Connection, communication, and collective reflection are central to the season’s poetry releases, which draw solace from humanity’s bonds while challenging readers to confront narratives of systemic oppression.
Top 10
Alive at the End of the World
Saeed Jones. Coffee House, Sept. 13 ($16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-56689-651-1)
Jones explores grief and mourning in poems drawing from memoir and fiction. Considerations of white supremacy appear alongside poems about Aretha Franklin and Diahann Carroll, showing the prevalence of perilous contrast in modern America; foreword by D.A. Powell.
Call It in the Air: Poems
Ed Pavlić. Milkweed, Oct. 11 ($16 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-57131-548-9)
Pavlić’s elegiac, genre-bending work considers the life and death of his elder sister, Kate, questions whether individuals can ever understand each other, and writes into and against the stronghold of personal loss and grief.
Divine Blue Light (for John Coltrane): Pocket Poets Series No. 63
Will Alexander. City Lights, Nov. 15 ($16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-87286-870-0)
These surrealist and Afrofuturist poems examine politics, globalism, and the powers and limitations of language, while paying tribute to artists forced to flee the Nazi invasion of France.
Golden Ax
Rio Cortez. Penguin, Aug. 30 ($18 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-14-313713-9)
Cortez investigates Black history and experience in this reckoning with life and artistic freedom. She vividly explores her family’s history as pioneers in the American West, reenvisioning settle-
ment narratives and the journey toward freedom.
How to Communicate
John Lee Clark. Norton, Dec. 6 ($26.95, ISBN 978-1-324-03534-3)
Poetic forms inspired by the braille slate and translations from ASL and Protactile, a language built on touch, are brought to the page in this consideration of identity, community, and grief.
Martian: The Saint of Loneliness
James Cagney. Nomadic, Sept. 27 ($19.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-62317-770-6)
The second collection from Cagney features poems on anti-Black violence that excavate feelings of alienation and injustice while searching for resolution, acceptance, and love.
Milkweed Smithereens
Bernadette Mayer. New Directions, Nov. 1 ($15.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-8112-2922-7)
Nature poems, pastiches, sequences, epigrams, and excerpts from Mayer’s Covid diary are collected alongside early poems to reveal Mayer’s unique sense making, voice, and style.
[To] the Last [Be] Human
Jorie Graham. Copper Canyon, Sept. 6 ($22 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-55659-660-5)
Four of Graham’s seminal works are collected and serve as a lyric testament to the poet’s writing on climate change and loss, while also celebrating the beauty and gifts of the world.
Woman Without Shame
Sandra Cisneros. Knopf, Sept. 13 ($27, ISBN 978-0-593-53482-3)
In her first collection in 28 years, Cisneros returns with elegies and songs that catalogue life experiences, reinvention, self-awareness, and Mexico.
Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency
Chen Chen. Boa, Sept. 13 ($17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-950774-69-2)
Family and friendship are at the heart of this second collection that interrogates mass violence, the Covid pandemic, and being queer and Asian American during the Trump era.
Poetry
ABRAMS
American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide, edited
by Susan Barba, illus. by Leanne Shapton (Sept. 20, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-4197-6016-7). Presented as a field guide, this anthology collects classic and contemporary poems and essays about wildflowers.
And Other Stories
An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell by Deborah Levy (Jan. 31, $15.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-913505-25-7) contemplates questions of individual agency and the search for love and happiness by telling the story of an angel and an accountant in the suburbs of London.
Andrews McMeel
Velvet Dragonflies by Billy Chapata (Oct. 11, $16.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-5248-7680-7) champions self-love in a
collection divided into five sections, each invoking a different quality of softness as discovered through introspection. 75,000-copy announced first printing.
Belknap
A Greeting of the Spirit: Selected Poetry of John Keats with Commentaries by Susan J. Wolfson (Oct. 25, $35,
ISBN 978-0-674-98089-1). Keats scholar Wolfson surveys 78 verse selections, contextualizing and offering commentary on form, style, and meaning.
BOA
Little Mr. Prose Poem: Selected Poems of Russell Edson by Russell Edson, edited by Craig Morgan Teicher (Oct. 25, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-950774-73-9). With a foreword by Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Simic, these prose poems highlight Edson’s unusual and fantastical vision.
A Tinderbox in Three Acts by Cynthia Dewi Oka (Oct. 11, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-950774-71-5) addresses the devastating aftermath of the Indonesian anticommunist genocide of 1965 and uses declassified U.S. government documents to probe history and memory.
Carnegie Mellon Univ.
All the Hanging Wrenches by Barbara Edelman (Oct. 18, $15.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-88748-682-1). Poems with
frequent wordplay tackle themes of human connection, memory, history, and paradox.
