New Books in Poetry

In his first work of nonfiction, poet chaun webster blends memoir, archival research, visual poetics, and cultural criticism to trace the ways structural anti-Black violence has shaped his inheritance, and grapples with the question of how to know—and mourn—the kin he was never able to meet.webster is particularly drawn to his grandfather Reginald, who worked for years as a Pullman porter, who was denied rest while his labor enabled rest for others, and who died without receiving a pension before webster was born. Returning to the figures of Reginald and the train, webster explores the relationship between comportment and confinement, speaking in tongues in the Pentecostal church, the ancestral meeting place of dreams, his fraught relationship with his mother, and moments with his own child. Throughout, webster also reflects on nonbiological kinship, tethering his and his predecessors’ lives to those of several historical Black figures—Harriet Jacobs, John Henry, Henry “Box” Brown, and Henry Dumas, a writer who was killed by New York City police while riding the subway.Attempting to exhaust the possibilities of the sentence and the grammar of anti-Blackness, webster riffs and rails on the debris within reach. Part elegy, part archival detective story, and part visual poem, Without Terminus: untraining an archive (Greywolf, 2026) is a philosophically rigorous and deeply moving text that takes us beyond the archive of loss. You can find the works chaun references during our conversation, as well as a further discussion about literary form, at the Additions to the Archive Substack. Follow chaun webster on Instagram. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

A guide for today’s classrooms, this collection from leading Joyce scholars explores innovative pedagogical approaches to the works of this often-challenging writer Teaching James Joyce in the Twenty-First Century (UP of Florida, 2025) presents examples of bold, innovative pedagogical techniques instructors have used to adapt the study of Joyce’s work for the contemporary classroom. Leading Joyce scholars share approaches that go beyond the traditional university lecture hall to include experiences teaching high school students, senior citizens, art students, book club members, and people in prisons. The strategies in this inspirational volume range from class discussions to creating art and music to walking city streets. Works examined include the complex Finnegans Wake and the influential modernist milestones Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. While Joyce is often viewed as an essential and foundational author of Irish literature, contributors to this volume argue that the spirit of Joyce’s writing is global, and they offer suggestions for teaching these works in an international context. Students are often daunted by the perceived difficulty and inaccessibility of Joyce, but this volume helps both new and experienced teachers of Joyce make the writer’s texts understandable, relatable, and even fun. These authors argue that reading Joyce helps develop skills in holding and interrogating opposing ideas, skills that are essential in navigating the modern academic and political landscape. In grappling with Joyce, students will recognize his writing as relevant and urgent. Barry Devine is associate professor of English at Heidelberg University. Ellen Scheible is professor of English at Bridgewater State University. Scheible is the author or editor of many books, including Body Politics in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction: The Literary Legacy of Mother Ireland. Daniel Moran’s writing about literature and film can be found on Pages and Frames. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing and co-hosts the long-running podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Furious Harvests (Harvard University Press, 2026) transports readers to Alex Averbuch’s homeland of eastern Ukraine. Amid the bloody destruction brought by Russia’s war of aggression, the poet toils in fields of memory, reaping lyrics from family archives and mementos to amass testaments to the complex and painful histories of this place and its peoples. A family tree, letters to home, and the faint scent of a grandmother’s dress kept in the back of a closet speak to histories of inter-ethnic violence, WWII forced laborers, and the Holocaust. Mixing dialects, styles, registers, and voices, Furious Harvests—presented in a bilingual edition—defiantly cries out in its rage and longing toward reconciliation of the self and other.  Alex Averbuch is assistant professor of Ukrainian literature and culture in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. Megan Buskey is an independent writer and scholar focused on Ukrainian history, culture, and politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

For the RtB Books in Dark Times series back in 2021, John spoke with Elizabeth Bradfield, editor of Broadsided Press, poet, professor of creative writing at Brandeis, naturalist, photographer. Her books include Interpretive Work, Approaching Ice, Once Removed, and Toward Antarctica. She lives on Cape Cod, travels north every summer to guide people into Arctic climes, birdwatches. Liz is in and of and for our whole natural world. Did poetry sustaining her through the darkest hours of the pandemic? What about other sources of inspiration? Mentioned in the episode: Eavand Boland, “Quarantine” (from Against Love Poetry; read her NY Times obituary here) Maeve Binchy, “Circle of Friends“ Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology Louise Gluck Averno and Wild Iris Brian Teare, Doomstead Days Derek Walcott, “Omeros“ W. S. Merwin, “The Folding Cliffs” Natasha Trethewey, “Belloqc’s Ophelia“ Yeats, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” Nest, Eggs and Nestlings of North American Birds (Princeton Field

