Collections coming in fall adopt unusual lenses to grapple with the complexities of the past and the powers of art in the modern age.
Top 10
All Souls
Saskia Hamilton. Graywolf, Oct. 3 ($17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64445-263-9)
Poems and lyric fragments catalogue delicate truths about fear, memory, compassion, mortality, and hope in Hamilton’s fifth collection.
The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov
Denise Levertov, edited by Paul A. Lacey. New Directions, Nov. 7 ($39.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-8112-3754-3)
Covering more than six decades and every poem Levertov published, this volume presents the work of a celebrated 20th-century poet, antiwar activist, and environmentalist to new audiences.
Death Prefers the Minor Keys
Sean Thomas Dougherty. BOA, Nov. 7 ($17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-960145-06-2)
Dougherty’s prose poems contemplating disability, illness, love, and survival were written on the backs of medical forms while he was on break as a third-shift medical technician.
The Ferguson Report: An Erasure
Nicole Sealey. Knopf, Aug. 22 ($29, ISBN 978-0-593-53599-8)
Sealey redacts the U.S. Justice Department’s report on the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and reimagines the document by giving shape—and bearing witness—to racism in America.
Grand Tour
Elisa Gonzalez. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Sept. 19 ($26, ISBN 978-0-374-61137-8)
Gonzalez grapples with family history, love, death, and place (including Cyprus, Puerto Rico, Poland, and Ohio) in poems that question and celebrate the tensions and paradoxes of the world.
Homeland of My Body: New & Selected Poems
Richard Blanco. Beacon, Oct. 24 ($25.95, ISBN 978-0-8070-1297-0)
Blanco explores queer Latino identity and “otherness,” as well as sources of internal and external struggle, in a volume bookended by two sections of new poems.
Information Desk: An Epic
Robyn Schiff. Penguin, Aug. 15 ($20 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-14-313680-4)
Schiff’s fourth collection is a book-length, three-part poem set in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art that combines art history and a coming-of-age narrative, while drawing from her former staff position at the museum’s information desk.
The Lights
Ben Lerner. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Sept. 5 ($26, ISBN 978-0-374-27921-9)
Verse and prose join with other forms, including voicemails, vignettes, and songs, as Lerner reckons with personal and collective experience and the process of making art in challenging times.
Pig
Sam Sax. Simon & Schuster, Sept. 19 ($17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-66801-999-3)
Using the pig as an entry point to consider the body, belief, desire, and violence, these poems feature drag queens, Miss Piggy, pig farming, and hog lagoons.
Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems 2002–2022
Major Jackson. Norton, Sept. 5 ($26.95, ISBN 978-1-324-06490-9)
Drawing from five volumes across two decades and including three dozen new poems, Jackson’s latest addresses racial tension and the ongoing struggle for human dignity in the U.S.
Poetry longlist
Acre
Survivor’s Notebook by Dan O’Brien (Sept. 15, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-946724-63-2) gathers prose poems that explore survival and illness using photos and memoir to tell the stories of two cancer survivors and their families.
Akashic
Tender Headed by Olatunde Osinaike (Dec. 5, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-63614-141-1) reflects on Black experience, perceptions of masculinity, and the nature of relationships.
American Poetry Review
Public Abstract by Jane Huffman (Sept. 26, $16 trade paper, ISBN 979-8-9875852-1-4) contemplates the impact of addiction, recovery, and loss on the members of a family.
Andrews McMeel
Daughter: The Soul Journey of a Black Woman in America Having a Human Experience by Ebonee Davis (Oct. 10, $16.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-5248-8135-1). These poems and essays on the experience of a young Black woman offer a self-reflective view of what it takes to break generational cycles and heal from trauma.
Backwaters
Butterfly Nebula by Laura Reece Hogan (Oct. 1, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4962-3610-4) considers a plethora of creatures and natural phenomena that animate an interest in the preservation of the natural world, faith, and identity.
BOA
Transitory by Subhaga Crystal Bacon (Nov. 14, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-950774-96-8). These elegies and epistolary poems pay tribute to the 46 transgender and gender-nonconforming people murdered in the U.S. and Puerto Rico in 2020, going beyond news cycles to bring deeper dynamics and themes to the surface.
Book*hug
Queers Like Me by Michael V. Smith (Oct. 12, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-77166-850-7) investigates the experience of growing up queer and working-class in poems that engage with urban life, social occasions, family relationships, teenage crushes, and childhood bullies.
She Who Lies Above by Beatriz Hausner (Nov. 7, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-77166-820-0). Hypatia of Alexandria, the fourth-century Byzantine mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher, is the subject of these epistolary pieces tracing the layered and erotic correspondence between a couple.
Carnegie Mellon Univ.
Night Wing over Metropolitan Area by John Hoppenthaler (Oct. 31, $20 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-88748-692-0). The fourth collection from Hoppenthaler features reflective poems that consider the passage of time, aging, politics, death, resilience, family life, and the challenges faced by a mentally ill child.
Central Avenue Poetry
Heavy Is the Head by Sumaya Enyegue (Aug. 1, $16.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-77168-297-8). Girlhood, Blackness, generational trauma, sexual assault, and mental health are elements of the human experience that Enyegue explores in her debut.
Cherry Orchard
I Lived on the Battlefield of Poltova by Alexei Parshchikov (Nov. 21, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 979-8-88719-225-3). Power relations between Russia and Ukraine are at the center of this 1985 historical lyrical poem. Translator Donald Wesling’s version carries over the rhyme and meter of the original poem, and is presented along with the Russian text and his commentary and notes.
City Lights
The Delicacy of Embracing Spirals by Mimi Tempestt (Oct. 3, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-87286-925-7). Examining narratives of Black womanhood, these jagged-line poems engage with personal struggle and social and political tensions. The collection ends with the staging of a high-stakes play in which the lives of both actors and audience are at risk.
Copper Canyon
Snakedoctor by Maurice Manning (Nov. 14, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-55659-698-8). Evoking Kentucky’s pastoral landscapes, Manning’s eighth collection addresses memory, dreams, faith, and local storytelling in rhyme, blues, haiku, and other forms.
Ecco
Fixer by Edgar Kunz (Aug. 22, $17.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-06-328859-1) takes on labor in the age of late capitalism through a consideration of conspiracy theories, temping, urban gardening, and the use of artificial intelligence.
Hell, I Love Everybody: The Essential James Tate by James Tate (Nov. 7, $17.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-06-330607-3). Introduced by Terrance Hayes, this collection celebrates Tate’s unconventional and inventive voice and style.
Everyman’s Library
Uyghur Poems, edited and trans. by Aziz Isa Elkun (Nov. 7, $20, ISBN 978-1-101-90834-1), spans the 1,000-year legacy of the Uyghur people, a minority in Central Asia, whose poetry roots date back to the oral epics of the second century BCE.
Fordham Univ.
In Gorgeous Display by Ugochukwu Damian Okpara (Sept. 5, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-5315-0460-1). These poems about living as a queer or effeminate person in Nigeria draw from the March 2020 murder of a queer man in Anambra State. Dedicated to his memory, the collection interrogates antiqueer violence.
Graywolf
The Kingdom of Surfaces by Sally Wen Mao (Aug. 1, $16 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64445-237-0). Art, history, and the origins of valued objects such as porcelain, silk, and pearls are among the subjects Mao uses to explore themes of beauty, violence, and exploitation.
Low by Nick Flynn (Nov. 7, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64445-259-2) investigates memory, loss, violence, trauma, and home in prose pieces, lyric sequences, and loose sonnet crowns.
Griffin
Someone Somewhere Maybe by Sophie Diener (Sept. 26, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-250-89271-3). Contemporary womanhood is studied in introspective poems about growing up, including descriptions of first love, disappointment, loss, identity, self-esteem, and hope. 75,000-copy announced first printing.
Haymarket
Florida Water by Aja Monet (Sept. 12, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-64259-967-1) reflects on migrating to South Florida from Brooklyn, N.Y., and sifts through themes of systemic violence, love, community, prejudice, and climate change. The title refers to the cleansing water used in spiritual baths.
House of Anansi
Theophylline by Erín Moure and Elisa Sampedrín (Aug. 8, $22.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4870-1160-4). Influenced by the work of three American modernists—Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop, and Angelina Weld Grimké—these poems reckon with asthma, racial bias, migration, and more.
Alice James
Orders of Service by Willie Lee Kinard III (Nov. 14, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-949944-57-0). This coming-of-age study of a young, Black queer person in a small Southern town wrestles with themes of identity, lineage, faith, desire, and shame as it studies the stories, narratives, and beliefs held along the Bible Belt.
