TheNewVerse.News : GOOD NIGHT AMERICA, JANUARY 2026

Thursday, January 22, 2026

GOOD NIGHT AMERICA, JANUARY 2026

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

Good night almighty oaks, good night acorns
snug in shells. Goodnight hens, asleep on perches.
Good night good people of Minneapolis St. Paul
hanging sheets of plastic over doors broken down
by ICE agents. Lullaby your little ones to sleep.
Good night neighbors with cameras and whistles.
Good night Mr. President, tweeting your fury,
slide easy into haunting dreams of disloyalty,

dreams of failed plastic surgery, bad poll numbers,
dreams of not enough admirers or paying guests—
Remember the kerfuffle when caviar was served
at Mar-a-Lago in tiny plastic spoons? Never enough!
It’s natural to want more caviar, money and power.
It’s natural to want kids not to be afraid or hungry
or molested or separated or zip-tied or teargassed.

Bonnie Jo Campbell’s latest novel The Waters, a national bestseller, was published in January 2024. She has a new novel The Spirits forthcoming in Fall 2026 from W.W. Norton. Her poetry has been published mostly in Southern Revoew, Mississippi Review, Midwest Review, and elsewhere. Kim Addonizio chose Bonnie Jo’s chapbook Love Letters to Sons of Bitches for the New York City Center for Book Arts Contest a few years back. Her poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. Bonnie Jo Campbell is a National Book Award finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award (fiction) finalist, as well as a Guggenheim fellow.

Emails to The New Verse News that do not follow the guidelines printed at the top of this page and in this column will be deleted. Poets are reminded, therefore, NOT to send attachments unless specifically requested to do so.

Although the editors and audience of The New Verse News have a politically progressive bias, we welcome well-written verses of various visions and viewpoints.

In any event, opinions expressed in The New Verse News are those of the poems' writers (or, perhaps, only of the poems' speakers) and not necessarily those of the editors, the audience, or other contributors to the site.

TheNewVerse.News walks a fine line between News and Literature. We choose not to publish poems that merely restate what one finds in a news article. On the other hand, we dare not offer verse that misleads our audience into thinking that an invented scenario actually happened in reality. In some cases, therefore, we request an author to add a note to explain how a poem veers from documented facts.

We do not accept work that exhibits racism, homophobia, xenophobia, sexism, ageism, classism, religious prejudice, ableism, or hatred of any marginalized group or individual.

By submitting work to The New Verse News, each contributor is affirming that the work is entirely her/his/their own creation, that it was not written, developed, or assisted by AI tools such as ChatGPT, that s/he/they owns the copyright to the work, that the work has not been previously published in print or posted online (including on personal blogs and social media or even on a private, password-protected location online), and that the work's publication in The New Verse News does not violate the rights of any publication, organization, or individual. The New Verse News thus requires and expects that each poem published herein is the original work of the person, named in the byline, who submits the poem, although it cannot guarantee that this is the case.

The editor typically introduces a poem on site with an illustration borrowed from news stories or photo collections. Although we reject any AI-created or AI-enhanced poetry, we do use graphics generated using AI applications at Shutterstock and NightCafé. We understand the ethical dilemmas: https://nightcafe.studio/blogs/info/ethical-concerns-in-using-ai-generated-images and https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/ethical-ai-for-good . If you are uncomfortable with our using AI graphics, you might refrain from submitting your work to us.

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The writer retains all other rights to her/his/their work. The writer of a poem accepted by the editors will be informed of that acceptance simultaneously with the posting of the poem on site. The editors try to respond to submissions within a fortnight.

The New Verse News accepts multiple, but NOT simultaneous submissions. In general, the editors of The New Verse News try not to post the work of any one poet more than once in ten days.

Please create a new email thread for each submission (i.e.: if you’ve submitted to us before, please don’t reply to a previous submission’s email thread).

The editors do not have the time to comment on poems submitted to The New Verse News. Even had we the time, we have found from unhappy experiences in the past that editorial feedback is too often the prompt for argument and too infrequently accepted as constructive. Decisions are based on the needs of the journal on any given day and are not at all meant to be judgements on the quality of submitted poems. Many poems rejected by The New Verse News have been eagerly accepted and published by other fine journals.

Poems published in The New Verse News generally remain available in the site's archives eternally or until a writer requests that her/his/their work be deleted.

The Managing Editor of The New Verse News is James Penha. Interviews with him regarding the editorial policies of the journal are available at:
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Thursday, January 22, 2026

GOOD NIGHT AMERICA, JANUARY 2026