Just this: New and Selected Poems
2026
Forthcoming May 12, 2026.
Available for preorder.
I hope copies of this book will be passed out by the ferryman at the River Styx crossing. Of course, we all would have benefited from it earlier, but better late than never. Who knows how long that crossing might take? — Red Pine, author of Zen Baggage
Per Amazon blurb:
In Just This, beloved poet John Brehm returns with a rich and inclusive collection of his best poems. As he faces his own mortality and health challenges, Brehm offers us a moving, elegant, and refreshingly honest look at moments of beauty, pain, and insight in his own life. The collection also contains a substantial selection of poems from his previous books, allowing us to see the evolution of his work over the past twenty years, as his Dharma practice and his poetry practice become more integrated.
For readers, the lively, accessible poems in Just This may come to feel like companions—offering wisdom, comfort, and the blessed relief of laughter—as they walk through the ten thousand joys and sorrows of their own lives.
Brehm’s poems engage us immediately, without pretense, without fanfare, as if seeking no private insight about transcendence, only a hope that writer and reader can together gain a perspective that may reconcile them with the world. This braiding of hope and experience is obvious from his earliest books, but it becomes central in his more recent work as the poet confronts the challenges of age and illness. Just This is a book of wonderful freshness, the kind that makes us feel, as Thoreau might say, that it was written this morning. — Carl Dennis, author of Earthly Virtues and Practical Gods, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
What do you hope to find in poetry? Wisdom, humor, delight? Acerbic wit? Reverence, irony, profound insight? Look no further. John Brehm’s Just This has them all. In splendid abundance. With thirty-seven new poems and selections from four previous collections, Brehm leads you to ‘the mystical realm that shimmers / like a heat mirage at the center of all things.’ At that crux, this masterful poet ignites what he aptly calls ‘little fires of consciousness.’ Take note: our fraught world is offering you a bright boon named Just This. By all means, say yes to this luminous gift. — Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita