Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley
Chelsea Krieg, Everything Is Water, Texas Review Press, March 2026, poetry
Everything Is Water is an open letter to caregivers as the speaker grapples with her partner’s life-threatening illness, pregnancy and new motherhood, and marriage. Growing up on the Virginia coast, the speaker knows the water’s danger and allure—asks, what is beneath, what has control in so much open and unknown space? The speaker continues to feel this unease in everything as she navigates fear, identity, and loss. Everything is water. Everything is the surface tension created by the unknown. The collection often returns to the water and those inhabiting it, but it also looks to winged creatures, those on land, and those who are in between elements as they wrestle with their own survival. Water is an element that sustains and devours. When danger comes, we wonder when it will end. We ask how we can live with loss. Is it easier to run away? To let go? Everything Is Water leaves the reader suspended, treading water alongside the speaker as she seeks to answer these questions.
B.K. O’Connor, Eve: A Novel, Histria Books/Simon & Schuster, March 2026, literary fiction (novel)
In this retelling of Paradise Lost, rewriting Eve as the hero, Eve takes the fruit, leaves Adam, and travels the ancient world. Eve: A Novel touches on both the burdens and riches of motherhood, by way of the “first” mother. Themes of divine rebellion, feminine awakening, the theology of desire and shame, all fall in line behind the holy art of curiosity. Eve yearns to understand why she was created, to understand the god that made and abandoned her. In the end, Eve seeks to know the limits to her own power, to sate her hunger, once and for all. Navigating loves, betrayals, and the duties of motherhood from Nippur to the coastal city of Canaan and across the Aegean Sea to Cyprus, Eve will go as far as it takes.
Chrissy Martin, Whole, Holy, Hot, Write Bloody Publishing, April 2026, poetry
Chrissy Martin’s debut book of poetry, Whole, Holy, Hot, captures a mind and body on fire: illuminated, inflamed, blushed, and charred. Selfhood refracts through a kaleidoscope of pop culture, gender performance, shifting geographies, religious control, medical systems, and violence both intimate and structural—alongside love gathered in doorways and kitchens and the wild light of humor, play, and magic. Wielding theory in one hand and an espresso martini in the other, these poems balance critical inquiry with camp and whimsy. Through formal verse, sprawling prose poems, and whispered gossip, Whole, Holy, Hot challenges popular depictions of disability and mental illness and finds sharp truths in the reality TV confessional booth. This collection insists that every mind and body is already whole, already holy, and absolutely hot.
Adriana Oniță, Descântec For My Split Tongue, Palimpsest Press, May 2026, poetry
Descântec For My Split Tongue, Adriana Oniță’s first book of poetry, gathers English-Romanian poems that travel across generations, homelands, and dreamscapes to ask: what do we lose when we lose a language? Drawn from Oniță’s childhood and her immigration from Jilava to Edmonton, the poems explore dor—a Romanian word for deep longing—for her mother tongue. Along the way, Oniță unpacks “untranslatable” Romanian words and proverbs, each a compressed zip file of culture, humour, grief, and courage. The book itself becomes a descântec—part incantation, part prayer, part spell—summoning both the failures and the triumphs of translation into a ritual of healing.