New Books in Poetry

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 tide of the Great Migration when she made her exodus to New York City. She married, divorced, and raised eight children, all while struggling to define herself in an America that looks frighteningly like our own. Using found forms like recipes, a family tree, and a US Census Report alongside imagined psalms and scriptures, Diamond draws bold parallels between biblical narratives and the lived experiences of those often relegated to the margins of history. The result is both a heartfelt elegy and a new sacred text. Find Diamond at her website and on Instagram. And find host, Sullivan Summer, at her website, on Instagram, and over on Substack, where she and Diamond continued their conversation. 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 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 complex memorial while pushing against the utmost limits of memory's power. Dislocating experiments juxtapose with searingly direct verse to make this book a haunting poetic memoir that will remain with readers long after they put it down. David Martin has published three previous collections of poetry: Tar Swan (NeWest Press, 2018), Kink Bands (NeWest Press, 2023), and Limited Verse (University of Calgary Press, 2024). He lives in Calgary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

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 abandonment, who has tried to make sense of suffering in a world that too often turns its back This is a book for those who have screamed into the void, for those who carry loss like scripture, and for anyone who has ever felt betrayed by the very thing they were taught to believe would save them. With language that sears and softens, My God’s Been Silent does not seek resolution-it seeks release. This collection is not an answer. It is a reckoning. A remembering. A return. You can find Dr. Darius Phelps on Instagram and X. And find host, Sullivan Summer, at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack. 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 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 seeks answers - why sun? A crow considers children in this cruel, spiky world. And allthe while, character actors gather for the endless convention... Guy Elston's debut poetry collection, The Character Actor Convention, is a curious smorgasbord of personas, new voices and (un)natural perspectives. Through impossible encounters and strange viewpoints an insistent, ever-shifting 'I' questions its relation to reality, and itself. Wist, wit, obsession and irony rise like tides, are forgotten, and start fresh. Authenticity is always just round the corner. The Character Actor Convention is not urgent, timely or topical. It's something else. Guy Elston was born and raised in Oxford, UK. After various jobs, journeys and other lifetimes he surfaced in Toronto in 2020. He has an MA in History from the University of Amsterdam. Since moving to Canada his poetry has been published by The Malahat Review, Canadian Literature, Event, The Literary Review of Canada, Vallum, The Antigonish Review and other journals. His chapbook Automatic Sleep Mode was published by Anstruther Press in 2023. His debut full-length collection, The Character Actor Convention, is forthcoming from The Porcupine's Quill in 2025. Guy lives in Toronto and can be found at poetry events. He's a member of the Meet the Presses collective and is a first reader for Untethered magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Narrative verse, or poems that tell a story, has existed for millennia, yet the mode of writing has been neglected by literary publishers, editors, and critics in our own time. This anthology reestablishes the vital relationship of narrative verse to a contemporary readership of poetry. It presents a wide range of specimens from twenty-eight poets who were born since World War II and who published their narrative poems over the past fifty years. Featured poets include Rita Dove, Christian Wiman, Alberto Rios, A. E. Stallings, Bob Dylan, Daniel Mark Epstein, David Mason, Mary Jo Salter, and Dana Gioia, and other exemplary practitioners of the form. In these poems, character, plot, and dialogue turn up as readily as in prose fiction. As John Dryden wrote of Chaucer’s works, “Here is God’s plenty.” Anecdote, fable, myth, biography, thriller, Western, ghost story―these are among the many different genres of tale collected by poet-critic Sunil Iyengar, who introduces each poet and the anthology itself. Sunil Iyengar is the author of a poetry chapbook, A Call from the Shallows (Finishing Line Press). His poems and/or book reviews have appeared in such periodicals as The New Criterion, Literary Matters, New Verse Review, PN Review, Essays in Criticism, The American Scholar, The Hopkins Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Washington Post. He lives outside Washington, D.C., where he works as an arts research director. 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. 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 NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with poet Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi about their new poetry collection, The Book of Interruptions. In The Book of Interruptions (Buckrider Books, 2025) Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi has brought together a collection of poems written with scalpel-like precision. Infused with “pre-emptive violence” these poems mark the intersection of war, immigration, sexuality and history, with lines often placed at the crossroads of Perso-Islamic and Western thought. Moving between an Iran that is marked with “tulips from the martyr’s blood” and Toronto, a city that is always screaming but where the author is a “ghost, anecdotal,” Mohammadi writes unflinchingly of the reality that faces them and others like them who straddle two worlds. But within this fierce collection there is also room for art, and for pleasure, and for words that invite us all with “gentle patterns of light against light against light.” Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi (they/them) is a queer, Iranian-born, Toronto-based poet, writer and translator. They are the winner of the 2021 Vallum Poetry Award and the author of nine chapbooks of poetry. The Book of Interruptions is their fifth poetry book. 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 NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with poet Margo LaPierre about her poetry collection, Ajar (Guernica Editions, 2025). The poems in Ajar navigate the physical and psychological dangers of womanhood through the flattening lens of mood disorder. Psychosis isn’t the opposite of reality—it’s another perceptual system. If neurotypical thought measures the world in centimetres, this collection measures it in inches, gallons, amperes. Ajar celebrates radical recovery from gendered violence and psychotic paradigm shifts, approaching madness through prismatic inquiry. As time converges within us, we find new ways to heal and grow. From the emergency room to the pharmacy to the fertility clinic to the dis/comfort of home and memory, this collection humanizes bipolar psychosis.Note: These poems depict suicidality and some of the violences that worsen the risk. In Canada and the US, the suicide crisis helpline is 988 and it’s available 24/7. Margo LaPierre is a writer and freelance literary editor. With multi-genre work published in The Ex-Puritan, CV2, Room, PRISM, and Arc, among others, she has won national awards for her poetry, fiction, and editing. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Ajar is her second poetry collection. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

My Excellency: Comedy in Three Acts (Swan Isle Press, 2025) by Luis Rechani Agrait was translated into English by William Carlos Williams but not published in his lifetime. This first-ever edition of Williams’s translation was edited and has an introduction by Jonathan Cohen. It includes a foreword by Julio Marzán and an afterword by José Luis Ramos Escobar. It also includes the lecture Williams gave on poetry at the 1941 Inter-American Writers’ Conference of the University of Puerto Rico, where he met Rechani Agrait and received from him the published play as a gift. William Carlos Williams's English translation of the play, Mi Señoría, by Puerto Rican playwright Luis Rechani Agrait, reflects Williams's connection to his Puerto Rican roots and deft skills as a translator. The play is a satirical critique of political corruption, featuring comical malapropisms and an idealistic but naive politician's rise, highlighting themes of materialism and power, and showcasing Williams's adept handling of language. William Carlos Williams’s mother, Raquel Hélène Rose Hoheb Williams, was from Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. Williams was deeply engaged with translation and the unique cultural worlds wrought by migration. His rendering of My Excellency invites us to think about translation not simply as a linguistic act, but as an ethical and artistic one: What happens when a Puerto Rican political satire crosses languages, audiences, and power structures? What is gained, what is altered, and what remains unresolved? In this episode, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera (UPR-M) and editor Jonathan Cohen discuss the historical context of the play, Williams’s role as translator, and the broader questions the work raises about voice, authority, and cultural mediation. By looking closely at My Excellency, we open a wider conversation about literature in translation and the complex relationships between language, migration, text, and translation. This conversation forms part of the STEM to STEAM initiative, sponsored by the Teagle Foundation, which seeks to connect medicine, science, technology, and engineering with the interpretive and ethical sensibilities cultivated in the humanities. By foregrounding literature, poetry, history, philosophy, and the arts, the initiative reimagines how humanistic study can serve as a central component of technical and