Alice James Books Welcomes Back Andrés Cerpa & Ina Cariño
Alice James Books is thrilled to announce new titles forthcoming from Andrés Cerpa & Ina Cariño!
Andrés Cerpa’s The Palace is forthcoming from Alice James in January 2026. Andrés is the author of two books of poetry, Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy (2019) and The Vault (2021), which was longlisted for a National Book Award and celebrated as one of the best poetry books of 2021 by The New York Times. A recipient of a McDowell fellowship, his writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The Rumpus, + elsewhere.
More by Andrés Cerpa:
Andrés Cerpa
Longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award in Poetry
A Rumpus Poetry Book Club Selection for May 2021
“A teacher once told me that a poem should be like a spider web — if you touch any part, the rest of it will tremble. This whole book feels like that”
—Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times
June 2021
ISBN: 9781948579186
Andrés Cerpa
Featured by Poets & Writers’ “Page One”
“[The Palace] tells the story of a family’s journey through real and imagined landscapes in poems that engage with violent histories, addiction, the natural world, survival, and hope.”
—Publishers Weekly
"Following the critical acclaim of Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy and his National Book Award-longlisted collection, The Vault, Cerpa returns with his most ambitious work yet: The Palace."
—Sabrina Iraggi, Bookstr
January 2026
ISBN: 9781949944877
Ina Cariño’s Reverse Requiem will be published in April 2026. Ina is a 2022 Whiting Award winner for poetry. Their work appears in the American Poetry Review, the Margins, Guernica, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Magazine, the Paris Review Daily, Waxwing, New England Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman fellow and is the winner of the 2021 Alice James Award for Feast, published by Alice James Books in March 2023. In 2019, Ina founded a poetry reading series called Indigena Collective, a platform that aims to center marginalized creatives in the NC community and beyond.
More by Ina Cariño:
Ina Cariño
Featured in Poets & Writers Magazine's “Page One”
Ina Cariño is a winner of a 2022 Whiting Award in Poetry
Winner of the 2021 Alice James Award
Recommended by Book Riot
"‘To be other is to read badly-/drawn maps,’ writes Ina Cariño, ‘to hum / with a revolutionary's love song.’ I love the vividness of these poems, the language of the senses that's so alive on each page of FEAST. But these poems aren't just beautiful, sensual lyrics. There is more at stake here. Cariño is a kind of poet who claims family and identity with style that's akin to spell-making. ‘I dream in a tongue not my own’ the poet says—and we see it instantly: Here, even a simple act of cooking rice can become a ceremony, a rhapsody of liberation. All of this is done not with literary pretension but with vulnerability and honesty. If Ina Cariño says ‘names are spells,’ it is because this poet aims to write actual spells, and not just with the pen, but with breath: ‘I am the last spell, the only song left. deliberate utterance of bone’. Here, we are in presence of something special, I think. Bravo.”
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa
March 2023
ISBN: 9781948579315
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.
FEATURED TITLES
Matthew Olzmann
A Rumpus Poetry Book Club Pick for November 2021
Longlisted for the 2022 Julie Suk Award
“Conceived as the assembled contents of a mail carrier’s pouch, the intimate and affecting third book by Olzmann (Contradictions in the Design) presents the poet as sender, receiver, and courier. … In language at once direct and artful, Olzmann memorably explores the question of how one might speak across the gulfs dividing humankind.”
—Publishers Weekly
January 2022
ISBN: 9781948579230
Ina Cariño
Featured in Poets & Writers Magazine's “Page One”
Ina Cariño is a winner of a 2022 Whiting Award in Poetry
Winner of the 2021 Alice James Award
Recommended by Book Riot
"‘To be other is to read badly-/drawn maps,’ writes Ina Cariño, ‘to hum / with a revolutionary's love song.’ I love the vividness of these poems, the language of the senses that's so alive on each page of FEAST. But these poems aren't just beautiful, sensual lyrics. There is more at stake here. Cariño is a kind of poet who claims family and identity with style that's akin to spell-making. ‘I dream in a tongue not my own’ the poet says—and we see it instantly: Here, even a simple act of cooking rice can become a ceremony, a rhapsody of liberation. All of this is done not with literary pretension but with vulnerability and honesty. If Ina Cariño says ‘names are spells,’ it is because this poet aims to write actual spells, and not just with the pen, but with breath: ‘I am the last spell, the only song left. deliberate utterance of bone’. Here, we are in presence of something special, I think. Bravo.”
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa
March 2023
ISBN: 9781948579315
Candace Williams
Finalist: The 2024 Housatonic Book Award for Poetry
Winner of a Silver Nautilus Book Award
Recommended by Vogue
Over the course of these poems, the Black, queer protagonist begins to erase violent structures and fill the white spaces with her hard-won wisdom and love. I Am the Most Dangerous Thing doesn't just use poetry to comment on life and history. The book is a comment on writing itself. What have words done? When does writing become a form of disengagement, or worse, violence? The book is an exercise in paring the state down to its true logic of violence and imagining what can happen next. There are many contradictions—Although the protagonist teaches the same science that was used to justify enslavement and a racial caste system, she knows she will die at the hands of science and denies the state the last word by penning her own death certificate. As an educator and knowledge worker, she is an overseer of the same racist, misogynistic, and homophobic systems that terrorize her. Yet, she musters the courage to kill Kurtz, a primordial vision of white terror. She is Black and queer and fat and angry and chill and witty and joyful and depressed and lovely and flawed and an (im)perfect dagger to the heart of white supremacist capitalism.
May 2023
ISBN: 9781949944525
Duy Đoàn
"Spare, haunting, and wry, Zombie Vomit Mad Libs does not fuck around. These poems exist on the razor-thin edge that divide the states of waking and sleep, of being high and sober, of living and not living: 'the breath / you take as you cross over into sleep.' This is a brilliant mind at work, culling the expanse of human creation—from Shakespeare to Pokémon to the iPhone—to wrestle with deadly serious themes of suicide, imperialism, love, and loss. Tightly crafted gems that flirt, rage, and sing in multiple dictions and registers, Doan's poems will leave you devastated, changed."
—Tamiko Beyer, author of Last Days
November 2024
ISBN: 9781949944686
Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
Recommended by the Poetry Foundation
Shortlisted with Distinction - The 2024 TFR Reader’s Choice Awards
A Finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry
A Finalist for the 2025 Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature
A Finalist for the 2026 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
"The potent and focused fourth collection from Espinoza (There Should Be Flowers) captures the danger, mental strain, and transcendence of a trans woman’s experience. ... At times devastating, at times chilling, this volume expresses an exhilarating defiance."
—Publishers Weekly
August 2024
ISBN: 9781949944631
Joan Larkin
Longlisted for the 2024 Julie Suk Award
"The observant sixth collection from Larkin (Blue Hanuman) offers an extensive miscellany while continuing the poet's career-long interest in the body. ... Amid losses, restitutions, sudden joys, and unknowns, this volume sustains an appealing verve."
—Publishers Weekly
August 2024
ISBN: 9781949944648
Alicia Ostriker
"Ostriker confronts the intricate dance between spiritual despair and revelatory beauty in her ethereal 17th collection. ... [The Holy & Broken Bliss] resonates long after the final page, reminding readers that even in a fractured, plague-stricken world, there is still a living, breathing force within all things."
—Publishers Weekly
October 2024
ISBN: 9781949944679
Also Available on Bookshop.
Mia Ayumi Malhotra
"In her new collection, Mothersalt, Mia Ayumi Malhotra writes about motherhood with wit, heart, and bracing candor.”
—Ron Charles, Washington Post Book Club
"Mothersalt insists on telling the story of the mother’s labor in the birth story, on the story of the mother who creates herself, despite every imposed impossibility. How exciting to see another fantastic poetry collection about early motherhood."
—Katherine Indermaur, The Colorado Review
May 2025
ISBN: 9781949944723
Ally Ang
A 2026 Barbara Gittings Literature Award Honor Title
A Finalist for the 2026 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
"The emotions in Ang’s poems jumped from the line and into my soul. They explore queerness without filter or apology. The poems are radiant."
—Debutiful
“Ang's debut volume of poems is a tour de force of passion, longing, and loneliness … An important new poet to watch and read.”
—Library Journal
“Ally Ang is a poet who refuses the deadening distances of capital, borders, and patriarchy, embracing instead the richest, queerest intimacies of uncouth body, kinky breath, and collective revolt. These gorgeous, daring poems say: Let your eyebrows be as close as they want. Become the swine feral with love, the mango ungovernable with sweetness that this heartbreaking world needs. Welcome the moon’s song in your belly, where it has always truly belonged.”
—Chen Chen
November 2025
ISBN: 9781949944884
Also Available on Bookshop.
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
Leigh Sugar
"The prison is not a metaphor, except when it is; the metaphor is not a prison, except when it locks you in—and the fact that these two statements can exist side-by-side, trembling with heat and contradiction, tells you everything you need to know about Leigh Sugar’s FREELAND, a book so formally clean and so emotionally feral that it feels, by the end, like pacing the perimeter of a visitation room."
—Rishi Janakiraman, Sontag Mag
June 2025
ISBN: 9781949944730
Esther Lin
Winner of the 2026 Norma Farber First Book Award
Winner of the 2023 Alice James Award
Longlisted for the 2026 PEN Open Book Award
Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry
Longlisted for the 2025 Maya Angelou Book Award for Poetry
Recipient of a 2026 Asian Pacific American Awards Poetry Honor
Lin debuts with an impressive collection that tells the story of an undocumented daughter of parents who flee Communist China and become fundamentalist Christians in America. ... These stunning poems breathe new life into the confessional form."
—Publishers Weekly Starred Review
March 2025
ISBN: 9781949944709
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.
Mary Helen Callier
The 2023 Alice James Award Editor’s Choice
"Mary Helen Callier’s debut poetry collection, When the Horses, is a masterful foray into a girlhood and self shaped by the unruly landscape of the American South. ... Altogether, the collection reads as a tour of a haunted home, each room enclosed with a secret and a memory."
—Brandi Martin, October Hill Magazine
"Callier’s movement through ['The Battle of San Romano'] has a quality of leaping, giving chase, like our movement through her eyes around the painting. The insistence on a background detail as central makes the poem feel asymmetrical—teetering, unstable, an egg on a marble table. But she also seems to be saying: this is my Uccello, making no strong claim, as Auden might, to what the painting is 'about' for anyone else."
—Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times
"... Gorgeous, intelligent, enigmatic, humanly nuanced poems."
—Loisa Fenichell
April 2025
ISBN: 9781949944716
Also Available on Bookshop.
Michael M. Weinstein
Recommended by Debutiful
"In the space they take up, these poems offer a glimpse into the speaker’s deepest vulnerabilities. This debut reads like the hand of the past reaching into the present, ushering us forward like the lover pushing aside the crutch."
—Amanda Hawkins, Los Angeles Review of Books
August 2025
ISBN: 9781949944747
R. A. Villanueva
Winner of the 2024 Alice James Award
"Intellectually rigorous and emotionally piercing, Villanueva’s sophomore collection (after Reliquaria) threads Greek myth, Christian iconography, and family history into a frank exploration of mortality. ... The result is a dynamic book of witness, resistance, and radical hope."
—Publishers Weekly Starred Review
"[A Holy Dread] tackles difficult topics while interweaving Villanueva’s Filipino American upbringing throughout. … Villanueva is a gifted poet, and his new collection is sure to appeal to many readers."
—Sarah Michaelis, Library Journal
"Villanueva has the ability to transform language into images, ideas, and moments that stir my spirit and enkindle my mind. It is a remarkable thing, to watch as a writer gives you new vocabulary with which to move through the world—to describe things you have seen, or felt, or sensed but could never capture with your own tongue or pen. We are so lucky to have these poems."
—Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed and Above Ground
February 2026
ISBN: 9781949944860
Also Available on 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.
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.
Cecily Parks
Winner of the 2026 UNT Rilke Prize for Poetry
Winner of the Women Writing the West 2026 WILLA Literary Award in Poetry
A finalist for the 2026 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry
Recommended by Library Journal
"With The Seeds, her third book, Cecily Parks comes into her full powers. These poems are dark, lavish, far-reaching and subtly layered, making a harsh and rich mirror of the pastoral and the domestic...This book is a delight, a feast of grief and determined celebration."
—Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR
"Women and the natural world take center stage in these precise and visionary poems by Parks (O’Nights). The collection interrogates interiority, motherhood, and the choices of famous female figures ... Parks memorably evokes the textures and intricacies of life on earth."
—Publishers Weekly
October 2025
ISBN: 9781949944891
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.
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.
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
Judith Vollmer
"This collection offers much to think about and the language to revel in, an opening of soul, a true poet’s journey, one of artful surprise and subtle grace."
—Catherine Anderson, RHINO Reviews
"The poet shows how we wear our loneliness with care, even a beautiful resilience, until the day a soft hand of curious innocence touches us, leading us to put away the things that have made themselves our fears about love. The light fills the empty, tattered sketched in Vollmer's latest work. These are poems that bring the global nature of who we are into a time when fantasies of pure being flood into our spaces. Inspired by Cesare Pavese, Vollmer reminds us of the complex beauty of our souls, how love takes root in every detail of who we are, despite the real dangers of war and conflict. This is quintessential work by one of our finest poets."
—Afaa M. Weaver, author of A Fire in the Hills
March 2026
ISBN: 9781967149087
Also Available on 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
Matthew Nienow
Featured by Poets and Writers' "Page One"
“IF NOTHING, by Matthew Nienow. (Alice James Books, paperback, $24.95.) 'This world expects a man/to prove that he exists,' Nienow writes in his second collection, a meditation on masculinity that grapples with alcoholism, recovery and the deep yearning for forgiveness."
—New York Times Book Review
"Don’t start Matthew Nienow’s new collection, If Nothing unless you can finish it. These poems, just as captivating as they are devastating, begin in a dark place. With lines strafed with self-reproach, Nienow wrestles with addiction, suicidal depression, and the agony of wanting to be a better father. ... This is an arduous journey very much worth taking."
—Ron Charles, Washington Post Book Club
"Unflinching and tender, this volume affirms Nienow’s distinctive poetic gifts."
—Publisher's Weekly, Starred Review
January 2025
ISBN: 9781949944693
Ayokunle Falomo
Winner of the 2025 Maine Literary Award for Excellence in Publishing
Honor-Winner for the TIL 2025 Burdine C. Johnson Award for Best Book of Poetry
"...Falomo, a native Nigerian who resides in Houston, Texas, pulls apart the fabric of what it means to be both Nigerian and American, father and son, real and myth. ... Autobiomythography of is a proverbial multiversity of meeting, challenging and reconciling with one's self. Ayokunle Falomo uses brave and inventive form, coupled with fables and mythology, to chart a journey of finding love and joy for oneself. Ending with its own ode to joy, the book makes space to celebrate the failures, the hopes, the dreams, and the decisions that keep us up at night. It builds a bridge between culture, religion, and identity, proving 'memory is the greatest myth.’”
—Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, Muzzle Magazine
September 2024
ISBN: 9781949944655
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
Andrés Cerpa
A Book Riot Must-Read Poetry Collection
Recommended by Foundry Journal
"With fierce despair and wisdom hard won through pain...these experiences have sharpened Cerpa’s stunning, dark observations and sparked chilling lines.”
—Publishers Weekly
January 2019
ISBN: 9781938584978