Knopf
The Asking: New and Selected Poems by Jane Hirshfield (Sept. 12, $35, ISBN 978-0-593-53595-0). Gathering pieces from Hirshfield’s nine previous books and including a substantial opening section of new poems, this collection engages with eros, uncertainty, and astonishment.
Spectral Evidence by Gregory Pardlo (Jan. 30, $28, ISBN 978-1-5247-3178-6) examines identity, Blackness, beauty, and faith against the backdrop of America’s unjust justice system and history of racial bigotry. Pardlo also reflects on the hip-hop group NWA and Tituba (the only Black woman to be accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials).
Milkweed
Aster of Ceremonies by Jjjjjerome Ellis (Sept. 26, $16 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-63955-012-8). The latest installment in the Multiverse series, written and curated by neurodivergent poet Ellis, investigates the connections between Blackness, music, poetry writing, voice, and disabled speech.
I Love Information by Courtney Bush (Aug. 22, $16 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-63955-003-6) experiments with language, offering its own nonlinear logic in poems that look at the intersection of people and stories.
New Directions
Bathhouse and Other Tanka by Ishii Tatsuhiko, trans. by Hiroaki Sato (Nov. 7, $18.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-8112-3134-3). Writing in the classical poetic form of the tanka, Ishii adapts the five line 5-7-5-7-7-syllable verse form into one line, creating pieces that allude to subjects as various as Proust, oysters, and the form of poetry itself.
Nightwood Editions
Old Gods by Conor Kerr (Oct. 3, $19.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-88971-446-5). The newest from Métis Ukrainian writer Kerr addresses the natural world, travel, memory, friendship, colonialism, belief, and social media, shifting location and time.
Norton
Up Late by Nick Laird (Nov. 14, $26.95, ISBN 978-1-324-06544-9). The fifth collection from Laird considers the unpredictability of modern life and anxieties about aging, death, time, and legacy.
Paraclete
Journey to the Morning Light by Catherine de Vinck (Sept. 26, $21 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64060-770-5). With a foreword by Mary Evelyn Tucker, this posthumous collection delves into seasons, creation, memory, and death.
Penguin Books
Tarta Americana by J. Michael Martinez (Sept. 12, $20 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-14-313711-5) interrogates mid-20th-century ideas about race, art, identity, gender, and desire in poems that conjure the rock and roll legend Ritchie Valens.
Princeton Univ.
Prickly Moses by Simon West (Oct. 10, $19.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-691-25059-5). From Australia to Italy, West catalogues the language of the natural world, calling attention to regional identity, Europe, and the historical dimensions of landscapes.
Soft Skull
I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times by Taylor Byas (Aug. 22, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-59376-741-9). This debut draws its inspiration from the cult classic film The Wiz, paying homage to South Side Chicago and a Black woman’s journey toward self-discovery.
Tate
Dreams of Love: Rossetti Poetry, compiled by Amy Key (Oct. 3, $18.99, ISBN 978-1-84976-843-6). Arranged thematically under the headings Love, Sex, Money, and Death, this volume gathers works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, and Elizabeth Siddal. The poems are complemented by Pre-Raphaelite images.
Univ. of Notre Dame
The Rivers Are Inside Our Homes by Victoria María Castells (Aug. 1, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-268-20567-6). Cuban poet Castells contemplates her native country, exile, time’s passage, fairy tales, love, machismo, heartbreak, and disappointment.
Univ. of Wisconsin
The Roof of the Whale by Juan Calzadilla, trans. by Katherine M. Hedeen and Olivia Lott (Nov. 14, $18.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-299-34664-5), is an omnibus bilingual volume of three books published by Venezuelan poet Calzadilla between 1962 and 1967 with the neo-avant-garde arts collective El Techo de la Ballena (The Roof of the Whale), which he cofounded.
Wesleyan Univ.
Fierce Elegy by Peter Gizzi (Aug. 8, $27, ISBN 978-0-8195-0067-0). Gizzi interprets the elegy as both a lament and an artifact of love in poems that probe life and death, grief and hope.
Sukun: New and Selected Poems by Kazim Ali (Sept. 12, $40, ISBN 978-0-8195-0070-0) considers themes of identity, migration, love, loss, and the meeting of cultural and spiritual traditions.
White Pine
Returning Home: Poems of Tao Yuan-Ming by Tao Yuan-ming, trans. by Dan Vetch (Oct. 10, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-945680-69-4), gathers the plainspoken poetry of Yuan-ming, who lived around 400 CE and is considered one of China’s great lyric poets.
