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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? 

Written a generation apart and rarely treated together by scholars, Little Women (1868) and The House of Mirth (1905) share a deep concern with materialism, moral development, and self-construction. The heroines in both grapple with conspicuous consumption, an aspect of modernity that challenges older beliefs about ethical behavior and core identity. 

Placing both novels at the historical intersection of modern consumer culture and older religious discourse on materialism and identity, Sarah Way Sherman analyzes how Alcott and Wharton rework traditional Protestant discourse to interpret their heroines' struggle with modern consumerism. Her conclusion reveals how Little Women's optimism, still buoyed by otherworldly justice, providential interventions, and the notion of essential identity, ultimately gives way to the much darker vision of modern materialistic culture in The House of Mirth.

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.” 

Bestselling Irish novelist Sally Rooney has emerged as the defining voice of a generation, a cultural phenomenon whose spare, intelligent prose and sharp social insight have reshaped contemporary fiction and sparked a global conversation about intimacy, politics, and the millennial condition. This new collection brings together contributors from a wide range of disciplines to offer fresh critical readings of Rooney’s influential novels, alongside adaptable strategies for teaching her work in today’s undergraduate and graduate classrooms. The essays situate Rooney within literary traditions from Romantic poetry to the bildungsroman and the contemporary campus novel, while engaging with contemporary topics such as gender politics, late capitalism, and media adaptation. Providing accessible yet rigorous frameworks for exploring Rooney’s fiction, this volume confirms her significance not only within contemporary literary studies but also as a cultural force whose work reaffirms the relevance of the humanities in the twenty-first-century classroom.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Keen observation and vivid imagery mark this collection of poems by a Chickasaw Indian. Linda Hogan's subjects are often drawn from events of everyday life—gathering wood, watching her daughters sleep, witnessing changes in the weather, awaiting nightfall. But beneath the surface of these daily happenings runs a powerful undercurrent, a sureness of life's basic rhythms and a sensitivity to the pressures of survival.

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.

Poetry tracing the parallel lives of two characters as they grapple with transcendence, selfhood, technology, and desire.

In Silicon Ana: A Quantum Entanglement, two narratives weave across each page: Ana, a stigmatic visionary navigating miraculous healings and supernatural visitations, and Nan, discovering sexuality and selfhood through a found Penthouse magazine. Across seven movements, their stories braid and diverge—hospital beds mirror bedroom paralysis, religious ecstasy meets erotic awakening, strange prophecies echo in both realms. Through tightly wound five-line stanzas, this double helix of consciousness explores possession in all its forms: spiritual, sexual, psychological, and technological. Each stanza creates a chamber where sacred and profane collapse into each other. Written in an era of AI awakening and quantum computing, where consciousness becomes suspect, this collection asks what happens when the experiment becomes self-aware. As Ana ascends toward cosmic transcendence and Nan navigates earthly desire, their entangled fates ask if we are observing one entity being split across an unfathomable divide or two that are bound by invisible threads. Silicon Ana is a fevered meditation on bodies that refuse singular interpretation in an age of infinite possible selves.

Outstanding Academic Title, CHOICE

The first oral history to fully explore the contributions of black women intellectuals to the Black Arts Movement, Sistuhs in the Struggle reclaims a vital yet under-researched chapter in African American, women’s, and theater history. This groundbreaking study documents how black women theater artists and activists—many of whom worked behind the scenes as directors, designers, producers, stage managers, and artistic directors—disseminated the black aesthetic and emboldened their communities.

Drawing on nearly thirty original interviews with well-known artists such as Ntozake Shange and Sonia Sanchez as well as less-studied figures including distinguished lighting designer Shirley Prendergast, dancer and choreographer Halifu Osumare, and three-time Tony-nominated writer and composer Micki Grant, La Donna L. Forsgren centers black women’s cultural work as a crucial component of civil rights and black power activism. Sistuhs in the Struggle is an essential collection for theater scholars, historians, and students interested in learning how black women’s art and activism both advanced and critiqued the ethos of the Black Arts and Black Power movements.

When Sleep Journeys first appeared in 1981, it took the Urdu poetry world by storm. Now considered one of the finest contemporary Urdu poets, Azra Abbas was among the first to embrace experimental, free verse poetry. A single book-length poem, divided into three cantos, Sleep Journeys is a dreamlike rumination that explores faith, female desire, and the subconscious mind. Abbas’s language is simple and austere, the complexity of the work emerging through repetition, interweaving, and juxtaposition. The result is a gossamer thread that leads the reader through a labyrinth of metaphor, imagery, and awe.

Award-winning translator Daisy Rockwell expertly captures the rhythm and flow of the original. The result is a book that ushers us into a state between sleeping and waking, the world of hidden thoughts and desires. This edition brings one of the most celebrated Urdu poems of the latter twentieth century to a broader, worldwide readership.

Sleeping in the Courtyard brings together historically isolated writers in community—and invites readers to join them around the table to share in their memories, secrets, tears, and joys. Featuring poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and graphic work by emerging and well-established writers, this collection shines a light on works by a diverse group of contemporary Kurdish women and nonbinary writers living in Kurdistan and in diaspora.

Recognizing the complex web of physical and lingual displacement of the Kurdish people and celebrating the diverse tapestry of their stories, this collection presents work originally written in English and work translated from Kurdish dialects as well as from Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Swedish. A few works in Kurdish dialects appear alongside their translations, both in recognition of the experience of linguicide and to push against oppressive attempts to strip away Kurdish language.

Several works here explore the impact of the countless forms of militarized displacement, cultural destruction, and mass genocide that Kurds have endured. Other pieces illuminate Kurdish experiences of desire, friendship, empowerment, familial intricacies, and other topics spanning across universal human conditions. The writers in these pages take risks both in craft and content—and in some cases, just by daring to write and publish. What emerges in Sleeping in the Courtyard is the antithesis of erasure.

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. 

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.”