New Books in Poetry

In 2006 poet Amanda Johnston went in search of community and, when she didn’t find what she was looking for, Amanda built her own. Today, Torch Literary Arts is a resource and a destination for Black women writers and readers across the diaspora. Fueled by wisdom and writings from poets, novelists, and screenwriters, the organization’s exceptional programming and award-winning magazine amplify Black women’s voices, and has featured work from poets like Patricia Smith, Yona Harvey, and Toi Derricotte, screenwriters and playwrights like Jonterri Gadson, Charla Lauriston, and Lisa B. Thompson, and novelists like Tayari Jones, Crystal Wilkinson, and Sapphire.

And at a time when Amanda is preparing for Torch’s 20th Anniversary celebration, “A Gathering of Flames,” she is also celebrating the publication of a new book in her capacity as the 61st Texas Poet Laureate, Praisesong for the People: Poems from the Heart and Soul of Texas (Host Publications, 2025), showcasing original praise poems commissioned from poets across the state, and seeking to uplift diverse and intersecting populations across age, gender, and BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, differently-abled, and immigrant communities.

You can find Amanda at her website, on Instagram, and on Threads. And check out Torch Literary Arts, Torch Magazine, and follow the organization on Instagram, Facebook, and Threads.

Want to hear more from Amanda about the journey to Torch’s 20th Anniversary? Check out our continued conversation on Substack.

Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.
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In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Donna Vorreyer about her poetry collection, Unrivered (Sundress Publications, 2025).

Donna Vorreyer strikes gold with Unrivered, a stunning collection of poems that meditate on grief, regret, longing, self-love, and acceptance. Reeling from the loss of her parents, Vorreyer’s speaker is forced to grapple with her own mortality, and with the complicated feelings that come with aging. At times whispering softly in our ears, at times spitting venom with every word, Vorreyer charts the ways loss impacts the body and our perceptions of self, and how we are to keep on living. With a heroic sonnet crown woven through the book like the loose stitches in her grandmother's quilt, Vorreyer offers hope, courage, and gratitude in the face of our deepest fears. The result is a masterful and gripping story of loss and acceptance. Offering up rending, apocalyptic elegy, ironic detachment, or passionate, joyful celebration of life, Unrivered is bound to both take your breath away and give it a new form.

Donna Vorreyer is the author of four full-length poetry collections: To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), and Unrivered (2025), all from Sundress Publications. Recent work has appeared in Ploughshares, Poet Lore, Colorado Review, Harpur Palate, Baltimore Review, and Booth. Her visual art has been featured in North American Review, Waxwing, About Place, Penn Review, Ilanot Review, Double Back Review, Pithead Chapel, and other journals. Donna currently lives and creates in the western suburbs of Chicago and runs the online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey.
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Walt Whitman’s outrage at American politics and politicians was surpassed only by his passionate faith in democracy’s future. Both his anger and his hope fire his visionary prose writings on democracy, gathered for the first time in a new Library of America paperback edited by acclaimed political commentator and literary critic David Bromwich.

Join Bromwich, Mark Edmundson (author of Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy) and Karen Karbiener (The Modern Scholar: Walt Whitman and the Birth of Modern American Poetry) for an exploration of our essential poet of democracy and his prophetic vision for the country that speaks directly to our present moment.
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In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews acclaimed poet
Laurie D. Graham about her new book of poetry, Calling it Back to Me
(McClelland & Stewart, 2026).

A poet’s clear-eyed witnessing of familial history, this is the most
personal collection yet from two-time Trillium Book Award finalist
Laurie D. Graham.

In these searching, spare, and resonant poems,
Laurie D. Graham traces the story of her great-grandmothers’ lives
before and after they left their homelands and settled on this
continent, striving to understand how she came to be here and writing
the act of colonization as it exists in her own family history. This
collection’s fractured lines, time-weathered yet alive with detail,
reflect a family’s knowledge broken by global immigration and memory
loss, both individual and collective. The result is a courageous
reckoning with the legacy of leaving home.

With tender curiosity and a determination to bear unflinching witness, Calling It Back to Me: Poems (Random House, 2026) asks: When language and memory are so tenuous, what is it that gets passed down between generations?

LAURIE D. GRAHAM grew up in Treaty 6 Territory, near
amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton, Alberta), and she has lived in
Nogojiwanong/Peterborough, in the Territory of the Mississauga
Anishinaabeg, since 2018, where she is a poet, an editor, and the
publisher of Brick magazine, a journal of literary non-fiction based in Toronto. Her first book, Rove,
was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for the best
first book of poetry in Canada. Her second and third books, Settler Education and Fast Commute, were both nominated for Ontario’s Trillium Book Award for Poetry.
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In her third collection, Nova Scotian poet Jaime Forsythe has created an elegant long poem with Yield (Buckrider Books, 2026).
In these dreamlike lines a mother faces the postpartum void from a
porous house by the ocean as the veil between land and sea, and between
being lost and being found, grows thinner. With repeated waves of
couplets Forsythe brings the reader unforgettable images: a pom-pom
that hardens into a sea urchin, an underwater dance club, a coast that melts into the sea. Delicately tracing the disorientation and dark edges of new motherhood, this is a collection that embraces beauty and ambiguity with a baby that roots for milk while what's ancient—whether history or memory—floods in.

Jaime Forsythe's previous books are I Heard Something (Anvil Press, 2018) and Sympathy Loophole (Mansfield Press, 2012). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Arc, EVENT, Grain, The Malahat Review, Geist, The Ampersand Review and This Magazine,
among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University
of Guelph and currently lives close to where she grew up in Nova
Scotia/Mi'kma'ki.

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian
multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her
MFA in Creative Writing from  the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir
of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica
Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for
Nonfiction/Memoir.
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