The news is horrific, but the sun is shining in Tennessee and I’m spending as much time as I can outside, despite The Great Pollening. I hope you all are taking care of yourselves and learning how to show up for your communities. Grab one of these new Southern releases (ideally some poetry to celebrate National Poetry Month) and settle in for a spring picnic.
Wolvers
By Taylor Brown
April 7, 2026
St Martin’s: “A suspenseful, thrillingly-written tale set at the burning edge of today’s Southwest, where once-extinct wolves have returned, the land is tinder-dry and fragile, and desperate men seek to reclaim what they believe is theirs to rule.”
If Only the Rain Would Come
By Natalie Sypolt
April 7, 2026
University Press of Kentucky: “At the center of this gritty novel-in-stories is Hazel. A teacher at the local elementary school, she is intelligent, introspective, and lonely. … As the residents of Warm, West Virginia, cope with addiction, grief, poverty, and abandonment, Hazel must confront her own life choices and weigh their cost. Revealed through a brilliant chorus of voices with dialogue that sings off the page, Natalie Sypolt’s If Only the Rain Would Come is unflinchingly honest and deeply human.”
Self-Portrait as the “i” in Florida
By P. Scott Cunningham
April 7, 2026
Autumn House Press: “Cunningham’s second collection weaves together ecological and familial landscapes, capturing both the spectacle — burning sugarcane fields, snake farms, chaotic highways — and the daily rituals that bind a family: school drop-offs, sick days, and small kindnesses. Blending formalist and free verse, the book becomes both an inquiry into belonging and a celebration of the essential everyday moments that define a life. At once panoramic and deeply personal, Cunningham writes with a documentarian’s eye and a father’s heart.”
I’ll Take My Body To-Go
By Kindall Fredricks
April 7, 2026
University of Akron Press: “Kindall Fredricks’ debut collection, I’ll Take My Body To-Go, begins by following a rattling hive of girls who came of age in the early 2000s. … With brazen reverence, Fredricks does not shy from illuminating the trauma of their lived experiences, which are a rejection of the wax-paper world of girlhood that is so often portrayed—together, they flick the ashes of amen to the dirt, shoplift cheap wine from gas stations, and hunt for any escape from the everyday violence girls are expected to endure. I’ll Take My Body To-Go is about girls who listened, women who are listening still.”
Work to Do
By Jules Wernersbach
April 7, 2026
University of Iowa Press: “Eleanor and Meg founded Guadalupe Street Co-op in the early 1980s. Together, they envisioned an idyllic grocery store owned by its workers and customers. But after only a year, Meg bolted, leaving Eleanor with a floundering business and an angry, unhealing wound. Forty years later, Guadalupe Street Co-op is an iconic Austin business with a loyal customer base, an antiquated business model, and a disgruntled staff. Unfolding over the course of a single week during Texas hurricane season, Work to Do pings between the co-op’s first year and present day, as the unionization bid reaches fever pitch. Who owns the grocery store? And who has a right to its future? Will the workers ever be paid enough to buy the organic groceries they shelve?”
Into the Night Woods
By E. Davis Enloe
April 14, 2026
Regal House: “In the heart of the North Carolina Appalachians, a summer of escape becomes a fight for survival in this gripping thriller. Thirteen-year-old Boyd is sent to his grandfather’ s farm after a schoolyard fight, where he’ s expected to spend the summer working the land and praying. But Boyd has other plans. Alongside Roger, Boyd embarks on an adventure to find an abandoned trestle and explore a cave with personal significance. … In the end, the adventure he craves brings with it unimaginable loss, forcing him to confront the darkness within the world…and himself.”
Reverse Requiem
By Ina Cariño
April 14, 2026
Alice James: “These soulful and elegiac poems, written in Cariño’s signature saturated lines, follow a speaker shaped by both subtle and profound personal tragedies. The collection’s emotional resonance is deepened by its formal inventiveness: poems shift in length, tone, and use of white space, mirroring the fractured, nonlinear journey at the book’s heart. The title, Reverse Requiem, suggests a retracing of a life: rather than unfolding chronologically, the poems are guided by the speaker’s shifting mental and emotional states. Early pieces carry a stark, dirge-like weight that gradually gives way to glimmers of hope — proposing that healing, though never linear, remains within reach.”
Underlake
By Erin L. McCoy
April 21, 2026
Doubleday: “Hypnotic and arresting, Underlake brings a poet’s attention to language, evoking the ethereal work of Marilynne Robinson, Lauren Groff, and Emily St. John Mandel and the imaginative brio of Margaret Atwood. In taking her place as a major new voice in American fiction, McCoy shrewdly explores the American obsession with land, inheritance, and race, asking what we cling to when the world changes — and who gets erased in the name of preserving it.”
Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir
By Jayne Anne Phillips
April 21, 2026
Knopf: “Jayne Anne Phillips grew up in the small town of Buckhannon, West Virginia. The distinctly American landscape of Appalachia — dense with forests and small churches, rich in history and misunderstandings — has been the great setting for her fiction, even as she and her boundless imagination have traveled to other times and places. … Tender, inviting, sparkling with wisdom and open-heartedness, Small Town Girls is part coming-of-age story, part social history, Jayne Anne Phillips’s most personal, most accessible book yet — a love letter to the place and the people who have shaped her perceptions and her writing.”
What the Mirror Said
By Ashley M. Jones
April 21, 2026
University of Michigan Press: “Part critical essay, part personal essay collection, What the Mirror Said traces the influence of nine Black women poets in Jones’s writing and life. She brings together historical biographical information, personal reflection, and close readings as she explores personal connections to poets from Phillis Wheatley to Patricia Smith. This book is expansive in its study, from classical metrical scansion to metaphorical explication. In offering new ways to interpret poems by important contemporary poets, What the Mirror Said makes the case for the need to study and celebrate Black women poets.”
A History of Heartache
By Patrick Strickland
April 21, 2026
Melville House: “With taut sentences and a wicked sense of humor, these 14 stories chart the small mercies and big mistakes that make a life: the songs we inherit, the bottles we empty, the tools we fashion from whatever’s at hand. Gritty and tender in the same breath, this debut fiction collection asks what it costs to stay, what it takes to leave, and who we become when we do. Readers of Denis Johnson and Ron Rash will recognize the hard light, bruised humor, and sudden grace that burn through these pages.”
Southern Review of Books 