The Stanza
Bainbridge Island Press weekly newsletter · May 7, 2026
This week I have been thinking about silence, and not the silence of absence we sometimes mistake for emptiness, but the silence that is its own form of presence, the kind that carries everything sound cannot. A poem knows this better than almost any other form, which is why every line break asks the reader to hold a small silence, and every stanza break asks for a longer one. The white space around a poem is not where the poem ends but where it keeps going, in the body of the reader, in the air of the room, in the breath between one line and the next, in whatever the words have set in motion. A poem without an awareness of silence is only half a poem.
I have been holding Martin Willitts Jr.’s new collection, Sounds I Cannot Hear Clearly Anymore Add Up to the Sum of Silence, and the book has been teaching me what it means to write into silence rather than around it. Willitts honors silences that poetry cannot fill, and the honoring turns out to be a form of love. This issue gathers a few of the voices doing that work, and I am glad to bring them to you.
Now Open for Enrollment
POETICS Summer Workshop 2026
A five-session workshop on the vocabulary of poetics · Taught by Tamarah Rockwood
Writer's Digest recently named Bainbridge Island Press to their 28th Annual 101 Best Websites for Writers and listed us at the top of the Poetry section. That recognition belongs to the readers and writers who have made this press what it is, and it is also the reason I am opening my first live summer workshop. If the POETICS essays or the podcast have meant something to you over the past year, this is where the project goes next. This is worth your time and worth your learning.
The workshop runs five Wednesday evenings on Zoom for twelve poets, and the focus is the working vocabulary of our craft. We will work with the fundamentals of poetry: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, mimesis, ethos, peripeteia, volta, conceit, anaphora. Most of us already use these by feel. The work of the workshop is learning to name them when we do, so that when a poem is not working we have something to reach for besides starting over.
Each session opens with a sixty-minute lecture drawn from the POETICS Substack essays, then moves to small-group breakouts and an open mic for craft response. Cameras and microphones stay on. A poem should hold some risk.
The heart of the workshop is the mentorship. Starting in Session 2, every participant submits one poem per session for individual written feedback from me, returned by email before the next class. Across the series, that produces forty-eight feedback letters, one for every poem from every poet in the room. This is not a lecture you are buying. It is a writing relationship.
Sessions run 5:00 to 7:00 PM Pacific on July 1, July 15, July 29, August 12, and August 26. Tuition is $600 for early registration through June 17, $750 after. The cap is twelve poets, and a small number of reduced-fee scholarship spots are available for poets who would not otherwise be able to join.
Featured Title · Pre-Order
Sounds I Cannot Hear Clearly Anymore Add Up to the Sum of Silence
Martin Willitts Jr. · Bainbridge Island Press · Ships May 31
Every so often a manuscript arrives that asks the reader to slow down, and Martin Willitts Jr.’s new collection is one of those books. Sounds I Cannot Hear Clearly Anymore Add Up to the Sum of Silence traces the many forms silence takes across a lifetime: the silence of a deaf father who refused to learn sign language, the silence between a parent and an estranged son, the silence that follows war, and the gradual quieting of the poet’s own hearing.
At the heart of the collection is a father who lost his hearing when his cannon backfired during the Second World War, and a son who would later lose his own partial hearing from shelling as a field medic in Vietnam. Between them lies a lifetime of missed words, lip-reading, fingerspelling, and the ache of communication that never quite arrives. The poems move from rural childhood summers and piano music through the brutal education of war, into the long grief of watching parents age and die, and finally into the poet’s own slowly closing world of sound.
Woven throughout is another silence: the poet’s son, lost to addiction, who one day calls to say he never wants to see his father again. These poems hold that absence without flinching, and they are some of the most quietly devastating I have read this year. Dedicated to the deaf community and to the hearing world that learns alongside them, this is a book about what happens in the spaces where sound should be, and how love persists across every silence.
Find More Books & Chapbooks at Bainbridge Island Press
The May/June issue of Writer’s Digest recently called the POETICS podcast a place that “connect[s] great readers with great poetry.”
One Last Note Before You Go
The May/June issue of Writer’s Digest is on stands through the end of the month, and we are still grateful to be listed at the top of the Poetry section in their 28th Annual 101 Best Websites for Writers, alongside Rattle and Poets.org. Page 35 if you happen to pick up a copy. Thank you to every reader and writer who has made this press what it is.
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The Stanza is a weekly newsletter from Bainbridge Island Press celebrating poetry, the poets who write it, and the readers who make it matter. Subscribe at bainbridgeislandpress.substack.com.
Just pre-ordered my copy of Willitts' collection!