Disillusioned former high school sweethearts must come to terms with their past and present in the face of a tragedy.

It’s 2008: the age of the blog, the dawn of social media, and the birth of the smartphone. Obama is running for president on a slogan of hope, while in the shadows, an opioid crisis emerges, and the housing market teeters. Stevie and Sam, two old high school flames who have grown up and grown apart, are brought back together in the aftermath of a tragedy that throws them off the tracks of their lives. Sam, a struggling realtor, is determined to solve a mystery at any cost. Stevie hits on a plan for a “redo” that involves abandoning her adult life to relive her teenage glory days. As both struggle inside the mediocrity of their early adulthoods, the disenchanted world begins to reveal itself, and secrets threaten to overwhelm them. On the cusp of a new era of uncertainty, these old friends must find ways to reconcile their past and find their way home.

A new poetry collection from Eleanor Stanford that is musical, sexy, and darkly funny. 

These poems take the reader from Mexico City to West Philadelphia to Karachi. The works wade into the difficult joys of mothering, self-exploration, and romantic entanglement in midlife. Throughout, Eleanor Stanford embraces the mysticism of Hildegard of Bingen, the abjection of Tammy Wynette, and the wry self-appraisal of Sylvia Plath, fashioning it all into something entirely its own.

A ruminative collection of poetry that is mystified by life in our built and natural world.

Cameo Blue is a spiritual topography, recording the traces of people in their environments, natural and otherwise, and the portents, memories, and signs they use to navigate their path or understand the precipices they face. Lush with color, weather, and imagery, some poems are driven by breathless conjecture, or propelled by the acute observation that often comes with shock, when time stands still and a camera flash reveals the gap between external and internal, hope and fear, past and future. Other poems cross physical and emotional space more quietly, with a narrative voice like the intimate whisper of a secret podcast. The collection is its own immersive environment for the reader to fall into, with poems that take on a talismanic quality, laden with haunted characters, resonant objects, and occult signs.

Follow the everyday lives of those trying to keep up with a changing Nashville, Tennessee.
 
Set in the rapidly changing city of Nashville, Tennessee, the characters in Dear Second Husband struggle to make their marriages, friendships, and families thrive despite the pressures of modern life. An unapologetic widower, a self-destructive musician, a teacher grieving a miscarriage, and a mother trying to be everything for everyone rely on resilience and persistence to find joy and belonging in the fragile connections between one another.

Through the course of numerous books, Samuel Green has established his primary poetic preoccupations, and in Disturbing the Light, he continues to mine them, addressing rituals and work in a small, isolated, rural community; the influence of the past on the present, especially in families; and the nature and evolution of a love that has spanned five decades. Added to these themes is something new: Poems written in response to symptoms of late onset PTSD. Though Green’s Coast Guard service in Vietnam ended in the fall of 1969, memories have returned recently in vivid, disturbing details, amplified by the haunting knowledge that civilians in Southeast Asia are still, today, suffering death and injury from unexploded ordnance left over from that war. A powerful collection that reminds us that our past is always with us, even as we attend carefully to the present, Disturbing the Light is a masterwork from a poet at the height of his powers.  

A luminous new perspective on aging, science, and the tender strangeness of being alive.

What does it mean to exist in a universe that refuses to stay still? In The End of the Clockwork Universe, Fleda Brown weaves together the vastness of cosmic discovery with the intimate textures of daily life. Ranging from quarks to catalytic converters, snapping turtles to black holes, these poems trace the mysteries of time and perception, offering a voice both unsentimental and deeply compassionate.

With wry humor and unending curiosity, Brown walks the fine line between knowing and not knowing, between order and entropy. Her poems wander through scientific revelation and personal reflection and capture the quiet astonishment of existence. The End of the Clockwork Universe does not seek to solve life’s uncertainties, but sings to them, leaving behind echoes of resilience and the sheer joy of paying attention.

In Flourish, multiple meanings catch light—as the leaves of growing things might, or the facets of cut gemstones, or a signal mirror flashing in distress. These poems explore themes of thriving, growth, innovation, and survival, while immersing the reader in the pleasures of language itself—the “flourish” of linguistic gesture, play, form, turn, and adornment.
Here, the lens zooms in and out to micro and macro levels, asking us to see the familiar with new eyes. The collection engages with the materials of the worlds we inhabit—natural worlds and those of our own making—and a full spectrum of poetry’s own materials, building worlds of words and illuminating the shadowed terrain of our interior landscapes as well.

Unflinching and deeply human—Derek Green perfectly encapsulates the quiet dramas of modern America.

