All We've Got by Isaiah Newman

Limited edition print copy from the 2026 Garden Party Chapbook Contest!
Shipping in Fall 2026!
cover art: Home by David Newman (2024)

Isaiah Newman is a queer, Jewish writer and social worker living in the Boston area. They write both fiction and poetry, and their work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Voicemail Poems, Diode Poetry Journal, ANMLY, and elsewhere. You can find their work (and contact them) at isaiahnewman.com or on Instagram @thegreatskittishbakeoff.

Praise for All We've Got:

Isaiah tells such a good story. Their style is so needed in the current poetic landscape—they are unafraid to dive into rabbit holes, to talk about the lineage of the thing, to dissect root causes, to follow an aside, to make their feelings apparent, and always to plainly name underlying political oppression. When Isaiah started coming to Boston Poetry Slam, they said they were mainly a fiction writer, and I said, too bad, you're a poet now. Because the best poets bring that dexterity of language and style. These poems are bursting with heart, hope, and anger, stitched with a sense of humor and unabashed obsession with pop culture. This chapbook is like listening to them tell a long, winding story that will give you new ways to view the world, and I will never tire of hearing it.

-Myles Taylor, Masculinity Parable (2023)

“If our grief knows only our own / can we survive?” Isaiah Newman asks, radiating the ideas of love and loss in this collection through overlapping lenses of Palestinian liberation, Jewish identity, therapy practice, the TV show Fleabag, and family history. It is not only one another's grief we find in All We've Got, but where that grief lives: in making art, sharing soup, singing the names of our beloveds. Reckoning with the concrete tragedies and despairs of this world—a “house of bones, pipes of rotten blood,”—Newman implores us to move from “the breath held / before a punchline” to instead imagine "prayers sung by one many-throated voice," because we can—and must—turn to one another to chart our collective survival.

-Aparna Paul, Home // Free (Game Over Books)

In All We’ve Got, Isaiah Newman excavates bones and ghosts and trauma and the cost of surviving it all. These sensory poems examine the vast range of human connection with stunning and tactile language that is mesmerizing in its rhythm. Readers will be drawn to Isaiah’s deep empathy, their reflections on “deaths of honeybees and humans” and the ways “there is always a new form of grief waiting / to sink its teeth into our heels.” But this collection is not simply a reflection on grief and prayers for change in a conflicted world, but a testament to the power of community and connection to propel us towards survival.

-Annie Marhefka, GPC 2026 Judge