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.
Assembled Audience, Erika Meitner
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: September 29, 2026
Format: Paperback
“What does it mean to gather together?” asks this fervent, frank collection. In these poems, people come together—over meals, at the beach, in protest and prayer and celebration, through vital acts of witness and collective mourning. Amid instability and peril, embodied gathering is not only a survival mechanism, but a form of resistance.
Provocative and engaging, our speaker is a peripatetic philosopher, at once a Cassandra and a Pied Piper who brings us into the urgencies of the present moment: climate change, the pandemic and its aftermath, gun violence, xenophobia, fracking, eroding reproductive rights, and the moralized pressure to “stay present” amid disorder and danger. Over and over, we return to the hard work of existing in the Anthropocene—despite all of our knowledge, everything is perilous, and safety is an illusion.
Brutally honest and lyrically dexterous, fusing Whitman’s generous expansiveness with Erika Meitner’s signature virtuosic electricity and wit, Assembled Audience reminds us that forced optimism and bland platitudes won’t save us—but luck and wonder might.
Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Useful Junk; Holy Moly Carry Me, which won the National Jewish Book Award in poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Copia; and Ideal Cities, a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Meitner’s poems have been anthologized widely and have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Poetry, Orion, The Believer, and elsewhere. Other honors include fellowships from MacDowell, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Loghaven Artist Residency, T. S. Eliot House, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Marble House Project, Bethany Arts Community, the Mandel Institute, and the US-UK Fulbright Commission. Meitner is currently a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also directs the Creative Writing program and the Conney Project on Jewish Arts.
The Blue Eye of Earth, Beckian Fritz Goldberg
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication Date: September 29, 2026
Format: Paperback
In her first collection in a decade, Beckian Fritz Goldberg returns with The Blue Eye of Earth, her tour de force of luminous, meditative poems that measure a secret distance between person and cosmos, memory and desire, beauty and grief. Whether standing at her neighbor’s fence of desert oleander, or birdwatching with her mother, or flipping through late-night TV, or going out to watch the moon again, Fritz Goldberg never fails to attend the romance of a world we are sure to lose. This is a lyricist unafraid of the ordinary predicament of the night sky, a place where historical figures, scientific inquiry, and encounters with strangers are imagined with intimacy and music, and where the orphic questions are answered by a glance back. Through precise imagery and philosophical reach, these poems pursue what it means to inhabit a mortal body on a threatened planet while still finding moments of wonder, connection, and astonishment. In The Blue Eye of Earth, Beckian Fritz Goldberg offers her sublime, compassionate hymnal to the enduring mysteries of love, consciousness, and mortal time.
Beckian Fritz Goldberg is the author of seven previous volumes of poetry, including Never Be the Horse, winner of the University of Akron Poetry Prize; Twentieth Century Children, winner of the Indiana Review Chapbook Prize; and Lie Awake Lake, winner of the Field Poetry Prize. Goldberg has been awarded the Theodore Roethke Poetry Prize from Poetry Northwest, The Gettysburg Review Annual Poetry Prize, two Arizona Commission on the Arts Poetry Fellowships, and two Pushcart Prizes. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including New American Poets of the ’90s, Best American Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Harper’s, Gulf Coast, Plume,and others. She currently lives in Oxnard, California, with her two cats.
Egrets, While War, Tishani Doshi
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: September 29, 2026
Format: Paperback
Unflinching, yet tender, the poems in Tishani Doshi’s Egrets, While War exist in a world of dualities, holding “desire in one hand, suffering in another.” Meditations on loss and larger world conflicts move alongside personal experiences, vulnerable self-reflections, and a deep longing for “what’s wild / and pulsing.” Thick with lush and immersive imagery, the pages of this collection are punctuated by birds as omens, as prophecies, as epiphanies, and sometimes, as moments of “brief blazing splendor.” Parakeets feed from orange blossoms outside a window. Wildflowers appear in the garden overnight. Sunbirds dive “in and out / of dens of gold.” Sharp and subtle, these poems lament the loss of humanity, while relishing the beauty, strength, and persistence of the natural world. Egrets, While War posits hope, resilience, and the earth as answers to our physical, spiritual, and emotional survival.
