Loopholes

poems by Tamara Štajner

translated from the German

by Rebecca Weingart

21 pages, paper, staple-bound

Toad Press, 2026. $6.00

poems by Tamara Štajner

English translations Rebecca Weingart

Cover image based on the 19th century print “Blue and pink paste paper with circle and wavy line pattern,” Anonymous, Object 40.21.112 at The MET. In the public domain; courtesy of Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1940. 

You can purchase a copy of Loopholes at Asterism.

A selection of poems by award-winning musician, author, and performance artist Tamara Štajner. LOOPHOLES draws from Tamara Štajner's poetry collection Schlupflöcher (Wunderhorn, 2022), which explores themes of memory, place, and motherhood. These resonant and sonic poems connect English readers to an important new voice in German literature. Štajner's portrayal of pregnancy in the "loopholes" series of poems--included in its entirety here--may feel especially timely for American audiences living in a post-Roe v. Wade society.

The literary critic Beate Tröger praised the courage and genius of Štajner’s poetry: “What does it mean to (not) be a mother? This question, which in the cycle attempts to poetically capture perceptions of the body, is translated here in a nuanced and emotional way into a language that transforms a subjective experience into a universal one, connecting the longing for connection and the desire for autonomy, tough and tender at the same time.”

Tamara Štajner, born in Novo mesto (Slovenia), is a musician and author, based in Vienna, Austria. She received her Masters in Viola at the University for Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. She is a sought-after soloist and plays in multiple established ensembles. Tamara’s performance art has been presented at the Viennese Museums Quartier, the Secession, the Kunstraum Niederösterreich, OstLicht, and Vienna Art Week. She has led workshops at institutions including Williams College, the Private University for Music and Art in Vienna, and the University for Music and Performing Arts Graz. She received multiple fellowships from the Federal Ministry of Art and Culture, including the annual literature scholarship (2026). In 2020, she was admitted to the "Junge Akademie" of the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz. Her first book of poetry, Schlupflöcher, was published in 2022 by Wunderhorn, followed by her narrative debut, Raupenfell, in 2023. In 2024, she won the Meran Poetry Prize and read at the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, where she was awarded the Kelag Prize for her text Luft nach unten. In spring 2026, her Slovenian debut novel Goseničji kožuh was published by Beletrina. Her novel Luft nach unten is forthcoming from Paul Zsolnay Verlag in autumn 2026.


Rebecca Weingart is a translator from the Midwest. Her translations have appeared in Pakn Treger, Hopkins Review, Harvard Review, and Grotto Journal and have received support from the Yiddish Book Center, the American Literary Translators Association, and the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and is currently a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis.

 

2026 titles available for preorder

 

We are so excited about our 2026 chapbook selections! We're putting the final touches on our two exciting titles: 

 

 

LOOPHOLES, poems by Tamara Štajner, translated from the German by Rebecca Weingart. (21 pages, paper, staple-bound. Toad Press, 2026. $6.00)

 

 

 

 

& IN BLOOM, stories by Katarzyna Szaulińska, translated from the Polish by Mark Tardi. Cover art by Małgorzata Myk. (29 pages, paper, staple-bound. Toad Press, 2026. $6.00)

 

 

 

 

LOOPHOLES will be available mid-August, and IN BLOOM will arrive mid-September, but you can pre-order today on Asterism! Learn more and reserve your copy at asterismbooks.com/publisher/toad-press

 

 

 

Leaving the Beach

poems by Ariane Dreyfus

translated 

by Elaine Terranova

39 pages, paper, staple-bound

Toad Press, 2025. $6.00

poems by Araine Dreyfus

translations by Elaine Terranova

cover drawing by Ariene Dreyfus, "Partir encore plus loin?"

You can purchase a copy of Leaving the Beach at Asterism, on Etsy, or from submittable.

Ariane Dreyfus is a French poet, critic, and retired professor who continues to teach poetry writing workshops. She was born in 1958. Her work has appeared in most major literary periodicals and prominent anthologies in France as well as included in New European Poets, ed. Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer (Graywolf, 2008). She has published more than fifteen works, including Le dernier livre des enfants (Flammarion, 2016), inspired in part by A High Wind in Jamaica, a novel by Richard Hughes, and its film adaptation by Alexander Mackendrick; Nous nous attendons and Iris, c’est votre bleu (Poesie/Gallimard, 2023); and Le double été (Castor Astral, 2024). She has always drawn inspiration from other arts, particularly the circus, dance, and cinema. Her poetry is often narrative.

Elaine Terranova has published eight collections of poetry, most recently Rinse (Grid Books, 2023), two chapbooks, and The Diamond Cutter’s Daughter: a Poet’s Memoir. Her translation of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis is part of the Penn Greek Drama Series. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The New Yorker, APR, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Hotel Amerika. She has received the Academy of American Poets First Book Award (formerly the Walt Whitman Award); fellowships from Pew, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts; the 2024 Maurice English Poetry Award; and a Pushcart Prize.

 

Middle-Aged Man's Self-Portrait

poems by Yan An

translated 

by Chen Du & Xisheng Chen

 

17 pages, paper, staple-bound

Toad Press, 2025. $6.00

poems by Yan An

translations by Chen Du & Xisheng Chen

cover art by Yichao Sun

You can purchase a copy of Middle-Aged Man's Self-Portrait at Asterism,  on Etsy or from submittable.

