New Books in Poetry

Епизоде

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  Rachel Eliza Griffiths, "The Flower Bearers" (Random House, 2026) 15.09.2026 47мин

  On September 24, 2021, Rachel Eliza Griffiths married her husband, the novelist Salman Rushdie. On the same day, hundreds of miles away, Griffiths’ closest friend and chosen sister, the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who was expected to speak at the wedding, died suddenly. Eleven months later, as Griffiths attempted to piece together her life as a newlywed with heartbreak in one hand and immense love in the other, a brutal attack nearly killed her husband. As trauma compounded trauma, Griffiths realized that in order to survive her grief, she would need to mourn not only her friend, but the woman she had been on her wedding day, a woman who had also died that day. In the process of rebuilding a self, Griffiths chronicles her friendship with Moon, the seventeen years since their meeting at Sarah Lawrence College. Together, they embraced their literary foremothers—Lucille Clifton, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, to name a few—and fought to embrace themselves as poets, artists, and Black women. Alongside this unbreakable bond, Griffiths weaves the story of her relationship with Rushdie, of the challenges they have faced and the unshakeable devotion that endures. In The Flower Bearers (Random House, 2026), Griffiths inscribes the trajectories of two transformational relationships with grace and honesty, chronicling the beauty and pain that comes with opening oneself fully to love. This is a conversation not to be missed.
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  Remco E Breuker, "Not Everything Unfolds as Anticipated: Selections from Yi Kyubo’s Tongguk Yi Sangguk Chip" (U Hawaii Press, 2026) 14.09.2026 45мин
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  Kirby, "Fairy" (Palimpsest Press, 2026) 06.09.2026 41мин

  In this episode, NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Kirby about their joyful and powerful new book, Fairy (Palimpsest Press, 2026). In Fairy, Kirby continues to mine their riches and fan the flames lit in their instant classic, Poetry is Queer. Their essays are an act of liberation they call “tending to each other’s freedom,” and are written with signature Kirby directness and panache, from early AIDS-activist monologues, to launching a counter city-wide “safe-sex” campaign that includes the public depiction of an affectionate gay couple, to leaving the States in a love that made them “the most beautiful boy in the world,” to becoming a Canadian queer poetry icon. Like countless fairies before them, Kirby scouts desire paths beyond mere survival for new queer voices to continue to amaze, flourish, and thrive. Or as Fairy says, “This way >>>” Kirby is the author of She (KFB, 2025), Poetry is Queer (Palimpsest Press, 2021), This Is Where I Get Off (Permanent Sleep Press, 2019), featured columnist at Send My Love to Anyone and publisher at Knife | Fork | Book. kirbyfairy.ca Hollay Ghadery is an award-winning Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024 and was longlisted for the Toronto Book Award. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, was released with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is a host on The New Books Network, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Founder of River Street, and the co-chair of the League of Canadian Poets BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. She is also a member of The National Book Critics Circle, The Creative Nonfiction Collective, and The Writers Union of Canada. Learn more about Hollay here. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
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  Inside Ink & Ribbon Press with Founder G.K. Allum and Poet Jan Noble 03.09.2026 58мин

  A year ago, Ink & Ribbon Press did not exist. Today it’s a nonprofit publisher with its first books in the world, a readership built largely through Substack, early editions that have sold out, and an inaugural prize — the LemonLight Prize — that drew more than 3,500 poems from 706 poets across eight countries. Among the press’s forthcoming titles is Jan Noble’s My Name Is Swan, a poem Jan has spent more than a decade performing in pubs across Britain. A film of the poem recently took Best Narrative at the International Poetry Film Festival in Los Angeles. In this conversation, we discuss what it takes to build a nonprofit publisher and the world of poetry today. G.K. Allum is Founding Editor & President of Ink & Ribbon Press. Jan Noble is the author of My Name is Swan. He is a British poet and performer whose work spans page, stage, film, radio, and recording. My Name Is Swan brings together three of his major narrative works as one unified manuscript for the first time. He has performed the poem in many pubs named Swan. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
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  Patricia A. Billingsley, "Lorca in Vermont: The Spanish Poet and His American Lover" (High Road Books, 2026) 24.08.2026 55мин

