loyola Marymount University, the University of Kansas, UCLA, San Jose State University, Howard University and the George Washington University. His albums of spoken word and music, Sometimes I Wonder Can A Matchbox Hold My Blues and Spider Cone: More Blues, Rage and Hollers, are available on Apple Music and other streaming services. His poems have appeared in both Best American Poems and Best American Experimental Writing.
The Unbecoming, Kathy Fagan
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Hardcover
On a sketch of the Virgin and Child, Michelangelo instructed his young assistant, in shorthand Italian, to Draw faster, acknowledging that life lasts a moment, death—and art—far longer.
As an aging, bi, childless poet currently recognizing the limits of her own life and that of our planet, Kathy Fagan has immersed herself in the intimate and urgent discovery that growth and decay are the same cycle, and that art and memory, made in the tumultuous rush of these, are the deeply human attempts to outlast them.
Fagan’s luminous seventh collection, The Unbecoming, begins with the sequence “Listening to Others,” and a command: Run, into a process that is, for all of us, a circle of becoming and unbecoming simultaneously. Favoring perspective over nostalgia and clarity over certainty, the poems are, then, memento mori, a loving reminder, a poet’s reckoning with the rewards and losses of age, and with our painfully beautiful little lives “rounded with a sleep.”
Kathy Fagan is the author of seven poetry collections including Bad Hobby, winner of the 2023 William Carlos Williams Award. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Fellowship, Fagan is professor emerita of English at The Ohio State University.
Exhibit G: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of Gaza, Fady Joudah
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Hardcover
Fady Joudah writes from the split perspective of a Palestinian American physician caring for the sick while watching the destruction of Gaza from the United States, a nation complicit in that destruction. He locates the paradox of his position everywhere: in the seed a sparrow eats from his proffered hand; in his writing in English, the oppressor’s language; in the faces of Palestinian children receiving meals from aid kitchens—a glimpse into what his life could have been, and what is being lost in a war disproportionately impacting children and their families. Throughout the book, beauty insists on its survival not only through the Palestinian people, but also through the nonhuman world in which he takes occasional refuge from the devastation that humanity brings upon itself.
By placing before readers a series of carefully chosen images from Gaza, Joudah presses his reader to comprehend that the experience of both the individual and the whole are integral to an explicitly Palestinian understanding of genocide, even if that rendering is a nearly impossible endeavor. Exhibit G insists on the immensity of Palestinian interiority, and finds in this collective act of creation a hyper-present awareness. “By claiming what is being actively erased,” Joudah writes, “I become presence.”
At once an indictment of genocide, a rendering of catastrophic loss, and “an affirmation of life instead of a staging of death” (Katherine Larson), Exhibit G insists that love exists in all its variousness, and that it is the only defense against a totalizing, destructive force.
Fady Joudah is the author of […], a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and Exhibit G. His other poetic works include: The Earth in the Attic; Alight; Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition and has received the Jackson Poetry Prize, a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arab American Book Award. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.
Madness Belongs to the People, Jody Chan
Publisher: Brick Books
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
With gentle fervour and precise language that speaks to the nonverbal, the gestural, the sonic, Jody Chan’s third collection of poetry mobilizes the intimate, the historical, the revolutionary, and the mundane to confront the instrumentalization of disability as a surplus class. Chan’s multidisciplinary poems are a lyrical account of anti-colonial, anti-capitalist psychiatric survivor- and patient-led movements, from Germany to Japan.
Inspired by poets, artists, and activists like Frantz Fanon, Etel Adnan, and Solmaz Sharif, Chan’s prose and lyric poems delve into activist movements during World War II, the late 20th century, and the present day. This is an investigation of madness as resistance and political strategy. We experience “listening as a form of touch,” and the future as a change of form.
Jody Chan is a poet, multidisciplinary artist, care worker, and community organizer. They are the author of two previous books of poetry: sick (Black Lawrence Press 2020), finalist for the Lambda Literary and Pat Lowther Memorial Awards, and winner of the 2018 St. Lawrence Book Award and 2021 Trillium Award for Poetry; and impact statement (Brick Books 2024), longlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Jody was the 2023–2024 Artist-in-Residence at the University of Toronto’s Queer and Trans Research Lab, and the 2023 recipient of the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize in Literature from the Canada Council for the Arts. They live in Toronto.