Tishani Doshi publishes poetry, essays, and fiction. Her most recent books are A God at the Door; Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Poetry Award and a Firecracker Award; and the novel Small Days and Nights, shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, the Tata Literature Live! Book of the Year Award (Fiction), and The New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. For fifteen years, she worked as a dancer with the Chandralekha group in Chennai. She has interviewed over a hundred writers about the craft of writing and has published essays in The Hindu, Granta, The National, The New York Times, The Guardian, Literary Hub, and Corriere della Sera. She is a visiting associate professor at New York University Abu Dhabi, and otherwise lives on a beach in Tamil Nadu. Egrets, While War is her fifth full-length collection of poems.
Welcome Calm, Silence Tyrants: Adult Lullabies, Melanie Weldon-Soiset
Publisher: Shanti Arts
Publication Date: September 29, 2026
Format: Paperback
Welcome Calm, Silence Tyrants: Adult Lullabies is a unique and beautiful exploration of the varied roles of lullabies across time and cultures. Introduced by a descriptive essay grounded in extensive research, debut author Melanie Weldon-Soiset reveals that lullabies are not only soothing songs, but also lament, blessing, secret confession, and songs of work and action. Lullabies speak to a culture’s fears and dreams. If the Smithsonian and the Calm app collaborated on a joint book in common, it would be Welcome Calm, Silence Tyrants. Diverse in form and topic, these adult lullabies invite the benevolence of safe slumber that is grounded in social justice.
Melanie Weldon-Soiset has held many roles over the years: teacher, student, poet, pastor, immigrant, and #ChurchToo survivor. The more she practice contemplative prayer and poetry, the more wonder, creativity, and hope she discovers in the world. Indeed, the process of receiving and creating beauty this season has helped to bring healing from past traumas.
Beckoning, Hollie Adams
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Publication Date: October 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
How do you become your best self in what feels like the worst of worlds? Both probing and playful, the poems in this collection are interested in what it means to be a good person while trying to survive late capitalism. Is it our intentions or our actions which make us “good”? Is it enough to try to do better, or must our trying accomplish something? The speakers of these poems are often looking for better versions of themselves, imagining other selves within themselves, and seeking out alternate worlds in which they are themselves but new and improved.
Hollie Adams, originally from Windsor, Ontario, now lives in Bangor, Maine, teaching Creative Writing and Canadian Literature at the University of Maine. She studied at the University of Windsor and holds a PhD in English from the University of Calgary. Hollie is the author of the novel Things You’ve Inherited from Your Mother (NeWest Press, 2015) and the short story collection Dear Humans (NeWest Press, 2026). She has served as the fiction editor of The Windsor Review and as Resident Artist at Acadia National Park. Her poetry and prose have been published in magazines and anthologies including Geist, The New Quarterly, Room, Carousel, Event, Contemporary Verse 2, Best Canadian Poetry, and Best Canadian Essays.
HUM, Sanam Sheriff
Publisher: The Backwaters Press
Publication Date: October 1, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
The word “hum” in Urdu can mean both “we” and “I.” In English, it’s a gesture of sound—a vibration. Sanam Sheriff’s HUM is a trans call to the beauty of attempt rather than the clarity of arrival. This book seeks as the pilgrim seeks, wandering from a plural sense of self with a lyric attunement to the wound’s power.
Following a queer, trans, Muslim speaker who grew up in southern India and migrated to the United States, Sheriff’s debut collection invites us to listen: to how yearning for a country blurs with yearning for a beloved; to how exile, for queer and trans people, is where the body itself becomes a place of dignity and prayer.
Enriched by Urdu lyric traditions of love, and love mourned, HUM raises the queer erotic to the heavens, even as the grief of separation lingers as paradise lost. Here, Sheriff weaves together the two most potent threads of human life: pain and love, strummed until they sing.
Sanam Sheriff is a queer poet, performer, and educator from Bangalore, India. From 2022 to 2025, they served as a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at Bryn Mawr College. Sheriff curates the Poets’ Studio with Twelve Gates Arts in Philadelphia.
Song in Tammuz, Avia Tadmor
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Publication Date: October 1, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
While stylistically daring, even virtuosic, Avia Tadmor’s stunning debut is unified by its enduring engagement with questions of language and alterity. What does it mean to be othered by and through language? What happens when grammar, syntax, and the concepts of identity housed within them are at odds? Does a revolutionary message demand new forms of discourse? “I can say it through the distance of this other tongue,” Tadmor writes.
