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

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

Gianluca Rizzo writes through a classic of world literature, Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, looking to the past for the right words to implicate the present. It is a daring experiment that disrupts, displaces, recontextualizes, and yet falls short of a proper betrayal. The slippery French prose is dragged through Italian and English as if to make a point: translation is a creative pursuit, the most loving kind of reading, an antidote to the bloated narcissism that afflicts us all, a respite from our contemporaries, a promontory where the future can be met on equal footing.  The accompanying visual poems run a separate but parallel course, from the elegance of Venetian Renaissance printing to the brute force of artificial intelligence.

DISPLACEMENTS features two previously unpublished prose poems, as well as a monologue and a sermon. If the mutability of collage, as Alan Wald suggests, engenders the poetic logic of prose poems, Mohr's comic permissiveness tethers their unfamiliar juxtapositions with puckish vivacity. The other pair of pieces strike a more contumacious note in the narrator's refusal to reconcile himself to a specious fate. In each work the lift-off of each sentence pushes aside not only what has preceded it, but the recoil of what might yet happen.  

In the poetic sequence, Eight, Amy Allara explores her recent days through a sustained revery of childhood. As musically deft a composition as Allara has accomplished, her masterful sense of collage shows above all in her compelling flights and harmonies. As she notes, “A minuet – its own ways and means.”

As with her previous two titles for Magra, A Theory of Consequence and Unfamiliar Terms, most remarkable about Allara’s poetry is the precision of her imaginings that are both fresh and moving. As Allara demands, with a child’s integrity, “Who would trade a reverie for a treatise?”

Drawings by Emma Wolgast

Selected from a longer work, Sogetti a cancellazione (Archipelago Itaca, 2022), Lorenzo Mari’s Cancellations is marked by continuing ‘slippage,’ lapses and indiscretions, as they remain the hallmark of this fugitive and haunting  work. While playing with different codes, including QR codes and automatically generated subtitles and translations, the young poet’s remarkable texts deal with the hypothesis that poetry may be an exploration on the verge of cancellation. “It isn’t flat, it’s a slope,” says Mari, “the place hasn’t an answer / to the song.”

Beginning with a pair of elegies for the Chicano poet Alfred Arteaga, the three sequences making up terra terra speak to the loss and displacement of our times and the long history of colonial violence that has occasioned them. Drawing in part on the Tristia, the Roman poet Ovid’s lament for his colonial exile on the frontiers of the Roman imperium, the poems open out on the still unfinished business of empire from Ireland to Afghanistan and from the Mediterranean to the Pacific. The chorus of their many voices sings of lament, persistence and resistance.

Photos by the author.

As with his two previous titles for Magra Books, Desert Sequence and 17 Meditations on Time, Dennis Phillips continues his explorations into harmony and time with this sequence of 14-line poems, Sonnets. His rhythms respond to the pulse of everyday life, with a language consistently tuneful and precise. From his readings of Dante to the early sunlight lending grace to the trees outside his window, the poet steadfastly dwells in these brief excursions.

Drawings by Courtney Gregg.

As with her previous Magra title, Theory of Consequence (2019), Amy Allara displays a relentless exploration of illness and the false clarity that often accompanies its consideration. Using fragments of medical lore from classical antiquity, such as Galen and Hippocrates, Allaraimmerses herself in a meditation upon body and brain, broken and whole, and how we come to know our own experience of the world. As with the earlier Theory of Consequence, this sequence, Unfamiliar Terms, is taken from the second part of a longer work of the same name. The precision of Allara’s verse gives the sequence a lyrical energy that is fresh and very moving.

Drawings by Michele Lombardelli.

Avery Burns’ latest poem In the Margins is an accretive sequence dealing with the unmentionable. The poet actively resisted writing a poem following both surgery and later radiation treatment for cancer. As time passed, the initial push to write to poem came from a vivid dream conflating a faceless doctor discussing cells being “in the margin” post-surgery and a book on cancer simply titled One. The shadowy mimetic structure of the poem evidences the poet’s ongoing lyric preoccupations of minimalism and vocabulary restraint.

Drawings by Giulio Lacchini.

In 17 Meditations on Time Dennis Phillips tries to capture the evanescent, to grasp the ungraspable, wrestling with that oldest and most unmappable of mysteries, time. In 2019 Talisman House brought out Mappa Mundi, Phillips’ 17th volume of poetry. With Mappa Mundi the book setting a predicate for “Mappa Mundi” the project, Phillips has written a second volume, The Cartographer’s Lament. Continuing the exploration of themes and variations, the Lament consists of ten sections, of which “17 Meditations on Time” is the second section.

Three Stories presents a collection of three linked fairy tales that are invigorated by strange language, visceral images, and baffling magic, as well as the implications of violence and love.

Art by Emma Wolgast.

Close-Up: Paul Celan is a selection, by renowned translator Norma Cole, from a conversation between Jean Daive and Bernhard Böschenstein, “Intime,” concerning their friend the remarkable poet Paul Celan. “Intime” recently appeared in Paris in Daive’s book, Paul Celan: Days and Nights. This e-book marks the 100th anniversary of Celan’s birth and the 50th anniversary of his death. In addition to three of her drawings, Cole has chosen a Celan poem, “Anabasis,” with both French and English versions to close the book.

with drawings by Paolo Colombo

Andrea Applebee’s Anemones is a poignant collection of poetry that delves into themes of loss, resilience, and nature's fleeting beauty. Through evocative imagery and lyrical language, Appleby explores the delicate interplay between human emotions and the natural world. The collection is marked by its rich, contemplative tone and introspective depth, capturing moments of vulnerability and strength. Each poem resonates with a quiet intensity, making Anemones a deeply moving and introspective read.

Selected from the opening section of Amelia Rosselli’s 1976 collection, Documento, Document is translators Lucia Re’s and Paul Vangelisti’s work-in-progress, presenting this vital, later book of this major Italian poet. Of Re’s and Vangelisti’s award-winning translation of Rosselli’s first book, War Variations (Variazioni belliche, 1964), Poetrymagazine’s on-line journal, Harriet, in 2016, noted that “Re and Vangelisti’s excellent translation of War Variations reveals Rosselli to be… perennially contemporary.” Drawings by Giuliano Della Casa.

The Insistent Island is a hybrid work, neither essay nor translation, but a poetic response to the myriad incarnations of the Odyssey; particularly Samuel Butler’s prose translation as lodged in Beck's memory from a 1980s audiobook rendition. The poems were written over some thirty years, finding their synergy unplanned and unexpected. Like Homer's originals, best taken with food and drink and, of course, a pinch of salt. Drawings by Michele Lombardelli.

The trio of sequences, Furrow Archive, honors Ezra Pound’s dictum, “Dichtung = condensare.” Concentrated, apparently slight lyrics and epigrams open onto wider fields and time scales, from the geological in Kodalith to the relation of interiority, music and history in The White Note. Light writing in stone, the furrows the poems carve constitute an archive of the instant meeting with duration in “momentary branchings of the breath.” Smoke drawings by Jessica Huang.

Poet Amy Allara’s unwavering concern for bona fide curiosity over false clarity is her guiding principle in A Theory of Consequence. Excerpted from the longer “Unfamiliar Terms,” Allara weaves ancient ideas about body and brain, broken and whole, into an investigation of how we come to know what we know, using the works of Hippocrates and Galen among the elements used to craft this candid, lyrical and emotionally moving Theory. Collages by Courtney Gregg.

More Fugues is a selection by poet Susanna Rabitti from a much longer work-in-progress titled Fughe [“Fugues”]. Music, in all its silent particularity, is the focus of the Rabitti’s arresting compositions. In 2018 Magra Books published Rabitti’s chapbook, Fugues, an initial selection of the work. Translated by poets Dennis Phillips & Paul Vangelisti, with drawings by Courtney Gregg. 

Mechanical Love is poet Milli Graffi’s chapbook-length selection from her influential 1994 book of the same title. Her mordant wit is foregrounded in this selection, underlining her ‘fabulous confrontation’ with the language that we daily inhabit. Working closely with the author, Mechanical Love also marks poet Dennis Phillips’ first publication as a translator.

On Marriage: The Imagination of Being is Douglas Messerli’s reflection on what the state of matrimony might mean in our time. It is an extended reflection upon that other person to whom a profound attachment makes a critical difference in our perception of ourselves. That he or she, in Messerli’s view, “who forces you into perceiving yourself as someone other than your own imagination of being.”

Fugues is a selection by poet Susanna Rabitti from her much longer work-in-progress of the same name. Music, in all its silent particularity, is the focus of the Rabitti’s compositions, offering a much needed respite from all the noise, social, political and cultural, promoted by the corporate neo-liberal state. 

In the Odes is Neeli Cherkovski’s homage to two of the most important influences in his career as a poet, Confucius and Ezra Pound. A mature look, as well as a poetic inventory and self-examination, of what it has meant for Cherkovski to be a poet immersed in the natural world. As Pound looked to Confucius, Cherkovski examines his own work in the light of the 20th century master’s debt to the Confucian tradition. 

A previously uncollected and unpublished radio drama by the ground-breaking Italian poet Corrado Costa. Never part of Costa’s collected writings in Italian, The Dodo was composed in 1979-1980 for Pacifica Radio’s “Los Angeles Theater of the Ear” (L.A.T.E.) and premiered on KPFK Radio in Los Angeles in March 1980. The contemporary and the ancient mix in dizzying fashion in this one-act drama, driving the listener/reader to seek shelter in a shelter-less and unremitting aural landscape. “Who’s there?” one is finally forced to exclaim, along with the main character ringing, as well as the characters answering their door bells.

With several of Corrado Costa’s witty & curious drawings to highlight the script. 

In Gillian Conoley’s new collection, the four poems, “Preparing One’s Consciousness for the Avatar,” “Recipe for the Avatar,” “The Right to Be Forgotten” and “Life on Earth,” challenge language to meet its utopian obligations, and to overcome those all too familiar pragmatic expectations that have come to infect our imaginations. Conoley’s poetic vision, as radical as any today, insists upon nothing less than astonishment: “Jay a cobalt flash in the honeysuckle its head already gone (beyond itself).” Two collages by Courtney Gregg highlight the volume.

A previously unpublished work by the poet Robert Crosson. A highly condensed mock epic in the form of a memoir, The Price of Lemons chronicles the young writers life in the fifties as an undergraduate at UCLA, the start of his career as an actor and time spent abroad in Spain on the island of Mallorca. Search as he might for a better life and an alternative to McCarthyism’s vision of Amerika, our young protagonist is constantly forced back to his own devices and to the written page that will come to define his life. A bizarre and hilarious coming of age tale in the highly original manner of Robert Crosson’s compostions.

Two collages by Los Angeles artist Courtney Gregg bookend the opening and closing of this tale.