Abider, Melissa Crowe
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Paperback
Equal parts sad, sexy, and searching, Abider opens with the central lament/brag of its lover-speaker, that she can never truly leave anything—or anyone—behind. The origins of this abidingness are traced in odes and elegies for a rural girlhood beset with jeopardy and scarcity and neglect. But it was also good-wild, conducive to a reckless freedom she can’t help grieving, even as she falls in love at sixteen and marries hard. Meanwhile, other, electric connections are painfully delimited by heteronormative expectations, and her growing dis-ease reveals that she has been trying (and failing) to heal by remaining where she is harmed. She wants—this harrowed, semi-feral girl turned unswerving woman—to stay and go at once, and the tension between her desire for connection and her wish to escape threatens her sense of self and animates these vivid, urgent, tenderhearted poems. Right on time, then, a secret third thing emerges: a final, lush and lucid sonnet sequence that culminates in a promise to abide—first, foremost, always—the self.
Melissa Crowe is the author of Dear Terror, Dear Splendor and Lo, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and the New England Review and has been featured in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. She was the recipient of the 2021 Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and is chair of the Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
Behold, Shara McCallum
Publisher: Alice James Books
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Over two years spent working on this book, McCallum traveled to museums in the U.S. and abroad with the explicit goal of standing before works of art created by contemporary Caribbean, Black, and women artists. The resulting collection works to untangle what it means to locate oneself within the frame—to imagine belonging by entering the scene.
Behold begins as a dialogue, a call and response traversing the territory McCallum is known for: history, interiority, identity, and the ways bodies present themselves in the world. These poems explore fulfillment and connection, the labor of seeking, the ache of loss, and the histories carried within the self. They are meditations on the existence of place within us, the way it is seeded within, and seeds us.
From Jamaica and born to a Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother, Shara McCallum is the author of seven books of poetry, published in the US & UK, including Behold, forthcoming in 2026. Awards for her work include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Musgrave Medal, NEA Fellowship, Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for No Ruined Stone, OCM Bocas Caribbean Poetry Prize for Madwoman, Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for The Water Between Us, among others. McCallum teaches at Penn State University and served as the Penn State Laureate from 2021-2022.
The Volcano’s High Held Snow Note, Tim Lilburn
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
The Volcano’s High Held Snow Note is a collection preoccupied with a small mountain called SṈAḴE (Snow Mountain) in the language of the W̱SÁNEĆ people on the Saanich Peninsula and the Gulf Islands. The time is the days of early Covid and the multiplying signs of violent climate alteration in burning northern forests. Elsewhere, an uncanny holy child wishes to swim through matter and find healing substances deep under the earth, Marguerite Porete has some ideas for how to deal with Master Reason in a crisis, and hummingbirds take in half-frozen sugar slush as anagogic liquid.
Tim Lilburn lives in the Bowker Creek watershed in W̱SÁNEĆ territory on Vancouver Island. He is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Harmonia Mundi, The House of Charlemagne, The Names, Assiniboia, Orphic Politics, Kill-site, Moosewood Sandhills, and To the River. His poetry has received the Governor General’s Award, the Canadian Authors Association Award, the European Medal of Poetry and Art (the Homer Medal), and the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award, among other prizes. His poetry has been translated widely. Lilburn is also the author of three earlier essay collections, Living In The World As If It Were Home, Going Home, and The Larger Conversation: Contemplation and Place, and editor of two other influential books on poetics. A new essay collection, Numinous Seditions: Interiority and Climate Change, appeared from the University of Alberta Press in 2023. He has taught at the University of Victoria, the University of Saskatchewan, and Middlebury College, and worked with the dance company New Dance Horizons as a writer and performer, collaborating with directors Edward Poitras and Robin Poitras. He has been the poetry editor for Grain and was one of the founders of Jackpine Press.
Perfect Italian, Kiki Petrosino
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Through vivid imagery and spare, precise verse, Kiki Petrosino’s Perfect Italian examines the complexities of cultural inheritance, the nuances of language, and the emotional weight of diasporic identity as a Black and Italian American. The collection weaves personal memories with ancestral echoes, reflecting on themes of family, grief, and the search for connection across generations and geographies. From the sensory experiences of travel in Italy to the tension of navigating dual identities, Petrosino’s work captures the beauty and struggle of self-discovery. Her language creates a rich tapestry of emotions and landscapes, offering a profound meditation on the intersections of race, culture, and belonging.
Perfect Italian is the third and final installment in Petrosino’s series on heritage and identity. Previous books in the collection, also published by Sarabande, include White Blood (2020) and Bright (2022)
Kiki Petrosino is the author of several poetry collections which include Perfect Italian (2026) White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia (2020), Witch Wife (2017), Hymn for the Black Terrific (2013), and Fort Red Border (2009), and the memoir Bright (2022) all published by Sarabande Books. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. She is a Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia where she teaches in the MFA and undergraduate Creative Writing programs. Petrosino is the recipient of a DeWitt Wallace/Readers Digest fellowship from MacDowell artist residency, a Pushcart Prize, a Fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, the UNT Rilke Prize, & the Spalding Prize, among other honors.
