Myth by Terese Mason Pierre
(House of Anansi Press, April 2025)
In her debut poetry collection, Toronto-based writer Terese Mason Pierre marries fiction and reality using equal parts clairvoyance and harmonic lyricism. Myth is structured as an upward trajectory from the depths of the ocean to the expanses of outer space. Pierre makes pit stops along the way at Caribbean shorelines and in church parking lots, with both migrations and minutiae, to consider urgent questions about family and belonging, relationships and pleasure, trauma and grief. Myth does the same work of doubling that we turn to all myth for: finding deep-felt truths in mirror-selves. This collection does not just remember, but re-members, putting a memory back together limb by limb and stretching back ancestrally while speculating about a future in which we all are held, considered and loved.
Precedence by Pujita Verma
(Brick Books, March 2026)
Precedence is a reckoning with the slipperiness of language — in translation, in unspeakable trauma, in the frameworks that attempt to impose order and logic where there is none. The London-based author Pujita Verma showcases a unique approach to formalism in her debut, using writing tools such as caesura, enjambments and erasure to reclaim power over narratives of childhood sexual abuse. As highly technical as this collection is, it is also experimental and playful. Verma, for example, places the poem title “Racoon in Basement Window” in a box in the upper corner of the page and crafts a deconstructed glosa from a Hindi nursery rhyme. Haunting and humanizing, Precedence is a collection that asks us: Where do we draw the lines of justice, of borders, and of the body?
The Hungering Years by Summer Farah
(Host Publications, Feb. 2026)
Like a View-Master toy, the physical act of turning each page of The Hungering Years brings on a new cast of characters and new setting, all filtered through the same light of Farah’s symphonic and insurgent poetic voice. While mosaic in nature, the collection is also almost like a book-length ode to poet Etel Adnan, Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora. In doing so it deeply explores both the idea and realities of present apocalypse, giving way to future liberation. Farah does not let us be passive in that imagining; in the poem “Noooo Don’t be a Birthright Apologist You’re So Sexy Ahha,” she writes that “solidarity is not sympathy it is work / I have built millions of fields for us to try.”
E by Noa Micaela Fields
(Nightboat Books, Jan. 2026)
In Noa Micaela Fields’ debut collection, echodeviant (a term coined by Fields to mean being trans with hearing aids) mishearings form the bedrock of a liberatory poetic, inviting the reader to, “From other words / form other worlds.” E springs forth from and dances with Louis Zukofsky’s lifepoem, “A,” which is an amalgamation of 50 years of the American objectivist poet’s musings. In Fields’ own words, E is “A” “transposed up a fifth,” thanks to estrogen. This work vibrates to vibrato, simultaneously homage to Zukofsky and entirely its own. E is equal parts obsessive experiment and homophonic testament, finding all of the queer capaciousness that language has to offer.
A Bow Forged from Ash by Melissa Powless Day
(Palimpsest Press, Sept. 2025)
Melissa Powless Day’s debut collection is a book poised for action, with section titles named after the three actions associated with pulling and releasing an arrow from a bow. A Bow Forged from Ash considers where the body and blood begin and end, as the reader winds through landscape, history and familial lineage. In Day’s verse, repetition, parentheticals and italics form rhythms that function to remind, to insist, to refuse, to reclaim. Fingers pull at the flesh of fish, overripe berries burst, and concrete gives way to what is underneath as we are invited to walk alongside Day’s simultaneous diligent recounting and futurist imagining.
This article appeared in the 2026 Apr/May issue.