[After an unexpected medical hiatus, we are gearing up for our next releases. If you’re waiting on a response for something, it’s on the way.]
This National Poetry Month, it is our great pleasure to share three new Belle Point poetry collections—including two debuts—by deeply talented poets from Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky: coming in May and June.
The poems in thunder makes us explore heritage, faith, and womanhood in the American South. They navigate the tension of cherishing the world we’re raised in while also wrestling with the ways it can eventually harm us. In this soulful debut, Whitney Rio-Ross illustrates a woman grappling with the thorny parts of the landscape and family she’s always known, a grappling that yields a hard-fought yet enduring commitment to the work of clear-eyed love.
A Southern native, Whitney Rio-Ross is the author of the chapbook Birthmarks (Wipf & Stock, 2020) and poetry editor for Fare Forward. Her poems have appeared in Image, Whale Road Review, ONLY POEMS DAILY, America Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Nashville, TN.
Degenerate Era of an Expanding Universe is a book about apocalypses large and small. The poems in this meditative debut collection explore economic and climatological trends toward dissolution, and how these forces seep into the domestic sphere. Whether exploring the constellations of family dynamics or observing natural and human disasters, Jennifer Polson Peterson reflects on “the newly unmade world” that nonetheless urges us to continue rebuilding.
Jennifer Polson Peterson is the author of Degenerate Era of an Expanding Universe (Belle Point Press, 2026) and Must Resemble Leisure (Seven Kitchens Press, 2022). She serves as the 2024-28 Poet Laureate of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. In 2025 she was named a Laureate Fellow of the Academy of American Poets. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, including The Threepenny Review, The Laurel Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Colorado Review, Image, The Southern Humanities Review, and Denver Quarterly. Her poems have been adapted for performance by choir and orchestra, featured on Poetry Daily, and nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize. She teaches writing at the University of Southern Mississippi.
Water. Witness. Word. is a meditation on loves and griefs of many shapes: place, family, and shared visions of a world fading away. The speakers in this stunning, formally diverse collection consider the relationships between humans and the natural world, between injustice, identity, and power. Marianne Worthington’s unique voice powerfully expresses a love of place that isn’t always lovable, the challenges of chronic illness, and the beauty of the natural world even when exploited and in peril.
Pre-order Water. Witness. Word.
Marianne Worthington is author of The Girl Singer (University Press of Kentucky, 2021), winner of the Weatherford Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, CALYX, Swing, Southern Humanities Review, and Zone 3, among other places. She cofounded and co-edited Still: The Journal, an online literary magazine publishing writers, artists, and musicians with ties to Appalachia (2009-2024). Her work has been supported by Kentucky Arts Council, Kentucky Foundation for Women, and Appalachian Sound Archives Fellowship. She has co-edited two anthologies for the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop at Hindman Settlement School. A retired college professor, she grew up in East Tennessee, and lives, writes, and teaches in Southeastern Kentucky.
In times of uncertainty and disbelief, poetry remains a powerful balm and a reminder of the reasons we keep going. We can’t wait for you to discover these new collections.
More on the way, but as always, thanks for sticking around.
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