Our 2022 partners, sponsors, and advertisers present some of their new titles in celebration of National Poetry Month! Join us in reading poetry this April and beyond.
A Poetry Reading List for National Poetry Month 2022
Beast at Every Threshold by Natalie Wee
Arsenal Pulp Press, March 2022
Wee's poems explore thresholds of queerness, immigration, nationhood, and reinvention of the self through myth. Memories turn malleable, pop culture provides a backdrop to glittery queer love, and folklore becomes a radical tool of survival.
Swollening by Jason Purcell
Arsenal Pulp Press, April 2022
A tender debut poetry collection that examines the queer, sick body as a reaction to an ill world and asks it how to move on toward hope.
Broken Halves of a Milky Sun by Aaiún Nin
Astra Publishing House, February 2022
In their breathtaking international debut, Nin speaks to the universal vulnerability of existence. A captivating blend of evocative prose and intimate testimony that explores the effects of racism, war and colonialism, queer love and desire.
Dreaming of You by Melissa Lozada-Oliva
Astra Publishing House, October 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.
Love as of Late by Adrienne Wartts
Barnes & Noble Publishing, October 2021
Love As of Late is a deeply evocative collection of poems that will undoubtedly connect those who have lost a loved one to moments in which they have experienced hope, love, lament, and an expectation for rare magical moments.
Vinegar Hill by Colm Tóibín
Beacon Press, April 2022
From the highly acclaimed author of Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín’s first poetry collection explores a wide range of subjects—politics, queer love, reflections on literary and artistic greats, living through COVID, memory, and facing mortality.
Green: Sighs of Our Ailing Planet by Niyi Osundare
Black Widow Press, February 2022
From one of Africa’s most-esteemed voices, Green: Sighs of Our Ailing Planet is a fiery call-to-action, a vital interface between the ecological and the cosmic that confronts, implores, and champions for our endangered world.
The Necessity of Wildfire by Caitlin Scarano
Blair, April 2022
Winner of the Wren Poetry Prize selected by Ada Limón, Caitlin Scarano’s second poetry collection The Necessity of Wildfire wrestles with family violence, escaping home, unraveling relationships, and the complexity of sexuality.
Useful Junk by Erika Meitner
BOA Editions, Ltd., April 2022
Useful Junk explores memory, passion, and the ways the body sees and is seen. Meitner reminds us that we are made real and beautiful by embodied experiences, and our desire is what keeps us alive.
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.
You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson
Button Poetry, November 2021
You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson is a queer, political, and feminist collection guided by self-reflection. Gibson’s trademark honesty and vulnerability are on full display, inviting readers to be just as they are.
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.
BloodFresh by Ebony Stewart
Button Poetry, February 2022
BloodFresh by Ebony Stewart finds brilliant and lucid ways of discussing heavy topics and pairs them with beautiful moments of self-discovery. This book is about survival, celebration, and everything in between.
NOT A LOT OF REASONS TO SING, BUT ENOUGH by Kyle "Guante" Tran Myhre
Button Poetry, March 2022
Kyle Tran Myhre’s NOT A LOT OF REASONS TO SING, BUT ENOUGH, follows two wandering poets, village to village, across a prison colony moon full of exiled rebels, robots, and storytellers.
Anthropocene Lullaby by K. A. Hays
Carnegie Mellon University Press, February 2022
The poems of Anthropocene Lullaby move from the micro to the macro, from dragonflies to galaxies, from the intersecting forces of climate change, capitalism, and digital technologies to intersecting anxieties of selfhood and motherhood.
Mausoleum of Flowers by Daniel B. Summerhill
CavanKerry Press, April 2022
Mausoleum of Flowers grabs fate by the throat and confronts it, placing the focus on what it means to live despite your friends dying beside you. Summerhill’s poems meld spirituality, rebellion, and Black tradition.
Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear by Mosab Abu Toha
City Lights Books, April 2022
In this poetry debut, Mosab Abu Toha bears witness to a grinding cycle of destruction and assault in poems inspired by a profound humanity.
Daughters of Harriet by Cynthia Parker-Ohene
Center for Literary Publishing, March 2022
Drawing inspiration from the life of Harriet Tubman, Cynthia Parker-Ohene’s poetic narratives follow a historical arc of consciousness of Black women, giving voice to the unspeakable, the unreachable, the multiple Black selves waiting to become.
Paperback $16.95 & e-Book $13.95
Earth Room by Rachel Mannheimer
Changes Press, April 2022
Selected by Louise Glück as winner of the inaugural Bergman Prize, Rachel Mannheimer’s debut, Earth Room, is a dazzling book-length narrative poem that explores with tenderness how art and love intersect to make one’s life.
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.
Iguana Iguana by Caylin Capra-Thomas
Deep Vellum, June 2022
Alive to the beauty and anxiety of new worlds and people, debut poetry collection Iguana Iguana imagines a tough and tender soundtrack for tumbleweeds in search of roots.
A Boy in the City by S. Yarberry
Deep Vellum, May 2022
A Boy in the City is a distinct work of joy and liberation that reckons with the language of gender and desire, weaving a sexy, glitzy journey through the city.
