Episodi

  • Sharon Israel, "Voice Lesson" (Post Traumatic Press, 2017)
    May 15 2026
    In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with poet Sharon Israel about her poetry collection, Voice Lesson (Post Traumatic Press). Sharon Israel’s poems are full of song and detail, movement and color; the pleasures she brings to the page are many and varied. We are as likely to find Israel’s speaker sighting owls in the Catskills, or helping in her dad’s butcher shop, as in the world of music implied by the title. In Voice Lesson, Israel’s urge is alchemical, so that when she’s behind the counter, “scoop[ing] shiny brains into plastic bags” she is also arranging them “carefully like pale jewels.” She’s after a kind of transformation, and urges us, “Always make room/for that singing thing/inside you.” —Daisy Fried, author of Women's Poetry: Poems and Advice Sharon Israel, Sephardic American poet and soprano, was an early recipient of Brooklyn College's Leonard Hecht Poetry Explication Award, was nominated for “Best of the Net” 2016 and won Four Lines’ 2020 winter poetry challenge. Her chapbook Voice Lesson was published by Post Traumatic Press. Her work has most recently appeared in Loud Coffee Press among other journals (print and on-line) and anthologies. . Sharon hosts the radio show and podcast, Planet Poet-Words in Space, on WIOX 91.3 FM in the Catskills. All podcast episodes are available on YouTube Music, Spotify and Apple. Sharon is a member of the sound/poetry duo OrphicMix with composer Robert Cucinotta. Sharon has also collaborated with Cucinotta on works for voice, live instruments, and electronics and has premiered several of his works in New York.Sharon has a B.A. from Brooklyn College and an M.S. from the New School of Social Research. She was a local news reporter, feature writer and music critic for Courier-Life publications, Women’s ENews and for the late, lamented Brooklyn Phoenix; she worked as a shoe saleswoman, microbiology lab technician, secretary, had a short stint as a municipal bond salesperson, and worked over two decades as a grant writer and development director. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
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    41 min
  • Stephanie Bolster, "Long Exposure" (Palimpsest Press, 2025)
    Apr 28 2026
    In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with award-winning poet Stephanie Bolster about her new book, Long Exposure (Palimpsest Press, 2025). After Hurricane Katrina, the photographer Robert Polidori flew to New Orleans to document the devastation. In the wreckage he witnessed, and in her questions about what she saw in what he saw, Stephanie Bolster found the beginnings of a long poem. Those questions led to unexpected places; meanwhile, life kept pouring in. The ensuing book, Long Exposure, is Bolster's fifth, a roaming, associative exploration of disasters and their ongoing aftermaths, sufferings large and small, and the vulnerability and value of our own lives. Incremental, unsettling, Long Exposure rushes to and through. Stephanie Bolster has published four books of poetry, the most recent of which, A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth, appeared with Brick Books in 2011 and was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Award. Her first book, White Stone: The Alice Poems (Véhicule Press, 1998) won the Governor General's and the Gerald Lampert Awards, and her second, Two Bowls of Milk (McClelland & Stewart, 1999), won the Archibald Lampman Award and was a finalist for the Trillium Award. Her work has been translated into French (Pierre Blanche: poèmes d'Alice, Les Éditions du Noroît, 2007), Spanish, German, and Serbo-Croatian. She edited The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 (Tightrope), the inaugural volume in that ongoing series; and co-edited Penned: Zoo Poems (Signal/Véhicule, 2009). Born in Vancouver, she grew up in Burnaby, BC, now lives in Pointe-Claire, Québec on the Mohawk (Kanien'kehá:ka) territory of Skaniatará:ti, and has taught creative writing at Concordia University in Montréal since 2000. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
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    58 min
  • Kaie Kellough, "Interposition" (McClelland & Stewart, 2026)
    Apr 26 2026
    In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks wit Griffin Prize winner Kaie Kellough about his new long poem, Interposition (McClelland & Steward, 2026). Featured in the Publishers Weekly Spring 2026 PreviewFrom Kaie Kellough, poet, sound performer, and Griffin prize winner, comes a linguistic incursion into desire, technology, and the absurd.Kaie Kellough (Magnetic Equator, Griffin Poetry Prize winner, 2020) returns with a long poem that repurposes the language of the present. Interposition borrows its vocabulary from the news, entertainment, war, advertising, technology, and the everyday tragedies of popular culture. It reveals the morbid humour of our inability to distinguish between the urgencies of personal achievement and climate crisis. It compresses sound and rhythm into paradox, and it conflates absurdity and emergency.Mapping the continued encroachment of capital and virtual culture upon our psychic space, Interposition examines how, with each click, we are reconstituted online and sold back to ourselves, and asks: How do we uncouple our selves from our avatars? KAIE KELLOUGH is a poet, fiction writer, and sound performer living in Montreal. His previous collection, Magnetic Equator, won the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is a writer and vocalist for the group FYEAR and is pursuing graduate work in English at Queen’s University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
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    52 min
  • Sarah Jean Grimm, "Hog Lagoon" (blush, 2023) and "Soft Focus" (Metatron, 2017)
    Apr 22 2026