The characters in Jackson State live in a land of contradictions—where wealth and poverty, beauty and decay, hope and despair exist side by side. In this striking collection, Derek Green brings the American Midwest to life, tracing the tensions of class and race through intimate, unforgettable stories.

A father’s protective instinct threatens to unravel his family. A single mother must confront the dangers lurking outside her door. Two siblings navigate the fallout of their father’s militia ties. On the shores of Lake Michigan, a prodigal daughter’s return forces a reckoning with the past. With sharp prose and stark realism, Green captures the struggles and complexities of contemporary American life, establishing Green as a storyteller in the tradition of Carver, Updike, and Cheever.

An ambitious collection of poems that reckon with life and death through the point of view of famous speakers throughout history and literature, spanning from Penelope to Frankenstein’s monster.
 
A book that holds death in one hand and wonder in the other, Killing Orpheus explores the horror of mortality, the brutality of history, and the gentle miracles of love. Using received forms, especially the sonnet, this collection cycles through various speakers, including an aging Penelope, Frankenstein’s monster, Isaac beneath Abraham’s blade, and an elephant in Hannibal’s army. Here are sprays of flowers and hungry alligators, lethal snakes, and a baby’s first breath. Here are poems that reckon with death, but for the sake of life. Here is a poetic consciousness that shows us we must dare to make “a truce with loss” in order to go “spinning into love’s bizarre abyss.”

Poems that capture a transformative and visionary way of life in Haiti.

Konbit is a Haitian Creole word, a way of living, for which there is no direct translation in the English language. It captures the communal life in Haiti and is used for every event where neighbors are called upon to help each other. These poems revolve around the Bois-Caïman ceremony (the first konbit) when enslaved people in Saint-Domingue vowed to fight for their independence. The ceremony is both real and a stand-in for climate change. Like our society, everything around enslaved people in Saint-Domingue was created to uphold the status quo. Imagining an alternative would have been seen as futile. Yet, they did. This collection is an attempt to do the same, to imagine a future beyond colonialism, imperialism, and climate catastrophe. With poems influenced by and in conversation with Tyehimba Jess, Natasha Trethewey, Derek Walcott, Shara McCallum, and Adrian Matejka, Sony Ton-Aime aims to provide a new language to articulate our common past, present, and future.

Stories of resilience, belonging, and the quiet beauty of life on the edge of the wild.

In The Little Lights of Town, acclaimed poet and memoirist Jonathan Johnson turns to fiction, bringing to life the rugged landscapes and tightly knit communities of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Against the backdrop of Lake Superior’s cold, untamed shores, his characters navigate love, loss, and the relentless pull of home.

From those who choose to stay despite the ever-present shadow of isolation to those searching for connection in a land where nature looms larger than life, these stories illuminate the quiet urgencies of human existence. With prose as lyrical as it is unflinching, Johnson visualizes a place where the past lingers in the streets, and where even in the darkest winters, little lights continue to shine.

A poetic exploration of how we carry the past forward: reshaped but never broken.

In Markers and Shrines, Margot Schilpp traces the moments that define us—the losses that strip away our former selves and the resilience that emerges in their wake. These poems illuminate the way the past etches itself onto the future, displaying how experience, no matter how painful, strengthens and redefines us.

With lyrical precision and a musician’s ear for language, Schilpp crafts a world where memory lingers and meaning deepens. Her unembellished eloquence and eye for striking detail turn the everyday into something enlightening, reminding us that even in loss, there is beauty. Markers and Shrines is a reflection on survival and the unseen forces that shape who we become.

A poetic exploration of life amid intimate losses.

In Museum of the Soon to Depart, poet Andy Young searches for her place in history as it unfolds around her through revolution, plague, and natural disaster. As curator of her museum, she navigates her own and others’ suffering through intense observation, from the inner mechanisms of grief and illness to the solace of distance provided by photography. The material of the poet’s own life and events on the world stage intertwine, resulting in poems with a staggering range, inhabiting language in ways that ultimately point to its limits.

An updated translation of Colette’s revolutionary 1922 autobiographical collection that contains six previously untranslated chapters.

This book is a much-needed new translation of Colette’s classic La Maison de Claudine. A careful re-reading of the text was long overdue, given Colette’s evolution into one of the most admired French novelists in the modern world, the inadequacy of earlier translations, which omitted six significant chapters, and changes in contemporary attitudes on motherhood and sexual orientation. The controversial topic at the center of the novel, her passion for her mother Sido, animates her writing as a whole. As the BBC notes, “The Most Beloved French writer of all time. . . . An icon in her native France, Colette's scandalous life and works still captivate readers 150 years on from her birth, writes John Self.”

