Our 2020 partners, sponsors, and advertisers present some of their new poetry titles for your at-home reading or teaching.
Books for Spring–Summer 2020
Dear Girl by Aija Mayrock
Andrews McMeel Publishing, April 2020
From activist and spoken-word performer Aija Mayrock, comes her debut poetry collection that takes readers on an empowering, lyrical journey through being a woman in today's society, exploring issues like suicide, sexual assault, and self-image.
Plunder by Dorsey Craft
Bauhan Publishing, April 2020
"Dorsey Craft’s thrilling book of poems, Plunder—featuring, Pirate Anne Bonny—serves up scintillant treasures from the bottomless trunk of her imagination, wit, and verve." —Deb Gorlin, judge, 2019 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize
Pricks in the Tapestry by Jameson Fitzpatrick
Birds, LLC, June 2020
A bildungsroman in poems, Pricks in the Tapestry follows Fitzpatrick's attempts to locate the granular in the universal—the personal in the public—and to understand the self as a subject constellated among many.
Savage Pageant by Jessica Q. Stark
Birds, LLC, March 2020
Savage Pageant recounts the history of Jungleland, which housed Hollywood's show animals until 1969, and explores US American spectacle with a hybrid, documentary poetics, revealing how we narrate and control geographical space and accumulative histories.
Can You Smell the Rain? by Patricia Cleary Miller
BkMk Press, April 2020
Mia Leonin writes that “Miller’s rapturous attention to detail and her deft sense of story conjure a poetic genealogy, swirling and swooning with ancestors, lovers, and earthly delights.”
geode by Susan Barba
Black Sparrow Press, April 2020
Award-winning poet’s much-anticipated second collection is a searching, timely ode to the earth. “geode is rich with shining interiors and tactile relationships, delicate human to delicate earth,” Naomi Shihab Nye.
Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems by Wanda Coleman
Black Sparrow Press, April 2020
Terrance Hayes has selected more than 130 poems, spanning four decades, for this powerful gathering of groundbreaking poet Wanda Coleman’s work. “Words to crack you open and heal you where it counts,” Mary Karr.
Hardcover, $25.95, E-Book, $11.83
Year of the Dog by Deborah Paredez
BOA Editions, Ltd., April 2020
A Latina feminist chronicle of the Vietnam War era in poems and fragmented images that highlight the voices of women, immigrants, and others whose stories have been relegated to the margins of history.
Scraping Away by Fred Shaw
CavanKerry Press, April 2020
In his full-length debut, Shaw’s poems consider the costs (beyond dollars) of feeding a starving public that finds service workers faceless and replaceable, and celebrate and humanize millions doing labor that’s often forgotten or misunderstood.
Magnifier by Brandon Krieg
The Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University, December 2019
Brandon Krieg’s Magnifier trains its gaze on the deep dependencies we are urged daily to hide from ourselves and interrogates the ways we insulate ourselves from the environmental and social degradations we perpetrate.
Little Hill by Alli Warren
City Lights Books, April 2020
Award-winning poet explores new formal terrain: seven long poems against the violence of the present political moment.
"Little Hill is gift more than condemnation, though as the latter it's unsparing. Still, it's a gift."––Alice Notley
Paperback, $15.95
Thresholes by Lara Mimosa Montes
Coffee House Press, May 2020
Thresholes is both a doorway and an absence, a road map and a remembering. In elegiac and fervent language, Lara Mimosa Montes writes across the thresholds of fracture, trauma, violence, and identity.
The Malevolent Volume by Justin Phillip Reed
Coffee House Press, April 2020
In The Malevolent Volume, National Book Award winner Justin Phillip Reed explores the myths and transformations of Black being, on a continuum between the monstrous and the sublime, summoning a retaliatory, counterviolent Black spirit to revolt.
Indigo by Ellen Bass
Copper Canyon Press, April 2020
"Extraordinary… Indigo is in dialogue with the meat of mortal existence."—The Adroit Journal
Ellen Bass's newest collection merges elegy and praise poem in a rich and sensual exploration of life’s complexities.
Obit by Victoria Chang
Copper Canyon Press, April 2020
Victoria Chang's Obit offers obituaries for all that is lost—“language,” “the future,” “Mother’s blue dress”—in the wake of a mother's death. A powerful look at grief, and a testament for the living.
