America is a mother
Multiple traditions, immigrant roots, the hard labor of making a life in the United States, the joys and sorrows of family life: Agusto-Cox treats all of these and more in this remarkable book. For anyone who has followed Serena’s career, it is extremely gratifying to see her work come to fruition in this excellent collection.
Blending the search for identity with the search for home
An amalgam is a mixture or blending of disparate elements to create something new. It’s fitting that Maria Karametou’s debut novel The Amalgam (Vine Leaves, 2026) is a book that is many things at once. It’s an immigrant story, a story of place and belonging, a family story. But at its core, The Amalgam is a story of a woman searching for herself. For identity.
Poems of the Unexpected—and the Struggle to Connect
Two words I’d use to describe the poems in this collection—their language and imagery—are muscular and unexpected. By muscular I mean the words and images aren’t just substantial, they flex and push against you as you read; a reader feels pulled into grappling with them. Unexpected images and metaphors—that sometimes don’t initially seem to fit the tone—and unusual words surface a lot. This makes the reading experience satisfying work. It doesn’t shut the reader out, but demands something from them.
Where a Poetic Repository of Gesture Becomes a Spiritual Release
Gestures carry the weight of words. Think of the hand wave that signals “hello” or “goodbye,” or blowing a kiss to someone. These tiny actions can hold such significance. Gestuary by French-Senegalese poet Sylvie Kandé, translated into English by Nancy Naomi Carlson, is a repository for gestures that carry cultural significance and instances of violence, as well as historical significance. The original was published as Gestuaire by Éditions Gallimard in 2016 and received the 2017 Prix Louise Labé. Carlson’s translation, issued by Seagull Books, came out this year.
“She told me and I remember knowing”
Displacement, memory, raising a child in a new country—these are some of the themes that Burgi Zenhausern treats in her first full length collection, White Door. The fact that these fine poems were written in Zenhausern’s second language makes this achievement even more impressive.
Regenerating a Scattered Family
Bsrat Mezghebe’s debut novel, I Hope You Find What You’re Looking For (Liveright/Norton, 2026), is an affecting portrait of three Eritrean women living in Alexandria, Va in 1991, as their country’s long war for independence from Ethiopia enters its final push. The story, weaving the prosaic and the extraordinary, juxtaposes day-to-day struggles in the DMV with the brutal war for independence back home. It unfolds through the alternating perspectives of these three strong-willed characters.
A tense, gripping story of survival
Prudence Wright has made it. She’s overcome a traumatic past, beaten the odds, and is now living a comfortable, upper-middle-class life. Perhaps even the American Dream. Big house in Washington, D.C. Beautiful clothes. The occasional fancy night out with her husband, Davis. She and Davis are well-educated, cultured, accomplished, and beautiful. And yet she is weighed down by personal challenges and the constant reminder that the color of her skin defines much of her reality.
“Where does tranquility exist?”
True Blue, while ostensibly a journey through the pandemic, in fact ranges widely through interiors (both physical and mental), nature and cities, and memories in search of those consolations.
Step inside poetic art and emerge with new perspectives on humanity
Enter through the door on the cover of Reasons for Étant Donnés by Sara Cahill Marron and you enter a world of mystery. Like the peepholes ofMarcel Duchamp’s last major artwork, Étant Donnés, Marron’s poetry is a window into a world of mysteries—Water, Marriage, Kingdom, Transfiguration, and Body—that are open to interpretation and reinterpretation by the reader.
An interwoven tapestry of belonging, family, and homeland
Restitution (Regal House, 2025) is a quiet but powerful novel about place, belonging, and family. It asks us to consider what it means to belong to a place, to a person, or to a people. And what does it mean to not belong? What do we owe each other? And can we ever understand the truth of the past?
I am looking at just a crow, only one, and wait for more.
One of the most welcome new books by a DMV poet is J.D. Smith’s The Place That Is Coming to Us (Broadstone Books, 2025). Smith is a long-time mainstay of the D.C.-area poetry community and, from the evidence on view in this collection, his powers have not diminished.
Kinship requires a leap of faith and a keen eye for beauty in darkness
What Haunts Me by Bernadette Geyer is an intimate look at kinship and all the responsibilities and history it comes with. The narrator of these poems is looking at nature, their family, and events to find the source of kinship and whether they are deserving of it.
Of mountains and good men
Dixon, Descending is an extraordinary book. It’s hard to say what I loved more as I read it—the rich characters or the lively, convincing descriptions of both everyday moments and literal, top-of-the-world moments in the lives of the main character, an educator and amateur mountain climber, and his brother.
If you leave, try this book
If You Leave, the richly-drawn debut novel by Margaret Hutton (Regal House Publishing, October 2025), is the story of two women who are unlikely friends. But whereas the trope of unlikely friends usually signals a well-trod exploration of those aforementioned opposites, protagonists Lucille and Audrey offer something fresher and more relatable because they resist those neat, contrasting boxes.
One local writer’s vision of make-believe living
The stories in Lauren D. Woods' debut collection, The Great Grown-up Game of Make Believe (Autumn House Press, October 2025), pendulum between the speculative and the real, embodying how many people live their lives: half in imagination, half in the material world. These tales tremble with an unusual sense of stasis and imbalance, like someone who knows they’re susceptible to vertigo, yet keeps glancing over the edge of a high balcony anyway.
“Part of you wants to believe this poem was written by a human”
Using a wide array of emotional tones and an equally varied set of forms and styles, Knapp engages directly with many of the issues affecting our nation and our planet as a whole. By turns humorous, sad, ironic, witty, angry, resigned, these poems are essential reading and vital acts of resistance.
Quirky, strange, vulnerable, and defiant
Hannah Grieco’s debut book is a slim but powerful collection of short stories that are at times funny, at times devastating, and always full of heart, intensity, and life. First Kicking, Then Not (Stanchion, 2025) examines motherhood, caretaking, and mid-life n —particularly the gritty, imperfect parts of womanhood that we often don’t talk about or acknowledge in our society.
Poems of mystery and shape-shifting along the James River
From the get-go, Bernier pulls the rug out from under the reader (gently, but with koan-like force). In this poem, to know does not mean to understand; your gestures have resonance, but not meaning, and when some natural element reaches the sea, it becomes … unreal, a fantasy.
Love is a driving force
Writer and literary activist Mike Maggio is a long-time fixture in the DMV literary community. In addition to his six poetry collections, he has published six novels and maintains a blog in which he reviews, promotes, and publishes the work of other writers, along with news of his own. The latter exemplifies his generosity toward other writers and the community at large.
Songs of yearning
Rarely has a collection of poems so perfectly embodied the experiences of the poet as does In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls, by Majda Gama. Gama, born in Beirut to a Saudi father and an American mother and now residing in the D.C. area, has chronicled her life of moving between cultures and identities before coming to at least a temporary rest here.