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with poet Sharon Israel about her poetry collection, Voice Lesson (Post Traumatic Press). Sharon Israel’s poems are full of song and detail, movement and color; the pleasures she brings to the page are many and varied. We are as likely to find Israel’s speaker sighting owls in the Catskills, or helping in her dad’s butcher shop, as in the world of music implied by the title. In Voice Lesson, Israel’s urge is alchemical, so that when she’s behind the counter, “scoop[ing] shiny brains into plastic bags” she is also arranging them “carefully like pale jewels.” She’s after a kind of transformation, and urges us, “Always make room/for that singing thing/inside you.”  —Daisy Fried, author of Women's Poetry: Poems and Advice Sharon Israel, Sephardic American poet and soprano, was an early recipient of Brooklyn College's Leonard Hecht Poetry Explication Award, was nominated for “Best of the Net” 2016 and won Four Lines’ 2020 winter poetry challenge. Her chapbook Voice Lesson was published by Post Traumatic Press. Her work has most recently appeared in Loud Coffee Press among other journals (print and on-line) and anthologies. . Sharon hosts the radio show and podcast, Planet Poet-Words in Space, on WIOX 91.3 FM in the Catskills. All podcast episodes are available on YouTube Music, Spotify and Apple. Sharon is a member of the sound/poetry duo OrphicMix with composer Robert Cucinotta. Sharon has also collaborated with Cucinotta on works for voice, live instruments, and electronics and has premiered several of his works in New York.Sharon has a B.A. from Brooklyn College and an M.S. from the New School of Social Research. She was a local news reporter, feature writer and music critic for Courier-Life publications, Women’s ENews and for the late, lamented Brooklyn Phoenix; she worked as a shoe saleswoman, microbiology lab technician, secretary, had a short stint as a municipal bond salesperson, and worked over two decades as a grant writer and development director. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with award-winning poet Stephanie Bolster about her new book, Long Exposure (Palimpsest Press, 2025). After Hurricane Katrina, the photographer Robert Polidori flew to New Orleans to document the devastation. In the wreckage he witnessed, and in her questions about what she saw in what he saw, Stephanie Bolster found the beginnings of a long poem. Those questions led to unexpected places; meanwhile, life kept pouring in. The ensuing book, Long Exposure, is Bolster's fifth, a roaming, associative exploration of disasters and their ongoing aftermaths, sufferings large and small, and the vulnerability and value of our own lives. Incremental, unsettling, Long Exposure rushes to and through. Stephanie Bolster has published four books of poetry, the most recent of which, A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth, appeared with Brick Books in 2011 and was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Award. Her first book, White Stone: The Alice Poems (Véhicule Press, 1998) won the Governor General's and the Gerald Lampert Awards, and her second, Two Bowls of Milk (McClelland and co-edited Penned: Zoo Poems (Signal/Véhicule, 2009). Born in Vancouver, she grew up in Burnaby, BC, now lives in Pointe-Claire, Québec on the Mohawk (Kanien'kehá:ka) territory of Skaniatará:ti, and has taught creative writing at Concordia University in Montréal since 2000. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks wit Griffin Prize winner Kaie Kellough about his new long poem, Interposition (McClelland & Steward, 2026). Featured in the Publishers Weekly Spring 2026 PreviewFrom Kaie Kellough, poet, sound performer, and Griffin prize winner, comes a linguistic incursion into desire, technology, and the absurd.Kaie Kellough (Magnetic Equator, Griffin Poetry Prize winner, 2020) returns with a long poem that repurposes the language of the present. Interposition borrows its vocabulary from the news, entertainment, war, advertising, technology, and the everyday tragedies of popular culture. It reveals the morbid humour of our inability to distinguish between the urgencies of personal achievement and climate crisis. It compresses sound and rhythm into paradox, and it conflates absurdity and emergency.Mapping the continued encroachment of capital and virtual culture upon our psychic space, Interposition examines how, with each click, we are reconstituted online and sold back to ourselves, and asks: How do we uncouple our selves from our avatars? KAIE KELLOUGH is a poet, fiction writer, and sound performer living in Montreal. His previous collection, Magnetic Equator, won the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is a writer and vocalist for the group FYEAR and is pursuing graduate work in English at Queen’s University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Sarah Jean Grimm is the author of Soft Focus (Metatron, 2017) and the chapbook Hog Lagoon (blush, 2023). She was a founding editor of Powder Keg Magazine (2014-2019) and currently edits the small poetry press After Hours Editions. She lives in upstate New York and works as a book publicist with Broadside PR. Book Recommendations: Niina Pollari Paths of Totality Song Cave Press, Emily Skillings, Tantrums in Air Michael Earl Craig, Thin Kimono Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In 2017, a cache of Jewish materials was discovered in the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania. The discovery included a manuscript of “Tsen Lider” (“Ten Poems”), a collection written and compiled by Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever while living in the Vilna Ghetto. This unique manuscript includes variants of later published poems and preserves Sutzkever's original spelling and punctuation. Sutzkever's manuscript, along with the other materials found in 2017, are being digitized as part of the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections Project. Join YIVO to celebrate the publication of Tsen Lider. Ten poems. Dešimt eilėraščių prepared by the National Library of Lithuania in collaboration with YIVO. This new publication offers facsimile images of the original manuscript, translations into English and Lithuanian, and essays on Sutzkever and his work by Mindaugas Kvietkauskas and David Fishman, with a forward by Lara Lempertienė. The event will feature a discussion panel on Sutzkever's work with Lithuanian Minister of Culture Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, Lara Lempertienė, head of the Judaica Department at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania, and literary and cultural historian Justin Cammy, moderated by YIVO's Executive Director and CEO Jonathan Brent and with welcoming remarks by Prof. Dr. Renaldas Gudauskas, Director General of the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania. This panel discussion was originally held on November 23, 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

And in the room we could hear the ocean waves, breaking against the history of ourselves. So concludes the first poem in Light Year (Nine Arches Press, 2025) by Jennifer Wong. This book is a meditation on time. These poems delve into the mind of a poet crossing spaces of deep wounds, love and healing: a constellation of friendships and love as she moves through upheaval, transformation and change. The collection offers glimpses into the journeys of a migrant, a daughter, and a mother; with the passage of years, the poems ask what it might mean to move like light itself, beyond expectations and into new ways of understanding ourselves more profoundly. With sublime precision, Jennifer Wong’s poetry brings clarity to the spaces between the stars – the time difference between memories and place, between our loved ones, and everything we hold dear in life.  Jennifer Wong is a Hong Kong-born poet who lives in the UK. She has three collections including Letters Home (Nine Arches Press). Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

'Unearthed in a clear-out, a picture calendar she’s kept– hoarding, I’ve learnt, is a mark of the emigrant –across continents and time.'So begins Sarah Howe’s extraordinary new collection, Foretokens, returning to the riddle of belonging she explored in her award-winning debut, Loop of Jade. At the heart is her own mother’s clouded past: abandoned as a baby and taken in, at the turbulent dawn of Communist China, by a woman with her own hidden motives. Now a mother herself, Howe finds herself re-examining this unreliable narrative with fresh sight. Sifting through her own history, the poet asks, how can a new generation transform a shattered inheritance? And what is lost and gained in the pursuit?‘From the other side of ruin / we found safe passage’, Howe writes in these spectacular poems of emotional heft and quickening wit, their voice salvaged from the fragments of a former self. Foretokens is a monumental work of survival and creation, turning over what is left behind as it strikes out towards astonishing new vistas. Sarah Howe is a British poet, academic and editor. She is currently the Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus and an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Liverpool. Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

This powerful work by award-winning poet Crystal Simone Smith exposes the uncomfortable truth about America’s founding text: while Common Sense is celebrated as a cornerstone of American democracy, Thomas Paine’s arguments for “total freedom and equality” were written exclusively for white men—completely excluding women and people of color from his vision of liberation.Through a clear-eyed point of view and innovative erasure poetry, Smith transforms this foundational document into Common Sense (1776): Addressed to Today's Citizen's of America (Beacon, 2026). The text is a mirror reflecting both our nation’s incomplete promises and today’s ongoing struggle for true equality, and reveals new meanings that speak to the experiences of ALL Americans—those who were silenced in 1776 and those still fighting for recognition today, just as America approaches its 250th anniversary. You can find Crystal Simone Smith on her on her Wikipedia page, and at her website. Find host, Sullivan Summer, at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

