Our 2023 partners, sponsors, and advertisers present some of their titles to help celebrate National Poetry Month! Join us in reading poetry this April and beyond.
A Reading List for National Poetry Month 2023
Metabolics by Jessica E. Johnson
Acre Books, March 2023
Jessica E. Johnson’s Metabolics is an essential study in the ecologies of contemporary parenting. In prose blocks and visual figures, this book-length hybrid poem considers how nature accomplishes both balance and deep transformation.
Keşke by Jennifer A. Reimer
Airlie Press, October 2022
Keşke (Turkish for “if only”) joins ancient and modern to the intense lyric experience of self-discovery. Experimental yet measured, watery scenes rewrite Homeric myth with a feminist eye, evoking desire for what might have been.
Quiet by Victoria Adukwei Bulley
Alfred A. Knopf, February 2023
A Black British poet makes her thrilling American debut exploring the importance of “quiet” in producing forms of community, resistance, and love.
“Mysterious and crystalline” —Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria
Love Letters from an Arsonist by David van den Berg
April Gloaming Publishing, March 2023
A satisfyingly textured collection that repulses, endears, and makes us question our relationship with God. A weird, wild, and beautiful wail of emotion that emanates from the heart of the American South. – Kirkus Starred Review
Afsanah in her words by Esma Ashraf
Archway Publishing, February 2023
Afsanah in her words is a collection of poems that recites the sonnets in authentic fashion. Some of the poetic titles are highlighted in Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and Urdu languages, however the poems are in English.
More Sure by A. Light Zachary
Arsenal Pulp Press, April 2023
Poems, interruptions, instances of love, self-realization, and recovery in nonbinary, queer, and autistic lives.
“Zachary is a master of their craft and a virtuoso talent, and they balance acute emotion with subtle wit.” —Kai Cheng Thom
Given by Liza Katz Duncan
Autumn House Press, April 2023
Winner of the 2022 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in Poetry, selected by Donika Kelly
This collection is an exploration of the unpredictable shifts in our lives. Given considers home and family and how to survive the losses associated with both.
Some of the Light: New and Selected Poems by Tim Z. Hernandez
Beacon Press, March 2023
This collection gathers the first twenty-five years of Tim Z. Hernandez’s award-winning poetry, offering twenty-eight new poems and a glimpse at the trajectory of a rising contemplative American author. Part of the Raised Voices Series.
Vinegar Hill by Colm Tóibín
Beacon Press, April 2023
Within this “meditative probe into the language of ordinary days (New York Times)”—shot through with keen observation, emotion, and humor—bestselling author Colm Tóibín offers us lines and verses to provoke, ponder, and cherish.
Homegirls and Handgrenades by Sonia Sanchez
Beacon Press, March 2023
Sanchez shows the “razor blades” clenched in her teeth in this collection of prose, prose poems, and lyric verses that is as fresh and radical today as when it was first published in 1984.
Weave: New and Selected Poems by Wendy Barker
BkMk Press, December 2022
Barker “is a storyteller of buoyancy and humor, and her poems are like inherited treasures you want to look at, handle, take with you move after move, through your scattered lives.” —Alicia Ostriker, from the foreword
American Scapegoat by Enzo Silon Surin
Black Lawrence Press, May 2023
This timely collection looks to the past and the future and fosters a deeply essential conversation about what it means to be Black and American in a democracy at war with itself and its humanity.
Four in Hand by Alicia Mountain
BOA Editions, April 2023
Comprising four heroic crowns of sonnets, Alicia Mountain’s Four in Hand is both formal and experimental. Through enthralling images, gripping storytelling, and world-building, Mountain carves out necessary space for the lesbian gaze, speakership, and personhood.
The Lamb Cycle: What the Great English Poets Would Have Written About Mary and Her Lamb (If They Had Thought of It First) by David R. Ewbank, illustrations by Kate Feiffer
Brandeis University Press, April 2023
The poem “Mary Had a Little Lamb” told in the style and substance of the great English poets. Billy Collins says “David Ewbank’s versatility in the art of literary imitation is nothing short of shapeshifting.”
Composition by Junious Ward
Button Poetry, February 2023
Composition interrogates historical perceptions of Blackness and biracial identity through a Southern lens. Ward unflinchingly explores the way language, generational trauma, loss, and resilience shape us into who we are and what we pass on.
