Through stories of suffering and survival, these collections explore desire, healing, the vulnerabilities of the body, the command of desire, and the impact of history.
Top 10
A “Working Life”
Eileen Myles. Grove, Apr. 18 ($26, ISBN 978-0-8021-6189-5)
Capturing the contrasts and paradoxes of human experience, these meditations bring a humorous and philosophical lens to some of life’s most pressing subjects.
Chrome Valley
Mahogany L. Browne. Live Right, Feb. 7 ($26.95, ISBN 978-1-324-09227-8)
Browne pays homage to women and the gifts and dangers of Black girlhood and motherhood in poems that consider the effects of historical violence.
Couplets: A Love Story
Maggie Millner. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Feb. 7 ($25, ISBN 978-0-374-60795-1)
The debut from Millner tells a love story about a woman’s coming out, and the subsequent end of her relationship with a man and new affair with a woman she meets at a bar.
From From
Monica Youn. Graywolf, Mar. 7 ($17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64445-221-9)
Youn considers Asian American identity and belonging in poems that interrogate Westerners’ beliefs and stereotypes about Asians.
Promises of Gold
José Olivarez, trans. by David Ruano. Holt, Feb. 7 ($21.95, ISBN 978-1-250-87849-6)
Gender, capitalism, religion, and migration are central themes of Olivarez’s investigation into types of love and the inconsistencies of the American Dream.
So to Speak
Terrance Hayes. Penguin, July 25 ($18 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-14-313772-6)
Hayes’s seventh collection is rich with forms—lyric fables, folk sonnets, ekphrastic—and alludes to a wide variety of figures, including David Berman, George Floyd, Bob Ross, and Lil Wayne.
Standing in the Forest of Being Alive
Katie Farris. Alice James, Apr. 4 ($17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-948579-32-2)
In Farris’s study of erotic love, the poems’ speaker faces a cancer diagnosis in the midst of the pandemic and political unrest. Farris examines suffering with humor and candor, as well as the power of love in the most difficult moments.
Tanya
Brenda Shaughnessy. Knopf, Mar. 7 ($28, ISBN 978-0-593-53593-6)
Shaughnessy reflects on literary inheritance and intimacy while paying tribute to women artists and mentors. Poems on friendship, love, art, memory, and death appear alongside poems on Dadaist artist Méret Oppenheim and the young choreographer Lauren Lovette.
To 2040
Jorie Graham. Copper Canyon, Apr. 18 ($25, ISBN 978-1-55659-677-3)
Graham’s 15th collection explores extinction and the possibility of apocalypse in poems that interrogate humanity and environment. The ruins of urban life are juxtaposed with the natural world, offering a portrait of the climate crisis, mortality, and the uncertain future.
To the Boy Who Was Night: Poems: Selected and New
Rigoberto González. Fourway, Mar. 15 ($17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-954245-52-5)
Featuring poems from his first book, published in 1999, this collection traces the poet’s career, ending with a new section, “Dispatches from the Broken World,” that showcases a new autobiographical style.
Poetry Listings
Acre
Metabolics by Jessica E. Johnson (Feb. 19, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-946724-57-1) explores themes of identity, relationships, and balance as the poems’ speaker attempts to regulate her body and the time she dedicates to digital devices.
Amistad
No Sweet Without Brine by Cynthia Manick (Apr. 4, $16.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-06-324430-6). Weaving memory with social commentary, Manick celebrates Blackness, focusing on Black love and Black joy. 35,000-copy announced first printing.
Andrews McMeel
God Themselves by Jae Nichelle (Mar. 14, $14.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-5248-7840-5). Religion, love, the risks of the female body, and growing up as a queer Black woman in the South are central themes in spoken word poet Nichelle’s debut.
Arsenal Pulp
More Sure by A. Light Zachary (Apr. 4, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-55152-917-2) positions queer and neurodivergent life as a voyage of self-discovery. Zachary weaves in quotations from ancient Greek and Roman thinkers, as well as punk rock and quantum physics.
Autumn House
Given by Liza Katz Duncan (Apr. 20, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-63768-068-1). Home and family, hope and survival, and the climate crisis are among Katz’s preoccupations.
Beacon
Some of the Light: New and Selected Poems by Tim Z. Hernandez (Mar. 28, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-8070-0669-6) charts Hernandez’s early exploration of machismo culture and more recent poems that consider single fatherhood, immigration, and spiritual questions.
BOA
Buffalo Girl by Jessica Q. Stark (Apr. 18, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-950774-88-3) reimagines the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale to consider Stark’s mother’s immigration to the U.S. from Vietnam at the end of war.
Four in Hand by Alicia Mountain (Apr. 4, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-950774-86-9) is composed of four heroic crowns of sonnets that explore personal and family stories, and interweave found text from financial newsletter emails.
Book*hug
Heating the Outdoors by Marie-Andrée Gill, trans. by Kristen Renee Miller (Mar. 7, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-77166-814-9). The micropoetic work from Canadian-French poet Gill draws its roots from Nitassinan, the territory and home of the Ilnu Nation, and engages with imperialism, love, and the recovery of language.
Brandeis Univ.
The Lamb Cycle: What the Great English Poets Might Have Written About Mary and Her Lamb (Had They Thought of It First) by David Ewbank, illus. by Kate Feiffer (Apr. 1, $18.95, ISBN 978-1-68458-145-0). Writing in the style of canonical English poets including Shakespeare, D.H. Lawrence, Alexander Pope, and T.S. Eliot, Ewbank delivers humorous poems, which are complemented by illustrations.
Carnegie Mellon Univ.
Sonnets with Two Torches and One Cliff by Robert Thomas (Feb. 14, $15.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-88748-691-3) explores the sonnet form in 80 nontraditional examples.
CavanKerry
Boy by Tracy Youngblom (Feb. 7, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-933880-99-0). Familial grief is at the heart of this collection that remembers the death of a youngest child, as well as other tragedies.
City Lights
Metamorphoses: City Lights Spotlight No. 22 by Evan Kennedy (Apr. 11, $15.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-87286-900-4) takes its cue from Ovid’s epic poem in this consideration of the equivocations of identity, overlaying ancient Rome onto San Francisco.
Coffee House
Village by Latasha N Nevada Diggs (Feb. 7, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-56689-661-0) studies the impacts of trauma on language, ancestry, and agency, giving rise to questions about public memorialization and survival.
Copper Canyon
Skeletons by Deborah Landau (Apr. 4, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-55659-665-0) probes mortality and virtual existence amid the pandemic and political unrest while also celebrating love and connection.
West: A Translation by Paisley Rekdal (May 2, $22 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-55659-656-8) reflects on American unity and division in poems that adopt multiple voices, languages, and forms and are juxtaposed with historical images.
Everyman’s Library
Little Poems, edited by Michael Hennessy (Mar. 14, $18, ISBN 978-0-593-53630-8). This pocket-sized volume features works by Sappho, Li Bai, Sandra Cisneros, Ocean Vuong, Ezra Pound, H.D., Dorothy Parker, and others.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
True Life by Adam Zagajewski, trans. by Clare Cavanagh (Feb. 21, $26, ISBN 978-0-374-60156-0) includes poems about the past, cities, and movement by the late Polish poet Zagajewski.
Graywolf
Saltwater Demands a Psalm by Kweku Abimbola (Apr. 4, $16 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64445-227-1) considers Black ancestry, Ghanaian Akan tradition and rituals, and the effects of violence against Black people.
Harvard Univ.
Sur’s Ocean: Classic Hindi Poetry in Translation by Surdas, trans. by John Stratton Hawley (Feb. 1, $19.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-674-29017-4). Surdas, a blind 16th-century poet and a major figure in Hindi verse, reworks the narrative of the deity Krishna and his lover Radha into accessible lyrics.
Haymarket
Ballast by Quenton Baker (Apr. 4, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64259-902-2). In this book-length poem, Baker uses the 1841 slave revolt aboard the brig Creole as a lens through which to consider the strength of Black lives and the legacy of slavery.
House of Anansi
Trinity Street by Jen Currin (Apr. 4, $19.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4870-1162-8) explores the climate crisis, capitalism, and shared grief.
Alice James
Feast by Ina Cariño (Mar. 7, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-948579-31-5). In poems that span the Philippines to the United States, Cariño explores intergenerational relationships, trauma, and diasporic communities.
Laurence King
The Book of Tree Poems by Anna Sampson (Apr. 11, $17.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-399-60909-8). Collecting poems by William Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Mew, and W.H. Auden, among others, this illustrated anthology of 60 poems praises the beauty and variety of trees.
Knopf
Fever of Unknown Origin by Campbell McGrath (May 9, $28, ISBN 978-0-593-53572-1) confronts ideas about modern America and reexamines the past to better understand the future.
Library of America
Ursula K. Le Guin: Collected Poems by Ursula K. Le Guin, edited by Harold Bloom (Apr. 4, $40, ISBN 978-1-59853-736-9). Le Guin’s poems capturing mystery, nature, and creativity are collected for the first time in this edition, the last to be edited by Bloom.
Little, Brown
Above Ground by Clint Smith (Mar. 28, $27, ISBN 978-0-316-54303-3) ruminates on how becoming a parent changes one’s sense of the world, as well as on how personal experience is shaped by historical legacy.
New Directions
Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence by Homero Aridjis, trans. by George McWhirter (Feb. 7, $18.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-8112-3173-2). Mexican writer Aridjis delivers poems about spiritual change through meetings with mythical animals and ghosts. Tributes to Goya and Heraclitus appear alongside poems critical of drug trafficking and political figures.
