Broadstone Books

01/01/2026

As we step into 2026, we want to begin with a heartfelt thank you: To our poets, readers, editors, reviewers, partners, and the entire Broadstone community. You made 2025 a truly meaningful year, and we’re deeply grateful for the creativity, care, and conversation you continue to bring to this press 💛

With a new year comes new voices 🖋️ Open reading has begun!

Broadstone Books is accepting poetry manuscripts — full-length & chapbook — now through January 31.

What we’re drawn to ✍️📖
• Poetry first — it’s our core mission
• Original language & striking imagery
• Formal or free verse
• Strong, cohesive collections (not just a stack of poems)
• Work we connect with and can help reach readers

Curious what resonates with us? Explore our titles, read through our FAQs, then submit here:
👉 https://www.broadstonebooks.com/submissions

12/29/2025

It’s our pleasure to recognize the following Broadstone poets nominated for consideration for a Pushcart Prize. We believe deeply in your voices and your work, and we’re honored to stand behind you. Wishing you every success!

12/15/2025

Our Broadstone community is nothing if not well received.

Washington Unbound just published a glowing review of J.D. Smith’s The Place That Is Coming to Us! Gregory Luce calls it “one of the most welcome new books by a DMV (D.C., Maryland, and Virginia metro) poet,” praising Smith’s mature, precise, and quietly intense voice.

From migration and memory to reflections on animals both common and extraordinary, this seventh poetry collection showcases a poet fully in command of his craft.

If you love poetry that lingers with you long after the page, it’s worth checking out when you get a chance.

Read the full review here:

In "The Place That Is Coming to Us," long-time DMV poet J.D. Smith writes about such topics as human migration, birds, and nature in a collection of quiet yet powerful poems.

12/14/2025

Just read a review on Triumph of the Now for The Exhaust of Dreams Adulterated by Jane Rosenberg LaForge. If you needed another reason to pick up a copy, here it is. Scott Manley Hadley says rarely do they read a poetry collection in a single go, but this one held them tight, even on a packed London train.

Full of autobiographical depth, generational history, and the quiet intensity of memory, Jane’s latest collection is being praised for its immediacy, humanity, and clarity.

Read the full review here:

a lovely collection of engaging autobiographical poetry

11/22/2025

Poets, mark your calendars 🖋️
Broadstone Books will be accepting submissions
January 1–31, 2026.
Full-length & chapbook poetry manuscripts welcome.
All voices. All backgrounds. All ethnicities, genders, and sexualities. All stories.
https://www.broadstonebooks.com/submissions-1
Questions?
☎️(502) 223-4415
📧[email protected]

11/08/2025

This nation is built of the labor of unhired hands – the hands of enslaved peoples – and David Mills yokes history and poetry to tell the stories of some of those hands. Through his compelling narrative and persona poems we are introduced to “Victoria Earle Matthews, Martha Peterson and Millie Tunnell, three African-American women who had been enslaved and who are buried in cemeteries in Queens, New York,” and in a fourth section he writes of “Massachusetts slavery… because, in 1641, Massachusetts was the first North American colony to legally enslave Africans.” By focusing on the history of slavery far from antebellum cotton fields, Mills instructs us on the pervasive endemic legacy of this institution. Writing of an 18th century Massachusetts colonist who beat his slave to death and went largely unpunished he asks, “How do the chasms in Christendom / answer for this offense?” It is a question yet awaiting an answer.

We are deeply honored to introduce Unhired Hands, poetry by David Mills.

Publication Date: November 30, 2025 Paperback, 82 pages ISBN: 978-1-966677-26-0 This nation is built of the labor of unhired hands – the hands of enslaved peoples – and David Mills yokes history and poetry to tell the stories of some of those hands. Through his compelling narrative and persona

11/07/2025

Michael Perret is a poet and translator from Austin, Texas. His books include Ennui Sonnets, The Chimera, The Decadent Book of Babylon, and his translation of Octavia, the Quadroon by Sidonie de La Houssaye.

Join us in celebrating his Broadstone debut: The Miracle on the Cross & Other Mythological Poems

Michael Perret’s poems are dense, painstaking, honest, sensuous and jagged. They are concerned with myths – Greek, Christian, Freudian – but never depart from the immanent. They are always about the body, and always in the moment of speaking. In their formal compression, their determination to get the colloquial and the ornate, one inside the other, they remind me of Allen Tate or Randall Jarrell, but they deploy the resources of this stylistic lineage against the conservatism that often has, but need not, animate it: instead they work to transmute their myths, to turn them not only towards transness, but towards resistance; and not only towards resistance, but towards difficult, costly joy.
—Cat Fitzpatrick, author of The Call-Out

Publication Date: November 15, 2025 Paperback, 76 pages ISBN: 978-1-966677-23-9 “And so, one day, I found myself wanting to write formal verse narratives that critically addressed traditional themes of Western art, molded and shaped as it is by patriarchal thinking and feeling. Folly? Well, the p

11/06/2025

Poet Speak celebrates Pamela Alexander and her thought provoking work:

Broadstone Books welcomes you to the third episode of our newest podcast, PoetSpeak. In this episode, join host Alison Palmer and cohost Samantha Ratcliffe a...

11/06/2025

Intriguing review of James Madigan’s Political Prisoners and Other Poems in Counter Punch. Check it out!

Poetry is not easy to compose, nor is it easy to write about. Like music, poetry requires a certain immersion into the composition one hears via their

11/05/2025

Kirkus describes Jane Rosenberg LaForge’s newest work as “A quietly devastating meditation on family, inheritance, and the limits of reinvention.” Join us in celebrating THE EXHAUST OF DREAMS ADULTERATED

LaForge’s poetry collection explores the gradual breakdown of her parents’ marriage alongside her own coming of age in smog-filled Southern California.

10/16/2025

I’ve Never Loved Somebody and Made Them Worse is a stunning debut, a fragmented and intimate record of relationships that blur the lines between romantic, platonic, physical, and intellectual connection. From grad seminar hallways, grocery store parking lots, borrowed bedrooms, to city sidewalks, Mia Nelson crafts a collection defined by vivid texture and tonal complexity. This is not a book about falling in or out of love. It is a study in emotional architecture, where want is a blueprint and memory the scaffolding. Nelson doesn’t seek resolution. She offers immersion. Conversations coexist with theory, flirtation breaks into philosophy, and tenderness turns on itself without warning: “I believe that the moon is the size of my thumb but also something else entirely.” Rich in voice and formal experimentation, I’ve Never Loved Somebody and Made Them Worse is a deeply felt, sharply rendered exploration of connection and its aftermath.

Publication Date: October 15, 2025 Paperback, 74 pages ISBN: 978-1-966677-22-2 I’ve Never Loved Somebody and Made Them Worse is a stunning debut, a fragmented and intimate record of relationships that blur the lines between romantic, platonic, physical, and intellectual connection. From grad se

10/16/2025

Praise for Jeanne Griggs & After Kenyon

These poems are subtle, self-effacing, then surprising, even shocking, as if a profile you’d been contemplating suddenly turns and looks at you. After Kenyon is a deep and detailed meditation on the long impact of place, taking as its exemplar the campus of Kenyon College. Claiming for each building and path a character with uses and names that change over time, Jeanne Griggs offers us the reward of her seasons and years of close observation and felt experience. “We walk with our heads down / in the footprints of others, / icy gravel shifting / with each step, gray // as tree trunks in old snow, the stone of the buildings, / the low sky of every day.” But the book is also a collection of love letters – with all the complex shades of feeling that implies – to literature itself, an implied anthology of poems that these poems – really a single, unified work – converse with as inspiration and ancestry. Most of all, this is a moving elegy for a way of life in service to writing and writers, “thinking about how to hold / the attention of young people,” “everyone attentive / to their needs and my job to be / attentive to everyone else’s, / providing training and pads of paper”. “We could get close to our heroes / in Weaver Cottage, just inches away / from a famous poet or novelist…” Griggs speaks for the irreplaceable lovers of language who stand and wait “in the little kitchen, / off to the side, where the after-reading hors d’oeuvres / were warming”. By its closing lines, After Kenyon has revealed itself as a masterful testament to the writers’ creed that only through particulars can we glimpse universals.

—Anthony Clarvoe, playwright, author of The Living & The Art of Sacrifice

Publication Date: October 15, 2025 Paperback, 70 pages ISBN: 978-1-966677-21-5 The sly word play in the title of Jeanne Griggs’ poetry collection After Kenyon is that while this volume indeed follows her retirement after long years at Kenyon College, reflecting on her time there and revisiting