Aaron Fagan Atom and Void: Poems Princeton University Press / 2025 / 55 pp / $17.95 Reviewed by Melissa Shepherd / May 2026 Aaron Fagan’s Atom and Void proves the paradox of freedom in constraint. Within the confines of their tidy boxes, the book’s fifty-five one-stanza sonnets range through existential ideas and loop together without section breaks in an ongoing interrogation of knowledge and perception. As its title suggests, opposing forces shape Atom and Void, Fagan’s f

Gabrielle Calvocoressi The New Economy Copper Canyon Press / 2025 / 125 pp / $22.00 Reviewed by Morrow Dowdle / April 2026 When Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s most recent poetry collection, The New Economy, was announced as a finalist for the seventy-sixth National Book Award, it came as no surprise to followers of Calvocoressi’s work, long-known for its meticulous attention to poetic craft, psychological complexity, and imaginative use of overtly fictional subjects. Readers

Renée Watson All the Blues in the Sky Bloomsbury Children’s Books / February 2025 / 182p / $17.99 Reviewed by Molly McNamara Carter / April 2026 “I didn’t know / best friends could die,” are the powerful opening words to Renée Watson’s 2026 Newbery Medal-winning middle-grade novel in verse, All the Blues in the Sky. From an emotional first-person perspective, Watson tells the story of a girl who has experienced an enormous loss in the death of her best friend, describing

Taylor Sheridan and Christian Wallace, creators Landman Paramount+ / 2024-present / TV-MA Reviewed by Don Michael Paul / April 2026 Landman tells you what it believes in the first few minutes. Since its Paramount+ debut on November 17, 2024, Texas natives Taylor Sheridan (Yellowstone, Hell or High Water) and Christian Wallace have doubled down on that worldview with zero interest in smoothing the edges. Men are men. Women are women. Oil is king. The Permian Basin, “The P

Erika J. Simpson This Is Your Mother: A Memoir Scribner / May 2025 / 213 pp / $27.99 Hardcover Reviewed by Josephine Greenfield / January 2026 “Imagine this is your mother, Sallie Carol. Daughter of sharecroppers. Middle of ten.” Thus begins Erika J. Simpson’s debut memoir, This Is Your Mother , which tells the story of the traumatic childhood Simpson and her sister endured as their mother battled illness, poverty, and a recurring cycle of evictions from increasingly ru

Andrea Barrett Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction W.W. Norton & Company /2025 /189 pp / $26.99 Hardcover Reviewed by Amanda A. Gibson / December 2025 A few years ago, I grew fascinated with a nineteenth-century photographer, Anna Atkins, who used a photographic process called cyanotype, which employs sunshine and chemicals to make ethereal blue images. Although Atkins was the first to publish photographs, she is all but lost to history, overshadowed by male photog