Love Between Men, Pádraig Ó Tuama
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Paperback
Some men love each other. For others, love of something else gets between them. Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Love Between Men begins in the garden of Eden, recasting Adam, Eve, and God into voices both abrasive and intimate. Then, in seven deadly sonnets, the poet details his own experiences of exorcisms and gay reparative therapies, exploring desire with its promise and fear of fulfillment. These poems—by turns, intelligent, funny, devastating, and explosive—consider time, the edges of empire, and the limits of the tongue. Here is rage paired with prayer, in punked-up forms and broken sequences. Love Between Men celebrates and challenges love: of history, poetry, language—and, ultimately, of change.
Pádraig Ó Tuama is an Irish poet, theologian, and broadcaster. He hosts Poetry Unbound from On Being Studios and has published critical and theological essays, a memoir, and multiple volumes of poetry. Kitchen Hymns was published in 2025 by Copper Canyon Press (published by Cheerio in the UK) and was shortlisted for a Lambda award. 44 Poems on Being with Each Other: A Poetry Unbound Collection (Canongate and W.W. Norton) was also published in 2025. Love Between Men is forthcoming in 2026.
Ó Tuama is a compelling writer and speaker. He holds an undergraduate and master’s degree in theology, with a PhD from the University of Glasgow in theology and creative writing. From 2014-2019 he was the leader of the Corrymeela Community, Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation community. He is on faculty at Yale Divinity School and lives in Connecticut on Quinnipiac land.
Small Talk, Acie Clark
Publisher: Hub City Press
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Paperback
Acie Clark wants to talk. In his debut collection, Clark reconsiders our relationship to talking about work and the weather. These poems tell the story of a trans man coming into a new literal and figurative voice while finding language for the world around him. In platonic love poems, interfaith self-talk, and images of the queer south, Clark calls contradictions into question and insists on the power of the conjunction and the hyphen. Small Talk works in both lyric and narrative traditions of trans poetics and spiritual writing.
From a poet Marie Howe once praised as “a stubborn inquisitive mind at work here and a resilient heart,” Small Talk introduces a unique new voice. Through lenses of recovery, birding, caregiving, gospel and semantics, this collection believes in multiplicities, in the seemingly contradicting identities that make us who we are, and that talking to each other might still save us.
Acie Clark is a multi-genre writer from Florida and Georgia. He has taught at the University of Central Arkansas, at Interlochen Center for the Arts, and at the Provincetown Public Library. He received his MFA from the University of Alabama where he worked for Black Warrior Review as the online editor and as a farmhand at Snows Bend Farm. His work has been supported by the Fine Arts Work Center, selected for Best New Poets, and anthologized in Divinity in the Margins, I Witness: An Anthology of Documentary Poetry, and The Florida Anthology. He lives in Arkansas.
Shadow of the Living Brightness, Dominique Béchard
Publisher: Coach House Books
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Shadow of the Living Brightness takes its title from Christian mystic Hildegard of Bingen’s description of the ‘sensation of God’s presence.’ Béchard manages to make this and other ineffables effable in this collection of poems that offers multiple dimensions of knowing and feeling that are at once fugitive and palpable. How to limn the tension between stepping into and away from the world? What do we not see in our seeing? How to sound sound? The book explores, with the dazzling honesty only a slant approach can achieve: grief, withdrawal, hope, mental illness, suicide. This is a book about unknowing, about uncertainty and in-between states. At the same time, the aching beauty of things and the language that evokes them can fire up a sense of radical attention and connection. Here it’s the very fallibility of set identities and truths that invites our re-engagement with their wobbly splendour.
Shadow of the Living Brightness is Dominique Béchard’s second collection. Her first, One Dog Town, came out with Gaspereau in 2019. She was a co-winner of the Frog Hollow Chapbook Contest in 2022 for Infinity Mirror. She has an MFA from New York University and a PhD from the University of New Brunswick. She currently lives in Windsor, where she works in publishing.
Lantern, Sanna Wani
Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Paperback
Meditating on the beauty of an ordinary life, Sanna Wani’s Lantern explores how we fall in love and make a home. What does it mean to belong to a city, or to truly enter adulthood? Imbued with a quiet queerness, this book is a guide for living in the aftermath of familial rifts, crises of faith, political struggle, and intergenerational grief—all while remaining devoted to an idea of goodness. Taking stock of one precious life, Lantern, Wani’s second poetry collection, invites us to consider our responsibilities—to ourselves and each other—and to choose who we might become.
