Read: "Space Age" in Menagerie Magazine

Purchase: The Alcestis Machine (Acre Books, 2024)

Carolyn Oliver is the author of The Alcestis Machine (Acre Books, 2024), Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022; selected for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize), and three chapbooks. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Image, Copper Nickel, Poetry Daily, Moist Poetry Journal, Consequence, and elsewhere. Born in Buffalo and raised in Ohio, she now lives in Massachusetts. 

Recommended Reading:

The Naomi Letters by Rachel Mennies

frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss

Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis

Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf

Metropolis (1927) film, Directed Fritz Lang

"Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint" by John Milton

Order and Disorder by Lucy Hutchinson

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin

Preorder Corrie Williamson's Your Mother's Bear Gun and Joe Wilkins' Pastoral, 1994

River River Bookswas founded by Amorak Huey and Han VanderHart in March 2022. Inspired by the idea that you cannot step in the same river twice, at River River Books, two poetry editors join together to publish (at least) two exceptional poetry titles a year. By limiting our press catalog, we commit to supporting our authors and their books with focused attention and joy. Submissions (fee optional) open to full-length poetry manuscripts May 1-June 30.

Amorak Huey (uh-MOR-ack) is author of four books of poems including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021). Co-founder with Han VanderHart of River River Books, Huey teaches in the BFA and MFA programs at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He also is co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2nd ed., 2024) and Slash/Slash (2021), winner of the Diode Editions Chapbook Prize. Huey is a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, and his poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, and many other print and online journals. 

Han VanderHart is a queer writer living in Durham, North Carolina. Their second poetry collection Larks, winner of the 2024 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, is forthcoming in April 2025 from Ohio University Press. Han is also the author of What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, 2021) and has work published in Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, AGNI, and elsewhere. Han hosts Of Poetry Podcast and alongside Amorak Huey co-edits the poetry press River River Books.

Read: "Midwinter" in The Dodge

Purchase: Songs for the Land-Bound (June Road Press, 2024)

Violeta Garcia-Mendoza is a Spanish-American poet, teacher, and suburban wildlife photographer. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals, and in 2022, she received a grant from the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She is a member of the Madwomen in the Attic Writing Workshops at Carlow University. Violeta lives with her husband, children, and pack of rescue dogs on a small certified wildlife habitat in western Pennsylvania. Songs for the Land-Bound (June Road Press, 2024) is her debut collection.

Recommended Reading

"In the Bleak Midwinter" by Christina Rossetti

June Road Press

Madwomen in the Attic
Episode 57: Sebastián H. Páramo (Of Apocalypse Literature, Writing Semi-Autobiography, and Hunting Pixelated Ducks)

Purchase: Sweet Hunter: The Complete Poems of St. Teresa of Ávila (Monkfish Book Publishing, 2024) trans. Dana Delibovi and The Widow's Crayon Box (Penguin, 2024) by Molly Peacock

Dana Delibovi is a poet, essayist, and translator. She began translating the poetry of St. Teresa of Ávila in 2019, after retiring from a hybrid career as an advertising copywriter and adjunct instructor of philosophy. Her translations of Teresa's poetry and her essays on Teresa’s legacy have appeared in Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, The Catholic Poetry Review, U.S. Catholic, After the Art, and Confluence, with a translation forthcoming in a new anthology from Word on Fire. Delibovi's writing has also appeared in Apple Valley Review, Bluestem, Ezra Translations, Moria, Noon, Psaltery & Lyre, Salamander, Slippery Elm and many other journals. She is a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee, a 2020 Best American Essays notable essayist, and 2023 co-winner of the Hueston Woods Poetry Contest. Delibovi is Consulting Poetry Editor at the literary e-zine Cable Street. She received her BA from Barnard College, Columbia University, and holds MA degrees from New York University (philosophy) and Bank Street College of Education (early childhood education). She lives in Lake Saint Louis, Missouri.

Molly Peacock is a poet and a biographer whose multi-genre literary life has taken her from New York City to Toronto, from poetry to prose, from lyric self-examination to curiosity about the lives of others.  Her latest poetry collection is The Widow’s Crayon Box (W.W. Norton), a  A book-length sequence of poems that dares to affirm the vast variety of emotional colors in loss and rejuvenation. Peacock is the author of eight books of poetry, including The Analyst: Poems and Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems, as well as A Friend Sails in on a Poem, about a 47-year friendship in poetry.  Peacock is the co-founder of Poetry in Motion on New York’s subways and buses, the founder of The Best Canadian Poetry series and, most recently, creator of The Secret Poetry Room at Binghamton University. Awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Canada Council, and the Leon Levy Center for Biography, Peacock is also a memoirist and biographer, author of two books about creativity in the lives of women artists Flower Diary and The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72, named a Book of the Year by Booklist, The Economist, The Globe and Mail, The Irish Times, The Kansas City Star, The London Evening Standard, MacLean’s, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette and The Sunday Telegraph. A dual citizen of Canada and the United States, she lives in Toronto and teaches at 92NY.

Read: "Inheritance" and "Homecoming, Rich Square, NC" (Fourway Review)

Purchase: Composition (Button Poetry, 2023)

Junious 'Jay' Ward is a poet and teaching artist from Charlotte, NC. He is a National Slam champion (2018), an Individual World Poetry Slam champion (2019), author of Sing Me A Lesser Wound (Bull City Press 2020) and Composition (Button Poetry 2023). Jay currently serves as Charlotte's inaugural Poet Laureate and is a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Ward has attended Breadloaf Writers Conference, Callaloo, The Watering Hole and Tin House Winter Workshop. His work can be found in Columbia Journal, Four Way Review, DIAGRAM, Diode Poetry Journal and elsewhere.

