New Books in Poetry

For the last forty-five years, the distinguished poetsMolly PeacockandPhillis Levinhave read and discussed nearly every poem they’ve written-an unparalleled friendship in poetry. InA Friend Sails in on a Poem(Palimpsest Press, 2022),Peacock collects her most important essays on poetic form and traces the development of her formalist aesthetic across their lifelong back-and-forth. Peacockoffers a charming, psychologically wise, and metaphorically piquant look at navigating craft and creativity. This is a book both for serious poets as well as for anyone who wants a deep dive into the impact of friendship on art itself. Levin's most recent work,Mr. Memory and Other Poems, tackles themes of memory and longing and is as expansive and is it detailed. Another unique aspect of this already rare friendship is that they shared a therapist - one who was so beloved that, when she had a stroke and had to close her practice, both Peacock and Levin felt bereft like they'd lost a mother. In a fascinating role reversal, Peacock cared for her therapist after her stroke, and wrote magnificently about the experience and their years-long relationship prior to Joan's stroke inThe Analyst(W.W. Nortton and Company, 2017). Peacock is a poet, biographer, and memoirist whose literary life has taken her from New York City to Toronto, from lyric self-examination to curiosity about the lives of others, from poetry to prose and back again to poetry. InA Friend Sails in on a Poemshe describes her decades-long friendship with distinguished poet Phillis Levin, quoting their poetry and outlining her personal rules for poetic form. In addition to The Analyst, Peacock's poetry collections includeCornucopia: New and Selected Poemsfrom Biblioasis and W.W. Norton and Company. She is the founder ofThe Best Canadian Poetryseries and the co-founder ofPoetry in Motionon New York’s subways and buses.Her poems have appeared in leading literary journals such asPoetry,The New Yorker,The Malahat Review,The Women’s Review of Books,andPlumeand are anthologized inThe Oxford Book of American Poetry. She has written two books about creativity in the lives of women artists:The Paper GardenandFlower Diary. Peacock teaches online for theUnterberg Poetry Center at 92NY. You can learn more about Megan Wildhood atmeganwildhood.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Linda Nemec Foster has published twelve collections of poetry includingAmber Necklace from Gdansk (finalist for the Ohio Book Award in Poetry),Talking Diamonds, and The Lake Michigan Mermaid (2019 MichiganNotable Book) which was created with co-author Anne-Marie Oomen andartist Meridith Ridl. Her work appears in magazines and journals such asThe Georgia Review, Nimrod, New American Writing, North AmericanReview, Verse Daily, Paterson Literary Review, Witness, and the 2022Best Small Fictions Anthology. She has received over 30 nominations forthe Pushcart Prize and awards from the Arts Foundation of Michigan,National Writer’s Voice, Dyer-Ives Foundation, The Poetry Center (NewJersey), Fish Anthology (Ireland), and the Academy of American Poets. In2021 her poetry book, The Blue Divide, was published by New IssuesPress and received a featured review in Publishers Weekly. A newcollection of prose poetry,Bone Country(Cornerstone Press), was published in 2023 after beinghonored as a finalist in several national competitions. Recently, she wasinvited to read an award-winning selection from Bone Country at the WestCork Literary Festival in Ireland. The first Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids,Michigan (2003-2005), Foster is the founder of the Contemporary WritersSeries at Aquinas College. You can find out morehere. Nemec Foster's collection of prose poems is a reflection of the world before COVID. All of the pieces are inspired by other parts of the world-Istanbul, Rome, Krakow, Prague, Vienna, Seville-not the familiar landscape of the United States. But, the narrator is definitely not a native of these countries; they are "the other," "the foreigner," the American with a distinct Midwest sensibility who is trying to make sense of a world on the brink of an unforeseen catastrophe - the world as we used to know it. You can learn more about the interviewer Megan Wildhood atmeganwildhood.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Matt Donovan speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his prose poem “Guy with a Gun,” which appeared inThe Common’sfall issue. Matt talks about the conversation that inspired the poem—an encounter with a Sandy Hook parent that highlights the complex gray area around guns and gun ownership. He also discusses how his poetry collection about the issue of guns in the US evolved from a nonfiction book proposal, his aims in undertaking the project, and his job running The Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College. Matt Donovan is the author of three collections of poetry, and a book of lyric essays. His latest collection,The Dug-Up Gun Museum, came out last year from BOA Editions. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Creative Capital Grant, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature. He serves as director of The Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College. ­­Read Matt’s poems inThe Commonhere. Read more from Matthere. The Commonis a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages,The Commonfeatures established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine atthecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter@CommonMag. Emily Everettis managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in theKenyon Review,Electric Literature, Tin HouseOnline,andMississippi Review. She is a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

