New Books and Recommendations from Former Guest Editors
Annie Finch recommends Might Could (Waywiser Books, 2026), poems by Anna Lena Phillips Bell. “These poems are in touch with poetry’s specific magical ways … they know how to use structure to move below, beyond, and through words.”
Mary Gordon recommends The Hill: A Novel by Harriet Clark (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026).
DeWitt Henry recommends Life Drawing and Other Stories by Louis Harnett O’Meara (Staircase Books, Fall 2026). “O’Meara’s debut collection offers five maximalist stories, which show honesty, humor, pathos, formal expertise, variety, and almost Jamesian shadings and perceptions. His characters differ in orientation, gender, age, lifestyle, nationality, class, and place. His focus is on confused relationships of body, soul, and social identity. And his sense of endings is surprising and instructive.”
DeWitt Henry published Perspectives: Uncollected Essays in April 2026 with Pierian Springs Press.
Alice Hoffman published The Witches of Cambridge in September 2026 with Scribner.
Joyce Peseroff recommends What Clever Friends: The Selected Letters of Jane Kenyon and Alice Mattison edited by Chad Wriglesworth (University of Michigan Press, 2026). “Kenyon and Mattison met when each published their first collection of poems with Alice James Books. For fifteen years, from their early friendship to Kenyon’s death from leukemia in 1995, they wrote letters to each other about writing—about editors and journals, acceptance and rejection, collaboration and community—as two women passionately committed to their art and managing ordinary life. Supportive and tender, witty and tumultuous, the correspondence plumbs the deepest concerns of two prizewinning writers while illuminating the development of contemporary women’s work as it flourished at the end of the twentieth century.”
Peggy Shumaker recommends An Ordinary Life by B. H. Fairchild (W. W. Norton & Company, 2023). “Fairchild lets us see the view from inside a welder’s face shield, lets us hear the scream of the lathe. He shows us the radiant kindness of a young woman, a stranger in a record store, who comforts a man felled by grief: ‘my son died this week.’ When his father cannot bear his son’s devotion to poetry, the poet exacts the perfect ‘Revenge,’ evoking for everyone the restorative power of art.”
Peggy Shumaker recommends The Blue Bridge by Maurya Simon (Etruscan Press, 2026). “Maurya Simon’s new poems offer in the face of grief and loss her profound awareness of beauty, her lyrical deftness, her irreverent humor. This poet’s work makes room for the intricacies of aging, the inheritance of ancient Greece, the suffering of one body in chronic pain and the suffering of specific traumatized lands, animals, cultures, and people. This is a mature poet writing at the height of her powers. This book is a triumph.”
Rosanna Warren recommends Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks (HarperCollins, 1995). “It’s not a ‘recent’ novel, but I’ve just read it, having long admired Banks’s Continental Drift (HarperCollins, 1985), Affliction (Harper & Row, 1989), and Lost Memory of Skin (Ecco, 2011). Banks channels an updated voice from Huckleberry Finn for his lost teenage hero, Chappie Dorset, who renames himself Bone. The novel is a marvel of voicing, catching the inflections and idioms of a late twentieth-century working-class American boy as it follows Bone’s self-invention as a moral being through, and past, the hypocrisies and insults of the adults near him (his parents, grandmother, and stepfather). It’s a tough story, carrying Bone from rural upstate New York to a serious dénouement in Jamaica.”
