Magra Books

Edited by Bill Mohr.

Bruce Boyd’s first book, Toward Morning: Selected Poems, is the most startling posthumous debut of any poet of the past century. Toward Morning, therefore, represents a massively overdue publication of a poet whose work appeared alongside the writing of Gary Snyder, Jack Spicer, and Stuart Z. Perkoff in such journals as Evergreen Review, Yugen, Measure, and Spicer’s legendary magazine, J. Boyd lived and wrote his poems in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Venice West, moving back and forth with an emblematic restlessness often associated with mid-century mendicant poets. Elusive as he was as a person, however, the themes of his poems point to the embodying value of an enduring vision, now finally if belatedly shared, and deserving of slow absorption and grateful celebration.

ISBN: 979-8-9926955-1-9
Pub. Date: April 15, 2026

Three corpora in one, Pretty Punks forges a complex and intertwined aesthetics drawn from the American South, Irish/ Irish-American folk traditions, and the complexities of gender. "Poems" takes Yeats as a starting point and diverges with great urgency. "Portrait" offers a compelling told-tale about Louisiana bull riding and loss. "Play" features players contemplating the existential punishment of both facing and being death.

With drawings by Emma Wolgast.

Pub. Date: December 1, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9926955-0-2

Pub. Date: November 14, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9926955-2-6

Magra Books is pleased to announce the publication of The Cartographer’s Lament, by Dennis Phillips. Now included in this masterful, book-length sequence, Magra first published Phillips’ 17 Meditations on Time in 2021. The poet, in his Lament, seeks to capture the evanescent, to grasp the ungraspable, wrestling with that oldest and most unmappable of mysteries, time. In this remarkable project, Phillips shows himself to be a true practitioner of the impossible.

Book designed by River Jukes-Hudson
with Drawings by Courtney Gregg

A World of Imperfect Haikus: Poems 2022 by Richard Milazzo is a book of poetry the author contends a “poetry lover (ugh!) will regret reading. And which I regret writing.” He believes in “neither poetry nor in the excuses that led him to “compile these complaints and lamentations, these manifestations of self-pity; existential stories out of school; an ideological bag of tricks resulting in an orgy of dialectical irresolutions, but which did not prevent me from lauding, at some subliminal level, these louche and outré characteristics. In the end, this is all you will find here.” We, the publishers, of course, beg to differ. But our opinions, evidently, mattered little to our author, unable, as we were, to dissuade him from this onslaught of self-deprecations, and ultimately from denouncing the book. A “poet with black wings,” indeed. Such is the title of a painting which Alessandro Twombly destroyed, but which did not stop the author from gracing the front cover with it. “What attracted me was the way the word ‘imperfect’ pointed in the direction of the so-called ‘flaw’ in the image, the lacuna — the damaged part, the missing part of every history, every image, every perception.” A poet with black wings, if ever there was one, “invested neither in the journey nor the destination.”

Edited by David Trinidad.

Pensive, philosophical, and prophetic, Rachel Sherwood’s Mysteries of Afternoon and Evening has been perennially discussed since posthumously edited by David Trinidad and published by Sherwood Press / Yarmouth Press in 1981. This revised and expanded second edition includes the original collection as well as drafts and revisions of Sherwood’s body of work, and other images of archival materials that complement the work’s particular timelessness.

Pub. Date: May 15, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-9926955-3-3