Broadstone Books

07/23/2025

SXSE did a great job showcasing this beautiful collection which pairs Margaret McCarthy’s interesting photography with Gabriel Rosenstock’s stunning poetry.

“This trans-Atlantic collaboration pairs Margaret McCarthy’s black & white photographs of the ancient world with Irish poet Gabriel Rosenstock’s bi-lingual (English & Irish) tanka poetry. Rosenstock’s ekphrastic poems were written and translated in spontaneous response to McCarthy’s atmospheric photographs, with a theme emerging out of the process: our very human search for the (literal and personified) belovèd, throughout history, across place and time. It asks: What is sacred to us? What really stands the test of time? Who and what are we devoted to? Who and what do we hold dear?”

07/16/2025

Don’t forget to grab your 20% discount by buying straight from our website. Pick up this brilliant collection, THE BOOK OF LAZARUS, poetry by Steven Mueske

Steven Mueske offers a refreshing perspective on existence and all its intimacies and absurdities in The Book of Lazarus. Through rich images and intricate form, Mueske invites us to witness the radiant fracture of being, to examine ourselves and our longevity. This work reckons with our limitlessness and what it means to be human in an age of collapse, longing, and persistent spiritual hunger. This author’s voice is familiar, resting with the reader momentarily in the in-betweens, each line carefully illuminating the profound fragility of our connected consciousness, “The in-between place is the radius’s / way of saying, I am the meadow. / From there, every direction you look / seems exactly the same.” This is a luminous, unflinching exploration of grace and humanity, packed full of wit, myth and metafiction. The collection offers a gift to its readers, a lesson on presence through life’s estranged shifts and magnificent returns.

Publication Date: July 15, 2025 Paperback, 88 pages ISBN: 978-1-966677-14-7 Steven Mueske offers a refreshing perspective on existence and all its intimacies and absurdities in The Book of Lazarus . Through rich images and intricate form, Mueske invites us to witness the radiant fracture of bein

07/15/2025

Love Luther Jett’s description of SCREENS, poetry by Henry Crawford:

What does it mean to be human in this age when technology inundates us until we imagine we are drowning? How do we hold on to that humanity? Henry Crawford reminds of the infinite grace to be found in the details of living — a mother’s eyes “sweeter than strawberries”; “a summer window partially opened” — even the loneliness of a house “with coffee to be made and nobody home”, or the pain of a prize fight, or a lost love. Humanity is all of that, and each page of Crawford’s Screens contains such gems, images that startle the reader toward awakening. Crawford asks “How is life any more real than our dreams?” and leaves it to the reader to find the answer on their own. And that is how it should be.
—W. Luther Jett, author of Flying to America & The Colour War

Screens are ubiquitous in this technological moment, the word itself simultaneously conjuring connection and concealment, knowledge and obfuscation, communication and distortion, and in these new poems from Henry Crawford screens serve as metaphor for the dislocations of contemporary living. “How is life any more real than our dreams?” he asks, answering in verse often surreal, sentence and syntax and punctuation fractured and fragmented nearly to the point of incomprehension, suggesting the limitations of language itself to contain and convey meaning any longer. In “Afterwards” he imagines the erasure of everything, until finally the burnt coffee of a roadside diner is left “just the black no longer hot / holding all the secrets.” This is a witty, wily, and wise collection of secrets, equal parts challenging and delightful, in which Crawford bid us go “With confidence. Into the future. / Use your head. It’s what we do best. / But don’t say. I didn’t warn you.”

Publication Date: July 15, 2025 Paperback, 78 pages ISBN: 978-1-966677-10-9 Screens are ubiquitous in this technological moment, the word itself simultaneously conjuring connection and concealment, knowledge and obfuscation, communication and distortion, and in these new poems from Henry Crawfor

07/14/2025

Check out this beautiful collection by David Dodd Lee, The Bay. Haunting and heartfelt work!