  A groundbreaking reassessment of the relationship between Federico García Lorca and American poet Philip Cummings and its impact on the poems in Lorca's landmark collection, Poet in New York.In August 1929, Spanish poet Federico García Lorca left New York City to spend ten days with his friend and lover Philip Cummings at a lakeside cottage in northern Vermont. Lorca in Vermont: The Spanish Poet and His American Lover (High Road Books, 2026) tells the story of two young men with mismatched goals and expectations: Lorca, already well established in his career, who sought a sustained romantic relationship with another man, and Cummings, a new college graduate eight years his junior, who had no interest in long-term commitment or in challenging social conventions. Based on over a decade of research, Lorca in Vermont explores the full course of Lorca’s relationship with Cummings, an affair that spanned three years and two continents. Combining unique access to primary sources, extensive original research, and a fresh analysis of published sources, the book describes not only the pair’s history as a couple but also the suppression of their relationship by Lorca scholars after the poet’s tragic death in 1936. Perhaps most importantly, it reveals previously unrecognized links between the disappointment and loss Lorca experienced in his relationship with Cummings and at least eight of the poems in his landmark collection Poet in New York, a work that has long intrigued and inspired other writers. The book brilliantly blends compelling new findings and an engaging narrative style in a page-turning tale that is a must read for anyone interested in Lorca and his legacy. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
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  Christopher R. Rogers, "My City Need Something" (Common Notions, 2026) 11.08.2026 54мин

  Moving between word and image, the call-and-response collaboration between writer Christopher R. Rogers and photographer karim brown improvises a contemporary portrait of present-day Black Philadelphia, replete with the unfinished activism present since the transnational upsurge of the George Floyd Uprising.Arriving five years after the crucible of that period, this experimental essay-as-LP challenges us to prioritize the urgency of reckoning with our own hang-ups and half-steps and to reground ourselves within the daily, prefigurative life-work of rehearsing Black liberation. This is a hyperlocal, future-forward recommitment to ongoing principled struggle and a hopeful model of contemporary self-criticism.Taking its title from a song by the late, beloved Uptown Philadelphia rapper PnB Rock, My City Need Something (Common Notions, 2026) challenges readers to strive for clarity in a time of Black suffering, in a city resplendent with Black joy. Christopher R. Rogers, PhD is a Philadelphia-based cultural organizer and educator hailing from Chester, PA with more than a decade of experience in supporting radical arts, culture, and community-building. He is a Facilitator with the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction and co-coordinates the Friends of The Tanner House, incubating a revitalized National Historic Landmark rowhome that Dr. Carter G. Woodson once dubbed the “center of Black intellectual life in Philadelphia.” He previously published with Common Notions as Lead Editor for How We Stay Free: Notes on a Black Uprising (2022) alongside novelist Fajr Muhammad. You can find Chris on Instagram @justmaybechris. After listening to this episode, head over to the Additions to the Archive Substack, where Chris and Sullivan talk further about community education and activism. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
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  The Letters of Emily Dickinson 30.07.2026 53мин

  Emily Dickinson was a letter writer before she was a poet. And it was through letters that she shared prose reflections–alternately humorous, provocative, affectionate, and philosophical–with her extensive community. While her letters often contain poems, and some letters consist entirely of a single poem, they also constitute a rich genre all their own. Through her correspondence, Dickinson appears in her many facets as a reader, writer, and thinker; social commentator and comedian; friend, neighbor, sister, and daughter. The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Belknap Press, 2024) is the first collected edition of the poet’s correspondence since 1958. It presents all 1,304 of her extant letters, along with the small number available from her correspondents. Almost 300 are previously uncollected, including letters published after 1958, letters more recently discovered in manuscript, and more than 200 “letter-poems” that Dickinson sent to correspondents without accompanying prose. This edition also redates much of her correspondence, relying on records of Amherst weather patterns, historical events, and details about flora and fauna to locate the letters more precisely in time. Finally, updated annotations place Dickinson’s writing more firmly in relation to national and international events, as well as the rhythms of daily life in her hometown. What emerges is not the reclusive Dickinson of legend but a poet firmly embedded in the political and literary currents of her time. Dickinson’s letters shed light on the soaring and capacious mind of a great American poet and her vast world of relationships. This edition presents her correspondence anew, in all its complexity and brilliance. Guest: Dr. Cristanne Miller is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Edward H. Butler Professor of Literature, and serves on the advisory board of the Emily Dickinson Archive. Her scholarship on Dickinson includes Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar; Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them; and The Letters of Emily Dickinson, which she co-edited with Domhnall Mitchell. Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the creator, producer and host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: The World She Edited: Katharine S White at the New Yorker Once Upon A Tome Your Art Will Save Your Life Wild Everything The Banned Book Becoming The Writer You Already Are Archival Etiquette What To Know Before You Go Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
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  Molly Peacock, "The Widow’s Crayon Box" (WW Norton & Co, 2025) 23.07.2026 34мин