Idea Vilariño’s final masterpiece, where poetry becomes both refusal and resilience.

In No, Idea Vilariño strips poetry to its essence—distilling love, loss, and the inexorable passage of time into spare yet searing verses. Renowned as a leading voice of Uruguay’s “Generation of 45,” Vilariño’s final collection is at once a defiant refusal and an unrelenting assertion of existence. From its stark nihilism emerges a poetic voice that insists on being heard, even as it denies life’s joys.

Now available in English for the first time, No has been masterfully translated by María José Zubieta, in collaboration with poet and musicologist J. Martin Daughtry. This bilingual edition preserves Vilariño’s rhythmic precision and existential intensity, giving readers a rare glimpse into a body of work that continues to resonate far beyond its origins. No is a testament to the power of poetry to confront the void, and to carve meaning from silence.

Part bestiary, part litany, part elegy, Rebecca Morgan Frank’s Oh You Robot Saints! is populated by a strange menagerie of early automata and robots, including octobots and an eighteenth-century digesting duck, set alongside medieval mechanical virgins and robot priests. From a riveting robobee sonnet sequence that links weapons of war and industrial fixes for infertility to a microdrama sketching out a missing Sophocles play on the mythical bronze man, Talos, these muscular poems blur and sing the lines between machines and the divine. This lyrical exploration of the ongoing human desire to create life navigates wonder and grief, joining the uncanny investigation of what it is to be, to make, and to be made.
 

A study of the city of Pittsburgh’s unique history and spirit.

Maybe you never wondered if any metro area nearly straddles the borders of three major regions of the country, but The Paris of Appalachia: Pittsburgh in the Twenty-First Century tells us why this city is a place apart. It’s not East Coast, Midwest, or Southern, but the rest of America can fret about how to label Pittsburgh. It’s just fine being a walkable town that plays a big city on TV. Brian O'Neill, who walked its streets for more than three decades as a newspaper columnist, fell in love with the place from the moment he arrived. And when you read what he found, odds are better than even that you will, too. This reissue of the book includes a new introduction.

Poems that travel through time and terrain, seeking solace in the raw physicality of the world.

To grieve is to search. In Pine, Jonathan Johnson’s poems travel across continents: through Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the Scottish Highlands, the Greek islands, and the mountain wildernesses of the American Northwest, seeking meaning in the spaces left behind. These poems embrace the raw physicality of place, uncovering the deep textures of the natural world as both a witness and companion to loss.

Amid the perpetual elegy of everything, Pine offers moments of improbable wonder. Johnson’s voice is steady and rich with narrative, guiding us through landscapes of memory and wilderness alike. In this intimate collection, grief and grace are intertwined, and the world—against all odds—goes on.

The true story of the Gilded Age’s “political twins” who brought women’s suffrage and political reform to the city of Pittsburgh.

Sometimes troublemakers emerge from the most unlikely of places. This true story follows the lives of two daughters of the Gilded Age—Lucy and Eliza Kennedy—who were educated at Vassar College and became leaders of the suffrage movement. Then, after the Nineteenth Amendment was passed in 1920, they spent the next forty years fighting corruption in politics and government.

Tenacious, smart, and witty, they captivated crowds, disarmed their opponents, and instilled particular dread among the corrupt politicians who were the unfortunate targets of their nonpartisan crusade. Their entry across the threshold of Pittsburgh’s City-County Building would reportedly invoke a flurry of hushed warnings through the halls: “The She Devils are at the door!” Together, Lucy and Eliza fought for the vote, empowered women to use it wisely, forced a mayor out of office in disgrace, took control of the city budget, exposed a series of scandals, spearheaded police reform, and launched a campaign that would eventually clear Pittsburgh of its smoky veil.

Featuring the true story of two powerful women, this book comes at a propitious time, reminding us how far women have come and how vigilant we must remain.
 

Poems that arise from the currents of felt experience.

Joseph Millar’s lyrical poems explore work, love, filial connection, life, and death. This is Millar’s sixth collection, and it reaches a deeper, more sonic level than his usual narrative voice. A collection of half songs rendered in a hardscrabble lyricism, they are propelled by their shifting, irregular rhymes, half rhymes, and off rhymes. The poems’ subjects grow from moments of daily life and their deeper obsessions—love, work, death, desire—and the making of art itself. Touched with more humor than earlier work, and with an unpredictable timing that seems to listen to itself as it travels down the page, the poems are part wonder and part reflection, carried along by their music.

