United States, 21st Jul 2026 - WILMINGTON, DE, Poet Phil Linz, founder and publisher of Fierce Grace Press, announces the release of How It Was; How It Is: New & Selected Poems, an illustrated retrospective collection spanning more than fifty years of writing, from May 1971 through the present day. The book is illustrated by artist Ryn Gargulinski and published under Linz’s independent imprint, dedicated to what he calls “Publishing Under the Radar.”

Divided into two parts, “How It Was,” a selection of poems written between 1971 and 2018, and “How It Is,” a collection of new work, the book charts a life shaped by literary influences, addiction and recovery, love, faith, and friendship. Linz has cited Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs among his early touchstones, and the collection is dedicated in part to Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs, as well as to Alcoholics Anonymous co-founders Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith. In his author’s note, Linz reflects that he has written poems for more than fifty years and that many have “never been seen by anyone but me,” adding that after decades it “maybe it’s time” to share them. He describes an early poem, “From A Journal,” as an account of the drinking that nearly killed him before he found sobriety through AA.

The collection also includes lighter, wry moments, including “On Being Asked for Phil Linz’s Autograph,” a poem recounting the many times the author has been mistaken for his namesake, the late New York Yankees infielder Phil Linz. Elsewhere, the poems trace decades of relationships and locations, New York City, Croton, Los Angeles, and Pooler, Georgia among them, alongside reflections on spirituality, longtime involvement with HAI (Human Awareness Institute) workshops, and Linz’s enduring friendship with illustrator Ryn Gargulinski, which is itself the subject of several of the book’s poems.

Gargulinski’s illustrations run throughout the 108-page volume, complementing Linz’s free-verse style with original artwork created specifically for this edition. The pairing reflects a creative partnership that has spanned roughly 2,400 miles and many years, as the two traded poems and stayed connected even as their lives took them to different corners of the country, from a corporate office in Hawthorne, New York, to Gargulinski’s eventual home in Tucson, Arizona.

Throughout the collection, Linz writes in an unadorned, confessional free-verse style shaped by the Beat poets he came of age reading. The “How It Was” section moves chronologically from 1971 through 2018, taking readers through a wedding poem for friends, reflections on a subway ride through New York City, a poem written in protest of the Iraq War, and quieter pieces marking birthdays, anniversaries, and ordinary days at home in New York, Croton, Los Angeles, and Pooler. The newer “How It Is” poems, written more recently, find Linz taking stock: writing the day before his seventy-second birthday, he describes “looking back, looking forward” and feeling “strong, willing, open to new experience. Still.”

Linz has been writing poetry since 1971 and has published eight previous chapbooks, collected in The Chapbooks: Collected Poems (2019). He has twice been named a Delaware Division of the Arts Fellow and is a regular reader at Wilmington’s Second Saturday Poets and Brooklyn’s Brownstone Poets series. He is a member of the American Academy of Poets, the Mad Poets Society, and the Beat Museum.