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Blooming Fiascoes is a collective of verse that deconstructs identity. We are beautiful and monstrous. We live in a beautiful and monstrous world. Ellen Hagan poetically mirrors these metaphoric adversaries, drawing on her experiences as a woman, an artist, a mother, a transplanted southerner, and above all, a human being. She plumbs origins in history, body, and living to question how we reckon our whole selves in the catacombs of a world gone mad:

We mourn, we bless, / we blow, we wail, we / wind—down, we sip, / we spin, we blind, we / bend, bow & hem. We / hip, we blend, we bind, / we shake, we shine, / shine. We lips & we / teeth, we praise & protest.

In these poems, Assyrian, Italian, and Irish lines seep deeper into a body that is growing older but remains engaged with unruly encounters: the experience of raising daughters, sexual freedom, and squaring body image against the body’s prohibitions. This is a work where the legacy is still evolving and always asking questions in real time. Blooming Fiascos spindles poetry that is not afraid to see itself and the lives it inhabits.

Blue Selvage reminds us that a revolutionary message often requires new forms of discourse. 

The poems in Blue Selvage weave lyric, essay, documentary fragments, and historical reckoning into an exploration of skin, cloth, color, and form as living archives—where the gendered, racialized, and colonial histories inscribed on the body are continually exposed, resisted, and re-stitched through memory, touch, and language itself.

Preeti Parikh’s debut poetry collection is a mapping of boundaries, a (re)framing of fractured interiority, a text(ile) unfurling across shifting homelands. In this deeply embodied, formally daring meditation, the corpus is both archive and threshold, a site where “what’s felt becomes the body, what’s draped becomes form.” Here, passion for indigo, a medical-science informed perspective, fascination with the materiality of cloth and skin, and a journeying towards reclamation interlace with feminist inquiries and cultural examination to conceptualize the poems’ multivalent inhabitances. 

Expansive in its rhetorical modes and landscapes, Blue Selvage is unified by a remarkable singularity of voice and vision through which Parikh skillfully invokes form as metaphor, performance, dramatization, and content. Throughout the book, recurrent vocabularies and silences—integument, selvage, gaze—operate as warp and weft, binding personal experience to collective striving, devotion, and survival. Meanwhile, on the page, multilingual textures and typographic openness resist closure, offering apertures for looking within and without. What emerges is a capacious field of attention, where intimacy and history press against one another, and where writing itself becomes an act of unstitching and re-making—an ethical, sensuous practice of staying with what the body remembers and what culture would prefer to erase.

This study develops a new interpretation of The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio’s masterpiece, which has found new popularity in the wake of COVID. Dino S. Cervigni offers an inclusive and novel reading of the collection, theorizing that the first ninety tales offer a parodic rewriting of the Christian Middle Age, while the last ten tales craft a reconstruction of society based on human and liberal principles such as generosity and sacrifice. 

Still relevant to this day, The Decameron offers a notable description of the bubonic plague of 1348 which devastated Western Europe—drawing striking parallels with the current global pandemic. Furthermore, Boccaccio’s concluding message applies to all of us in the present moment, plunged as we are into a world of intellectual and ethical chaos, exhorting us to practice forgiveness, compassion, tolerance, mutual acceptance, and generous open-mindedness. No other book on The Decameron offers such a relevant, up-to-date reading of the classic work.

Since he first hitched a ride out of Lubbock, Texas, at the age of sixteen, singer-songwriter and Flatlanders band member Joe Ely has been a road warrior, traveling highways and back roads across America and Europe, playing music for "2 hours of ecstasy" out of "22 hours of misery." To stay sane on the road, Ely keeps a journal, penning verses that sometimes morph into songs, and other times remain "snapshots of what was flying by, just out of reach, so to savor at a later date when the wheels stop rolling, and the gears quit grinding, and the engines shut down."

In Bonfire of Roadmaps, Ely takes readers on the road with him. Using verse passages from his road journals and his own drawings, Ely authentically re-creates the experience of a musician's life on tour, from the hard goodbyes at home, to the long hours on the road, to the exhilaration of a great live show, to the exhaustion after weeks of touring. Ely's road trips begin as he rides the rails to Manhattan in 1972 and continue up through recent concert tours with fellow Flatlanders Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock.

