Broadstone Books

09/26/2025

We’re celebrating J.D. Smith’s release with this excellent interview with Work-in-Progress. All in good time, indeed.

Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

09/14/2025

A gorgeous addition to our September lineup:

Beginning with the declaration, “Because I have listened to train whistles spell / longings in dusks of three continents // Because three seas pulsate in my blood, / three languages threaded through the heart’s amulet,” Ruth Traubner Kessler speaks authoritatively on behalf of “We, Immigrants,” those living in flux and often fear in the global everywhere and nowhere of The Country of Elsewheres. As a two-time immigrant writing – in her third language – poetry exploring memory, place, and displacement both literal and figurative, her work presents in rich and wrenching imagery the lived experience of those “who chose not to go back, / but never cease going back.” Rooted in common human experience, appealing for common human dignity, seldom has a work of poetry felt so timely, and so necessary. “On a new scroll, write in a / beginner's careful hand: / Tomorrow … Hope’s harbor for the unfisting heart.”

Praise for Ruth Traubner Kessler & The Country of Elsewheres

In The Country of Elsewheres, a fierce exploration of the concept of exile, Ruth Kessler opens us to the many layers of loss that shape our lives: loss of our past, of homeland, of innocence, of certainty, even of self. Kessler conjures Ithaca, a patient about to undergo surgery, the remembered streets of Prague, and the terrible barriers erected by war, and knows that we always have the power to “return as all exiles do: shaken, and changed, and grateful.” Her images spike her lines with continual reminders that our moments of rightness, of perfect love, of belonging will all pass, are shards of light in the vast space that is the human condition. Kessler soars unafraid through this existential firmament, calling and calling to the beloved and to home in poems that mourn, rage, and cherish equally. Her lines, sometimes long and driving, sometimes swiftly cascading, insist the reader stay with her every step of the journey. This collection, where “reliquary itself is religion,” offers its readers a catharsis in verse, reuniting us with our essential nature and with the life-force that propelled us from Eden, banished and flawed and aware. We return at last “home to ourselves,” and she promises us “Hope’s harbor for the unfisting heart.”

—Nancy White, President, The Word Works

Publication Date: September 15, 2025 Paperback, 114 pages ISBN: 978-1-966677-11-6 Beginning with the declaration, “Because I have listened to train whistles spell / longings in dusks of three continents // Because three seas pulsate in my blood, / three languages threaded through the heart’s amu...

09/13/2025

Join us in celebrating Megan Leonard’s sparkling poetry collection Larkspur Queen, which opens with the Castle Queen exclaiming, “[Y]ou don’t know what my cells have endured / in this life or in another / unless you sit and listen / to me tell it.” What follows are six, awe-making sections of lyrical narratives that transport the reader to lands just unfamiliar enough to set the world we know off-kilter and make it new. Leonard weaves personal and universal tales taking her inspiration from the Lais of Marie de France, a collection of 12th century narrative romantic poems. “This is the magic,” Leonard writes, and readers will eagerly embrace the women of these stories: the Castle Queen, The Queen of Small Things, the Forest Queen, The Princess and the Falcon, the Spider Queen, and the Larkspur Queen. “Calling them by their names makes them friends,” the poet might say, and the reader comes to know each subject intimately brought to life in verse. “I will never leave you, we will find a way. . .” says the Larkspur Queen to her ghost daughter; Leonard’s writing holds this promise.

“Megan Leonard declares herself thankful to Marie de France, who “could not have imagined how her poetry would inspire and comfort and delight another woman, another writer, some 850 years after she created it,” but now Leonard has taken her turn to inspire and comfort and delight, and her readers will be thankful to her. In her inspired and inspiring Larkspur Queen, Megan Leonard herself does what she shows her Enyette, Queen of the Forest, doing: “Like mushroom spores, she flies on the wind, / scatters herself into countless specks across / a forest sunbeam.”
—H. L. Hix, author of Moral Tales

Publication Date: September 15, 2025 Paperback, 96 pages ISBN: 978-1-966677-18-5 Megan Leonard’s sparkling poetry collection Larkspur Queen opens with the Castle Queen exclaiming, “[Y]ou don’t know what my cells have endured / in this life or in another / unless you sit and listen / to me tell

09/12/2025

Hard to believe it’s already September! But so honored to have J. D. Smith’s The Place That Is Coming to Us to keep us company. His work begs the question: What type of world are we creating? From poems about “Sea Jellies” and “Canine,” to places like “Panajachel” and “At Finzel Swamp, or “Questions on Toads,” Smith’s gaze is far reaching, keenly observant, and honest. In the poem, “Apology in Siege,” the poet would “still like to imagine some god / would help, but” he observes, “that line looks broken/like the water, the gas and electricity.” With intellect, dry humor, and wit, Smith strips the world back, making visible that which the reader may overlook.

Praise for J. D. Smith & The Place That Is Coming to Us
Well-traveled and far-seeing, J.D. Smith observes the natural world with wonder and regret. From Longwood Gardens’ seemingly prehistoric dragonflies to the possible evolution of a future millennium’s savage squirrels, Smith serves as ironic skeptic, playful visionary, and sober guide through a troubled Creation whose human populace faces the “long curdling of Republic to Empire.” Invoking Walt Whitman, Smith aspires to “watch the animals / as more than travelers across a field of vision,” and in poems whose non-human cast ranges from aquatic Chesapeake Bay dwellers to bats, corvids, bowerbirds, and more, he succeeds brilliantly. His knack for concision only heightens his poetry’s intensity as he examines the failures of policy and politics that define our time. The Place That Is Coming to Us, quietly urgent, perfectly meets our contemporary moment.

https://www.broadstonebooks.com/shop/p/the-place-that-is-coming-to-us-poetry-by-j-d-smithh

Publication Date: September 15, 2025 Paperback, 78 pages ISBN: 978-1-966677-15-4 J.D. Smith sagely examines and savagely excavates life of “the innocent and the contrite” in his seventh book of poetry, The Place That Is Coming to Us . His work begs the question: What type of world are we creati

08/20/2025

Check out the gorgeous cover on Adam Day’s newest release. Get these titles and more 20% at BroadstoneBooks.com

Adam Day’s book-length poem The Strategic Crescent, a satirical travelogue, weaves together the picturesque medieval plazas and pomegranate trees of Afghanistan and Iraq, with Western military intervention. Modeled after The New York Times travel series, “36 Hours in _____,” Day does not disappoint curious readers. “‘So, forget magazine covers that promise: “Undiscovered M____!”/“Hidden H_____” “Secret T____,’” exclaims the speaker, a female journalist. “When a region has been attracting / admirers for more than 1,000 years,” she writes, “no square inch is undiscovered.” The speaker reports in both fact and fiction, and aspects of the two nations and the region are often conflated, as the casual Western observer is apt to do. This book is a thought-provoking adventure, full of great mosques, night owl nightspots, and “At sunrise… [an] outdoor abattoir... [Where]… water/steams and hisses on the white stones.”

https://www.broadstonebooks.com/shop/p/the-strategic-crescent-a-poem-by-adam-day

Publication Date: August 15, 2025 Paperback, 76 pages ISBN: 978-1-966677-06-2 Adam Day’s book-length poem The Strategic Crescent , a satirical travelogue, weaves together the picturesque medieval plazas and pomegranate trees of Afghanistan and Iraq, with Western military intervention. Modeled a

08/19/2025

Next in our August line up, the brilliant James Madigan—

In his new collection, James Madigan writes with energy, vivacity, tenacity and heart, and with a firm belief that poems have a role in public life and discourse. As he challenges the state's obsession with imprisoning and disappearing both human and non-human life, Madigan offers counter histories that begin from the body of the poet and move outward to find a language for murder, extinction, and the violent legacies of white supremacy. These are poems about survival, witness, and how we make meaning amid the neverending apocalypses of empire.

—Daniel Borzutzky, 2016 National Book Award winner for The Performance of Becoming Human

Publication Date: August 15, 2025 Paperback, 98 pages ISBN: 978-1-966677-16-1 Political Prisoners USA and Other Poems by James Madigan is a necessary debut that draws on expansive public and private experiences to create a lamentation for racial and social inequality. The poems are daring and

08/18/2025

The praise keeps coming onto for Michele Wolf’s Peacocks on the Street. Add on Instagram to read DeeCee’s purrrsonal review! 🐈‍⬛

Imagine a world in which animals talk—or, better—a world where we would learn their language and learn to see as they see, know as they know. Such is the premise that Michele Wolf has mused into being in her new collection, Peacocks on the Streets, with poems that range from elegy, to portraiture, to personal history. Michele Wolf is a poet of delight and mournful sensitivity; the work she has produced since her award-winning Conversations During Sleep only further underscores my fandom. Peacocks on the Streets is her best work to date, a gorgeous achievement.

—David Keplinger, author of Ice

[Michele Wolf’s] poems are candles held just high enough to es**rt us out of the surrounding darkness.

—E. Ethelbert Miller, author of the little book of e

Publication Date: September 1, 2025 Paperback, 70 pages ISBN: 978-1-966677-08-6 Michele Wolf’s poetry collection Peacocks on the Streets possesses immediate mystique and grit. Life is strange, the poet alerts her reader, strange things happen. Embrace the strangeness, Wolf suggests, for “Living

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.