New Books in Poetry

New Books in Poetry episodes:

• 04.08.2024

  Steve Mentz, "Sailing without Ahab: Ecopoetic Travels" (Fordham UP, 2024)

  When I decided to try my hand at interviewing authors for the New Books Network, one of my dream guests was Steve Mentz. Steve’s work in the environmental humanities marries a rigorous archival work, pathbreaking close readings, and a fluent...

  
• 03.21.2024

  David Ferry, Roger Reeves, and the Underworld

  In Memoriam: David Ferry (1924-2023) In this Recall This Book conversation from 2021, poets David Ferry and Roger Reeves talk about lyric, epic, and the underworld. The underworld, that repository of the Shades of the Dead, gets a lot of traffic from heroes...

  
• 03.20.2024

  Herbert Gold and Ari Gold, "Father Verses Sons: A Correspondence in Poems" (Rare Bird Books, 2024)

  Father Verses Sons: A Correspondence in Poems (Rare Bird, 2024). When the global pandemic forced his ninety-six-year-old father into isolation, filmmaker Ari Gold became concerned that loneliness would kill his father's spirits. As a prolific novelist who began writing in his twenties, Herbert Gold's incredible oeuvre...

  
• 03.12.2024

  Millicent Borges Accardi, "Quarantine Highway" (Flowersong Press, 2022)

  Millicent Borges Accardi, a Portuguese-American writer, is the author of four poetry collections, including Only More So (Salmon Poetry, Ireland), and Quarantine Highway (FlowerSong Press). Among her awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Fulbright, CantoMundo, Creative Capacity, the California...

  
• 02.06.2024

  Karen Rigby, "Fabulosa" (JackLeg Press, 2024)

  After her prize-winning debut, Karen Rigby returns with a beguiling ars poetica and tribute to the dazzling. From Dior to Olympic figure skating, Bruegel to British crime drama, Rigby’s poems revere memorable art, where “performance masks the hours.” Here, thread galvanizes air....

  
• 01.09.2024

  Cynthia Marie Hoffman, "Exploding Head" (Persea Books, 2024)

  Exploding Head (Persea Books, 2024) chronicles a woman’s childhood onset and adult journey through obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which manifests in fearful obsessions and counting compulsions that impact her relationship to motherhood, religion, and the larger world. Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s unsettling, image-rich...

  
• 01.08.2024

  Jessica Romney, "Lyric Poetry and Social Identity in Archaic Greece" (U Michigan Press, 2020)

  Jessica Romney's book Lyric Poetry and Social Identity in Archaic Greece (U Michigan Press, 2020) examines how Greek men presented themselves and their social groups to one another. The author examines identity rhetoric in sympotic lyric: how Greek poets constructed images of...

  
• 12.27.2023

  Adi Wolfson, "I Am Your Father" (Pardes Press, 2019)

  The poems in the book  I Am Your Father (Pardes Press, 2019) were written during a period of great confusion and pain, culminating in the moment when the poet discovered that the person he had until then referred to as his daughter...

  
• 12.24.2023

  Ran Oron, "He Could See a Bird Outside if He Looked Through His Window" (Persimmon Books, 2023)

  From his home in Connecticut, Ran Oron observed and drew a pair of ospreys, a couple of birds of prey that return each year to the same nest. With a delicate line, in a series of drawings, in a narrative that...

  
• 12.02.2023

  Elizabeth Hoover, "The Archive Is All in Present Tense" (Barrow Street Press, 2022)

  The Archive Is All in Present Tense (Barrow Street Press, 2022) attempts to capture the feeling of archival research, which, despite being an attempt to access information about the past, has a way of infusing the present; research unfolds in real...

  
• 11.29.2023

  Ian Probstein, trans., "Centuries Encircle Me with Fire: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam" (Academic Studies Press, 2022)

  Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's most influential poets. This collection, compiled, translated, and edited by poet and scholar Ian Probstein, provides Anglophone audiences with a powerful selection of Mandelstam's most beloved and haunting...

  
• 11.20.2023

  Shakespeare's Sonnets Part 3

  Part 3 starts with a discussion of general reading strategies to help you discover the poetic techniques and insights of any individual sonnet. It concludes with a close-reading of three sonnets from Professor Michael Schoenfeldt that show the extraordinary range...

