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2022 Featured Fall Books List
Balladz by Sharon Olds
Alfred A. Knopf, October 2022
Songs from our era of communal grief and reckoning—by the Pulitzer Prize and T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner, called “a poet for these times, a powerful woman who won’t back down” (San Francisco Chronicle). A finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in poetry.
Dreaming of You by Melissa Lozada-Oliva
Astra Publishing House, September 2022
An absurd yet heartfelt examination of celebrity worship. A macabre novel in verse of loss, longing, and identity crises following a poet who resurrects pop star Selena from the dead.
Common Grace: Poems by Aaron Caycedo-Kimura
Beacon Press, October 2022
“Wry, tender, musical and unsentimental. [...] In these poems, the visible world radiates meaning, memory becomes palpable, and loss is acknowledged.”—Robert Pinsky. Part of the Raised Voices poetry series.
Relinquenda: Poems by Alexandra Lytton Regalado
Beacon Press, October 2022
In a lyrical and often bilingual voice, Alexandra Lytton Regalado explores the impermanence of the body, communication and inarticulation, and the need to let go in order to heal regrets. A National Poetry Series Winner.
Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions That Grew Me Up by Remica Bingham-Risher
Beacon Press, August 2022
“This book is miraculous! Remica Bingham-Risher weaves together a book of knowledge, illumination, and song unlike any I have known but that I might have dreamed.”—Elizabeth Alexander
summonings by raena shirali
Black Lawrence Press, October 2022
Shirali investigates the ongoing practice of witch (“daayan”) hunting in India. A timely and important work, summonings comments on power & patriarchy, on authorial privilege & the shifting role of witness, and ultimately on an ethical poetics.
Never Catch Me by Darius Simpson
Button Poetry, October 2022
Never Catch Me centers on Black boyhood in the Midwest & familial disintegration over time. It is an anthem necessary to organize a community committed to a better right now— one that can only be achieved with an intensity and action that goes far beyond the page.
Dialect of Distant Harbors by Dipika Mukherjee
CavanKerry Press, October 2022
With wonder, empathy, and even rage, Dialect of Distant Harbors explores the ties of family and home as well as the challenges of global migration and violence against women around the world.
Fire Cider Rain by Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin
Coach House Books, September 2022
Poetry that navigates the science of cold waterways to consider the warmth of the poet’s Chinese Mauritian family ties.
Alive at the End of the World by Saeed Jones
Coffee House Press, September 2022
Pierced by grief and charged with history, this new poetry collection from the award-winning author of Prelude to Bruise and How We Fight for Our Lives confronts our everyday apocalypses.
Knot by Forrest Gander
Copper Canyon Press, November 2022
Knot is a profound dialogue between word and image, observation and inspiration, imagination and intellect. “What do you see?” one poem wonders aloud. “A divinity wrung from a black cloud.”
Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems by Dionne Brand
Duke University Press, October 2022
Nomenclature features a new long poem, “Nomenclature for the Time Being,” and collects eight volumes of Brand’s poetry published between 1982 and 2010 as well as a critical introduction by literary scholar and theorist Christina Sharpe.
or, on being the other woman by Simone White
Duke University Press, August 2022
Any reader of poetry, Black critical thought, music theory, or experimental autobiography will find life in this work and will be compelled and captivated by it.” —Dawn Lundy Martin, author of Good Stock Strange Blood
The Most Charming Creatures by Gary Barwin
ECW Press, September 2022
With uncanny wit, inventive beauty, and numinous surprise, The Most Charming Creatures explores the contemporary and its language, considering our wonder, sorrow, bewilderment, anxiety, and tenderness.
Draw Me After by Peter Cole
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, November 2022
Peter Cole’s Draw Me After is, in many ways, his freest and most moving to date. Cole’s poetry disturbs and enchants with “a quiet, streaming power that leads the reader back to it over and over again” (The Bloomsbury Review).
The Complete Translations by Seamus Heaney, edited by Marco Sonzogni
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, January 2023
Marco Sonzogni has collected Nobel laureate and prolific, revolutionary translator Seamus Heaney’s translations and framed them with the poet’s own writings on his works and their composition from his introductions, interviews, and commentary.
Beyond Belief by John Koethe
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2022
The eleventh book of poetry, from America’s philosopher-poet John Koethe is an intimate, searching collection that gives life to the mundane and lends words to our most interior and abstract musings.
This Afterlife by A. E. Stallings
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, December 2022
Award-winning poet and translator A. E. Stallings brings together poetry from her four acclaimed collections, Archaic Smile, Hapax, Olives, and Like, as well as a lagniappe of outlier poems.
Only by Rebecca Foust
Four Way Books, September 2022
Scaling the cliff face of adulthood, this collection transcribes the paradox of individual life in a dizzying world, where we find that each of us is only ourselves and yet delicately interconnected with everyone, everything else.
Muse Found in a Colonized Body by Yesenia Montilla
Four Way Books, September 2022
Observing pop culture, interrogating history, and resisting contemporary injustice, the poems of Muse Found in a Colonized Body range far and wide in content but share the spinal cord of unflinching love.
The Rupture Tense by Jenny Xie
Graywolf Press, September 2022
Shaped around moments of puncture and release, Jenny Xie’s stunning second collection registers what leaks across the breached borders between past and future, background and foreground, silence and utterance.
Swansdown by Donald Platt
Grid Books, October 2022
“One of the finest American poets working today,” writes poet and editor Adrian Matejka, “A writer of unparalleled lyric and formal integrity.” Indeed, these qualities gird Platt for this masterful eighth collection.
Pathetic Literature edited by Eileen Myles
Grove Atlantic, November 2022
A unique anthology of poetry, drama, and prose examining pathos and feeling, giving a well-timed rehab to the word pathetic. Composed by award-winning poet Eileen Myles and featuring titans of global literature, queer icons, revolutionaries, and up-and-coming writers.
And Yet by Kate Baer
Harper Collins, November 2022
The second full length poetry collection from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of What Kind of Woman.
“If you want your breath to catch and your heart to stop, turn to Kate Baer.” —Joanna Goddard, Cup of Jo
Por Siempre by José Olivarez and Antonio Salazar
Haymarket Books, December 2022
A visual and verbal narrative of the grit and gentleness in Southwestern Latinx communities through photography by Antonio Salazar and poetry by José Olivarez, author of Citizen Illegal.
Super Sad Black Girl by Diamond Sharp
Haymarket Books, December 2022
Diamond Sharp’s Super Sad Black Girl is a love letter to her hometown of Chicago, where the speaker finds solace and community with her literary idols in hopes of answering the question: What does it look like when Black women are free?
In the Hands of the River by Lucien Darjeun Meadows
Hub City Press, September 2022
In these haunting, layered poems, Lucien Darjeun Meadows subverts traditional poetic forms to show how a childhood for a queer boy of both Cherokee and European heritage happens within and outside dominant narratives of Appalachia.
Threads of Trust by Ankit Mishra
Inkfeathers Publishing, July 2022
Threads of Trust is a manifestation of an ordinary person’s effort to discover love, sensuality, separation, and itself. Each poem lingers in the duality of life between the erotic and exotic, the lost and the aware, the breaking and the healing, and the life and the death itself.
Paperback, $6.99 & e-Book, $3.99
Endymion or The State of Entropy by Kurt R. Ward
Kurt R. Ward, July 2022
A lyrical drama for the 21st century was just published which uses mythological archetypes to portray our battle with the subconscious.
I, Caustic by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine translated by Jake Syersak
Litmus Press, October 2022
A poetic call to arms against all forms of authoritarianism, I, Caustic is the first English-language translation of Amazigh Moroccan author Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Moi, l’aigre. With a relevance rendered immediate through Jake Syersak’s skillful translation.
The Cloud Notebook by Ada Smailbegović
Litmus Press, November 2022
At once playful, probing, elegiac, humorous, and ceaselessly, spellbindingly metamorphic. Ada Smailbegović's debut poetry collection, The Cloud Notebook, weaves experiences of displacement, war, gender and power. Selected by Tracie Morris in Litmus Press’s 2020 Open Call.
Come Kingdom: Poems by Derrick Harriell
LSU Press, August 2022
This third collection of poetry from Derrick Harriell chronicles a Black man’s journey toward an ever-elusive American dream with poems anchored in the trenches of personal crossroads ranging from child conception to substance abuse and racism.
Now You Can Join the Others: Poems by Taije Silverman
LSU Press, November 2022
This second collection of poetry by Taije Silverman traces the absurdities of desire, the shifting nature of grief, and the concentric circles of history and myth that ripple around motherhood and marriage.
Still Life by Jay Hopler
McSweeney's Publishing, April 2022
Longlisted for the National Book Award. Confronted with a terminal cancer diagnosis, Jay Hopler got to work. The result is Still Life, a collection of poems that are heartbreaking, terrifying, and deeply, darkly hilarious.
The Evangelist by David Armand
Mercer University Press, October 2022
Deceptively simple, clear, and colloquial, yet dense with meaning and universal significance, Armand fashions poems of great lyrical beauty and potent symbolism that remind his readers of the importance of memory and of a shared language.
Against the Woods’ Dark Trunks by Jack B. Bedell
Mercer University Press, October 2022
Staring deep into the shadows of the South Louisiana swamp, even in the darkest of memories,the most broken of hearts, and the longest days, there is grace to be found. These poems dig for it.
According to Sand by Thorpe Moeckel
Mercer University Press, October 2022
The poems in According to Sand exhume often lost and surprising senses of the world and of words. These creaturely poems track the abundant and the minimal, singing (in praise and loss) the uncanniness of existence.
Where You Come from is Gone by Annie Woodford
Mercer University Press, October 2022
Shaped by the displaced cadences of the Appalachian mill workers and the folkways of Virginia, these poems examine the economic and racial violence of rural America, where whiteness is a fraught and often dysfunctional identity.
Bluest Nude by Ama Codjoe
Milkweed Editions, September 2022
“How beautifully seen, tended, and rendered are our many Black lives under this poet's exquisite gaze . . . Bluest Nude is an ecstatic encounter.”—Tracy K. Smith
Ask the Brindled by No'u Revilla
Milkweed Editions, August 2022
“In her debut collection, which won the 2021 National Poetry series, Native Hawaiian poet No'u Revilla explores bodies, language, the legacies of colonialism, the natural world, and grief . . . a beautiful book.”— BookRiot
Milkweed Smithereens by Bernadette Mayer
New Directions Press, November 2022
Milkweed Smithereens gathers lively, wickedly smart, intimate, and indelible Bernadette Mayer poems: the volume ranges from brand-new nature poems, pastiches, sequences, epigrams, and excerpts from her Covid Diary and Second World of Nature to early poems and sonnets found in the attic or rooted out in the UC San Diego archive.
The Way of the Earth: Poems by Matthew Shendo
Northwestern University Press, November 2022
The fourth and most personal collection by award-winner Shenoda, it explores the quotidian beauty that surrounds us despite deep loss and climate crisis. “Time never goes back,” he writes, “but the imagination must."
Alone in the House of My Heart: Poems by Kari Gunter-Seymour
Ohio University Press, September 2022
With poems that are as complicated, breathtaking, and ravaged as Ohio’s southeastern foothills, Ohio Poet Laureate Kari Gunter-Seymour shares an insider’s appreciation for Appalachia’s hard-worked land and hardworking people.
Uterotopia by Rachel Galvin
Persea Books, November 2022
With lyric intensity, wordplay, and dark humor, Uterotopia explores sexism and aging, fertility and mortality, the bystander effect, and violence against women on an intimate and national level. In poems that converse with writers including César Vallejo, Kim Hyesoon, and W.H. Auden, urban legends and folk rituals interweave with facts, anecdotes, and news items.
Please make me pretty, I don't want to die: Poems by Tawanda Mulalu
Princeton University Press, September 2022
Please make me pretty, I don’t want to die explores tactility, sound, sensuality, and intimacy. Set across the four seasons of a year, these original poems combine an inviting confessional voice and offbeat imagery.
Lives by CJ Evans
Sarabande Books, June 2022
Winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, Lives offers a panoramic exploration of our world as we know it: one of climate change and fatality, certainly, but also of celebration, hope, and love.
In the Same Light: 200 Poems for Our Century, From the Migrants & Exiles of the Tang Dynasty translated by Wong May
The Song Cave, September 2022
Chinese poetry is unique in world literature in that it was written for the best part of 3,000 years by exiles and refugees. In this anthology, we meet some poets less familiar to readers in English.
Gold Hill Family Audio by Corrie Lynn White
Southeast Missouri Press, October 2022
“The poems in Corrie Lynn White’s Gold Hill Family Audio have all the intimacy and urgency of prayers— prayers for a deeper connection to place, to family, to our very selves.” — Austin Smith, author of Flyover Country
Where Are the Snows: Poems by Kathleen Rooney
Texas Review Press, September 2022
Winner of The 2021 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, selected by Kazim Ali. Prose poems, alive and determined to connect as a YouTube comment, in the vein of stand-up comedy. A funny-sad send-up of the absurdity of existence.
The Strings Are Lightning And Hold You In by Chee Brossy
Tupelo Press, November 2022
In this stunning collection, Chee Brossy forges a poetics of wonder, dailiness, and transformation. Here, the “sugar cane Coke” and “the leafy houseplant[s]” of the speaker’s daily life, those artifacts of routine, are revealed as glimpses into all that is unknowable, subtle reminders of “today’s mystery.”
Ore Choir: The Lava On Iceland by Katy Didden
Tupelo Press, October 2022
Part miracle, part oracle, in these poems lava speaks “with the focus of a burning glass,” lighting lyric core samples through geo-historical and cultural texts about Iceland.
Rewild by Meredith Stricker
Tupelo Press, September 2022
Rewild is a collection of documentary lyric poetry that explores places that, having been ravaged by war and environmental plunder, have since been abandoned to regenerate and restore.
The Sky Watched: Poems of Ojibwe Lives by Linda LeGarde Grover
University of Minnesota Press, October 2022
Award-winning poet and scholar Linda LeGarde Grover gives poetic voice to Ojibwe family life. In English and Ojibwe, she creates a collective memoir in poetry as expansive and particular as the starry sky.
Brown Girl Chromatography by Anuradha Bhowmik
University of Pittsburgh Press, October 2022
Brown Girl Chromatography interrogates issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality while navigating Bhowmik’s millennial childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. She draws on pop culture and free association to examine displacement and make meaning out of hurt.
Stilettos in a Rifle Range by Tyrone Williams
Wayne State University Press, December 2022
Poems about the joys and struggles of complex, contemporary life. Written against a backdrop of heartbreak and spanning the geography of Cincinnati, Detroit, and New York, this is a complex, intriguing book that plays dynamically with language.
In a Few Minutes Before Later by Brenda Hillman
Wesleyan University Press, October 2022
An iconoclastic ecopoet who has led the way for many artists, Brenda Hillman continues to re-cast innovative poetic forms. Hillman’s poetry offers courage even in times of existential peril. Her work represents what is best in American poetry.
Goddesses of Water by Jeannette L. Clariond translated from Spanish by Samantha Schnee
World Poetry Books, September 2022
Jeannette L. Clariond’s sixth book in English translation refracts the war waged against thousands of Mexican women through Nahuatl philosophy and Aztec mythology, investigating gender construction and fluidity.
Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light by Joy Harjo
W.W. Norton, November 2022
A magnificent selection of fifty poems to celebrate three-term US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s fifty years as a poet.
Catching the Light by Joy Harjo
Yale University Press, October 2022
In this lyrical meditation, Joy Harjo, the first Native American Poet Laureate of the U.S., reflects on significant points of illumination, experience, and questioning from her fifty years as a poet.
My Trade is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing by Carl Phillips
Yale University Press, November 2022
The award-winning poet Carl Phillips shares intimate lessons about the writing life, weaving his forty years of experience with the necessary survival skills including ambition, stamina, silence, politics, practice, audience, and community.