Now Read This – VAGABOND CITY

Everything, Issue 119, Issue 98, Now Read This

Now Read This: May 2026

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Gold Star by Emma McKenna Drawn from the experience of growing up in poverty in a single-parent home and escaping to the city at the age of sixteen, these poems look at the physical and emotional implications of trauma but also reveal how being bisexual and […]

Everything, Issue 118, Issue 98, Now Read This

Now Read This: April 2026

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators All Us Beautiful Monsters by Alex Lemon Having extensively detailed his experience with a traumatic brain injury, Alex Lemon writes with the remarkable ability to transform the depth of pain into brilliant light. His enthralling new collection charts a visual map of the sprawling mind, translating […]

Everything, Issue 116, Issue 98, Now Read This

Now Read This: February 2026

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Do you have a lit journal issue, chapbook, book, or other work that’s about to be published? Email us at vagabondcityliterary@gmail.com to be added to our Books Available to Review list and/or featured on an upcoming Now Read This list.

Everything, Issue 115, Issue 98, Now Read This

Now Read This: January 2026

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Cancer Courts My Mother by LindaAnn LoSchiavo “Cancer Courts My Mother” gives voice to the creativity borne out of the experience of late-stage cancer from the perspective of a caregiver and a daughter. Written with candor, warmth, and grace, these poems explore universal themes of sorrow, […]

Everything, Issue 114, Issue 98, Now Read This

Now Read This | December 2025

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela https://www.ndbooks.com/book/we-are-green-and-trembling/Cabezón Cámara and Translated by Robin Myers Deep in the wilds of the New World, Antonio de Erauso begins to write a letter to his aunt, the prioress of the Basque convent he escaped as a young girl. Since […]

Everything, Issue 113, Now Read This

Now Read This | November 2025

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators The Light Becomes Us by Colleen S. Harris The Light Becomes Us is a collection of narrative poems exploring how the American family holds both the grace to save us and the tragedies that doom us. Poems from the perspectives of mother and daughter delve into […]

Everything, issue 112, Now Read This

Now Read This: October 2025

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Now Flourish Northern Cardinal: Selected Poems 2005-2025 by Darren C. Demaree A sweeping collection that spans two decades of poetry—storm and salvation, devastation and beauty, carried in lines that linger like thunder. The Light Becomes Us by Colleen S. Harris The Light Becomes Us is a […]

Everything, issue 111, Issue 98, Now Read This

Now Read This: September 2025

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Peppermint by Amber Isaac “And I was taught not to use certain words in poems / but sometimes I act undisciplined to feel better” Amber states in the opening poem of Peppermint. Through cutting matter-of-fact language, Peppermint is a reel of personal lore: a childhood on a farm in […]

Everything, Issue 110, Issue 98, Now Read This

Now Read This: August 2025

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 […]

Everything, Issue 109, Issue 98, Now Read This

Now Read This: July 2025

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Poetry Is Not a Luxury: Poems for All Seasons by Anonymous Inspired by writer and philosopher Audre Lorde’s famous claim: “Poetry is not a luxury,” this anthology proves the vitality of poetry as a crucial source of inspiration, comfort, and delight. In a first section, “Summer,” […]

Everything, Issue 98, Now Read This

Now Read This: June 2025

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators The Blue Door by Janice Deal Is a parent responsible for a child who commits a crime? If so, how can she deal with that burden? These are the questions that haunt Flo when her daughter Teddy plans to visit after a long separation. The prospect […]

Everything, Issue 98, Now Read This

Now Read This: May 2025

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators The Nothing by Lauren Davis The Nothing, Lauren Davis’s debut fiction collection, exists on the whisper between reality and illusion. Think Shirley Jackson’s characters stuck in the damp Pacific Northwest or an Olympic Peninsula funhouse mirror held up to Karen Russell’s Florida. The worlds Davis creates […]

