New Books in Poetry

In 2006 poet Amanda Johnston went in search of community and, when she didn’t find what she was looking for, Amanda built her own. Today, Torch Literary Arts is a resource and a destination for Black women writers and readers across the diaspora. Fueled by wisdom and writings from poets, novelists, and screenwriters, the organization’s exceptional programming and award-winning magazine amplify Bla...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Donna Vorreyer about her poetry collection, Unrivered (Sundress Publications, 2025). Donna Vorreyer strikes gold with Unrivered, a stunning collection of poems that meditate on grief, regret, longing, self-love, and acceptance. Reeling from the loss of her parents, Vorreyer’s speaker is forced to grapple with her own mortality, and with the comp...

Walt Whitman’s outrage at American politics and politicians was surpassed only by his passionate faith in democracy’s future. Both his anger and his hope fire his visionary prose writings on democracy, gathered for the first time in a new Library of America paperback edited by acclaimed political commentator and literary critic David Bromwich. Join Bromwich, Mark Edmundson (author of Song of Ourse...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews acclaimed poet Laurie D. Graham about her new book of poetry, Calling it Back to Me (McClelland & Stewart, 2026). A poet’s clear-eyed witnessing of familial history, this is the most personal collection yet from two-time Trillium Book Award finalist Laurie D. Graham. In these searching, spare, and resonant poems, Laurie D. Graham traces the story...

In her third collection, Nova Scotian poet Jaime Forsythe has created an elegant long poem with Yield (Buckrider Books, 2026). In these dreamlike lines a mother faces the postpartum void from a porous house by the ocean as the veil between land and sea, and between being lost and being found, grows thinner. With repeated waves of couplets Forsythe brings the reader unforgettable images: a po...

Amrita Chowdhury and Ujaan Ghosh bring into English for the first time a long-inaccessible masterpiece of South Asian literature Baidehisha Bilasa: The Amorous Plays of Sita’s Husband (2025). Composed in the late seventeenth century by Upendra Bhanja — the Odia prince-poet hailed as Kavi Samrat, the Emperor of Poets — the work is a Ramayana that privileges shringara, the erotic sentiment, over ma...

In his first work of nonfiction, poet chaun webster blends memoir, archival research, visual poetics, and cultural criticism to trace the ways structural anti-Black violence has shaped his inheritance, and grapples with the question of how to know—and mourn—the kin he was never able to meet.webster is particularly drawn to his grandfather Reginald, who worked for years as a Pullman porter, who was...

A guide for today’s classrooms, this collection from leading Joyce scholars explores innovative pedagogical approaches to the works of this often-challenging writer Teaching James Joyce in the Twenty-First Century (UP of Florida, 2025) presents examples of bold, innovative pedagogical techniques instructors have used to adapt the study of Joyce’s work for the contemporary classroom. Leading Joyce...

Furious Harvests (Harvard University Press, 2026) transports readers to Alex Averbuch’s homeland of eastern Ukraine. Amid the bloody destruction brought by Russia’s war of aggression, the poet toils in fields of memory, reaping lyrics from family archives and mementos to amass testaments to the complex and painful histories of this place and its peoples. A family tree, letters to home, and th...

For the RtB Books in Dark Times series back in 2021, John spoke with Elizabeth Bradfield, 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 guide people into Arctic climes, birdwatches. Liz is in and of ...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with poet Sharon Israel about her poetry collection, Voice Lesson (Post Traumatic Press). Sharon Israel’s poems are full of song and detail, movement and color; the pleasures she brings to the page are many and varied. We are as likely to find Israel’s speaker sighting owls in the Catskills, or helping in her dad’s butcher shop, as in the world of mu...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with award-winning poet Stephanie Bolster about her new book, Long Exposure (Palimpsest Press, 2025). After Hurricane Katrina, the photographer Robert Polidori flew to New Orleans to document the devastation. In the wreckage he witnessed, and in her questions about what she saw in what he saw, Stephanie Bolster found the beginnings of a long poem. Th...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks wit Griffin Prize winner Kaie Kellough about his new long poem, Interposition (McClelland & Steward, 2026). Featured in the Publishers Weekly Spring 2026 PreviewFrom Kaie Kellough, poet, sound performer, and Griffin prize winner, comes a linguistic incursion into desire, technology, and the absurd. Kaie Kellough (Magnetic Equator, Griffin Poetry Priz...

