New Books and Recommendations from Former Guest Editors
Annie Finch recommends Matriarchal Societies of the Past and the Rise of Patriarchy by Heide Goettner-Abendroth (Peter Lang, 2022). “This jaw-droppingly inspiring tome is THE book on matriarchy, by the mother of modern matriarchal studies.”
Annie Finch recommends Collected Poems by Lenore Kandel (North Atlantic Books, 2012). “A lost gem of women’s poetry from the Beat era, Kandel’s work is deliciously erotic, and visionary.”
David Gullette recommends Chronic Transience by J. Allyn Rosser (Unbound Edition Press, 2025). “Jill Rosser is an old favorite of mine, and this new book is full of her mordant, occasionally melancholy, wit, like when she remembers how her family only ate out a couple times a year, at a greasy spoon called The Central, where ‘you’d be greeted / by a sour, pickle-nosed, washed-out mother / of someone in your sister’s grade / who seated you with an impatient flourish / of paper placemats and expired deodorant.’ After some years the poet herself had the same job there, ‘and I became the one / who bore those plates to homemade faces.’ Rosser is elegantly, mercilessly honest to a fault (if that’s a fault).”
DeWitt Henry recommends The Age of Migration: A Novella and Stories by Kai Maristed (WTAW Press, 2026). “Maristed is a complete Person of Letters (playwright, critic, essayist, novelist, and short story writer), and her award-winning second collection features international spies, curious and transgressive teenage girls, beasts, and spiritually bereft searchers from contrasting cultures, races, classes, faiths, and languages. Where violence threatens, there is ‘this slurred desire to tear away views … look through the looking glass.’ Across borders of many sorts, reader and character biases prove to be chagrined.”
DeWitt Henry published Perspectives: Uncollected Essays in 2026 with Pierian Springs Press.
Jane Hirshfield recommends Book of Potions by Lauren K. Watel (Sarabande Books, 2025). “On the shelves of sui generis strangeness, Lauren Watel’s prose poem vignettes are near the works of Lewis Carroll and Kafka, the telegram oddity of Sorescu, and Mandelstam’s late notebooks: all combine a sumi-e brush freedom with a certain ferocity of conjured assertion. Yet Watel’s shifting syntax, terrain, and rangings are entirely her own. In the end, these potions are perhaps more like Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits, in the way they extend self beyond self’s story, even while looking unflinchingly at it.”
Joyce Peseroff recommends Collected Father by John Pijewski (Finishing Line Press, 2026). “Horrifying, engrossing, impossible to turn away from, Collected Father is a book-length exorcism of ‘the last man in the world I could imagine / as someone’s father, anyone’s son.’ John Pijewski depicts a patriarch whose legacy of abuse emerges from the closed fist of family, aided and abetted by the implacable onslaught of history. Pijewski’s Polish father was regularly beaten by his own father, then imprisoned by the Nazis in a forced labor camp where he was tortured and starved. After marrying a fellow inmate and settling in America, where he could find only dangerous, menial jobs, Tadek Pijewski’s bitterness turned toward his sons. How the poet manages to unravel the strands of a present ‘built on top of memories / that cloud the future’ and find love, humor, and consolation in a relationship shaped by brutality, is a wonder to behold.”
Lloyd Schwartz published He Tells His Mother What He’s Working On in 2026 with Grolier Poetry Press.
Lloyd Schwartz published Artur Schnabel and Joseph Szigeti Play Mozart at the Frick Collection (April 4, 1948) and other poems in 2026 with Arrowsmith Press.
Rosanna Warren recommends From Here to Here: New & Selected Poems by Lan Lan, translated by Diana Shi and George O’Connell (Hudson Valley Writers Center, 2026). “It’s a revelation, this new book by one of China’s most admired poets. Everything Lan Lan touches is transformed: ‘wind tells the scarf / summer’s coming’; ‘a flame licks itself / like a Buddha lamp in a ruined temple’; a toddler ‘bends to a fallen leaf, her first / love letter from the earth.’ These poems reflect an intense inner life, and also a stark response to outward pressure: ‘I can’t live lies. / My heart won’t let me.’”
