A number of career retrospectives are in order for the poetry world this spring—the words “collected” and “selected” are popping up everywhere—particularly with the deaths of several leading poets the past couple of years.

But we’ll start with the living, and some notable titles from Ecco, which is releasing the prolific John Ashbery’s new collection, as well as those of two fellow Pulitzer Prize winners: Charles Simic, who will drop The Lunatic, and Jorie Graham, whose From the New World: Poems, 1976–2014 culls from her 11 collections.

Moving on to the deceased, we find final works from the remarkable quartet of Maya Angelou, Wislawa Szymborska, Amiri Baraka, and Frank Stanford. Random House will publish Angelou’s The Complete Poetry, which includes her previously unpublished poem commissioned for the 2008 Olympics. Szymborska’s highly anticipated Map: Collected and Last Poems is on the way from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and features poems from her final collection in Polish, Enough, rendered in English for the first time.

On the men’s side, Grove will release Baraka’s SOS: Poems, 1961–2013, a fitting final testament to his innovative and incendiary life and work. The myth and mystique of Frank Stanford’s tragically short career (he committed suicide in 1978) finds full expression in Copper Canyon’s publication of What About This: The Collected Poems of Frank Stanford, which includes previously unpublished work and loads of Stanford-related ephemera.

Back among the living we find Terrance Hayes, who graciously reviewed the late Baraka’s selected poems for PW (Reviews, Jan. 19). Hayes cemented his star status after becoming a MacArthur Fellow in 2014, and he follows his 2010 National Book Award–winning Lighthead with How to Be Drawn, a collection from Penguin that puts his observational talents and visual arts skills in full service of his poetry.

Another Pulitzer Prize winner, the ever-sharp Rae Armantrout, returns with Itself, a fantastic collection from Wesleyan that sees increasing attention paid to the natural sciences alongside her trademark social critique. Mary Jo Bang demonstrates, with a brilliantly caustic and piercing collection, her seventh, that her surname is not merely a happy accident: The Last Two Seconds, from Graywolf, takes on all manner of worldly ills, and it might be her best yet. Finally, rising star Heather Christle attempts to transcend our solar system with the aptly titled Heliopause. Her fourth book, and second from Wesleyan, probes the boundaries of the known and unknown like a poetic Voyager 1.

PW’s Top 10: Poetry

The Complete Poetry. Maya Angelou. Random, Mar. 31

From the New World: Poems 1976–2014. Jorie Graham. Ecco, Feb. 17

Heliopause. Heather Christle. Wesleyan Univ., Mar. 9

How to Be Drawn. Terrance Hayes. Penguin, Mar. 31

Itself. Rae Armantrout. Wesleyan Univ., Feb. 25

The Last Two Seconds: Poems. Mary Jo Bang. Graywolf, Mar. 3

The Lunatic: Poems. Charles Simic. Ecco, Apr. 7

Map: Collected and Last Poems. Wislawa Szymborska, trans. by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Apr. 7

SOS: Poems 1961–2013. Amiri Baraka, edited by Paul Vangelisti. Grove, Feb. 3

What About This: The Collected Poems of Frank Stanford. Frank Stanford. Copper Canyon, Apr. 14

Poetry Listings

Akashic

Eight New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set, edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani (Apr. 14, box set, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-61775-355-8). This elegant, limited-edition box set of nine chapbooks—eight volumes of poetry, plus an introduction by editors Dawes and Abani—is an annual project of the African Poetry Book Fund, in collaboration with Akashic Books.

Alice James

(dist. by Consortium)

O’Nights by Cecily Parks (Apr. 14, paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-1-938584-11-4). Parks constructs stunning manifestations of a modern Thoreauvian wilderness, investigating how the natural world gives shape to the self, body, and emotions. This ode to the wild in all of us destabilizes identity and seeks possibilities for love that wilderness provokes.

Yearling by Lo Kwa Mei-en (Apr. 14, paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-1-938584-10-7). Mei-en’s poems fall terribly in love with, inhabit, wreak havoc on, and eventually attempt to revive the ecologies of adolescence. Harsh, forlorn yet effervescent, Mei-en’s lyricism perfectly captures the ethos of youth in an unsure world.

Arte Público

Monsters, Zombies and Addicts: Poems by Gwendolyn Zepeda (Mar. 31, paper, $14.95, ISBN 978-1-55885-810-7). Musings on family, remembrances of childhood games, and encounters with strangers (and ants!) fill this clever, thought-provoking second collection from Houston’s first poet laureate.

Bloomsbury

Hold Your Own: Poems by Kate Tempest (Mar. 10, paper, $17, ISBN 978-1-63286-205-1). Basing this work on the myth of the blind prophet Tiresias, Ted Hughes Award–winner Tempest delivers a riveting tale of youth and experience, sex and love, wealth and poverty, community and alienation.

BOA

(dist. by Consortium)

Smugglers by Ales Debeljak, trans. by Brian Henry (June 9, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1-938160-67-7). These poems, presented in English and Slovenian, move through rapid historical shifts and meditations, exploring the people and geography of the Balkans. Debeljak’s urban imagination creates a mosaic—intimate and historical—of a vanished people and their country.

Testament by G.C. Waldrep (May 12, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1-938160-63-9). In this book-length poem, Waldrep addresses matters as diverse as Mormonism, cymatics, race, Dolly the cloned sheep, and his own life and faith. Drafting these poems over 12 trance-like days while in residence at Hawthornden Castle, Waldrep tackles the question of whether gender can be a lyric form.

Why God Is a Woman by Nin Andrews (May 12, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1-938160-61-5). Set on a magical island where women rule and men are the second sex, the world celebrated prose poet Andrews creates is both fantastic and familiar where all the myths, logic, and institutions support the dominance of women.

Fanny Says by Nickole Brown (Apr. 14, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1-938160-57-8). An “unleashed love song” to her late grandmother, Brown’s collection brings her brassy, bawdy, tough-as-new-rope grandmother to life. A cross-genre collection that reads like a novel, this book wrestles with the complexities of the South, including poverty, racism, and domestic violence.

Carnegie Mellon Univ.

The Octopus Game by Nicky Beer (Feb. 3, paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-0-88748-593-0). The figure of the octopus shape-shifts itself across ocean depths, tide pools, aquariums, gardens, movies, pulp novels, fine art, and nightmares; Beer acts as the strange documentarian recording the bizarre, beautiful, and disturbing habits of creatures for whom subterfuge and mimicry are a means of survival.

We Mammals in Hospitable Times by Jynne Dilling Martin (Feb. 3, paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-0-88748-596-1). This highly anticipated debut finds its narrator rushing headlong into a dangerous planet wanting desperately to make sense of all the perplexing behavior on view and offering poems with armfuls of empathy, curiosity, and spiritual force.

City Lights

On Time: Poems 2005–2014 by Joanne Kyger (Apr. 14, paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-0-87286-680-5). Kyger’s first full-length collection of poetry in nearly a decade blends the personal and the political, the natural and the spiritual in a restless quest for sanity. A major new collection from one of the most significant poets of the San Francisco Renaissance.

Women in Public by Elaine Kahn (Apr. 14, paper, $13.95, ISBN 978-0-87286-681-2). In this debut full-length collection by poet/musician Kahn, personal philosophies and collective admissions are put through the corporeal grinder, harnessing the sensual as a medium for the cerebral in order to negotiate the “feminine condition” of being simultaneously othered and consumed.

Coach House

(dist. by Consortium)

Asbestos Heights by David McGimpsey (Apr. 14, paper, $17.95, ISBN 978-1-55245-309-4). Implored to be “classy” and “real” for once, McGimpsey looks to all things “poetic,” like birds and history, and instead amps up his trademark sideswiping of formal rhetoric with pop-culture verve to find a bold Late Night Petrarchan spirit.

Coffee House

(dist. by Consortium)

Alone and Not Alone by Ron Padgett (May 12, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1-56689-401-2). From one of contemporary poetry’s living masters comes a collection of wry, generous, lucid new poems that demonstrate how vital Padgett’s skills as a poet remain, continuously reminding us that the world may be seen in a clearer and more generous light.

Null Set by Ted Mathys (June 9, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1-56689-403-6) collects the obsessive possibilities that rise when we give them the space: odd jobs, trouble-making, and farmboy rambling, all in dialogue with mathematics, Faulkner, or other poets. Mathys builds reflections that lead to dark, complex work that’s provocative, rhythmic, and a little sly.

Copper Canyon

(dist. by Consortium)

The News by Jeffrey Brown (May 12, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1-55659-480-9). Emmy-award winning journalist Brown explores the intersections between politics and poetry in his debut. From a high-security prison in Arizona, a West Point classroom, a slum in Haiti, Brown’s poems share the perspectives of inmates, cadets, and survivors.

Shirt in Heaven by Jean Valentine (May 12, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1-55659-478-6). Quietly marked by elegy and memory, Valentine’s 13th book is empowered by her signature clear music and compassion. Drawing on the Tibetan word bardo, “intermediate state,” National Book Award–winner Valentine explores love and loss in the dreamlike liminal space of memory.

War of the Foxes by Richard Siken (Apr. 14, paper, $17, ISBN 978-1-55659-477-9). In this much-anticipated second book, Siken, winner of the 2004 Yale Younger Poets’ prize, seeks definite answers to indefinite questions: what it means to be called to make—whether it be a self, love, war, or art—and what it means to answer that call.

What About This: The Collected Poems of Frank Stanford by Frank Stanford, intro. by Dean Young (Apr. 14, hardcover, $40, ISBN 978-1-55659-468-7). This 600-plus-page book highlights the arc of Stanford’s all-too-brief and incandescently brilliant career. Despite critical praise and near-mythic status as a poet, Stanford’s oeuvre has never fully been unified until now.

Counterpoint

(dist. by PGW)

This Present Moment: New Poems by Gary Snyder (Apr. 14, hardcover, $24, ISBN 978-1-61902-524-0). For his first collection of new poems since 2004, Snyder finds himself ranging over the planet. From the Dolomites to Lake Tahoe, from Paris to Tuscany to Delphi, from Santa Fe to Sella Pass, Snyder lays out a map of the last decade.

Ecco

Breezeway: New Poems by John Ashbery (May 12, hardcover, $22.99, ISBN 978-0-06-238702-8). Demonstrating his extraordinary command of language and his ability to move fluidly and elegantly between wide-ranging thoughts and ideas, Ashbery shows that he is a virtuoso fluent in diverse styles and tones of language.

From the New World: Poems 1976–2014 by Jorie Graham (Feb. 17, hardcover, $29.99, ISBN 978-0-06-231540-3). Pulitzer Prize–winner Graham returns with a new selection, this time from 11 volumes, including previously unpublished work, which, in its breathtaking overview, illuminates the unfolding of her signature ethical and ecopolitical concerns, as well as her deft exploration of mythology, history, and love.

The Lunatic: Poems by Charles Simic (Apr. 7, hardcover, $22.99, ISBN 978-0-06-236474-6). This latest from the celebrated Simic demonstrates his revered signature style—a mix of understated brilliance, wry melancholy, and sardonic wit—in luminous poems that range in subject from mortality to personal ads, from the simple wonders of nature to his childhood in war-torn Yugoslavia.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Heaven: Poems by Rowan Ricardo Phillips (June 16, hardcover, $23, ISBN 978-0-374-16852-0). Swerving elegantly from humor to heartbreak, from Colorado to Florida, from Dante’s Paradise to Homer’s Iliad, from knowledge to ignorance to awe, Phillips turns his gaze upward and outward, probing and upending notions of the beyond.

Multitudinous Heart: Selected Poems: A Bilingual Edition by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, trans. by Richard Zenith (June 23, hardcover, $35, ISBN 978-0-374-28070-3). The most generous selection of Drummond’s poems available in English gathers work from the various phases of this restless, brilliant modernist. Richard Zenith’s selection and translation brings us a more vivid and surprising poet than we knew.

Nothing to Declare: Poems by Henri Cole (Mar. 31, hardcover, $23, ISBN 978-0-374-22292-5). The poems in Cole’s ninth book explore life, need, and delight. Each poem starts up from its own unique occasion and is conducted through surprising (sometimes unnerving) and self-steadying domains. The result is a daring, delicate, unguarded, and tender collection.

Graywolf

The Last Two Seconds: Poems by Mary Jo Bang (Mar. 3, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1-55597-704-7). Bang captures the difficulties inherent in being human in the 21st century, when we set our watches by nuclear disasters, species collapse, pollution, mounting inequalities, warring nations, and our own mortality. This is brilliant and profound work by an essential poet of our time.

Selfish: Poems by Albert Goldbarth (May 5, paper, $18, ISBN 978-1-55597-708-5). The incomparable Goldbarth explores all things “self-ish”: the origins of identity, the search for ancestry, the neurology of self-awareness, and the line between “self” and “other.” Whether one line long or 10 pages, whether uproariously comic or steeped in gravitas, these are poems that address our human essence.

Turning into Dwelling: Poems by Christopher Gilbert, intro. by Terrance Hayes (July 7, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1-55597-713-9). Part of Graywolf’s popular Re/View series, this milestone publication collects two books by Gilbert—Across the Mutual Landscape (1984) and a posthumously discovered unpublished manuscript—under one cover.

Grove

SOS: Poems, 1961–2013 by Amiri Baraka, edited by Paul Vangelisti (Feb. 3, hardcover, $30, ISBN 978-0-8021-2335-0). Fusing the personal and the political in high-voltage verse, Baraka was one of the pre-eminent literary innovators of the past century. This volume comprises the fullest spectrum of his revolutionary poems, from his first collection to previously unpublished pieces composed during his final years.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Map: Collected and Last Poems by Wislawa Szymborska, trans. by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak (Apr. 7, hardcover, $32, ISBN 978-0-544-12602-2). Edited by Cavanagh, her longtime translator, the poems here trace Szymborska’s work until her death in 2012. Nearly 40 are newly translated and 13 represent the entirety of the poet’s last Polish collection, Enough, never before published in English.

Knopf

The Beauty: Poems by Jane Hirshfield (Mar., hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0-385-35107-2). An incandescent new collection from one of American poetry’s most distinctive and essential voices. With a pen faithful to the actual yet dipped at times in the ink of the surreal, Hirshfield considers the inner and outer worlds we live in yet are not confined by.

The Players: Poems by Jill Bialosky (Mar., hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0-385-35262-8). The strongest collection yet from this widely praised poet is about the central players in our lives, our relationships over time—between mother and son, mother and daughter—and how one generation of relationships informs and shapes the next.

Milkweed

(dist. by PGW)

Crow-Work: Poems by Eric Pankey (Feb. 10, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1-57131-454-3). “What is a song but a snare to capture the moment?” This central question drives Pankey’s ekphrastic exploration of the moment where emotion and energy flood a work of art. Pankey seeks not only to explain great art, but also to embody it.

Pictograph: Poems by Melissa Kwasny (Mar. 17, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1-57131-462-8). These poems emerge from Kwasny’s visits to the ancient pictograph and petroglyph sites around her rural Montana home and capture the natural world she encounters around the sacred art, filling it with new, personal meaning.

River House: Poems by Sally Keith (May 12, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1-57131-465-9). Written after the loss of her mother, these poems of absence follow Keith as she makes her way through the depths of grief, navigating a world newly transfigured.

Vessel: Poems by Parneshia Jones (Apr. 14, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1-57131-467-3). The imagination of a girl, the retelling of family stories, and the unfolding of a rich and often painful history: Jones’s debut collection explores the intersections of these elements of experience with refreshing candor and metaphorical purpose.

New Directions

Blue Fasa by Nathaniel Mackey (May, paper, $16.95, ISBN 978-0-8112-2445-1). Mackey’s sixth collection takes its title from two related black musical traditions, a West African griot epic as told by the Fasa and trumpeter Kenny Dorham’s hard bop classic “Blue Bossa,” and follows a band of refugees from history on their incessant migrations through time, place, and polity toward renewal.

New York Review Books

Alive: New and Selected Poems by Elizabeth Willis (Apr. 14, paper, $14, ISBN 978-1-59017-864-5). Willis has long been hailed as one of the most important, most singular contemporary poets working today, and this collection of her best poems will bring her incomparable work to the attention of a new generation of poetry readers.

Nightboat

(dist. by SPD)

hart island by Stacy Szymaszek (May 15, paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-1-937658-34-2). In Szymaszek’s long poem, the poet narrator walks and works in Manhattan’s East Village, navigating the day-to-day needs and desires of a community, an organization, a changing neighborhood, as well as her own.

In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy by Daniel Borzutzky (May 5, paper, $16.95, ISBN 978-1-937658-33-5). This bracing new work from Borzutzky confronts violent action, from state sponsored torture and the bombing of civilians and other “non-essential personnel” to the collapse of the global economy, the barbarism of corporate greed, data fascism, and the deaths of immigrants attempting to cross borders.

Land Sparing by Gabriella Klein (May 5, paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-1-937658-32-8). Klein lays bare the prospects of an individual in times of ecological disaster and personal and political upheaval. These quiet but savage poems are gyroscopic, telescopic, and microscopic.

Norton

Deep Lane: Poems by Mark Doty (Apr., hardcover, $25.95, ISBN 978-0-393-07023-1). Doty offers a book of descents: into the earth, beneath the garden, into the dark substrata of a life. But these poems seek repair through the possibilities that sustain the speaker aboveground: art and ardor, animals and gardens, the pleasure of seeing, the world tuned by the word.

Oracle: Poems by Cate Marvin (Mar., hardcover, $25.95, ISBN 978-0-393-07798-8). Marvin’s haunting, passionate poems, set in New York’s Staten Island, explore themes of loss, of the vulnerability of womanhood in a world hostile to it, and of the fraught, strangely compelling landscape of adolescence.

Penguin

How to Be Drawn by Terrance Hayes (Mar. 31, paper, $20, ISBN 978-0-14-312688-1). In his daring fifth collection, National Book Award–winner Hayes explores how we see and are seen. While many of these poems bear the clearest imprint yet of Hayes’s background as a visual artist, they do not strive to describe art so much as inhabit it.

Scattered at Sea by Amy Gerstler (May 26, paper, $20, ISBN 978-0-14-312689-8). Groping for an inclusive, imaginative, postmodern spirituality, Gerstler draws from an array of sources, including the philosophy of the ancient Stoics, diagnostic tests for Alzheimer’s disease, 1950s recipes, the Babylonian Talmud, and Walter Benjamin’s writing on his drug experiences.

Persea

(dist. by Norton)

Teratology: Poems by Susannah Nevison (May, paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-0-89255-458-4). Winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry, this debut collection explores the psychic existences beget by physical abnormality and imperfection. Nevison’s poems name and reclaim the body, making and unmaking it, portraying the “marvelous monsters” that we all are—whether outside or in.

Random

The Complete Poetry by Maya Angelou (Mar. 31, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-0-8129-9787-3). As the world celebrates and reflects on Angelou’s beautiful life, Random House presents an updated collection of her poetry, including a never-before-published work titled, “Amazement Awaits,” commissioned for the 2008 Olympic Games.

Saturnalia

(dist. by SPD)

Industry of Brief Distraction by Laurie Saurborn Young (Apr. 7, paper, $15, ISBN 978-0-9915454-4-5). In a voice at once direct, musical, and surreal, these poems document the journey of a woman as she examines her role in both the political landscape of modern American culture and within the scope of her familial history.

Neighbors by Jay Nebel (Apr. 7, paper, $15, ISBN 978-0-9915454-6-9). Nebel’s book of lyric narratives about the men and women who live and work next to us, the people standing in line at the DMV or buying milk and bread at the grocery store, gives voice to an America lost in the graffiti of park benches and 24-hour diner parking lots.

Soft Skull

(dist. by PGW)

Tijuana Book of the Dead by Luis Alberto Urrea (Mar. 17, paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-1-61902-482-3). Weaving English and Spanish as fluidly as he blends cultures of the southwest, Urrea offers a tour of Tijuana, from Skid Row to the suburbs of East Los Angeles, from the stunning yet deadly Mojave Desert to Mexico and the border fence itself.

Univ. of Pittsburgh

Loose Strife by Quan Barry (Feb. 13, paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-0-8229-6329-5). In poems initially inspired by Aeschylus’s fifth-century trilogy the Oresteia, which chronicles the fall of the house of Atreides, Barry investigates the classical sense of loose strife, namely “to loose battle” or “sow chaos,” a concept still very much with us more than 2,500 years later.

Wave

(dist. by Consortium)

A Roll of the Dice by Stéphane Mallarmé, trans. by Jeff Clark and Robert Bononno (Apr. 14, hardcover, $25, ISBN 978-1-940696-04-1). Translator Bononno and designer Clark turn one of Mallarmé’s most well-known and visually complex poems into contemporary English language and design; composed in an elaborate set of type to both honor the original and be an object of delight.

Superior Packets by Susie Timmons (Apr. 14, paper, $20, ISBN 978-1-940696-06-5). Previously only available in small-run editions, here are 35 years worth of poems, rare or out of print, by Timmons, long heralded by such peers in New York as Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, and Eileen Myles. Her poems are witty, smart, and quick, with a surprising clarity and freshness.

Surrounded by Friends by Matthew Rohrer (Apr. 14, paper, $18, ISBN 978-1-940696-03-4). The poems in Rohrer’s seventh collection are generated by, and embrace, friendships with the living, the dead, and the inanimate. Friends, family, and the urban peoplescape are gathered together in these poems, with more poetic voices joining in, and ending with poems written “in collaboration” with several legendary poets.

Touché by Rod Smith (Apr. 14, paper, $18, ISBN 978-1-940696-08-9). Well-known for his radical poetics and politics, Smith turns yet another avant-garde corner. Ranging from conceptual and flarf to high lyric and even confessional works, these poems toss the reader into the seemingly infinite possibilities Smith’s style(s) inhabit.

Wesleyan Univ.

The Glory Gets by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (May 11, hardcover, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8195-7542-5). In her fourth and most accomplished collection, Jeffers turns to the task of seeking and reconciling the blues and its three movements—identification, exploration, and resolution—with wisdom. It’s a deft, lyrical meditation on blues, womanhood, and beyond.

Heliopause by Heather Christle (Mar. 9, hardcover, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8195-7529-6). Christle’s stunning fourth collection blends disarming honesty with keen leaps of the imagination. Like the boundary between our sun’s sphere of influence and interstellar space, the poems locate themselves along the border of the known and unknown, moving with breathtaking assurance from the page to the beyond.

Itself by Rae Armantrout (Feb. 25, hardcover, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8195-7467-1). What do “self” and “it” have in common? In Pulitzer Prize–winner Armantrout’s new poems, there is no inert substance. Self and it (word and particle) are ritual and rigmarole, song-and-dance, and long distance call into whatever dark matter might exist. How could a self not be selfish?

Yale Univ.

Blue Yodel by Ansel Elkins, foreword by Carl Phillips (Mar. 31, hardcover, $45, ISBN 978-0-300-21003-3). Elkins’s imaginative and haunting debut is the 109th volume to be honored by the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. Judge Carl Phillips praises Elkins for her “arresting use of persona,” calling her poems “razor-edged in their intelligence, Southern Gothic in their sensibility.”