Edited by Melissa Joplin Higley
New and forthcoming books (listed by publication date).
Elizabeth O’Rourke, Rewoven in the Dew, Kelsay Books, June 2026, poetry
Rewoven in the Dew explores shades of what life asks of us when we are committed to noticing. Through experiences of young & committed love, the prairie of new motherhood, the heartbreak of medical missteps, and even encounters with women of the Bible, this collection weaves patience and trust for what inevitably comes next.
Aimee Suzara, Birth Language, Tia Chucha Press, August 2026, poetry
Aimee Suzara’s second full-length book Birth Language centers on a Filipina-American time traveling through her history, twisted and haunted like the roots of a balete tree. The book fuses English, Spanish, and Tagalog. It employs archival texts from as early as the 1500s when European conquistadors and explorers encountered the pre-colonial Philippine islands. Guided by the babaylan (shaman) and populated by mythical creatures like the mananngangal, kapre, and sireno, the collection celebrates a history of resistance, reclaiming and redefining the self despite colonization, assimilation, and cultural loss.
Amy Barone, Treesongs, Broadstone Books, September 2026, poetry
In Treesongs, poet Amy Barone pays homage to all things green. This volume reveals her love of nature, and emphasizes her deep appreciation for trees – as scenic beauty, environmental necessity, and a source of spiritual wonder. With a focus on place, nature, and metamorphosis, the collection celebrates and honors the splendor and resiliency of trees and nature, which can serve as an antidote to crises in a world growing smaller and less manageable. Touching on memory, family, history, and tragedy, some pieces conclude on a note of acceptance and resolution.
Jennifer Barber, A Prevalence of Angels, The Word Works, October 2026, poetry
Jennifer Barber’s fifth collection casts light on presences and absences, from the mythic and biblical to the loss of loved ones and a countervailing openness to the world. Ishtar enters the present day; seabirds plunge through the waves; a mother is mourned; and, at this moment of national rupture, appalled angels flock to the branches of a tree. Barber renders daughterhood, motherhood, friendship, and the round of seasons with startling precision. Her poems reveal essences but also let silence have its say, drawing the reader into a shared dimension that is familiar and mysterious, immediate and far-reaching.
Bridgette James, Gestating Creatures, Dithering Chaps, October 2026, poetry (chapbook)
In this debut poetry chapbook, British Sierra Leonean writer Bridgette James explores infertility, IVF, pregnancy loss and the passage into motherhood. Her speakers inhabit a world where clinical diagnoses collide with biblical commandments, inherited fertility myths and family expectations. Desire for a child becomes entangled with shame, faith, sexuality and the struggle to retain authority over her own body. Across eighteen poems, shifting forms include prose poetry, fragments, lists and cascading lines. Tenderness and anger coexist with dark wit. The collection moves through mourning and longing towards birth, then confronts the exhaustion, isolation and psychological turbulence that can accompany caring for a newborn. Motherhood emerges as a complex relationship shaped by bodily experience, cultural inheritance and competing claims of ownership.
Jen Karetnick, Domiciliary, Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, October 2026, poetry
What happens when you set yourself a constraint-based writing challenge? Sometimes, a book like Domiciliary comes out of it. During the pandemic, Miami-based, New Jersey-native poet Jen Karetnick tasked herself to write 26 beautiful outlaws and 26 abecedarians, one of each titled for every letter in the alphabet. The result is poems that run riot over traditions and expectations, with many meshing multiple forms together in a strata of craft—but all of them exploring some aspect of what it means to be “home,” where this poet often finds herself.
Catherine Owen, Sixteen Homes, Wolsak & Wynn, October 2026, creative nonfiction (memoir)
You say house and wood falls over you like a cloak, your passion becomes windows. You say home and all memories gather. In Sixteen Homes Catherine Owen pulls together the ideas, words and images that surround our understanding of home and housing. Asking questions about transience and about how long it takes to set down roots, Owen set out not to write a memoir but to reflect on a society that has priced many out of their home cities. Moving between diary entries, essays, poetry and photographs, Owen shares her path from her struggles with housing as a young mother to the security she now feels. From her parents’ purpose-built home in Vancouver – co-owned with another family – to Delilah – the century-old house she now owns in Edmonton – Sixteen Homes moves through the many places Owen has lived, considering what these types of experiences mean for our ideas of belonging. All along she invites the reader to consider what it is that turns a house into a home and who it is that gets to have one.
Kate Blakinger, How to Court Disaster, University of Iowa Press, November 2026, literary fiction (short stories)
How to Court Disaster tells the stories of characters knocked sideways by circumstances, or lured into trouble by the glitter of adventures with irresponsible people. A shipwrecked sailor crawls out of the sea and joins the crew of a movie being filmed on a remote island. A pregnant teen finds herself on foot in the middle of a whiteout snowstorm with a stranger’s baby in her arms. A grieving mother explores the secret chambers of a cave system, and a runaway takes shelter with the grandmother she believes is a witch. Richly observed and shot through with a touch of uncanny magic, this collection is about loves that wound, losses that haunt, and desires that spur unexpected transformations.
Julie Trimingham, The Heart Has Its Reasons and Its Own Velocity, Dzanc Books, January 2027, literary fiction (novel)
Actress Mia is adrift. Tucked away in snowy Montreal, she feels wrecked on the shoals of her own life, aimless as she ages out of the film roles given to beautiful young women. When her longtime yet noncommittal boyfriend Alex asks if she’d like to go to Cuba with him on a research trip, she says yes on a whim. In Havana, Mia gets swept up in wild music and color and her own long-forgotten desires—especially after she meets Carlos, a piano player and local fixer whose connection to Alex complicates what they might be to each other. Yet she can find nothing to anchor herself to. Until, one searingly hot day, wandering alone on the outskirts of a town, Mia comes across a baby abandoned in a parked car. What builds from there is a gale-force storm. As a hurricane whirls toward the island, Mia must decide how far she will go in the name of love, and how love has cast her in her own story: as sinner or saint.