Indeed, she considers the role of language—from conceptual framework to vast storehouse of history, culture, and inheritance—in shaping the self, ultimately revealing our agency within a grammar and syntax we did not choose. As Tadmor writes, “Her pen is a stronghold, a lighthouse / flickering late in July.”
Avia Tadmor’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Best New Poets, The New Republic, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Tadmor has received support from Yaddo, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Adroit Journal’s Gregory Djanikian Scholars Program. Previously, she taught writing at Columbia University, where she directed the Columbia Artist/Teachers program, promoting no-cost arts education in schools and community organizations in New York City. Currently, she is clinical assistant professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. Born in Jerusalem, she lives in New York.
Sonic Warfare, Adeena Karasick
Publisher: Roof Books
Publication Date: October 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
Through a language mired in interlingual insurrection, Sonic Warfare negotiates the fraught reality of generative artificial intelligence, large language models and their impact on contemporary socio-philosophical, linguistic and political ethos. Highlighting how when presence is relational and there is no fixed, locatable Truth, when everything is haunted by repetition, substitutions, veiled surveillance, within a scrolling corollary of coded communication, it wryly examines the public conversation on one of the most important challenges facing the world today.
Adeena Karasick’s poetry demonstrates how desire flows through language via Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish, feminist mashups. Recent books include Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings, Æ rotomania: The Book of Lumenations, Massaging the Medium: 7 Pechakuchas, Checking In, and Salomé: Woman of Valor. She teaches Literature and Critical Theory at Pratt Institute. She is Poet Laureate of the Institute of General Semantics. The Adeena Karasick archive is at Simon Fraser University.
Mother Wound, Gauri Awasthi
Publisher: Trio House Press
Publication Date: October 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
In the tradition of Kith by Divya Victor and Illiterate Heart by Meena Alexander, Gauri Awasthi’s collection is firmly set in both India and the US, and navigates the emotional, physical, and cultural tensions through a feminist lens.
Mother Wound examines the inheritance of trauma through the lens of a daughter’s experience of domestic violence and emotional abuse. These raw, vivid poems grapple with questions of identity as a girl becoming a woman, as well as a non-citizen living between homes, between countries. Structured around the rhythm cycle of Indian classical music (SA-RE-GA-MA-PA-DHA-NI-SA, equivalent to Western Solfège), Mother Wound explores the meaning of each note, mirroring the cycle of generational trauma that passes through women, echoed through language and recurring motifs, in the end composing songs of words to create shrines of safety and healing.
Gauri Awasthi, born in Kanpur, India, is a poet and filmmaker. She has won fellowships from Yaddo, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Hedgebrook, and Hambidge Center where she was a National Endowment for the Arts Distinguished Fellow. A formally trained Bharatanatyam dancer, Gauri lives in New York City.
The Cosmos and Me: New and Selected Poems, Lucille Lang Day
Publisher: Trio House Press
Publication Date: October 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
Lucille Lang Day’s best poems are collected here, tracing themes of feminism, identity, nature, and of course, the cosmos. Beginning with poems from the early 1970’s, when she was a young mother, and ending with poems written now that she is a grandmother, this collection is, at its heart, a love letter to the future.
The Cosmos and Me by Lucille Lang Day is an opus of a life spent pursuing wonder, justice, love, and of course, poetry. In these poems that span over fifty years, Day invites the reader to consider the larger questions of existence and meaning alongside the small joys of the everyday, with poems on the universe alongside poems that consider red shoes or a lost necklace, poems set in outer space alongside poems set in the backyard. Lucille Lang Day is unafraid to ask and to answer the hard questions, to bear witness to our times, be they beautiful, tragic, or both. As California Poet Laureate emeritus Dana Gioia puts it: “Full of both intellect and emotion, The Cosmos and Me lives up to its large and lofty title.”
Lucille Lang Day is the author of seven full-length poetry collections, four poetry chapbooks, two children’s books, and a memoir. She also edited the anthology Poetry and Science: Writing Our Way to Discovery and coedited Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California and Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California. The founder and publisher of a small press, Scarlet Tanager Books,
she lives in Oakland, California.
Public House, Dylan Weir
Publisher: Trio House Press
Publication Date: October 1, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Like Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar, Public House by Dylan Weir reckons with the uneven, sometimes messy process of recovery from alcoholism in this inspiring and artful collection.
