September 2026:

Tree of Knowledge, Victoria Chang

A poet watches the limbs of a eucalyptus tree get sawed off: the image persists, recurring across poems of art, language, selfhood, memory, and loss.

Joan Mitchell said, When I talk about love, I mean loving a tree. When I talk about love, I mean loving where a tree used to be. Men assess the eucalyptus tree growing on the poet’s street; a crane arrives. The sound of a chainsaw rings in the air and branches begin to fall. This tree-cutting haunts the poet, and refracts across the remarkable work collected in Tree of Knowledge as Chang turns her thoughts to artists such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Mitchell and Hilma af Klint. Roving, evocative, and intricate, Tree of Knowledge is rooted in Victoria Chang’s crystalline voice and generous, probing gaze, and by certain images ― trees, a hanging figure, a branch, fingertips, a briefcase ― that resurface like apparitions.

October 2026:

Killing Spree, Jorie Graham

Jorie Graham has long used her remarkably self-renewing gifts to confront the threats posed to the planet and to our humanity. Her recent work – collected in [To]The Last [Be] Human – followed by the acclaimed To 2040 – constitute a wake-up call regarding the ecological, technological, spiritual and political risks we face in the ‘new world’ we are creating. Graham now speaks to that world in 2026, with particular focus on the forces of destruction we have unleashed across the globe.

Urgent and unflinching, these poems test how the human spirit might endure under conditions set to undo it. Killing Spree is a book of vigilance and resistance, insisting that imagination and love remain forces of survival. Here, at the height of her powers, Graham offers not consolation but clarity, guiding us through catastrophe toward what cannot be taken from us.

One of the most celebrated living American poets – winner of the Forward Prize 2012 and Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 1996 – presents a poetry against numbness, insisting on the need to understand, respond to and act upon political reality in her new collection, as confrontationally titled as it is scrupulously crafted.

November 2026:

Cafés, Holly Pester

Welcome to Cafés! Somewhere to eat and forget about work, where we can meet friends and not think about love, where we can meet lovers and be too nervous to eat. In Holly Pester’s unique lyric, the café becomes a structure of fantasy and language exploring life at the pressurized edges. It becomes a form – a canto or a verse – unearthing what this space promises us in terms of freedom and thought, and what it holds back. In each iteration, the café remakes itself through the people who pass through it. A worker tries to run a café franchise. A lover sits in the corner, waiting. A woman mourns a friendship while contemplating age and childlessness. An artist tries to launch an art café and hosts an open mic. Both a stylish political intervention and an elegy for communal space, Holly Pester’s newest collection reaffirms her as one of the most exciting poets of our time.

Daniel Sluman

Daniel Sluman is a poet and disability rights activist. He co-edited the first major UK Disability poetry anthology Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back and he has appeared widely in U.K. poetry journals. He has three poetry collections published by Nine Arches Press and his most recent book, single window, was released in 2021 and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. 

His experience of judging the Forward Prize last year has reinvigorated his lifelong passion for looking beneath the surface of poems to really interrogate what makes a poem, and what forges and then sustains a poetic career.