Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley
New & notable, recent & forthcoming. Books are listed in order of publication date.
Laurel Benjamin, Flowers on a Train, Sheila-Na-Gig, June 2025, poetry
Flowers on a Train traverses a natural world both real and imagined, where we hunger for something beyond the boundaries of loss. Rich in crisp, lush imagery and filled with family, food, art, and music, the poems take us to local and far away places. Walking the neighborhood before surgery, we encounter a talking tree, hiking in a Sierra storm, the skies appear as a white bird, and listening to a New York jazz combo, we time-travel to Paris in the ‘20s. In the end, Benjamin shows us that through memory, forgiveness, and reconciliation, we can navigate what’s broken.
Cheryl J. Fish, Crater and Tower, Shanti Arts Publishing, August 2025, poetry
Crater and Tower poetically juxtaposes the volcanic eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980—the deadliest eruption in United States history—with the attack on The World Trade Center on September 11, 2001—the deadliest terrorist attack in United States history. Fish includes poems that document her evacuation from her apartment near the towers and of students at the community college where Fish is a professor. Poems address the impact of the 9/11 terrorist attack and the Mount St. Helens eruption on the lives of families, women, workers, and the natural world. She articulates a sharp ecological and political stance that incorporates the mental and physical repercussions of these traumatic events as well as how we might heal and move forward.
Margo Berdeshevsky, It Is Still Beautiful To Hear The Heart Beat, Salmon Poetry, August 2025, poetry
“Margo Berdeshevsky, trained as an actress, took a primal influence from Shakespeare’s diction and presents poems of innermost reflection as speeches, soliloquies, spot-lit. The subject here is the world now in its various but one crisis, particularly as a space of war. The witness, perceiver, speaker has come to have the guise or part of an old woman—crone. I repeat, this is now, the harrowing recent ‘real’ world, but it is often stripped of reference. By not having context except that of one’s own experience, the reader may float in the language and its melodies. Presented as gift, after all.” —Alice Notley. “This is an incredibly beautiful and sentient book. Margo Berdeshevsky’s poetic rhythms are agile and incantatory, her imagery compelling, and her concerns consistently cogent, womanly, and universal.” —Cyrus Cassells
Heidi Seaborn, tic tic tic, Cornerstone Press, September 2025, poetry
tic tic tic begins in the ashes of 2019—a roaring ‘20s New Year’s Eve party gives way to a pandemic, an insurrection, war after war, the possibility of tyranny, and the mounting climate crisis. Along the way, the steady change of seasons and tick of time elevate the tension between the urgency of the moment and history’s expanse, between an individual’s response and the inevitable legacy of collective generations. tic tic tic is a clear-eyed lyric take on the chaos of our times, yet an affirmation of the human spirit. A life is lived, a new generation created, faith smolders, love and hope persist.
Gillian Sze, An Orange, A Syllable, ECW Press (Toronto), September 2025, poetry
An Orange, A Syllable details a period of maternal and artistic transformation. This prosimetrical work is a meditation on motherhood, language, and art. The central speaker witnesses the earliest utterances of her child and launches into a poetic inquiry of words themselves, asking, “How to measure one’s mouth by its words?” The speaker seeks an answer amidst the language that surrounds her—words misspoken, mispronounced, remembered, unwritten—and, in doing so, struggles with signification and significance.
Anna Rollins, Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, December 2025, creative nonfiction (memoir)
This groundbreaking debut memoir examines the rhyming scripts of diet culture and evangelical purity culture, both of which direct women to fear their own bodies and appetites. Blending memoir, research, and reporting, Famished untangles these lies and encourages women to reclaim their appetites for life, love, and food, both physical and spiritual. Interweaving her own story of disordered eating and sexual dysfunction with those of other women she interviews, Rollins discovers a sisterhood committed to finding freedom from body shame. Along the way she rewrites her own body’s story to include a purpose much greater than its size or parts or the roles she fills as daughter, wife, and mother, a body well-loved by her and beloved by God.
Chiara Di Lello, Childless Millennial, Game Over Books, January 2026, poetry (chapbook)
Childless Millennial is a rallying cry for a label reclaimed with pride. This book is a blueprint-by-amalgamation for what a fulfilling non-reproducing life can be. Drawing inspiration from as disparate sources as her own non-biological mother figures, the act of nurturing other people’s children, and the natural world, Chiara Di Lello’s chapbook cuts against the expectation of compulsory motherhood. Through a multi-generational dive into her own Ukrainian immigrant family, she wrestles with the choice to be child-free and its thorny entanglements with gender and culture. Childless Millennial rejects expectations and forges its own answers to what makes a meaningful life.
Rebecca Hart Olander, Singing from the Deep End, CavanKerry Press, February 2026, poetry
Rebecca Hart Olander’s second collection Singing from the Deep End chronicles coming of age in the ‘70s and ‘80s with a single mother, girlhood friends, the death of a dearest friend, and the poet’s own dive into motherhood. Rooted in the rocky coastline of Gloucester, Massachusetts, these poems thrum with music, mirrors, granite quarries, the Atlantic, potholder looms, feathered hair, and repurposed garments. Singing from the Deep End navigates how our ever-changing bodies can betray us and be betrayed, treading through layered griefs and surfacing into joy and reclamation. Anchored in the lives of women, this poetic mixtape is a love song to mothers, children, girldom, and friendship.
Hollay Ghadery, The Unravelling of Ou, Palimpsest Press, February 2026, literary fiction (novel)
Moving on is hard. Even harder when it’s from a make-believe friend—someone, or in this instance, some thing—who’s been your strongest source of support. On what should be one of the happiest days ever, the day her granddaughter is born, Minoo is faced with a terrible choice: make a clean break from her constant companion, a sock puppet named Ecology Paul, or lose her daughter and granddaughter, and maybe all of the people she loves. On an emotional drive home from the hospital, Ecology Paul shares the story of how Minoo got to this point, recalling Minoo’s early teenage pregnancy in Iran, her exile to Canada, her questions about her sexuality, and how a ragtag sock puppet came to her when she desperately needed to be seen. Full of imagination, whimsy, and heart, The Unravelling of Ou follows Minoo’s struggles to justify the puppet’s existence and eventually, untangle herself from her dependence on it and reconnect with the people she loves.