Public House maps the delirious landscapes of addiction. In poem after poem, Weir chronicles the mix of memory and mythology concocted between last call and first light. Between oblivion and sobriety. Between the pull of the bottle and the harder seductions of hope. Part dive bar karoake part confession booth breakdown, Weir writes with the rhythm of someone who’s counted days, lost count, and started over too many times to count, who has learned recovery isn’t a straight line but a mobius strip, a roundabout on which one must meet and lose many different versions of one’s self.
Dylan Weir is a writer who lives in Chicago. A graduate of the MFA program at University of Wisconsin-Madison, his poems have appeared in Best New Poets, New England Review, Narrative and
elsewhere.
Christos Anesti, Sylvie Baumgartel
Publisher: TRP: The University Press of SHSU
Publication Date: October 1, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In the third poetry collection by Sylvie Baumgartel, Christos Anesti takes beautifully rich textures of art, history, and mythology and melds them with raw images of pain, trauma and environmental devastation. Each page delivers a lush declaration: God is who we are. These poems journey into territories, typically uncomfortable, but laced in language that’s not just accessible but also relatable.
Sylvie Baumgartel is the author of two books of poetry: Song of Songs (FSG, 2019) and Pink (FSG, 2021). Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Financial Times, The New York Review of Books, Subtropics, The Virginia Quarterly Review, the PEN Poetry Series and elsewhere. Her essay, “Fat Man & Little Boy” was included in The Best American Essays 2023, edited by Vivian Gornick.
Crying My Best, Angelica Esquivel
Publisher: TRP: The University Press of SHSU
Publication Date: October 1, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Crying My Best is a poetry debut that delves into the complex, often hidden histories of the poet’s Midwestern Mexican American family. These poems confront intergenerational addiction, cultural estrangement, and personal and collective grief. Here, language makes survival possible and becomes a turning point for transformation.
Crying My Best is a powerful poetry debut that brims with emotional urgency and that delves into the complex, often hidden histories of the poet’s Midwestern Mexican American family. With unflinching honesty and clarity, these poems confront intergenerational addiction, cultural estrangement, and personal and collective grief. Here, language makes survival possible and becomes a turning point for transformation and a hard-won sense of wonder.
Angelica Esquivel is a Xicana poet and artist from Fostoria, Ohio. Her work has appeared in Poet Lore, Barrelhouse, and A Public Space. Her first chapbook, A Casual Apocalypse in Acapulco, received the Prima Materia Award from First Matter Press. She is the recipient of the 2021 Zocalo Poetry Prize and currently serves as the inaugural 2025-2026 YpsiWrites Writer in Residence of Ypsilanti, Michigan.
Tooth Gaps in the Archives, Francis Dylan Waguespack
Publisher: Button Poetry
Publication Date: September 29, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Set in Southeast Louisiana—one of the last regions in the contemporary United States to resist full Americanization—Tooth Gaps in the Archives traces how place-based cultural memory persists beyond its disappearing geography and amid a cycle of forced migration, an emerging domestic climate diaspora, and the slow violence enacted against a people whose power has been systematically withheld through regulatory capture. In Tooth Gaps, Louisiana is not rendered as the unlucky exception or a site of tragedy, but as a resource extraction colony, its people asked to disappear quietly to facilitate the commodification and consumption of their land, labor, and culture.
Moving between lyric poems and documentary prose, Tooth Gaps drops the reader directly into the speaker’s interior and exterior worlds without mediation, creating an immersive, embodied experience that refuses abstraction and distance. From the very first to the very last page, it insists on the body as archive and frames the very existence of the people of Louisiana as an act of resistance.
Francis Dylan Waguespack (he/they) is a painter and Pushcart-nominated poet from New Orleans who writes about the politics of disasters and being from a place and in a body that both live under threat. He is 34, and therefore recently found out about birds. His work appears in many publications including ONLY POEMS DAILY, wildness journal, The Penn Review, and Foglifter. He was a finalist for the 2025 St. Lawrence Poetry Award and won the 2025 Button Poetry First Book Award for his debut collection, Tooth Gaps in the Archives.
