Poetry Gets Local

Produced in conjunction with the twentieth anniversary of the Altadena Poet Laureate Program, the Altadena Poetry Review: Anthology 2026 is now in print, published by Golden Foothills Press.

The anthology came together under the editorship of Altadena’s 2024-2026 Poets Laureate Lester Graves Lennon (Editor in Chief) and Sehba Sarwar (Assistant Editor) and with help from Thelma T. Reyna (Assistant Editor). Reyna is the publisher of the Golden Foothills Press. The Altadena Library District organizes and supports the Altadena Poet Laureate Program and through the Program the publication of the Review.

The anthology’s poems are in two sections. The first, “All Honored Fire Poems,” collects poems written in response to the Eaton Fire and previously published online in the 2025 issue of the Review. The second section, “All Open Submission Poems,” collects the poems submitted and accepted specifically for the 2026 issue.

The 2026 Anthology is at once a collection of poems and a historical document.

Consider Lennon’s statement in his preface: “Altadena was founded by the Woodbury brothers in 1887. That is the only event in Altadena’s history more consequential than the Eaton Fire that began on January 7, 2025, claimed 19 lives, and destroyed over 9,000 structures.”

In 1887, Altadena came into existence. With the Eaton Fire, the town seemed to face an end but has undergone a new beginning. Many of the local authors with poems in the issue speak to this moment of ending and beginning.

In doing so, their poems variously meditate on an event in which the history of the town crossed paths with the history of the Earth, the Eaton Fire being an example of the region’s fire ecology yet at the same time a fire boosted in its severity by impacts of anthropogenic global warming on Eaton Canyon and the San Gabriel Mountains.

Poems in the anthology such as Kathee Hennigan Bautista’s “Fire Rained Down on Us in the Wind” and Joseph Grieco’s “Wind and Fire” evidence the poetic imagination seeking to envision this strange situation of one fire made worse by, and inseparable from, another: the burning of fossil fuels. The uncanniness comes through with force in Leah Sullivan’s “Eaton Canyon Night, January 7, 2025.”

The anthology includes many poems on topics besides the Eaton Fire. And, like South Pasadena’s Poet Laureate Ron Koertge, who contributes the poem “The Natural World,” many of the authors are poet laureates with many publications.

There’s “The Plane Tree” by David Mason, a former Poet Laureate of Colorado currently living in Tasmania. Santa Barbara resident and that city’s tenth Poet Laureate Melinda Palacio contributes “The Power of Vultures.” The current West Hollywood City Poet Laureate Jen Cheng offers two poems, “Bamboo Children of the Chinese Diaspora Are Strong Like Precious Jade” and “I Bought the Sexy Pleather Moto Suit Margaret Cho Wore on Her Instagram Post and It Failed to Get Me a Date.”

Some of the contributors have achieved notable literary fame. For example, the author of Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A., Luis J. Rodriguez, contributes the poem “Perhaps.”

But a few of the poems are their authors’ very first publications.

Consider, for example, Emily Glory Peters’s poem “Dead Love,” which wryly deploys reification as a figurative mode to ponder the human-relation-become-thing the title names.

And then there’s “Digging Through the Rubble of Our Home” by Asha Srikantiah. In this poem, deploying reification’s contrary, personification, the poet meditates with passionate calm on things lost to the Eaton Fire, things bearing histories of human relation, culminating in a coin that brings the poem’s emotions home.

If you soon come across poems by Peters or by Srikantiah in other publications, do not be surprised.

Poetry fans should find reading around in the 2026 Anthology rewarding. If you are a survivor of the Eaton Fire, the collection has much to offer in terms of poems both enjoyable in themselves and useful for discovering and working through your thoughts and emotions about the fire and its aftermath. And any bookshelf collecting works on and of the history of Altadena would do well to include a copy.

DEETS

Altadena Poetry Review: Anthology 2026, edited by Lester Graves Lennon, Sehba Sarwar, and Thelma T. Reyna. Golden Foothills Press, 326 pages, $20. Available from local booksellers, from Amazon, or from the publisher.