Poets & Writers Magazine

As a literary agent, I’m often asked what I look for in a book. Over the years, I’ve realized the answer isn’t so different from what I look for as a reader. I want to feel compelled to keep turning pages. I want to stay up too late, promising myself “just one more chapter,” only to realize I can’t put the book down. Recently, I’ve come to understand that this feeling is rooted in curiosity. The books that stay with me—be they fiction or nonfiction—are the ones that continuously pose questions.

“Let America be America again. / Let it be the dream it used to be. / Let it be the pioneer on the plain / Seeking a home where he himself is free.

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain, whose novel, Bone Horn, is out today from Soft Skull. “If you had a horn, where would you keep it? Where in your life would someone find a record of it? An email to a plastic surgeon? In a message to a friend?” These are the questions the narrator, a newly registered private investigator in dire straits, must ask herself. She has just received a mysterious call from an anonymous client who is convinced that Alice B.

When my daughter was small, I found very little time for my writing and began to rely on residencies in focused bursts. When I told this to Alice Notley, a key mother-poet in my life, she scolded me and said I should touch in with my work every day, even if for a few minutes.

As climate collapse transforms our experiences of the natural world, researchers are sounding the alarm that smells and scents will become extinct alongside changes in plant biodioversity, weather-related phenomena, and the evolution of the world’s landscapes of man-made structures.

In an interview for the Poetry Society of America, Diane Seuss talks to Jennifer Franklin about how she writes with a keen awareness of the body as a site of both immense precarity and radical agency. When considering the role of structure in poetry, Seuss draws a parallel between the literary form and human form, how language can be compressed and lead through the formal constraints of a poetic form in the same way the human body can act as an impediment and a guide.

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Monica Datta, whose novel Nebraska is out today from Astra House. It’s Thanksgiving 2006, and the Chatterjees are not alright. Prabir Chatterjee has arrived at a prison in upper upstate New York to collect his wife, Anna, who has just spent fourteen years behind bars for manslaughter after she jumped in front of a train and took their eight-year-old son with her.

In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 274. I began my writing career as a poet—an unsuccessful, unpublished poet. From the time I was young, I have always loved poetry, especially poems with rhyme and structure and meter: the sonnet, the villanelle, the sestina…. Smitten with the work of Elizabeth Bishop and A. E. Stallings, I envied poets and what I saw as the orderly security of those lovely forms.

The first several times I brought up the word brand to my authors, I was met with hesitation, confliction, embarrassment, and even sometimes disgust. No one wanted to think of their life’s work in those kinds of shorthand, commercialized terms. However, we live in an age of algorithms, SEO, metadata, and sales track. Even for the most literary books, publishers care very much about these things, and they will think about your work that way, even if you don’t.

Edna Bonhomme reads from her memoir, Tending to Our Wounds: A Diasporic Memoir, published by Haymarket Books in June 2026.