After some preliminaries, including a moving introductory essay, the collection proper opens on a grayscale map of northeastern Indiana, where the fictional town of Mercy is marked with a red star—the only spot of color in the book and, metaphorically speaking, one of few in the poems and the lives of their speakers.

On the two facing pages that follow, we find ten couplets and a monostich in Ruth’s voice (page 2), and a deft Elizabethan sonnet in Naomi’s (page 3). Ruth: “Most of our neighbors / borrow furtively, when night has fully darkened // our lightless street.” Naomi: “At first, the neighbors slunk around like strays, / as if afraid to come into our yard.”

And with that formal prologue—the reader’s introduction to “those two women,” as they’re referred to by the speaker of “The Next-Door Neighbor Borrows Crime and Punishment”—Mercy becomes a book of intensely voice-driven prose poems. As such, it uses every resource available to poetry except the line break.

In several of the poems, the reader hears the ghost of other sonnets. Sometimes it’s a Marleyesque ghost, loudly rattling its chains. Did Custer simply dust off some old sonnets, lose the line breaks, and upcycle little boxes of lineated poetry into little blocks of melodic prose?

Maybe. And what if she did? Is that a failing?

We say no.

For one thing, this is precisely the kind of strategy (among others, such as writing in syllabics) that a wily contemporary poet with a formalist temperament would use to sidestep both the lingering stench of reactionary New Formalism and the flabby orthodoxy of free verse.

For another, Custer’s prose poems work. As poems, they have music, compression, and striking imagery, the latter often embedded in a speaker’s regional idioms and figures of speech, which do double duty as narrative engines. As little monologues, they move elegantly through their linear or circular or recursive arcs, with not a word wasted, and without recourse to the facile surrealism that stands in for story logic in so much anglophone prose poetry.

In short, a poet who can write “Bombs shaped like children kept falling all around me” (“A Mother Reads The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”) and “Johnny is so often the thing disasters have in common, even when he doesn’t try to be” (“Johnny Reads The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”) and “Gary’s a whole theater of a man” (“The Night Johnny Cash Drove Through Town”) and “I loved that baby a lifetime in three days” (“The Gravestone Washer Clips Obituaries from the Times”) has nothing she needs to justify or explain to anybody, anywhere, at any time. At all.

Like all books of excellence, Mercy flings open a world that edifies and challenges and changes its readers. In these linked poems, two women live together in mythical Mercy, Indiana, a tiny “finger wag of a town.” We come to know Mercy’s residents—factory workers, clergymen, farmers, and a host of others battered by poverty, addiction, and despair—through the books they borrow from the two women’s Little Free Library. This is a beautiful book, musical and full of surprising turns of phrase that will “stick inside you like a hook,” proving that “what makes a story true is how it’s told.”

—, author of Bright Stain and What Small Sound

Rachel Custer had me weeping with her introduction to Mercy, and I kept weeping as I read the poems. Only rarely has a book caused me so much grief and joy at the same time. Custer writes of books that “get in your blood” and “alter you.” I can say that her poems have altered me. I was also a poor kid who depended on the bookmobile. The bookmobile was the most dependable thing in my life. I believe the same was true for Custer.

—, author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (National Book Award, 2007), War Dances (PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, 2010), and ten collections of poetry

Rachel Custer, Mercy (Monday Editions, 2026). Limited edition, signed and numbered by the author. 5.5 x 8.5 inches, 46 pages. ISBN: 979-8-9926804-6-1.Publication date: February 25, 2026. Price: $22 (includes shipping within the continental US).

Order MERCY here.

is the author of two previous collections, The Temple She Became (Five Oaks Press, 2017) and Flatback Sally Country (Terrapin Books, 2023). Her work has appeared in many literary journals, including Rattle, The American Journal of Poetry, and Hobart, and she publishes Songs on the Way to God on Substack. A 2019 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, she lives in Indiana with her companion and their daughter.

Waning Gibbous IV, executive editor at Monday Editions, attended the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and completed the Columbia (formerly Radcliffe) Publishing Course. His late grandfather, Waning Gibbous Jr., is remembered as the author of two well-received collections, The Vicar’s Boneyard (1947) and O Lenticular Cloud of Sorrow (1958).

Happy New Year, everyone!

This will be our first full year of book publishing under the retooled Monday Editions imprint. We’re excited about what we’ll be offering you in 2026.

But let’s take a look back at 2025.

Last year, starting in June, we published three books in limited editions. Two of our limited editions were also issued in second, open editions.

James Maynard
THE FOURTEEN THIEVES & BODY CAMS

This two-part collection of 28 innovative sonnets, with the first part consisting of a 14-sonnet crown, was published in a limited edition of 50 copies on June 16, James Maynard’s birthday (also the date of the single day chronicled by James Joyce in his novel Ulysses). James celebrated both his birthday and the book’s publication with a reading at Word Virus Books in Portland, Oregon.

James shared these thoughts with us:

What I like to say about Monday Editions, when people ask, is how much focus you put into the actual crafting of the book, which I think is how the publishing of a piece of poetry should feel. During the process, the manuscript underwent refinement. All my previous experience of publishing was not like this. That, to me, was the best part of the chapbook itself. When I pick it up, I like how handsome it is.

It was a pleasure to work with James Maynard, not least because his manuscript presented unique editorial and design challenges:

• James wanted the 14 individual poems of the sonnet crown to be untitled.

• For editorial reasons involving the sonnet sequence in the book’s second part, we wanted the crown’s poems to be unnumbered.

• Those two decisions left us needing a way to visually differentiate 14 untitled, unnumbered poems from one another while maintaining their integrity as a crown.

To solve our dilemma, and in keeping with the narrative thread that runs through the sonnet crown, we bracketed each of the crown’s sonnets, top and bottom, with a single line, in red ink, of Baybayin script spelling out “the fourteen thieves.” For the book’s cover and part openers, we repeated that line 14 times.

A few copies of the book are still available here.

X. P. Callahan
MORTAL SUGAR: POEMS IN THE KEY OF LOTERÍA

Mortal Sugar, rooted in conceptual poetic practice, consists of 54 musical poems, each one limited to 54 syllables, each poem in conversation with one of the images on the 54 cards in the deck of the traditional Mexican lotería game (sometimes described as Mexican bingo).

The deluxe pocket-size limited edition, ultimately capped at 100 copies, went through three printings on 70-pound silk-coated paper and included 55 full-color images. The limited edition is sold out, but the second edition is available here as a 5 by 8 paperback, with all the original poems and images.

Rebecca Weil
SHADOW OF A BEAR: A POEM IN 23 PASSAGES

Rebecca Weil’s chapbook-length poem was our first runaway success. Not only were the limited edition’s 50 copies snapped up within two hours of the book’s launch, the second edition reached #3 on Amazon’s list of top 100 best sellers in US poetry.

Rebecca let us know early on that the Monday Editions publishing model had inspired her to donate all proceeds to the Kilham Bear Center for the care and release of orphaned, injured, and abandoned black bear cubs. To date, the center has received $1,000 and counting from sales of the book.

“This has been a gift economy in action, unfurling into the world,” Rebecca wrote to us. She also shared the following reflections on what she calls our “gem of a press”:

Being published by Monday Editions has been a great joy. I could not have imagined such a seamless and remarkable process. When the limited edition rapidly sold out, Monday Editions quickly responded to the wait list by producing a second edition. Yes, a micropress can be nimble—and has been! But, more than that, X. P. [Callahan, our founder] has been kind, insightful, and generous as an editor and publisher.

The second edition of Shadow of a Bear is available here. As with the limited edition, all proceeds benefit the Kilham Bear Center (you can make a donation at the link).

2026: A Look Ahead

• : Mercy (poems)

• : Black Shirt Emblazoned (poems; second, revised edition);1 I Totally Stole and Burned This Book (poems)2

• , , and Alexandra Napier: work in progress

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  Heartfelt thanks to our paying subscribers and other patrons whose generosity has funded and continues to support our radically author-centered publishing model.

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Waning Gibbous IV, executive editor at Monday Editions, attended the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and completed the Columbia (formerly Radcliffe) Publishing Course. His late grandfather, Waning Gibbous Jr., is remembered as the author of two well-received collections, The Vicar’s Boneyard (1947) and O Lenticular Cloud of Sorrow (1958).

UPDATE
The limited edition of Rebecca Weil’s new chapbook has sold out. Monday Editions has issued a second (open) edition, available here.

MONDAY EDITIONS is pleased to announce the publication of Rebecca Weil’s new chapbook, Shadow of a Bear: A Poem in 23 Passages.

As the subtitle indicates, this chapbook consists of a single poem divided into twenty-three parts that range in length from a single line (“I give room to any mother with young”) to longer meditations on perception (“Sometimes we look for things we want to see. / Sometimes we look again, another way”), on the mysteries elided by self-identity (“it is hard enough to know what it is to be ourselves / and so easy to forget that we can’t know // what it is to be another living being”), and on the toll that human life can take on the lives of the black bears in the poet’s rural community (“Gun talk is loose / when charcoal grills are broken”).

I see Rebecca Weil finding ways, while observing the wild world, to learn from its rhythms—gluttony, longing, rest. She has a way of writing little blessings for moments of insight that settle the mind. Weil reminds me that a poem, like an episode of direct encounter with Earth creatures, can offer discovery, connection, immersion, as if leaves and wings and roots and all the rest are teaching us how to be human here, and Weil is the courier of this instruction.
—Kim Stafford, author of Wild Honey, Tough Salt, Singer Come from Afar, and As the Sky Begins to Change

Weil moves deftly from imagistic lyric to narrative, from persona discourse to philosophical reflection to neighborly reportage (“Jerry says the bear has eaten / corn behind his cow barn, / left broken stalks like crop circles”), from family anecdote (“halfway up the stairs on our wedding night / the innkeeper charged us with his bear gun”) to the direst of interspecies encounters:

inside muscular skin
inside rocketing metal

did they see each other
know who the other was

a flash of eyes

before
each     other

became a headline

Rebecca Weil writes with hope: “we can make space / for the wild around us / and inside us.” The speaker in this kaleidoscopic poem questions what it means to see the “other”—in this case, Ursus americanus—for what the “other” truly is while showing us how the maternal may help bridge the divide. Weil’s language—at moments spare, at other times lush and luxurious—enthralls, serving as a wise and insistent guide to the possibilities of crossing boundaries and of learning, with deep compassion and empathy, to live peacefully in the presence of the world that sustains us.
—Todd Davis, author of Native Species, Coffin Honey, and Ditch Memory: New and Selected Poems

This is deceptively quiet work. It layers daily observation of seasonal changes with (as Weil writes in “A Tumble of Wild,” her brief introductory essay) “impossible beauty and searing tragedy,” all in a voice that resists anthropomorphism while embodying the most profound humane values.

Rebecca Weil, Shadow of a Bear: A Poem in 23 Passages (Monday Editions, 2025). Limited edition of 50 copies, signed and numbered; 40 pages, with an introductory essay by the author. Cover illustration by Kristen Griger. ISBN: 979-8-9926804-3-0. Publication date: October 29, 2025. Price: $15. UPDATE: The limited edition has sold out. Put yourself on the waiting list for the second (open) edition here. All proceeds from both editions support the rescue, rehabilitation, and release of orphaned, abandoned, and injured black bear cubs by the Kilham Bear Center, Lyme, New Hampshire.

Rebecca Weil writes from the edge of a heron rookery surrounded by swamps, forests, and farmland. Her recent writing has been published in One, Emerge Literary Journal, Earthshine, Humana Obscura, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, the Journal of Wild Culture, and Phoebe: A Journal of Literature and Art, where her piece “Old Friends” was a finalist in the journal’s 2024 nonfiction contest. Weil has work forthcoming in Pangyrus and is the author of Bring Me the Ocean: Nature as Teacher, Messenger, and Intermediary, an award-winning collection of true stories about connecting individuals and communities with nature. More of her writing can be found at www.rebeccaweil.com.

, executive editor at Monday Editions, attended the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and completed the Columbia (formerly Radcliffe) Publishing Course. His late grandfather, Waning Gibbous Jr., is remembered as the author of two well-received collections, The Vicar’s Boneyard (1947) and O Lenticular Cloud of Sorrow (1958).

UPDATE

Friends, thank you so much for your response to Mortal Sugar.

• The first printing of this signed and numbered limited edition (copies 1 through 50) sold out on publication day.

• The second printing (copies 51 through 70) has also sold out.

• The third printing (copies 71 through 100) has sold out, too.

The second, open edition (unsigned and unnumbered) is available here.

Monday Editions announces the publication of X. P. Callahan’s new collection, Mortal Sugar: Poems in the Key of Lotería.

Rooted in conceptual poetic practice, the collection consists of fifty-four musical poems, each one limited to fifty-four syllables, each poem responding to one of the images on the fifty-four cards of traditional Mexican lotería, a game of chance that resembles bingo and, like bingo, has its origins in the Italian High Renaissance.

The collection comprises persona poems, lyric poems, epistolary poems, narrative poems, imagist poems, elegies, crackpot monologues, disingenuous confessions, agnostic prayers, sinister little vignettes, and poems that are sometimes closely autobiographical, sometimes autobiographical only in the sense of shared generational, cultural, or sociopolitical influences.

As a gesture toward the largely rhyming proverbs and other sayings printed on the lotería cards, most of the poems have an identifiable rhyme scheme, however irregular or slant. In addition to fifty-five full-color illustrations, this pocket-size little book includes a short introductory essay by the author—a Monday Editions hallmark.

This collection, sometimes deadly serious but more often playful, reshuffles the fifty-four cards of lotería into fifty-four poems of exactly fifty-four syllables. From folk archetypes to postmodern riffs, the deck turns strange and resonant: El Negrito becomes Emmett Till, an absentminded Yo-Yo Ma slips in slyly, and La Pera glows in the dark of October “to share her story / of orchard and sun.”
—, author of Tulips for Elsie and The Sweet Spot in the Chaos

X. P. Callahan balances irony, humor, and heartbreak in a book whose title references the brutal acts of the oppressor as well as the precarious sweetness of life. Invoking such diverse figures as JFK, Bette Midler, and Emmett Till to interrogate the lotería deck’s flat images, the poems peel back colonial tropes and summon a deeper truth.
—, author of Writer, interrupted, a Substack Featured Publication

Surprising, wry, and fun, these are poems that both challenge assumptions and make you laugh. Although you can read the book in one sitting, you’ll want to keep it close by for those moments when you need to be jostled awake again.
—, author of Punctuated and Gathering the Pieces of Days

X. P. Callahan, Mortal Sugar: Poems in the Key of Lotería (Monday Editions, 2025). Limited edition, signed and numbered. 4.25 x 7 inches, 132 pages, with 55 full-color illustrations, notes on the poems, and an introductory essay by the author. ISBN: 979-8-9926804-0-9. Publication date: August 27, 2025.

Waning Gibbous IV, executive editor at Monday Editions, attended the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and completed the Columbia (formerly Radcliffe) Publishing Course. His late grandfather, Waning Gibbous Jr., is remembered as the author of two well-received collections,The Vicar’s Boneyard(1947) andO Lenticular Cloud of Sorrow(1958).

The collection has two parts: the crown of sonnets titled “The Fourteen Thieves,” and the fourteen additional sonnets that make up the collection’s second part, “Body Cams.”

Anyone who has followed Maynard’s long-running Substack publication, And Now, A Sonnet, or read his earlier chapbooks (Throwaways and An Absence of, An Earnest), knows that the hallmarks of a Maynard poem are its idiosyncratic diction and syntax, not to mention its eccentric system of punctuation. As for Maynard’s poetic voice, it could pass for the mutterings of a pirate marooned in the Chaucer Collection at the British Library, if that pirate’s mental soundscape included a continuous loop of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

James Maynard’s Escher-like sonnets expand one’s sense of how sonnets work and how collections are formed. The present collection, begun “in memory,” has been transmogrified by time, tradition, colonialism, and instinct. Maynard’s arresting, unflinching poems offer “new meanings, spoken and sung.”
—Kortney Garrison, author of Elemental and Every Broken Year: The Persephone Cycle

But these twenty-eight sonnets, for all their grounding in the Anglo-American tradition—Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Wordsworth, Coleridge, et al.; and, on the American side, Phillis Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Claude McKay, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks—are also heir to the later innovations of Wanda Coleman, while standing in conversation with the more recent experiments of Terrance Hayes, Patricia Smith, Jericho Brown, and Diane Seuss.

In this collection, James Maynard takes his place among the remarkable poets who are reinvigorating and reshaping the American sonnet. These poems sing of torments—personal, historical, linguistic, poetic—and invite a reckoning with our worthwhile but ordinary lives.
—Jesse DeLong, author of The Amateur Scientist’s Notebook: Poems

Maynard acknowledges that the collection’s poems are anything but accessible.

“I feel I must explain a landscape that is clear in my mind but foreign to others,” he writes in “For an Age of Torment,” his introduction to the book.

And so he does explain—minimally. Otherwise, he leaves the poems to speak for themselves. That gesture recalls the invitation Laurie Anderson issues at the beginning of her spoken-word piece “Difficult Listening Hour” (United States Live, 1984, track 13): “Sit bolt upright in that straight-backed chair, button that top button, and get set for some difficult music.”

James Maynard, The Fourteen Thieves & Body Cams (Monday Editions, 2025). Limited edition of 50 copies, signed and numbered; 46 pages, with an introductory essay by the author. ISBN: 979-8-9926804-1-6. Publication date: June 16, 2025. Price: $10. Order here before the limited edition sells out.

James Maynard will read from The Fourteen Thieves & Body Cams on Monday, June 16, at Word Virus Books, 6518 SE Foster Road, Portland, 7–8 PM.

Waning Gibbous IV, executive editor at Monday Editions, attended the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and completed the Columbia (formerly Radcliffe) Publishing Course. His late grandfather, Waning Gibbous Jr., is remembered as the author of two well-received collections,The Vicar’s Boneyard(1947) andO Lenticular Cloud of Sorrow(1958).