scientific education. In this episode are: • Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, Professor of Humanities at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez (UPR-M) and Director of the Instituto Nuevos Horizontes. • Jonathan Cohen is an award-winning translator of Latin American poetry and scholar of inter-American literature. He is editor of Williams’s verse translations from Spanish, By Word of Mouth, and his translation of the Spanish Golden Age novella The Dog and the Fever. Topics discussed and scholars mentioned: Emilia Quiñones Otal, Directora del Departamento de Humanidades, UPR-M Julio Marzán, The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams. Marta Aponte Alsina "The Art and Science of Translation" Rebecca Ruth Gould and “co-translating” William Carlos Williams Society 2024 conference at the UPR-M Last Nights of Paris, Philippe Soupault "Translation will motivate English to do new things ... to serve as an apprentice to a master writer."—Jonathan Cohen "The Sugarcane Girl who was my mother" Walter Scott Peterson podcast, “[M]y ‘case’ to work up’: William Carlos Williams’s Paterson” “Williams struggled throughout his life, and the conflict produced great literature.”—Jonathan Cohen David Unger 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 NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Bänoo Zan and Cy Strom about their anthology, Woman Life Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution (Guernica Editions, 2025). This international anthology marks a world-historical moment: the first ever feminist revolution. The slogan chanted by the demonstrators in Iran is Woman, Life, Freedom, and it encompasses hopes and ideals for all people everywhere. This anthology echoes that cry. The poems here might be reflections on the present moment, denunciations of injustice, examinations of the poet’s own conscience, laments for the fallen, bitter curses, prayers, celebrations of life, and visions of a better future. Bänoo and Cy aim to raise awareness of the women’s revolution in Iran and show the world that this cause is alive and will not be put down. About the editors:  Bänoo Zan is a poet, translator, essayist, and poetry curator, with numerous published pieces and three books. Songs of Exile was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Letters to My Father was published in 2017. She is the founder of Shab-e She’r (Poetry Night), Canada’s most diverse and brave poetry reading and open mic series (inception: 2012). Shab-e She'r bridges the gap between communities of poets from different ethnicities, nationalities, religions (or lack thereof), ages, genders, sexual orientations, abilities, poetic styles, voices, and visions. Bänoo calls herself a war correspondent in verse. Others describe her as a political, metaphysical, and spiritual poet. Cy Strom works as an editor. He holds MA and MPhil degrees in early modern European history and has published in academic and other areas, including the visual arts. He edits in different genres and sometimes languages, and has had a role in developing professional editorial standards and educational materials. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

This is the history of England told in a new way: glimpsed through twenty-five remarkable poems written down between the eighth century and today, which connect us directly with the nation’s past, and the experiences, emotions and imaginations of those who lived it. These poems open windows onto wildly different worlds – from the public to the intimate, from the witty to the savage, from the playful to the wistful. They take us onto battlefields, inside royal courts, down coal mines and below stairs in great houses. Their creators, witnesses to events from the Great Fire of London to the Miners’ Strike, range from the famous to the forgotten, yet each invites us into an immersive encounter with their own time. A History of England in 25 Poems (Penguin, 2025) by Professor Catherine Clarke is a portal to the past; a constant companion, filled with vivid voices and surprising stories alongside familiar landmarks, and language that speaks in new ways on each reading. Professor Clarke’s knowledge and passion take us inside the words and the moments they capture, with thoughtful insights, humour and new perspectives on how the nation has dreamed itself into existence – and who gets to tell England’s story. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

As a third generation Holocaust survivor, this was an important conversation with a second generation survivor. Marty has been conducting workshops on writing memory for quite a while and that's where we met - in his workshops with Jewish Ethiopians in Israel. Son of the Shoah: Poems from a Second-Generation Holocaust Survivor is his emotional reckoning with his parents and the world as being born into a world of pain and distance. At times I saw my own parents in the discussion and at times I would hear my friend whose family is descended from Jews tortured in the Inquisitions.  This was an intimate and powerful discussion which will help the field of memory and Holocaust studies. 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 NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Paul Vermeersch about his new collection of poetry, NMLCT (ECW Press, 2025). Fables and fairy tales collide with virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and monstrous myths in a world where no one knows what to believe. In his eighth book of poems, Paul Vermeersch responds to the increasing difficulty of knowing what is real and what isn’t, what is our genuine experience and what is constructed for us by The Algorithm. In a “post-truth” society rife with simulations, misinformation, and computer-generated hallucinations, these poems explore the relationship between the synthetic and the authentic as they raise hope for the possibility of escape from MCHNCT (Machine City) to NMLCT (Animal City), where the promise of “real life” still exists. Paul Vermeersch is a poet, multimedia artist, and literary editor. His last book of poetry was Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995–2020. A professor of creative writing and publishing at Sheridan College, he also edits his own imprint, Buckrider Books, for Wolsak & Wynn Publishers. He lives in Toronto, ON. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Waka poetry was all the rage in tenth-century, courtly Japan. Every educated person composed it, emperors and consorts sponsored it, and societal interest in it was at an all-time high. Poets, Patrons, and the Public: Poetry as Cultural Phenomenon in Courtly Japan (Brill, 2025) offers an unprecedentedly broad and vivid portrayal of this season of literary flourishing, revealing the multitude of factors that contributed to it, as well as the social, political, and cultural reasons behind waka’s rise.Deftly combining sociological theory and social and intellectual history with insightful readings of a wealth of primary texts—some never before discussed in English—the book is both a history of waka in the Heian period and a study of Heian court society through the lens of waka. Gian Piero Persiani is Assistant Professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Jingyi Li is an assistant professor of Japanese Studies at Occidental College, Los Angeles. She is a cultural historian of nineteenth-century Japan. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. 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 NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews Andrew Fadyen-Ketchum about his poetry collection, Fight or Flight (Stephen F. Austin State UP, 2023).   Fight or Flight artifacts the trauma of McFadyen-Ketchum's divorce and the journey he took across the wilds of America (living in a tent on the California coast, getting intentionally lost in the Utah desert, tracking wild animals in the bitter cold of Indiana winters) in search of healing that led to the greatest discovery of all: his indigenous wife and her three children he now calls his own. Andrew Fadyen-Ketchum is an author, editor, and ghostwriter. He is author of three poetry collections, Fight or Flight, Visiting Hours and Ghost Gear. He is the assistant Director of the Owsley Fork Writer's Sanctuary, Founder and Editor of PoemoftheWeek, The Floodgate Poetry Series, and Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days; He is also the acquisitions editor for Upper Rubber Boot Books. 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 NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews acclaimed Alberta poet Rayanne Haines about her book, What Kind of Daughter (Frontenac House Press, 2024).  What Kind of Daughter? is a poetic memoir by Rayanne Haines that considers identity and gender expectations while exploring the public perception of the space between the spaces we inhabit during periods of grieving, whether that grieving is based in loss of self or the loss of another. In this hybrid collection of poetry and essay, Haines reflects on her life growing up in rural Alberta, and considers the loss of her mother to cancer while asking questions such as how do we steer through holding patterns of almost grief, how do we navigate the terrain of discovery, how do we journey through the burden of care? In, What Kind of Daughter? Haines reflects on the choices women are asked to make and challenges readers to reflect on the way we value, devalue, or simply exist within the spaces of gender and grief. About Rayanne Haines: Rayanne Haines (she/her) is an award-winning hybrid author and pushcart nominated poet as well as a cultural producer of films, stage shows, and panels. Rayanne has penned three poetry collections – The Stories in My Skin (2013), Stained with the Colours of Sunday Morning (Inanna, 2017), and Tell The Birds Your Body Is Not A Gun (Frontenac, 2021) which won the 2022 Stephan G. Stephansson, Alberta Literary Award for Poetry as well as being shortlisted for both the BPAA Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry, and the National ReLit Award for Poetry. She hosts the literary podcast Crow Reads, is the president for the League of Canadian Poets, and is an Assistant Professor in Arts and Cultural Management at MacEwan University. Rayanne has been published in the Globe and Mail, Minola Review, Fiddlehead, Grain, FreeFall, Prairie Fire, and others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

“Literature is pathetic.” So claims Eileen Myles in their provocative and robust introduction to Pathetic Literature (Grove Press, 2022), a breathtaking mishmash of pieces ranging from poems to theater scripts to prose to anything in between, all exploring the so-called “pathetic” or awkwardly-felt moments and revelations around which lives are both built and undone. An utterly unique collection composed by the award-winning poet and writer, a global anthology of pieces from lesser-known classics by luminaries like Franz Kafka, Samuel R. Delany, and Gwendolyn Brooks to up-and-coming writers that examine pathos and feeling, giving a well-timed rehab to the word “pathetic”. Hal Coase is a PhD candidate at La Sapienza, University of Rome. 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 NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Yvonne Blomer about her stunning narrative poetry, Death of Persephone: A Murder (Caitlin Press, 2024). In Death of Persephone, the patriarchal myth of the maiden taken, raped, and made the potent and sexualized queen of the underworld is questioned, altered, flipped. Instead, we have Stephanie, a girl of seven, taken and raised by her Uncle H. who is obsessed by her, tries to control her, to keep her, to have her even as she blooms out from underneath him. In poems both lyrical and narrative, a woman paints Hecate on a building, a Hyacinth Macaw flies overhead, a detective bumbles from crime to crime. This is a city with a vast underground where bats hang and paperwhites bloom, a city where men still rule. Who sees what, who will pay, and who will survive in this ancient story altered at the core? About Yvonne Blomer: Yvonne Blomer is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections The Last Show on Earth (Caitlin Press, 2022) and As if a Raven (Palimpsest Press, 2015) as well as the travel memoir Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur (Palimpsest Press, 2017). Blomer served as the city of Victoria poet laureate from 2015 to 2018. Through poetry, she has raised awareness for the plight of the Pacific Ocean and its ecology. She is the creator and editor of Refugium: Poems for the Pacific (Caitlin Press, 2017), the first in a trilogy of water-based poetry anthologies that was followed by Sweet Water: Poems for the Watershed (Caitlin Press, 2020). She was the Artistic Director for the weekly Planet Earth Poetry series and edited the anthology Poems for Planet Earth. Yvonne recently edited Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page (Caitlin Press, 2023). She has been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the Montreal Poetry Prize and the Troubadour International Poetry Prize and won the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize for Death of Persephone. She has performed at reading series and festivals in cities across the country and has had poems published in Canada, the UK and Japan. Yvonne lives, works and raises her family on the traditional territories of the WSÁNEĆ (Saanich), Lkwungen (Songhees), Wyomilth (Esquimalt) peoples of the Coast Salish Nation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

A transcript of this interview is available [here] A queer disabled love song to trees and beavers, tremors and dreams, Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming (Duke UP, 2025) explores the pulsing core and porous edges of survival, sorrow, and dreaming. Blending poetry and creative nonfiction, emotion and activist thinking, Eli Clare invites us to unfurl ourselves into the lovely multitude of genders beyond the binary of woman and man, the fierceness of street protest, and the long slow time of granite. He sings to aquifers. Wrestles with the aftermath of child abuse and his family’s legacy as white settlers occupying Dakota homelands. He leans into history. Calls the names of the living and the dead. Connects his own tremoring body to a world full of tremors—earthquakes, jackhammers, quaking aspens. Unfurl reveals deep queer kinships between human and more-than-human, sentient and nonsentient. At every juncture, these poems and essays embrace porousness and the power of dreaming. Ultimately, Unfurl is an invitation to rebellion and joy. 