This award-winning bilingual collection intertwines the lives of a Renaissance painter and a modern migrant worker, offering a fresh perspective on art and migration. In this highly imaginative work, the lives of the northern Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516) and an imagined contemporary migrant worker named Juan Coyoc, later known as Juan Domínguez, run in parallel as they mirror each other across languages, time, and continents. By comparing and at times intertwining these two poetic narratives, the book explores themes of art, migration, narco-violence, family, spirituality, and the idea that every human being represents all humanity at any moment in history. Both Hieronymus Bosch and Juan Domínguez become relatable and intimate figures, part of our own story. Written in simple, sharp language, the book employs surprising imagery and a novel structure to blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, while examining the intricacies of the human condition--from the life of Saint Anthony to the violent acts of narcos across Central America and the U.S.-Mexico border. With formal sophistication and philosophical depth, this work enriches the tradition of poetry about both migration and art, contributing to the literary heritage of Mexico and the United States over the past several decades. Manuel Iris is a Mexican-born American poet who has served as poet laureate of Cincinnati, Ohio. Iris is the author of five poetry collections, including The Disguises of Fire [Los disfraces del fuego]. Kevin C. McHugh is book editor and former writer and editor for international branding studios. He taught writing for thirty-one years. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Conor Mc Donnell about his long poem, What We Know So Far Is...(Wolsak & Wynn, 2025). The Irish word for shadow, “scáth,” is also our word for shelter. In a powerful long poem that captures the disquiet of our age with cinematic language and imagery, Conor Mc Donnell’s What We Know So Far Is … harkens back to the previous century in its daring. Drawing from his Irish heritage, his experience as a pediatrician and many other sources, Mc Donnell has created a work that echoes the scope of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Hart Crane’s The Bridge. Both ecstatic and challenging, the lines of the poem are filled with allusions and references, with biology shading into history into cultures both ancient and contemporary, where words are predators and “memes disseminate cultural-genes.” Through it all runs Mc Donnell’s fascination with language, ever shifting, beguiling, mutating, virus-like. In these questioning, DNA-like lines, Mc Donnell shows us how to unmake and remake our understanding of the world. Dr. Conor Mc Donnell is a poet and physician at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto. He is the author of two collections of poems (most recently, This Insistent List) and three chapbooks. His poetry has appeared in various Canadian and international publications as well as noted medical journals such as JAMA and CMAJ. He is an associate professor at the University of Toronto and editor in chief of Case Repertory, a Narrative-Based Medicine Lab publication that seeks to engage and promote the voice of the patient in collaboration with their health-carers. He is a frequently invited international lecturer on pediatric perioperative care, error prevention and opioid stewardship, and he is current vice-president of the Canadian Pediatric Anesthesia Society.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

My guest today is Eric Weiskott, Professor of English at Boston College. Eric has previously published Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650 (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021) and English Alliterative Verse: Poetic Tradition and Literary History (Cambridge University Press, 2016), as well as a chapbook titled Chanties: An American Dream (Bottlecap, 2023). Eric is also a co-editor for the Yearbook of Langland Studies. Today, we are discussing two of Eric’s recent books that share a connection to the fourteenth-century English poem Piers Plowman. The first is Cycle of Dreams (Punctum, 2024), a poetry collection that uses motifs, literary devices, and themes of William Langland’s surreal poem as a springboard to meditate on the equally surreal experience of political and social life in the twenty-first century. Cycle of Dreams is published by Punctum Books. The second book we are discussing is a new edition of the A-version of Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the A-Text (U Exeter Press, 2025) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Winner of the 2025 James Laughlin Award from The Academy of American Poets  When her grandmother died, poet Diamond Forde inherited a well-worn family Bible to remember her by. In The Book of Alice (Scribner, 2026), she retells the story of her grandmother’s life through the framework of the only poetry Alice knew: the King James Bible. A Black woman born in the Jim Crow South, Alice joined the tide of the Great Migration when she made her exodus to New York City. She married, divorced, and raised eight children, all while struggling to define herself in an America that looks frighteningly like our own. Using found forms like recipes, a family tree, and a US Census Report alongside imagined psalms and scriptures, Diamond draws bold parallels between biblical narratives and the lived experiences of those often relegated to the margins of history. The result is both a heartfelt elegy and a new sacred text. Find Diamond at her website and on Instagram. And find host, Sullivan Summer, at her website, on Instagram, and over on Substack, where she and Diamond continued their conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with acclaimed Calgary, Alberta poet David Martin about is new collection, nightstead (Palimpsest Press, 2026).  In his most personal collection to date, award-winning poet David Martin elegizes his younger brother who died by suicide at the age of twenty-three. With a mixture of childhood recollections and anguished moments nightstead produces a complex memorial while pushing against the utmost limits of memory's power. Dislocating experiments juxtapose with searingly direct verse to make this book a haunting poetic memoir that will remain with readers long after they put it down. David Martin has published three previous collections of poetry: Tar Swan (NeWest Press, 2018), Kink Bands (NeWest Press, 2023), and Limited Verse (University of Calgary Press, 2024). He lives in Calgary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

My God’s Been Silent (Writ Large Press, 2026) is a poetry collection that lives at the intersection of faith and fury, grief and grace. Written in the aftermath of loss and disillusionment, these poems are elegies and incantations-each one a plea, a protest, a prayer left unanswered. This collection excavates the silence of God through the body of a Black man who has known both sanctuary and abandonment, who has tried to make sense of suffering in a world that too often turns its back This is a book for those who have screamed into the void, for those who carry loss like scripture, and for anyone who has ever felt betrayed by the very thing they were taught to believe would save them. With language that sears and softens, My God’s Been Silent does not seek resolution-it seeks release. This collection is not an answer. It is a reckoning. A remembering. A return. You can find Dr. Darius Phelps on Instagram and X. And find host, Sullivan Summer, at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Toronto poet Guy Elston about his debut poetry collection, The Character Actor Convention (Gordon Hill Press/Porcupine's Quill, 2025).  A pumpkin writes a letter to his father. A sheep recalls a revolution, and love. Hydrogen pens a tell-all expos of Oxygen. The Stick Insect Orders His Tomb. Napoleon counts waves and cheats at cards. A sunflower seeks answers - why sun? A crow considers children in this cruel, spiky world. And allthe while, character actors gather for the endless convention... Guy Elston's debut poetry collection, The Character Actor Convention, is a curious smorgasbord of personas, new voices and (un)natural perspectives. Through impossible encounters and strange viewpoints an insistent, ever-shifting 'I' questions its relation to reality, and itself. Wist, wit, obsession and irony rise like tides, are forgotten, and start fresh. Authenticity is always just round the corner. The Character Actor Convention is not urgent, timely or topical. It's something else. Guy Elston was born and raised in Oxford, UK. After various jobs, journeys and other lifetimes he surfaced in Toronto in 2020. He has an MA in History from the University of Amsterdam. Since moving to Canada his poetry has been published by The Malahat Review, Canadian Literature, Event, The Literary Review of Canada, Vallum, The Antigonish Review and other journals. His chapbook Automatic Sleep Mode was published by Anstruther Press in 2023. His debut full-length collection, The Character Actor Convention, is forthcoming from The Porcupine's Quill in 2025. Guy lives in Toronto and can be found at poetry events. He's a member of the Meet the Presses collective and is a first reader for Untethered magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Narrative verse, or poems that tell a story, has existed for millennia, yet the mode of writing has been neglected by literary publishers, editors, and critics in our own time. This anthology reestablishes the vital relationship of narrative verse to a contemporary readership of poetry. It presents a wide range of specimens from twenty-eight poets who were born since World War II and who published their narrative poems over the past fifty years. Featured poets include Rita Dove, Christian Wiman, Alberto Rios, A. E. Stallings, Bob Dylan, Daniel Mark Epstein, David Mason, Mary Jo Salter, and Dana Gioia, and other exemplary practitioners of the form. In these poems, character, plot, and dialogue turn up as readily as in prose fiction. As John Dryden wrote of Chaucer’s works, “Here is God’s plenty.” Anecdote, fable, myth, biography, thriller, Western, ghost story―these are among the many different genres of tale collected by poet-critic Sunil Iyengar, who introduces each poet and the anthology itself. Sunil Iyengar is the author of a poetry chapbook, A Call from the Shallows (Finishing Line Press). His poems and/or book reviews have appeared in such periodicals as The New Criterion, Literary Matters, New Verse Review, PN Review, Essays in Criticism, The American Scholar, The Hopkins Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Washington Post. He lives outside Washington, D.C., where he works as an arts research director. Daniel Moran’s writing about literature and film can be found on Pages and Frames. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing and co-hosts the long-running podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with poet Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi about their new poetry collection, The Book of Interruptions. In The Book of Interruptions (Buckrider Books, 2025) Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi has brought together a collection of poems written with scalpel-like precision. Infused with “pre-emptive violence” these poems mark the intersection of war, immigration, sexuality and history, with lines often placed at the crossroads of Perso-Islamic and Western thought. Moving between an Iran that is marked with “tulips from the martyr’s blood” and Toronto, a city that is always screaming but where the author is a “ghost, anecdotal,” Mohammadi writes unflinchingly of the reality that faces them and others like them who straddle two worlds. But within this fierce collection there is also room for art, and for pleasure, and for words that invite us all with “gentle patterns of light against light against light.” Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi (they/them) is a queer, Iranian-born, Toronto-based poet, writer and translator. They are the winner of the 2021 Vallum Poetry Award and the author of nine chapbooks of poetry. The Book of Interruptions is their fifth poetry book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with poet Margo LaPierre about her poetry collection, Ajar (Guernica Editions, 2025). The poems in Ajar navigate the physical and psychological dangers of womanhood through the flattening lens of mood disorder. Psychosis isn’t the opposite of reality—it’s another perceptual system. If neurotypical thought measures the world in centimetres, this collection measures it in inches, gallons, amperes. Ajar celebrates radical recovery from gendered violence and psychotic paradigm shifts, approaching madness through prismatic inquiry. As time converges within us, we find new ways to heal and grow. From the emergency room to the pharmacy to the fertility clinic to the dis/comfort of home and memory, this collection humanizes bipolar psychosis.Note: These poems depict suicidality and some of the violences that worsen the risk. In Canada and the US, the suicide crisis helpline is 988 and it’s available 24/7. Margo LaPierre is a writer and freelance literary editor. With multi-genre work published in The Ex-Puritan, CV2, Room, PRISM, and Arc, among others, she has won national awards for her poetry, fiction, and editing. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Ajar is her second poetry collection. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

My Excellency: Comedy in Three Acts (Swan Isle Press, 2025) by Luis Rechani Agrait was translated into English by William Carlos Williams but not published in his lifetime. This first-ever edition of Williams’s translation was edited and has an introduction by Jonathan Cohen. It includes a foreword by Julio Marzán and an afterword by José Luis Ramos Escobar. It also includes the lecture Williams gave on poetry at the 1941 Inter-American Writers’ Conference of the University of Puerto Rico, where he met Rechani Agrait and received from him the published play as a gift. William Carlos Williams's English translation of the play, Mi Señoría, by Puerto Rican playwright Luis Rechani Agrait, reflects Williams's connection to his Puerto Rican roots and deft skills as a translator. The play is a satirical critique of political corruption, featuring comical malapropisms and an idealistic but naive politician's rise, highlighting themes of materialism and power, and showcasing Williams's adept handling of language. William Carlos Williams’s mother, Raquel Hélène Rose Hoheb Williams, was from Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. Williams was deeply engaged with translation and the unique cultural worlds wrought by migration. His rendering of My Excellency invites us to think about translation not simply as a linguistic act, but as an ethical and artistic one: What happens when a Puerto Rican political satire crosses languages, audiences, and power structures? What is gained, what is altered, and what remains unresolved? In this episode, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera (UPR-M) and editor Jonathan Cohen discuss the historical context of the play, Williams’s role as translator, and the broader questions the work raises about voice, authority, and cultural mediation. By looking closely at My Excellency, we open a wider conversation about literature in translation and the complex relationships between language, migration, text, and translation. This conversation forms part of the STEM to STEAM initiative, sponsored by the Teagle Foundation, which seeks to connect medicine, science, technology, and engineering with the interpretive and ethical sensibilities cultivated in the humanities. By foregrounding literature, poetry, history, philosophy, and the arts, the initiative reimagines how humanistic study can serve as a central component of technical and scientific education. In this episode are: • Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, Professor of Humanities at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez (UPR-M) and Director of the Instituto Nuevos Horizontes. • Jonathan Cohen is an award-winning translator

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Bänoo Zan and Cy Strom about their anthology, Woman Life Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution (Guernica Editions, 2025). This international anthology marks a world-historical moment: the first ever feminist revolution. The slogan chanted by the demonstrators in Iran is Woman, Life, Freedom, and it encompasses hopes and ideals for all people everywhere. This anthology echoes that cry. The poems here might be reflections on the present moment, denunciations of injustice, examinations of the poet’s own conscience, laments for the fallen, bitter curses, prayers, celebrations of life, and visions of a better future. Bänoo and Cy aim to raise awareness of the women’s revolution in Iran and show the world that this cause is alive and will not be put down. About the editors:  Bänoo Zan is a poet, translator, essayist, and poetry curator, with numerous published pieces and three books. Songs of Exile was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Letters to My Father was published in 2017. She is the founder of Shab-e She’r (Poetry Night), Canada’s most diverse and brave poetry reading and open mic series (inception: 2012). Shab-e She'r bridges the gap between communities of poets from different ethnicities, nationalities, religions (or lack thereof), ages, genders, sexual orientations, abilities, poetic styles, voices, and visions. Bänoo calls herself a war correspondent in verse. Others describe her as a political, metaphysical, and spiritual poet. Cy Strom works as an editor. He holds MA and MPhil degrees in early modern European history and has published in academic and other areas, including the visual arts. He edits in different genres and sometimes languages, and has had a role in developing professional editorial standards and educational materials. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

