BestNewPoetryNews

 by Jeff Hebert Equal parts irreverent and deeply instructive, Write Good Poems in Two Weeks is the poetry workbook we didn’t know we were waiting for. A.F. Towers delivers 14 days of no-nonsense, totally unpretentious exercises that manage to be both craft-savvy and refreshingly human. From day one (“Sound”) to the final, oddly touching farewell (“You’re all done and can quit poetry forever!”), the voice is casual, funny, and honest—like a favorite writing teacher who also knows how to throw a party. Don’t expect flowery theory or MFA jargon. Towers is more interested in getting you writing —and writing in your own voice—than dazzling you with formalism. That said, this workbook quietly covers the foundations of poetic technique (line breaks, image, simile, the turn, etc.) with precision and care, all without ever feeling academic. Perfect for beginners, stuck poets, or anyone who just wants to shake the dust off their process. It’s a book that reminds us why we started w...

  By JF Hugo There’s no shortage of AI-generated poetry books populating the internet’s weirder corners — perhaps the definitive book of the genre is  I Am Code: An Artificial Intelligence Speaks: Poems by code-davinci-002.   Most are novelties: curiosities to screenshot, skim, and discard.  But 34 AI Poems With the Word Cuck in Them by Erlorn Marshk manages something rarer — it turns what could be a one-note gag into a strangely soulful meditation on masculinity, shame, and digital culture’s absurd poetics. The premise is blunt: every poem in the book contains the word “cuck.” But rather than resting on the word’s notoriety, Marshk uses AI to excavate and recontextualize it. The result is not just 34 jokes, but 34 attempts to understand a word that has, as Marshk writes in the introduction, been “distorted and reanimated by so many evolving cultural contexts." There’s wit here, sure. In “Cuck, But With Flowers,” the speaker reflects on buying peonies for a lov...

  By Jeff Hebert There are poetry collections that whisper. Some that wail. Erlorn Marshk’s 34 AI Poems With the Word Cuck in Them does something stranger — it murmurs, memes, and spirals until you’re unsure whether you’re in a confessional booth, a group chat, or a Slack channel with God. Conceived as a conceptual stunt — all 34 poems contain the word “cuck” — the collection is part digital performance, part cultural excavation, and surprisingly, part devotional text. Marshk, a pseudonymous author-editor working with generative AI, invites us into a book that feels both rigorously absurd and heartbreakingly sincere. The premise could have collapsed under its own irony. “Cuck,” after all, is one of the internet’s most weaponized words — once a fringe insult, now an all-purpose barb deployed across political, sexual, and cultural lines. But Marshk’s poems don’t just poke fun at the term; they metabolize it. They ask what it means to feel sidelined, to love without reciprocity, to e...

  By LC Croft In Husbandry , Matthew Dickman (author of All American Poem ) offers a collection as familiar as the kitchen sink—yet in its intimacy, as profound as a quiet epiphany. Composed entirely in terse, two‑line couplets, these poems distill the chaos of single fatherhood during COVID‑era lockdown into moments that feel both raw and transcendently lyrical. Driven by both anxiety and gratitude, the collection is a radical testament to the everyday sublime . Husbandry doesn’t engage in grand gestures—it persists in the persistent , finds music in repetition, and honors parenting as both drudgery and elevation. In a quiet, couplet‑driven whisper, Husbandry resounds like a roar.

  By Jeff Hebert Reading Ocean Vuong is like standing in a field of quiet explosions. Each line holds its breath just long enough to rupture the one before it. He writes as if language itself were a living, breakable thing — tender, volatile, and trembling with memory. With his debut poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds , Vuong established himself not just as a promising new voice, but as a necessary one. His lines carry the ache of inheritance — war, diaspora, queerness, love — but they do so with the grace of a dancer stepping over glass. There’s music in every syllable, silence between every image. His metaphors don’t just compare; they transfigure. A father becomes a bomb. A mother becomes a prayer. A boy becomes a question the world refuses to answer. In his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous , Vuong does the impossible again: he bends prose into poetry without sacrificing plot, character, or intimacy. The book is a letter, a confession, a flame. It pulses with t...

  By T.S. Craft When Rupi Kaur self-published her first book of poems in 2014, few could have predicted the global tremor that would follow. Her debut, Milk and Honey , with its stark lowercase vulnerability and line-broken heartbreak, exploded on Instagram before most literary gatekeepers knew what was happening. By the time traditional publishers caught up, Kaur was a phenomenon — not just a poet, but a brand, a movement, a mood. But is she changing poetry? That depends on who you ask. To her millions of fans — many of them young women of color navigating trauma, identity, and longing — Kaur is a revelation. Her work, often accompanied by hand-drawn line art, distills emotion into digestible doses: a few words that stab clean through, like a haiku with a selfie filter. She's democratized the form, taking poetry off the dusty bookshelf and dropping it into your feed. If Sylvia Plath had an iPhone, maybe she'd be posting like this too. To her critics, Kaur’s minimalist aes...