  
• 11.13.2023

  Shakespeare's Sonnets Part 2

  Part 2 focuses closely on the two major “characters” to whom the sonnets are addressed: a beautiful young man, and a woman described as black. You’ll learn how the speaker represents his relationship to these figures and his desire for...

  
• 11.08.2023

  Seamus Heaney’s Afterlives

  In 1995, Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. During his speech, he explained that the adequacy of lyric poetry spoke to the “‘temple inside our hearing’ which the passage of the poem calls into being. It is...

  
• 11.06.2023

  Shakespeare's Sonnets Part 1

  The sonnet — a 14-line poem with a strict rhyme scheme, conventionally associated with love — was one of the most popular poetic forms in late Elizabethan England. In 1609, Shakespeare published a sequence of 154 sonnets that radically reimagined...

  
• 11.06.2023

  Katherine Gaffney, "Fool in a Blue House" (U Tampa Press, 2023)

  Katherine Gaffney completed her MFA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is currently working on her PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, jubilat, Harpur Palate, Mississippi...

  
• 10.31.2023

  Ann C. Bracken, "Crash: A Memoir of Overmedication and Recovery" (Charing Cross Press, 2022)

  Ann Bracken has published three poetry collections, The Altar of Innocence, No Barking in the Hallways: Poems from the Classroom, Once You’re Inside: Poetry Exploring Incarceration, and a memoir entitled Crash: A Memoir of Overmedication and Recovery (Charing Cross Press, 2022). She serves as a...

  
• 10.27.2023

  Christopher Spaide, "Closure?" The Common Magazine (May 2023)

  Christopher Spaide speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his poem “Closure?,” which appears in The Common’s most recent issue. Chris talks about how his curiosity for language and wordplay often lead him into deeper themes in his poems. He also discusses...

  
• 10.10.2023

  Caitlin Cowan, "Happy Everything" (Cornerstone Press, 2024)

  Caitlin Cowan is the author of Happy Everything, forthcoming in February 2024 from Cornerstone Press. Caitlin holds a PhD in English from the University of North Texas, an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School, and BAs in English and...

  
• 10.07.2023

  Christopher Merrill, "On the Road to Lviv" (Arrowsmith Press, 2023)

  Prismatic and polysemous, On the Road to Lviv (Arrowsmith Press, 2023) invites us on an odyssey across Ukraine in the hour of war. "This chronicle/ Took shape the day the war began, which was/ My 65th birthday," writes legendary traveler, war correspondent, memoirist...

  
• 10.05.2023

  Eileen Myles, "Pathetic Literature" (Grove Press, 2022)

  “Literature is pathetic.” So claims Eileen Myles in their provocative and robust introduction to Pathetic Literature (Grove Press, 2022), a breathtaking mishmash of pieces ranging from poems to theater scripts to prose to anything in between, all exploring the so-called “pathetic” or...

  
• 09.19.2023

  Jane Hirshfield, "The Asking: New and Selected Poems" (Knopf, 2023)

  When poet Jane Hirshfield first arrived at Tassajara Monastery nearly fifty years ago, a Zen teacher told her that it was a good idea to have a question to practice with. She’s been asking questions ever since. Both in her...

  
• 09.15.2023

  Alyssa Noelle Coelho, "The Alchemy of the Beast" (Saved by Story, 2023)

  "I wept as time stopped, and I wept as time refused to cease."  Grieving her faith, her love, and her identity, twenty-one-year-old Scarlett V. Leonelli is devastated by an unexpected tragedy--one threatening to unravel her to her very core. Following a...

  
• 09.13.2023

  Amy Berkowitz, "Gravitas" (Éditions du Noroît/Total Joy, 2023)

  Frank, conversational, and darkly funny, Gravitas examines the tendency of MFA programs to teach women that their lives aren’t worth writing about. These poems bear witness not only to alienation but also to the bittersweet joy of being forced to invent alternative...

  
• 09.12.2023

  Dong Li, "The Orange Tree" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

  Dong Li’s The Orange Tree (U Chicago Press, 2023) is a collection of narrative poems that braids forgotten legends, personal sorrows, and political upheavals into a cinematic account of Chinese history as experienced by one family. Amid chaos and catastrophe, the child narrator...

  
• 09.12.2023

  A Better Way to Buy Books

  Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the...