This is the history of England told in a new way: glimpsed through twenty-five remarkable poems written down between the eighth century and today, which connect us directly with the nation’s past, and the experiences, emotions and imaginations of those who lived it. These poems open windows onto wildly different worlds – from the public to the intimate, from the witty to the savage, from the playful to the wistful. They take us onto battlefields, inside royal courts, down coal mines and below stairs in great houses. Their creators, witnesses to events from the Great Fire of London to the Miners’ Strike, range from the famous to the forgotten, yet each invites us into an immersive encounter with their own time. A History of England in 25 Poems (Penguin, 2025) by Professor Catherine Clarke is a portal to the past; a constant companion, filled with vivid voices and surprising stories alongside familiar landmarks, and language that speaks in new ways on each reading. Professor Clarke’s knowledge and passion take us inside the words and the moments they capture, with thoughtful insights, humour and new perspectives on how the nation has dreamed itself into existence – and who gets to tell England’s story. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

As a third generation Holocaust survivor, this was an important conversation with a second generation survivor. Marty has been conducting workshops on writing memory for quite a while and that's where we met - in his workshops with Jewish Ethiopians in Israel. Son of the Shoah: Poems from a Second-Generation Holocaust Survivor is his emotional reckoning with his parents and the world as being born into a world of pain and distance. At times I saw my own parents in the discussion and at times I would hear my friend whose family is descended from Jews tortured in the Inquisitions.  This was an intimate and powerful discussion which will help the field of memory and Holocaust studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Paul Vermeersch about his new collection of poetry, NMLCT (ECW Press, 2025). Fables and fairy tales collide with virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and monstrous myths in a world where no one knows what to believe. In his eighth book of poems, Paul Vermeersch responds to the increasing difficulty of knowing what is real and what isn’t, what is our genuine experience and what is constructed for us by The Algorithm. In a “post-truth” society rife with simulations, misinformation, and computer-generated hallucinations, these poems explore the relationship between the synthetic and the authentic as they raise hope for the possibility of escape from MCHNCT (Machine City) to NMLCT (Animal City), where the promise of “real life” still exists. Paul Vermeersch is a poet, multimedia artist, and literary editor. His last book of poetry was Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995–2020. A professor of creative writing and publishing at Sheridan College, he also edits his own imprint, Buckrider Books, for Wolsak & Wynn Publishers. He lives in Toronto, ON. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Waka poetry was all the rage in tenth-century, courtly Japan. Every educated person composed it, emperors and consorts sponsored it, and societal interest in it was at an all-time high. Poets, Patrons, and the Public: Poetry as Cultural Phenomenon in Courtly Japan (Brill, 2025) offers an unprecedentedly broad and vivid portrayal of this season of literary flourishing, revealing the multitude of factors that contributed to it, as well as the social, political, and cultural reasons behind waka’s rise.Deftly combining sociological theory and social and intellectual history with insightful readings of a wealth of primary texts—some never before discussed in English—the book is both a history of waka in the Heian period and a study of Heian court society through the lens of waka. Gian Piero Persiani is Assistant Professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Jingyi Li is an assistant professor of Japanese Studies at Occidental College, Los Angeles. She is a cultural historian of nineteenth-century Japan. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews Andrew Fadyen-Ketchum about his poetry collection, Fight or Flight (Stephen F. Austin State UP, 2023).   Fight or Flight artifacts the trauma of McFadyen-Ketchum's divorce and the journey he took across the wilds of America (living in a tent on the California coast, getting intentionally lost in the Utah desert, tracking wild animals in the bitter cold of Indiana winters) in search of healing that led to the greatest discovery of all: his indigenous wife and her three children he now calls his own. Andrew Fadyen-Ketchum is an author, editor, and ghostwriter. He is author of three poetry collections, Fight or Flight, Visiting Hours and Ghost Gear. He is the assistant Director of the Owsley Fork Writer's Sanctuary, Founder and Editor of PoemoftheWeek, The Floodgate Poetry Series, and Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days; He is also the acquisitions editor for Upper Rubber Boot Books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews acclaimed Alberta poet Rayanne Haines about her book, What Kind of Daughter (Frontenac House Press, 2024).  What Kind of Daughter? is a poetic memoir by Rayanne Haines that considers identity and gender expectations while exploring the public perception of the space between the spaces we inhabit during periods of grieving, whether that grieving is based in loss of self or the loss of another. In this hybrid collection of poetry and essay, Haines reflects on her life growing up in rural Alberta, and considers the loss of her mother to cancer while asking questions such as how do we steer through holding patterns of almost grief, how do we navigate the terrain of discovery, how do we journey through the burden of care? In, What Kind of Daughter? Haines reflects on the choices women are asked to make and challenges readers to reflect on the way we value, devalue, or simply exist within the spaces of gender and grief. About Rayanne Haines: Rayanne Haines (she/her) is an award-winning hybrid author and pushcart nominated poet as well as a cultural producer of films, stage shows, and panels. Rayanne has penned three poetry collections – The Stories in My Skin (2013), Stained with the Colours of Sunday Morning (Inanna, 2017), and Tell The Birds Your Body Is Not A Gun (Frontenac, 2021) which won the 2022 Stephan G. Stephansson, Alberta Literary Award for Poetry as well as being shortlisted for both the BPAA Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry, and the National ReLit Award for Poetry. She hosts the literary podcast Crow Reads, is the president for the League of Canadian Poets, and is an Assistant Professor in Arts and Cultural Management at MacEwan University. Rayanne has been published in the Globe and Mail, Minola Review, Fiddlehead, Grain, FreeFall, Prairie Fire, and others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

“Literature is pathetic.” So claims Eileen Myles in their provocative and robust introduction to Pathetic Literature (Grove Press, 2022), a breathtaking mishmash of pieces ranging from poems to theater scripts to prose to anything in between, all exploring the so-called “pathetic” or awkwardly-felt moments and revelations around which lives are both built and undone. An utterly unique collection composed by the award-winning poet and writer, a global anthology of pieces from lesser-known classics by luminaries like Franz Kafka, Samuel R. Delany, and Gwendolyn Brooks to up-and-coming writers that examine pathos and feeling, giving a well-timed rehab to the word “pathetic”.Hal Coase is a PhD candidate at La Sapienza, University of Rome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Yvonne Blomer about her stunning narrative poetry, Death of Persephone: A Murder (Caitlin Press, 2024). In Death of Persephone, the patriarchal myth of the maiden taken, raped, and made the potent and sexualized queen of the underworld is questioned, altered, flipped. Instead, we have Stephanie, a girl of seven, taken and raised by her Uncle H. who is obsessed by her, tries to control her, to keep her, to have her even as she blooms out from underneath him. In poems both lyrical and narrative, a woman paints Hecate on a building, a Hyacinth Macaw flies overhead, a detective bumbles from crime to crime. This is a city with a vast underground where bats hang and paperwhites bloom, a city where men still rule. Who sees what, who will pay, and who will survive in this ancient story altered at the core? About Yvonne Blomer: Yvonne Blomer is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections The Last Show on Earth (Caitlin Press, 2022) and As if a Raven (Palimpsest Press, 2015) as well as the travel memoir Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur (Palimpsest Press, 2017). Blomer served as the city of Victoria poet laureate from 2015 to 2018. Through poetry, she has raised awareness for the plight of the Pacific Ocean and its ecology. She is the creator and editor of Refugium: Poems for the Pacific (Caitlin Press, 2017), the first in a trilogy of water-based poetry anthologies that was followed by Sweet Water: Poems for the Watershed (Caitlin Press, 2020). She was the Artistic Director for the weekly Planet Earth Poetry series and edited the anthology Poems for Planet Earth. Yvonne recently edited Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page (Caitlin Press, 2023). She has been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the Montreal Poetry Prize and the Troubadour International Poetry Prize and won the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize for Death of Persephone. She has performed at reading series and festivals in cities across the country and has had poems published in Canada, the UK and Japan. Yvonne lives, works and raises her family on the traditional territories of the WSÁNEĆ (Saanich), Lkwungen (Songhees), Wyomilth (Esquimalt) peoples of the Coast Salish Nation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

