poetry & books

Often employing myth, art, and nature, Malisa Garlieb writes personal histories while simultaneously unfolding archetypes. She was a recent poetry editor at Mud Season Review.

QUICKFALL

(forthcoming from Milk & Cake Press in 2026)

The poems in Quickfall document a quick, happy marriage and her husband's sudden death. Additional themes include her spouse’s immigration from Scotland and grieving during Covid lockdown.

Select poems:

Cento of Last Lines, Rhino 2022

Passage, Qu, Summer 2022

HANDING OUT APPLES IN EDEN

(Wind Ridge Books, 2014)

In her debut collection, Handing Out Apples in Eden, poet Malisa Garlieb has produced a book of warm and sometimes startling intimacy that grapples with issues at the core of modern relationships: the fluidity of identity and desire, the intersection of image and reality, the crux where personal and political collide in small acts of allegiance and betrayal. Holding and releasing emotional tension, trilling on the tongue, these poems, like arrows, fly straight to the heart.

Out of print, but sometimes available used.

“Line after line, these poems are stunning! Born in mind and mouth, true and real experience, found and transformed into poetry…in which you will find yourself.”

-Gary Margolis

"The imagery in the poetry dwells often on fruit—on pears and plums and blueberries and on a bushel of bruised apples—and it suggests too, a perfidious Adam as disruptor of the Eden of the modern marriage that unravels to divorce in the pages of the book."

-Moira Richards, Off the Coast 2015

“Malisa Garlieb has an ear for the sound of her poems: the many stressed syllables, internal rhymes and alliterative phrasing make the poems best read aloud. From parenting to love, she shines a lucid light on the personal.”

-Josie Leavitt

“Reading these poems is like stepping into a secret garden. Garlieb’s words are wildly beautiful, and the sensations she plants grow untamed within the reader. Each poem hangs on a balance between tension and reconciliation. Garlieb seduces the reader with her ripe imagery and artful expression. She has created a garden, full of unapologetic temptation.”

-Rebekah Hopkinson

PUBLISHED POEMS

Qu, RHINO Poetry, Rust + Moth, Rathalla Review, Tar River Poetry, Calyx, Painted Bride Quarterly, So to Speak, Gyroscope Review, Sugar House Review, Blue Unicorn, South Florida Poetry Journal, Steam Ticket, Vermont Public Radio, Briar Cliff Review, Behind the Mirror, Good Works Review, West Trade Review, Poetry Quarterly, Cold Lake Anthology, Fourteen Hills, Off the Coast, Chautaugua, Kaleidoscope, Compass Rose, Mad Poets Review, Ship of Fools, Sugared Water, Lines + Stars, Please Do Not Remove Anthology