Episodes

  • Adam Bremer-McCollum, "The Pearlsong" (Harvard UP, 2025)

    Adam Bremer-McCollum, "The Pearlsong" (Harvard UP, 2025)
    Oct 10 2025
    The Pearlsong (Harvard University Press, 2025) offers the reader a beautifully translated story of a young child who goes on a journey to far away places, donning glistening garments, meeting dragons, and encountering talking letters. In addition to the translated text of The Pearlsong Syriac poem, the reader will find a thorough commentary and glossary. The appendices of the book offer further delights to explore: everything from a discussion of Syriac poetry and meter, to translations of the Acts of Thomas, to an assemblage of ancient sources about pearls. The expansive subjects, texts, and translations covered in the book will be a treasure to any reader. The Pearlsong is available as a free pdf on the Center for the Study of World Religions website. New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review. Dr. Adam Bremer-McCollum is Series Co-Editor of the Texts & Translations of Transcendence & Transformation (4T) Series and Research Associate at The Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. Lydia Bremer-McCollum teaches Religious Studies at Spelman College. 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 mins
  • Aisha Sasha John, "total: poems" (Random House, 2025)

    Aisha Sasha John, "total: poems" (Random House, 2025)
    Oct 9 2025
    In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Aisha Sasha John about her poetry collection, total: poems (McClelland & Stewart, 2025). "John is brilliant at communicating. She's also really funny. Poems don't get more direct and precise and unforgettable than this." —National Post The highly anticipated new collection from Griffin Poetry Prize finalist Aisha Sasha John. IS THERE A SYNONYM CLOSER TO COMPASSION THAN PATIENCE? A PERSON WHO LOVES BEAUTY MORE THAN THEY FEAR IT THE CLOSEST TO NOTHING YOU CAN DO FOR MONEY TO TOUCH TIME TO ITSELF About Aisha Sasha John: AISHA SASHA JOHN is the author of i have to live (2017), a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize; THOU (2014), a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the ReLit Poetry Award; and The Shining Material (2011). She choreographs and performs in the feminist collective WIVES as well as solo performances (The Aisha of Oz, VOLUNTEER). Aisha's video work and text art have been exhibited in galleries (Doris McCarthy, Oakville Galleries) and installed at Union Station in Toronto (Art Metropole). She was born in Montreal. 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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    27 mins
  • Taylor Byas, "Resting Bitch Face: Poems" (Catapult, 2025)

    Taylor Byas, "Resting Bitch Face: Poems" (Catapult, 2025)
    Oct 8 2025
    The author of the award-winning national bestseller I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times returns with a poetry collection that transforms the Black female speaker from object, artistic muse, and victim to subject, critic, and master of her story.Resting Bitch Face (Soft Skull Press, 2025) is a book for women, for Black women, for lovers of art and film criticism, and for writers interested in work that finds a middle ground between poetry and prose. Taylor Byas uses some of our most common ways of “watching” throughout history (painting, films, sculpture, and photographs) to explore how these mediums shape Black female subjectivity.From the examination of artwork by Picasso, Gauguin, Sally Mann, and Nan Goldin, Byas displays her mastery of the poetic form by engaging in intimate and inventive writing. Fluctuating between watcher and watched, the speaker of these poems uses mirrors and reflections to flip the script and talk back to histories of art, text, photography, relationships, and men. From Polaroids to gesso primer to sculpture, Byas creates a world in which the artist calls out and the muse responds. For not only does she enter the world of the long-revered classic artist, but she also infuses her poems with such iconic pop culture works as The Joker, WandaVision, and Last Tango in Paris. You can find Taylor on Instagram and Bluesky. Find host Sullivan Summer online, on Instagram, and over on Substack, where she and Taylor went to continue their conversation. 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 hr and 1 min
  • Farah Ghafoor, "Shadow Price: Poems" (House of Anansi, 2025)

    Farah Ghafoor, "Shadow Price: Poems" (House of Anansi, 2025)
    Oct 8 2025
    In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews Farah Ghafoor about her poetry collection, Shadow Price (House of Anansi, 2025), which was longlisted for the 2025 Toronto Book Awards. Borrowing its title from a finance term—“the estimated price of a good or service for which no market price exists”—Shadow Price is a stunning debut that examines the idea of value in a world that burns under our capitalist lens. What gives life value? How do we serve existing societal structures that determine its cost? Employing both surreal and documentary imagery, Farah Ghafoor's arresting collection articulates how narrative is used to revise the past and manipulate the future, ultimately forming our present-day climate crisis. Interrogating personal complicity, generational implications, and the shock of our collective disregard for a world that sustains every living thing, Shadow Price captures the complexities of living and writing as a young poet born in the year that “climate change denial” first appeared in print. Mourning the loss of Earth’s biodiversity, from insects to mammoths to trees, these introspective poems invite us to consider the risks and rewards of loving what may vanish in our lifetime. Shadow Price charges readers to contemplate their power and purpose in the world today, recognizing that there is hope even in the belly of the beast. About Farah Ghafoor: Based in Tkaranto (Toronto), Farah Ghafoor is the author of Shadow Price (House of Anansi, 2025). A finalist for the Toronto Book Awards, selections of Shadow Price won the E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize in Poetry, and were finalists for the CBC Poetry Prize and the Far Horizons Award. Her work appears in magazines such as The Walrus, The Offing, Brick Magazine, and The Fiddlehead, art exhibitions like Who's Afraid of Labour Justice ? and FACE/WASTE, as well as anthologies and post-secondary course curriculums. 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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    35 mins
  • Eibhear Walshe and Eleanor Fitzsimons, "Speranza: Poems by Jane Wilde" (Liverpool UP, 2025)