A transcript of this interview is available [here] A queer disabled love song to trees and beavers, tremors and dreams, Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming (Duke UP, 2025) explores the pulsing core and porous edges of survival, sorrow, and dreaming. Blending poetry and creative nonfiction, emotion and activist thinking, Eli Clare invites us to unfurl ourselves into the lovely multitude of genders beyond the binary of woman and man, the fierceness of street protest, and the long slow time of granite. He sings to aquifers. Wrestles with the aftermath of child abuse and his family’s legacy as white settlers occupying Dakota homelands. He leans into history. Calls the names of the living and the dead. Connects his own tremoring body to a world full of tremors—earthquakes, jackhammers, quaking aspens. Unfurl reveals deep queer kinships between human and more-than-human, sentient and nonsentient. At every juncture, these poems and essays embrace porousness and the power of dreaming. Ultimately, Unfurl is an invitation to rebellion and joy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews Gregory Betts, one of the poets behind the collaboration, Muttertongue: what is a word in utter space (Exile Editions, 2025) – by Lillian Allen (Toronto’ s seventh Poet Laureate, a dub poet, writer, and Juno Award winner), Gary Barwin (poet, writer, composer, multimedia artist, performer, and educator), and Gregory Betts (whose writing explores the boundaries between self, other, and alien – the radical other). This is a collaborative collection that crackles in its exploration of land, language, and page space. Combining the intensity of Dub Poetry with the intricacies of experimental poetics, Muttertongue presents a sonorous soundscape echoing with the question of where (and why) is here (hear). The book opens with a dialogue between the three authors, and concludes with an Afterword by Kaie Kellough. The release of the book recedes a new music LP by the three authors (June of 2025). This is a project by the Muttertongue Trio: Allen • Barwin • Betts. Lillian Allen is the 7th Poet Laureate of Toronto and a professor of creative writing at Ontario College of Art and Design University. She is a two time JUNO award winner and trailblazer in the field of spoken word and dub poetry. Lillian’s debut book of poetry Rhythm An’ Hardtimes became a Canadian best seller, blazing new trails for poetic expression and opened up the form. Lillian’s latest collection Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen, edited by Ronald Cummings was published in Spring 2021 and is part of the Laurier Poetry Series. Her other collections, Women Do This Everyday and Psychic Unrest are studied across the educational spectrum. Her literary work for young people includes three books: Why Me, If You See Truth, and Nothing But a Hero. She received the Margaret Laurence Lecture award, 2020 and the Gustafson Distinguished Poet award, 2021. She is a Toronto Cultural Champion and the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate for her contribution to Canadian Letters. Her current art practice veers into vocal sonic poetics and explores pre-language and post-language poetics. Gary Barwin is a writer, musician and multimedia artist and the author of 34 books including Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction 2024-1984. His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates which won the Leacock Medal and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award and the Giller Prize and was longlisted for Canada Reads. His last novel, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award and was the Hamilton Reads choice for 2023-2024. His last poetry collection, The Most Charming Creatures also won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award. His most recent novel, The Comedian’s

