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A debut collection of poems that question authority with wit and clarity

“Words lead on to words” is both provocation and method in SIGN BROKEN, MESSAGE INSIDE, Susanna Schantz’s debut collection rooted in examining the roadside church signs near her South Carolina home. These poems are at turns humorous and polemical, a deft call-and-response, taking the lure and scold of these marquees as prompts for close reading and reinvention. From the local, she sketches a portrait of the national, offering an “orison / from the republic of readers,” and asking with one illuminated placard, “what will our words be like today?”

Treating church signs as a public language—communal, persuasive, sometimes backhanded—these poems expose the friction between proclamation and reception, between belonging and exclusion. They press on questions of gender and agency in faith and civic life: what role women are meant to play in the church, and what might happen if a woman were to “sail beyond this place on her / own wings and a prayer.” Formally alive, Schantz’s lines stretch, scatter, and rearrange across the page, their shapes mirroring a refusal to be contained by the cramped wit of the marquee. Her diction is tactile and bodily, reconnecting language to sensation: “fall[ing] to one’s knees / not in surrender, but / simply to luxuriate / in the cool mud.” Elsewhere, a more bristling music rises: “alphabets of tick bytes / and sacramental snaps / Climbing into our avatars / we thread our way in.” The poems’ bold sounds and rhythms echo the urgency of the signs themselves even as they reclaim their message.

“She has seen signs, and wonders,” the epigraph promises; this book delivers both. In Schantz’s hands, the roadside semaphore becomes a threshold and a mirror, inviting readers to decide: When is it enough to observe, and when must we answer back? 

Saint October is a collection of title-less poems that create a network throughout the season of autumn. With challenging language and surprising imagery, these poems lift the rock of superficial autumnal beauty and examine the finer details of death and transformation, often daring the reader to leave their comfort zone. Saint October begins by taking an objective look at the last gleams of summer and quickly re-grounds itself by participating in the dynamic processes of a new season. Loss and rebirth weave these poems together as the speaker listens to the earth’s last words before she passes into death and stalks the secrets she took to her grave.

Winner, 2025 Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize

The poems in Rachel Webster’s debut collection Septem­ber often address a fleeting moment. Like the month, the moment can be a single leaf falling or a season of life. Webster’s pastoral poems address personal physical change in the seasons of life, including childhood, love, motherhood, and death. Together they lead the reader through a lyrical landscape of conversation, meditation, and healing. The work of a poet sensitive to worlds ex­ternal and internal, September speaks to the core of life and the simplicity of human events and the natural world around us.

Winner of the 2024 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize
 
Persistent yet flickering, Slow Burn unveils a passionate world where love is both impossible and inevitable. Divided into three sections, Evan Wang’s debut chapbook traces the confrontation of the self through a cyclical journey of discovery and contradiction, ultimately leading to the choice of allowance: that which is made by the reader. These poems slowly burn first through our own inner silence, then through the thick dark of night, and finally to abstract closure—or lack thereof. They urge and hold us back, begging us to understand how, amid cultural, societal, and political suppression of the self, we kiss the muscled mouths of the world by carrying our bodies through it. Slow Burn is a romantic’s answer to the search for love, and the strangely comforting realization that the effects of the world mark us all.

This book debuts selected poetry by Kim Nam-ju (1946–1994) in English translation, along with the original Korean. Referred to as the “Che Guevara of South Korea,” and self-described a “warrior poet,” Kim Nam-ju remains, to this day, an enduring voice of the 1970s and 80s cultures of anti-authoritarian resistance in South Korea. Kim was arrested in 1979 for his involvement with the “South Josǒn” National Liberation Front, a leftist underground group organizing against the Yushin regime. Kim wrote prolifically while in prison (1979-1988), at times by etching his poems into scraps of foil, milk carton, or cigarette packages. The work he produced in prison alone totals around 360 poems. This bilingual volume selects 65 poems from Kim's oeuvre, sampling across many different chapters of the poet’s career. Readers will find autobiographical reflections on his childhood, love poems, missives from the prison cell, commemorations of the Kwangju Uprising, the poet’s calls to arms, and more. 

이 책은 김남주 시인(1946~1994)의 시 65편을 한국어 원문과 함께 영문 번역으로 처음 선보인다. ‘한국의 체 게바라’로 불리며 스스로를 ‘전사 시인’이라 칭했던 김남주는 오늘날까지도 한국의 1970·80년대 반독재 저항운동을 대표하는 사라지지 않는 목소리로 남아 있다. 김남주는 유신정권에 맞서 결성된 좌파 지하조직 ‘남조선민족해방전선준비위원회’에 가담한 혐의로 1979년에 체포되었다. 1979년부터 1988년에 이르는 수감 기간에도 꾸준히 창작 활동을 이어갔으며, 때로는 은박지 조각이나 우유곽, 담뱃갑 등에 시를 새겨 집필하기도 하였다. 이 시기에 쓴 작품만 해도 360여 편에 이른다.  이 영역시집은 시인의 전체 작품 중에서 65편의 시를 엄선하여 시인의 생애와 창작 활동의 다양한 시기를 아우르는 시적 여정을 한눈에 보여준다. 독자들은 시인의 어린 시절에 대한 자전적인 회고, 사랑의 시, 옥중 서한,  5·18 광주항쟁을 추모하는 시, 민중의 투쟁을 촉구하는 시 등 다양한 작품을 만나볼 수 있을 것이다. 

English-Korean Bilingual Edition 
영-한 이중언어판

This book is published with the support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea)

A translator’s notebook, an almanac, an ecological history, Judy Halebsky’s Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) moves between multiple intersections and sign systems connected in a long glossary poem that serves as the book’s guide to what is lost, erased, or disrupted in transition both from experience to written word and from one language, location, and time period to another.

Writers Li Bai, Matsuo Bashō, Sei Shōnagon, and Du Fu make frequent appearances in centuries ranging from the eighth to the twenty-first, and appear in conversation with Grace Paley, Donald Hall, and Halebsky herself, as the poet explores subjects ranging from work and marriage to environmental destruction. Asking what would happen if these poets—not just their work—appeared in California, the poems slip between different geographies, syntaxes, times, and cultural frameworks.

The role of the literary translator is to bring text from one language into another, working to at once shift and retain the context of the original—from one alphabet to another, one point in time to another. These are poems in homage to translation; they rely on concepts that can bridge time and space, and as a result are as likely to find meaning in donuts or Zumba as they are to find it in the ocean. Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) finds reasons for hope not in how the world should be, but in how it has always been.

The poems in Brandon Dean Lamson's first volume, Starship Tahiti, explore imprisoned bodies and the tension between captivity and imagination. Beginning on Rikers Island, the book traces a creation myth in reverse, moving from prison to the spacious arches of Grand Central Station to the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. 

Lamson examines themes of violence, gender, and identity in various real and imagined settings where inmates read Antigone, Howlin' Wolf sings in a black barbershop, and Metallica records burn on a Viking altar. Throughout these shifts, the poems construct fractured narratives that subvert linear storytelling. The layering of voice and imagery in this collection transgresses boundaries between the secular and the sacred, and between the communal and the personal. As the speaker of “Portland Bardo” says, “The fragile, in between state of larvae hatching / is no less desirable than full bloom in a city of roses, if such a city can ever be found.”

Winner of the 2025 Vermont Book Award for Poetry!

“I’ll tell you everything I know. Though there might not be much to tell,” confesses the speaker in Strange Hymn 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.”