Broadside: from Jewel Box

Toby Altman

2026

Jewel Box engages the buildings that the architect Louis Sullivan designed in the last years of his life. Though Sullivan is widely considered the father of modern architecture, he spent the last thirty years of his life struggling to find work: in part, because of his unwillingness to compromise with the Gilded Age capitalists who were his best clients and biggest supporters. In small towns across Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, Sullivan tried to develop an architecture of democracy, an architectural practice that would restore American democracy to its utopian promise.

Jewel Box investigates both the accomplishment and the failures of Sullivan’s architecture. The book revives Sullivan’s design practice, recreating his ostentatious, ornate buildings as elaborate concrete poems that spill across the page. But, it also locates Sullivan’s architecture in a colonial landscape, documenting the way that Sullivan’s achievement relies on the genocidal erasure of native peoples—an erasure that Sullivan participated in, calling for an “indigenous” American architectural style, built by white architects.

“Piece Meal”

Kate Colby

2026

KATE COLBY’S books of poetry and prose include I Mean, Reverse Engineer and Dream of the Trenches. She has received awards and fellowships from the Poetry Society of America, Rhode Island State Council for the Arts, the Dodd Research Center at University of Connecticut, and the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University. Her poems and essays have recently appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Harper’s,Lana Turner, LitHub and The Nation. She grew up in Massachusetts and currently lives in Providence, where she teaches at Brown and UPenn, and performs with the ad hoc poets’ theater group, Spatulate Church Emergency Shift. Her website is www.katecolby.com.