In Andy Izenson’s gorgeous collection, The World That Is Coming Inside You, the intense specificity of the Trans, Jewish, mystical, Queer experience is rendered in explosive technicolor with such evocative and remarkable language that the book serves as both a window and a mirror; inviting the reader, no matter their own lived experience, to consider the blood-bright depths of their own humanity.

At its core, Trans Artifacts: Bones Between My Teeth by Ren Wilding traces the experience of a trans speaker coming into being, not as a clean emergence, but as a haunted one. In the very first poem, they say: “I’m trying to give myself / a warning / that my body / will be haunted / by what it sheds” as a recognition that transition is not erasure, but layering. The poems refuse the simplicity of a before & after, instead dwelling in the tension between the perceived self & the lived self, between what was imposed & what is claimed.

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The title of Jessica Walsh’s fourth poetry collection, Blowdown (Small Harbor Publishing, 2026), alludes to arboreal casualties of an act of God — trees felled by wind, as in a storm. This volume focuses on the type of tree that maps family histories; the speaker’s genealogical pursuits guide her to navigate her own interior landscape, along with familial relations and traumas that span generations — and, ultimately, the spiritual terrain that both connects and transcends them all…

As Séance of the Bees moves between nonfiction prose, poetry, and visual collage, Rexilius places “unlike things in association” in order to explore concepts of selfhood and collective identity within the context of a natural world that buzzes and hums. 

Ancient Algorithms proposes translation not as a faithful transfer between fixed linguistic containers, but as a living, generative art form that thrives on deviation, ritual, collaboration, & intentional error. In this hybrid work, Katrine Øgaard Jensen engages the poetry of Ursula Andkjær Olsen along with poets Sawako Nakayasu, Aditi Machado, CAConrad, Baba Badji, & Paul Cunningham through mistranslation, rewriting, & remixing, guided by a series of self-imposed rules that function as both algorithm & spell. Translation here is not a service to an original text but an active site of creation, where meaning is allowed & encouraged to mutate.

Chris McCreary talks with Cate Peebles about her latest collection, The Haunting, exploring inheritance, influence, & the reimagining of the gothic.

Launched in 2022, Cul-de-sac of Bloodhas been lovingly curated by its Philadelphia-based co-editors  J †Johnson and Gina Myers to include, in their words, "poems & other writing that engage monstrosity, the macabre, the weird & the eerie, horror films, darkness & night, the mysterious unknown, & the perverse urge to speak the unspeakable." We conducted this interview over email during the summer of 2025, with the editors sometimes chiming in individually and sometimes collectively for CDSOB.

After 11 years, we’re proud to unveil the next chapter of White Stag Publishing with a re-imagined identity rooted in our passion for poetry while enhancing our vision for this space.