Shake Until Cloudy by Amanda Nadelberg

*Coming soon! Presale begins in Spring 2026, or you can order the 2026 subscription now.*

In her fourth collection, Shake Until Cloudy, Amanda Nadelberg approaches the everyday from a slant that reappraises reality and inspires wonder. The book begins with an assembly of Micropoems—conceptual miniatures with a sense of humor—which lead into lyric mediations on love, personhood, and the desire to begin again. Filled with tenderness and temporality, these poems open into metaphysical questions and possibilities—"Faces appeared in fragments / I didn’t remember how to go / going through the world / being who you are.” With Shake Until Cloudy, Nadelberg shows us once more how forms can create the sway of life, rhythmic and emotional, and how our observations reveal the transformative nature of attention.

"Recalibrating Romanticism's glittering abyss with every available phoneme, dream, and waking moment is what Amanda Nadelberg is here to do."  —Lucy Ives

"I am OBSESSED with Shake Until Cloudy! This brilliant book elated, stimulated, and bettered me. There isn't a false step to be found anywhere in these intelligent, elegant, witty, and rueful poems. The Micropoems are aphorisms, koans, jokes, footnotes...wonderful to read and to think about on walks or in daydream moments. Amanda Nadelberg is wise and a colossal talent."  —Alice Elliott Dark

"'I don’t remember much / beyond plain images,' Nadelberg writes in this luminous, hilarious, melancholic collection of poems. The plainness of these images belies a world of intricate precision, whose overhanging clouds, like those in the Bubbies jar where she found her book's title, invoke a delectable, astringent brine that preserves and provokes. Nadelberg is, as she describes Gertrude Stein, 'a bartender of speech' who pours shot after microshot of salty, sweet, gently stinging concoctions that must be consumed with relish."  —Andrew Leland

Amanda Nadelberg is the author of three previous collections: Isa the Truck Named Isadore (winner of the Slope Editions Book Prize), Bright Brave Phenomena, and Songs from a Mountain. A graduate of Carleton College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she’s the founder of Culture Forms and lives in Oakland, California. 

Cover photo: Nathaniel Dorsky