(l-r): Erin Belieu (photo: Allysia Dunn) and Joanna Klink (photo: Antonia Wolf)

Erin Belieu (RJFWA ’95), Cocklebur: New & Selected Poems, Copper Canyon Press, October 2026

“In celebration of a major voice in American letters, Erin Belieu’s Cocklebur: New & Selected Poems gathers decades of work alongside a generous selection of new poems. Wide ranging in style, subject and structure, this collection confronts with unsentimental clarity both tender intimacies and grief, as well as the absurdities of what it is to be a human. Belieu considers with fierce emotional intelligence and intellectual rigor the power dynamics and quiet brutality often embedded in our domestic lives and national narratives. Whether addressing sexuality, the sustainability of faith in one’s self or others, or American identity, the poems are penetrating and precise. Cocklebur is a portrait of a poet unafraid to look directly at our personal and collective histories—what they permit, what they erase, and what they ask us to carry.”

Joanna Klink (RJFWA ’03) Days & Chances, Penguin Poets, September 2026

“In Joanna Klink’s dreamlike sixth book, she turns her gaze to ordinary days and asks, What is the measure of a life? How should we weigh time, luck, love? Against the extreme terrain of Texas—with its soaring temperatures, ice storms, and flash floods—she tries to make sense of the loss of natural spaces, her father going blind, falling in love mid-life. Each of her poems embodies what Virginia Woolf described as ‘moments of being’: moments of awareness and intense feeling in which we become conscious of our connection to the world around us. Flickering between personal and ecological time, Klink’s poems deepen those connections even as the landscapes and relationships around her become less recognizable. Days & Chances lets us see the depths in everyday moments—and chances to live more fully.”

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