The Woman with a Cat on Her Shoulder: And Other Riffs by Richard Katrovas (Oct. 18, $15.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-88748-683-8). Meditating on the fear of annihilation and its relationship to love, these poems illustrate the role of faith and doubt in public and private spheres.
Coffee House
Dot by Ron Padgett (Nov. 1, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-56689-655-9) studies quotidian moments to see how observation and reflection shape daily experience.
Your Kingdom by Eleni Sikelianos (Jan. 10, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-56689-659-7). This ecopoetic collection considers humanity’s animal beginnings and imagines an ancestral line of existence and future possibilities for the ecosystem.
Copper Canyon
Intimacies, Received by Taneum Bambrick (Sept. 27, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-55659-631-5). Set in rural southern Spain, Bambrick’s second book reveals how violence resides beneath intimacy and memory, and what is required to survive and name trauma.
Late Summer Ode by Olena Kalytiak Davis (Oct. 4, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-55659-647-6). Defined by contradiction and balanced between past and present, these poems explore selfhood and place.
Counterpoint
Uncollected Poems, Drafts, Fragments, and Translations by Gary Snyder (Aug. 16, $20, ISBN 978-1-64009-577-9). Collecting previously uncollected and unpublished works by Pulitzer Prize–winning beat poet Snyder, this book offers a glimpse at the poet’s output during his most productive and influential years.
Duke Univ.
Or, on Being the Other Woman by Simone White (Aug. 26, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4780-1846-9). Black feminism propels White’s book-length poem, a combination of verse, essay, personal narrative, and critical theory that addresses the realities of being a Black woman and artist.
Ecco
Harbinger by Shelley Puhak (Oct. 18, $16.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-06-323396-6). These National Poetry Series–winning poems consider art, history, and selfhood by exploring motherhood, labor, and politics.
The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On by Franny Choi (Nov. 1, $25.99, ISBN 978-0-06-324008-7) tackles history and the end of the world to offer a commentary on collective responsibility, as well as to ponder what might outlast the apocalypse.
Everyman’s Library
River Poems, edited by Henry Hughes (Oct. 4, $18, ISBN 978-0-593-53553-0), showcases writings on rivers throughout the ages and from all parts of the world.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
The Complete Translations by Seamus Heaney, edited by Marco Sonzogni (Nov. 22, $50, ISBN 978-0-374-27773-4). Nobel laureate Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, Virgil’s Aeneid Book VI, and poems from Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Scottish Gaelic, and Spanish are gathered for the first time in this complete edition.
This Afterlife: Selected Poems by A.E. Stallings (Dec. 6, $28, ISBN 978-0-374-60069-3) gathers poems about history, mortality, motherhood, and travel from Stallings’s first four collections.
Fence
Mopes by Kenneth Reveiz (Aug. 16, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-944380-24-3) offers poems that tackle themes of equality across race and culture, artistic expression, and pleasure and disappointment.
Graywolf
Concentrate by Courtney Faye Taylor (Nov. 1, $16 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64445-210-3). The poems in Taylor’s debut address the murder of Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old Black girl killed by a Korean shop owner after being falsely accused of shoplifting, and the 1992 Los Angeles uprising.
The Rupture Tense by Jenny Xie (Sept. 6, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64445-201-1). The personal and historical sequences in Xie’s second collection consider diaspora, memory, and the aftermath of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
We Are Mermaids by Stephanie Burt (Oct. 4, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64445-205-9). Celebrating interconnectedness, these poems span registers and topics including Disney films, trans culture, and identity.
Harper Perennial
And Yet by Kate Baer (Nov. 8, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-06-311555-2). In this second full-length collection, Baer revisits and expands on the subjects of her first collection, among them motherhood, friendship, love, and grief. 150,000-copy announced first printing.
House of Anansi
Passengers by Michael Crummey (Aug. 2, $19.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4870-1125-3). This imagined travelogue follows Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer on a trip that takes in Newfoundland, Stockholm’s ABBA museum, and the pre-pandemic cities of Europe.
Alice James
Brother Sleep by Aldo Amparán (Sept. 13, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-948579-27-8). These poems address grief, violence against queer and Mexican people, and the distance between speech and speechlessness.
Decade of the Brain by Janine Joseph (Jan. 17, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-948579-30-8). The mind as experienced after traumatic brain injury is the central preoccupation of these works.
Knopf
Balladz by Sharon Olds (Oct. 4, $28, ISBN 978-0-525-65695-1). Opening with a selection of quarantine poems, Olds addresses childhood and womanhood, white privilege, and the state of the planet in poems that draw their hope from everyday life.
To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness by Robin Coste Lewis (Dec. 6, $35, ISBN 978-1-5247-3258-5) investigates poetry, migration, and photography. A series of antique photographs discovered in an old suitcase 25 years after Coste Lewis’s maternal grandmother’s death prompts a reckoning with 20th-century race and migration.
Milkweed
Ask the Brindled by No’u Revilla (Aug. 9, $16 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-63955-000-5). Winner of the 2021 National Poetry Series, Revilla’s debut reclaims Indigenous and queer Hawaiian identity, challenging colonial narratives by investigating history and personal experience.
The Wanting Way by Adam Wolfond (Nov. 8, $16 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-57131-550-2). The second book in Multiverse, a series written by the neurodivergent Wolfond, probes the relationships between humanity and nature.
New York Review Books
A Summer Day in the Company of Ghosts by Wang Yin, trans. by Andrea Lingenfelter (Aug. 16, $16 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-68137-648-6). This bilingual edition—Yin’s English language debut—provides a glimpse of the trajectory of a Chinese writer and photographer’s career from the Deep Image–influenced work of the 1980s to today.
Nightwood Editions
Cut to Fortress by Tawahum Bige (Oct. 25, $19.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-88971-416-8) investigates colonialism, relationships, grief, and ancestral lineage and trauma in poems that are personal and political.
Norton
Almost an Elegy: New and Later Selected Poems by Linda Pastan (Oct. 4, $30, ISBN 978-1-324-02149-0). More than 30 new works appear alongside poems drawn from Pastan’s five most recent volumes, including The Last Uncle (2002), Traveling Light (2011), and Insomnia (2015).
Midwood by Jana Prikryl (Aug. 9, $26.95, ISBN 978-1-324-03521-3). The third book from Prikryl examines the concept of midlife through poems on love, sex, motherhood, and everyday experience.
Wound Is the Origin of Wonder by Maya C. Popa (Nov. 8, $26.95, ISBN 978-1-324-02136-0). The poems in Popa’s second book reflect on the role of wonder in shaping the human experience, and the role of beauty and grief in deepening one’s humanity.
Penguin Books
The Symmetry of Fish by Su Cho (Oct. 11, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-14-313725-2). Language, immigration, memory, the power of expression, and family are central themes in this coming-of-age narrative.
Phoneme Media
When the Night Agrees to Speak to Me by Ananda Devi, trans. by Kazim Ali (Aug. 16, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64605-188-5). Mauritian writer Devi considers loneliness, desire, violence, and aging in this autobiographical collection.
Princeton Univ.
Please Make Me Pretty, I Don’t Want to Die by Tawanda Mulalu (Sept. 13, $18.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-691-23903-3) examines diasporic Black African identity in white America in poems that span a wide variety of forms.
Seven Stories
Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle/ Historias y Poemas de Una Lucha de Clases by Roque Dalton, trans. by Jack Hirschmann (Aug. 2, $18.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64421-176-2). Dalton’s poems blend politics and art, exposing the realities of American imperialism.
Soft Skull
Normal Distance by Elisa Gabbert (Sept. 13, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-59376-733-4). Looking at the mind through an assembly of unusual facts delivered in contemporary, essayistic, and contemplative language, these poems reflect on meaning, thinking, and feeling.
Syracuse Univ.
The Less Said, the Truer: New and Selected Poems, 2016–2022 by Samuel Hazo (Oct. 17, $12.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-8156-1152-3). New poems are gathered alongside a selection from three previous books to reflect on life and death, love and grief, and the role of memory.
Tin House
Magnolia by Nina Mingya Powles (Aug. 16, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-953534-21-7) blends memory and myth to relay experiences of a mixed-race youth. Spanning Aotearoa, London, Shanghai, and New York City, these poems question opportunities for connection.
Univ. of Nebraska
Cotton Candy: Poems Dipped Out of the Air by Ted Kooser (Sept. 1, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4962-3129-1). These poems emerged out of Kooser’s daily routine of writing poems before dawn in an associative, playful, and uncensored manner.
Might Kindred by Mónica Gomery (Nov. 1, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4962-3239-7). Connection, identity, and first-generation American experience are central to these poems that summon humans, animals, and landscapes to reveal deeper truths.
Univ. of New Mexico
Reflections Through the Convex Mirror of Time: Poems in Remembrance of the Spanish Civil War/ Reflexiones tras el Espejo Convexo del Tiempo: Poemas en Recuerdo de la Guerra Civil Española by E.A. Mares (Aug. 15, $21.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-8263-6430-2). This bilingual posthumous collection by New Mexican poet Mares offers poems about the reverberations of the Spanish Civil War.
White Pine
Underfoot by Nillas Holmberg, trans. by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs and Johanna Domokos, illus. by Inga-Wiktoria Påve (Oct. 18, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-945680-55-7). Poems dealing with capitalism, mechanization, sustainability, and community are interwoven with illustrations by Sami artist Pave.