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Concetta Principe about her poetry collection, DIsorder (Gordon Hill Press, 2024).  Disorder, the newest collection of poetry from Concetta Principe, explores the metaphorical relationship between the home and the mind, where a home should be place of sanctuary but can have its safe borders destabilized by mental illness. The poems work through these questions with Principe's characteristic subtlety, intelligence ? a nuanced and compassionate meditation on what it means to be at home. About Concetta Principe: Concetta Principe is a writer of poetry and creative non-fiction, and scholarship on the impact of the secular unconscious on culture and political thought. Her recent collection, This Real (Pedlar Press 2017) was long-listed for the League of Canadian Poet's Raymond Souster Award. Her essays, ?Who Shot Meriwether Lewis was long-listed for the 2019 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Award at The New Quarterly, and ?I Title it ?Suicide Letter was short-listed for The Malahat Review 2019 Constance Rooke award. Her poetry and creative non-fiction has appeared in Canadian and American journals including The Malahat Review, The Capilano Review, experiment-o, and Hamilton Arts and Literature. Her academic monograph exploring trauma in contemporary secular thought, Secular Messiahs and the Return to Paul's Real: A Lacanian Approach, came out with Palgrave Macmillan in 2015. She teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at Trent University, Durham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Kabir is the most alive of all dead poets. He is a fabric without stitches. No centres, no edges. Anand threads his way in. Over the years, as a publisher and editor, Anand immerses himself in the works of Babasaheb Ambedkar and other anticaste thinkers. He gives up his practice of music and poetry, blaming his disenchantment on caste. One day in Delhi, Anand starts looking for Kabir. He finds him here, there, everywhere. He begins to pay attention to the many ways in which Kabir’s words are sung, and translates them. Soon, Kabir starts looking out for Anand. The songs of Kabir sung by a range of singers—Prahlad Tipaniya, Fariduddin Ayaz, Mukhtiyar Ali, Kumar Gandharva, Kaluram Bamaniya, Mahesha Ram and other wayfarers—make Anand return to music and poetry. Anand translates songs seldom found in books. Along the way, he witnesses Kabir drawing on the Buddha, often restating ancient suttas in joyous ways. The Notbook of Kabir is the result of this pursuit with no end in sight. This is the story of how Anand loses himself trying to find Kabir. You can check out the YouTube list of relevant Kabir's songs curated by S. Anand here. For readers interested in the paradoxical, downside-up language in Kabiri and its resonances with Daoist language (e.g. this translation of Daodejing), especially the mysthical atheist aspects, check out appendix B to this book by Brook Ziporyn. Feel free to check out Anand's Navayana Publishing, and his insightful blog posts here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews poet Lorne Daniel about his poetry collection, What is Broken Binds Us (University of Calgary Press, 2025).  What is Broken Binds Us is a collection of poems of the disruptions and emotional tremors that shape us: enslaved families broken and dispersed, histories hidden, addiction and estrangement, and the shocks of bodily trauma. What is Broken Binds Us shares stories of loss, absence, acceptance, and hope. Returning to the page after a long absence, poet Lorne Daniel provides a unique perspective on crisis that balances raw emotion with vulnerability, thoughtfulness, and care. In seven sections, Daniel braids the stories of empire, personal traumas, addiction and family estrangement, shifting emergencies, and the wisdom of elders and the natural world. Lessons in Emergency Preparedness traces accident, injury and recovery, facing the trauma of a sudden loss of physical competence through the metaphorical and literal breaks of a shattered body and the slow movement towards mending. When the Tributaries Ran Rich unravels empire and a five-century narrative of hard-working immigrants with the discovery of enslavement in family records, forcing a deep reconsideration of the truth of the past. Episodic Tremor & Slip speaks of the tectonic shifts in family life that occur when facing substance abuse, addiction, and mental health struggles, of the pain of estrangement and the love that continues. In the Family Name is a reflection on time, on people, and on the natural world that revisits and turns over all that came before, exploring it from new angles. Lorne Daniel writes with calm, conversational assurance. These poems are accessible and evocative, speaking from their specificity to the many people who have faced injury, estrangement, struggle, and pain, and must carry it—and carry on. About Lorne Daniel: Lorne Daniel is a Canadian poet and non-fiction writer. He has been deeply engaged in the literary community, including the emergence of a Canadian prairie poetry scene in the 1970s. He has publsihed four books of poetry, edited anthologies and literary journals, and written freelance journalism. His work has been published in dozens of anthologies, journals, newspapers and magazines in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. Lorne lives on the traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən people in Victoria, BC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Archivum (Pavillion Poetry at Liverpool UP, 2025) by Dr. Theresa Muñoz is a book – wise, funny and inventive by turn – that explores what it means to look at artefacts in an archive, and how these objects resonate with events in our lives. Imagined as a walk across Edinburgh, landmarks such as the Balmoral clock, National Library of Scotland, Meadows, Canongate Kirkyard and Water of Leith provide a meditative backdrop to the poems. The archives - in particular the archive of the writer Muriel Spark – are used to create a space to come to terms with the complexities of a life and how we in turn tell stories about ourselves: the depths of our familial relationships, relationship breakdowns and the death of a parent. What’s found in the archive’s boxes -- including recipes, telegrams, letters -- stirs and amplifies feelings of belonging, disorientation, triumph and grief. With a focus on women writers and interracial relationships, the book explores objects belonging to significant figures in the poet’s imaginary: along with Spark, the actor Maggie Smith, poet Elizabeth Bishop, the 19th century slave owner’s daughter Eliza Junor and psychotherapist Marie Battle Singer. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

"I'll tell you everything I know. Though there might not be much to tell," confesses the speaker in Strange Hymn: Poems (U Mass Press, 2025) 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." Source: Publisher Kavya Sarathy is a Linguistics student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a Marketing Intern for the University of Massachusetts Press. She is currently a political Staff Writer at The Massachusetts Daily Collegian. Kavya has always enjoyed reading, writing, and engaging with literature in any form, and is thrilled to be in conversation with these authors through the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with poet Patrick Grace about his stunning poetry collection, Deviant (U Alberta Press, 2024). Deviant traces a trajectory of queer self-discovery from childhood to adulthood, examining love, fear, grief, and the violence that men are capable of in intimate same-sex relationships. Richly engaged with the tangible and experiential, Patrick Grace’s confessional poetry captures profound, sharp emotions, tracking a journey impacted equally by beauty and by brutality. Coming-of-age identity struggles are recalled with wry wit, and dreamlike poems embrace adolescent queer love and connections as a way to cope with the fear and cruelty that can occur in gay relationships. Later poems in the collection recall vivid moments of psychological trauma and stalking and explore the bias of the justice system toward gay men. Collecting memories, dreams, and fears about sexual identity, Deviant makes important contributions to queer coming-of-age and intimate partner violence narratives. Patrick Grace is an author and teacher who divides his time between Vancouver and Victoria, BC. His poems have been published widely in Canadian literary magazines, including Arc Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry, Columba, EVENT, The Ex-Puritan, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, and more. His work has been a finalist for literary contests with CV2 and PRISM international, and in 2020, his poem "A Violence" won The Malahat Review's Open Season Award for poetry. He has published two chapbooks: a blurred wind swirls back for you (2023), and Dastardly (2021), both of which explore aspects of love, fear, and trauma that represent a personal queer identity. Deviant, his first full-length poetry collection, continues to explore these themes and was shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award. Follow him on IG: @thepoetpatrick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In “[M]y ‘case’ to work up’: William Carlos Williams’s Paterson” (William Carlos Williams Review, Volume 41, Number 2, 2024), Walter Scott Peterson argues that as a physician-poet Dr. Williams approaches his poetic material very much as he approaches his patients, and that the form of Paterson in particular is intentionally and actually reminiscent of the various forms taken by the medical case narrative, or “work-up.” This episode concerns the poet and physician William Carlos Williams, whose mother, Raquel Hélène Rose Hoheb Williams, was born and raised in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. This conversation is part of the STEM to STEAM initiative, sponsored by the Teagle Foundation, that links medicine, science, technology and engineering to the sensibilities honed in the humanities—rethinking ways to blend and combine studies in literature, poetry, history, philosophy, and the arts as more central dimensions of technical preparation. The discussion explores the profound connection between medical humanities and poetry, highlighting how their combination enriches our understanding of patient care, fosters empathy, and humanizes the medical experience. Medical humanities is an interdisciplinary field combining arts, literature, philosophy and cultural approaches to the human condition—considering each of these as insights into the emotional and ethical dimensions of healthcare. Poetry can serve as a powerful tool for expressing the complex feelings and narratives that often go unspoken in clinical settings. Blending poetry and the science of healthcare reminds us that medicine is not just a science but also an art, emphasizing compassion, understanding, and the shared human experience at the heart of healing. In this episode are: Walter Scott Peterson is a retired ophthalmologist and William Carlos Williams scholar; he is the author of the first book-length study of William Carlos Williams’s epic poem Paterson, titled An Approach to Paterson (Yale, 1967). Vamsi Koneru is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry in the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, Professor of Humanities at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

