Winter 2027 Catalog

Publication date March 2, 2027 poetry

A visionary new collection by former poet laureate of the United States and winner of the Pulitzer Prize Tracy K. Smith

The forest in Tracy K. Smith’s brilliant new work is and is not a metaphor. While these poems strive to hear and to heed the voices of the earth and its nations of trees, they also test a discomfiting view of humanity, not as divided and opposing factions but as a vast cacophonous family connected by a single deep root.

The Forest grapples with violence, cynicism, and injustice by tapping into the ecstatic for much-needed insight, humility, and conviction. Enlivened by slow time and spiritual desire, Smith’s poems are political and devotional conduits that bear witness to meditative visions and channeled conversations with ancestors and ascended guides. Several poems honor motherhood and the particular care bound up in mothering Black sons. Others come to terms with grief and a failed marriage now so distant as to be another life. Hovering always near, the divine feminine is a figure called forth to refute the God of War. 

The Forest is a magnificent act of foresight beyond the granular realities of partisan depravity, polarization, and indifference. Smith reaches an exhilarating new height, in contact with the mythic and the rapturous.

Publication date February 16, 2027 fiction

New York is months into yet another police lockdown. Most people have abandoned the city. Stores are shuttered and the streets are empty, except for cops standing on every corner and the stream of drivers delivering packages to holdouts stuck inside.
 

Agatha—holding out in Brooklyn with Marco, her boyfriend, and Nathan and Emily, their two best friends—cannot sleep. She has tried every therapy and combination of pills, to no avail; with her insomnia only worsening under Marco’s claustrophobic love, she’s taken to squatting in a vacant unit in a high-rise near their home, to be alone with her condition, her phone, her credit card debt, her unfinished freelance work, her ambivalence about having children, and her memories of the catastrophic event that precipitated the lockdown. Then a mysterious telehealth doctor diagnoses her with a new disorder, and things quickly get stranger.
 

Elvia Wilk’s witty, riveting novel begins in a somewhat familiar milieu before tunneling into an Other World of wounds, portals, doubles, hypnosis, and resurrections. Borrowing from noir, science fiction, and horror, and inflected by the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the lives of medieval saints, and contemporary views on sleep, illness, technology, and relationships, A Diagnosis asks: Who is casting the spells that we live under today?