Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry
By U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze
April 2026
97981556597329 | $17.00 | Paperback | 184 Pages | 5.0 in. x 7.0 in.

Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry is a personal guide to global poetry in translation by 25th U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze. Focusing on an accessible selection of key works, Sze takes readers through nearly two millennia of poetry from every part of the world, constructing fifteen different “zones” of literary discussion with a critical focus on the artistic dimensions of translation itself. To do this, Sze engages multiple translations of the same source poems—as well as original poems written by translators—to explore deep connections between the acts of writing and reading. In Zone 10, for instance, Sze presents two translations of a single poem by Marina Tsevataeva, the first a well-known standard and the second by a poet who speaks no Russian and employed a Russian-speaking friend to help translate the poem phrase by phrase. In another Zone, Sze presents a famous passage from the Iliad, but rather than present another translation Sze instead juxtaposes a contemporary poem that uses numerous elements of the Iliad as a springboard to write through the original Greek and into an original work in English.

A Third Commonness: Essays on Poetry 
By Robert Hass
May 2026
97981556597282 | $22.00 | Paperback | 376 Pages | 6.0 in. x 9.0 in.

In his newest collection of essays, former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass traces many currents through time and topography, spanning Zen Buddhist poetry and American Ecopoetry, Walt Whitman and T.S Eliot, an unlikely fellowship between poet-priests Thomas Merton and Ernesto Cardenal, and more. Told through various lectures, tributes, and miscellaneous writing by Hass, Third Commonness is at once a collection of literary criticism and a sprawling exploration of modern poetic heritage itself. Here, lineage is carved by both the pen and the land; a poetic movement is as much a matter of formal evolution as it is of individual people crossing paths in the Berkeley Hills, at the Trappist monastery in Kentucky, or through the pulp of the page. The book inherits its own title from Wallace Stevens’s poem “The River of Rivers in Connecticut”: “the third commonness with light and air / a river, an unnamed flowing…” Hass explores these connections with the boundless vision of a writer who has floated further down that river than most. “Here it is, this stretch of it,” he says. Sometimes, the story is a personal narrative, elsewhere — a romance, a political reckoning, or a requiem. In the end, it is always a tale about poetry encountering itself over and over again, beckoned into being by some propelling force.

I Was Bonnie & Clyde 
By Laura Kasischke
May 2026
9781556597312 | $17.00 | Paperback | 112 Pages | 6.0 in. x 9.0 in.

In Laura Kasischke’s new collection, every moment contains an infinity: the mundane in the monumental, and the monumental in the mundane. As technology and consumerism inch to the forefront of society, I Was Bonnie and Clyde illuminates small moments of collision between life and death, from “The worm in the grave of JFK” to “the mole hauled out of the ground / by the dog to die in the sun.” In Kasischke’s imaginings, nature, ghosts, and bodies become blended with the inanimate—through glass brains, anchors of placenta, and black forests in small boxes, their suffocation haunts and heightens the text. Calling upon the weariness of Peter Rabbit, the poetry of Bonnie Parker, and the electrocution of Topsy the elephant, Kasischke evokes history and tragedy with a quiet, conversational reverence. Through their repetitions, their exclamations, and their laments, these poems serve as both mirror and reflection, reaching out as the reader gazes in.

Creature Feature
By Dean Young
April 2026
9781556597220 | $17.00 | Paperback | 112 Pages | 6.0 in. x 9.0 in.

With Creature Feature, the late Dean Young delivers the final installment of a trilogy written in the wake of his heart transplant, including Shock by Shock (2015) and Solar Perplexus (2019). Revised by Young in the weeks before his death, this newest collection of poems represents a darker foray into the surreal terrain of his work, all the while brimming with the kind of sharp humor, playfulness, and imaginative power that has come to distinguish a Young book. Both entirely of this planet and somewhere slanted to it, Creature Feature is punctuated by broken crayons, hotel TVs, mannequins stuffed with love letters, and headless people waiting in line at the post office. Horror flick iconography interweaves with everyday ritual to disclose a world that is about to break from its containment field, already pushing through the gaps between this life and the next, and those all around us. “Is reality just a failure of the imagination?” The speaker asks. “That’s not what the dandelion thinks / Breaking through the asphalt.

Breathe
By Bob Hicok
April 2026
9781556597305 | $17.00 | Paperback | 112 Pages | 6.0 in. x 9.0 in.

Bob Hicok meets distress with tenderness in his newest collection, meditating on the persistence of love in the modern era. With poems that drip with affection, Hicok writes to his wife and his cat, to his dying father and to the “the moon alone / or the ocean full of languages,” words that speak to a longing “to believe in something, Christ / or pickle ball or that a cello would make a beautiful person.” Hicok treats “elation as a career” in a post-COVID world, reflecting on a cultural shift with a penchant towards violence but great potential for change. Focusing on that which is human in all things, Breathe is as much a meditative work as it is an invitation to converse. In a world that is constantly in quickening motion, Breathe is a call for stillness—a call “To understand what leaves / are saying to the wind. To be deserving / of the giddyup of your breath.”