Everything, issue 106, Issue 98, Now Read This

Now Read This: April 2025

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators When Whales Went Back to the Water by Lisa Baird Steely, tender, and sensual, Lisa Baird’s When Whales Went Back to the Water creates a reverent container for a broken world. These poems are hymns to living in wonder through loss, joy, motherhood’s sleepless nights, domestic violence, and […]

Everything, issue 105, Issue 98, Now Read This

Now Read This: March 2025

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Pause the Document by Mónica de la Torre As the world shuts down, Mónica de la Torre’s poems become gregarious sites of encounter—homages to connections lost and new bonds forged. Shuttling between lyrical and experimental modes, the poems in Pause the Document challenge linear notions of time by […]

Everything, issue 104, Issue 98, Now Read This

Now Read This: Feburary 2025

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Beyond the Watershed by Nadia Alexis A hybrid collection of poetry and photography, Beyond the Watershed explores the various experiences of a Haitian American daughter and her Haitian immigrant mother. Nadia Alexis crafts a moving portrayal of generational trauma, domestic violence, survival, and reclamation using stunning […]

Everything, issue 103, Issue 98, Now Read This

Now Read This: January 2025

Everything, Issue 101, Now Read This

Now Read This: November 2024

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators So Much More: Abstracts, Unfinished Sequences, and Political Prose Poems by Darren C. Demaree So Much More is a collection of interstitial wants and fears. Quilted together in a way that can amplify the abstracts, the sequences, the political prose poems, this book works with an energy […]

Everything, issue 100, Issue 98, Now Read This

Now Read This: October 2024

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators No One Knows Their Blood Type by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat (Translated by Hazem Jamjoum) No One Knows Their Blood Type is a novel of identity, belonging, and conflicting truths—of stories, secrets, songs, rumors, and lies. On the day that her father dies, Jumana makes a discovery […]

Everything, Issue 98, Now Read This

Now Read This: September 2024

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators DEED by torrin a. greathouse DEED, the follow-up to torrin a. greathouse’s 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award winning debut, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, is a formally and lyrically innovative exploration of queer sex and desire, and what it can cost. Sprawling across art, eros, […]

Everything, Issue 98, Now Read This

Now Read This: August 2024

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators You Could Be That Kind of Girl: stories by Téa Franco Frida Kahlo resurrects as a social media influencer, a girl feeds all of her food to a bloom of angry ladybugs, a skunk funeral makes a young woman contemplate her life and more in Téa […]

Everything, Issue 97, Now Read This

Now Read This: July 2024

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Sex Goblin by Lauren Cook As if hauled up squirming from the bowels of the internet, Sex Goblin metabolizes sex writing, popular culture, and autofiction to present the real and the imagined as equally surreal possibilities. In the narrator’s childlike voice, all things become both mundane […]

Everything, Issue 96, Now Read This

Now Read This | June 2024

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Discovery by Dee Allen In New York City during the Truman years, two photographers met and worked with their greatest discovery – a blue-eyed, fresh-faced brunette from Nashville who stepped before their cameras, bound to change the game. The poems in Discovery – Oakland performance poet […]

Everything, Issue 95, Now Read This

Now Read This | May 2024

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators NDA by Lily Lady NDA by poet and filmmaker Lily Lady is an intimate and opaque poetry collection about [REDACTED] and [REDACTED]. Spiral upward, downward, and side to side. From the safe words of New York to the alleys of Los Angeles….and all the flights in […]

Everything, Issue 94, Now Read This, vagabond city

Now Read This | April 2024

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Crimson Stain: Poems Inspired by King’s letter from jail, Real Life & a Facet of Blood Diamond Culture by Dee Allen In Winter 2007, a full-time college student broke 7 years of writer’s block by writing a new poem, generated while reading Martin Luther King’s Letter […]

Everything, Issue 93, Now Read This

Now Read This | March 2024

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators The Sadness of Shadows by Lola Ancira (translated by Juana Adcock) Lola Ancira’s third short story collection, and the first to be translated into English, gives voice to those who have been marginalised and condemned to live life in the shadows of lunacy, nostalgia, loss and […]

