John's Table

by Lesle Lewis

John’s Table is Lewis’ sixth full-length book of prose poems. Arranged in 45 monostich pieces, all with single-word titles, this collection showcases a poet who, after more than 20 years of releasing books into the world, is an artist who continues to master her craft. John's Table spotlight's the New Hampshire-based author's writing in peak form, with her lines moving fluidly between feeling like napkin notes and fragments scribbled upon waking from a dream. This braiding of daily life ("There's a noise in the woodshed. / The unknowable is everywhere.") with magical moments ("She laughs her head off and hands it to me.") results in an intimate snapshot of a poet fully inhabiting her abilities. Shifting between the “I,” the “you,” and the “we,” John's Table feels simultaneously personal and communal, connected to and estranged from the world surrounding the writer. Full of loss and worry yet joy and hope, with an overall unease of our excessive use of technology, the poems tangle big-picture questions with internal confusions, internal reflections with collective uncertainties. Reading John’s Table feels like flipping through a notepad or watching the news cycle next to a typewriter. Laugh-out-loud funny, heartbreaking, tender, cheerful, and poignant all at once.

“Wildly alive. A carnival of thoughts. Exotic, familiar. A door in the floor in your bedroom that leads to everywhere. Impossible and pleasing.”

Rachel B. Glaser, author of Hairdo (2017)

"“The train’s left the station, and we’re on it.” I can never be certain what awaits at each destination."

Nate Logan, author of Wrong Horse (2024)

“John’s Table is a delight to inhabit. Lesle Lewis enlivens sentences–hers are refreshingly unsettling, somehow strange and familiar at once.”

Danika Stegeman, author of Ablation (2023)

70 pages, Paperback

Expected publication May 27, 2026

About the author

Lesle Lewis' collections include Small Boat (winner of the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize), Landscapes I & II (Alice James Books, 2006), lie down too (Alice James Books, 2011), and A Boot's a Boot (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2014). Her chapbook, It's Rothko in Winter or Belgium was published by Factory Hollow Press in 2012. She has had poems appear in American Letters and Commentary, Northern New England Review, Hotel Amerika, Mississippi Review, The Cincinnati Review, Green Mountains Review, Barrow Street Mudfish, LIT, Pool, jubilat, notnostrums, and Sentence. She lives in New Hampshire and is a Professor of Creative Writing at Landmark College.

Reviews

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been reading and enjoying Lesle Lewis' prose poems for over five years and I'm honored to be able to release her sixth full-length poetry collection through Piżama Press. This book is full of some of the most startling and magnificent lines I've ever come across in poetry. It's a whirlwind of a book, written in a way that only Lewis knows how.