Air
By Daniel Halpern
May 2026
9781556597251 | $17.00 | Paperback | 136 Pages | 6.0 in. x 9.0 in.

Daniel Halpern’s newest poetry collection, Air, tells it all like it is. Life’s normalities are romantically recounted through rich, intimate exposition, drawing on the people, places, and ideas both dear and curious to Halpern. He writes to French actresses, insomnia, old lovers, stew, friends of both the past and present, and the human experience. Air hinges on  the beauty of the mundane and makes every detail as familiar to readers as their own hometown. Halpern allows his readers to frame the world with his poetry-prescription glasses, using a confessional style to question his observations, reminisce on once-realities, and transcend form as a whole. Halpern’s penmanship is cinematic, nostalgic, and unabashedly raw, asking why “it’s no longer possible to find the sun reliably rising and / Shining on the morning, new light no longer ascending the trees?” Air is, in short, documented proof that poetry is quite literally all around us. 

The Man in 119
By Kazim Ali
August 2026
9781556597299 | $17.00 | Paperback | 120 Pages | 6.0 in. x 9.0 in.

The latest collection from accomplished poet Kazim Ali uses precise poetic verse to trace a reproduction of the self after the loss of the poet’s mother. The book opens on the far edge of the world on the Homer Spit in Alaska, before tracing its way back into the locus of memory. Through musically beautiful poetry, Kazim Ali’s writing shows there is no clean endpoint for the body moving through grief. Instead, like migration, the body moves, it reproduces itself through the experience of losing and living still. The poems offer vignettes of various geographies, individuals, and memories. With bounding rhythms and sounds, the poems follow the Ali’s “unmoored” life. At one moment he recalls conversing with his friend, the poet Fanny Howe, and at another, he remembers a young hiker who teases him on the trail. Ranging from Lisbon to the River Jordan, Ali draws on a lifetime of memories, from the bittersweet to the bewitching. With minimal punctuation, Kazim Ali focuses intensely on the sounds and origins of individual words of the verse. At the height of his stylistic grandeur, Ali’s poems pull from a Middle English lexicon, evoking the alliterative Anglo-Saxon verse that gave birth to English poetry. His forms are equally inspired by the Qasida praise poems of ancient Arabic. Ali’s latest work uses dialects and forms contemporary and pre-modern to approach the experience of living, loving other people, and moving through the large world, with a skilled poet’s eye given to rhythmic sound.

Accidental Devotions
By Kelli Russell Agodon
May 2026
9781556597268 | $17.00 | Paperback | 112 Pages | 6.0 in. x 9.0 in.

A meditation on the sacredness of all things—milkweed and phone screens and the ghosts of 19th century poets—Kelli Russell Agodon’s third collection revisits lost loves on familiar shores. Burgeoning with nostalgia, Accidental Devotions interrogates loss and loneliness in the digital world, focusing not on its bleakness, but on the hope that blossoms through. A celebration of young love and dying spiders, of free-swimming mermaids and the shadows of snowberries, Accidental Devotions is an effortless elegy to summer romance and homage to Emily Dickinson, whose ghost never truly fades from the first page. Amidst growing isolation, Agodon beckons the reader to “let everything in,” to embrace “longing as an offering” and “hold on to desire like an inferno”—despite everything, to love with abandon. Agodon’s words are the type you can drown in—tender, enchanting, and building like a rising tide.

Tread Upon
By Christopher Kondrich
April 2026
9781556597244 | $17.00 | Paperback | 120 Pages | 6.0 in. x 9.0 in.

Tread Upon by Christopher Kondrich is a lyrical meditation on the boundary between the self and the world. The collection explores what it means to live upon the Earth, inquiring the consequences of coexistence and consumption. From blades of grass to coal ash, migrating animals to melting glaciers, Kondrich’s poems confront the climate crisis and attend to the intricacies of the systems that inhabit everyday life. With language as fine-tuned as it is compassionate, Tread Upon ultimately asks whether it’s possible to imagine a different way of being—one that listens, mourns, and resists, even as the future slips into the sea.

Cloudwatcher
By Michael Bazzett
April 2026
9798987585252 | $17.00 | Paperback | 76 Pages | 6.0 in. x 9.0 in.

Winner of the inaugural 2025 Stern Prize from The American Poetry Review, Michael Bazzett’s astonishing Cloudwatcher is laced with wit and buoyed by a welcome eccentricity. These poems reside in an otherwhere of missing rivers and bottled starlight, where the sea leaves cryptic letters for beachcombers on shore, where rain can “wipe the name clean off a mountain.” Bazzett is a master at building a world slightly parallel to this one, a place of weirdness and mystery, where to be imprisoned in a “cage of one’s own desires” comes replete with cedar shavings, feeding tray, and water bottle. With its evocative imagery and language crackling with energy, Cloudwatcher brings us to a place where the eternal rubs shoulders with the everyday, leaving us with a heightened sense of how absurd and wondrous it is to inhabit a temporary body in this world, and the life-affirming reminder that “until / you crack a bit, you can’t be over-joyed.”