While acknowledging that "it is not the nature of a gypsy to look in the rearview mirror," Joe Ely nevertheless offers his many fans a revelatory look back over the roads he's traveled and the wisdom he's won from his experiences. And for "those who want to venture beyond the horizon just to see what is there... to those, I hope these accounts will give a glint of inspiration..."

Any event can be a vigil: a walk by a river, a flu shot at Walgreens, an hour spent by a bird feeder attracting mostly cardinals. A vigil means you are keeping watch, and these poems are watching the world around them—and the worlds beneath those worlds, too. The poems in this collection pull from dreams and apparitions as much as they do reality: a woman in a house, a coffee mug, a book of matches, a load of unfolded laundry, a goldfish won at a county fair. All is fair game. Bonfires & Other Vigils celebrates the watching in unconventional ways. Readers can expect to revel in the elusive wonder of haziness, otherworldliness, and wildness of examining life through lenses of vigilant dreaming.

An intriguing evaluation of the concept of beginnings in the medieval period.

Medieval Studies/Literary Theory

The literary journals of a key figure in both the Beat and San Francisco Renaissance movements of the New American Poetry, and an ordained Zen Buddhist priest

Philip Whalen (1923–2002) authored twenty collections of verse, more than twenty broadsides, two novels, a huge assemblage of autobiographical literary journals, nine or ten experimental prose works, and dozens of critical essays, lectures, commentaries, introductions, prefaces, and interviews. But he came to regard his literary journals as his most important prose legacy.

Whalen’s literary work represents a significant turn in American letters, as he and his closest colleagues immersed themselves in East Asian literature and religion, reinvigorating strikingly new linguistic and aesthetic paths for North American writers and artists. However, until now Whalen’s forty-plus years of journals—sixty small eight-by-six-inch notebooks—have been largely inaccessible, archived in the rare book and manuscript library at the University of California, Berkeley, undigitized and unavailable online. Thus, the publication of a critical scholarly edition of Whalen’s journals and notebooks constitutes an important literary event and an invaluable resource for scholars, teachers, poets, and lay readers who follow twentieth-century North American poetry.
 

A finalist for the 2026 National Book Award for Poetry, this seventh collection by acclaimed poet Susan Stewart offers a meditation on difficulty and the powers of nature.
 
In the biblical book of Judges, the bramble is a figure of destructive leadership, thwarting the lives of trees. In ballads and fairy tales, roses grow “‘round the briar” in tragic contrast to heroines who are enveloped by the thorns. One of the oldest English words and an even older symbol, “bramble” reminds us of the entangled and unending struggle that comes with living in time and searching beyond appearances. The rough thicket presents impediments, yet it also bears fruit and delicate flowers.
 
With Bramble, Susan Stewart has composed a book of many forms, including satires, elegies, meditations, and songs. Bramble is also an exploration of the act of making such forms. The book’s three sections—“Mirror,” “Briar,” and “Channel”—link lyric time to our lives as they are situated in history and nature. Reflecting upon illness, grief, and change, the poems follow the progress of day and night, the movement of the seasons, and the path of water from springs to the sea.
 

The best-known work by acclaimed Cuban poet Ángel Escobar

Ángel Escobar’s Breach of Trust / Abuso de confianza is known by many as the most devastating book of his poetic generation. It is his first to be offered to an English-speaking audience. Merging personal and collective meditations, these twenty-three poems perform an indictment of violence. Escobar’s poetry delineates lacerations etched on bodies and minds by the sanguinary twentieth century, which unfolded out of a longer modernity spanning the Americas.

Breach of Trust / Abuso de confianza outlived its author, who took his own life in 1997. Brief and implicit appeals for justice and love offset the book’s abject theatricality. Escobar’s tragic masterpiece deftly interweaves themes into a striking synthesis offered in the spirit of survival.

Award-winning translator Kristin Dykstra introduces this collection with a comprehensive examination of Escobar’s life, work, and the times within which he wrote. Dykstra situates Escobar’s poetic abjection as his drive to confront thingification face to (non)face.