This summer, we encourage you to check out these new poetry titles from some of our partners, sponsors, and advertisers. Happy reading!
2022 Summer Books List
Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology by Michael Walsh
Autumn House Press, May 2022
Showcasing over 200 LGBTQIA+ writers, Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology expands upon the canon of nature poetry while also offering new lenses through which to view queerness and the natural world.
Seed Celestial by Sara R. Burnett
Autumn House Press, October 2022
Sara R. Burnett's debut poetry collection, Seed Celestial, weaves together themes of motherhood, immigration, and social transformation. Burnett writes haunting reflections on origins—of myth and memory, language and country, earth and mothers.
Feelings Of And by Barry Schwabsky
Black Square Editions, March 2022
“The poems seem to yield to poetry rather than trying to snare or create it - poetry inundates and the reader is like a component drifting through…” - Richard Hell
Infinite Criteria by Joseph Donahue
Black Square Editions, June 2022
“…Donahue, master of seriality and the extended lyric, has transformed the haiku from the inside out. A devout Blakean, he instinctively understands what it means To see a World in a Grain of Sand.” — Norman Finkelstein
Minor Secrets by Billie Chernicoff
Black Square Editions, July 2022
“Exhilarating freedom and subtle command, lyric surprise and electric movement of mind - all that and more runs through every line of Billie Chernicoff’s Minor Secrets.” — Peter Cole
The Queen of Queens by Jennifer Martelli
Bordighera Press, April 2022
In this tenacious poetry collection, drugs, pop music, and Martelli's “queens” embody the struggle with and resistance against gender oppression, political sexism, and ongoing threats to reproductive rights, while reminding us of the power of one strong woman.
What Lightning Spoke: New and Selected Poems by Robert Bensen
Bright Hill Press, January 2022
Bright Hill Press’s What Lightning Spoke: New and Selected Poems manifests ways a childhood lightning strike gave the poet Robert Bensen his calling, in poems that illuminate the paths of spirit in the world.
I’ll Fly Away by Rudy Francisco
Button Poetry, December 2020
I’ll Fly Away uses Francisco’s invented lexicon as the palette to paint an intimate portrait of Black life in America ― one that praises joy without shying away from the hard truths confronting us today.
A Peculiar People by Steven Willis
Button Poetry, April 2022
Steven Willis highlights the multidimensional nature of Blackness by pairing politics with personal experience. A Peculiar People is succinct and focused but simultaneously addresses a wide range of topics such as family, music, hardships, and sacrifice.
Paperback, eBook, & Audiobook, $18
Revenge Body by Rachel Wiley
Button Poetry, January 2022
Rachel Wiley’s third collection of poetry, Revenge Body, is a journey filled with righteous anger, Black identity, magic, mental health, navigating maternal relationships, and the love and loss that comes from a breakup.
Paperback, e-Book, & Audiobook, $18
So, Stranger by Topaz Winters
Button Poetry, May 2022
So, Stranger speaks between histories & futures of being a daughter, being an artist, & being an immigrant. If its reader begins as a stranger, they end as part of a lineage: one both of grief & glory, of distance & arrival.
Boat by Lisa Robertson
Coach House Books, May 2022
These poems bring fresh vehemence to Robertson’s ongoing examination of the changing shape of feminism, the male-dominated philosophical tradition, the daily forms of discourse, and the possibilities of language itself.
Swallowed Light by Michael Wasson
Copper Canyon Press, May 2022
Swallowed Light begins at the clearing of myth, at the mouth of history. In his debut poetry collection, Michael Wasson writes into the gaps left by erasure where the indigenous tongue is determined to bloom.
The Year the City Emptied: After Baudelaire by Daisy Fried
Flood Editions, March 2022
“This book has killer atmosphere, fragrances fine and foul. It growls with the cavernous hunger of our ‘graveyard Nation’ mid-pandemic.”— Jennifer Moxley
All The Blood Involved In Love by Maya Marshall
Haymarket Books, June 2022
Maya Marshall’s poems traverse familial mythography to investigate contemporary politics, Blackness, reproductive justice, and the stakes of race and interracial partnership, queerness, and love.
The Body Family by Hope Wabuke
Haymarket Books, April 2022
This lyrical and imagistic poetry collection tells the story of a family’s journey to flee the murderous reign of Uganda’s Idi Amin only to land in a racist American landscape.
DEAR GOD. DEAR BONES. DEAR YELLOW. by Noor Hindi
Haymarket Books, May 2022
Noor Hindi’s poems explore colonialism, religion, patriarchy and everything in between with sharp wit and innovative precision. Layered to reflect the intersections of her identity, while constantly interrogating this identity itself, her writing combines lyrical beauty with political urgency.
Super Sad Black Girl by Diamond Sharp
Haymarket Books, October 2022
Super Sad Black Girl lyrically explores the in-between spaces of a time and place where the speaker can live safely and freely, in this compassionate and ethereal depiction of mental illness from a promising and powerful poet.
Plan B: A Poet’s Survivors Manual by Sandy McIntosh
Marsh Hawk Press, May 2022
“Plan B: A Poet’s Survivors Manual is a wonderful book, an important book, a book aspiring writers of fiction and poetry should read.” — David Lehman, Editor, The Oxford Book of American Poetry
In Beauty We Are Made Visible by Christine Morro
Middle Creek Publishing, May 2022
Christine Morro reads the subtle space between the human and the Earth and exquisitely translates it. She misses nothing, and her poems open us up more fully to the mystery of every moment.
Our Mother, The Mountain by Alexander Shalom Joseph
Middle Creek Publishing, March 2022
Prose poems of skillfully scrolling moments stitched together by hand into a near-novella, imbued with the unique regional rurality, tones and mood and rich, subtle beauty of living and working in the mountains.
The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón
Milkweed Editions, May 2022
An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist Ada Limón.
Master Suffering by CM Burroughs
Tupelo Press, January 2021
Master Suffering pendulates between yield and command; the bodies of this book are supplicant yet seething—they want nothing more than to survive. But how does a woman survive?
The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez by Iliana Rocha
Tupelo Press, February 2022
The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez chronicles an obsession with the 1971 unsolved murder of Rocha’s grandfather while interrogating the true crime genre, tabloid culture, immigrant identity, the phenomena of missing and murdered women, troubled relationships with law enforcement, and the intersection of prose and poetry.
Today in the Taxi by Sean Singer
Tupelo Press, April 2022
“From the passenger seat of Sean Singer’s taxicab, we witness New York’s streets livid and languid with story and contemplation that give us awareness and aliveness with each trip across the asphalt and pavement.” — Tyehimba Jess
Gifts to the Attentive by Marie Marchand
Winter Goose Publishing, May 2022
Marchand’s poems traverse the domains of reverence, resilience, and reverie, illuminating the transcendent within the ordinary. Her poems exude a quiet power of deepening awareness that invites the reader to a place of
healing.