Poetry Porch Announcement 2026

Kelsay Books announces the publication of
a new collection of poems by Joyce Wilson.

 

 

THE MORNING AFTER BURNS NIGHT
by Joyce Wilson

Kelsay Books
502 South 1040 East, A-119
American Fork, Utah 84003
Kelsaybooks.com

Publishing date: June 10, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-90146-986-6
Cover illustration photo by the author
$20.00 paper

Contact Kelsay Books to order online. Also available on Amazon.

Purchase a copy in person at GROLIER POETRY BOOK SHOP, 6 Plympton Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. Call 617-547-4648 for hours and directions. Or visit online .



 

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The poems in The Morning after Burns Night call to mind D. H. Lawrence’s phrase for his own poems, “acts of attention.” Joyce Wilson peers closely and deeply at details from nature and human nature gleaned from a lifetime spent close to home on the South Shore of Boston but also from far-flung travel. Everywhere evident is the formal adeptness the reader expects from a seasoned formalist poet, but there is far more than that here, as can be witnessed by the powerful sonnet crown “The Remnant of His Life,” which is at the heart of the book. The conclusion of “Prose Poem: On Lichens” beautifully sums up the poet’s spirit and enterprise: “When we take walks this winter, we plan to keep looking around for lichens in our favorite wandering places. Where lichens appear, we will stop, look, and take a measure of changes and renewal around us.”

          Bruce Bennett, author of Just Another Day in Just Our Town

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    Joyce Wilson is editor of The Poetry Porch (www.poetryporch.com), a literary magazine on the Internet since 1997. She taught English at Boston University and Suffolk University, about ten years each. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals, among them The Hudson Review, Ibbetson Street Magazine, and Mezzo Cammin. Her chapbook The Need for a Bridge and a full-length collection Take and Receive were both published in 2019. Her poem “The Other and the One” won the Roberts Memorial Prize with The Lyric in 2022. A sequence of poems “The Octagonal Schoolhouse” won the Samuel Washington Allen Honorable Mention Prize from the New England Poetry Club in 2023. (Author photo by John Goldie.)

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