    Sarah Jean Grimm is the author of Soft Focus (Metatron, 2017) and the chapbook Hog Lagoon (blush, 2023). She was a founding editor of Powder Keg Magazine (2014-2019) and currently edits the small poetry press After Hours Editions. She lives in upstate New York and works as a book publicist with Broadside PR. Book Recommendations: Niina Pollari Paths of Totality Song Cave Press, Emily Skillings, Tantrums in Air Michael Earl Craig, Thin Kimono Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
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    50 min
  • Avrom Sutzkever: Ten Poems
    Apr 10 2026
    In 2017, a cache of Jewish materials was discovered in the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania. The discovery included a manuscript of “Tsen Lider” (“Ten Poems”), a collection written and compiled by Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever while living in the Vilna Ghetto. This unique manuscript includes variants of later published poems and preserves Sutzkever's original spelling and punctuation. Sutzkever's manuscript, along with the other materials found in 2017, are being digitized as part of the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections Project. Join YIVO to celebrate the publication of Tsen Lider. Ten poems. Dešimt eilėraščių prepared by the National Library of Lithuania in collaboration with YIVO. This new publication offers facsimile images of the original manuscript, translations into English and Lithuanian, and essays on Sutzkever and his work by Mindaugas Kvietkauskas and David Fishman, with a forward by Lara Lempertienė. The event will feature a discussion panel on Sutzkever's work with Lithuanian Minister of Culture Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, Lara Lempertienė, head of the Judaica Department at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania, and literary and cultural historian Justin Cammy, moderated by YIVO's Executive Director and CEO Jonathan Brent and with welcoming remarks by Prof. Dr. Renaldas Gudauskas, Director General of the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania. This panel discussion was originally held on November 23, 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
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    1 ora e 15 min
  • Jennifer Wong, "Light Year" (Nine Arches Press, 2025)
    Apr 5 2026
    And in the room we could hear the ocean waves, breaking against the history of ourselves. So concludes the first poem in Light Year (Nine Arches Press, 2025) by Jennifer Wong. This book is a meditation on time. These poems delve into the mind of a poet crossing spaces of deep wounds, love and healing: a constellation of friendships and love as she moves through upheaval, transformation and change. The collection offers glimpses into the journeys of a migrant, a daughter, and a mother; with the passage of years, the poems ask what it might mean to move like light itself, beyond expectations and into new ways of understanding ourselves more profoundly. With sublime precision, Jennifer Wong’s poetry brings clarity to the spaces between the stars – the time difference between memories and place, between our loved ones, and everything we hold dear in life. Jennifer Wong is a Hong Kong-born poet who lives in the UK. She has three collections including Letters Home (Nine Arches Press). Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
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    1 ora
  • Sarah Howe, "Foretokens" (Random House, 2025)
    Mar 27 2026
    'Unearthed in a clear-out, a picture calendar she’s kept– hoarding, I’ve learnt, is a mark of the emigrant –across continents and time.'So begins Sarah Howe’s extraordinary new collection, Foretokens, returning to the riddle of belonging she explored in her award-winning debut, Loop of Jade. At the heart is her own mother’s clouded past: abandoned as a baby and taken in, at the turbulent dawn of Communist China, by a woman with her own hidden motives. Now a mother herself, Howe finds herself re-examining this unreliable narrative with fresh sight. Sifting through her own history, the poet asks, how can a new generation transform a shattered inheritance? And what is lost and gained in the pursuit?‘From the other side of ruin / we found safe passage’, Howe writes in these spectacular poems of emotional heft and quickening wit, their voice salvaged from the fragments of a former self. Foretokens is a monumental work of survival and creation, turning over what is left behind as it strikes out towards astonishing new vistas. Sarah Howe is a British poet, academic and editor. She is currently the Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus and an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Liverpool. Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
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    1 ora e 3 min
  • Crystal Simone Smith, "Common Sense (1776), Addressed to Today's Citizen's of America: An Erasure" (Beacon, 2026)
    Mar 25 2026
    This powerful work by award-winning poet Crystal Simone Smith exposes the uncomfortable truth about America’s founding text: while Common Sense is celebrated as a cornerstone of American democracy, Thomas Paine’s arguments for “total freedom and equality” were written exclusively for white men—completely excluding women and people of color from his vision of liberation.Through a clear-eyed point of view and innovative erasure poetry, Smith transforms this foundational document into Common Sense (1776): Addressed to Today's Citizen's of America (Beacon, 2026). The text is a mirror reflecting both our nation’s incomplete promises and today’s ongoing struggle for true equality, and reveals new meanings that speak to the experiences of ALL Americans—those who were silenced in 1776 and those still fighting for recognition today, just as America approaches its 250th anniversary. You can find Crystal Simone Smith on her on her Wikipedia page, and at her website. Find host, Sullivan Summer, at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
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    54 min