Corresponding Squares, by Nkosi Nkululeko [PREORDER]

In his debut chapbook, Nkosi Nkululeko finds unexpected harmony between chess and poetry. His square poems, which read both left-to-right and top-to-bottom, are breathtaking feats of clockwork—yet despite its technical brilliance, the work never loses sight of the poetry that matters most. You don’t need to be a chess player to find Corresponding Squares worth reading, and reading, and reading.

Corresponding Squares comes out April 28, 2026. Preorders will be shipped to arrive around that date or earlier.

Praise

In Corresponding Squares, Nkosi Nkululeko transforms the chess board into a site of poetic revelation. These remarkable square poems refuse linear reading, inviting us instead to navigate meaning through multiple pathways—horizontal, vertical, diagonal—each journey revealing new syntactic possibilities and emotional truths. Like chess itself, every move matters, every direction opens new strategies for understanding. This is fugitive poetry at its finest: text that escapes conventional boundaries and demands we reimagine how words can move across the page and through our lives and consciousness.

— Marwa Helal

A black rook in grainy whether, Nkosi’s opening gambit moves the meter into a geometry with ate by ate dimensions. His pawns chain & reign into pomes which are not to be tasted en passant, but teased into all their iterations. Here Nkululeko’s tactics multiply & divide into phonetic combinations which fork & spear before locking into bespoke matrices. Meaning: Freedom. Choose your own adventure, but Nkosi’s endgame is to promote and be promoted—not merely to a king or queen of how or why Basquiat rhymes with survey, but rather the plié between a dark knight & a beige bishop as they kneel to prey on the endless possibilities of play.

— Joel Dias-Porter

Details

ISBN: 978-1-7339515-2-4
Publication Date: April 28, 2026
Pages: 46
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