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2020 Featured Fall Books
Quiet Spiders of the Hidden Soul by Mykola Bazhan
Academic Studies Press, September 2020
This bilingual Ukrainian-English collection for the first time makes the major works by Mykola “Nik” Bazhan, one of the most important Ukrainian modernist poets of the twentieth century, available to scholars and the general reader alike.
New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set (Saba) edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani
Akashic Press, September 2020
The latest entry in the acclaimed series of limited-edition chapbook box sets—an African Poetry Book Fund (APBF) project—edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani, features the work of eleven new African poets.
Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic edited by Alice Quinn
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., June 2020
In this urgent outpouring of American voices, our poets speak to us as they shelter in place, addressing our collective fear, grief, and hope from eloquent and diverse individual perspectives.
Allegria by Giuseppe Ungaretti
Archipelago Books, October 2020
A translation of Ungaretti’s first full-length volume of poetry and a seminal work of Italian modernism. Written in the trenches of World War I, the poems seek to express what he called “an awakening to the human condition.”
Render by Sachiko Murakami
Arsenal Pulp, September 2020
Wading through the aftermath of her addiction, Sachiko Murakami explores what happens to trauma when it is put down on the page in her poetry collection Render.
Foxlogic, Fireweed by Jennifer K. Sweeney
The Backwaters Press, September 2020
Winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry, Foxlogic, Fireweed follows a lyrical sequence of five physical and emotional terrains—floodplain, coast, desert, suburbia, and mesa—braiding themes of nature, domesticity, isolation, and human relationships.
Dog-eared: Poems About Humanity's Best Friend edited by Duncan Wu
Basic Books, October 2020
Rich and inviting, Dog-eared is a spellbinding collection of poetic musings about humans and dogs and what they mean to each other.
Cuttings From the Tangle by Richard Buckner
Black Sparrow Press, November 2020
Richard Buckner has traveled the backroads for decades, alone with little more than his guitars and notebooks. Long admired for his impressionistic and elliptical lyrics, this debut collection gathers story-like poems from the fringes.
Poise & Arrows by Kimberley Castlemain
September 2019
A collection of 200+ poems that are little hymns of hope belonging to no religion in particular. Its themes are surrealist and existential, while at the same time offering a sense of being understood.
Cardinal by Tyree Daye
Copper Canyon Press, October 2020
Part family history, part “Green Book,” Cardinal navigates the American South's burdened interiors and asks: Where can Black people go to be safe?
The Disappearing Ox by Lewis Hyde and Max Gimblett
Copper Canyon Press, September 2020
MacArthur Fellow Lewis Hyde and painter Max Gimblett collaborate to create a modern American version of the twelfth-century Chinese “Oxherding Series,” featuring the original Chinese text, Gimblett's paintings, and Hyde's inventive translations.
For Now by James Richardson
Copper Canyon Press, June 2020
National Book Award finalist James Richardson celebrates “nows” of every length, from the sweep of cosmic evolution, to the span of a life, to the glint of dew on a cold shovel.
The Essential Ruth Stone edited by Bianca Stone
Copper Canyon Press, September 2020
The Essential Ruth Stone collects a beloved American poet’s career-defining poems into a single, incandescent volume.
The Nightgown and Other Poems by Taisia Kitaiskaia
Deep Vellum, September 2020
Ripe with mythic awareness and dark, fairytale–turned–feminist humor, Literary Witches author Taisia Kitaiskaia’s debut poetry collection catalogs magical beasts, language, and the mysteries of our world with wide, witchy eyes.
Runaway by Jorie Graham
Ecco, September 2020
Called “our most formidable nature poet,” Jorie Graham is an essential voice in this time of environmental and social calamity, urging us to attention and action.
Memory Rose into Threshold Speech by Paul Celan
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, November 2020
Memory Rose into Threshold Speech gathers the first four books of the celebrated poet Paul Celan’s oeuvre, written between 1952 and 1963, which established his reputation as perhaps the greatest major post–World War II German-language poet.
Blizzard by Henri Cole
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2020
Henri Cole, one of our greatest poets, explores the discordant nature of our condition on earth in Blizzard, his tenth collection.