The Pearlsong (Harvard University Press, 2025) offers the reader a beautifully translated story of a young child who goes on a journey to far away places, donning glistening garments, meeting dragons, and encountering talking letters. In addition to the translated text of The Pearlsong Syriac poem, the reader will find a thorough commentary and glossary. The appendices of the book offer further delights to explore: everything from a discussion of Syriac poetry and meter, to translations of the Acts of Thomas, to an assemblage of ancient sources about pearls. The expansive subjects, texts, and translations covered in the book will be a treasure to any reader. The Pearlsong is available as a free pdf on the Center for the Study of World Religions website. New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review. Dr. Adam Bremer-McCollum is Series Co-Editor of the Texts & Translations of Transcendence & Transformation (4T) Series and Research Associate at The Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. Lydia Bremer-McCollum teaches Religious Studies at Spelman College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Aisha Sasha John about her poetry collection, total: poems (McClelland THOU (2014), a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the ReLit Poetry Award; and The Shining Material (2011). She choreographs and performs in the feminist collective WIVES as well as solo performances (The Aisha of Oz, VOLUNTEER). Aisha's video work and text art have been exhibited in galleries (Doris McCarthy, Oakville Galleries) and installed at Union Station in Toronto (Art Metropole). She was born in Montreal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

The author of the award-winning national bestseller I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times returns with a poetry collection that transforms the Black female speaker from object, artistic muse, and victim to subject, critic, and master of her story.Resting Bitch Face (Soft Skull Press, 2025) is a book for women, for Black women, for lovers of art and film criticism, and for writers interested in work that finds a middle ground between poetry and prose. Taylor Byas uses some of our most common ways of “watching” throughout history (painting, films, sculpture, and photographs) to explore how these mediums shape Black female subjectivity.From the examination of artwork by Picasso, Gauguin, Sally Mann, and Nan Goldin, Byas displays her mastery of the poetic form by engaging in intimate and inventive writing. Fluctuating between watcher and watched, the speaker of these poems uses mirrors and reflections to flip the script and talk back to histories of art, text, photography, relationships, and men. From Polaroids to gesso primer to sculpture, Byas creates a world in which the artist calls out and the muse responds. For not only does she enter the world of the long-revered classic artist, but she also infuses her poems with such iconic pop culture works as The Joker, WandaVision, and Last Tango in Paris. You can find Taylor on Instagram and Bluesky. Find host Sullivan Summer online, on Instagram, and over on Substack, where she and Taylor went to continue their conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews Farah Ghafoor about her poetry collection, Shadow Price (House of Anansi, 2025), which was longlisted for the 2025 Toronto Book Awards. 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. About Farah Ghafoor:  Based in Tkaranto (Toronto), Farah Ghafoor is the author of Shadow Price (House of Anansi, 2025). A finalist for the Toronto Book Awards, selections of Shadow Price won the E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize in Poetry, and were finalists for the CBC Poetry Prize and the Far Horizons Award. Her work appears in magazines such as The Walrus, The Offing, Brick Magazine, and The Fiddlehead, art exhibitions like Who's Afraid of Labour Justice ? and FACE/WASTE, as well as anthologies and post-secondary course curriculums. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Speranza: Poems by Jane Wilde (Liverpool UP, 2025) by Dr. Eibhear Walshe and Dr. Eleanor Fitzsimons is the first contemporary edition of the poetry of Jane Wilde, née Elgee, who also wrote as Speranza. Speranza was, in her time, renowned worldwide, with essays, poetry and translated work published in Ireland, England, America and beyond. She was a key figure in the nationalist Young Ireland movement of the 1840s, and her poetry records the hardship experienced by the Irish people - famine and migration in particular. She was also an early advocate for women’s rights, who campaigned for the admission of women to higher education. This edition, which contains several previously unpublished poems, will make the poetry of this emblematic figure in nineteenth-century Irish writing accessible to a contemporary audience for the first time. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Based on Tea Gerbeza's experience with scoliosis, How I Bend Into More (Anstruther Books, 2025) re-articulates selfhood in the face of ableism and trauma. Meditating on pain, consent, and disability, this long poem builds a body both visually and linguistically, creating a multimodal space that forges Gerbeza's grammar of embodiment as an act of reclamation. Paper-quilled shapes represent the poet's body on the page; these shapes weave between lines of verse and with them the reclaimed disabled body is made. How I Bend Into More is a distinctive poetic debut that challenges ableist perceptions of normalcy, and centres "the double architecture / of ( metamorphosis (." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In the late 1890s a US congressman argued that the United States had the right to seize Cuba because he believed it was made of silt that had washed out of the mouth of the Mississippi River which made it literally US soil. That story inspired Puerto Rican Jewish poet Aurora Levins Morales to apply for a writing residency in New Orleans, and to travel the length of the river from Minnesota to the Gulf Coast, doing "poet research." In Silt: Prose Poems (Palabrera Press, 2019) she follows the pathways of water across the natural and social landscapes of the Mississippi River and the Caribbean Sea, tracing the real residues of their relationship, and turning that long story into a kind of prayer, for our waters, our planet and our lives.In this conversation, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, Joanna Cifredo de Fellman (יוחנה סיפרדו פלמן) and Aurora Levins Morales discuss Silt in the context of contemporary Puerto Rico.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

With previous work hailed by the New York Times as “unflinching” and “piercing,” Ashley M. Jones’s Lullaby for the Grieving (Hub City Press, 2025) is her most personal collection to date. In it, Jones studies the multifaceted nature of grief: the personal grief of losing her father, and the political grief tied to Black Southern identity. How does one find a path through the deep sorrow of losing a parent? What wonders of Blackness must be suppressed to make way for “progress?” Journeying through landscapes of Alabama, the Middle Passage and Underground Railroad, interior spaces of loss and love, and her father’s garden, Jones constructs both an elegy for her father and a celebration of the sacred exuberance and audacity of life. Featuring poems from her tenure as Alabama’s first Black and youngest Poet Laureate, Lullaby for the Grieving finds calm in unimaginable storms and attempts to listen for the sounds of healing. Ashley M. Jones is the Poet Laureate of Alabama (2022-2026). She is the first person of color and youngest person in Alabama’s history to hold this position, which was created in 1930. You can find her online at Ashley M. Jones Poetry. You can find host, Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack, where she and Ashley discuss Ashley’s tenure as Poet Laureate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In her debut poetry collection, What Had Happened Was, Therí Alyce Pickens investigates the complex structures of Black storytelling. Addressing topics ranging from Black life, popular culture, and history to individual encounters with emotion, love, and chronic disability, Pickens crafts and questions the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and who we want to be. Throughout, Pickens mines the formal structures and the play of Black English within the lives and afterlives of Harriet Tubman, Mary J. Blige, Lil' Kim, Breonna Taylor, and figments of our collective imagination. Her singular poetic voice effortlessly flows between what she knows and what she’s heard and between everyday Black conversation and her work in cultural criticism and disability studies. Traveling at the speed of thought, Pickens explores a praxis of storytelling governed by the places where truths and fables kiss. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry