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 Poetry that invites us to transform our sense of kinship, mutuality, and reciprocity.
 

With this collection, poet and artist Meredith Stricker considers questions about personhood, belonging, property, and ownership within interdependent living cultural systems. Looking beyond humans alone, she considers whether animals dream, who our relations are, what interior lives are held within words, and whether the world is truly alive to us today or if it is simply something we experience through screens. The poems track bee swarms and hazardous waste, separation walls, and diatoms. They are intently visual, aural, and spatial, tracing the dendritic forms of trees and fractal coastlines and the symmetries of biomorphic animal patterns. They highlight non-artificial, non-extractive intelligences in sharp contrast to the rise of AI. Informed by biosemiotics, SENTIENCE arises from Stricker's continuing multidisciplinary work and architectural habitat restoration in Big Sur and her performance collaborations with musicians, composers, artists, and beekeepers.

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? 

A comprehensive treatise on the life and works of Idah Meacham Strobridge, an American writer and bookbinder known primarily for a trio of works about the Great Basin.

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.

The energies animating Saints of Little Faith, Megan Pinto’s electrifying debut in poetry, are a forceful quiet, a loud stillness, the caesura between a lightning strike and the sound of thunder. Everywhere, the speaker sees the numinous power of language, the incipience of things to come, even a kind of catastrophic grace in desolation and destruction — as if within the terrain of her own obsession, she recognizes the familiar, ever-changing seasons. Fierce and intimate, this poet’s meditative transformations engage with South Asian experiences of addiction, domestic violence, and mental illness, refusing to ignore narratives treated as unspeakable and overlooked by the English canon. Mapping the collision of abuse, psychosis, and rage, Pinto sees beyond them, buoyed by an inscrutable but abiding faith in the holiness of life itself, in a cold God nevertheless capable of gentleness. Once, “desire was an arrow, but now desire / is the field.” Pinto presides over this expanse, deciding, “I have three choices: to drift through life / anesthetized, to soften. . .” In that unspoken “or,” the merciful lacuna of that ellipsis, reside the lyrical mystery and medicine that feed this astonishing collection and strengthen resolve, both ours and the speaker’s: “The lake looks frozen, but it is not.” 

The energies animating Saints of Little Faith, Megan Pinto’s electrifying debut in poetry, are a forceful quiet, a loud stillness, the caesura between a lightning strike and the sound of thunder. Everywhere, the speaker sees the numinous power of language, the incipience of things to come, even a kind of catastrophic grace in desolation and destruction — as if within the terrain of her own obsession, she recognizes the familiar, ever-changing seasons. Fierce and intimate, this poet’s meditative transformations engage with South Asian experiences of addiction, domestic violence, and mental illness, refusing to ignore narratives treated as unspeakable and overlooked by the English canon. Mapping the collision of abuse, psychosis, and rage, Pinto sees beyond them, buoyed by an inscrutable but abiding faith in the holiness of life itself, in a cold God nevertheless capable of gentleness. Once, “desire was an arrow, but now desire / is the field.” Pinto presides over this expanse, deciding, “I have three choices: to drift through life / anesthetized, to soften. . .” In that unspoken “or,” the merciful lacuna of that ellipsis, reside the lyrical mystery and medicine that feed this astonishing collection and strengthen resolve, both ours and the speaker’s: “The lake looks frozen, but it is not.” 

An insightful reconsideration of our historical moment seen through the lens of madness.

In Seeing Through Madness, W. J. T. Mitchell pursues the idea of “putting madness to work” by transforming it from an individual affliction—an illness to be treated—into a critical framework for understanding the human condition. The human species is now a danger to itself and others—the very definition of mental disorder in most societies. Therefore, it is time, Mitchell argues, for a fundamental reconsideration of madness, not only as a subject in media and the arts but more fundamentally as a “critical optic” on our historical moment. It is time to see through madness in all its variations, to see by means of it as a template for understanding, and to see it through to some form of wisdom. 

While drawing a sense of urgency from Mitchell’s conviction that the whole world is experiencing a widespread political madness, the book specifically focuses on American psychoses and collective disorders, not least the country’s delusional exceptionalism. 

Incisive, eclectic, and occasionally enraged, Mitchell’s essays are the guide we need to see us through crazy times.

Selected Poems is compiled from the best works in Jean Garrigue's eight published collections. Garrigue (1914-72) is recognized as a leading American poet of the fifties and sixties. Among her awards and honors were a Guggenheim fellowship and a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant.

She Said NO investigates the gender inequality in the authority to speak—and therefore to refuse—that prevailed in the establishment and interpretation of the French classics. By selecting authors deemed essential to French cultural heritage and erasing the works of women writers, this biased canon has systematically undervalued female agency—even in well-known works by both men and women, such as Beauty and the Beast, The Princess of Clèves, and "Little Red Riding Hood." With this book, Jennifer Tamas fills a striking gap in early modern French studies by conceptualizing consent in a society where being a woman made it structurally difficult to say "no." Yet, women did refuse. The history Tamas explores is one of forgotten, erased, misunderstood, or inadmissible refusals, and how they have been obscured. The #MeToo movement has brought questions of female agency and consent to the fore, and this book retraces an "archive of refusal" to serve as a source of inspiration for contemporary feminist discourse and to change our reception of the French canon. 

"When Bill Faulkner came to New Orleans he was a skinny little guy, three years older than I, and was not taken very seriously except by a few of us." Thus the late William Spratling, popularly known as the Taxco "Silver King," recalled the mid-1920's, when Faulkner, a young man fresh from Oxford, Mississippi, roomed with Spratling in Pirates Alley.

