Serotonin Press is proud to announce our third book publication of 2026, Jon Todd’s first full length poetry collection, Samsara. These poems weave a story of addiction, accountability, and awareness that transform the poet from suffering, starving artist to a self-aware and supportive husband and father. The poet comes to recognize himself as just one brick in a building of hundreds within a city of thousands, and yet his lived experiences resonate as unique and valued. It would be easy to despair in Jon Todd’s sometimes bleak cityscape and interior life, but somehow this poet unearths hope from underneath the garbage strewn Broad Street sidewalk. In spite of the oppressive, ever hanging storm cloud of capitalism hanging over the individual and the city, the reader of Samsara learns that it is the defiance of the artist, and most importantly, the defiance of love that will win out in the end.
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Jonathan Todd is a poet, anarchist, and confused individual. His work has been featured in Prolit and Protean Magazine, among others. He is the author of 4 chapbooks: Burning Traces (2010), Overtime (Moonstone Press 2020), and Shift Drinks (Dead Mall Press 2023) and most recently, Terms and Conditions (2026). Currently, he lives in Philadelphia with his wife, two kids, and two cats. Samsara (Serotonin Press, 2026) is his first full length poetry collection.
Jon Todd’s poems shatter illusions with a musician’s ear and anarchist’s brick, letting us in on the secret that if you start to look at the shapes long enough, the barriers turn to mist. “Who owns the trains other than / the stories of its passengers?” Samsara meditates on the thorny traps of waged labor, addiction, morality, and ego, refusing to resolve contradictions. Jon’s koan-like lyric is at turns funny and gutting. This book demands more than the freedom to change only the numerator. Alienation is unceasing but ceaselessly countered by the pleasures of reading, sneaking away for a smoke, and dozing on the clock. “When the modes become sonorous / … lay into the street / speak a new tongue.” Samsara invokes a dailiness that is beautiful and free.
-ebs sanders
With lyric intensity and playful inquiry, Jon Todd maps a struggle of recovery in Samsara, where “there is no god/and he is always with you.” The poet attends to memory and moment-by-moment consciousness, linking experiences of disorientation to desire for liberation. Echoes of Kenneth Fearing run through this work, but Samsara is very much a record of the 2020s. The fog of drudgery and work are not allowed the final word. If the world remains bent on exploiting our labor and telling us to be happy, the poem here says “24 hours for what we will.” Follow it to the unnamed place.
-ryan eckes
As its name suggests, Jon Todd’s Samsara moves in cycles: of anguish and release, of memory and oblivion, of sobriety and indulgence. Each poem wanders through material and psychospiritual realms, meditating in equal measure on riot and ritual. At the heart of Todd’s work, though, is the “Shift Drink” sequence, parts of which I had the honor of publishing in Protean. In cutting, austere language, these poems reckon with what structures our everyday lives as workers – the shift as control, the bosses as “fucking cowards” – and concludes with the only demand that matters: “we want everything / starting with production.” When uncertainty reemerges here, it is the bosses who must ask themselves, fretfully: “is that a threat?”
-dominick knowles