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9781938603761_FC.jpg

Dispatch from Every Second Guess eBook by Megan Gannon

$7.99

A verse-memoir spanning the breakdown of a marriage and the resulting wide-open horizon of single motherhood, Dispatch From Every Second Guess explores how we negotiate the present in the light of the past, how our lingering resentments limit our attentions, and how old wounds reopen in new ways.

Gannon’s life is layered with tensions. The tension of being a white adoptive mother to a Black son. The tension of healing from a failed marriage. The tension of supporting a partner through mental health crises. The tension of mothering the partner’s child in the shadow of a fraught relationship with one’s own mother. And the tension of admitting ugly truths in a genre that often demands beauty, especially from women poets.

Perfect for fans of Sharon Olds and Maggie Smith, Gannon’s second full-length collection of poetry is rife with poignant self-reflection and lyrical storytelling as she writes her way toward understanding, and maybe even forgiveness.

Publication Date: March 24, 2026

Ebook

advance PRAISE FOR dispatch from every second guess

"Megan Gannon’s dispatches seethe, shock, and wink at the absurdity of it all." –Foreword Reviews

“'No one will call this book beautiful,' Megan Gannon states matter-of-factly in one of her dispatches. Gannon writes from the complicated center of families both broken and blended; as the divorced mother of two sons (one Black, one white; one she gave birth to, one the biological son of another mother); as the stepmother of another woman’s daughter; as a daughter estranged from her own mother. Her personal complications intersect with the social/political realities of racism and sexism compelling her to 'write the things I don’t want to say.' Her poems cobble 'broken bits / and detritus . . . into new likenesses.' And that is a thing of beauty.”

–Grace Bauer, author of Unholy Heart: New & Selected Poems.

"In Dispatch from Every Second Guess, Megan Gannon delivers a fearless verse memoir traversing the intimate terrains of motherhood, race, divorce, grief, and artistic reckoning. With a lyric voice at once personal and political, Gannon excavates the violence embedded in care and the paradox of holding love through the world’s impossibilities. Across poem-dispatches sutured to a taut couplet form, Gannon writes from 'the day’s small breaks and burns,' charting what it means to survive love, to parent, to persist in visibility within a world that rewards disappearance. I love this book for how it complicates easy frames for understanding motherhood and love, for how it reveals that life itself foils our best-laid plans, and for all the tenderness crouched deep inside its hard edges. Dispatch from Every Second Guess reminds us of what poetry can still do: bear witness, second guess, revise the self, and insist—again and again—on the fragile art of remaining visible in one’s own life."

—Jessica Q. Stark, author of Buffalo Girl and Poetry Editor for AGNI 

"In Dispatch from Every Second Guess, Megan Gannon skillfully interweaves structural and aesthetic innovation with layered narrative depth and propulsive energy. The repetition of the dispatch form reinforces the paradoxes of time, memory, and emotion—how within the sequence of days, some experiences fade while others strengthen and haunt. 'Anyone can tell you what becomes of hunger:' Gannon writes in the collection's searching, wise, and intimate voice, 'always the widening where the weather / comes from, the narrow throat making a mess / of its urgent searching, and the wanting / is the center of the still.'" 

—Jonathan Fink, author of Don't Do It—We Love You, My Heart

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Megan Gannon is the author of Cumberland (a novel) and White Nightgown (poems). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, Pleiades, and most recently in Alaska Quarterly Review, Atlanta Review, Calyx, Meridian, and The Pinch. She is an associate professor of English at Ripon College in Wisconsin.

A verse-memoir spanning the breakdown of a marriage and the resulting wide-open horizon of single motherhood, Dispatch From Every Second Guess explores how we negotiate the present in the light of the past, how our lingering resentments limit our attentions, and how old wounds reopen in new ways.

Gannon’s life is layered with tensions. The tension of being a white adoptive mother to a Black son. The tension of healing from a failed marriage. The tension of supporting a partner through mental health crises. The tension of mothering the partner’s child in the shadow of a fraught relationship with one’s own mother. And the tension of admitting ugly truths in a genre that often demands beauty, especially from women poets.

Perfect for fans of Sharon Olds and Maggie Smith, Gannon’s second full-length collection of poetry is rife with poignant self-reflection and lyrical storytelling as she writes her way toward understanding, and maybe even forgiveness.

