PULSE

by Maria Nazos

Named for the Pulse nightclub shooting and the rhythm of heartbeats, this collection of poems grapples with finding life amid profound losses.

The poems of PULSE look deeply into a troubled world, inspecting what makes us suffer and demonstrating how we overcome difficulties. PULSE interrogates painful losses of friends to cancer, harmful politics, hate crimes, and mass shootings, including the 2016 massacre at Pulse nightclub. Maria Nazos examines the life force that continues to pulse relentlessly through a fragmented world, that enables us to flow, breathe, and regenerate, even through grief and loss. From Provincetown beaches and Costa Rican crab shacks to Midwestern plains and a Tampa nightclub, the collection moves through madness, redemption, and love.

88 pages, Paperback

Expected publication April 5, 2026

About the author

Poet, translator, and memoirist Maria Nazos has been published in The New Yorker, TriQuarterly, World Literature Today, The Columbia Review, The Denver Quarterly, The Mid-American Review, American Life in Poetry, The Greensboro Review, The North American Review, The Tampa Review, Anomaly, The Florida Review, The Southern Humanities Review, The New Ohio Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere.

A Pushcart nominee, her work has appeared in renowned anthologies including What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump, (Northwestern University Press, 2020) edited by Martín Espada, and Nasty Woman, An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse, edited by Grace Bauer and Julie Kane (Lost Horse Press, 2017). Maria is the author of two collections of poetry: Still Life (Dancing Girl Press 2016) and A Hymn That Meanders (Wising Up Press 2011).

She served for three years as Ted Kooser's editorial assistant for his "American Life in Poetry" nationally-syndicated column. She holds an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a Ph.D. in English with a Creative Writing Emphasis and a minor in Women's and Gender Studies from The University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her work has received an Academy of American Poets Award, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from The Sewanee Writers' Conference, scholarships from The Santa Fe Art Institute, The Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, The Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and fellowships from The University of Nebraska, The Vermont Studio Center, The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.