  
• 08.28.2023

  David Waldstreicher, "The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence" (FSG, 2023)

  Thy Power, O Liberty, make strong the weak, And (wond’rous instinct) Ethiopians speak. At the age of 19, Phillis Wheatley published the first book in English by a person of African descent and the third book of poetry by a North American...

  
• 08.26.2023

  Hollis Robbins, "Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition" (U Georgia Press, 2020)

  As I learned from Hollis Robbins’s monograph Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition (U Georgia Press, 2020), there has been a long-standing skepticism of the sonnet form among Black writers and literary critics. Langston Hughes wrote that “the Shakespearean...

  
• 08.15.2023

  Molly Peacock, "A Friend Sails in on a Poem: Essays on Friendship, Freedom and Poetic Form" (Palimpsest Press, 2022)

  For the last forty-five years, the distinguished poets Molly Peacock and Phillis Levin have read and discussed nearly every poem they’ve written-an unparalleled friendship in poetry. In A Friend Sails in on a Poem (Palimpsest Press, 2022), Peacock collects her most important essays on poetic form and...

  
• 08.01.2023

  Linda Nemec Foster, "Bone Country: Prose Poems" (Cornerstone Press, 2023)

  Linda Nemec Foster has published twelve collections of poetry including Amber Necklace from Gdansk (finalist for the Ohio Book Award in Poetry), Talking Diamonds, and The Lake Michigan Mermaid (2019 Michigan Notable Book) which was created with co-author Anne-Marie Oomen and artist Meridith Ridl....

  
• 07.21.2023

  Matt Donovan, "Guy with a Gun" The Common Magazine (Fall, 2023)

  Matt Donovan speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his prose poem “Guy with a Gun,” which appeared in The Common’s fall issue. Matt talks about the conversation that inspired the poem—an encounter with a Sandy Hook parent that highlights the complex...

  
• 07.15.2023

  Rachel Mennies, "The Naomi Letters" (BOA Editions, 2021)

  Rachel Mennies embraces the public/private duality of writing letters in her latest collection of poems. Told through a time-honored epistolary narrative, The Naomi Letters (BOA Editions, 2021) chronicles the relationship between a woman speaker and Naomi, the woman she loves. Set mostly over...

  
• 07.04.2023

  Jenifer Debellis, "New Wilderness" (Cornerstone Press, 2023)

  Jenifer DeBellis, M.F.A., is author of New Wilderness (Cornerstone Press, 2023), Warrior Sister, Cut Yourself Free from Your Assault (Library Tales Publishing, 2021), and Blood Sisters (Main Street Rag, 2018). Her freelance career spans over two decades, allowing her to ghostwrite and edit literary and mass...

  
• 07.01.2023

  Proust Questionnaire 38: Ricardo Alberto Maldonado

  Ricardo Alberto Maldonado is a poet residing in New York City who was born and raised in Puerto Rico. His first collection of poems, The Life Assignment, was a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. He...

  
• 06.20.2023

  Michele Herman, "Just Another Jack: The Private Lives of Nursery Rhymes" (Finishing Line Press, 2022)

  Michele Herman is author of the novel Save The Village (Regal House Publishing, 2022) and the poetry chapbook Victory Boulevard (Finishing Line Press) as well as Just Another Jack (Finishing Line Press, 2022). Her poems, stories, and essays have appeared widely in publications including The Sun,...

  
• 06.19.2023

  Mag Gabbert, "Sex Depression Animals" (Ohio State UP, 2023)

  In Sex Depression Animals (Ohio State UP, 2023), Mag Gabbert redefines the bestiary in fiery, insistent, and resistant terms. These poems recast the traumas of her adolescence while charting new paths toward linguistic and bodily autonomy as an adult. Using dreamlike, shimmering...

  
• 06.10.2023

  Rumi, "Gold" (New York Review of Books, 2022)

  In this conversation, we discuss Haleh Liza Gafori's masterful new translations of poetry by Rumi, the 13th-century Persian mystic and poet. Rumi's work is well-known in the West, but has often been encountered through the work of translators without direct...

  
• 06.06.2023

  Emily Hockaday, "Naming the Ghost" (Cornerstone Press, 2022)

  Emily Hockaday is a poet from Queens who writes about ecology, astronomy, and the city landscape, alongside more personal subjects. Her first collection Naming the Ghost (Cornerstone Press, 2022) tackles the onset of chronic illness and parenting through grief. Her next full-length, In a...

  
• 05.27.2023

  Halyna Kruk, "A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails" (Arrowsmith Press, 2023)

  "We act like children with our dead," Halyna Kruk writes as she struggles to come to terms with the horror unfolding around her: "confused, / as if none of us knew until now/ how easy it is to die." In...

  
• 05.26.2023

  Rin Ishigaki, "This Overflowing Light: Selected Poems" (Isobar Press, 2022)

  Born in central Tokyo in 1920, Rin Ishigaki was one of the most daring and gifted poets of Japan’s postwar cultural renaissance. She knew Japan before the war, during it, and afterwards, saw it move from hubris to disastrous defeat – which...

  
• 05.24.2023

  Carolyn Forché and Ilya Kaminsky, "In the Hour of War: Poetry from Ukraine" (Arrowsmith Press, 2023)

  Ukraine may be the only country on earth that owes its existence, at least in part, to a poet. Ever since the appearance of Taras Shevchenko's Kobzar in 1840, poetry has played an outsized role in Ukrainian culture. "Our anthology begins: Letters of...

  
• 05.09.2023

  Heather Bourbeau, "Monarch" (Cornerstone Press, 2023)

  Heather Bourbeau’s poetry and fiction appeared in 100 Word Story, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review, Meridian, The Stockholm Review of Literature, and SWWIM. She is the winner of La Piccioletta Barca’s inaugural competition and the Chapman Magazine Flash Fiction winner, and has twice...

  
• 05.03.2023

  Lavinia Singer, "Artifice" (Prototype, 2023)

  Artifice (Prototype, 2023), the debut collection by Lavinia Singer, is an exploration of the art of making. Its poems celebrate the artistry of craftsmanship: how works relate to beauty, and how they might inspire or ensnare. They consider issues of artificiality...

  
• 05.03.2023

  Shanee Stepakoff, "Testimony: Found Poems from the Special Court for Sierra Leone" (Bucknell UP, 2021)

  Content note: This episode contains discussions of violence, including rape and mutilation Derived from public testimonies at a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Freetown, Testimony: Found Poems from the Special Court for Sierra Leone (Bucknell University Press, 202) is a remarkable poetry collection, which won...

  
• 05.01.2023

  Evie Shockley, "Suddenly We" (Wesleyan UP, 2023)

  In her new poetry collection Suddenly We (Wesleyan UP, 2023), Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes towards openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious "we." How do we navigate between the urgency of our own...

  
• 04.29.2023

  Ostap Kin, "Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond" (HURI, 2022)

  In 2021, the world commemorates the 80th anniversary of the massacres of Jews at Babyn Yar. The present collection brings together for the first time the responses to the tragic events of September 1941 by Ukrainian Jewish and non-Jewish poets...

  
• 04.24.2023

  Tawanda Mulalu, "Please Make Me Pretty, I Don't Want to Die" (Princeton UP, 2022)

  Please Make Me Pretty, I Don't Want to Die (Princeton UP, 2022) explores tactility, sound, sensuality, and intimacy. Set across the four seasons of a year, these fresh and original poems by Tawanda Mulalu combine an inviting confessional voice and offbeat...

  
• 04.20.2023

  Elizabeth Bradfield in Dark Times (JP)

  For the RtB Books in Dark Times series back in 2021, John spoke with Elizabeth Bradfied, editor of Broadsided Press, poet, professor of creative writing at Brandeis, naturalist, photographer. Her books include Interpretive Work, Approaching Ice, Once Removed, and Toward Antarctica. She lives on Cape Cod, travels north every summer to...

  
• 04.07.2023

  Marianna Kiyanovska, "The Voices of Babyn Yar" (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2022)

  Today I talked to the translators of Marianna Kiyanovska's The Voices of Babyn Yar (HURI, 2022), Max Rosochinsky and Oksana Maksymchuk. With this collection of stirring poems the award-winning Ukrainian poet honors the victims of the Holocaust by writing their stories of horror, death, and survival...

  
• 04.06.2023

  Sassan Tabatabai: Poetry, Observation, and Form

  "For me, there is something so solid and comforting in stone" says Sassan Tabatabai in our conversation, and in his poem "Firestones" the words roll, weigh and satisfyingly click together. Firestones I was collecting rocks on the Cardiff coast, a testimony to centuries...