This summer, we encourage you to check out these new poetry titles from some of our partners, sponsors, and advertisers. Happy reading!
2023 Summer Books List
Linden Word by Robert Kelly
Black Square Editions, March 2023
“Robert Kelly’s body of work is singular because of the various, particular and omnidirectional vision it offers us of how it is to be a human on earth.” — Kimberly Lyons
Nomenclatures of Invisibility by Mahtem Shiferraw
BOA Editions, April 2023
Through a personal, historical, and political lens, Mahtem Shiferraw attends to the collective experiences inherited through deeply-rooted ancestry, tracing patterns of movement and migration, sorrow and invisibility, and the resulting complicated notions of home.
Flare, Corona by Jeannine Hall Gailey
BOA Editions, May 2023
Against a constellation of solar weather events and an evolving pandemic, Jeannine Hall Gailey’s Flare, Corona paints a self-portrait of the ways that we prevail and persevere through health adversities while facing an uncertain future.
Ephemera by Sierra DeMulder
Button Poetry, June 2023
If every experience lasted forever there would be nothing to immortalize in writing. In Sierra DeMulder’s melancholic yet hopeful poetry collection, Ephemera, she writes with the wisdom of someone who has learned to love and lose.
Susto by Tommy Archuleta
Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State, March 2023
Susto is part unearthed family album, unlocked diary, ode to motherhood, manual on preparing for a happy death, and primer on the art of curanderismo, a traditional Mexican American holistic healing system.
The Collected Poems of Anselm Hollo by Anselm Hollo, edited by John Bloomberg-Rissman and Yasmina Ghiasi
Coffee House Press, August 2023
Over five decades of Anselm Hollo’s work in one elegant volume. Full of his singular humor, charm, and wisdom, this collection reminds us that poetry is not just an art, but a way of life.
Deal: New and Selected Poems by Randall Mann
Copper Canyon Press, May 2023
Deal: New and Selected Poems harnesses five previous volumes and includes expansive new works rooted in an age of Wi-Fi. His newest poems move us word by word until we arrive at a stark reality.
You Look Like Hell by Schuyler Peck
Game Over Books, June 2023
You Look Like Hell is an arson-charred, sultry-eyed, bump-in-the-night book of poems that provides room to revel in your villain curiosity.
Shrines by Sagaree Jain
Game Over Books, June 2023
This book is full of shrines. Fiery, devotional, and sparking with wit, these poems journey through love in all its forms.
Fire Index by Bethany Breitland
Green Writers Press, April 2023
Fire Index measures the interior life of a survivor against the world she creates through her own fractured life and religion. Using hybrid/persona fragments, Breitland confronts the trauma of her brother’s death and childhood abuse.
Quick to Bolt by Mary Fister
Green Writers Press, April 2023
Quick to Bolt celebrates the sense of mystery, wonder, and comfort that is integral to the natural world and captures those moments when the beauty in nature arrests us, and we must look or listen closely.
Odes to the Ordinary by Emily Benson-Scott
Green Writers Press, April 2023
Brimming with sensual language and densely layered imagery, these poems remind us to have gratitude for the beauty that infuses even the most seemingly insignificant objects or unpleasant circumstances—from bad breakups to bad weather.
Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond edited by Ostap Kin, translated by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin
Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature, May 2023
This collection brings together, for the first time, the responses to the tragic events at Babyn Yar in September 1941 by Ukrainian poets, written from 1941 to 2018 and presented here in the original and in English translation by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin.
The Voices of Babyn Yar by Marianna Kiyanovska, translated by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky
Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature, August 2022,
With this collection of stirring poems, Marianna Kiyanovska—an award-winning Ukrainian poet—honors the victims of the Holocaust as she writes their stories of horror, death, and survival by projecting their own imagined voices, presented here in the original and in masterful translation by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky.
Because You Were Mine by Brionne Janae
Haymarket Books, July 2023
Survivors, queer folks, and readers of poetry will find recognition and solace in Brionne Janae’s stunning new collection. These hard-wrought poems honor survivorship, queer love, parent wounds, trauma, and the complexities of familial blood.
Imago by Brian Swann
Johns Hopkins University Press, March 2023
In language dense and rich, this vital collection traverses realms both rural and urban, foreign and domestic. Tracing the vagaries of the self, it transmutes biography from that of an English youth to the trials of aging in the United States.
human/nature poems by Tracie Morris
Litmus Press, May 2023
“Tracie Morris’s human/nature poems calls us to deep and spacious attention for everyday rituals of wonder – our ‘small seam of certainty’ in the midst of gray breath and human ceremony.” —Ching-In Chen
Bullet Points: A Lyric by Jennifer A Sutherland
River River Books, June 2023
A single book-length prose poem/lyric essay, Bullet Points traces a trial lawyer’s experiences of an American courthouse shooting, its aftermath, and its echoes in law, history, and capitalism.
I, Boombox by Robert Glück
Roof Books, April 2023
“I, Boombox is fashioned from my misreadings. In that sense, it’s an autobiography in which I dream on the page.”
This is a sexy poem of bellicose minimalism with a sly sense of prosody.
Excursive by Elizabeth Robinson
Roof Books, April 2023
The poems in Excursive are practical essays in the manner of Francis Bacon or Montaigne and in the spirit of Robert Duncan what goes on daily in the poet’s world of archetypes.
EtC by Laura Mullen
Solid Objects, November 2023
“Laura Mullen is not only one of the best decoders of ideological traps that I know of but also a master creator of liminal subjectivities that are already imagining alternate futures.” —Rodrigo Toscano
The Burning Key: New & Selected Poems (1973–2023) by Beatrix Gates
Thera Books, August 2023
“Like witnessing a holy physics, this collection grabs our greatest potentials of mind, soul, and revolutionary praxis. A deft hand takes us on a brilliant journey of humanization through the rare power to synthesize a multiplicity of threaded subjects. Gates’s talent for motion through convergence makes all phenomena music. You will exit this collection transformed.” –Tongo Eisen-Martin
I Do Everything I'm Told by Megan Fernandes
Tin House Books, June 2023
“Fernandes’s poems are loving and messy but always precise, her insights the kind that make you reevaluate your entire life. I Do Everything I’m Told is a perfect entry point to Fernandes’s captivating and irreverent style” ― Vulture
Coriolis by A. D. Lauren-Abunasser
The University of Arkansas Press, November 2023
Winner of the 2023 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. “This is one of the most memorable, immaculate, and singular poetry debuts I’ve ever read.” — George Abraham
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banana [ ] by Paul Hlava Ceballos
University of Pittsburgh Press, September 2022
Winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, banana [ ] “seeks to illuminate dark chapters of our interconnected histories” —Yes Magazine
Some of the Things I’ve Seen by Sara Berkeley
Wake Forest University Press, March 2023
“Berkeley’s bravery is magnificent, her palliative courage simply astonishing.” —Thomas McCarthy, Dublin Review of Books
The Orchestra of Wind Chimes by Geoffrey Jacques
Wayne State University Press, March 2023
Thought-provoking poems that challenge preconceptions of form and style while focusing on themes of everyday experience, class, politics, literature, and more.
The Second Stop Is Jupiter by upfromsumdirt
Wayne State University Press, September 2023
This collection is a deep engagement with the cultural narrative, populated with Black hero figures who will fuel the imagination. upfromsumdirt invites us to ask, what if, with characters and poetic motifs rooted in existing narratives of Black life and fable.
What to Count by Alise Alousi
Wayne State University Press, August 2023
With heart and insight, Alise Alousi’s poems speak to coming of age as an Iraqi American during the Gulf War; the joy and complexity of motherhood and daughterhood; and what it means to live a creative life.