Sanna Wani is a Kashmiri writer, editor, and translator based in Toronto. Her debut collection, My Grief, the Sun, won the 2023 Trillium Award for Poetry. Her writing has been widely published, including in Best Canadian Poetry, Brick, Hazlitt, and Poem-A-Day. She is the creator and host of the podcast, Poet Talk; poetry editor at The Ex-Puritan; and Publicity Manager at Between the Lines.
Rope, Maurice Riordan
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Nuggets of wisdom, snippets of anecdote and choice quotations are collected here, signposted by suggestive shoulder notes. Together they form a kind of contemporary commonplace book, accumulating with associative loops and echoes.
Across three prose sections, Maurice Riordan knots together strands including scientific lore, colour theory and AI, philosophy, ethics and psychoanalysis. There are instructive revelations on the art of poetry and literature – whether the ‘folly of literary ambition’ or the ‘sinuous garland of plagiarism’ – gleaned from a lifetime of reading and writing. The middle section delves into the author’s personal history, evoking a childhood in rural Cork – ‘I was born into a horse-drawn candlelit world’ – and a ‘new self’ forged in fatherhood.
Riordan is an intimate and jocular narrator throughout, calling upon everyone from Shakespeare to Schrödinger, Sappho to Siri to share this series of piquant and unforgettable discoveries.
Maurice Riordan was born in 1953 in Lisgoold, Co. Cork. His Selected Poems, chosen by Jack Underwood, appeared in 2025 drawing on work published across forty years. A former editor of the Poetry Review, he taught at Imperial College and at Goldsmiths, University of London. He teaches currently for the Faber Academy.
The Decadent Movement, Laura Kolbe
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Paperback
The Decadent Movement is a book-length suite of poems that spins backward in time through the early days of parenthood and the preceding nine months of pregnancy. Beginning a year after childbirth in the harried throes of marriage and parenting, the collection proceeds toward its finale “Minus Time,” which marvels at death’s near-identical twin – that infinite period of nonexistence that precedes each new life. From the opening poem “Afterword,” each dated poem slides backward in time, with the poem “Hinge” at the manuscript’s midpoint spoken from the moment of childbirth.
This unraveling of a predicament by playing it in reverse – “Muybridged / out so anyone could see, framed, a woman / running for her life” – allows for rigorously honest accounting of mixed feelings about motherhood and its accompanying physical and psychic changes, detached from the readymade tropes of the “pregnancy plot.”
The Decadent Movement is a book about the fear of loss (of sexual personhood, bodily self-determination, the ability to write, and the license to be headlong and volatile). Yet it is also about the need to insist on new terms of engagement with those we love, new languages of willfulness and desire.
Laura Kolbe is a physician, medical ethicist, and writer. Her poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry series and in American Poetry Review, Conjunctions, Harper’s, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Her first collection, Little Pharma, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her chapbook Keeping House: Six Longer Love Poems was selected by Kwame Dawes as the Center for Book Arts annual chapbook contest winner. She teaches and practices medicine in New York City.
Riddled in Red, Brenda Sciberras
Publisher: At Bay Press
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Paperback
A new collection of poetry by award-winning poet Brenda Sciberras. Separated into three sections, and written in the experimental ekphrasis form, the poet uses a detailed description of a particular painting by Mary Pratt, as a literary device. This process allowed for an emotional response and brought forth memories or associations from the poet’s own personal experience, often using description beyond the frame of the artwork. The poet has connected with Mary Pratt’s surviving family members and received permission to both use and discuss the famed Canadian’s iconic artworks. Riddled in Red draws fascinating parallels between visual art and the written word.
Brenda Sciberras is an award-winning poet. Her first collection, Magpie Days, won the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book, and was nominated for Most Promising Writer at the Manitoba Book Awards 2015. Her second collection, Starland, was launched in 2018, both with Turnstone Press. Her poetry has been published in literary journals and anthologies across Canada. Most recently, six poems from Riddled in Red (At Bay Press, 2026) have been published in Prairie Fire and the New Quarterly. She lives in Winnipeg.
Out Toward Morning, Catherine Stearns
Publisher: Off the Grid Press
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Paperback
Spent by their losses, people come to an impasse and must forge new ways to understand the world. As the philosopher Stanley Cavell wrote, “We have to learn to think after thinking comes to a dead end.” In the poems of Out Toward Morning, leaf-gatherers, dog-walkers, children and artists are caught unlearning ways of thinking, to live “after thinking.” Stearns blends memory and history with humor and hope in poems that present us with a coming-of-age with age, its fears, paradoxes, and freedom, reminding us that while change is part of life, so too, inevitably, is transformation. In the poem that closes this collection, when a transfigured Daphne “examines her tattoos,” we see how the most beautiful, redeemable of human forms emerges “when the gods bear down.”
