Broadstone Books celebrates the stunning achievement that is the completion of Estill Pollock’s seven volume poetry cycle CARTOGRAPHIC PROJECTIONS OF A SPHERE. Ranging over virtually the entirety of Western canon, culture, history, and science, exhibiting mastery of a wide range of poetry styles and voices, the volumes that make up this series reveal a profound mind and a contemplative spirit at work, and play, in the realm of language. No poetry library that seeks to include the greatest works of the last decade is complete without this series.

We are offering the entire cycle at one-third off the individual retail price (and claiming the POETS24 discount code at checkout will save an additional 20 percent.)

Read below for Estill’s responses to our questions about his process and intentions for this series:

When did you realize that these individual poems written over a very long time in a variety of styles and addressing an incredibly wide range of subjects, then aggregating into individual volumes, were part of a sweeping cycle?

Although there are many poems and these could be said to be written in different voices, thematically there are common threads throughout the works — historical references that balance personal experience and the chronological sweep of factual instance and subject intimacy, the shifting nature of time as it may be apprehended within human interactions and subjective memory and the sooty corners of daily life we return to, long after the grand parade has passed — nothing in the work is invented; it is simply a trick of recollecting the present tense as through metaphysical veils. A better explanation might be to think of ‘today’ as once being someone’s distant future and in the same breath too to recognise it as someone’s distant past. Time is everywhere and nowhere; this table is of oak, but it is also a seething knot of subatomic particles. 

And once you did, how did that affect your poetry writing and manuscript assembly process, if at all?

The writing itself is a byproduct of the philosophy noted above. There is no hand-wringing or longingly inspirational asides. The poem begins with a phrase, which becomes a line, then a stanza, then another, then the poem. I think all the books in the Cartographic Projections of a Sphere series were each written in a couple of months. I follow the thread.

How did you decide when you were done with this cycle? Were you writing/compiling toward a predetermined end state?

In the Carto series there was an arc, a kind of charged atmosphere that made itself known, and I think I simply let myself be drawn along its way. Even when I wasn’t physically setting down the poems I was aware of this atmospheric charge, invisible but pervasive, at least as concerned the writing of poems.

While you've lived most of your life in the UK, you occasionally revisit your US (Kentucky) roots in your work. Do you regard yourself as a transatlantic author in terms of your life experience and perspective, part Brit, part Yank? How do these poems serve your larger objectives?

I have lived in England for several decades, certainly far longer than I lived in Kentucky or in the U.S. generally. There was a time when I considered my life in England one of exile, both in fact and conscience. I have returned to the U.S. twice only in all that time, and I think now it’s unlikely that I will ever return. British writer L.P. Hartley’s line, that the past is another country, is well known. What is not often noted is the concluding phrase, ‘…they do things differently there.’ Although my roots are in Kentucky, and I circle back to memories of people and places there from time to time, I know that these no longer exist, the way that people cease to exist, or buildings or country lanes or a house from one’s childhood. 

Publication Date: October 31, 2026

Paperback, 114 pages 

ISBN: 978-1-966677-62-8

Coinciding with the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, In Shallah by poet Rashidah Ismaili captures the Muslim response to those events and their aftermath, a volume filled with grief and despair taking the reader on a journey of family and community displacement as a metaphor for that response, reflecting the continuing loss – fueled by prejudice and  misunderstanding – to a community still struggling to recover itself.

Praise for Rashidah Ismaili & In Shallah

Rashidah Ismaili – novelist, professor, activist, and founder of Salon d’Afrique – in  this searing collection In Shallah  brings the lives of uprooted refugees drifting from snow to sea, widows waiting endlessly at windows, grandmothers carrying the memories of an olive tree severed from its land. Clear-eyed and luminous, Ismaili transforms a lifetime of listening into fierce acts of witness – to exile, cruelty and love. In Shallah – “In God’s Time / God Willing” – offers a window into a tragic episode and the consequences still felt a quarter of a century afterwards.