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 the span of a single year encompassing the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath, their love story unfolds via correspondence, capturing the letters the speaker sends to Naomi—and occasionally Naomi’s responses, as filtered through the speaker’s retelling. These letter-poems form a braid, first from the use of found texts, next from the speaker’s personal observations about her bisexuality, Judaism, and mental illness, and lastly from her testimonies of past experiences. As the speaker discovers she has fallen in love with Naomi, her letters reveal the struggles, joys, and erasures she endures as she becomes reacquainted with her own body following a long period of anxiety and suicidal ideation, working to recover both physically and emotionally as she grows to understand this long-distance love and its stakes—a love held by a woman for a woman, forever at a short, but precarious distance. Rachel Mennies is the author of the poetry collectionsThe Naomi Letters(BOA Editions, 2021) andThe Glad Hand of God Points Backwards, winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry at Texas Tech University Press and finalist for a 2015 National Jewish Book Award. Her poetry has appeared, or will soon, atPoetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, the Believer,and elsewhere. She is the series editor, since 2016, of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry and serves as assistant poetry editor and reviews editor forAGNI. With Ruth Awad, she edited the anthologyThe Familiar Wild: On Dogs and Poetryfor Sundress Publications. Anna Zumbahlenlives in Albuquerque and works in book marketing and publicity at the University of Chicago Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Jenifer DeBellis, M.F.A., is author ofNew Wilderness(Cornerstone Press, 2023),Warrior Sister, Cut Yourself Free from Your Assault(Library Tales Publishing, 2021), andBlood Sisters(Main Street Rag, 2018). Her freelance career spans over two decades, allowing her to ghostwrite and edit literary and mass media content. She editsPink Panther Magazineand directsaRIFT Warrior ProjectandDetroit Writers’ Guild(501c3). She's featured inPsychology Todayand Seattle's My Independence Report and her writing appears in AWP'sFestival Writer, CALYX, the Good Men Project, Medical Literary Messenger, Solstice, and other fine journals. A former Meadow Brook Writing Project fellow, JDB facilitates summer workshops for Oakland University as well as teaches writing and literature for Saginaw Valley State University. Find more atJeniferDeBellis.com. DeBelli's latest collectionNew Wilderness takes readers through the nuances of raising a mentally ill child whose young adult brain cancer experiences transport this daughter and mother into an uncharted wilderness. With little more than a demagnetized compass and crayon-drawn treasure map, the daughter travels deeper into wastelands. Four states away, her mom charts a new topography to smuggle her back to civilization. The poems in this collection build on a triangulated path that moves between life before, during, and after cancer. Despite compounding loss, disappointment, and destruction, Jenifer DeBellis's versified narratives reveal that paths forged with love can lead even the wildest creatures out of bewildering terrain. You can learn more about the interviewer Megan Wildhood atmeganwildhood.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

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 forthe Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. He is the executive director and president of the Academy of American Poets, a leading nonprofit that established April as National Poetry Month and brings verse to a wide audience through itsPoem-a-Dayseries with more than 330,000 daily subscribers. The Academy also awards more than $1.3 million a year to hundreds of writers. Maldonado will be the organization’s first Latino leader and intends to highlight, among other things, the linguistic diversity of American poetry today. Prior to assuming his role at the Academy of American Poets, he co-directed the poetry center at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, where Ulrich Baer, one of our co-hosts,also teaches courses on poetry and literature. Follow Ricky onTwitter. Ulrich Baeris University Professor at New York University where he teaches literature and photography, and writes frequently about photography, art, literature, and other subjects. He is also the host of the podcast “Think About It” and editorial director atWarbler Press. Twitter: @UliBaer;Instagram.Caroline Weberis a specialist of French literature, history, and culture. She is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Barnard College and Columbia University in New York City. Twitter: @CorklinedRoom.Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Michele Herman is author of the novelSave The Village(Regal House Publishing, 2022) and the poetry chapbookVictory Boulevard(Finishing Line Press) as well asJust Another Jack(Finishing Line Press, 2022). Her poems, stories, and essays have appeared widely in publications including The Sun, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review and The NewYork Times. TheRecipient of several writing awards, she teaches fiction, poetry and memoir at The Writers Studio, works as a developmental editor and writing coach, writes columns for The Village Sun, translates French songs and occasionally performs her own work in cabaret and theatrical settings.You can learn more atwww.micheleherman.com. InJust Another Jack: The Private Lives of Nursery Rhymes, poet and novelist Michele Herman explores a variety of timeless human predicaments - adolescent lust, overprotective parents, dementia, gender confusion and more - by imagining her way into the actual lives of eight familiar nursery-rhyme characters. Many authors have taken fictional or mythological characters and brought them into our contemporary world, but these eight story-poems accomplish something more unusual by roaming around in Mr. and Mrs. Sprat's house to find out what ails them, following little Bo Beep out to the Welsh pasture to learn how she lost track of her sheep, conjuring up a twin brother for Little Miss Muffet, and much more. Save The Village features Herman's beloved home village, which feels itself like a character as alive as any other we meet in this novel as sprawling as it is particular.Life hasn’t turned out quite the way Becca Cammeyer of Greenwich Village – once voted most likely to land on Broadway or in jail for a good cause – had planned. Her only child has moved to another continent, she’s still living in a fifth-floor walkup with her aging dog, still single, still nearly broke, still not on speaking terms with her best friend or mother, and still hearing the ghost of her long-dead father whispering in her ear. But she’s a semi-famous tour guide, and on a perfect October evening, Becca almost believes all is well with her world as she helps a group of South Carolinian tourists fall in love with her beloved Village. The tour concludes, and Becca sends the women on their way, unaware that her world is about to be upended. In the aftermath of a tragedy, Becca must come to terms with her own paralysis, her survivor’s guilt, and the messiness of her life. She embarks on wildly improbable reconciliations and new relationships. At once a love story about Greenwich Village and a reflection on a changing world,Save the Villagereveals how when a community comes together, everyone wins.You can find Save The Village atRegal House Pressand at Amazon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

InSex 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 imagery, she pieces together a fractured portrait of femininity—one that electrifies the confessional mode with its formal play and rich curiosity. Gabbert examines the origin of shame, the role of inheritance, and what counts as a myth, asking, “What’s the opposite of a man? / A woman? A wound? The devil’s image?” Mag Gabbert has received a Discovery Award from 92NY’s Unterberg Poetry Center and fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and Idyllwild Arts. Her poems have appeared inAmerican Poetry Review,Paris Review Daily,Pleiades,Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Southern Methodist University. Anna Zumbahlenlives in Albuquerque and works in book marketing and publicity at the University of Chicago Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

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 knowledge of Persian language or culture. Haleh Liza Gafori's intimate knowledge of both, as well as her singer's knack for the sound of language, lends these translations both authoritativeness and beauty. The poems inGold(New York Review of Books, 2022) areabout ecstatic love, both of God and of our fellow human beings. Newcomers to Rumi will discover a new favorite poet, while longtime fans will encounter this major voice of world literature anew. Andy Boydis a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Emily Hockaday is a poet from Queens who writes about ecology, astronomy, and the city landscape, alongside more personal subjects. Her first collectionNaming the Ghost(Cornerstone Press, 2022)tackles the onset of chronic illness and parenting through grief. Her next full-length,In a Body,will be out in October with Harbor Editions. This collection looks at chronic illness through the lens of ecopoetry. Emily is the author of five chapbooks and has had poems in a variety of print and online journals. You can learn more about her atwww.emilyhockaday.com. Naming the Ghost, Hockaday's first full-length collection,is a strikingly unique collection of poems that take on the grief of losing a parent just as the author becomes one herself during the time between onset of her chronic symptoms and a diagnosis that she was convinced, all evidence be damned,was fatal. Written during what the author herself calls her nervous breakdown,Naming the Ghostgives the reader a voiceyvisceral, encapsulating experience of the anxiety, disorientation and kind of fear of the tempts one to do reckless things that comprise the no-man's land between knowing something's wrong but not yet knowing its name. You can find Naming The Ghost onCornerstone Press's storeand onAmazon. You can learn more about the interviewer Megan Wildhood atmeganwildhood.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry