NEW RELEASES
Aldo Amparán
"The beautiful strangeness of language and the sobering strangeness of life are braided into lyrical brilliance in Aldo Amparán’s second book. Here, what haunts the speaker and the language itself is so startling, so deftly stapled down, I often found myself spellbound. Here, queerness and borders are sites of refusals and consolations. These poems are undeniable and exquisite."
—Eduardo Corral, author of Guillotine
"'Men instilled in me /an empty. I’ve grown up/ without a body // of my own.' The traumas and vital reclamations of 'Self-Portrait of the Stolen Body' come midway in Amparán’s visceral second collection and its poems full of hauntings, of trauma reflected from the opening loose crown of sonnets filled with closets and candlelit rooms and wounded and severed bodies. ... Amparán depicts the brutalities of the world unmitigated by art."
—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Literary Hub
September 2026
ISBN: 9781967149001
Also Available via Bookshop.
Nick Martino
The 2024 Alice James Award Editor’s Choice
"Martino’s debut collection lounges on Lake Michigan beaches, looks out on Milwaukee’s skyline, and provides readers with myriad ways to enjoy these poems. ... Scrap Book asks what we inherit from our parents, what lies behind a broken relationship, and the meaning of conviction and the handcuff 'chaining us to memory.'"
—Abby McCabe, Booklist Starred Review
"Nick Martino's formally inventive debut poetry collection draws on his mother's journals and 1980s Polaroids to capture a family dynamic overshadowed by divorce and incarceration."
—Rebecca Foster, Shelf Awareness Starred Review
June 2026
ISBN: 9781949944792
Also Available on Bookshop.
Mihaela Moscaliuc
"Guggenheim fellow Moscaliuc presents lucid, lithe, and gripping poems about growing up in a Romania besieged by dictatorial tyrannies, intrusive and crushing....The need for secrecy, the valor of helping others, the malignancy of informers, and systemic corruption are all addressed with chilling matter-of-factness. Moscaliuc’s lyrical and sensuous palimpsest poems of her life in the U.S. evoke a world in sharp contrast even as the past is hauntingly present."
—Donna Seaman, Booklist
August 2026
ISBN: 9781949944808
Also Available via Bookshop.
Ina Cariño
"Ina Cariño's Reverse Requiem addresses the ghosts of history, which through language and tender attention, Cariño exhumes and brings to aliveness with sumptuous naming. Working against silence and power and deeply imbued with liberatory politics, the poems are an ode to self, lineage, and love. This work is a triumph."
—Cathy Linh Che, author of Becoming Ghost, Split, and An Asian American A to Z: A Children’s Guide to Our History
"In their second full-length collection, Whiting Award–winner Cariño bends time. Challenging the theory that entropy can only increase, these poems pull ancestors and ghosts known and hidden to the fore, evoking a shared timeline that bends in many directions ... A slim collection that feels much heftier than its page count, this is a luminous work."
—Sara Verstynen, ALA Booklist
April 2026
ISBN: 9781949944778
Also Available via Bookshop.
FORTHCOMING
Kelly Grace Thomas
"Future Tense is a thoughtful, beautiful meditation on the slow, aching, and sometimes miraculous state of intertwined grief—in a manner that is not only about sadness, but also, through its rich imagery and world-building, asks a reader to consider what they love, what they have, perhaps, taken for granted, and how to adjust the arc of their own universe."
—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There’s Always This Year
"Future Tense is memoir-in-verse gifting us ample permutations of longing. Kelly Grace Thomas charts the overlap (both temporal and metaphorical) of her mother’s death and trying for a child. True to the title, tension lights up this collection. In eclectic structures, whether careful tercets or sprawling fragments, Thomas ricochets between loss and desire until they blend. When it comes to the myriad expectations and stigmas placed on the infertile body, Thomas is willing to lay so much bare for us, unflinchingly charting desperation and the cost of wanting."
—Shira Erlichman, author of Odes to Lithium
October 2026
ISBN: 9781967149049
Also available on Bookshop.
Shara McCallum
"Shara McCallum’s Behold is the kind of book that first stunned me into the abiding love I have for language. At once mystical, political, and lyrical, these poems redraw the boundaries of what we might consider the limits of human insight. Poems like these remind us that, if there is ever to be a fully realized awakening in terms of our relationship to history, we need poetry."
—Tim Seibles, author of Voodoo Libretto: New & Selected Poems
“This skillful collection uncovers the intersection of art’s public and private dimensions.”
—Publishers Weekly
"[Behold] is a praise hymn to close attention, soulful contemplation, and, for the reader, a curated voyage of discovery."
—The Scotsman
September 2026
ISBN: 9781967149025
Also available on Bookshop.
Malena Mörling
“Malena Mörling has the gift of looking at ordinary things with such wonder it can feel like visionary hunger."
—Robert Hass
November 2026
ISBN: 9781967149063
Also available on Bookshop.
zakia henderson-brown
The 2025 Alice James Award Editor’s Choice
“zakia henderson-brown delivers a gorgeous debut, richly layered and refreshingly diverse in form and tone. These are poems to savor, to soak in, to wonder alongside. Lyrically poignant, sharply chiseled, and deeply felt; this collection is an incredible journey through cultural and familial histories and spaces, through grief and love and survival, through witness and reparation and remembrance.”
—Morgan Parker
January 2027
ISBN: 9781967149995
Also Available on Bookshop.
DeeSoul Carson
Finalist for the 2025 Alice James Award
Finalist for the 2025 A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize
“A work that pulses with grief, musicality, Black spirituality, and the tension between rage and resilience. Through powerful meditation on lineage, the body, spoken work, and spiritual contradiction, Carson crafts a book that does not shy away from the absurdities of daily survival in a world that demands Black people should shoulder grief without pause.”
—Tupelo Quarterly
“The poems of The Laughing Barrel testify and tease, weep and wink, dance on the edge of despair. DeeSoul Carson’s far-out forms reshape our everyday. Tony! Toni! Toné!, magnolia trees, and Granny watching Jeopardy! combat spam texts, spam ads, and spam speech. Every line possesses the kind of levity shared by laughter and prayer. Every poem is an invigorating invocation sent up and over to us. This is a remarkable debut by a truly original new poet.”
—Terrance Hayes
April 2027
ISBN: 9781967149155
Olatunde Osinaike
"Osinaike's sophomore poetry collection is loyal to the Westside of Chicago and to place as a poetic subject. The book insists readers leave and return—to journey a web of cross-modal Black artistry into which this book is woven. Osinaike, a poet committed to exactitude, casts his critical attention onto the dual states of seeing and being seen. Beyond its abstractions and atop its steady, quiet music, his poems explore love and creation through traditional received forms, and in forms this ambitious poet has forged himself."
—Maya Marshall, author of All the Blood Involved in Love
August 2027
ISBN: 9781967149162
Rosebud Ben-Oni
"Rosebud Ben-Oni makes quantum leaps in this second volume of her Discovery trilogy, galloping with Icelandic horses across post-apocalyptic realms of shimmering verse and the Multiverse. These poems show us how infinity resides within the bl∞dy hooves that mark the snow and in the trailing arc of fallen stars. Here is a surrealist poetry of proton and wishbone, of northern lights and stained glass shards, of blood and bloodline, and of dazzling, extraterrestrial possibilities."
—Deborah Paredez, author of Year of the Dog
June 2027
ISBN: 9781967149964
Jeffrey Thomson
"These rich, layered poems present us the world, and then surprise us with a world beyond that world. A simple journey by ferry to a dockside restaurant mirrors the journey of Orpheus; a runner in the 2013 Boston Marathon shadows his earliest Greek counterpart; the poet’s self-portrait reveals Charles Mingus playing the Sesame Street theme. Musical, sensual, deeply invested in the natural world, Rediscovered Beauty Room is a beauty for any reader to discover."
—Beth Ann Fennelly, author of The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs
May 2027
ISBN: 9781967149971
Matthew Olzmann
"Being human is the bleakest, saddest, most incomprehensibly infuriating endeavor I have ever participated in. And yet. So much laughter. So many delicious things to eat. So many friends who make life worth living. Why is Matthew Olzmann one of the only poets I know who actually allows all of this to be true. Everyone talks about Matthew Olzmann as one of our funniest poets. Higher praise to me is that he is our true Bard of Oblivion. And that honesty. That ethics and care to not insist that it gets better becomes the most revelatory thing: honesty, which becomes a gateway to hilarity, which becomes the physical manifestation of laughter and crying and marveling and telling one's friends about it. At the end of the world may I have poetry and friendship and love like Matthew Olzmann. This book should be seen as part of an oeuvre of unrelenting fury and grace. Let that be the end of the world I am part of. Olzmann is unmatched and welcomes every one of us."
—Gabrielle Calvocoressi, author of The New Economy
September 2027
ISBN: 9781949944006
J. Mae Barizo
Part of the Jean Valentine Series
"The magisterial journey of desire and grief in J. Mae Barizo’s Cloud Pantoums is stunningly laden with a scenographic music never since heard before. Such is the pitch of Barizo’s questing intellect that once again we are born aloft with the knowing that suffering and love instigate waves of a lyric exploration and human depth that often leave us breathless. I have such a profound regard for the deep intimacy that is Barizo's art. My heart yields to the sensuous thinking in these poems."
—Major Jackson, author of The Absurd Man
October 2027
ISBN: 9781949944839
Nicole Cooley
"Nicole Cooley is my soul sister in poetry - both of us obsessed by trash, where it came from, where it takes us, where the thoughts go when contemplating it. Her lovingly precise and brilliant poems exalt the topic to giant realities confronting us all. With full truthful heart, she wanders the streets, improving them. I want to follow her."
—Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Grace Notes: Poems about Families
November 2027
ISBN: 9781949944846
Kevin Goodan
"This is a book of gnawing; a poetry collection memory-quickened and harvest ready. And of the language; the words pour the reader into place, setting, being. Surrounded fully by sound and sight, one is submersed into these captured moments. A beautiful read."
—J.F. Merifield, author of only half-breathed air
January 2028
ISBN: 9781967149179
FEATURED TITLES
Franny Choi
A Book Riot Top Queer Poetry Collections to Read During National Poetry Month
Paris Review Staff Pick
A Book Riot Must-Read Poetry Collection
Recommended by Buzzfeed News
A Rumpus Book Club Pick
One of Nylon’s Best Books to Read in 2019
One of Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2019
". . . Choi creates an exhilarating matrix of poetry, science, and technology."
—Publishers Weekly
April 2019
ISBN: 9781938584992
Katie Marya
The 2020 Alice James Award Editor’s Choice
Longlisted for the 2022 Julie Suk Award
Featured in Poets & Writers Magazine's “Page One”
Recommended by The New York Times
“Marya's debut lands in the gorgeous, messy place where the sacred and profane overlap. Sugar Work has a compelling narrative bent and generous eyes, stunning in its southern reality and recognition of suffering and work. Marya is a psychologically astute poet, a bright new talent in touch with her own humanity and that of others—allowing strippers dignity on stage, and looking upon addicts and her own young self with nuance and compassion.”
—Megan Mayhew Bergman
June 2022
ISBN: 9781948579261
Sumita Chakraborty
Winner of the 2022 GLCA New Writers Award
A finalist in the 2020 Foreword INDIES Awards
A finalist in the 2020 Julie Suk Award
"Chakraborty writes poems that are full of life and joy even when she is thinking through violence and grief, but in their sweep, they defy easy notions of aboutness."
—Elisa Gabbert for The New York Times
A Bookmarks Most-Anticipated Poetry Collection for Fall/Winter 2020
September 2020
ISBN: 9781948579117
Jean Valentine
Recommended by Publishers Weekly,LitHub, and Library Journal
"A new retrospective of her work, Light Me Down, out this week from Maine-based press Alice James Books, showcases Valentine’s ability to charge between the dreamy and unalloyed precision. ... These are poems of snow, of the quiet, profound transformation, of moments of altering nothingness in the night. Valentine, who died in 2020, does with language what poetry is meant to do with language, which is to go beyond it."
—Nina MacLaughlin, The Boston Globe
April 2024
ISBN: 9781949944594
Cole Swensen
Part of the Jean Valentine Series
"Swensen's insightfully idiosyncratic prose lyrics connect readers to their surroundings in new and surprising ways, reintroducing things and investing them with a prescient awareness and intelligence."
—Library Journal Starred Review
May 2026
ISBN: 9781949944785
Also Available via Bookshop.
Kelly Grace Thomas
"Future Tense is a thoughtful, beautiful meditation on the slow, aching, and sometimes miraculous state of intertwined grief—in a manner that is not only about sadness, but also, through its rich imagery and world-building, asks a reader to consider what they love, what they have, perhaps, taken for granted, and how to adjust the arc of their own universe."
—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There’s Always This Year
"Future Tense is memoir-in-verse gifting us ample permutations of longing. Kelly Grace Thomas charts the overlap (both temporal and metaphorical) of her mother’s death and trying for a child. True to the title, tension lights up this collection. In eclectic structures, whether careful tercets or sprawling fragments, Thomas ricochets between loss and desire until they blend. When it comes to the myriad expectations and stigmas placed on the infertile body, Thomas is willing to lay so much bare for us, unflinchingly charting desperation and the cost of wanting."
—Shira Erlichman, author of Odes to Lithium
October 2026
ISBN: 9781967149049
Also available on Bookshop.
Aldo Amparán
"The beautiful strangeness of language and the sobering strangeness of life are braided into lyrical brilliance in Aldo Amparán’s second book. Here, what haunts the speaker and the language itself is so startling, so deftly stapled down, I often found myself spellbound. Here, queerness and borders are sites of refusals and consolations. These poems are undeniable and exquisite."
—Eduardo Corral, author of Guillotine
"'Men instilled in me /an empty. I’ve grown up/ without a body // of my own.' The traumas and vital reclamations of 'Self-Portrait of the Stolen Body' come midway in Amparán’s visceral second collection and its poems full of hauntings, of trauma reflected from the opening loose crown of sonnets filled with closets and candlelit rooms and wounded and severed bodies. ... Amparán depicts the brutalities of the world unmitigated by art."
—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Literary Hub
September 2026
ISBN: 9781967149001
Also Available via Bookshop.
Shara McCallum
"Shara McCallum’s Behold is the kind of book that first stunned me into the abiding love I have for language. At once mystical, political, and lyrical, these poems redraw the boundaries of what we might consider the limits of human insight. Poems like these remind us that, if there is ever to be a fully realized awakening in terms of our relationship to history, we need poetry."
—Tim Seibles, author of Voodoo Libretto: New & Selected Poems
“This skillful collection uncovers the intersection of art’s public and private dimensions.”
—Publishers Weekly
"[Behold] is a praise hymn to close attention, soulful contemplation, and, for the reader, a curated voyage of discovery."
—The Scotsman
September 2026
ISBN: 9781967149025
Also available on Bookshop.
Nick Martino
The 2024 Alice James Award Editor’s Choice
"Martino’s debut collection lounges on Lake Michigan beaches, looks out on Milwaukee’s skyline, and provides readers with myriad ways to enjoy these poems. ... Scrap Book asks what we inherit from our parents, what lies behind a broken relationship, and the meaning of conviction and the handcuff 'chaining us to memory.'"
—Abby McCabe, Booklist Starred Review
"Nick Martino's formally inventive debut poetry collection draws on his mother's journals and 1980s Polaroids to capture a family dynamic overshadowed by divorce and incarceration."