Here Is the Sweet Hand by francine j. harris
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 2020
Here is the Sweet Hand explores solitude as a way of seeing. The speakers in francine j. harris’ third collection explore the mystique of female loneliness as it relates to Blackness, aging, landscape, and artistic tradition.
Snow Approaching on the Hudson by August Kleinzahler
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, November 2020
August Kleinzahler, National Book Critics Circle Award–winning “poetry star” (The New York Times), presents Snow Approaching on the Hudson, his thirteenth collection of poetry.
Sometimes I Never Suffered by Shane McCrae
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 2020
Shane McCrae’s seventh collection is a search for purpose and atonement, freedom and forgiveness, reckoning with the nuances of America’s—as well as his own—racial history.
Music for the Dead and Resurrected by Valzhyna Mort
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, November 2020
In her letters to the dead, the prize-winning poet Valzhyna Mort relearns how to mourn those erased by violent history.
The Caiplie Caves by Karen Solie
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 2020
A striking new collection of poems that blends the story of a seventh-century monk with contemporary themes.
scenery: a lyric by José Felipe Alvergue
Fordham University Press, September 2020
“. . . scenery is a powerful work, stirred from an instance of the author’s desperate powerlessness. We should study this.” —Douglas Kearney
My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites by S. Brook Corfman Foreword by Cathy Park Hong
Fordham University Press, September 2020
“In this gentle and devastating record of a life, Corfman highlights and distorts the real to transmit a remarkable interior world, intricate with questions of selfhood, affect, and the mortality that transforms and binds humanity.” —Publishers Weekly
The Newest Employee of the Museum of Ruin by Charlie Clark
Four Way Books, September 2020
Readers follow a speaker searching for ways to enjoy living within a damaged and declining world. Rich in image, the beautiful, the plain, the ugly coexist in a debut collection fifteen years in the making.
Seize by Brian Komei Dempster
Four Way Books, September 2020
Seize asks, How does a parent guide a child without speech? And how does one become the parent of another when they are still healing, perhaps having never been given the opportunity to heal?
Between Lakes by Jeffrey Harrison
Four Way Books, September 2020
Whether observing nature with steadfast precision or describing his ailing father resting on the porch, Jeffrey Harrison sings the song of experience of late middle-life.
You Don't Have to Go to Mars for Love by Yona Harvey
Four Way Books, September 2020
The poems of award-winning poet Yona Harvey’s much anticipated You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love follow an unnamed protagonist on her multidimensional, Afro-futuristic journey.
The Life Assignment by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado
Four Way Books, September 2020
Ricardo Alberto Maldonado bends poems through bilingual lyrics presenting spartan observation as evidence for an exacting verdict: “We never leave when life is elsewhere. The clemency of men disappears / as does the light, tarring the roofs.”
My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree by Yi Lei translated by Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi
Graywolf Press, November 2020
Presented in the original Chinese alongside English translations by Changtai Bi and Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Tracy K. Smith, this collection introduces American readers to poems that rejoice in the body, human empathy, and the natural world.
Fugitive Atlas by Khaled Mattawa
Graywolf Press, October 2020
In these sweeping, impassioned poems about refugee crises, military occupations, and ecological degradation, Khaled Mattawa asks how we are expected to endure our times and how we let loose those we love into an unpredictable world.
That Was Now, This Is Then by Vijay Seshadri
Graywolf Press, October 2020
Vijay Seshadri’s fourth collection—and his first since winning the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for 3 Sections—addresses contradictions of space and time, longing, and grief through the lyric and elegy.
How to Fly (in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) by Barbara Kingsolver
Harper Books, September 2020
A stunning new collection of poetry from beloved New York Times bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver. In this intimate, luminous collection, Kingsolver explores friendship and family, life and death, and the natural world.
The Selected Letters of John Berryman edited by Philip Coleman and Calista McRae
Harvard University Press, October 2020
A wide-ranging, first-of-its-kind selection of John Berryman’s correspondence with friends, loved ones, writers, and editors, showcasing the turbulent, fascinating life and mind of one of America’s major poets.
Text Messages or How I Found Myself Time Traveling by Yassin "Narcy" Al Salman
Haymarket Books, September 2020
Narcy’s verses span the space between hip-hop and manifesto, portraying a crumbling, end-stage capitalist society, visions for a new reality, and exposing the myth of multiculturalism in post-9/11 North America.
The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom by Felicia Rose Chavez
Haymarket Books, January 2021
A captivating mix of memoir and progressive teaching strategies, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop demonstrates how to be culturally attuned, twenty-first century educators.
African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song edited by Kevin Young
Library of America, October 2020
250 Years of Struggle & Song, a definitive new Library of America anthology, edited by poet and scholar Kevin Young, gathers nearly 250 poets from the colonial period to the present.
Thrown in the Throat by Benjamin Garcia
Milkweed Editions, August 2020
“Garcia investigates what makes a son, queer and brown, in an America where the white star on a Texas flag is also ‘the open throat of a cottonmouth.’” —Sally Wen Mao
Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020 by Paul Vermeersch
MisFit (an imprint of ECW Books), September 2020
Bringing together the very best of Paul Vermeersch’s poetry with never-before-published works. A sprawling achievement chronicling the dawn of civilizations, the wondrous minutiae of contemporary life, and any number of alarming, possible futures.
This Red Metropolis What Remains by Leia Penina Wilson
Omnidawn, September 2020
Answering a call to go feral, these poems are part invocation, and part prayer, re-imagining the form of the confessional poem by exploring the nature of confession from a feminist and anti-colonial perspective.
Owed by Joshua Bennett
Penguin Books, September 2020
A collection that shines a light on the past in order to reconstruct a deeper, truer vision of the present. “I’m glad to have [this] amazing collection right now. I will be glad to have it tomorrow.” —Terrance Hayes
Systems for the Future of Feeling by Kimberly Grey
Persea Books, December 2020
While constructing interviews with literary and intellectual forebears―Anne Carson, Jack Gilbert, Sina Queyras Gertrude Stein, Ludwig Wittgenstein―Kimberly Grey builds “language systems” to help us express awe, confusion, bewilderment, nostalgia, horror, and joy.
In the Dark, Soft Earth by Frank Watson
Plum White Press, July 2020
Dig into Frank Watson’s latest poetry collection, In the Dark, Soft Earth. These vignette verses, interspersed with tarot symbolism and jazzy blues, explore the workings of love, nature, spirituality, and dreams. Beautifully illustrated with classic paintings.
9 Lively Cat Tales and Other Pet Poems by Jeffry Glover
Poems for Pleasure Press LLC, September 2020
Today is "Caterday"! Enjoy 83 lively rhyming poems (including story poems) about many kinds of cats and a few beloved dogs, a delight for children, reluctant readers, teens, and adults. Order at PoetryPie.com.
A Recipe for a Feeling by Evan E. Roberts
PPLPWRD, August 2020
The debut work from Evan E. Roberts, A Recipe for a Feeling captures the growth of a young Black man from 2013 to 2020 showcasing the wonders of poetry for easing the troubled mind.
Index of Haunted Houses by Adam O. Davis
Sarabande Books, September 2020
Index of Haunted Houses is an investigation of longing and belonging, of haunting as a mode of living. A stunning debut, one that will surprise, convince, and most of all, delight.
Hotel Almighty by Sarah J. Sloat
Sarabande Books, September 2020
Visually arresting and utterly one-of-a-kind, Hotel Almighty is a book-length erasure of pages from Misery by Stephen King, a mixed-media reimagining of the novel's themes of constraint and possibility in elliptical, enigmatic poems.
Every Bruise is a Figure of Remembrance: Poems in Conversation & a Conversation by Toi Derricotte and Dawn Lundy Martin
Slapering Hol Press
Every Bruise is a Figure of Remembrance: Poems in Conversation & a Conversation by Toi Derricotte and Dawn Lundy Martin is the seventh installment of SHP’s Conversation Chapbook Series which features two women poets.
Listener by Samuel Amadon
Solid Objects, September 2020
“Each poem makes play out of self’s inevitable self-consciousness . . . and plumbs the remarkable capacities of poetic language for representation and plasticity, fact and fancy, imagistic precision, and prosodic invention.” —Brian Teare
Negotiations by Destiny O. Birdsong
Tin House, October 2020
Urgent, unflinching, and utterly singular, Destiny O. Birdsong's debut negotiates identities shaped by seemingly contradictory spaces: the academy and the hood, the bedroom and the sanctuary, the hospital room and the beauty salon.
Resistencia: Poems of Protest and Revolution
Tin House, September 2020
Formally dexterous and emotionally wide-ranging in their work, the poets of Resistencia bring feminist, queer, indigenous, urban, and ecological themes to the fore alongside historically prominent protests against imperialism, dictatorships, and economic inequality.
Devil's Lake by Sarah M. Sala
Tolsun Books, August 2020
Like a prism, this startling debut fractures into shades of possibility and memory, queering science, nature, and form to lay bare the colors of joy despite a world that seems intent on its destruction.
Island of the Innocent: A Consideration of the Book of Job by Diane Glancy
Turtle Point Press, June 2020
Island of the Innocent’s haunting poems filter the story of the Book of Job through a Native American lens, giving a name and voice to Job’s wife, and asking the question: who among us is innocent?
The Marble Bed by Grace Schulman
Turtle Point Press, October 2020
In her eighth collection, Grace Schulman rises to new heights with poems of lament and praise, traveling from mourning to joyful wonder of existence as she meditates on an injured world.
Strip by Jessica Abughattas
University of Arkansas, October 2020
Winner, 2020 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize
“Whether in terms of dispossession or sexuality, admiration or pity, Abughattas renders her treatment of the body with candor and poignancy.” —Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara, series editors, from the preface
Migratory Sound by Sara Lupita Olivares
University of Arkansas Press, October 2020
Winner, 2020 CantoMundo Poetry Prize
“This is a rare, evocative, and haunting book. I found myself returning again and again to its atmospheric method of knowing.”
—Roberto Tejada, 2020 series judge
Some Are Always Hungry by Jihyun Jun
University of Nebraska Press, September 2020
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Jihyun Yun limns sharply a wartime family's immigration through the lens of their cuisine. The collection elegantly traces how diasporic communities comfort themselves through cooking and mythmaking.
Riddle Field by Derek Thomas Dew
University of Nevada Press, September 2020
Winner, 2019 Interim Test Site Poetry Series Prize
Rich and unforgettable images and the quiet strength of hard-won survival, Riddle Field tackles the complex process of achieving self-awareness and recovery in the wake of profound trauma.
The Mouth of Earth by Sarah P. Strong
University of Nevada Press, October 2020
This vivid, compelling book is a powerful contribution to environmental literature of the twentieth-first century, and a survival guide for those seeking connection to our planet and one another in the age of climate crisis.
Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Tess O’Dwyer
University of Pittsburgh Press, October 2020
This collection of essays by fifteen scholars across diverse fields explores forty years of writing by Giannina Braschi, one of the most revolutionary Latinx poets of her generation. Featuring a foreword by Ilan Stavans.
Be Holding by Ross Gay
University of Pittsburgh Press, October 2020
A love song to legendary basketball player Julius Erving. In this book-length poem, Gay connects Erving’s famously impossible move from the 1980 NBA Finals to pick-up basketball, the flying Igbo, the Middle Passage, and more.
Post Romantic by Kathleen Flenniken
University of Washington Press, October 2020
In her third book, Kathleen Flenniken undertakes the difficult task of re-seeing what is before us—fusing personal memory with national and ecological upheaval, and interweaving narratives of family, nuclear history, and love of country.
Fractures by Carlos Andrés Gómez
University of Wisconsin Press, October 2020
In his landmark debut, Gómez interrogates race, gender, sexuality, and violence to explore some of the most pressing issues of our time. Unflinching, poignant, and powerful, Fractures is both a gut punch and a balm.
Un-American by Hafizah Geter
Wesleyan University Press, September 2020
Hafizah Geter's debut collection charts the history of a Black family of mixed citizenships through poems imbued by migration, racism, queerness, loss, and the heartbreak of trying to feel at home in a country that does not recognize you.