Deluge by Leila Chatti
Copper Canyon Press, April 2020
Deluge depicts Chatti's journey from diagnosis to surgery and remission through the lens of a young Arab-American woman suffering a taboo female affliction. A powerful chronicle of illness, womanhood, and faith.
Shrapnel Maps by Philip Metres
Copper Canyon Press, April 2020
At once activist and elegiac, Philip Metres’s Shrapnel Maps pairs poetry with maps, vintage postcards, travelogues, and first-person testimonies in order to write into the wounds of the Israel/Palestine conflict.
The Voice in the Headphones by David Grubbs
Duke University Press, April 2020
This book-length prose poem draws on decades of recording experience, taking readers into the recording studio to tell the story of an unnamed musician who struggles to complete a film soundtrack in a day-long marathon recording session.
Dub: Finding Ceremony by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Duke University Press, February 2020
The concluding volume in a poetic triptych, Dub: Finding Ceremony takes inspiration from theorist Sylvia Wynter, dub poetry, and ocean life to offer a catalog of possible methods for remembering, healing, listening, and living otherwise.
The Essential T.S. Eliot by T.S. Eliot
Ecco, April 2020
A selection of the most significant and enduring poems from one of the twentieth century’s major writers, chosen and introduced by Vijay Seshadri.
Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry by John Murillo
Four Way Books, March 2020
John Murillo’s second book is a reflective look at the legacy of institutional, accepted violence against Blacks and Latinos and the personal and societal wreckage wrought by long histories of subjugation.
Dwellers in the House of the Lord by Wesley McNair
David R. Godine, Publisher, April 2020
In a new book-length narrative poem, Wesley McNair explores the potential for love and reconciliation in an era when political strife ensnarls our country. “McNair is a kind of Chekhov of American poetry,” Ted Kooser
Catrachos by Roy G. Guzmán
Graywolf Press, May 2020
Part immigration narrative, part elegy, and part queer coming-of-age story, Catrachos finds its own religion in pop singers, the X-Men, and the “Queerodactyl,” a dinosaur sashaying in the shadow of an oncoming comet, insistent on surviving extinction.
Synthesizing Gravity by Kay Ryan
Grove Atlantic, April 2020
“Reading Ryan’s writing will charge and recharge the mind. This is the first collection of nonfiction from Ryan, a national treasure… [and] a wonderful entry point to her work.”—San Francisco Chronicle
My Name is Immigrant by Wang Ping
Hanging Loose Press, April 2020
"Her broad intelligence, delightful political wit and poetic vision expands understanding of the American nation." -- Gary Snyder.
"Renders a moving argument about language and expression and about the freedom poetry sometimes claims." -- Tracy K. Smith.
The Death of Sitting Bear by N. Scott Momaday
Harper Books, March 2020
Pulitzer Prize winner N. Scott Momaday returns with a radiant collection of more than 200 new and selected poems celebrating Native American oral tradition and his spiritual relationship to the sacred Southwest landscape.
Cast Away by Naomi Shihab Nye
HarperCollins Children's Books, February 2020
Young People’s Poet Laureate Naomi Shihab Nye shines a spotlight on the things we cast away, from plastic water bottles to those less fortunate, in this moving, funny, and provocative poetry collection for all ages.
Hardcover, $16.99
Falling Up by Shel Silverstein
HarperCollins Children's Books, 1996
From New York Times bestselling author Shel Silverstein, the creator of the classics Where the Sidewalk Ends, A Light in the Attic, and Every Thing On It, comes a wondrous book of poems and drawings.
The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext edited by Felicia Rose Chavez, José Olivarez, Willie Perdomo
Haymarket Books, April 2020
The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext celebrates the embodied narratives of Latinidad. Poets speak from an array of nationalities, genders, sexualities, races, and writing styles, staking a claim to our cultural and civic space.
Too Much Midnight by Krista Franklin
Haymarket Books, April 2020
Krista Franklin draws on Pan African histories, Black Surrealism, Afrofuturism, pop culture, art history, and the historical and present-day violence inflicted upon Black people, forging imaginative spaces for radical possibilities and visions of liberation.
Soul Sister Revue: a Poetry Compilation edited by Cynthia Manick
Jamii Publishing, November 2019
In this striking anthology 40 poets from the Soul Sister Revue reading series, including Hanif Abdurraqib and Patricia Smith, commemorate culture, Motown, and community while responding to the question What does Soul mean to you?
Deep Gossip by Sidney Wade
Johns Hopkins University Press, April 2020
A subversive book by a lyric poet at the height of her craft. Playing with and challenging form in all directions, the 27 new and 96 selected poems in Deep Gossip bristle with a sly wit.
Riven by Catherine Owen
MisFit (an imprint of ECW Books), April 2020
A dynamic collection of emotional and ecological post-elegies, Catherine Owen’s Riven draws on the environs of the Fraser River, the solace for the loss of a spouse, and the unfolding, healing time of grief.
Repetition Nineteen by Mónica de la Torre
Nightboat Books, April 2020
Based on slippages between languages and irreverent approaches to translation, the poems in Repetition Nineteen riff on creative misunderstanding in response to the prevailing political discourse.
Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry: Poems & Artifacts by Nikky Finney
Northwestern University Press, April 2020
This new minglement of poems, observations, fictions, and treasured artifacts is lyrical daughter Nikky Finney’s linea nigra, her sweet black line of birth—a curious, private history and a journalism of the heart.
Scatterplot by David Koehn
Omnidawn, March 2020
Scatterplot offers Koehn’s candor and wry wisdom regarding the daily onslaught of family intimacies, the natural world’s crises, the uncivil civilization we all inhabit. Readers will appreciate his roving mind, recognizing themselves in his words.
In the Lateness of the World by Carolyn Forché
Penguin Press, March 2020
Carolyn Forché’s first new collection in seventeen years, In the Lateness of the World is a visionary collection of uncanny grace and moral force from one of our country's most celebrated poets.
The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century by John Burnside
Princeton University Press, January 2020
A revelatory and deeply personal history of twentieth-century poetry by prize-winning poet and memoirist John Burnside.
“Magisterial.”—Michael Hulse, coeditor of The 20th Century in Poetry
White Blood: a Lyric of Virginia by Kiki Petrosino
Sarabande Books, May 2020
In her fourth full-length book, Kiki Petrosino turns her gaze to Virginia, where she digs into her genealogical and intellectual roots, while contemplating the knotty legacies of slavery and discrimination in the Upper South.
Listener by Samuel Amadon
Solid Objects, June 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
Paper Bells by Phan Nhiên Hạo (translated by Hai-Dang Phan)
The Song Cave, April 2020
Paper Bells is a striking, new collection by poet Phan Nhiên Hạo, depicting his American life as a Vietnamese refugee and exiled poet. Translated by poet Hai-Dang Phan, these poems are sorrowful, humorous, and unforgettable.
Good Boys by Megan Fernandes
Tin House, February 2020
In an era of rising nationalism and geopolitical instability, Megan Fernandes’s Good Boys offers a complex portrait of messy feminist rage, negotiations with race and travel, and existential dread in the Anthropocene.
Soviet Texts by Dmitri Prigov, translated from Russian by Simon Schuchat with Ainsley Morse
Ugly Duckling Presse, February 2020
Soviet Texts, the first representative selected volume of Prigov's poetry and experimental prose to appear in English,includes poetic sequences that expose literature, history, and culture to the stark light of a post-modern Gogolian laughter.
The Accidental by Gina Franco
University of Arkansas Press, October 2019
Winner, 2019 CantoMundo Poetry Prize.
“Once again, Gina Franco delivers a stunning collection. Elegant, yet bracing, these poems cast an eye toward the ineffable bright border of the eternal.”—Luis Alberto Urrea
Bring Now the Angels by Dilruba Ahmed
University of Pittsburgh Press, April 2020
Ahmed’s second collection explores loss. Her poems weave mourning with the erratic process of healing. By turns elegiac, biting, and tender, Bring Now the Angels conveys a movement toward redemption, despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
Seeing the Body by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
W. W. Norton & Company, June 2020
Poems and photographs collide in this intimate and moving collection, challenging the invisible, indefinable ways mourning takes up residence in a body, both before and after life-altering loss.
Still Life by Ciaran Carson
Wake Forest University Press, February 2020
In his final collection, Carson guides us through centuries of art, into the chemo ward, into the allusive quicksilver of his mind. Michael Longley writes: “This is indeed writing for dear life… poetry of genius.”
Words Like Thunder: New and Used Anishinaabe Prayers by Lois Beardslee
Wayne State University Press, April 2020
Beardslee tackles contemporary topics like climate change and socioeconomic equality with a grace and readability that empowers readers and celebrates the strengths of today’s indigenous peoples. She transforms the mundane into the sacred.