—Rebecca Foster, Shelf Awareness Starred Review
June 2026
ISBN: 9781949944792
Also Available on Bookshop.
Mihaela Moscaliuc
"Guggenheim fellow Moscaliuc presents lucid, lithe, and gripping poems about growing up in a Romania besieged by dictatorial tyrannies, intrusive and crushing....The need for secrecy, the valor of helping others, the malignancy of informers, and systemic corruption are all addressed with chilling matter-of-factness. Moscaliuc’s lyrical and sensuous palimpsest poems of her life in the U.S. evoke a world in sharp contrast even as the past is hauntingly present."
—Donna Seaman, Booklist
August 2026
ISBN: 9781949944808
Also Available via Bookshop.
Malena Mörling
“Malena Mörling has the gift of looking at ordinary things with such wonder it can feel like visionary hunger."
—Robert Hass
November 2026
ISBN: 9781967149063
Also available on Bookshop.
zakia henderson-brown
The 2025 Alice James Award Editor’s Choice
“zakia henderson-brown delivers a gorgeous debut, richly layered and refreshingly diverse in form and tone. These are poems to savor, to soak in, to wonder alongside. Lyrically poignant, sharply chiseled, and deeply felt; this collection is an incredible journey through cultural and familial histories and spaces, through grief and love and survival, through witness and reparation and remembrance.”
—Morgan Parker
January 2027
ISBN: 9781967149995
Also Available on Bookshop.
DeeSoul Carson
Finalist for the 2025 Alice James Award
Finalist for the 2025 A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize
“A work that pulses with grief, musicality, Black spirituality, and the tension between rage and resilience. Through powerful meditation on lineage, the body, spoken work, and spiritual contradiction, Carson crafts a book that does not shy away from the absurdities of daily survival in a world that demands Black people should shoulder grief without pause.”
—Tupelo Quarterly
“The poems of The Laughing Barrel testify and tease, weep and wink, dance on the edge of despair. DeeSoul Carson’s far-out forms reshape our everyday. Tony! Toni! Toné!, magnolia trees, and Granny watching Jeopardy! combat spam texts, spam ads, and spam speech. Every line possesses the kind of levity shared by laughter and prayer. Every poem is an invigorating invocation sent up and over to us. This is a remarkable debut by a truly original new poet.”
—Terrance Hayes
April 2027
ISBN: 9781967149155
Ina Cariño
"Ina Cariño's Reverse Requiem addresses the ghosts of history, which through language and tender attention, Cariño exhumes and brings to aliveness with sumptuous naming. Working against silence and power and deeply imbued with liberatory politics, the poems are an ode to self, lineage, and love. This work is a triumph."
—Cathy Linh Che, author of Becoming Ghost, Split, and An Asian American A to Z: A Children’s Guide to Our History
"In their second full-length collection, Whiting Award–winner Cariño bends time. Challenging the theory that entropy can only increase, these poems pull ancestors and ghosts known and hidden to the fore, evoking a shared timeline that bends in many directions ... A slim collection that feels much heftier than its page count, this is a luminous work."
—Sara Verstynen, ALA Booklist
April 2026
ISBN: 9781949944778
Also Available via Bookshop.
Olatunde Osinaike
"Osinaike's sophomore poetry collection is loyal to the Westside of Chicago and to place as a poetic subject. The book insists readers leave and return—to journey a web of cross-modal Black artistry into which this book is woven. Osinaike, a poet committed to exactitude, casts his critical attention onto the dual states of seeing and being seen. Beyond its abstractions and atop its steady, quiet music, his poems explore love and creation through traditional received forms, and in forms this ambitious poet has forged himself."
—Maya Marshall, author of All the Blood Involved in Love
August 2027
ISBN: 9781967149162
Rosebud Ben-Oni
"Rosebud Ben-Oni makes quantum leaps in this second volume of her Discovery trilogy, galloping with Icelandic horses across post-apocalyptic realms of shimmering verse and the Multiverse. These poems show us how infinity resides within the bl∞dy hooves that mark the snow and in the trailing arc of fallen stars. Here is a surrealist poetry of proton and wishbone, of northern lights and stained glass shards, of blood and bloodline, and of dazzling, extraterrestrial possibilities."
—Deborah Paredez, author of Year of the Dog
June 2027
ISBN: 9781967149964
Jeffrey Thomson
"These rich, layered poems present us the world, and then surprise us with a world beyond that world. A simple journey by ferry to a dockside restaurant mirrors the journey of Orpheus; a runner in the 2013 Boston Marathon shadows his earliest Greek counterpart; the poet’s self-portrait reveals Charles Mingus playing the Sesame Street theme. Musical, sensual, deeply invested in the natural world, Rediscovered Beauty Room is a beauty for any reader to discover."
—Beth Ann Fennelly, author of The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs
May 2027
ISBN: 9781967149971
Matthew Olzmann
"Being human is the bleakest, saddest, most incomprehensibly infuriating endeavor I have ever participated in. And yet. So much laughter. So many delicious things to eat. So many friends who make life worth living. Why is Matthew Olzmann one of the only poets I know who actually allows all of this to be true. Everyone talks about Matthew Olzmann as one of our funniest poets. Higher praise to me is that he is our true Bard of Oblivion. And that honesty. That ethics and care to not insist that it gets better becomes the most revelatory thing: honesty, which becomes a gateway to hilarity, which becomes the physical manifestation of laughter and crying and marveling and telling one's friends about it. At the end of the world may I have poetry and friendship and love like Matthew Olzmann. This book should be seen as part of an oeuvre of unrelenting fury and grace. Let that be the end of the world I am part of. Olzmann is unmatched and welcomes every one of us."
—Gabrielle Calvocoressi, author of The New Economy
September 2027
ISBN: 9781949944006
J. Mae Barizo
Part of the Jean Valentine Series
"The magisterial journey of desire and grief in J. Mae Barizo’s Cloud Pantoums is stunningly laden with a scenographic music never since heard before. Such is the pitch of Barizo’s questing intellect that once again we are born aloft with the knowing that suffering and love instigate waves of a lyric exploration and human depth that often leave us breathless. I have such a profound regard for the deep intimacy that is Barizo's art. My heart yields to the sensuous thinking in these poems."
—Major Jackson, author of The Absurd Man
October 2027
ISBN: 9781949944839
Nicole Cooley
"Nicole Cooley is my soul sister in poetry - both of us obsessed by trash, where it came from, where it takes us, where the thoughts go when contemplating it. Her lovingly precise and brilliant poems exalt the topic to giant realities confronting us all. With full truthful heart, she wanders the streets, improving them. I want to follow her."
—Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Grace Notes: Poems about Families
November 2027
ISBN: 9781949944846
Kevin Goodan
"This is a book of gnawing; a poetry collection memory-quickened and harvest ready. And of the language; the words pour the reader into place, setting, being. Surrounded fully by sound and sight, one is submersed into these captured moments. A beautiful read."
—J.F. Merifield, author of only half-breathed air
January 2028
ISBN: 9781967149179
MERCHANDISE
Show off some small press pride with this super soft, 100% cotton AJB t-shirt! Limited quantities available.
100% Cotton T-shirt
Color: Black with White Logo
Stay hydrated in style this summer with this 17 oz. copper vacuum-insulated, double-walled AJB water bottle! Limited quantities available.
Color: Rose Gold with White Logo
Cole Swensen
Part of the Jean Valentine Series
"Swensen's insightfully idiosyncratic prose lyrics connect readers to their surroundings in new and surprising ways, reintroducing things and investing them with a prescient awareness and intelligence."
—Library Journal Starred Review
May 2026
ISBN: 9781949944785
Also Available via Bookshop.