Our partners, sponsors, and advertisers present some of their fall-winter 2019 poetry titles.
Featured Fall Books for 2019
I Offer My Heart as a Target/Ofrezco Mi Corazón Como Una Diana by Johanny Vázquez Paz
Akashic Books, December 2019
Introducing the winner of the Paz Prize for Poetry given by the National Poetry Series, featuring an introduction by Rigoberto González, and presented in both Spanish and English.
A Jazz Funeral for Uncle Tom by Harmony Holiday
Birds, LLC, July 2019
A Jazz Funeral for Uncle Tom is exactly what it announces it is: a book as ritual event wherein a feminine voice leads her band of improvisers in a procession of joyous interrogation and forgiveness.
while they sleep (under the bed is another country) by Raquel Salas Rivera
Birds, LLC, June 2019
Salas Rivera refuses to sweep up the shards of Hurricane María’s aftermath. Written in dialogic fragments and prose poems reflecting on the lasting impact of colonial trauma, this book is a tool for survival.
Latter Days of Eve by Beverly Burch
BkMk Press, November 2019
Burch imagines Eve's life after Eden, in a world both ancient and contemporary, dystopian and redeemed. Winner of the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, selected by Patricia Spears Jones.
On the Shores of Welcome Home by Bruce Weigl
BOA Editions, Ltd., October 2019
With an eye for mindfulness, Bruce Weigl's Isabella Gardner Award-winning poetry collection reveals the long scars left by the Vietnam War and the graceful sense of departure one encounters in life's second act.
Safe Houses I Have Known by Steve Healey
Coffee House Press, September 2019
A father revealed as a spy, a child unmoored from normalcy—in Safe Houses I Have Known, poems ripple with the secrets that we keep from ourselves and each other.
The Tradition by Jericho Brown
Copper Canyon Press, April 2019
The Tradition details the normalization of evil at the intersection of the past and the personal—poems of fatherhood, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma by one of today’s preeminent poets.
Lima :: Limón by Natalie Scenters-Zapico
Copper Canyon Press, May 2019
Scenters-Zapico sets her unflinching gaze on the liminal spaces between cultures, countries, and gender norms, naming the many faces of violence while lifting up the resilience required to survive it.
Father's Day by Matthew Zapruder
Copper Canyon Press, September 2019
Zapruder's newest poems weave a deeply generous sense of humor with love and moral urgency, exploring what it means to be a good father, partner, and citizen in uncertain times.
Summer Snow by Robert Hass
Ecco, January 2020
In Summer Snow, his first collection of poems since 2010, Robert Hass focuses on subjects including the poignancy of loss, the serene and resonant beauty of nature, and the mutability of desire.
Nightshade by Andrea Cohen
Four Way Books, September 2019
In Nightshade, Andrea Cohen assembles gems of poems into a formidable necklace of wit, wisdom, and profound truths.
In an Invisible Glass Case Which Is Also a Frame by Julia Guez
Four Way Books, September 2019
Poems that move deftly between the personal and the political in contemporary America.
Erou by Maya Phillips
Four Way Books, September 2019
An odyssey for the 21st century in poems that bind family and myth.
I Will Destroy You by Nick Flynn
Graywolf Press, September 2019
The newest collection from Nick Flynn delves into the deepest, most defeating parts of the self. It is an honest accounting of all that love must transcend and what we must risk for its truth.
Love and I by Fanny Howe
Graywolf Press, October 2019
Set in transit even as they investigate the transitory, the cinematic poems in Love and I move like a handheld camera through the eternal, the minds of passengers, and landscapes of Ireland and America.
Heed the Hollow by Malcolm Tariq
Graywolf Press, November 2019
The winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize explores the concept of “the bottom” across blackness, sexuality, and the American South. The voices in these poems reclaim their histories from a language that evolved to exclude them.
Elements of Fiction by Walter Mosley
Grove Atlantic, September 2019
Part writing guide, part study of the mechanics of the genre, Elements of Fiction is an eloquent treatise on the craft of fiction. Award-winning author Walter Mosley’s monograph will intrigue and encourage writers and readers alike.
