By a Roman, Catherine Theis

October, 2025

By a Roman includes meditations on the role of the female artist, motherhood, and language itself. What does it mean to daydream, to cast ourselves into others' most intimate lives, or perhaps into our own various selves? These poems chart those mesmerizing moments when the invisible forces of the world appear visible. A "Work of Art" includes the life and times of the poet, Catherine Theis, while other poems record Bacchic reveries in a landscape lit by fire and ruin, places where the speaker registers "a pleasure / cracked deep from one's mineral self."

Catherine Theis is the author of the poetry collection The Fraud of Good Sleep, the play MEDEA, and translator of Slashing Sounds, the first collection of the Italian poet Jolanda Insana to be published in English. 

Starving is the Energy, Stacy Szymaszek

December, 2025

Starving is the Energy explores the body, work, technology, and memory, weaving vivid details and moments of humor with reflections on music, literature, and philosophy. Influenced by the works of Antonin Artaud, John Clare, Julian of Norwich, and others, it considers the realities of illness, identity, and mortality while searching for meaning in the tension between life’s tenderness and its harshness. The farm where Szymaszek works grounds the narrative in sensory experiences: the smell of manure and fur, the feel of a curry comb in hand, the sight of a cow's damaged horn. These physical moments provide a connection to cycles of life and death, care and renewal. Recurring images, like cows flicking their horns or leaning into a touch, act as refrains that echo throughout the text, inviting contemplation of how small gestures can hold profound significance. Grooming is both a task and an expression of connection and resilience, a way to push back against a world that often dehumanizes or demands conformity. Through these simple, tactile acts, the work transforms labor into a practice of mutual care, recognition, and quiet healing.

Stacy Szymaszek is the author of nine books of poetry, including Starving is the Energy and Essay. They are the recipient of a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant in poetry, and are a 2024 MacDowell Fellow. They enjoy teaching and mentoring younger poets and have done both in a wide variety of contexts, including, recently, for the “ESB” Fellowship program they founded at The Poetry Project in 2013. They live in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley on the sacred homelands of the Munsee and Muhheaconneok people, who, due to forced removal, reside in Northeast Wisconsin as the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. They enjoy swimming and spending time with cows and other animals.

Terracotta Fragments, Eric Tyler Benick

February, 2026

Inspired by the forced parataxis of a museum where vestiges of the past appear without immediate context or correlation, Eric Tyler Benick’s Terracotta Fragments exhumes the turbid remainders of memory and arranges them in the politics of the present. Images stack on top of the other bricolaged of disparate time, tense, and materials. Benick’s lyrical I is sparse, not a locus of activity but an ancillary event, a self that merely happens, affects very little, and is gone. The Imagistic and the ruminative cohabit the short bursts of poetic action, the ancient overlays the contemporary, the sacred overlays the banal, humor and dejection are two ends of the same experience. Benick’s second collection continues his interest in the serial approach to poetic disintegration whereby the process of recall acts also as a process of forgetting.

Eric Tyler Benick is the author of the fox hunts (Beautiful Days, 2023), Memory Field; A Travelogue of Forgetting(Long Day, 2024), and Solip Schism (Blue Bag, 2024). With Nick Rossi, he runs Ursus Americanus Press, a publisher of shorter poetics. His work has appeared in Bennington Review, Brooklyn Review, Copper Nickel, Harvard Advocate, Meridian, Puerto Del Sol, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn and he teaches postcolonial and anticarceral literatures at Wagner.