Originally from the Midwest, Catherine Stearns received her MFA in Poetry from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. Her first book of poems, The Transparency of Skin (New Rivers Press), was a Minnesota Voices Project winner and a finalist for the Minnesota Book Awards. A later chapbook, Then & Again, winner of the Elyse Wolf Prize, was published by Slate Roof Press. She has received grants and awards from the Iowa Arts Council, The Dana Award, the Loft-McKnight Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and her poems have been anthologized in a collection of writing by American women abroad. She taught writing and literature in the Boston area for many years, and now lives with her husband, Richard Klug, a film director and cinematographer, on the Charles River in Natick, Massachusetts.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 9/22 and 9/28 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
“This language offers one possible framing through which to appreciate the law’s capacity to hope for, request, and even command commitment to a more just future.” Read two poems by Maggie Wang, our first biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Possibilities for Action.”
Chapbook Poem: I’ll Never Look This Good Again by Douglas Piccinnini
“[The poem] came out of real pressure: despair, worry, and grief I wanted to hold unflinchingly, alongside the anxiety of becoming a parent… For me the poem became a meditation on all the feeling that surfaces precisely when we’re told to feel only joy.” Read an excerpt from Douglas Piccinnini’s chapbook, House of Bad Memories, along with a few words from the poet.
“She sees herself in carbon, the element that bonds with almost anything- not because it wants to, but because it has empty spaces and things keep showing up to fill them. Notifications. Noise. Needs that never stop arriving.” Read four poems by Joely Williams, our second biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Single Mother Considers the Periodic Table.”
ADHD in a Non-ADHD World: on Undersight by Alison Hurwitz
“[Hurwitz] shares moments of angst and moments of awe. More than that, there are moments of deep recognition. She sees herself in [her sons] and, in fact, receives a later-life ADHD diagnosis of her own.” Read the full chapbook review by new contributor, Nancy Murphy.
“The woman’s head & hair are lavishly dressed. I probably leapt off the logic of the hairdresser being blind and therefore had to work on the head/body/mind rather than just hair as a surface issue of presentation.” Read two poems by Irene Cunningham, our third biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “The Blind Hairdresser.”
Flash Fiction: Nova by Kimmy Chang
“‘Nova’ is a lyrical second-person story about the narrator’s first true encounter with death…the story presents loss not as beautiful in itself, but as the place where beauty begins.” Read the first original fiction piece of the Summer 2026 issue, “Nova” by Kimmy Chang.
“To fit the nuanced, dimensional experience of dysphoria and transition into narrative…often feels flattening, falsely assured. I wanted to look at this discomfort I felt, to see what was necessary in it.” Read three poems by Joshua Zeitler, our fourth biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Cobbling.”
Excerpt: “On the puzzle still inside my head” by Truong Tran
“I am trying to excavate memories. I am trying to negotiate the difficult realities of existing as a brown man in this country and within the consciousness of white America.” Read an excerpt from Truong Tran’s forthcoming book from City Lights, How to Exi(s)t: A Poet’s Memoir.
“These poems try to make sense of how I arrived at a life that probably seems well thought-out, but has been one reactionary choice after another.” Read three poems by A.R. Dugan, our fifth biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Sleeptalking.”
Original Fiction: Muse by Somtoo Celestine Ezioha
“What I tried to trace was the underside. How watching someone closely for long enough becomes a substitute for approaching them.” Read the second original fiction piece of the Summer 2026 issue, “Muse” by Somtoo Celestine Ezioha.
“After childbirth, my body became a site of criticism rather than something to be celebrated for what it had endured and created. Writing this became a way to confront that experience…” Read three poems by Tanya Tuzeo, our sixth biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “i get Botox.”
“Through images of a familiar street, personal belongings, and a figure suspended in time, the poem considers absence, remembrance, and the quiet ways we continue searching for those who are gone.” Read two poems by Aardhra Chandran, our seventh, and final, biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Street View, 2021.”
Original Fiction: Aletheia by Kalliste Hardy
“Each fragment opens a door to the unsaid or the forgotten, letting language bruise and bloom. It is a study in red, in inheritance, in language, and of the quiet haunt of becoming.” Read the third, and final, original fiction piece of the Summer 2026 issue, “Aletheia” by Kalliste Hardy.