1919 by Eve L. Ewing
Haymarket Books, June 2019
O Magazine Best Books by Women of Summer 2019
Chicago Tribune 25 hot books of summer 2019
Reflections on race, class, violence, segregation, and the hidden histories that shape our divided urban landscapes.
Soul Sister Revue 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?
Ballyhoo by Hastings Hensel
Johns Hopkins University Press, April 2019
A poetry collection that grapples with the tragicomic nature of language, memory, love, work, and the performative self.
Songs for a Dead Rooster by Yuri Andrukhovych, translated by Vitaly Chernetsky & Ostap Kin
Lost Horse Press, September 2018
Yuri Andrukhovych emerged as a prominent voice in Ukrainian literature with the publication of his first book of poems in 1985. This book traces the evolution of Andrukhovych's poetics from the 1980s onward.
Smokes by Yuri Izdryk, translated by Roman Ivashkiv & Erín Moure
Lost Horse Press, April 2019
Smokes explodes with existential contemplations regarding love, identity, nature, society, and the divine. These poems teem with energy.
Pray to the Empty Wells by Iryna Shuvalova, translated by Olena Jennings & Iryna Shuvalova
Lost Horse Press, September 2019
Though the wells are empty, Shuvalova’s language overflows with rich images, corporeality, and a metaphoric sensibility that reaches across place and time and reverberates as a prayer against ancient stone.
A Field of Foundlings: Selected Poems of Iryna Starovoyt, translated by Grace Mahoney
Lost Horse Press, September 2017
Drawing on the paradoxes of mythology, technology, and tradition, Starovoyt brings the traces of undesirable histories and the minefields of memory into unexpected constellations that interrogate assertions of knowledge and meaning-making in our world today.
Bodega by Su Hwang
Milkweed Editions, October 2019
An incisive poetic debut that gives shape to anguish as much as it cherishes human life, Bodega offers a singular perspective on immigration, race, identity, and domesticity through the lens of a coming-of-age narrative.
Owl of Minerva by Eric Pankey
Milkweed Editions, October 2019
Owl of Minerva turns astonishingly precise attention to the physical world, scouring it for evidence of the spiritual as Pankey travels through Appalachia, New England, Venice, Spain, the Caribbean, and the American Midwest.
Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers by Jake Skeets
Milkweed Editions, September 2019
Called "a new, essential voice in poetry" by Tommy Orange, Skeets is a sculptural poet of reverence and reclamation. This National Poetry Series-winning collection examines the landscape of the west, alcoholism, masculinity, and desire.
The Norton Chaucer edited by David Lawton
Norton, May 2019
Both an enhanced digital edition and a handsome print volume, The Norton Chaucer provides the complete poetry and prose, meticulously glossed and annotated.
Splinters Are Children of Wood by Leia Penina Wilson
Notre Dame University Press, September 2019
Leia Penina Wilson has carved an epic, avant-garde, feminist spell. She calls forth the wildness of language to dispel the violence against––and to evoke the power of––'gurls' and women." —Craig Santos Perez
Civil Bound by Myung Mi Kim
Omnidawn, October 2019
Myung Mi Kim investigates ecological-corporal aggressions inherent in the will of capital, the militant machinery of colonization, and the logics of supremacy, while examining how suffering is inflicted, perpetuated, nullified and subsumed by “civilization.”
Forage by Rose McLarney
Penguin Books, September 2019
A poet acclaimed for "uncompromising, honest poems that sound like no one else" (The Rumpus) offers considerations of the natural world and humans' place within it in ecopoetry of both ambitious reach and elegant refinement.
Hebrew Melodies by Heinrich Heine
Penn State University Press, October 2019
Called “a witty American retelling, in word and in image, of Heinrich Heine’s inside-out, topsy-turvy satiric art” by Cynthia Ozick, this volume presents a new translation of the third cycle of poems in Heine’s late masterwork, Romanzero.
Paul Verlaine: A Bilingual Selection of His Verse by Paul Verlaine
Penn State University Press, November 2019
Crowned “Prince of Poets” in his later years, Paul Verlaine stands out among the iconoclastic founders of French modernist verse. This diglot anthology offers the most comprehensive selection of Verlaine’s poetry available in English translation.
Your New Feeling Is the Artifact of a Bygone Era by Chad Bennett
Sarabande Books, January 2020
Selected by Ocean Vuong as the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, Chad Bennett’s debut offers a deeply personal account of loss and the dismantling of America’s history of queerness.
Space Struck by Paige Lewis
Sarabande Books, October 2019
This astonishing, self-assured debut leads us on an exploration to the stars and back, begging us to reconsider our boundaries of self, time, space, and knowledge. The poems of Space Struck pulse like starlight.
American Faith by Maya C. Popa
Sarabande Books, November 2019
In gorgeous, scrutinizing, and ever-hopeful poetry, Romanian-American poet Maya C. Popa offers a hymnic study of American violence.
Leading with a Naked Body: Poems in Conversation & a Conversation by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon & Leela Chantrelle
Slapering Hol Press, March 2019
Leading with a Naked Body, an artisanal chapbook, is the sixth in Slapering Hol Press' Conversation Series wherein master poets mentor emerging poets and exchange interviews on craft.
A Fortune for Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib
Tin House, September 2019
Poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about rebuilding oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew.
Syncope by Asiya Wadud
Ugly Duckling Presse, September 2019
Through a series of prayers, invocations, and hymns, Syncope eulogizes those who have perished making Central Mediterranean crossings as well as collects first-hand accounts of those who have survived these perilous journeys.
Refugia: Poems by Kyce Bello
University of Nevada Press, September 2019
Winner of the Test Site Poetry Series Prize, this stunning debut ponders what it means to inhabit a particular place at a time of enormous disruption. Vivid poems touch upon history, inheritance, drought, and nature.
The Tenant of Fire by Ryan Black
University of Pittsburgh Press, September 2019
The 2018 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize winner is about the history of Queens. Black's poems explore how and why the plurality of a place like Queens is viewed as a threat to national security.
Ringer by Rebecca Lehmann
University of Pittsburgh Press, September 2019
Winner of the 2018 Donald Hall Prize, Ringer approaches womanhood from two directions: an examination of how women’s identities are tied to domestic spaces, and a consideration of physical, sexual, and political violence against women.
The Book of Daniel by Aaron Smith
University of Pittsburgh Press, October 2019
Part pop-thriller, part queer rage, and part mourning, the poems in Smith's fourth collection depict not only the complications of representation in the age of social media but a critique of identity.
The Grief of a Happy Life by Christopher Howell
University of Washington, October 2019
Howell’s twelfth collection of poems, The Grief of a Happy Life, explores the interplay between memory and imagination, celebrating the ways that happiness and grief inform one another and give our lives fullness and vitality.
The Insistence of Harm by Fernando Valverde, translated by Allen Josephs & Laura Juliet Wood
University Press of Florida, October 2019
Born in Granada, Spain, in 1980, Fernando Valverde is widely considered one of the top young poets writing in Spanish today. This bilingual edition introduces English-language readers to some of his latest, most exciting work.
From There to Here: Selected Poems and Translations by Ciaran Carson
Wake Forest University Press, October 2019
From the explosive long lines of his earliest poems to the concentrated stanzas and intellectual intensities of his latest work, Ciaran Carson’s shape-changing genius shines across the volumes included in this extraordinary new selection.
come see about me, marvin by brian g. gilmore
Wayne State University Press, September 2019
This collection is gilmore’s answer to life’s perplexing issues, with Marvin Gaye as the perfect vehicle to explore these ideals. Readers of poetry and Motown lovers will embrace this love letter to a local legend.
Teacher/Pizza Guy by Jeff Kass
Wayne State University Press, August 2019
This unapologetically political collection of autobiographical poems explores the emotional and physical labor necessary to work nights as a pizza delivery driver and days as a high school English teacher.
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