—Dr. Hisham Aidi, political scientist & author

“Poems cannot comfort the dying” writes Rashidah Ismaili in her collection, In Shallah. And yet, ironically, her words aspire to do just that. “Each tooth” she says,
“break forth to test the teats of a yielding mother.” These poems inexorably track the connectivity of life, generation to generation, practice by practice, noting how in the midst of suffering, knowledge grows and is passed on. It’s how we thwart the dying, how somehow, life continues.

In language often sacred and profound, clear and distilled, this poet reminds us that poetry is a tool, an art trying to find a way “to say, to gather colours to paint the smell of dismembered death.” Her poems compress time – “Yesterday is today,” she writes. In narrow verses, she presents trauma and wonder in the same voice, lets us journey her ancient land, feel “the stones under the soles, stop with her at a house of stone and dirt floors” She describes hunger as “the music of missed meals.”

Years ago I heard Ismaili read “The Shaming of an Olive Tree,” the final poem in this book. I was stunned then by the beauty of lines, by the connection of words to deed and outcome. I am stilled now, seeing for myself how her words move across the page. And I feel compelled to return to one of her earlier observations. “I watch the sinews of hand / hands that held my father’s oud.” She brings the same acute power to witness the ugliness and beauty of the world.

—Mervyn Taylor, author of Unpainted Houses

About the Author

Rashidah Ismaili is an academic and writer. Her works have been widely anthologised, recently included in New Daughters of Africa (ed. Margaret Busby). Her novel in linked stories Autobiography of the Lower East Side has been well received, and the second volume in the trilogy of An African Woman in New York (of which the autobiography is the first) is due out late Spring 2027. It is titled Turmoil of Truth.

Ismaili was a member of Umbra, a group of mostly African-American writers and visual artists active in the Sixties on the Lower East Side of New York City. Umbra was short lived but was a forerunner of the Black Arts Movement. She is a founding member of OWWA, Organisation of Women Writers of Africa, created in the late 1980s, and the vice president of Pen & Brush, an all women’s organisation of writers, visual artists, and at one time musicians. It is the oldest such organisation in the country.

She is the founder and hostess of Salon d’Afrique, where intellectuals, artists and writers hold salons to exchange the ideas and critique literary and cultural of modern creators and works.

Publication Date: December 15, 2026

Paperback, 106 pages 

ISBN: 978-1-966677-66-6

 When the narrator in this ghost story accidentally discovers a family secret, she goes back in time to haunt her grandfather, forcing him to reckon with the ramifications of his choices. Threaded into this generational haunting is the real-life story of Mercy Disbrow, who was accused and found guilty of witchcraft in 1692, and who is the many-greats grandmother to the narrator and her family. As the effects of family secrets and generational trauma unspool, spells, incantations, and magic float to the surface: the tools and meditations for getting the ghosts of previous generations out of the present.

Praise for Megan Leonard & Mercy

Mercy’s multifaceted ghost stories speak in the vernacular of witchcraft—scales, bones, frogs abound—but are, at their core, complex explorations of the truly occult, containing vast troves of information that has been lost, obscured, or suppressed: a childhood marked by unexpressed anger; a grandfather’s secret family; the author’s many-greats grandmother, Mercy Disbrow, accused of witchcraft, whose court records include “pages and / pages of what men thought of her” but not a word of Mercy’s own. Megan Leonard takes on the tender responsibility of telling a fuller and more imaginative story than the silences of the archive ever could, speaking for Mercy when her own voice was quite literally not taken into account. Much as a surprise glimpse of a snake’s movement draws attention to secret space inside a stone wall, Leonard’s skillful, deeply-felt poems emerge to illuminate the omissions in the record.

—Jen Jabaily-Blackburn, author of Girl in a Bear Suit

In her new poetry collection, Mercy, Megan Leonard knits together the story of her ancestor, a condemned witch in 1692 New England, with the stories of women across generations in her family. She asks, “How many generations / will it take / for the devil’s voice / to shake out / of my dna / my blood, pumping / beating pulsing / in my deafened, my secret-keeping / ear?” Leonard wields the poet’s tools masterfully in the telling, weaving these poems into spells of rage and sorrow, of “leafmuck” and lichen, of tenderness and clarity. Mercy is a gorgeous, haunting, page-turner of a book that will make you reexamine your own family stories in their uncanny, transformative light.

—Emily Mohn-Slate, author of The Falls

From the first lines of this book—“wild the eye, wild the shine / – let the fisher kits come / into the chicken yard”—I was ensorcelled. Mercy is a spellbook, a page-turner, a ghost story by way of genealogy. It is also a reckoning. In these haunting, tender poems, Leonard interrogates the past’s secrets and the present’s demands, and asks what we owe to those whose histories we hold.

—Catherine Pierce, author of Dear Beast

About the Author

Megan Leonard (she/they) is the author of four collections of poetry, including Mercy and Larkspur Queen, both from Broadstone Books. Meg is the founder of The Writing Mentors, which assists writers in deepening their writing practice at any stage in their creative process. You can find updates about Meg’s work at meganleonardpoetry.com.

Publication Date: October 15, 2026

Paperback, 102 pages 

ISBN: 978-1-966677-64-2

A collection of poetry ruminating on evolutionary stories of loss, survival, and perseverance, with a highlighted focus on explorative discoveries of the natural Earth, providing further musings on the strengths of humanity.

Praise for Mary K O’Melveney & What Remains?

Mary K. O’Melveny’s newest collection is beautiful and ambitious, sampling broadly from human experience around the globe and diving vertically into time in poems that evoke rich histories from her mother’s stories, her great-grandmother’s sampler, and further back, deeper down.  Beyond the personal artifact, fascinating natural research offers anchor and refrain. These poems introduce us to radioactive wasp nests, the syntax of whale songs, and to jellyfish who mutate inexorably toward salvation.

—Dave Essinger, Professor of English, University of Findlay, author of This World and The Next

Why do we read poetry? To engage our senses, and to test our capacity for feeling.  To experience the poet’s use of language that, when effective, promotes the potential for our own updated relationship with it. And to invite personal reflection on complex human and earthly experiences.  In What Remains? Mary K O’Melveny provides readers an opportunity to interact with our mysterious, beauteous world through the lens of history, with a keen eye on the fragility of the planet and how respect for it – and for creatures depending on it, including our fellow humans – can lighten despair, build hope, and open windows to a healthy perspective.  The experience of taking in the poems within this book is a wondrous and soulfully healing journey.

—Joe Maita, Editor/Publisher, Jerry Jazz Musician

Mary K O’Melveny’s new poetry volume, What Remains?, questions how we endure, find hope, in times of loss, grief, and crisis—personal, political, environmental, global. These poems offer illuminating and memorable visions of the decline of past civilizations, observations of the natural world, witnessing of present disasters—both environmental and global—and their impact, eschewing despair and reveling in natural phenomena, particularly the joys of birdsong, art, music, and moments of beauty and memory. With evocative, original, and startling imagery that also suggests profound philosophical exploration, she creates a poetic universe in which forms of loss are countered with the traces of all “that remains.” This is a volume that a reader will savor, return to for its complex visions and offers of spiritual sustenance.

—Jan Zlotnik Schmidt, author of Foraging for Light  Over the Moon Gone: The Vanishing Act of Bess Houdini

About the Author

Mary K O’Melveny is the author of five poetry collections and a chapbook, including an album of poetry and music If You Want To Go To Heaven, Follow A Songbird (Jerry Jazz Musician 2024);  Flight Patterns (Kelsay 2023) (nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award); Merging Star Hypotheses (Finishing Line 2020), semi-finalist, The Washington Prize/The Word Works). Rhina P. Espaillat, poet, essayist and short-story writer described Mary’s poetry in Dispatches From The Memory Care Museum (Kelsay 2021) as “nakedly genuine” …. of “consoling and enriching value.”  Mary’s award-winning poems are widely published in print and on-line literary journals, anthologies and poetry blog sites. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she is a member of the Hudson Valley Women’s Writing Group and co-authored the Group’s two published anthologies. A retired labor rights lawyer, Mary lives with her wife near Woodstock, New York, teaches writing classes and supports social justice causes.

Publication Date: November 15, 2026

Paperback, 80 pages 

ISBN: 978-1-966677-63-5

A vivid and often devastating collection of poetry of documentary witness detailing the hope and strength of the Ukrainian people in the face of on-going wartime, told through individual accounts of contemporary Ukrainians and a Ukrainian mythic figure, Nadiya, together with ekphrastic poems responding to Ukrainian artists, in particular Alla Horska to whom the book is dedicated.

Praise for Melinda Thomsen & Nadiya Summons the Poppies and Myrtle

David Daiches wrote in a WWII edition of Poetry Magazine: “The poet, in producing poetry in wartime, is demonstrating the vitality of the civilization we are defending and thus helping to renew its vigor, sustain its morale, and increase its effectiveness.…” And so it is Melinda Thomsen, focusing on the war in Ukraine,  joins an illustrious list of poets like Wilfred Owen, Muriel Rukeyser, Ilya Kaminsky, Wisława Szymborska, Yusef Komunyakaa, Mahmoud Darwish, and Carolyn Forche who have shown us the horrors, irony and human cost of conflict.  Her central character, Nadiya, speaks for, with and through Thomsen, as in “Airborne Debris” where the debris that follows explosions in Kharkiv is linked to the everyday debris including “sloughed skin and dander” so that the narrator seems to “breathe in myself and others” while “on these pages, I / exhale the typed up flames.” That kind of visceral account fills the pages of this artistically and politically amazing book that is so crucial for our times, and renews, as Daiches wrote, our very civilization.

­­­­­­­­­—Richard Jackson, author of Footprints & The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems

How do we hold journalistic fact, propaganda, and the alchemy of image-making without losing ethical attention? Across four decisive sections, Melinda Thomsen’s Nadiya Summons the Poppies and Myrtle confronts the unstable ground between reportage and lyric witness in the war in Ukraine. A key ekphrastic figure, Nadiya carries sorrow and resilience without becoming symbol. Her presence—on canvas or as mosaic, holding a rose soldered into a spent artillery shell, or as a kestrel taking flight as the earth closes its wounds—registers not resolution but endurance within devastation. The poems press against spectacle and numbness alike, where “hope knots itself into a weapon,” and even a missile becomes a strangely intimate object of regard. They refuse distance: “The least we can do is refuse / to buy Russian gas,” insisting witness becomes action. Thomsen’s collection leaves the reader in uneasy clarity—alert to what is seen, and to what remains obscured by a blind eye.

—Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of Those Absences Now Closest & Bad Harvest

About the Author

Melinda Thomsen’s four poetry collections include Dropping Sunrises in a Jar, the 2025 Eric Hoffer Award Honorable Mention winner in the chapbook category, and Armature, which was the 2019 Honorable Mention in the Lena Shull Book Award from North Carolina Poetry Society. Her 2011 poetry chapbook, Field Rations, is based on her grandfather’s letters to her grandmother during World War II. Her poems have won numerous awards and were recently published in Salamander Magazine, Kakalak, North Carolina Literary Review, and Big City Lit, among others, including two Pushcart Nominations. She lives in Greenville, North Carolina with her husband Hunt and their three cats and two chickens. For more information, please visit melindathomsen.com.