New York Review Poets
Lakdhas Wikkramasinha: A Selection of Poems by Lakdhas Wikkramasinha, edited by Michael Ondaatje and Aparna Halpé (June 27, $16 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-68137-734-6). One of Sri Lanka’s premier anglophone poets of the 20th century, Wikkramasinha (1941–1978) writes about political turmoil both in English and in translations from Sinhala.
Norton
Calligraphies by Marilyn Hacker (Apr. 4, $26.95, ISBN 978-1-324-03646-3). From Paris to Beirut, Hacker pays tribute to travel and other writers in poems of formal variety, including crowns of sonnets, ghazals, and renga.
Omnidawn
The Rendering by Anthony Cody (Apr. 5, $19.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-63243-114-1) investigates climate change, ecology, the history of the Dust Bowl, and humanity in the Anthropocene through experimental poems.
Paraclete
Holy Sparks by Diane G. Woodcock (June 6, $21 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64060-601-2). These ecopoetic and spiritual works draw on bibliophilic images to pay tribute to the Earth and God.
Penguin Books
Door by Ann Lauterbach (Mar. 7, $22 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-14-313737-5). The 11th collection from Lauterbach revisits the image of a door across poems, evoking the metaphorical interchange between what is open and closed.
Persea
Date of Birth by Shawn R. Jones (Apr. 11, $15.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-89255-569-7) tackles suffering and survival in poems that explore racism, violence, addiction, and incest, but nevertheless find moments of humor and play amid difficult circumstances.
Princeton Univ.
Brief Homage to Pluto and Other Poems by Fabio Pusterla, trans. and edited by Will Schutt (Apr. 11, $19.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-691-24509-6). Drawing from Pusterla’s six most recent collections, these 45 poems by the contemporary Italian poet engage with morality, nature, and memory.
Seagull
As Mornings and Mossgreen I. Step to the Window by Friederike Mayröcker, trans. by Alexander Booth (Feb. 5, $24.50, ISBN 978-1-80309-142-6). The personal and playful final book by the Austrian poet alludes to Derrida, Duchamp, Hölderlin, and Jean Paul in works that capture old age, landscapes, and loneliness.
She Writes
Catch Me When I Fall: Poems of Mother Loss and Healing by Donna Stoneham (May 9, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64742-428-2). These poems take the form of letters exchanged between mother and daughter over the course of four years and record the transformative powers of grief and love after death.
Soft Skull
Negative Money by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram (June 27, $13.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-59376-753-2) examines identity and the coming-of-age of a speaker who questions racial and gender identity, safety and risk, and love and seclusion.
Tin House
Trace Evidence by Charif Shanahan (Mar. 21, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-953534-66-8) investigates mixed-race identity and anti-Black sentiment in the U.S. and abroad, as well as queer longing, existential unease, and survival.
Univ. of Akron
Dear Outsiders by Jenny Sadre-Orafai (Mar. 7, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-62922-238-7). In Sadre-Orafai’s fourth collection, two siblings attempt to navigate an unfamiliar landscape after their parents’ deaths in a small tourist town.
Univ. of Chicago
Vexations by Annelyse Gelman (Mar. 31, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-226-82611-0). This experimental book-length poem traces a mother and daughter’s travels through a surreal landscape on the verge of ecological and social collapse.
Univ. of Kentucky
What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People, edited by Rebecca Gayle Howell, Ashley M. Jones, and Emily J. Jalloul (Mar. 7, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-8131-8243-8), wrestles with themes of economy, race, and labor.
Univ. of Massachusetts
Once, This Forest Belonged to a Storm by Austen Leah Rose (Apr. 28, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-62534-727-5) deals with personal and historical pain, humanity’s relationship to the environment, the aftermath of the Holocaust, and spiritual and existential inquiries.
Univ. of New Mexico
Suggest Paradise by Ray Gonzalez (Feb. 15, $18.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-8263-6450-0). The 16th collection from Gonzalez contemplates the self, love, and literature, drawing imagery from the landscapes of the Southwest and the borderlands.
Univ. of Notre Dame
Auto/Body by Vickie Vértiz (Feb. 1, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-268-20393-1) weaves in the language of auto body shops in poems that consider the queer body, patriarchy, violence, and desire.
Univ. of Wisconsin
Radium Girl by Celeste Lipkes (Mar. 21, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-299-34174-9) presents a speaker who is both a patient and undergoing medical training, evoking a cast of saints, magicians, and scientists.
Wave
Chariot by Timothy Donnelly (May 2, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-950268-77-1) proposes philosophical questions in conversation with French symbolist Odilon Redon, and offers reckonings with artistic lineage and history.
Yale Univ.
Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author by Enheduana, trans. by Sophus Helle (Mar. 28, $30, ISBN 978-0-300-26417-3). High priestess and princess Enheduana of the Sumerian city-state of Ur is the earliest known author in world literature. The first complete translation of her works includes poems on gender, exile, society, nature, and war.
