Gabrielle Calvocoressi (RJFWA ’02), The New Economy (Copper Canyon Press, October 2025)

“A devotional to the ungendered vessel as it ages, dreams, and survives. A practice of radical collaboration, failure, and renewal. A world of ‘Miss You’ poems opening a portal to all those we’ve lost and would love to visit for a while. In Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s latest collection, The New Economy, poems are haunted by the ghosts of loved ones and childhood memories, by changing landscapes and bodies. Calvocoressi’s own body is examined—the desire to protect the body one is born with, paired with a longing to have been born in another. Cisterns sing with the musicality of a poet who understands both the power of sound and silence—those quiet spaces inviting us to consider the words we cannot hear. ‘The days I don’t kill myself are extraordinary’ one poems says. ‘Why don’t we have a name for it?’ The New Economy asks us to name our fears and sorrows, then, without ever giving up the darkness, to find light in this (in)finite life.”

Ashley M. Jones (RJFWA ’15), Lullaby for the Grieving (Hub City Press, September 2025)

“In her fourth poetry collection, Jones studies the multifaceted nature of grief: the personal grief of losing her father, and the political grief tied to Black Southern identity. How does one find a path through the deep sorrow of losing a parent? What wonders of Blackness have to be suppressed to make way for ‘progress’? Journeying through landscapes of Alabama, the Middle Passage and Underground Railroad, interior spaces of loss and love, and her father’s garden, Jones constructs both an elegy for her father and a celebration of the sacred exuberance and audacity of life. Featuring poems from her tenure as Alabama’s first Black and youngest Poet Laureate, Lullaby for the Grieving finds calm in unimaginable storms and attempts to listen for the sounds of healing.”

Margaree Little (RJFWA ’13) At the Edge: Selected Political Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva (Green Linden Press, November 2025)

“Marina Tsvetaeva’s political poems, a crucial part of her sensibility and life’s work, have largely been neglected in English-language translation. Emphasized instead are poems she wrote about her tumultuous personal and romantic relationships, an emphasis that suggests a gendered reading of the poet as an extreme personality, rather than a poet responding to the extremity of her time. In fact, Tsvetaeva was deeply attuned to the political circumstances in which she lived, and she wrote extensively and incisively about them. To erase this part of the poet and her work domesticates and exotifies her and ignores her reality. Margaree Little’s At the Edge seeks to correct this misreading of Tsvetaeva’s work by bringing together a selection of her political poems—many of them never before translated into English—at a moment when they are acutely relevant to our own culture.”

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