"By the time I would be up, say at seven, Bill would already be out on the little balcony over the garden tapping away on his portable, an invariable glass of alcohol-and-water at hand."

A result of their friendship was a book depicting "various people who were then engaged … with the arts in New Orleans." It was based on firsthand observation.

"There were casual parties with wonderful conversation and with plenty of grand, or later to be grand, people." Some of the names, in addition to Sherwood Anderson, were Horace Liveright, Carl Van Doren, Carl Sandberg, John Dos Passos, Anita Loos, and Oliver La Farge.

Spratling supplied sharp caricatures of the people and Faulkner contributed succinct captions and a Foreword. It was all "sort of a private joke," but the four hundred copies were sold within a week and the original edition is now a collector's item. This book is a charming reminder of exciting days and talented people.

These are poems of queer ecology—poetry that “exults in the grit and texture of the natural world, in the unassuming and overlooked wonders beneath our feet and beyond our doors—in lichen and snow, in martens and mushrooms.” In reckoning with a mother’s aging, a breakup, or grief and disorientation in the face of the climate crisis, these poems seek a spiritual meaning in ecological belonging. Central to the collection is a series of poems exploring science, ceremony, and personal encounters with fungi. Fungi and lichen blur what we consider biological, what we think of as an individual, and how we understand death, and these poems reflect this complexity through imagery, juxtaposition, leaps of imagination, and sonic spells.
 

The poems in Slipstream deal with the slippery concept of home, with robots and the internet and other human inventions, and with what we can learn from the natural world around us. 

Winner of the Berkshire Prize, Slipstream is a bracing, intimate, and formally adventurous debut that moves with equal grace through personal memory, inherited history, myth, and the ambient technologies of contemporary life. Diana Cao’s poems braid ancient Chinese legend, family migration, illness, love, and grief with moon landers, algorithms, privacy policies, and online ritual, creating a lyric field where the ancestral and the digital speak fluently to one another. The book is formally restless and assured. Sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, fables, and linked sequences feel conversational rather than ornate, their intelligence worn lightly, their music precise and unforced. Throughout, Cao writes with a clarity that never flattens complexity: humor and vulnerability coexist with philosophical rigor. Tenderness is sharpened, not softened, by attention to politics, history, and care. 

What emerges is a voice attuned to relational life in all its registers—daughterhood, friendship, desire, citizenship, species—asking how to live, love, and remain lucid inside systems that both sustain and estrange us. Slipstream is a book of uncommon range and emotional intelligence, one that feels fully of this moment while remaining in deep, living conversation with the past. 

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.

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the social role of educated women and the nature of domesticity were the focus of widespread debate in Britain. The emergence of an identifiably feminist voice in that debate is the subject of Harriet Guest's new study, which explores how small changes in the meaning of patriotism and the relations between public and private categories permitted educated British women to imagine themselves as political subjects.

Small Change considers the celebration of learned women as tokens of national progress in the context of a commercial culture that complicates notions of gender difference. Guest offers a fascinating account of the women of the bluestocking circle, focusing in particular on Elizabeth Carter, hailed as the paradigmatic learned and domestic woman. She discusses the importance of the American war to the changing relation between patriotism and gender in the 1770s and 1780s, and she casts new light on Mary Wollstonecraft's writing of the 1790s, considering it in relation to the anti-feminine discourse of Hannah More, and the utopian feminism of Mary Hays.

Anticipating and then grieving the death of her father, Jen Levitt’s So Long fleshes out a full elegiac register, sitting with the mourning of farewell while holding onto gratitude, remembrance, and a permeating love. “Soon,” she says, “we’ll have to find another way to meet, as moonlight / makes the river glow.” In the contrails of bittersweet loss, Levitt’s speaker observes all that surrounds her, and the self, too, as a phenomenon in loneliness. In the suburbs, she notes high- school athletes circling “in their sweat-resistant fabrics,” “so natural in their tank tops, those dutiful kids trying to beat time”; upstate, she finds herself in temple where Broadway music has replaced prayer and discovers “no promises, / but, like hearing a rustle in deep woods & turning to locate its source, the chance for something rare.” It is this humanistic faith that inverts the title’s idiomatic goodbye into a statement of permanence, the truth of our enduring, improbable lives: look at this, she seems to command herself, “& look at how lucky I’ve been, for so long.”

Hailed as a landmark in its field since its first publication in 1984, Denis E. Cosgrove’s Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape has been influential well beyond geography. It has continued to spark lively debate among historians, geographers, art historians, social theorists, landscape architects, and others interested in the social and cultural politics of landscape.

Winner of the International Berkshire Prize, this collection draws from an incredible range of literary forms, from familiar couplets and tercets to footnotes, dictionary definitions, and luminous lyric fragments. 

While stylistically daring, even virtuosic, Avia Tadmor’s stunning debut is unified by its enduring engagement with questions of language and alterity. What does it mean to be othered by and through language? What happens when grammar, syntax, and the concepts of identity housed within them are at odds? Does a revolutionary message demand new forms of discourse? “I can say it through the distance of this other tongue,” Tadmor writes. 

Indeed, she considers the role of language—from conceptual framework to vast storehouse of history, culture, and inheritance—in shaping the self, ultimately revealing our agency within a grammar and syntax we did not choose. As Tadmor writes, “Her pen is a stronghold, a lighthouse / flickering late in July.”