Publication Date: October 15, 2026

Paperback, 98 pages 

ISBN: 978-1-966677-59-8

The End and The Beginning is autobiography in verse, beginning with Tony Howarth’s childhood in England (“six years old / I’m swept up by the crowd / everyone headed for Ravenscourt Park”). He recounts his boyhood war years (“I’m bundled on to train with Dad / evacuated from London / passed from auntie to uncle to auntie”) and an abrupt move to the States to join his mother (“a passport and ticket / on an aeroplane / to the United States”). There in postwar America, he forms deep friendships (“Win and me we’ve done a lot of talking / getting to know one another / ...I ask him...could we be room mates / he says sure”), and finds the love of his life (“I should buy a ring for Marna / my heart has made up its mind”).  A stint in the army allows for a joyous and long-awaited reunion with his beloved father (“a tap on my shoulder / I turn with a huzza into his arms / so sharply that everything in our hands / scatters across the platform”), completing the circle of the title.

Praise for Tony Howarth & The End and The Beginning

What the poet called “the still, sad music of humanity” suffuses this thrumming ode on two timeless romances – between son and father, between lost youth and found love – with an aching beauty that will shimmer in the heart of every reader blessed to have taken a similar journey to selfhood.

—Jeremy Gerard, performing arts critic and biographer

Lovers of poetry and storytelling will be entranced by this sweeping story of a boy’s journey to manhood. Tony Howarth sets the reader down in England . . . in a time and place where war, family turmoil and deceit separate a young boy from the father he loves. Each narrative poem is like a snapshot as the boy struggles to make a place for himself wherever he lands. I was breathless at times as I followed the high-spirited boy’s determination to explore and endure whatever came along as he searched for the way to manhood, and to finding the father he was forced to leave behind.

—Sarah White, author of The Wanderlust: A South Carolina Folk Tale & others

Tony Howarth, known for his moving novels in verse, has written a triumphant contemporary 

Odyssey—one that turns the narrative on its head and privileges the son's story and his poignant quest to rediscover his father. Throughout the book, we witness the ways that literature and love work to save the speaker as he bravely navigates the challenges of war, displacement, emigration, poverty, and familial lies. The End and The Beginning is a wonderful collection from a poet at the height of his powers.

 —Jennifer Franklin, A Fire in Her Brain (Princeton University Press, 2027)

 About the Author

 Tony Howarth, a playwright, director, and former journalist, retired in 1991 after twenty-eight years as a teacher of English and theatre at Woodlands High School in Westchester County, New York. He began writing poetry in 2009 after a visit to William Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage, in England’s Lake District, developing his craft at the Hudson Valley Writing Center under the treasured guidance of Jennifer Franklin and Fred Marchant. His poems have appeared in many magazines, among them Chronogram, The Naugatuck River Review, Obsessed with Pipework (England), The Connecticut River Review, Raven’s Perch, The Sow’s Ear, and the Grayson Press anthology Forgotten Women. His verse dramas Wild Man of the Mountain and A Hand to Hold, and his memoirs in verse, The Griefs That Fate Assigns and After the Storm, A Shaft of Sunlight were published by Broadstone Books.

Publication Date: November 15, 2026

Paperback, 96 pages 

ISBN: 978-1-966677-65-9

 A new collection of poetry from award-winning author Nancy Takacs examining the intersection of the natural and human world, informed and shaped by the context of the Hungarian and Polish cultural conventions and Catholic influence of her upbringing.

Praise for Nancy Takacs & A Whispering Beetle

Takacs pulls many and various narrative threads and fashions them into a fine fabric whose patterns and colors form a vibrant whole.  Extended family and its histories; beloved landscapes, domestic and wild; their flora, fauna, and mutations of weather; memories and ghosts, whose voices often intertwine – all are conveyed in her quiet, precise, and welcoming voice. Her cloth envelopes us like a warm shawl, as though we've always known her, and she, us.

—B.J. Buckley, author of Flyover Country

 In A Whispering Beetle, Nancy Takacs invokes the talismanic powers of food, language, and tradition, experienced poem by poem as eddying currents of memory and identity. Yet there is also always near at hand the sensuous pull of nature, that other wellspring of kinship, where the solitary self finds solace and sanctuary. “It might be good,” Takacs writes, “to let night close around you with fireflies.” This is, by any measure, a dazzling new collection.  

—Mike White, author of Addendum to a Miracle, Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize

Nancy Takacs’s poetry holds a voice so calm, so wise and resplendent, so full of wonder that each poem quietly and fully blossoms. Whether ruminating on a butterfly, lavender, an old Hungarian aunt, a runaway Catholic priest, Christmas ornaments or sweet peas, Takacs treats each subject with a fierce tenderness and honesty, bringing the reader to a deeper appreciation of “the natural order of things.” As the speaker says of a single lilac, “she believes in herself / her fresh artistry.” Here is a poet confident in herself and her artistry. And each poem proves she should be.

 —Sunni Brown Wilkinson, author of Rodeo, Donald Justice Poetry Prize

 About the Author

 Nancy Takacs is a recipient of The Juniper Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and two 15 Bytes magazine’s full-length poetry book prizes, among other awards. She has twice been a resident fellow at the Ucross Foundation. Nancy was the inaugural poet laureate of Helper City, a Utah art hub, and is the founder and director of the Steamboat Mountain Poetry Reading Series in Helper. A former wilderness studies and literature / creative writing educator at Utah State University Eastern, she continues to teach poetry writing to adults of all ages at the Senior Center in Price, Utah, and to poetry groups in the Intermountain West and near the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. She lives in central Utah and spends time near Lake Superior with her husband poet Jan Minich, their two pups Micah and Zoey, and a fifty-year-old box turtle Seattle.

Publication Date: October 15, 2026

Paperback, 84 pages 

ISBN: 978-1-966677-61-1

Richard St. John’s latest collection That Nothing be Lost takes the reader on an autobiographical journey seen through his deep and sometimes tragic friendships. These poems coupled with the author's childhood memories combine to make this work poignant and heartfelt. Included among the poems is a short story reminding us of the importance of community.

That Nothing Be Lost is a book of sacred witness: to our wounded companions, our personal histories and the shared challenges that shape our lives.  What can we hold in our hearts amidst the transience of all things?  What might shed light as we bravely make our way?

Praise for Richard St. John & That Nothing Be Lost

This is an astounding piece of literary work. Each poem feels like a warm personal embrace, yet as a collection they become our collective memory. These poems’ power is matched only by the poet’s dexterity and deep humanity.

— Sony Ton-Aime, Executive Director, Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures & author of Konbit.

These exquisitely observed poems are acts of deep human sympathy that seek to both break the heart and heal it. Richard St. John engages our historical moment with the rhythms and warm humanity of writers from Christopher Smart to the Psalmist to Aeschylus, reminding us of the long tradition of human empathy.

— Kim Garcia, author of DRONE & The Brighter House

St. John’s latest collection sees recollection and witness as poetic practices, as “a sacrament for us.” That Nothing Be Lost aims to do what its title commands—to marry memory of daily existence with the eternal. These poems confront the difficulty of this practice in the face of loss in its many forms. Yet even for the child who lives a single day, life is something cherished: “In the beginning: darkness, / heartbeat, blood. And it was good.”

— Jake Grefenstette, President, International Poetry Forum & Editor, Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series

About the Author

Richard St. John is also the author of Book of Entangled Souls (Broadstone Books, 2022), Each Perfected Name (Truman State University Press, 2015), The Pure Inconstancy of Grace (published in 2005 by Truman State University Press, as first runner-up for the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry) and Shrine (a long poem released as a chapbook in 2011). He enjoys connecting with readers and listeners in university and literary settings and, especially, with people who might be newer to poetry in congregations, online book groups, community spaces and welcoming homes. 

St. John received degrees in English from Princeton University (B.A.) and the University of Virginia (M.A.) In 2002, he completed a mid-career Loeb Fellowship for independent study at Harvard University.  A portion of his literary materials have been archived in the University of Pittsburgh library system. He has worked professionally in the areas of community development, nonprofit management, and reflective conversation.  He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Kate. For more information, please visit his website: http://richardstjohnpoet.com