Massachusetts Poetry Festival

We were so glad to attend MassPoFest for the first time with River River Books! Many thanks to Chiara Di Lello for snapping a photo of editor Han at the Small Press Fair on Saturday (y’all, be on the lookout for Chiara’s chapbook, forthcoming from Game Over Books!), and to connect with poets we adore (Carolyn Oliver! Becky Hart Olander! Suzanne Frischkorn! Shira Dentz! Adrie Rose! Ruben Quesada! Emily Kramer! Catherine Rockwood! Rachel Trousdale! DeMisty Bellinger! Keetje Kuipers! Stephanie Burt AND MORE!). Massachusetts is glittering with amazing poets—surely the spirit of Dickinson abides. Thanks for the amazing welcome, all.

If you MISSED US, you can head over to our bookshop for 20% off our poetry with the code SUMMER2025, now through the end of July! (Also, note we now have a permanent student and teacher discount in our online store: EDUCATION15)

What we are doing now…

We are currently reading our summer manuscripts as they come in through Duotrope (we are open all of May and June to full-length poetry manuscripts, our complete guidelines here, model contract here), reading our River Anthology submission essays (y’all sent us some incredible work, thank you!), and working on editing and design for our fall and spring titles. Amorak and I just wrapped up eventful spring semesters, so it has been a LOT, and we can both finally breathe a little. I would like twenty naps, thanks.

I’ll also be offering the workshop Finding Shape in the Dark: on writing difficult narratives twice this summer (with the proceeds from the $100 suggested donation going directly to the press), so I hope you consider taking it, or passing the description along to a friend. Full description below!

Description: I have been thinking about offering this workshop for sometime, after spending the last decade writing through different forms of historical & family trauma, violence, and healing. I am not a therapist, and the framing of this workshop comes from being a writer and approaching difficult narratives from a writer’s perspective: how do we give shape to trauma narratives, to unwieldy family stories, to personal accounts? How do we deal with memory gaps, empty spaces, lack of documents, family silences, linguistic disruption and failure? Conversely, how do we approach an abundance of material, an overwhelm of information? A box of letters we can barely stand to look at? Confederate roll calls? Court documents? I’ll be walking us through some practical, formal approaches to writing these narratives that have aided me, and also drawing from the community of books I’ve read in my own healing and processing journey (always ongoing), such as What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo, Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing by Jen Soriano, but also documentary poetic work such as Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip, Defacing the Monument by Susan Briante, Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, and Denise Levertov’s The Poet in the World. Touchstone poetic texts will include Jenny George’s The Dream of Reason, in case you are someone who wants to read ahead of time.

Participants will receive an inclusive reading packet as well as several writing prompts, and feedback from me on a selection of poems up to 15 pages.

I’m offering these workshops in part to raise funds for River River Books, and in part because I’ve wanted to offer this workshop for some time. I’m asking for a $100 donation, which you can make here, but also: I want you to be there if you want to be there, don’t worry about the money.

Email [email protected] and let me know what date you’d like a spot saved. I’ll probably cap around 10 people.

That is all for now, but we hope you find some incredible books of poetry this summer to read. Both editors have been reading Keetje Kuipers’ Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (BOA), Han has been reading Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters and Civil Disobediences (Coffeehouse Press), and we just can’t emphasize enough how important a time it is to buy directly from small presses. Yes, supporting your local bookstore matters (especially the co-op bookstores and leftist bookstores like Letters Bookshop and Firestorm Books), but if you want small presses to survive, you must buy directly from them, because that is where they actually make their money. I know Coffeehouse currently has a 20% off sale right now (as do we!). Go get your revolutionary texts, babes. Arm your minds.

Much love,

Han (& Amorak)