D. S. Waldman: Atria w/Shira Elrichman, Emily Lee Luan, & Francisco Márquez

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“A powerful debut, populated with lovers and painters and musicians and poets, all of it unified by D.S. Waldman’s keen, unblinking eye.” —Patrick Phillips, author of Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America

“Refusing parallel movement, the hands/ Those empty frames. Imagine holding/ a Memory—or was it a photograph”

In this rich, prismatic collection, D.S. Waldman guides readers through the halls of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, into encounters with Georges Braque and Frida Kahlo, and back through the landscapes of coastal California and his own rural Kentucky childhood. Along the way, formally experimental poems open into intimate explorations of fraternal loss and grief, love and romantic partnership, disability and the fragile human form, and the peculiar shapes memory takes. In one section—part essay, part crown of sonnets—the poet addresses the childhood accident that forever debilitated his hand, widening his aperture to the world and transforming his perception. Ultimately, through that experience and others, Waldman asks how—or whether—one can ever truly relate to another, or to the world.

Exploring presence and absence, proximity and distance, this “gorgeous, speculative” (David Baker, author of Whale Fall) debut announces D.S. Waldman as an intrepid new voice in poetry.

D. S. Waldman is the author of the poetry collection Atria (Liveright/W. W. Norton, 2026). His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, ZYZZYVA, and many other publications. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and recipient of Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, Waldman lives and teaches creative writing in New York City. He’s at work on a novel.

Shira Erlichman is the author of Odes to Lithium (Alice James Books, 2019) which won the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry and is the writer-illustrator of the children’s book Be/Hold: A Friendship Book (2019). Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Seattle Times, The Huffington Post, The Nation, and PBS, among others. She was a finalist for the Lambda Award, a Silver Medalist for the Nautilus Award, and the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship. She has been a returning guest host on The Slowdown. She runs In Surreal life: an Online Global Creativity School and is a Visiting Faculty Mentor at the Randolph MFA. She lives in Brooklyn with her wife.

Emily Lee Luan is the author of 回 / Return, a winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, and I Watch the Boughs, selected for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Poetry, and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2021, American Poetry Review, Lithub, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Adelphi University and on the teaching faculty of Adelphi's low-residency MFA.

Francisco Márquez is a Venezuelan poet with work in The Yale Review, Poetry London, Best American Poetry, and The Slowdown podcast. The recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, UCross, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, he lives in Brooklyn.