New Books in Poetry

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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Amrita Chowdhury and Ujaan Ghosh bring into English for the first time a long-inaccessible masterpiece of South Asian literature Baidehisha Bilasa: The Amorous Plays of Sita’s Husband (2025). Composed in the late seventeenth century by Upendra Bhanja — the Odia prince-poet hailed as Kavi Samrat, the Emperor of Poets — the work is a Ramayana that privileges shringara, the erotic sentiment, over martial heroism. Rama-the-lover overshadows Rama-the-warrior, and his conjugal life with Sita takes center stage in a poem dense with puns, classical ragas, and chitrapadya — word-arrangements that resolve into wheels, chariots, and arrows on the page. Famously, every verse begins with the letter ba, and the text has long been considered untranslatable. With a preface by Wendy Doniger, Chowdhury and Ghosh's decade-long translation preserves the strangeness and sensuality of the original while opening it to a new readership.
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In his first work of nonfiction, poet chaun webster blends memoir, archival research, visual poetics, and cultural criticism to trace the ways structural anti-Black violence has shaped his inheritance, and grapples with the question of how to know—and mourn—the kin he was never able to meet.webster is particularly drawn to his grandfather Reginald, who worked for years as a Pullman porter, who was denied rest while his labor enabled rest for others, and who died without receiving a pension before webster was born. Returning to the figures of Reginald and the train, webster explores the relationship between comportment and confinement, speaking in tongues in the Pentecostal church, the ancestral meeting place of dreams, his fraught relationship with his mother, and moments with his own child. Throughout, webster also reflects on nonbiological kinship, tethering his and his predecessors’ lives to those of several historical Black figures—Harriet Jacobs, John Henry, Henry “Box” Brown, and Henry Dumas, a writer who was killed by New York City police while riding the subway.Attempting to exhaust the possibilities of the sentence and the grammar of anti-Blackness, webster riffs and rails on the debris within reach. Part elegy, part archival detective story, and part visual poem, Without Terminus: untraining an archive (Greywolf, 2026) is a philosophically rigorous and deeply moving text that takes us beyond the archive of loss.

You can find the works chaun references during our conversation, as well as a further discussion about literary form, at the Additions to the Archive Substack.

Follow chaun webster on Instagram.

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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