  In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with internationally acclaimed poet and biographer of women’s creativity, Molly Peacock about her collection, The Widow’s Crayon Box (WW Norton & Co, 2025)--a book-length sequence of poems that dares to affirm the vast variety of emotional colors in loss and rejuvenation. After her husband’s death, Molly Peacock realized she was not living the received idea of a widow’s mauve existence but instead was experiencing life in all colors. These gorgeous poems—joyful, furious, mournful, bewildered, sexy, devastated, whimsical and above all, moving—composed in sonnet sequences and in open forms, designed in four movements (After, Before, When, and Afterglow)—illuminate both the role of the caregiver and the crystalline emotions one can experience after the death of a cherished partner. With her characteristic virtuosity, her fearless willingness to confront even the most difficult emotions, and always with buoyancy and zest, Peacock charts widowhood in the twenty-first century. About Molly Peacock: Molly is the author of eight volumes of poetry, including The Widow’s Crayon Box, The Analyst: Poems and Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems, all from W.W. Norton, she recently wrote a book about a half-century friendship, A Friend Sails in on a Poem. As a poetry activist, Peacock was the co-founder of Poetry in Motion on New York’s subways and buses, the founder of The Best Canadian Poetry series, and the creator of The Secret Poetry Room at Binghamton University. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
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  Phillip B. Williams, "Lift Every Voice" (Penguin, 2026) 14.07.2026 56мин

  Captivating for both its grandeur and intimacy, Lift Every Voice (Penguin Books, 2026) explores the past’s capacity to be both a source of dread and empowerment, an unshakable reminder of violence and an indelible testament to the endurance of love. In virtuosic poems that are wise, musical, richly layered, and saturated with vivid imagery, Williams honors a mother “who knew seven ways to say bitch under her breath,” a grandma whose smile “reflects the world,” and wonders at “the impossible lift” of forgiveness. Lift Every Voice is a staggering tribute to personal and collective evolutions, a vital chorus that answers only to God, community, and the empowered self. Phillip B. Williams is from Chicago, Illinois, and is the author of two collections of poetry: Thief in the Interior, which was the winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Lambda Literary Award, and Mutiny, which was a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection and the winner of a 2022 American Book Award. Williams is also the recipient of a Whiting Award and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. His 2025 novel, Ours, was named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, People, Los Angeles Times, NPR, and more. You can find Phillip on Instagram. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
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  In Praise: A Conversation with Texas Poet Laureate & Founder of Torch Literary Arts, Amanda Johnston 30.06.2026 34мин

  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 Black women’s voices, and has featured work from poets like Patricia Smith, Yona Harvey, and Toi Derricotte, screenwriters and playwrights like Jonterri Gadson, Charla Lauriston, and Lisa B. Thompson, and novelists like Tayari Jones, Crystal Wilkinson, and Sapphire. And at a time when Amanda is preparing for Torch’s 20th Anniversary celebration, “A Gathering of Flames,” she is also celebrating the publication of a new book in her capacity as the 61st Texas Poet Laureate, Praisesong for the People: Poems from the Heart and Soul of Texas (Host Publications, 2025), showcasing original praise poems commissioned from poets across the state, and seeking to uplift diverse and intersecting populations across age, gender, and BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, differently-abled, and immigrant communities. You can find Amanda at her website, on Instagram, and on Threads. And check out Torch Literary Arts, Torch Magazine, and follow the organization on Instagram, Facebook, and Threads. Want to hear more from Amanda about the journey to Torch’s 20th Anniversary? Check out our continued conversation on Substack. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
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  Donna Vorreyer, "Unrivered" (Sundress Publications, 2025) 20.06.2026 46мин

  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 complicated feelings that come with aging. At times whispering softly in our ears, at times spitting venom with every word, Vorreyer charts the ways loss impacts the body and our perceptions of self, and how we are to keep on living. With a heroic sonnet crown woven through the book like the loose stitches in her grandmother's quilt, Vorreyer offers hope, courage, and gratitude in the face of our deepest fears. The result is a masterful and gripping story of loss and acceptance. Offering up rending, apocalyptic elegy, ironic detachment, or passionate, joyful celebration of life, Unrivered is bound to both take your breath away and give it a new form. Donna Vorreyer is the author of four full-length poetry collections: To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), and Unrivered (2025), all from Sundress Publications. Recent work has appeared in Ploughshares, Poet Lore, Colorado Review, Harpur Palate, Baltimore Review, and Booth. Her visual art has been featured in North American Review, Waxwing, About Place, Penn Review, Ilanot Review, Double Back Review, Pithead Chapel, and other journals. Donna currently lives and creates in the western suburbs of Chicago and runs the online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
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  Poet-Prophet of American Democracy: Walt Whitman’s Vital Political Prose 13.06.2026 1ч 1мин