Canopy by Linda Gregerson
Ecco, March 2022
A long-awaited yet startlingly urgent new collection from Linda Gregerson—a fierce, big-hearted eye on our last, tumultuous decade, and our fragile environment.
Quiet Night Think: Poems & Essays by Gillian Sze
ECW Press, April 2022
An intimate anatomization of Gillian Sze's particular entanglement with languages and cultures. Quiet Night Think explores the early shaping of a writer, cultural and language gaps, identity, the creative process, and motherhood.
The Invisible World Is in Decline Book IX by Bruce Whiteman
ECW Press, April 2022
The stunning conclusion to a 40-year poetic project — full of startling poetic music and imagery that addresses the life of the heart, love as well as death, and philosophy as well as emotion.
Why the Assembly Disbanded by Roberto Tejada
Fordham University Press, February 2022
"Reflecting on the state of affairs between the U.S. and Latin America, Tejada writes on white supremacy, immigration, intersectional identity, and community." —Publishers Weekly
The World That the Shooter Left Us by Cyrus Cassells
Four Way Books, February 2022
In the aftermath of the Stand Your Ground killing of his close friend’s father, poet Cassells explores, in his most fearless book to date, the brutality, bigotry, and betrayal at the heart of current America.
Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch: The Complete Motorcycle Betrayal Poems by Diane Wakoski, introduction by Elizabeth A. I. Powell
Godine/Black Sparrow Press, March 2022
The liberating power of anger has rarely felt so good and healing as in this expanded edition of a landmark in feminist poetry. “The voice of a woman who is not afraid of depths.”—Anaïs Nin
Heart First into this Ruin: The Complete American Sonnets by Wanda Coleman, introduction by Mahogany L. Browne
Godine/Black Sparrow Press, June 2022
The first complete collection of Wanda Coleman’s original and inventive sonnets: one hundred poems give voice to loving passions, social outrage, and hard-earned wisdom. “Terrifying and fearlessly inventive.” —The New York Times
Customs by Solmaz Sharif
Graywolf Press, March 2022
In Customs, Solmaz Sharif examines what it means to exist in the nowhere of the arrivals terminal, a continual series of checkpoints, officers, searches, and questionings that become a relentless experience of America.
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.
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.
Thresh & Hold by Marlanda Dekine
Hub City, March 2022
Marlanda Dekine’s poems travel across age and time, reimagine intergenerational traumas, explore queerness and gender rooted in their homeplace and their Gullah-Geechee heritage, remembering and remaking in order to deeply connect to a spiritual home.
Harbour Grids by Zane Koss
Invisible Publishing, April 2022
A long poem that radiates outward from New York Harbor into a visual and lyric meditation on ideas of community and the landscapes we take for granted.
Water / Music by Peter Filkins
Johns Hopkins University Press, April 2021
A diverse display of formal dexterity, narrative power, and lyrical resonance, Peter Filkins's latest collection of poems explores the fraught relationship between the natural world and the human.
My Sister’s Country by Alexis V. Jackson
Kore Press, January 2022
Jackson bends and breaks traditional forms and introduces the playlist poem while exploring the makings of Black girlhood and womanhood. She invites readers to consider the ways Black women make a country in one another.
The Heart of America by Edward Hirsch
Library of America, April 2022
In this landmark new book, Edward Hirsch offers a deeply personal reading of the American tradition in forty essential poems, ranging from Anne Bradstreet to Joy Harjo, exploring how they might uplift our diverse, divided nation
Standard American English by EL_S_TH H__ST_ON
Litmus Press, June 2022
“This heartbreaking, experimental cycle of surrealist poems is a helluva ride in the Kathy Acker tradition of Blood and Guts in High School... Houston indicts every individual’s displaced capacity for cruelty under the patina of hipness.” —Tracie Morris
Apricots of Donbas by Lyuba Yakimchuk, translated by Oksana Maksymchuk, Max Rosochinsky & Svetlana Lavochkina
Lost Horse Press, September 2021
Reflecting the complex emotional experiences of witnessing the disintegration of the poet’s surroundings, Yakimchuk’s poetry ranges from the urgency of erotic desire in a war-torn city to imitations of child-like babbling about the tools of military combat.
a Year & other poems by Jos Charles
Milkweed Editions, March 2022
From Pulitzer Prize finalist Jos Charles, an unforgettable and mesmerizing new collection about grief and intimacy. With her signature inventiveness, Charles invites us into her year, “Awaiting not clarity but the shadow of something clear.”
Madness by Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué
Nightboat Books, March 2022
Originating in the late twentieth century and projecting into a speculative future, Madness by Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué reveals the riches and precarity of a life in poetry for a queer Latinx immigrant.
We Are Not Wearing Helmets: Poems by Cheryl Boyce-Taylor
Northwestern University Press, February 2022
Radiant and incisive, this collection meets the challenges women of color face in the United States head-on. These political love poems confront the injustices of ageism, racism, isolation, and oppression with bravery and kindness.
Terra Incognita by Sara Henning
Ohio University Press, March 2022
Winner of the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. Following her mother’s battle with colon cancer and her own crisis of meaning, Sara Henning culminates this elegiac collection with her rediscovery of joy in life’s small moments.
Paperback $17.95 & e-Book $17.99
The Place One Is by Martha Ronk
Omnidawn, April 2022
The Place One Is speaks lyrically of place, language, self in the context of our climate crisis. The fragmentary forms of her poems express the frailty of our lives and our planet.
All the Flowers Kneeling by Paul Tran
Penguin Books, February 2022
“A stunning debut.” —Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet
From acclaimed poet Paul Tran, this astonishing collection is a profound meditation on physical, emotional, and psychological transformation in the aftermath of imperial violence and interpersonal abuse.
Plainchant by Eamon Grennan
Red Hen Press, June 2022
Grennan’s new collection shows again his powers of close, patient, plainspoken observation. These are poems that serve to sharpen our own habits of attention, renewing our sense of the often unnoticed worlds around us.
50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse by Karyna McGlynn
Sarabande Books, April 2022
This is a book of tragicomic gurlesque word-witchery inspired by the Kate Bush cosmos. Campily glamorous, darkly funny, obsessively ekphrastic, boozily baroque, psychedelically girly & musically ecstatic, this book dazzles as Karyna McGlynn's third full-length collection.
Duende by Quincy Troupe
Seven Stories, January 2022
Troupe is a generous and gregarious poet in this giant offering that includes many new poems, as well as a selection chosen from across his eleven previously published volumes.
Always Alwaysland by Stanley Moss
Seven Stories, June 2022
A new collection from the great American poet Stanley Moss, Always Alwaysland written in his 94th, 95th, and 96th years, is a book of songs; devotion, beautiful, painful, useful truths; some work songs; spirituals; grand opera; hymns; and chants to God and no God.
The Moon Over Edgar by Ian Felice
Sibling Rivalry Press, February 2022
From the pen that crafted the lyrics of The Felice Brothers’ multiple albums, these 60 linked sonnets invite readers into realms of the strange—fairy tales, prophecies, premonitions—with a powerful sense of beauty.
The Mothers by Dorianne Laux & Leila Chatti
Slapering Hol Press, March 2022
Being a mother, having a mother, good and neglectful mothers, mothers in poetic form and free verse—all are part of this enticing collection by Laux and Chatti, The Mothers, which includes an ending interview.
Star Lake by Arda Collins
The Song Cave, April 2022
Arda Collins’s second book of poems, Star Lake, is a deeply personal, unforgettable collection that explores the ways our notions of daily life touch the presence of the eternal.
The Path to Kindness by James Crews
Storey Publishing, April 2022
James Crews, editor of the best-selling How to Love the World, presents a new collection that explores the theme of kindness, featuring more than 100 uplifting and relatable poems by a diverse range of voices.
Breakpoint by Betsy Aoki
Tebot Bach, March 2022
Video game producer Betsy Aoki exquisitely combines technology and the Asian-American experience in poems that span coding functions to Persephone. Kimiko Hahn says of Breakpoint, “No one else could write these marvelous poems—enjoy!”
Trickster Academy by Jenny L. Davis
University of Arizona Press, 2022
Trickster Academy by Jenny L. Davis is a collection of poems that explore being Native in Academia, illuminating the shared experiences of Indians across many regions, and all of us who live amongst Tricksters.
Gut by J. Bailey Hutchinson
University of Arkansas Press, March 2022
Winner of the 2022 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, J. Bailey Hutchinson’s Gut is the dazzling debut of a born storyteller—bold southern sensibility, rapturous and addictive, crafting poems that are impossible to turn away from.
Natural History by José Watanabe
University of Georgia Press, April 2022
Poems about language, nature, and Asian migration across the Americas, this dual-language edition of Natural History by the Peruvian José Watanabe is finally available in both Spanish and English for the first time.
Marrow by darlene anita scott
University of Kentucky Press, March 2022
“Marrow gives flesh and bone to the ghosts of Jones' People and puts the real and imagined story in this history.” —Adrienne Christian, author of Worn and A Proper Lover
Interior Femme by Stephanie Berger
University of Nevada Press, January 2022
Winner of the 2020 Betsy Joiner Flanagan Poetry Prize, Interior Femme cracks the earth open and exposes the “woman inside,” offering heartbreak and empowerment through poetry that reveals the totality of the Western feminine archetype.
A Sybil Society: Poems by Katherine Factor
University of Nevada Press, January 2022
Winner of the 2020 Test Site Poetry Prize, A Sybil Society paints a portrait of the present moment and unveils a restless truth in a collection of poems that is both playful and fearless.
Bone And Marrow: An Anthology of Irish Poetry from Medieval to Modern edited by Samuel K. Fisher & Brian Ó Conchubhair
Wake Forest University Press, March 2022
The most comprehensive anthology of Irish-language poetry to date, Bone and Marrow reveals poetry’s centrality to Irish history and culture. Researched by a team of international scholars, this bilingual anthology features many new translations, notes, and introductory essays.