Now Read This

Now Read This: February 2024

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Alt-Nature by Saretta Morgan Alt-Nature moves in the desert dreams and riverbeds, an emergent chorus feeling toward languages of connection of the American Southwest. These poems open to the desert as a practice of sensuality. Landscapes and Black queer social ecologies illuminate an anti-map of interior […]

Everything, Issue 91, Now Read This

Now Read This | January 2024

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Yaguareté White by Diego Báez In Diego Báez’s debut collection, Yaguareté White, English, Spanish, and Guaraní encounter each other through the elusive yet potent figure of the jaguar. The son of a Paraguayan father and a mother from Pennsylvania, Baéz grew up in central Illinois as […]

Issue 90, Now Read This

Now Read This | December 2023

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators One Impossible Step by Orides Fontela (translated by Chris Daniels) In her lifetime, Orides Fontela resisted all labels, all attempts to situate her work in a particular movement, school, tendency, or tradition. Here, in her first ever English-language collection, Fontela’s poetry continues to defy easy categorization. […]

Everything, Issue 87, Now Read This

Now Read This: September 2023

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Black Joy Unbound: An Anthology Inspired by a deep longing for writing that embodies the vivacity of Blackness and Black life, Black Joy Unbound is a multi-genre collection that encompasses a broad spectrum of literary writing on Black joy. Maps You Can’t Make by Mariella Saavedra […]

Everything, issue 86, Now Read This

Now Read This: August 2023

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators As If She Had a Say by Jennifer Fliss Who has a right to tell us how to experience our grief? How to perform—or not perform—the roles society prescribes to us based on our various points of identity? As If She Had a Say, the second story […]

Everything, Issue 85, Now Read This

Now Read This: July 2023

Teeter by Kimberly Alidio Comprised of three long poems, Teeter knows experimental forms can be as intimate as mothering; knows we can understand languages we do not speak. From “Hearing”s intensities of attention, to “Ambient Mom”’s familial Filipino immigrant soundscapes, to “Histories”s careful scrutiny of the socially-sanctioned narratives and trajectories to which we are meant […]

Everything, Issue 84, Now Read This, vagabond city

Now Read This: June 2023

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Sex With My Family by Jessica Anne Musings on infertility, cows, longing & freedom by an anemic woman in the winter of her 41st year. Glass Essays by J. A. Bernstein Glass Essays juxtapose the miracles of parenting and birth with the mysteries of death and […]

Everything, Issue 83, Now Read This, vagabond city

Now Read This: May 2023

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators This Conversation Is Being Recorded by Hannah Kezema Hannah Kezema’s hybrid debut, This Conversation Is Being Recorded, is a vibrant collection of poems and erasures of painted, dirtied, and flora-filled legal documents and interview notes from her experiences as an investigator and editor in the insurance […]

Everything, Issue 82, Now Read This

Now Read This: April 2023

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Black Avatar and Other Essays by Amit Majmudar Black Avatar and Other Essays is the first nonfiction collection by internationally acclaimed poet, novelist, and translator Amit Majmudar. Combining elements of memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, the eight pieces in this deeply engaging volume reflect the […]

Everything, Issue 81, Now Read This, vagabond city

Now Read This: March 2023

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Common Life by Stéphane Bouquet (translated by Lindsay Turner) In three poems, one play, and three short stories, Stéphane Bouquet’s Common Life offers a lively, searching vision of contemporary life, politics, and sociality. At a moment at which the fabric of everyday social life is increasingly threatened […]

Everything, Issue 80, Now Read This

Now Read This: February 2023

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators the luxury by Darren C. Demaree “In the luxury, Darren C. Demaree constructs a response to the catastrophic death of the natural world that enacts rage, love, and grief all at once. Filled with endless lyricism and an unpunctuated momentum, Demaree’s poems cascade and overflow. As […]

Everything, Issue 79, Now Read This

Now Read This: January 2023

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Common Life by Stéphane Bouquet and translated by Lindsay Turner In three poems, one play, and three short stories, Stéphane Bouquet’s Common Life offers a lively, searching vision of contemporary life, politics, and sociality. At a moment at which the fabric of everyday social life is […]

Everything, Issue 78, Now Read This

Now Read This: December 2022

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Another Way to Split Water by Alycia Pirmohamed In Alycia Pirmohamed’s debut collection, Another Way to Split Water, a woman’s body expands and contracts across the page, fog uncoils at the fringes of a forest, and water in all its forms cascades into metaphors of longing […]

Everything, Issue 77, Now Read This

Now Read This: November 2022

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Prescribee by Chia-Lun Chang Reading Prescribee is not dissimilar to the experience of coming across a recipe in a vintage American cookbook: it transforms the familiar ingredients of contemporary life into an uncanny, discomfiting concoction. Wielding English as a foreign language and medium, Chang redefines the […]

Everything, Issue 76, Now Read This, vagabond city

Now Read This: October 2022

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators A Queen in Bucks County by Kay Gabriel In A Queen in Bucks County, our protagonist Turner, who both is and is not the writer, makes his pleasurable way through miserable space. Men “buy him things,” lovers drive across state lines, users down volatile cocktails to […]

Everything, issue 75, Now Read This

Now Read This: September 2022

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators space neon neon space by luna rey hall space neon neon space is a striking collection on the body. luna’s voice is strong & momentous, and explores language with movement that will give you shivers! PTSD Poems to Slay Demons by Robin L Harvey Author Robin […]

Everything, Issue 74, Now Read This

Now Read This: August 2022

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Togetherness by Wo Chan Togetherness sends out sparks from its electric surface, radiating energy and verve from within its deep and steady emotional core: stories of the poet’s immigrant childhood spent in their family’s Chinese restaurant, culminating in a deportation battle against the State. These narrative threads […]

Everything, Issue 73, Now Read This

Now Read This: July 2022

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Iguana Iguana by Caylin Capra-Thomas: Alive to the beauty and anxiety of new worlds and people, Iguana Iguana imagines a tough and tender soundtrack for tumbleweeds in search of roots. Recursive, deliberate, and as adaptive as their titular lizard, these poems invite us to listen so […]

Everything, Issue 72, Now Read This

Now Read This: June 2022

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators La Movida by Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta: Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta croons in the voice of a lovesick teenaged folklorist time traveler about revolution, housework, anti-colonialism, folk tales, post-punk, anti-fascism, anorexia, and alcoholism. Named both for the Chicana feminist concepts of revolutionary maneuvers and submerged technologies of struggle and the explosive […]

Everything, Issue 71, Now Read This, vagabond city

Now Read This: May 2022

Highlighting recently released works by marginalized creators THE LOST CONVERSATION: Interviews with an Enduring Avant-Garde by Sara Farrington“In this collection of interviews conducted between 2019-2021 with New York theater artists who have spent their lives working in and inventing the avant-garde, playwright Sara Farrington brings to light a series of “lost conversations” about class, race, […]

Everything, Issue 70, Now Read This, vagabond city

Now Read This: April 2022

Highlighting recently released works by marginalized creators Aerial Concave Without Cloud by Sueyeun Juliette Lee “Aerial Concave Without Cloud is a collection of poetry steeped in the bluest apocalypse light of solar collapse and the pale, ghostly light of personal devastation and grief. Through a combination of academic research and the salp’uri dance form, Sueyeun Juliette […]

Everything, Issue 69, Now Read This

Now Read This: March 2022

Highlighting recently released works by marginalized creators Beast at Every Threshold by Natalie WeeDescription from Arsenal Pulp Press: An unflinching shapeshifter, Beast at Every Threshold dances between familial hauntings and cultural histories, intimate hungers and broader griefs. Memories become malleable, pop culture provides a backdrop to glittery queer love, and folklore speaks back as a […]