Publication Date: March 24, 2026

Ebook

advance PRAISE FOR dispatch from every second guess

"Megan Gannon’s dispatches seethe, shock, and wink at the absurdity of it all." –Foreword Reviews

“'No one will call this book beautiful,' Megan Gannon states matter-of-factly in one of her dispatches. Gannon writes from the complicated center of families both broken and blended; as the divorced mother of two sons (one Black, one white; one she gave birth to, one the biological son of another mother); as the stepmother of another woman’s daughter; as a daughter estranged from her own mother. Her personal complications intersect with the social/political realities of racism and sexism compelling her to 'write the things I don’t want to say.' Her poems cobble 'broken bits / and detritus . . . into new likenesses.' And that is a thing of beauty.”

–Grace Bauer, author of Unholy Heart: New & Selected Poems.

"In Dispatch from Every Second Guess, Megan Gannon delivers a fearless verse memoir traversing the intimate terrains of motherhood, race, divorce, grief, and artistic reckoning. With a lyric voice at once personal and political, Gannon excavates the violence embedded in care and the paradox of holding love through the world’s impossibilities. Across poem-dispatches sutured to a taut couplet form, Gannon writes from 'the day’s small breaks and burns,' charting what it means to survive love, to parent, to persist in visibility within a world that rewards disappearance. I love this book for how it complicates easy frames for understanding motherhood and love, for how it reveals that life itself foils our best-laid plans, and for all the tenderness crouched deep inside its hard edges. Dispatch from Every Second Guess reminds us of what poetry can still do: bear witness, second guess, revise the self, and insist—again and again—on the fragile art of remaining visible in one’s own life."

—Jessica Q. Stark, author of Buffalo Girl and Poetry Editor for AGNI 

"In Dispatch from Every Second Guess, Megan Gannon skillfully interweaves structural and aesthetic innovation with layered narrative depth and propulsive energy. The repetition of the dispatch form reinforces the paradoxes of time, memory, and emotion—how within the sequence of days, some experiences fade while others strengthen and haunt. 'Anyone can tell you what becomes of hunger:' Gannon writes in the collection's searching, wise, and intimate voice, 'always the widening where the weather / comes from, the narrow throat making a mess / of its urgent searching, and the wanting / is the center of the still.'" 

—Jonathan Fink, author of Don't Do It—We Love You, My Heart

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Megan Gannon is the author of Cumberland (a novel) and White Nightgown (poems). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, Pleiades, and most recently in Alaska Quarterly Review, Atlanta Review, Calyx, Meridian, and The Pinch. She is an associate professor of English at Ripon College in Wisconsin.

advance praise for the shipikisha club

"Gripping...A strong-willed woman contends with patriarchal entrenchment following her husband’s death in the riveting, nuanced novel The Shipikisha Club."

—Foreword Reviews, starred review

“Kalimamukwento (Obligations to the Wounded, 2024) reliably delivers emotionally charged stories with complex characters that confront the darker side of society, and her latest novel is no exception…Kalimamukwento expertly explores the insidious nature of toxic patriarchal systems, revealing how easily people cling to the very structures that cause them harm. Her prose is unyielding and tender, searing the desires and pains of each character indelibly into the heart and mind of every reader. An extraordinary read.”

––Booklist, starred review

“A heart-wrenching, unforgettable story of beauty, courage, and the strength of female determination.”

––Kirkus Reviews

“Affecting without being sentimental. Mubanga Kalimamukwento knows how to tell a story!”

—Chika Unigwe, author of The Middle Daughter

"The Shipikisha Club is electric. From the very first page I was pulled into the worlds of Ntashé and her mother. This is a book where the passages, full of beautifully spare, sharp words, are there to serve the story of relationships put to severe tests."

—Farah Ali, author of The River, the Town

“In The Shipikisha Club, Kalimamukwento creates an unflinching account of the myriad forms of intimate violence and betrayal within a patriarchal system, interspersed with moments of startling tenderness. She rejects moral certitude, instead pulling us into the minds of messy, complex women attempting to survive and connect in an unjust world. Kalimamukwento vividly renders the daily indignities of familial spaces with perfectly calibrated prose, every word uncompromising and honest, until the emotional and physical geography of these homes are seared into our brains.”

 —Sarah Yahm, author of Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation

 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mubanga Kalimamukwento is the author of The Shipikisha Club (Dzanc, 2026), Obligations to the Wounded (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024), Another Mother Does Not Come When Yours Dies (Wayfarer, 2025), unmarked graves (Tusculum, 2022), and The Mourning Bird (Jacana, 2019). Her work appears in adda, Overland, Isele, Kweli, Netflix, and elsewhere. She has edited for Shenandoah, the Water~Stone Review, Doek!, and Safundi, and mentors at the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. Mubanga founded Ubwali Literary Magazine. She is a PhD student in the department of Gender, Women and Sexualities Studies with a minor in Development Studies and Social Change at the University of Minnesota, where she researches Zambian married women who are long-term survivors of HIV.