Sarah Jean Grimm is the author of Soft Focus (Metatron, 2017) and the chapbook Hog Lagoon (blush, 2023). She was a founding editor of Powder Keg Magazine (2014-2019) and currently edits the small poetry press After Hours Editions. She lives in upstate New York and works as a book publicist with Broadside PR. Book Recommendations: Niina Pollari Paths of Totality Song Cave Press, Emily Skillings, Ta...

In 2017, a cache of Jewish materials was discovered in the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania. The discovery included a manuscript of “Tsen Lider” (“Ten Poems”), a collection written and compiled by Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever while living in the Vilna Ghetto. This unique manuscript includes variants of later published poems and preserves Sutzkever's original spelling and punctuation...

And in the room we could hear the ocean waves, breaking against the history of ourselves. So concludes the first poem in Light Year (Nine Arches Press, 2025) by Jennifer Wong. This book is a meditation on time. These poems delve into the mind of a poet crossing spaces of deep wounds, love and healing: a constellation of friendships and love as she moves through upheaval, transformation and change...

'Unearthed in a clear-out, a picture calendar she’s kept– hoarding, I’ve learnt, is a mark of the emigrant –across continents and time.'So begins Sarah Howe’s extraordinary new collection, Foretokens, returning to the riddle of belonging she explored in her award-winning debut, Loop of Jade. At the heart is her own mother’s clouded past: abandoned as a baby and taken in, at the turbulent dawn of C...

This powerful work by award-winning poet Crystal Simone Smith exposes the uncomfortable truth about America’s founding text: while Common Sense is celebrated as a cornerstone of American democracy, Thomas Paine’s arguments for “total freedom and equality” were written exclusively for white men—completely excluding women and people of color from his vision of liberation. Through a clear-eyed point...

This award-winning bilingual collection intertwines the lives of a Renaissance painter and a modern migrant worker, offering a fresh perspective on art and migration. In this highly imaginative work, the lives of the northern Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516) and an imagined contemporary migrant worker named Juan Coyoc, later known as Juan Domínguez, run in parallel as they mirror e...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Conor Mc Donnell about his long poem, What We Know So Far Is...(Wolsak & Wynn, 2025). The Irish word for shadow, “scáth,” is also our word for shelter. In a powerful long poem that captures the disquiet of our age with cinematic language and imagery, Conor Mc Donnell’s What We Know So Far Is … harkens back to the previous century in its daring....

My guest today is Eric Weiskott, Professor of English at Boston College. Eric has previously published Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650 (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021) and English Alliterative Verse: Poetic Tradition and Literary History (Cambridge University Press, 2016), as well as a chapbook titled Chanties: An American Dream (Bottlecap, 2023). Eric is also a co-editor for the Yearb...

Winner of the 2025 James Laughlin Award from The Academy of American Poets  When her grandmother died, poet Diamond Forde inherited a well-worn family Bible to remember her by. In The Book of Alice (Scribner, 2026), she retells the story of her grandmother’s life through the framework of the only poetry Alice knew: the King James Bible. A Black woman born in the Jim Crow South, Alice joined the...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with acclaimed Calgary, Alberta poet David Martin about is new collection, nightstead (Palimpsest Press, 2026).  In his most personal collection to date, award-winning poet David Martin elegizes his younger brother who died by suicide at the age of twenty-three. With a mixture of childhood recollections and anguished moments nightstead produces a com...

My God’s Been Silent (Writ Large Press, 2026) is a poetry collection that lives at the intersection of faith and fury, grief and grace. Written in the aftermath of loss and disillusionment, these poems are elegies and incantations-each one a plea, a protest, a prayer left unanswered. This collection excavates the silence of God through the body of a Black man who has known both sanctuary and aband...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Toronto poet Guy Elston about his debut poetry collection, The Character Actor Convention (Gordon Hill Press/Porcupine's Quill, 2025).  A pumpkin writes a letter to his father. A sheep recalls a revolution, and love. Hydrogen pens a tell-all expos of Oxygen. The Stick Insect Orders His Tomb. Napoleon counts waves and cheats at cards. A sunflower...