Blazes, Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Publisher: Subpress
Publication Date: October 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
I was already feeling the weight of my responsibility to encapsulate the work of, and this work by, a titan of poetry, poetics, and criticism whose vast and various writings I’ve been poring over for decades, and then I read Blazes and my task became more daunting. Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s latest and final collection of poems, collages, and prose meditations on time, art, death, and memory is the set of wayfinding marks and bright fires that its title suggests. Situated between the rigid days and the fleeting “traces” of our lives that we fight to retain in light and in spite of how “dawns regularly dawn / beyond you,” Blazes evinces a furious mind grasping at sense with the perilous syntax that DuPlessis has spent her career so beautifully engaging and upending. —Kate Colby
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a poet, scholar/critic, and collagist whose notable long poem The Complete Drafts was published by Coffee House Press (2025); it is conceptualized as an excessive and wide-ranging work of socio-poesis within an ethical aesthetics. In addition, CHAX Press brought out her Selected Poems 1980-2020 (2022).
In a grouping of six recent books, she faces the recent past with a fierce poetic response. Among these books are Late Work, Around the Day in 80 Worlds, Poetic Realism, and Daykeeping. The book Blazes caps this series of synoptic books from 2015-2026.
children, Milena Marković, Steven Teref (Tr), Maja Teref (Tr)
Publisher: Diálogos
Publication Date: October 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
Diálogos welcomes back award-winning Serbian poet, playwright, and screenwriter Milena Marković (1974–) with a blockbuster follow-up to Sympathy for the Salami. Deca (Children) is a book-length poem which, upon publication in 2021, won the NIN Book of the Year Award, the Serbian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. In this page-turner, Marković tells the story of her life from childhood to child-rearing in one breathless push of narrative poetry. It is as unheard-of in Serbia as it is in the United States or elsewhere for a book of poetry to become a best-seller and its author a cultural hero, but this is what Milena accomplished with this book.
We are grateful to Steven Teref & Maja Teref for this translation especially since their translation of Sympathy for the Salami was short-listed for the National Translation Award in 2025.
Milena Marković (b. 1974) is an award-winning Serbian poet, playwright, and screenwriter. She has published seven poetry collections; her latest collection, Deca [Children], is a book-length poem published in 2021. Deca won the NIN Book of the Year Award, the Serbian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. The book has been adapted into an opera in Belgrade, Serbia and a play in Zagreb, Croatia. Her own plays have been staged across Europe and in the United States. She has also written screenplays for film and TV, such as Patria, winner for Best Screenplay at the FEST International Film Festival.
Steven Teref is an editor, a translator, and a writer. He translates from Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian in collaboration with Maja Teref. Steven is the editor for the Academic Studies Press series Companions to Slavic Literature. He is coeditor with Aleksandar Bošković of the book Zenithism (1921–1927): A Yugoslav Avant-Garde Anthology (Academic Studies Press, 2023). His poetry translations include Novica Tadić’s Assembly (Host Publications, 2009) and Ana Ristović’s Directions for Use (Zephyr Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Best Translated Book Award, and National Translation Award. He is the author of the poetry collection Foreign Object (Negative Capability Press, 2017).
Maja Teref is a translator from Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian. Her translations include Ana Ristović’s Directions for Use, shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Best Translated Book Award, and the National Translation Award, and Novica Tadić’s Assembly. Her translation of Milena Marković’s play Tracks is forthcoming in the Egret anthology Yugoslavia Breaking Up, featuring one play from each of the former republics and Kosovo of the former Yugoslavia. Her translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Brooklyn Rail, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. Maja teaches English at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools where she is the faculty advisor for the literary translation journal Ouroboros Review.
Wet Manual, Eric Amling
Publisher: b l u s h
Publication Date: October 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
In Eric Amling’s Wet Manual, nothing is too geologic or fragile, too monstrous or saccharine to occupy its own landscape of attention. Two potted plants, a father who plays god, a banana going bad in a bag, the Santa Ana winds inhabit the same careful plane. The map, the manual that forms, wry and grief-laden in turns, rushes through a distinctly American terrain. There are glass Uzis filled with rum, a dentist’s kids idling on jet skis, bogs confident in their burping, keyboards that have become sundials, and meteorites hidden in every Bob Ross painting. There is also immeasurable sadness, with the funny and strange coming at an obvious cost. What do you even do with poems anymore, the speaker laments. As the poems wind with the tightest of control, they remind us that we are at once enormous and negligible and also simply passing through.
A kitchen drawer with various sauce packets… The whole world having been at some point put in various types of mouths.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 9/29 and 10/5 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.