A prominent poet in contemporary China, Yan An is the author of 15 poetry books, including Rock Arrangement, which won him The Sixth Lu Xun Literary Prize, one of China’s top four literary prizes. The winner of various national awards and prizes, he is also a Vice President of the Poetry Institute of China, a Vice President of the Shaanxi Writers Association, a member of the National Committee of China Writers Association, and the head and Executive Editor-in-Chief of the literary journal Yan River, one of the oldest and most famous literary journals in Northwestern China. In English, his full-length poetry collection, A Naturalist’s Manor, translated by Chen Du and Xisheng Chen and published by Chax Press, was one of four titles shortlisted for the 2022 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize, administered by the American Literary Translators Association. The poems in this chapbook are from Yan An’s full-length poetry collection Rock Arrangement.

Chen Du is a voting member of the American Translators Association and an expert member of the Translators Association of China with a Master’s Degree in Biophysics from Roswell Park Cancer Institute, SUNY at Buffalo, and a Master’s Degree in Radio Physics from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In the United States and a few other Western countries, she has published 150+ English translations, poems, and essays in 50+ literary journals.

Xisheng Chen, a Chinese American, is an ESL grammarian, lexicologist, linguist, translator, and educator. A translator for over three decades, he has published translations in various fields in newspapers and journals in China and abroad. He is also a freelance translator for JTG, Inc., Reston, VA for the translation project for the US Department of Justice.

 

Curious about the poems in this chapbook? Read "Stranger Comes to Visit in a Strange Way," published in Hedge Apple

 

diamonds & rust

poems by Catalina Vergara 

translated from the Spanish

by Tiffany Troy

unpaginated, paper, staple-bound

Toad Press, 2025. $6.00

poems in Spanish by Catalina Vergara

English translations by Tiffany Troy

cover art by Magdalena Vergara

You can purchase a copy of diamonds & rust at Asterism, on Etsy, or from submittable. 

In this tremendous chapbook, Mars is crummy, rusty, but alive, the planet confronting its feminine counterpart. The lyrical subject is enigmatic (masculine), or rather, enigmatic (feminine). It slips between lowercase letters, between caesuras and enjambments, leaping between silences and blank spaces behind the melancholy of romantic or emotional misunderstandings..... Vergara contrasts the pristine, clear, naked transparency of the diamond with its companion fragility, with the dirty, dark, and discomforting texture of rust. We all desire diamonds. No one wants rust, or do we? /  En esta tremenda obra, Marte siendo desierto, oxidado, pero con vida, enfrentado el planeta a su contraste femenino. El sujeto lírico es enigmático, o más bien enigmática. Se cuela entre las minúsculas y los desbordes de la pausa versal y los encabalgamientos, salta entre los silencios y los espacios en blanco tras la melancolía de ese desencuentro amoroso/afectivo..... Vergara contraste entre lo prístino, claro, desnudo de la transparencia en el diamante y su fragilidad, versus la textura sucia, oscura y poco deseada del óxido. Todos queremos diamantes, pero nadie quiere el óxido ¿o sí? - Blanca Hernández, author of Enmirlada 

Catalina Vergara is a writer who was born in Santiago de Chile in 1998. She studied Creative Literature and majored in Education at the Universidad Diego Portales. diamonds & rust' was written in a poetry workshop taught by Raúl Zurita. She published a science fiction novel titled Vulnicura through Aurea Ediciones. Catalina explores themes that stretch reality and the limits of what is perceptible through an occult and queer framework.

Tiffany Troy is a poet, translator, and critic. Based in Flushing, Queens, her poems revolve around her dreams and the dreams she carries. Tiffany is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and the chapbook When Ilium Burns (Bottlecap Press). She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote, and Co-Editor of Matter.

 

Reviews & Praise 

Diamonds and Rust es, en definitiva, un poemario que interroga el deseo y la forma en que lo habitamos: como carencia, como fantasía, como forma de contemplación. Explora esa línea limite donde el otro amado puede volverse tan lejano que termina por convertirse en figura artística, y no en presencia viva. Y, sin embargo, también hay en estos versos una necesidad entre líneas de ser tocado, de romper la distancia, de ser deseado también, de romper con la poesía que requiere de decoro para transmitir una emoción tan compleja como lo es el amar.
- Franco Fuentes, Asco Zine

diamonds & rust is, ultimately, a chapbook that interrogates desire and the way we inhabit it: as an absence, as fantasy or as a form of contemplation. It explores that limit where the beloved other can become so distanced from the self that they transform into an artistic figure rather than a living presence. And yet, between these lines also exists a need to be touched, to break the distance, to also be desired, and to break with the decorum poetry requires to convey an emotion as complex as to love. - Franco Fuentes, Asco Zine

The sixth dimension is essentially the “multiverse” – it contains all possibilities. The poet imagines a kind of fulfillment in the silence of dream that spells out the essence of the sixth dimension. In a note, Vergara explains her drive behind diamonds & rust, “El poemario es una sutura entre mi dolor, el de Baez y el silencio de aquellos que sufren por un amor imposible, una relacion corosiva.” (“The collection of poems is a suture between my pain, Baez’s pain, and the silence of those who suffer from an impossible love, a corrosive relationship.”) Re-written silence means suffering may be redeemed in another world, a parallel universe. Call it wish-fulfillment or liken it to the 18th century German “Sturm und Drang” movement with its emphasis on intense emotion, the impulse is sincere, searing.- Charles Rammelkamp, London Grip