Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators
On Remembering My Friends, My First Job, and My Second-Favorite Weezer CD by Francisco Delgado
When his son uncovers a Weezer CD at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Cody Taitano recalls his first job at McDonald’s during his senior year of high school. Back in 1999, he is a quiet kid desperate to make friends. His classmates, though, see nothing about him worth knowing, and his own family often leave him to figure out his problems for himself. Cody’s life is disrupted when, while he bikes home from work, the police mistake him for the only other brown kid at his school. This brief encounter with the cops highlights the complex intertwined relationship between race and class Cody struggled with growing up and prompts him to ruminate on all the ways that people can make themselves responsible for each other—both as high school friends and as parents during a global pandemic.
Itinerant Songs by Terra Oliveira
For those of us that work and are weighed down, Terra Oliveira’s Itinerant Songs is a yearning for home—for safe, affordable shelter, clean, commonly-held water, and the rights to our own land and being amongst our people. Through low-wage jobs, the “hard-facts of devotion,” and pilgrimage and recovery, these poems are a politically urgent testament to our times as much as they are a lasting, spiritual attestation.
We Had Mansions by Mandy Shunnarah
In the spirit of documentary poetics, We Had Mansions is a luminous and unflinching debut by queer Palestinian Appalachian poet and journalist Mandy Shunnarah. Blending archival research with lived experience, Shunnarah composes poems that bear witness to the fractured geographies of diaspora, the disinformation campaigns that erase Palestinian humanity, and the personal and collective grief that is carried across generations.
These poems trace an intricate web of inheritance: the displacement of the Nakba and the echoes of exile in Alabama’s Bible Belt; religious trauma shaped by evangelical fundamentalism; the contradictions of assimilation; and the painful reconciliation of a family history marked by addiction, silence, and loss. With fierce clarity and lyrical precision, Shunnarah interrogates how Palestinians are depicted in Western media and asserts a counter-narrative rooted in truth, emotion, and unshakeable love for the homeland.
We Had Mansions resists reducing Palestinians to mere symbols of suffering. Alongside poems of resistance and survival, there are odes to joy, desire, and the domestic. Here, the sacred is complex, and the mythic is recast in the light of diaspora, with every love poem also serving as a Palestine poem. With formal dexterity and unwavering moral vision, Shunnarah claims space for a voice that is too often erased, transforming rage into testimony and tenderness into resistance. This is a vital new collection from a poet of searing insight and an expansive heart.
VAGABOND CITY 