Poets published by What Books Press present their new work.

Join us to celebrate this year’s fiction slate from What Books Press!

On October 25th, Amy Elisabeth Davis, James Cushing, Celeste Boyer, and Bill Mohr will read from and discuss their new work.

About the participants:

Amy Elisabeth Davis, a historian and poet who studied at Cornell and Columbia and grew up between Van Cortlandt Park’s forested land and the Hudson River in New York City. A longtime resident of Southern California, her poems have appeared in Tar River Poetry, December, The Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She co-edited Written Here: The Community of Writers Poetry Review 2016 and was the recipient of a writing residency at Yefe Nof in autumn 2018.

James Cushing holds a doctorate in English from UC Irvine. From 1989 through 2020, when he retired, he taught literature and creative writing at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and served as the community’s Poet Laureate 2008 – 2010. Cushing’s poems have appeared in many journals, and 35-year association with Cahuenga Press has resulted in seven full-length collections of poetry.

Celeste Goyer is a poet and artist living in Los Angeles. Her New England childhood in Northampton, Massachusetts informs her work, as do the many years she spent in remote California desert and mountain towns. She edited a literary quarterly for 14 years and her work has appeared in numerous journals as well as anthologies, including Poetry Goes to the Movies from Beyond Baroque Books and Women in a Golden State, from Gunpowder Press.

Bill Mohr has worked as an editor, publisher, literary historian, and poet since the early 1970s. His books include Holdouts: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992 (University of Iowa Press; 2011) and a bilingual edition of poems, Pruebas Ocultas (Bonobos Editores, Mexico; 2015). What Books will publish Remiges: Three Extended Poems in the fall of 2026.

About the featured titles:

Leaving the Grid by Amy Elisabeth Davis ponders constraints and forms of freedom—how we approach them and choose the roads we might best follow. It touches on memory, grief, the earth and its waters, and family. This is a book about the ability to see and create the most nourishing ways to be, about finding agency and hope. Leaving the Grid is about where we want to be going and how we might get there.

Spoken in the Dark by James Cushing is a collection of sixty poems which were written three years before and during the first days of the Covid-19 pandemic,. These poems are rooted in the American tradition of Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, James Tate, and W. S. Merwin, but speaks in the language of the 21st century. Readers will find pantoums, prose-poems, references to popular culture, and an overall sense that Rimbaud was right when he said “I is someone else.”

The poems in In the Style of Falling by Celeste Boyer see the consistent absurdity and mystery of the world as something both beautiful, and in an odd way, comforting. The tone is akin to a hushed but matter-of-fact tour guide through lands where much cannot be understood, but the view from the ruins still dazzles. Celeste’s poems, like her visual art, owe much to the layering and leaps of collage. Through her lens, has something to say, so we hear from bread (a woman, naturally) postcards, and hurricanes, among many others. Like falling in love, this book’s journey into mystery is led by the heart, though the wry Observer is never far away.

Remiges: Three Extended Poems (1985-2025) by Bill Mohr: In this collection, nimbly lurking at the periphery of the Language school in the early 1980s, Bill Mohr absorbed as much as he could of their derring-do poetics, then went his own contumacious way. Comprising three long poems, Remiges is the culminating effort of a West Coast poet whose maverick affinities have grown increasingly quirky, at least when juxtaposed with their somber starting point. If the literary precedents to Remiges are obvious, the aftermath is less discernible. Begun well before Ron Silliman’s anthology of Language poets, In the American Tree, was published, this triptych of extended poems will always remain an avant- garde outlier. Mohr seems a playful anomaly rather than someone intent being a model to be studied; nevertheless, these sustained sequences of poems revel in the pleasures of associative logic in unexpected ways that will reward anyone’s close reading of their capacious, jaunty dialogue.