Blue Moon Looming by Javier Sandoval ’17 (CutBank)

The ten long, sometimes feverish poems in this debut chapbook toggle between Mexico and the American West. It’s a poetic landscape studded with cattle and campfires, chaos and comets, and the occasional talking dog. The poems are vibrant tales, meditations, and conversations—sometimes between lovers, sometimes between near strangers, sometimes with ancestors, and sometimes with ghosts. Sandoval teaches at the University of Alabama and edits poetry at Black Warrior Review. One of the poems, “Uncle Peyote,” also appears in The Best American Poetry 2025.

Subjectified: Becoming a Sexual Subject by Suzannah Weiss ’13 (Polity)

In this debut, Weiss explains that she learned early on that her body was not her own—that she was to be seen as an object and not a subject. In a book that is part cultural critique and part memoir, Weiss charts her ultimately sex-positive voyage from an early eating disorder and body perception issues to reporting on clothing-optional resorts, sex parties, and sex clubs, illuminating how she gained agency along the way. The prose is candid, crisp, and playful, combined with an underlying call to action. Weiss writes: “When we are the creators—inviting others into our worlds, not just stepping into theirs—our whole lives shift.” Weiss is a sex and relationship writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Glamour, and Men’s Health. 

Bombay//New York Book: A Tangled Tale of Two Cities by Ria Mirchandani ’15 & Shivantika Jain Kothari (bombaynewyorkbook.com)

With vignettes by Mirchandani and drawings by Kothari, readers vault through this brightly illustrated volume between two wildly different cities that are more alike than one might think. In New York, you might pick up a bagel, tough on the outside, chewy on the inside, with a cream cheese schmear. In Bombay (Mumbai), it would be pav, a shrunken Portuguese bread that is crispy on the outside, fluffy inside, and often filled with an omelet or minced meat. Mirchandani and Kothari grew up in Bombay,  met in Providence—Kothari went to RISD—and lived a few subway stops from each other in NYC. But as Mirchandani writes, whichever city they’re in, they often long for the other.