Covered by the nitty-gritty dirt banned by the powers that behave beastly, Home Planet News 25 lays it all out in black & white with poetry by James Benger, Douglas K. Currier, Ken Gosse, John Grey, Carol Hamilton, Jennifer Freya Helgeson, Iwuagwu Ikechukwu, Celia Lawren, Theo Morris, Kirby Olson, Hilary Sideris, Dudley Stone, & Watt Worris; fiction by Kevin Holdsworth, Clyde Liffey, & Allison Whittenberg; nonfiction by Shannon Frost Greenstein & Donald Mangum; & artwork by Edward Michael Supranowicz. Many thanks to all!

The editors of Home Planet are always happy to hear good news from past contributors. So, with that in mind . . . Congratulations to Alaina Hammond, whose novelette “Jillian, Formerly Known As Frog Girl,” which appeared in Home Planet News, won the 2025 Magnum Foof (the award bestowed by Foofaraw Press). To this, let me add a well-deserved Huzzah!

Happy as well & hell to announce Half Inch Press’s 2 new book releases: Kirby Olson’s Night Shift at the Utopian Turtletop Factory & Dudley Stone’s Strays & Fellow Travelers.

Kirby Olson’s Night Shift at the Utopian Turtletop Factory takes its title from Marianne Moore’s famously rejected suggestion for the Edsel, “Utopian Turtletop,” a moment when high modernist language briefly brushed American industry and was politely set aside. Night Shift at the Utopian Turtletop Factory imagines that phrase surviving after hours, carried into the night shift where work, prayer, and speech blur: poems shaped over years of pruning and return, attentive to the ricochet between working-class religion and the long afterlife of modernism, with older roots reaching back toward early patristic voices. Rather than argue positions, the book listens for pressure—how belief, labor, and inherited forms strike one another and leave a residue in the line–so that what began as fragments and refusals gradually coheres into a single, nocturnal field of attention.

Strays & Fellow Travelers, Dudley Stone’s debut poetry collection, is about all the things that wander in from the cold obsessionally or unexpectedly and take up residence in your days and dreams. Readers should expect an Olympiad of playful verbal & typographical gymnastics along the way.  Dudley Stone is the winner of the 2026 A.R. Ammons Poetry Prize.

Many thanks!

Matt