    Eibhear Walshe and Eleanor Fitzsimons, "Speranza: Poems by Jane Wilde" (Liverpool UP, 2025)
    Oct 1 2025
    Speranza: Poems by Jane Wilde (Liverpool UP, 2025) by Dr. Eibhear Walshe and Dr. Eleanor Fitzsimons is the first contemporary edition of the poetry of Jane Wilde, née Elgee, who also wrote as Speranza. Speranza was, in her time, renowned worldwide, with essays, poetry and translated work published in Ireland, England, America and beyond. She was a key figure in the nationalist Young Ireland movement of the 1840s, and her poetry records the hardship experienced by the Irish people - famine and migration in particular. She was also an early advocate for women’s rights, who campaigned for the admission of women to higher education. This edition, which contains several previously unpublished poems, will make the poetry of this emblematic figure in nineteenth-century Irish writing accessible to a contemporary audience for the first time. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 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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    38 mins
  • Tea Gerbeza, "How I Bend Into More" (Anstruther Books, 2025)

    Tea Gerbeza, "How I Bend Into More" (Anstruther Books, 2025)
    Sep 24 2025
    Based on Tea Gerbeza's experience with scoliosis, How I Bend Into More (Anstruther Books, 2025) re-articulates selfhood in the face of ableism and trauma. Meditating on pain, consent, and disability, this long poem builds a body both visually and linguistically, creating a multimodal space that forges Gerbeza's grammar of embodiment as an act of reclamation. Paper-quilled shapes represent the poet's body on the page; these shapes weave between lines of verse and with them the reclaimed disabled body is made. How I Bend Into More is a distinctive poetic debut that challenges ableist perceptions of normalcy, and centres "the double architecture / of ( metamorphosis (." 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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    39 mins
  • Aurora Levins Morales, "Silt: Prose Poems" (Palabrera Press, 2019)

    Aurora Levins Morales, "Silt: Prose Poems" (Palabrera Press, 2019)
    Sep 19 2025
    In the late 1890s a US congressman argued that the United States had the right to seize Cuba because he believed it was made of silt that had washed out of the mouth of the Mississippi River which made it literally US soil. That story inspired Puerto Rican Jewish poet Aurora Levins Morales to apply for a writing residency in New Orleans, and to travel the length of the river from Minnesota to the Gulf Coast, doing "poet research." In Silt: Prose Poems (Palabrera Press, 2019) she follows the pathways of water across the natural and social landscapes of the Mississippi River and the Caribbean Sea, tracing the real residues of their relationship, and turning that long story into a kind of prayer, for our waters, our planet and our lives.In this conversation, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, Joanna Cifredo de Fellman (יוחנה סיפרדו פלמן) and Aurora Levins Morales discuss Silt in the context of contemporary Puerto Rico. 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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    53 mins
  • Ashley M. Jones, "Lullaby for the Grieving" (Hub City Press, 2025)

    Ashley M. Jones, "Lullaby for the Grieving" (Hub City Press, 2025)
    Aug 22 2025
    With previous work hailed by the New York Times as “unflinching” and “piercing,” Ashley M. Jones’s Lullaby for the Grieving (Hub City Press, 2025) is her most personal collection to date. In it, Jones studies the multifaceted nature of grief: the personal grief of losing her father, and the political grief tied to Black Southern identity. How does one find a path through the deep sorrow of losing a parent? What wonders of Blackness must be suppressed to make way for “progress?” Journeying through landscapes of Alabama, the Middle Passage and Underground Railroad, interior spaces of loss and love, and her father’s garden, Jones constructs both an elegy for her father and a celebration of the sacred exuberance and audacity of life. Featuring poems from her tenure as Alabama’s first Black and youngest Poet Laureate, Lullaby for the Grieving finds calm in unimaginable storms and attempts to listen for the sounds of healing. Ashley M. Jones is the Poet Laureate of Alabama (2022-2026). She is the first person of color and youngest person in Alabama’s history to hold this position, which was created in 1930. You can find her online at Ashley M. Jones Poetry. You can find host, Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack, where she and Ashley discuss Ashley’s tenure as Poet Laureate. 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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    36 mins