  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 Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy) and Karen Karbiener (The Modern Scholar: Walt Whitman and the Birth of Modern American Poetry) for an exploration of our essential poet of democracy and his prophetic vision for the country that speaks directly to our present moment. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
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  Laurie D. Graham, "Calling It Back to Me: Poems" (Random House, 2026) 12.06.2026 45мин

  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 of her great-grandmothers’ lives before and after they left their homelands and settled on this continent, striving to understand how she came to be here and writing the act of colonization as it exists in her own family history. This collection’s fractured lines, time-weathered yet alive with detail, reflect a family’s knowledge broken by global immigration and memory loss, both individual and collective. The result is a courageous reckoning with the legacy of leaving home. With tender curiosity and a determination to bear unflinching witness, Calling It Back to Me: Poems (Random House, 2026) asks: When language and memory are so tenuous, what is it that gets passed down between generations? LAURIE D. GRAHAM grew up in Treaty 6 Territory, near amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton, Alberta), and she has lived in Nogojiwanong/Peterborough, in the Territory of the Mississauga Anishinaabeg, since 2018, where she is a poet, an editor, and the publisher of Brick magazine, a journal of literary non-fiction based in Toronto. Her first book, Rove, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for the best first book of poetry in Canada. Her second and third books, Settler Education and Fast Commute, were both nominated for Ontario’s Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
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  Jaime Forsythe, "Yield" (Buckrider Books, 2026) 10.06.2026 30мин

  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 pom-pom that hardens into a sea urchin, an underwater dance club, a coast that melts into the sea. Delicately tracing the disorientation and dark edges of new motherhood, this is a collection that embraces beauty and ambiguity with a baby that roots for milk while what's ancient—whether history or memory—floods in. Jaime Forsythe's previous books are I Heard Something (Anvil Press, 2018) and Sympathy Loophole (Mansfield Press, 2012). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Arc, EVENT, Grain, The Malahat Review, Geist, The Ampersand Review and This Magazine, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and currently lives close to where she grew up in Nova Scotia/Mi'kma'ki. Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from  the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
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  Amrita Chowdhury and Ujaan Ghosh trans., "Baidehisha Bilasa: The Amorous Plays of Sita’s Husband" (Wide Open Window Books, 2025) 04.06.2026 52мин

  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 martial heroism. Rama-the-lover overshadows Rama-the-warrior, and his conjugal life with Sita takes center stage in a poem dense with puns, classical ragas, and chitrapadya — word-arrangements that resolve into wheels, chariots, and arrows on the page. Famously, every verse begins with the letter ba, and the text has long been considered untranslatable. With a preface by Wendy Doniger, Chowdhury and Ghosh's decade-long translation preserves the strangeness and sensuality of the original while opening it to a new readership. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
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  chaun webster, "Without Terminus: untraining an archive" (Greywolf, 2026) 26.05.2026 52мин

  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 denied rest while his labor enabled rest for others, and who died without receiving a pension before webster was born. Returning to the figures of Reginald and the train, webster explores the relationship between comportment and confinement, speaking in tongues in the Pentecostal church, the ancestral meeting place of dreams, his fraught relationship with his mother, and moments with his own child. Throughout, webster also reflects on nonbiological kinship, tethering his and his predecessors’ lives to those of several historical Black figures—Harriet Jacobs, John Henry, Henry “Box” Brown, and Henry Dumas, a writer who was killed by New York City police while riding the subway.Attempting to exhaust the possibilities of the sentence and the grammar of anti-Blackness, webster riffs and rails on the debris within reach. Part elegy, part archival detective story, and part visual poem, Without Terminus: untraining an archive (Greywolf, 2026) is a philosophically rigorous and deeply moving text that takes us beyond the archive of loss. You can find the works chaun references during our conversation, as well as a further discussion about literary form, at the Additions to the Archive Substack. Follow chaun webster on Instagram. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
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  Barry Devine and Ellen Scheible eds., "Teaching James Joyce in the Twenty-First Century" (UP of Florida, 2025) 23.05.2026 48мин

