'My Unreliable Retrieval System'

Welcome news is so rare in our withered literary culture, we are obligated to celebrate good new work when we encounter it. The summer 2026 issue of New Verse Review has been published, and it includes work by several of our finest established poets, as well as poems by newcomers worth reading. You’ll find three epigrams by R.L. Barth, including “McNamara’s 100,000”: 

“Moronic? Bumbling? Drooling? Poor? Sign here.

There are 100,000 openings

In McNamara’s scheme. You’ll learn some things

You might convert to skills; and never fear,

If under fire you don’t know zig from zag,

Be sure he’ll give you your own body-bag.”

 

Mike Juster’s “Nothing in Hell Is Up to Snuff” is dedicated to his late friend the poet X.J. Kennedy:

 

“It rankles us that Satan doesn’t care

for process. Brimstone shipments are too slow

for summer fun, so flesh is roasted rare,

and He has banished Barry Manilow

without an explanation. Long ago,

He welcomed new arrivals with a show

of evil…not now! He seems unaware

that he is failing as a CEO.

Unshaven, dazed in tattered underwear,

He leaves His pitchfork on His patio,

then curses God without the same old flair.

Though revolution simmers in the air

and demons hatch new schemes for overthrow,

most souls prefer The Devil who they know.”

 

Here is Aaron Poochigian’s “Heliolatry,” a poem that revels in the miracle of photosynthesis:

 

“There are the trees forever doing

a slow, expansive dance

called ‘Reaching Toward the Light.’

 

“Then there’s how shadows keep imbuing

the patterns with askance

and horizontal height.

 

“The whole show, with its matching ways

of moving, points to one

bright source of bud and sprawl.

 

“I close my eyes and tilt my gaze

into the sun, the sun,

the pivot of it all.”

 

And here are two poems by a poet new to me, Adrienne Su. “Solitude” is a meditation on memory, which she describes as “my unreliable / retrieval system.”