Brooklyn NY: From Brooklyn-based poet, editor and publisher Joshua Wilkerson comes the small chapbook FUME LAPSE (Brooklyn NY: Urizen, 2026), an assemblage of odd, quirky, first-person descriptive narrative poems and texts that shimmer, ever so slightly, against the light. Wilkerson’s lyrics are quiet, bubbling with wild energy just underneath the surface, offering a thinking in real time lyric sentences. “I remember my father woke me up from my tent to say the earth’s shape is curved, round,” he writes, as part of the second “Fuse Lapse” poem, of which there are several scattered through the collection, “like a stone column. I remember he said the earth rests on water, like wood, that the first animals were enclosed in thorny barks: cockles, moon snails, pear conchs, serpent stars, speaking and singing.” There’s a way these poems set underneath the skin, become hard to shake. “Everyone is obsessive / Just to different degrees,” begins the poem “Two Cities,” “That’s why the years went by so fast / Overhanging branches stroke the trains as they pass [.]” These are poems that pass through memory and intimacy, carefully set and considered, writing with the exuberance of considered youth, from only the slightest distance. Or, as that same, second, four-page sequence “Fume Lapse” ends:
I remember my father woke
me up from my tent to show me
Alpha Centauri through
the telescope – its four year old light
against my eyes. I read
that somewhere, I overheard that, I made
that up, then furrowed it
into the dull thunder of this painting,
which is a poem, which is
another subway ride to work.
Chicago IL/Toronto ON: From acclaimed Toronto-based French writer Zoë Mahfouz (with a new book of short stories out this year, apparently) comes the chapbook Borges Must Be Rolling in his Grave (Chicago IL: dancing girl press, 2025), a series of intriguing constraint poems, most of which are held to the boundaries of four-line stanzas, with poems of three or four stanzas, most of which are centred upon the page. “Zero-gravity teardrop cocoon / No atoms to carry a sound wave,” begins the opening poem, “THE SUN BEARER’S POLLEN,” “The cataracts of the Nile boon / A cloudy-lens deprivation cave.” Form, as much as anything, seems to be the purpose here, and there’s even a haibun included, for good measure. Mafouz’s poems are propulsive, simultaneously energized and restrained. Composed as explorations of boundaries, and variations on constraint, but one that revels in a precise pattern of sounds and syllables, writing a lyric so tight not a wasted word, sound or stutter. These poems might just need to be heard.
BASAL GANGLIA DOMINION
Cheek by jowl, Hypnos
with pink granite
Crumbling uranium, isotopes
of potassium
Shadow-melding insectum plight
Coral keister befalls
cysts, maelstrom.
Foreign sycophant
involving crawling
Like sand through a ravaged
hourglass,
Oviparous, birthing bricks
intestines,
Sun-blood trade, egest in
flasks.
Defer the harvest amidst
matchboxes,
Scraping from under the
dermis,
Chewing nutrients, anemia
outfoxed,
Dry-cough Clozapine
blunts.
Insecticides tropho-goner,
Lethargic, excoriated
palms,
Asclepius’ urinalysis
qualms,
Delusional parasitosis
collar.
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