The Rusty Paperweight: May '26

The View from Childhood, Nostalgia, Enjambment, and the Poetry of Place

May 21, 2026

A busy summer is underway at New Verse Review. In the past month, we’ve published reviews of new collections by Rachel Hadas, Baron Wormser, Matthew Buckley Smith, and J.D. Smith. We published Daniel Cowper’s essay “Why Don’t People Like Poetry? What Poetry Do They Like?” and Christian Lingner’s essay “To Tell It How It Is.” We continue to spread the good word about our recent translations special issue, edited by D.A. Cooper and Mary Grace Mangano.

On June 1, we open for poetry submissions to our summer issue. The call runs through the end of the month. We’re excited to read your work!

Sadly, because it is 2026, I feel compelled to stress your work. You may have heard about the AI controversy at Granta. I do not want to get into a big philosophical debate here, especially when there is so much good work to feature below. I’ll just say that NVR is all about artisanal poems crafted by human intelligence. We are not interested in work that is generated by AI or in collaboration with AI. As Emerson would say, “Trust thyself.” You do not need Claude.

Listen Up!

Flannery, Family, and the View from Childhood

Angela Alaimo O'Donnell joins Jonathan Rogers on The Habit Podcast to discuss her new collection The View From Childhood. NVR was honored to publish three poems in this collection, including the title poem, last summer. It’s a rich conversation about family and the child’s eye. O’Donnell and Rogers have both written about Flannery O’Connor, so she figures prominently in the conversation as well.

Time and Other Solvents

Claudia Gary reads from her new collection at the Fayetteville Public Library in Arkansas.

Sitting Around Rhina’s Table

On Poetry Space_, Katie Dozier and Timothy Green visit Rhina P. Espaillat’s kitchen table for a conversation about inspiration, form, dancing, and much else. Espaillat also reads from her new collection For Instance.

The Meter Makers (Parts One and Two)

In another can’t-miss two-part episode of Poetry Space_, Katie Dozier and Tim Green talk with Susan Spear about poetic meter. Spear’s joined by some of the other poets from her “meter makers” writing group: Brian O'Sullivan, Chelsea McClellan, and Christiana Doucette. They share some poems and discuss the intricacies of various meters and forms. The discussion of alliterative verse is particularly rich.

Debating Didactic Verse

Daniel Cowper joins Matthew Buckley Smith on Sleerickets to discuss his recent NVR essay “Why Don’t People Like Poetry? What Poetry Do They Like?” In that essay, Cowper claims that the “forced avoidance of didacticism, where didacticism is appropriate, is nearly as foolish [as forcing didacticism where it is inappropriate], as it can leave the poem on a smaller scale than its natural growth would determine.” Cowper and Smith have a cordial debate about this claim. It’s well worth a listen.

Kindred Spirit

Monongahela Books

BJ Omanson’s Monongahela Books publishes an interesting mix of poetry, military history, and regional studies. It has published collections by contemporary poets such as Jared Carter and Marc Harshman. It has also published a volume of poems (introduced by Dana Gioia ) and a critical study of American World War I poet John Allan Wyeth. There are some intriguing forthcoming studies of literary regionalism in the Midwest, including Robert Bray’s The Regionalist Tradition in Midwestern Poetry and Early Review of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. Omanson is a gifted poet in his own right. I especially admire his collection Stark County Poems.

Step Right Up!

First Things Poetry Prize

The third annual First Things poetry contest is now open for submissions. James Matthew Wilson is this year’s guest judge. This is the rare contest without an entry fee! Send your submissions by June 30.

Around the Poetry World

“On Nostalgia: Ever Cleaner, Ever More Pillowy”

Boris Dralyuk writes about nostalgia for Poetry Magazine.

I am a nostalgist. More susceptible to the pull of the past than many of those around me, I am also aware of my condition, even somewhat ashamed of it. This inner conflict—my attraction to the past, my effort to remind myself that the past is always a dream—has guided much of my work as a poet and translator. I suppose I could blame my personal history. Uprooted as a child from my native town of Odesa, Ukraine, thrust into an alien culture, I sought comfort in memories: of playing in the park with herds of cats and one terribly loyal stray dog as the sun set, while old men swapped inflated war stories over games of checkers and dominoes; of racing back from the water of the Black Sea to bite into incomparably flavorful tomatoes sprinkled with salt; of listening to my mother’s guests crack jokes in our warm, sweet-smelling kitchen. The memories grew ever cleaner, ever more pillowy in response to my needs.

Enjambment

A couple of months ago, I linked to Tamarah Rockwood’s excellent series on the rhetorical master tropes for Bainbridge Island Press. She’s now writing about the central terms of poetics. In this essay, she draws on Giorgio Agamben(!) to argue that enjambment, or at least the possibility of enjambment, is the defining feature of poetry.

When a student of poetry asks why the line break matters, this is the answer. The line break is the difference between prose and poetry. Enjambment is the act of moving across that difference. Every line a poet writes is a decision about whether to step across the threshold or to rest at it.

“Jesse Graves and the Cosmic Appalachian Boogie”

Andy Fogle of Salvation South interviews Jesse Graves about the Appalachian roots of his poetry.

Andy Fogle: Was hearing the people around you part of how you fell in love with language?
Jesse Graves: I loved hearing my older relatives talk, especially my great-aunt June and great-uncle Cotton, who both had such vivid ways of expressing themselves. I saw these folks often—we lived in a “visiting” culture, where family members would just drop by and spend an afternoon talking. June lived just down the road from our house, and whenever dark clouds moved in, she would say, “I better get on home, it’s fixing to come a hanktum,” meaning a bad storm was on the way. I’ve never found any usage of that word anywhere else, and it seems to have been part of an almost private language within the family—everyone said it, but there is no trace of that word anywhere else. The mysteriousness of language, the lyricism and lushness of it, all the things I couldn’t articulate as a kid, entranced me then just as it does now.

“‘A Small Rebellion Against the Machine’”

Seth Wieck is another great poet of place. He and Joel J Miller have a conversation about Wieck’s recent collection Call Out Coyote, memorizing poems, and West Texas.

Your poems are rooted in Texas scrubland. I think of embodiment, observation, memory, and reflection. How does landscape inspire and inform your work?
Some landscapes immediately inspire works of art. My native landscape doesn’t have many landmarks. We do have two minor rivers (Red and Canadian) and the second largest canyon in the United States. But to the newcomer, our main feature is an endless horizon which can make a person feel adrift on a sea of short grass.
If you grow up in the environment and see the landscape under its different lights and weathers, you see the slope and watershed because in the winter of ’98 it rained so much that the main road to your best friend’s house was blocked for six months. You see the near fifteen-year growth of the locust trees the city planted in the park because the drought of 2011 killed the elm trees which had survived the Dust Bowl.
Outside of town are the mesquite trees who know when to throw leaves because they can discern what no weather machines seem to know: when the last freeze has taken place. You know when to get inside as the light goes green and an odd blast of cold air arrives before the hail storm, and you stand by the window next to your dad and wordlessly watch a pretty good stand of wheat get leveled in five minutes.

“Old Fred’s Night Music”

I write about Fred Chappell and his final poems in Front Porch Republic.

To my mind, few writers have as compellingly ranged from the horrific to the graciously affirming as Chappell (or blended them, as he did in his excellent Kirkland family novels). It is an odd bird that might plausibly appeal both to fans of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror and of Wendell Berry’s communitarianism, to literary prize committees and readers of pulp fiction, to both atheists and believers. “Old Fred,” as he has often been called and called himself, flies free of any of these perches. His is a peculiar vision, but in the end it is so compelling, to me at least, because its mythic and fairy tale trappings, its nods to weird fiction and revered classics, are not escapist. Chappell defends the poetic imagination at its most fanciful, but he also helps us see that our world is strange in its just mysteriously being there, in how it is always revealing different facets of itself, terrifying and beautiful.