Unbound Edition Press today announced it will publish Angie Estes’ eighth book, a volume of her most inventive and compelling poems. The Swallows Come Out: Selected Poems, 1995-2025 is scheduled for publication in March 2026 and includes a foreword by the acclaimed literary critic and poet, Professor Stephanie Burt of Harvard University. Prior to the selected poems being published, Estes’ seventh collection, Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City, will be released by the press in April 2025 as part of National Poetry Month.
Estes is widely celebrated for her work. She has won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Audre Lorde Prize for Lesbian Poetry, and was a 2010 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Among her many achievements are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lannan Foundation. In 2023, she was the Writer-in-Residence at the James Merrill House.
Of Estes’ work, Langdon Hammer, Professor of English at Yale University, previously wrote, “This is a poetry of style, elegance, and fresh surprise, for the ear and the eye, the heart and the mind. It reminds me why I read.”
Peter Campion, executive editor at Unbound Edition Press, acquired The Swallows Come Out for the house, and is editing the work with Estes. He writes: “Angie Estes writes with exquisite attention to the world, to the whole history of art in its many forms, and to language itself. At the same time, for all its subtlety and sophistication, her poetry remains emotionally immediate, disarmingly vulnerable. To read her work in its full breadth, as this collection allows, is to behold the major achievement of a major American poet.”
Patrick Davis, publisher and editor in chief at Unbound Edition Press, said, “It is impossible to overstate the importance of Angie Estes’ work within the arc of American poetry. Likewise, I cannot adequately express what a profound honor and pleasure it is to bring her very best poems to readers of serious literature. Her work is a gift to all who respect the endless potential of language, lovingly crafted, to capture and share the human experience in its full, complex variety. These are poems for the ages.”