Eighteen unforgettable stories of women navigating the beauty and chaos of Miami.

The Tamiami Trail cuts through the contradictions of Miami: a city shaped by swamps and skyscrapers, violence and desire. In Tamiami Trail: Miami Stories, Jennifer Bannan brings us eighteen vivid portraits of women navigating this teeming, volatile landscape.

An adolescent trapped in a toxic relationship. A middle-aged woman entangled with a reckless boy. A marketing executive profiting off the chaos of hurricanes. These women—mothers, daughters, lovers—take their chances in a world where environmental and personal disasters collide, where the ocean’s expanse mirrors the risks they take with their own lives.

Steamy, sharp, and deeply human, Tamiami Trail depicts the beauty and brutality of Miami, evoking its lush landscapes and relentless energy. With wit and sharp insight, Bannan maps the unruly desires that drive her unforgettable characters and the city that shapes them.

Reflects on the dark rise and fall of an ambitious rock music collective in the upper Midwest.

Matthew Pitt’s first novel draws from characters introduced in his debut story collection. The rock band Some Assault—comprised of dropouts and hedonists—flails from gig to gig, directed by their volatile drummer Liddy, who careens between foster homes and addictions. She and the band strike up a surprise friendship with Charlie Shales, their remedial algebra teacher. At first, this link is transactional, with Shales seeking drugs and the band seeking a customer. Before long, an odd and meaningful bond is formed.

When Charlie later passes, Liddy orchestrates an elaborate sonic empire, dismissing her own health woes. She recruits new members with targeted zeal, including Oliv, heiress to twin fortunes in condiment packaging and shortbread cookies. Deploying Oliv’s funds to buy a shuttered women’s prison, Some Assault converts the acreage into a farm collective and a massive recording studio dubbed The Hive.

Misfits continue to swell Some Assault’s roster, lured by The Hive’s promise of security and rabid praise: Andy Warhol’s Factory in an Instagram age. However, once the band’s fifteen minutes of fame threaten to expire, territorial violence rises, driven by dark desires to command the public eye at all costs. Chronicled by a member who managed to flee The Hive, Tear Here surveys the fierce fallout of cravings for celebrity that warp into cultish conduct.

Poems that reflect on the current tragedy in Ukraine.

In her newest collection, Ukrainian American poet Dzvinia Orlowsky is a witness, never a bystander, ready to stare down the demons, to “cut yourself with a dull razor.” She sets up house among the nightmares of intergenerational trauma and, as far as anyone can, humanizes them. Through her work, Orlowsky prompts us to enter our own histories instead of just watching.

In this compelling campus novel, a college freshman exposes hidden secrets as she fights for environmental justice in Marquette.

Arriving in Marquette for her freshman year at Northern Michigan University, Molly enrolls in Dr. Robinson’s ecology studies class, hoping to learn more about the natural world and how to protect the planet from human impact. She befriends her classmates, Dr. Robinson’s Crusoes, who share her love of hiking, camping, and building bonfires on the shores of Lake Superior.

Together, Molly and the Crusoes protest the development of Project ELF, a Navy program that is installing a series of extremely low-frequency transmitters across the Great Lakes. The US government claims Project ELF will help the country defend itself in the event of a nuclear invasion, but Upper Peninsula residents fear the communications lines will disrupt the natural environment that they hold sacred.

Initially preoccupied with the contingencies of freshman year—roommate problems, dormitory life, and dating—Molly begins to sense that the Project ELF protests may mask a more problematic dynamic between the students and faculty. As she struggles to find her purpose, Molly uncovers layers of lies and misunderstandings about campus life, Project ELF, and her time in Marquette that make her question her place in the community.

As in other notable campus novels, like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History or Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, Sharon Dilworth’s To Be Marquette portrays an undergraduate narrator groping for meaning in a world where personal transformation takes place alongside conflicting cultural paradigms.

Poetry that wrestles with language, loss, and resilience in times of crisis.

In Trying × Trying, Dora Malech dissects the language of our times; she turns over the familiar phrases of politics, parenthood, and pandemic to reveal what lies beneath. Through playing with the double meaning of “trying” as both perseverance and reproductive struggle, these poems navigate public and private spheres and interrogate the words we use to make sense of uncertainty and belief.

With sharp lyricism and restless energy, Malech transforms language into prayer and protest. Sound bends, meanings shift, and repetition becomes a revelation as she traces the tensions between individual and collective experience. Trying × Trying is an enlightening meditation on persistence, reminding us that even in fractured times, poetry finds a way forward.