Poems exploring the relationship between joy and elegy.

In Perishable, Stelios Mormoris asks incisive questions about the nature of human connection: Where does memory live—in the body, in the mind, or elsewhere? What happens when the objects that surround us—a wedding ring, an empty purse, a harp—reveal necessary truths about ourselves and those we love? As the book unfolds, lush sensory details and unmatched lyricism are brought to bear on these lingering concerns in a style as neoclassical as it is contemporary. In poems that radiate with intelligence, Mormoris combines understated elegance with finely tuned music and evocative imagery.

Poems that ask an urgent question:  how might a white friend write in protest of intimate Black death without becoming complicit in the commodification of Black trauma? 

Phantom Number listens for an absent voice. To survive and answer to her best friend and fellow poet April Freely’s death, Spring Ulmer rips meaning apart in her poems, then repairs it, only to rip it up again. Words bend, meaning shifts—abstraction a tool Ulmer wields to better get at the question at the heart of Phantom Number: How might a white friend write in protest of intimate Black death at a time when the push is to write Black joy as antidote to the commodification of Black trauma? Ulmer understands her position is suspect yet cannot shirk her love or rage. Ulmer asks the reader to do the work or else. Her abstracted poems vibrate, emotion emerging from a poem made rag. Ulmer’s abecedarium long form holds these fragments, inviting lines into an order of alliteration and words into an otherwise coherence, a belonging that has nothing to do with their origin. Phantom Number finds in abstraction a radical wail.

This handbook demystifies the process of crafting a full-length poetry collection. 

Poems Talking to Poems presents practical guidance for sequencing, structure and architecture, revision, and choosing titles for sections as well as the poetry manuscript as a whole. This guide also includes insider tips about how contests work, the literary marketplace, and how you can set your work apart. 

With essays by such literary luminaries as Ilya Kaminsky, Katie Farris, Kristina Marie Darling, Jeffrey Levine, and many other distinguished contributors, this anthology is a concise and comprehensive field guide to perfecting your book and getting it into print.
 

Cornelius Eady turns the inaugural poem into an instrument of reckoning.

First delivered to mark the historic inauguration of New York City’s mayor Zohran Mamdani on January 1, 2026, the title poem is not ceremony—it is summons. “You have to imagine it,” Eady insists, and from that insistence rises a chorus: those called too dark, too queer, too poor, too loud; those renamed invisible; those told “not now.” What if joy could wear down the rock of no? What if imagination were not escape, but evidence?

Moving from Robert Frost squinting into winter glare, to Elizabeth Alexander straightening her back before history, to Aretha Franklin beneath her church-crown hat, Eady braids civic pageantry with private memory. He summons the Colored Conventions of 1830, the 911 call that ricocheted through racial panic, the mock rifles on a Brooklyn rooftop, the “knife in sheep’s clothes.” Each poem widens the frame. Each poem refuses to look away.