Available November 1, 2026

“The body betrays. Not always. But enough. And here in Dagne Forrest’s slim and powerful collection Falldown Lane, the chaos of the traitorous body is captured with sublime clarity, the tug of war between spirit and flesh depicted with heart rending precision. Forrest offers the reader the firm footing of a delicate balance that her own body has stripped away from her. I dare you to read this collection without feeling grateful for Forrest’s wit and irony; I dare you to read this collection without feeling her fall as your own.”

       —Jason Schneiderman, author of Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire and Nothingism: Poetry at the End of Print Culture

After a traumatic accident, “some salty / god’s devising,” befalls the speaker, Falldown Lane becomes a site of loss that lives in the body. As she is being rewritten, the speaker is pressed to return over and over to the memory. Recovery, where “hope [has] its limits,” leaves hypervigilance and regret in its wake. Isolated and yet not, the speaker is enveloped by the “whole bruised / world larking towards oblivion, / although each one of us falls alone.” Forrest’s work will resonate with many who have been forced to rebuild after physical trauma.

—Jill Khoury, author of earthwork

Dagne Forrest is a Canadian poet who has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Canada’s National Magazine Award. In 2021 she had a poem included in Canada’s Poem in Your Pocket campaign. She won first prize in the 2025 Annual ruth weiss Poetry Contest and was selected as a finalist in the 2025 Marvin Bell Memorial Poetry Prize by Maggie Smith for December Magazine’s final issue. Her poetry has appeared in journals in the US and Canada, including Rogue Agent, RockPaperPoem, The New Quarterly, Anacapa Review, Pinhole Poetry, Funicular Magazine, Whale Road Review, Prism International, and Rust + Moth. She belongs to Painted Bride Quarterly’s senior editorial and podcast teams and is Managing Editor. Her chapbooks include Un/becoming (Baseline Press, 2025) and Falldown Lane (Whittle Micropress, 2026).