The Word Works

05/22/2026

What a delight to receive fresh orders for Radha Marcum's PINE SOOT TENDON BONE, to be reminded of Cyrus Cassells' summary: "Marcum invites us to feel and sense more deeply our dynamic, contradictory world, insisting time and again on attentive poetry’s gorgeous music and crisp, accurate magic." And this poem! That calms, that reminds, that steadies the lucky reader.
(Available at online bookstores and at our website: https://bit.ly/3Rifu5S)

By Radha Marcum Pine Soot Tendon Bone (the traditional ingredients of Japanese Sumi-e inkstone) is a work of absorbing, unerring description that celebrates the natural world’s wonders and consolations, while nimbly acknowledging, in almost the same breath, the persistence of annihilating, at-larg...

05/21/2026

Register today! Adam Tavel's book launch for his dizzying kaleidoscopic examination of post-pandemic America, The GHOST-STAR KING! This book resurrects the tragic hero Oedipus, a figure from Greek antiquity, in a series of monologues that rage, plead, and pray for the empathy to confront power, alienation, and polarization in the digital age. Part poetry sequence, part stage drama, it rollicks through myth, politics, pop culture, neurodivergence, and the American Dream in its search for community and belonging.
Register here for this Zoom event through The Writer's Center:

The Writer’s Center welcomes poet Adam Tavel for a reading from his new collection, The Ghost-Star King. Adam is joined by Melissa Reddish for the reading and conversation. FREE & open to the public. RSVP below. Adam Tavel is the author of seven books of poetry and the recipient of the Richard Wil...

05/20/2026

We're savoring the release of *form a more perfect* by Marina Blitshteyn. Winner of the Tenth Gate Prize, Blitshteyn pushes the boundaries of what it means to belong, and has written, according to Elizabeth Clark Wessel, "an astonishing book, as sonically rich as it is intellectually rigorous. Its subjects range from migration, class, gender, and all types of Otherness to the minor tendernesses of life when you are young and in love in the city. Blitshteyn is dueling with language while dancing. Her wordplay rewires how we hear. She can take a familiar phrase and tweak it in a way that excavates its deep structures. She speaks to us like we are her beloved. She can be raw, witty, wry. Her work is visually arresting and formally voracious, her ear the best of her generation. I cannot wait for you to read this book."
(Available at your favorite online bookstore or at our website https://bit.ly/3R4abXz)

By Marina Blitshteyn Was it always like this? What was it like back then? Why do some sit in cafés while others live on the street? What’s the worst that can happen? These are questions to conjure with, and in asking them, among many others equally trenchant, the linguistically alert poems of for...

05/19/2026

Happy, happy pub day to Marina Blitshteyn's *form a more perfect*! Richard Hoffman, the judge of the Tenth Gate Prize who selected this book for publication, says this: "Was it always like this? What was it like back then? Why do some sit in cafés while others live on the street? What's the worst that can happen? These are questions to conjure with, and in asking them, among many others equally trenchant, the linguistically alert poems of form a more perfect conjure a vision of our common life that is emancipatory, clear, fresh, and exciting. Crossing borders of language, of class, of this or that expectation, Blitshteyn’s concentrated and incandescent poems are pleasurably unsettling, even liberating. Profane, vulgar, beautiful, and deeply nourishing—the poems in form a more perfect bear witness to the tragedy of our unravelling, yet somehow manage to dance while carrying that weight."
(Available at your favorite online bookseller or from our website at https://bit.ly/3R4abXz)

By Marina Blitshteyn Was it always like this? What was it like back then? Why do some sit in cafés while others live on the street? What’s the worst that can happen? These are questions to conjure with, and in asking them, among many others equally trenchant, the linguistically alert poems of for...

05/13/2026

Are you ready for Marina Blitshteyn's *form a more perfect*? E. C. Belli says that it “grapples with multilingualism, identity, and the way language tries until it fails and falls apart, while paradoxically offering itself up as a rare salve. In this vibrant universe haunted by Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, and English, where Moldova as well as Buffalo, New York, and America are key players, Seussian rhymes are distorted and 'ignorance is bills.'” RELEASE: May 19
https://bit.ly/3R4abXz

05/12/2026

Where will you be on Thursday night? A fantastic reading in DC at Lost City Books with Arden Levine and others! You won't want to miss it--

05/08/2026

Many, many thanks to all who entrusted us with their manuscripts in 2025! It was a slow process this year, but the final selections are ready to announce:

NEW MEMBERS OF THE WORD WORKS COMMUNITY:

Shira Dentz (NY), Maglo

Adam Gelling (TX), The Dusting of Small Houses

Nino Budabin McQuown (MD), Cruise Ship

T. Dallas Saylor (WV), The Dragon Year

Stephanie Strickland (NY), Truth Crisis

BELOVED RETURNING POETS:

Sarah Browning (PA), Call Me Yes

Anatoly Molotkov (OR), Love Letter

Huge congratulations to all, and we can't wait to get started, creating these exciting books!

05/02/2026

Visit our table at the Indie Lit Fair, where all the best books are happening! Recent titles, our NYC authors, and works in translation, all in support of PEN and CLMP, who do so much for the indie publishing world.

This year, the Indie Lit Fair takes place on Washington Square South, between Sullivan Street and Thompson Street. Free and open to the public, the Indie Lit Fair celebrates the vitality and diversity of independent literary publishing, showcasing new and established poetry presses, fiction and creative nonfiction publishers, and innovative literary magazines. Stop by to browse, buy, and bask in the breadth of the literary arts being published today.

Join us for the tenth annual Indie Lit Fair, co-presented by the PEN World Voices Festival and the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP). This year, the Indie Lit Fair will take place on Washington Square South, between Sullivan Street and Thompson Street. Free and open to the public, t...

05/01/2026

Join us in welcoming GHOST-STAR KING to the world! It's PUB DAY for Adam Tavel's brilliant, gorgeous, funny-and-dead-serious investigation of life as a man, a parent, an academic, of life as an American. And yet, of course, it's also about knowing that you're really Oedipus in disguise. Don't believe us? Well, you'll need your own copy for sure. D. Nurske calls this book "wildly original, traumatized, and funky. It's an act of exorcism, necessary and unforgettable...We all know we will understand contemporary America through tragedy, not through podcasts. Adam Tavel takes us on a Sophoclean vision quest into our frozen present."

By Adam Tavel Adam Tavel’s The Ghost-Star King is part apocalyptical landscape, part fantastical romp through classrooms and the ruined empires of capitalism. While each poem begins in mock-epic style announcing “I, Oedipus,” this book’s Oedipus is plural, playful, and elliptical. Tavel’s ...

05/01/2026

Orders are rolling in (appropriately, given that it’s now National Bike Month). Here’s just one of the poems, first appearing in Sixth Finch, that will speed you across the pages of Spoke. Elizabeth Gray shares our pride: “The voice in Spoke is a savvy speaker’s riff on what hard-won wisdom looks like: raw and well-read, astute and lacerated, compassionate and sardonic, with a keen edge of laugh-out-loud sophistication. Round and round, throughout, the bicycle is both ‘weapon and witness… bystander and accomplice in this story.’ Levine is fully in control of the language she has learned to wield against the common but wily forces that beset us all.” Available from your favorite online bookseller or at our website: https://bit.ly/41qr0xQ