David Dodd Lee’s The Bay is a book that wrestles with life in 21st Century America. The poems explore the events of our times—pandemic, political strife, climate change, and general tumult— with language that is intelligent, wry, specific and often aching in its beauty. These poems remind us that careful observation is a form of love. The world with its geese and foxes and even ticks, with beloved pets and humans we love and struggle with, deserves our full attention. So often we are turned to our devices, our internal landscape, and The Bay asks us to look outward, to see and find a way out of our habits of distance and dislike into a consideration of what to make of our world and our time on it. This is a bracing, often funny, and exquisite book.
—Cullen Bailey Burns, author of Slip

Publication Date: July 15, 2025 Paperback, 102 pages ISBN: 978-1-966677-09-3 David Dodd Lee’s new poetry collection The Bay is a “a hymn made out of spider webs.” Lee creates a pulsing lyrical narrative of our nature, a fragile but enduring ecosystem—animal, bird, fish, and human. “Persona...

07/08/2025

Out this month through Broadstone Books, a beautiful women’s poetry collective, An Illegal Feast.

Everywhere I look in this world I see disarray and terror. Very little in me has felt like poetry has the requisite confrontational minerals to act as an effective resistance. But this avant-garde poetry project confronted my meager imagination and revived my hope. In An Illegal Feast four performer-poets responded to a prompt with a poem from a fifth poet to synthesize into one poem. Then wash rinse repeat for each subsequent poem. The spirit of the project—so free of vanity, so full of enthusiastic letting go—is a trust exercise on the page that reminds us that “our world has become dark energy driving us apart” so we must rely on community if we are to survive. Each poem’s reliance on the voice of the other poets is a revelation, the way the ideas and words curiously weave in and out of each other, blurring origins. Reading An Illegal Feast calmed my nervous system by suggesting that we must love all the unsolved “loop of preguntas” that vulnerable intimacy raises in us, rather than focus on seeking answers to the origins of our social ills. This innovative collection of poems was a soup line at the back of an artful church indeed serving a feast to my malnourished soul.
—Joe Loya, award-winning essayist, playwright, TV writer, podcast host & producer

Publication Date: July 15, 2025 Paperback, 78 pages ISBN: 978-1-966677-05-5 “We are ambulance chasers of the soul.” So begins the poetic manifesto, An Illegal Feast , collectively penned by Addison, Flores, Goyan, King, and Wong. This powerful, energetic, thrill-ride of words has a musical beat

07/02/2025

Check out this great review of Marcia LeBeau’s newest release, A Curious Hunger. Christina Cook says: “Marcia LeBeau’s debut collection, A Curious Hunger, is a powerful testament to the unabashed wholeness of womanhood—and an assertion that our culture, where power skews cis male, needs to make space for it. All of it.”

This is the summer reading we need right now!

Marcia LeBeau’s debut collection, A Curious Hunger, is a powerful testament to the unabashed wholeness of womanhood—and an assertion that our culture,

06/23/2025

Sugar House Review says this about Jamie Wendt’s Laughing in Yiddish “Wendt uses a variety of formal and informal poetic forms to carry contemporary and historical voices, threading together the present and its past. The poems take risks, using ekphrastic poems, ghazals, pantoums, an ode, and even a triolet to build a nuanced and compelling history.”

We’re honored to publish this important work. Thank you Jamie Wendt and Sugar House Review.

Laughing in Yiddish by Jamie Wendt (Broadstone Books, 2025) Reviewed by Rebecca Ellis Laughing in Yiddish , the second poetry collection b...

06/23/2025

Wonderful reviews coming out for Laughing in Yiddish by Jamie Wendt! Thank you Jewish Book Council for this stellar review:

Jamie Wendt’s second collection of poetry, Laughing in Yiddish, maintains a delicate balance of earnestness and subtlety.

06/14/2025

Please help us welcome one of our newest releases, THE LIGHT OF SMALL ONES BLINKING, poetry by Ellen Devlin

There’s as much to be gleaned from what’s said as what’s left unsaid in Ellen Devlin’s The Light of Small Ones Blinking. Part Valentine and Tate, Glück and Ruefle—but wholly Delvin’s—these Janus-faced, chiseled capsules of “scattermoon” catalogue obsoletion (manually-operated elevators, pay phone booths), upend expectations (what does it mean to be the “anti-bride,” to mother?), and smolder with observation (“blistered shingles,” “pillowed hammer”) through “remembering like lightning.” Like “strawberries taken too long with,” these poems bid relish and pause—to read them is to sample the “almond taste of stillness.”

—Flower Conroy, author of Zoodikers: A Bestiary

Publication Date: June 15, 2025 Paperback, 80 pages ISBN: 978-1-966677-04-8 Ellen Devlin’s poems are “strangers with notes in their hands.” The Light of Small Ones Blinking is composed in masterful bursts of visions: past lives, the past itself, and places we may or may not have been. Dedicate...

06/12/2025

Please join us in celebrating this beautiful collection, BELOVÈD: PHOTO-TANKA MEDITATIONS, poetry by Gabriel Rosenstock / photography by Margaret McCarthy

This ethereal trans-Atlantic collaboration pairs the bilingual (Irish-Gaelic and English) tanka poetry of Irish author Gabriel Rosenstock with American photographer Margaret McCarthy’s atmospheric black & white images of the ancient world (with some complementary contemporary additions) — of art, landscape, and standing stone structures. Rosenstock’s ekphrastic poems were written and translated in spontaneous response to McCarthy’s photographs, with a theme emerging out of the process: our very human search for the (literal and personified) belovèd, throughout history, across place and time. Through the synergy between image and text, their work creates a third thing—a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Praise for Margaret McCarthy & Gabriel Rosenstock

Some artists defy conventions and merge different mediums to create something entirely new and thought-provoking. Pairing photography with tanka poetry adds a layer of depth and complexity to the visual art, engaging the audience in a different way than traditional approaches might.

— Charlotte Parkin, On Landscape Magazine

Publication Date: June 15, 2025 Paperback, 116 pages ISBN: 978-1-956782-94-3 This ethereal trans-Atlantic collaboration pairs the bilingual (Irish-Gaelic and English) tanka poetry of Irish author Gabriel Rosenstock with American photographer Margaret McCarthy’s atmospheric black & white i

05/16/2024

It's my honor to announce a very special publication event from Broadstone Books: the final four collections from the late poet and master of metaphor Thomas Zemsky: HOW TO BUILD A THEATER, A REAL LIVE BARBIE DOLL, DEAR DEATH, & THE ECOLOGY OF RELUCTANCE.

When we learned earlier this spring that Tom likely had only a few months to live (which in the end turned out to be a few weeks), we decided to undertake his final four collections, which we had planned to publish in coming years, while we still had him with us (more important than ever because Tom was an exacting craftsman when it came to the precise appearance of his poems). This required starting from rough handwritten revisions of poems and turning them into finished manuscripts, proofing design drafts, along with preparing covers, and of course printing. This entire process was completed in 43 days! Unfortunately Tom died just hours before the finished books arrived, but he knew they were coming.

I want to give special recognition to Broadstone editor-in-chief Sheila Bucy Potter for preparing the typescripts from Tom's drafts; to Jeremy Wooldridge for designing four distinctive covers in one night (!); to Tom's fellow poets Richard Taylor and Sara Marron for providing endorsements over the course of a single weekend; and to our wonderful printing partners at Bookmobile for producing all four of these titles in under a week. Thanks to all of you for making this possible.

I honestly can say that if we never had published a book before, or we never did again, this project alone has justified all the effort we have put into Broadstone Books over the years. I never have been so proud of my team, our company, and our community.

This is for you, old friend. And for all who love your words.

And for anyone who wonders if it was worth the effort, you can judge for yourselves by finding his books at BroadstoneBooks.com.