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 NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews Gregory Betts, one of the poets behind the collaboration, Muttertongue: what is a word in utter space (Exile Editions, 2025) – by Lillian Allen (Toronto’ s seventh Poet Laureate, a dub poet, writer, and Juno Award winner), Gary Barwin (poet, writer, composer, multimedia artist, performer, and educator), and Gregory Betts (whose writing explores the boundaries between self, other, and alien – the radical other). This is a collaborative collection that crackles in its exploration of land, language, and page space. Combining the intensity of Dub Poetry with the intricacies of experimental poetics, Muttertongue presents a sonorous soundscape echoing with the question of where (and why) is here (hear). The book opens with a dialogue between the three authors, and concludes with an Afterword by Kaie Kellough. The release of the book recedes a new music LP by the three authors (June of 2025). This is a project by the Muttertongue Trio: Allen • Barwin • Betts. Lillian Allen is the 7th Poet Laureate of Toronto and a professor of creative writing at Ontario College of Art and Design University. She is a two time JUNO award winner and trailblazer in the field of spoken word and dub poetry. Lillian’s debut book of poetry Rhythm An’ Hardtimes became a Canadian best seller, blazing new trails for poetic expression and opened up the form. Lillian’s latest collection Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen, edited by Ronald Cummings was published in Spring 2021 and is part of the Laurier Poetry Series. Her other collections, Women Do This Everyday and Psychic Unrest are studied across the educational spectrum. Her literary work for young people includes three books: Why Me, If You See Truth, and Nothing But a Hero. She received the Margaret Laurence Lecture award, 2020 and the Gustafson Distinguished Poet award, 2021. She is a Toronto Cultural Champion and the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate for her contribution to Canadian Letters. Her current art practice veers into vocal sonic poetics and explores pre-language and post-language poetics. Gary Barwin is a writer, musician and multimedia artist and the author of 34 books including Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction 2024-1984. His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates which won the Leacock Medal and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award and the Giller Prize and was longlisted for Canada Reads. His last novel, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award and was the Hamilton Reads choice for 2023-2024. His last poetry collection, The Most Charming Creatures also won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award. His most recent novel, The Comedian’s Book of the Dead will be published in 2026. He has received the Life Membership Award from the League of Canadian Poets and has twice been shortlisted for their Spoken Word Prize. His art and media works have been exhibited internationally. A PhD in music, he has been writer-in-residence and taught courses at many universities and colleges. Born in Northern Ireland to South African parents of Lithuanian Ashkenazi descent, he lives in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Website here Gregory Betts is a poet and professor at Brock University and the author or editor of 25 books. His poems have been stenciled into the sidewalks of St. Catharines and selected by the SETI Institute to be implanted into the surface of the moon. He has performed his poetry at such venues as the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games as part of the Cultural Olympiad, the National Library in Dublin, and the Sorbonne Université in Paris, amongst many others. He is an award-winning scholar of the Canadian avant-garde, curator of the bpNichol.ca Digital Archive, and Literary Arts Residency Lead at the SETI Institute. 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 NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Concetta Principe about her poetry collection, DIsorder (Gordon Hill Press, 2024).  Disorder, the newest collection of poetry from Concetta Principe, explores the metaphorical relationship between the home and the mind, where a home should be place of sanctuary but can have its safe borders destabilized by mental illness. The poems work through these questions with Principe's characteristic subtlety, intelligence ? a nuanced and compassionate meditation on what it means to be at home. About Concetta Principe: Concetta Principe is a writer of poetry and creative non-fiction, and scholarship on the impact of the secular unconscious on culture and political thought. Her recent collection, This Real (Pedlar Press 2017) was long-listed for the League of Canadian Poet's Raymond Souster Award. Her essays, ?Who Shot Meriwether Lewis was long-listed for the 2019 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Award at The New Quarterly, and ?I Title it ?Suicide Letter was short-listed for The Malahat Review 2019 Constance Rooke award. Her poetry and creative non-fiction has appeared in Canadian and American journals including The Malahat Review, The Capilano Review, experiment-o, and Hamilton Arts and Literature. Her academic monograph exploring trauma in contemporary secular thought, Secular Messiahs and the Return to Paul's Real: A Lacanian Approach, came out with Palgrave Macmillan in 2015. She teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at Trent University, Durham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry