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1. Accidental Devotions by Kelli Russell Agodon (Copper Canyon Press, 2026)

This collection is a reckoning with life’s finity. It is also a journey of self-discovery through the many different roles a woman plays, from childhood playmate to lover to grieving friend. By combining the modern language of technology with the vast metaphor and inventive wordplay that readers of Agodon’s work know her for, the author makes a striking case for living in the moment, that living that moment to its fullest is the only thing she, and any of us, can really do. Agodon’s most memorable poems seem on the surface to argue that modernization can allow life to go on forever, but with a deeper read it becomes clear that this argument is ironic. For example, in the poem “After the Death of a Friend, I Feel Enlightened for Approximately Three Hours,” the speaker is faced with the reality of death and how her life also has limitations. She says “I can’t/ be everywhere at once except when I am/ online” and later has to accept that her friend is no longer with her when she says “I forgot faith somewhere in the parking lot/ when I let the memorial card slip out of the pages/ of my book, so I could stop remembering she was gone.” It is in the last poem of the collection that the meaning of its title truly becomes apparent. Despite having seen the convenience that our now uber-technological society offers us, in the poem “Necessary Prayer,” the speaker allows for the power of language to offer hope, if not healing, when she opens with these lines: “Language lingers in the grammar of/ treetops.” It is in her accidental devotions that she learns to fully appreciate life’s awesome, through temporary, glow.

2. All the Losses by Andrea Damic (Alien Buddha Press, 2026)

Just like grief is a complex set of emotions in response to loss, this collection is hard to categorize. Made of poems, flash fiction and nonfiction and artwork, as a whole, the collection tells the story of a woman remembering the loss of her innocence as a child when she lived through the 1990s Bosnian War, while at the same time experiencing the loss of her father. The first piece in the collection is nostalgic for the Sarajevo the speaker knew as a child: “I shall go back again/ across the mountains and dark blue seas/ to the place of my youthful innocence/ where it all began.” Even if grief is never fully resolved, the speaker is hoping that peace and acceptance are possible: “to the city where myriad faiths and beliefs are displayed./ I shall be gone to what I know and understand - one day/to make peace.”

The prose pieces in this collection have similarly crisp language and are just as resonant. “greys or no greys” is a particularly moving prose piece. Told in the second person, several of its sentences start with the word imagine, and this works to reveal the regret that often goes hand in hand with grief. The speaker reveals that she believes she was her father’s favorite child and now as an adult woman with greying hair, is able to recall memories of feeling loved as a child by her father, but because she did not know the last FaceTime call with her father would be the last time she would speak with her father, she regrets that she wasn’t able to make the conversation last longer. She begins the work of facing the deep loss of her father at the end of this piece: “tell yourself it was the hindmost of thoughts because if you knew it then, the phone call would have lasted longer and it wouldn’t have been so awkward; and maybe, just maybe you would have said something meaningful – greys or no greys.”

The artwork in this collection, with its sharp use of color and contrast, is a distinctive anchor for the striking images in the written works. “Dreaming” shows clouds juxtaposed with a black sky full of stars. This contrast highlights the collection as a whole presenting grief as a mosaic of emotions that is constantly moving in a world where love and memory never truly go away.

3. Monster Monolgues by Patricia Nelson (Fernwood Press, 2025)

Functioning as an instruction manual on the monsters and seers from classic mythology, this is also a collection of profound personal introspection on both the savagery and the beauty that make up humanity. The first section involves the retelling of stories of monsters, from minotaurs and centaurs to Medusa. Several of the poems in this section concern the horrific story of Jason and Medea, how they fell in love and then after Jason left Medea for another woman, she committed the ultimate act of betrayal by killing their children. In the poem “Medea Remembers” Medea recalls with clarity falling in love with Jason: “The horizon where I loved him/ was a blue and hot as daylight.” In the poem “Medea Revisits Memory” she acknowledges the brutal end of her and Jason’s love story: “We came to it by way of winds/ of murder and betrayal, weather/ that spoke to who were at heart.” The speaker of this poem realizes that memory changes as time goes by. By the end of this poem Medea has the maturity to understand that monstrosity is an unshakeable part of her humanity.

The second part of this collection involves the seers from mythology. Seers were mortals given the divine gift of insight. Perhaps the most famous of these was Cassandra, a Trojan princess who was given the gift of prophecy by the god Apollo, though she is also cursed by no one believing her. In the poem “Cassandra Unheard” the speaker tries to warn the Trojans of their impending defeat by the Greeks: “An image rises, walled and still./ My city’s towers glow:/ wicks already burning.” By the end of the poem she questions why her warnings must go unheard: “Why must I go among the unaware--/ all those lovely, heedless, unwarned things?”

The ending poems of this collection are about acceptance. Using dance as a symbol for acceptance of human fallibility and mortality in the poem “The Dancers,” the speaker ends with an acceptance of nature’s power over that of humanity with these exceptionally beautiful lines: “Come swim in the slow dissolution/ of mountains, they say, the tide of sky./ Come wear the eagle’s yellow, floating eye.”