Recommended Reading and Listening:

Year of the Dog by Deborah Paredez (Boa Editions)

Look by Solmaz Sharif (Graywolf Press)

Zong! by M. nourbeSe philip (Graywolf Press)

Defacing the Monument by Susan Briante (Noemi Press)

Whereas by Layli Long Soldier (Graywolf)

Catherine Rockwood's Episode 44: Of Pirates, the Event of the Image, and Angelic Sex

Read: "I Pull My Leaf Leg Stockings Off My Body" (The Boiler Journal)

Purchase: The Girl Who Became a Rabbit (HCP, 2024)

Emilie Menzel, writer and librarian of hybridities, is the author of the book-length lyric The Girl Who Became a Rabbit (Hub City Press, 2024). Their gently haunted writing features in Copper Nickel, Bennington Review, and The Offing, amongst others, and has garnered such honors as the New Southern Voices Poetry Prize, the Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award in Poetry, and the Cara Parravani Memorial Award in Fiction. Menzel holds an MFA from UMass Amherst and serves as a collections librarian at Duke University and creative resources librarian for Seventh Wave. Raised on Georgia summers, they live in Durham, North Carolina.

Recommended Reading:

The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley

"The War of Vaslav Ninjinsky" by Frank Bidart

My Life in the Nineties by Lyn Hejinian

Max Porter

Annie Dillard

Toni Morrison

Maggie Nelson

Bernadette Meyer

Sabrina Ora Mark

Lydia Davis

Read: "Men Working Above: demolition" and "Parable of Baiting" (UCity Review)

Purchase: Altars of Spine and Fraction (Northwestern University Press, 2024)

Nicholas Molbert Born and raised on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, Nicholas lives in Los Angeles. He is the author of Altars of Spine and Fraction(Northwestern University Press, 2024) and two poetry chapbooks from Foundlings Press: Goodness Gracious (2019) and Cocodrie Elegy (2024). You can find his work in places like The Cincinnati Review, The Greensboro Review, Mississippi Review, and Missouri Review among others. He holds a PhD from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign."

Recommended Reading:

Martha Serpas

Dear Memphis by Rachel Edelman

Night Angler by Geoffrey Davis

Lures by Adam Vibes

Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith

Beyond Katrina by Natasha Trethewey

The Room Where I Was Born by Brian Teare

Larry Levis

Phillip Levine

Wanda Coleman

Unmanly Grief by Jess Williard

Read: "Everyone Said Nature Was Healing" (Poetry Northwest)

Purchase: Portrait of Us Burning(Curbstone Books, 2023)

Sebastián H. Páramo is the author of Portrait of Us Burning (Curbstone Books, 2023) and was named a finalist for the 2023 Best First Book of Poetry by the Texas Institute of Letters. His poems have recently appeared or will appear in AGNI, Poetry Northwest, The Arkansas International, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, and elsewhere.  His work has received fellowships and support from the Dobie Paisano Fellowship Program at UT-Austin, CantoMundo, among others. He is the founding editor of The Boiler and lives in Texas.

Recommended Reading:

Apocalypse and Disaster Communities Reading List on Bookshop

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabriel Zevin

Meltwater by Claire Wahmanholm 

Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank

The World Keeps Ending, the World Goes On by Franny Choi

The Murderbot Diariesby Martha Wells

Stanley Kunitz

Larry Levis

Thomas Lux

Nicola Davison-Reed

Read: Emily's poem "The Meat of the Plum" in Moist Poetry Journal

Emily Kramer is a poet and editor living in Boston, MA. She received her BA in English from Barnard College, and her PhD from Boston University’s Editorial Institute. Her critical edition of Arthur Henry Hallam’s collected poems is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. 

Recommended Reading:

Saskia Hamilton

Arthur Henry Hallam

Alfred, Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam

Robert Lowell

Words in Air: the complete correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton

The Dolphin by Robert Lowell, edited Saskia Hamilton

Virginia Woolf's Letters with Vita Sackville-West (Paris Review)

John Keats' Letters

Read: "Invitatory" at Poetry Daily

Purchase: Invitatory (Parlor Press, 2024)

Molly Spencer is a poet, critic, editor, and writing instructor. Her debut collection, If the House (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019) won the 2019 Brittingham Prize judged by Carl Phillips. A second collection, Hinge​ (SIU Press, 2020), a finalist for the National Poetry Series, won the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition judged by Allison Joseph. Invitatory, her forthcoming third collection, won the 2022 New Measure Poetry Prize and will be published in 2024 by Free Verse Editions / Parlor Press. Molly’s poetry has appeared in Blackbird, Copper Nickel, FIELD, The Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Her critical writing and essays have appeared at Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review online, Literary Hub, The Writer's Chronicle, and The Rumpus, where she is a senior poetry editor. Molly's work has won a Lucile Medwick Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, a Writers@Work Fellowship Award, and a faculty fellowship from the University of Michigan's Institute for the Humanities. She holds an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop and an MPA from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and teaches writing at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. ​

Further Reading:

Carl Phillips

Jorie Graham

"Home Burial" by Robert Frost

Wordsworth's Prelude, Book 1 ("Fair seedtime had my soul...")

Aracelis Girmay's essay From Woe to Wonder

Jake Skeets' essay Poetry as Field

Louise Glück