  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 scholars share approaches that go beyond the traditional university lecture hall to include experiences teaching high school students, senior citizens, art students, book club members, and people in prisons. The strategies in this inspirational volume range from class discussions to creating art and music to walking city streets. Works examined include the complex Finnegans Wake and the influential modernist milestones Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. While Joyce is often viewed as an essential and foundational author of Irish literature, contributors to this volume argue that the spirit of Joyce’s writing is global, and they offer suggestions for teaching these works in an international context. Students are often daunted by the perceived difficulty and inaccessibility of Joyce, but this volume helps both new and experienced teachers of Joyce make the writer’s texts understandable, relatable, and even fun. These authors argue that reading Joyce helps develop skills in holding and interrogating opposing ideas, skills that are essential in navigating the modern academic and political landscape. In grappling with Joyce, students will recognize his writing as relevant and urgent. Barry Devine is associate professor of English at Heidelberg University. Ellen Scheible is professor of English at Bridgewater State University. Scheible is the author or editor of many books, including Body Politics in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction: The Literary Legacy of Mother Ireland. Daniel Moran’s writing about literature and film can be found on Pages and Frames. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing and co-hosts the long-running podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
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  Alex Averbuch, "Furious Harvests" (Harvard UP, 2026) 22.05.2026 45мин

  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 the faint scent of a grandmother’s dress kept in the back of a closet speak to histories of inter-ethnic violence, WWII forced laborers, and the Holocaust. Mixing dialects, styles, registers, and voices, Furious Harvests—presented in a bilingual edition—defiantly cries out in its rage and longing toward reconciliation of the self and other.  Alex Averbuch is assistant professor of Ukrainian literature and culture in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. Megan Buskey is an independent writer and scholar focused on Ukrainian history, culture, and politics. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
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  Elizabeth Bradfield's Books in Dark Times (JP) 21.05.2026 27мин

  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 and for our whole natural world. Did poetry sustaining her through the darkest hours of the pandemic? What about other sources of inspiration? Mentioned in the episode: Eavand Boland, “Quarantine” (from Against Love Poetry; read her NY Times obituary here) Maeve Binchy, “Circle of Friends“ Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology Louise Gluck Averno and Wild Iris Brian Teare, Doomstead Days Derek Walcott, “Omeros“ W. S. Merwin, “The Folding Cliffs” Natasha Trethewey, “Belloqc’s Ophelia“ Yeats, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” Nest, Eggs and Nestlings of North American Birds (Princeton Field Guides) Trixie Belden Shel Silverstein Lois Lowry, “The Giver“ Liz equates poetry and Tetris Leanne Simpson, “This Accident of Being Lost“ Elizabeth Bradfield, “We all want to see a mammal“ Listen and Read Here: Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
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  Sharon Israel, "Voice Lesson" (Post Traumatic Press, 2017) 15.05.2026 38мин

  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 music implied by the title. In Voice Lesson, Israel’s urge is alchemical, so that when she’s behind the counter, “scoop[ing] shiny brains into plastic bags” she is also arranging them “carefully like pale jewels.” She’s after a kind of transformation, and urges us, “Always make room/for that singing thing/inside you.”  —Daisy Fried, author of Women's Poetry: Poems and Advice Sharon Israel, Sephardic American poet and soprano, was an early recipient of Brooklyn College's Leonard Hecht Poetry Explication Award, was nominated for “Best of the Net” 2016 and won Four Lines’ 2020 winter poetry challenge. Her chapbook Voice Lesson was published by Post Traumatic Press. Her work has most recently appeared in Loud Coffee Press among other journals (print and on-line) and anthologies. . Sharon hosts the radio show and podcast, Planet Poet-Words in Space, on WIOX 91.3 FM in the Catskills. All podcast episodes are available on YouTube Music, Spotify and Apple. Sharon is a member of the sound/poetry duo OrphicMix with composer Robert Cucinotta. Sharon has also collaborated with Cucinotta on works for voice, live instruments, and electronics and has premiered several of his works in New York.Sharon has a B.A. from Brooklyn College and an M.S. from the New School of Social Research. She was a local news reporter, feature writer and music critic for Courier-Life publications, Women’s ENews and for the late, lamented Brooklyn Phoenix; she worked as a shoe saleswoman, microbiology lab technician, secretary, had a short stint as a municipal bond salesperson, and worked over two decades as a grant writer and development director. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry