NEW SCHOOL ALUMNI POETS
April is Poetry Month and we’re proud to share this collection of New School alumni poets with works published within the past few years! Have your own poetry collection coming out? Share your work with us to be included in collections like these!
Judith Antelman
Schools of Public Engagement MFA Creative Writing ‘21
The Pugilist’s Daughter
The poems in The Pugilist’s Daughter navigate an arduous childhood, and take the reader on a journey that dissects what comprises home and how far you must run to seek solace — if at all. Through use of poetic forms, Judith Antelman confronts the personal and collective scars of domestic violence, dementia, war, and genocide. Antelman’s writing seamlessly travels through these shifting landscapes — while also searching for love — as she traverses exhilaration and loss.
Tiffany Babb
Schools of Public Engagement MFA Creative Writing ‘20
A List of Things I’ve Lost
“I remember that it takes work to remember.” Fragmented portraits and metropolitan pastorals arc along a pendulum of solitude, illustrating alternating desires for preservation and renewal. Babb creates connections through elemental communion with objects, nature, family, and fading keepsakes, transforming mundanity and trauma into oneness with the present.
Laura Cronk
Schools of Public Engagement MFA Creative Writing ’05
Ghost Hour
Sometimes compact, sometimes expansive, the poems in Ghost Hour emanate from adolescence and other liminal spaces, considering girlhood and contemporary womanhood — the ways both are fraught with the pleasures and limits of embodiment
Laura Cronk writes personally, intimately, yet never without profound consideration of contemporary violence, which we must love in spite of and rage against.
Megin Jimenez
Schools of Public Engagement MFA Creative Writing ‘04
Mongrel Tongue
This collection of prose poems and hybrid texts explores what’s left out of the official history, the movie version, the news account, the branding campaign. Latin Americans exiled in surreal landscapes, women on the lam from the eternal feminine, and people awake to the breakdown of the general narrative take shape in monologues, interviews, fractured fairy tales, and alternative histories.
Jeff Johnson
Schools of Public Engagement MFA Creative Writing ‘11
The Book or The Woods
The author’s second published collection of poetry, The Book / Or / The Woods is an ongoing metaserial work, one that defies the traditional notion of the epic as a heroic nation-building story, though it borrows tropes from both Dante and Sappho.
S.N. (Samantha) Kirby
Schools of Public Engagement MFA Creative Writing ’17
Lunatiques
The stories in this collection feature a moon daydreaming about wandering the streets on a hot day in June, a stranger hosting a party where the dead live again on a satellite made from the city’s trash, and an estate on the Hudson haunting a young writer as she confronts both the trauma of her past and the perils of her present.
Linda Kleinbub
Schools of Public Engagement, MFA Creative Writing ’14
Cover Charge
Linda Kleinbub brings New York to life in a clear-eyed and unsentimental poetry collection. She serves as both a guide and a witness to decades of gritty, glamorous, and ever-changing life in the city, depicted in glimpses and shards.
Michelle Lerner
Schools of Public Engagement, MFA Creative Writing ‘08
Protection
In Protection, Michelle Lerner explores the wonder and challenges of parenting from pregnancy through early childhood, taking on subjects rarely considered in poetry such as difficult labor, c-sections, questions of gender identity and development in young children, and the experience of parenting while chronically ill.
Cynthia Manick
Schools of Public Engagement MFA Creative Writing ‘07
No Sweet Without Brine
Cynthia Manick’s sophomore poetry collection is an elegiac ode to Black womanhood in four parts, both soulful and celebratory. Life’s satisfying moments are captured in odes to Idris Elba’s dulcet tones on a mediation app, half-priced Entenmann’s poundcake, and observations of parental Black love. The sour taps into an analysis of the reality of history, silencing catcalls on the street, and detailed recipes, and advice to Black girls forced to endow themselves with armor against the world.
Dante Micheaux
Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts BA Liberal Arts: Psychology ‘02
Circus
Micheaux won the T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of America and The T.S. Eliot Foundation for this collection. “In this long poem, each line is tuned by breath and image, serious play and heartfelt critique, but also by the modern urban motifs of grief and love. At times, signifying can get us to a desperate truth. The reader or listener has to possess a sense of history in order to be transported to the here and now. In Circus, the borders between the imaginary and the real dissolve as the poem delivers us into verisimilitude.” — Yusef Komunyakaa
Gina Myers
Schools of Public Engagement MFA Creative Writing ’05
Some of the Times
“Gina Myers is a deeply authentic poet who intimately captures her struggles with rent, debt, work, illness, politics, and violence in the capitalist ruins of America. Throughout, she bravely confronts some of the times that she almost died and lovingly holds onto some of the times that she fully felt joy. This book is necessary reading for our precarious times.” — Craig Santos Perez
Kathleen Ossip
Schools of Public Engagement MFA Creative Writing ’98
In her groundbreaking and most politicized collection, Kathleen Ossip takes a hard look at the U.S.A. as it now stands. She meditates on our various responses to our country — whether ironic, infantile, righteous, or defeated. Her diction is both high and low, her tone both elegant and straightforward. The book’s crowning achievement, its anchor, and its centerpiece is the poem “July.” In a generous fifty pages, Ossip recounts a road trip from Bemidji, MN, to Key West, FL, with her daughter riding shotgun. Inspired by images that flick across their car windows and nurtured by intimate conversation and plenty of time to think, the poem has an entertaining cinematic sweep. There are poems based on bumper stickers, the names of churches, little shops. Traveling tests her beliefs, and Ossip fully discloses her doubts and confusions. Ossip is an unconventional, mighty magician with words.
Cate (Catherine) Peebles
Schools of Public Engagement MFA Creative Writing ‘07
Cate Peebles’ debut book of poems, Thicket, is deft and ideal in its pertinence to our current moment while also reaching both back and beyond itself. In the long poem, “The Woodlands,” Peebles writes: “When the flood comes / we will be on our phones / searching for how / to save ourselves from / the flood.” The sigh of recognition, of “so true,” will be a constant companion for readers of Thicket. Peebles considers the female figure in the world in this #MeToo moment.
Mai Perkins
Schools of Public Engagement MA International Affairs ’15
The Walking Nerve Ending
The Walking Nerve-Ending is a collection that takes you on a fanciful journey. It represents all things love, family, and friendship meticulously crafted into rhyming and free-verse poetry. Mai Perkins dances with language and themes throughout this debut while touching on her experiences as a world-traveler with a joyous zeal for life…not to mention delicious food! These poems and reflections include snapshots of places like New York City, Los Angeles, the Middle East, and Hong Kong through her narrative writing lens. She invites you to identify with her openness and vulnerability as a self-described “walking nerve-ending” in a raw yet touching, and poignantly delightful way.
Nicole Santalucia
Schools of Public Engagement MFA Creative Writing ‘08
The Book of Dirt
Nicole Santalucia’s collection The Book of Dirt is an unsettling journey through a small-town American landscape permeated by gun violence, homophobia, misogyny, and addiction, a setting in which “there are no corners to turn.” The terrain is littered with “broken hands and broken heads” and “soldiers brushing their hair with bones,” but somehow Santalucia’s tough, queer, often grimly humorous voice generates hope that she might find or invent “a silent place to love,” a place where strength derives not from violence but from poetry.
Greg Santos
Schools of Public Engagement MFA Creative Writing ’09
Ghost Face
In his third DC Books title, Ghost Face, Greg Santos explores what it means to have been a Cambodian infant adopted at birth by a Canadian family. Through a uniquely playful and self-reflective series of poems that pay moving homage to his adoptive parents, and explore the fantasies of a lost family and life in Cambodia, Santos leads the reader through his visceral process of unlearning and relearning who he is and who he might become.
Lorraine Schein
Schools of Public Engagement MFA Creative Writing ‘09
Lady Anarchist Cafe
The poems and stories in this collection are by turns satiric, playful, utopian, psychedelic, and gritty. With language that is sometimes deceptively simple, sometimes layered and complex, and fantastic metaphors of atoms, druids, planets, and mermaids, Lorraine Schein makes readers laugh, think, and remember what poetry is all about.
Charlotte Seley
Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts BA Liberal Arts ‘07
The World is My Rival
“The World Is My Rival is a streetwise catalogue of heartbreak, a record of the daily aggravation of being a mind trapped in a body like a man in a whale or a wreck in the ocean: ‘I can’t comprehend how live forever / and never die are the same.’ Modeled on the pop tradition of the lost-love song, this book is for anyone who’s had the ‘majestic blues’ of thwarted desire and gone back for more: ‘Come and get me, stupid light.’ — Elisa Gabbert
Robert Siek
Schools of Public Engagement MFA Creative Writing ’99
We Go Seasonal
“Robert Siek’s Manhattan is a city in distress, one that resembles, at times, a zombie apocalypse…Siek loads his poems with the nightmarish grittiness of urban life. His lines expand, stretch to the limit, until it feels like they’re going to split at the seams and it’s all going to spill out, a blood-and-guts mess.” — David Trinidad
Allen Strouse
Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts BA Liberal Arts ‘08
Transfer Queen
“A.W. Strouse’s entrancing epigrams combine tough-minded bawdiness and neoclassical beauty. In his deft hands, acute sociological analysis arrives via subway voyeurism. Take this fearless book on your next ride. Notice how Strouse’s lines and Patty Barth’s lucid drawings sharpen your yearnings and make them newly available for blame-free inspection.” — Wayne Koestenbaum
Matthew Thorburn
Schools of Public Engagement MFA Creative Writing ’01
The Grace of Distance
In The Grace of Distance, his poignant, far-traveling new collection of poems, Matthew Thorburn explores the ways in which we try to close the distances we experience in modern life — between doubt and faith, between cultures, between ourselves and those we love. He seeks to name, and find, that elusive, essential sense of connection humanity hungers for. In one poem, a boy places a bell in the hollow of a tree so someone might find it. In others, an overworked baker wishes for an annunciation of her own, while a man calls down into a well until another voice calls back. Set in China and America, in the present and the distant past, Thorburn’s poems examine both Eastern and Western ideas of spirituality, looking closely at the ways we can lose faith, then sometimes find it again. The poems also confront the unbridgeable distances we must live with and the perhaps surprising grace they can provide — a greater sense of perspective, understanding, and peace — even as our lives move in the only direction they can, away from the past.