Paperback, $21; audiobook and e-Book, $18
Ephemera by Sierra DeMulder
Button Poetry, June 2023
If every experience lasted forever, our most loving moments uninterrupted, there would be nothing to immortalize in writing. Melancholic yet beautifully hopeful, Ephemera captures the wisdom of someone who has learned to love and lose.
Paperback, audiobook, and e-Book, $18
Poetry by Chance: An Anthology of Poems Powered by Metaphor Dice edited by Taylor Mali
Button Poetry, July 2023
Writers have used Metaphor Dice for years to revel in the formulaic nature of metaphors. In this anthology there’s no singular style or voice; these poems are the brainchild of an ingenious yet simple tool.
Sweet, Young, & Worried by Blythe Baird
Button Poetry, November 2022
Following her successful debut, Baird wastes no time reeling in her reader with breathtaking imagery and punching narratives. With precision and vulnerability, She guides us on an expedition embracing queerness, mental health, feminism, and healing.
Paperback, e-Book, and audiobook, $18
Sonnets with Two Torches and One Cliff by Robert Thomas
Carnegie Mellon University Press, February 2023
Eighty nontraditional sonnets explore love and jealousy, the traditional obsessions of sonnets, from nontraditional angles. Other galaxies are jealous of Earth in these heartbreaking, funny, ecstatic, profound, never boring poems.
When Did We Stop Being Cute? by Martin Wiley
CavanKerry Press, April 2023
Set to a soundtrack of eighties hits, this collection tells the story of a young man dealing with the challenges of being mixed race, growing up, facing the police, and confronting himself.
Susto by Tommy Archuleta
Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University, 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.
Metamorphoses by Evan Kennedy
City Lights Books, April 2023
Evan Kennedy has one foot in ancient Rome and the other in contemporary San Francisco, acknowledging the “transformations of this city [he] loves” into “awful condos of steel and glass” alongside Victorian homes.
Slows: Twice by T. Liem
Coach House Books, May 2023
Backward and forward: a double book of mirrored poems about identity in all its forms.
The Collected Poems of Anselm Hollo by Anselm Hollo, edited by John Bloomberg-Rissman and Yasmina Ghiasi
Coffee House Press, August 2023
More than 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 isn’t just an art, but a way of life.
Things I Didn’t Do with This Body by Amanda Gunn
Copper Canyon Press, May 2023
Bedecked in Fenty and Shalimar, Amanda Gunn’s debut, Things I Didn’t Do with this Body, invites you to read with all of your senses and gives fresh meaning to the phrase “a body of work.”
Freedom House by KB Brookins
Deep Vellum, April 2023
In this debut, full-length collection Freedom House, KB Brookins’s formally diverse, music-influenced poetry explores transness, the politics of the body, gentrification, sexual violence, climate change, masculinity, and Afrofuturism while chronicling Brookins’s transition.
Green Burial by Derek Graf
Elixir Press, January 2023
Derek Graf’s Green Burial is the winner of the 2021 Antivenom Poetry Award. Prize judge Kirun Kapur had this to say about it: “Lush and frantic, Green Burial submerges us in a dazzling, apocalyptic pastoral.”
When Your Sky Runs into Mine by Rooja Mohassessy
Elixir Press, February 2023
Mohassessy’s When Your Sky Runs into Mine is the winner of the twenty-second annual Elixir Press Poetry Award. She is an Iranian-born poet, a 2022 MacDowell Fellow, and a student in Pacific University’s MFA program.
Out of Season by Kirk Wilson
Elixir Press, January 2023
Kirk Wilson’s short story collection, Out of Season, is the winner of the 2021 Elixir Press Fiction Award. Kirk’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry are widely published in literary journals and anthologies.
Nine Irish Plays for Voices by Eamon Grennan
Fordham University Press, March 2023
In Nine Irish Plays for Voices, award-winning poet Eamon Grennan delves deeply into key Irish subjects—big, small, literary, historical, political, biographical—and illuminates them for today’s audiences and readers.
The Ghetto, and Other Poems: An Annotated Version by Lola Ridge, edited by Lawrence Kramer
Fordham University Press, March 2023
At last recovered in this enriching annotated edition, this important but neglected work of American modernism offers a unique poetic encounter with the Jewish communities on New York’s Lower East Side.
Bianca by Eugenia Leigh
Four Way Books, March 2023
Leigh’s second collection introduces us to a woman managing marriage, motherhood, and mental illness as the trauma from her childhood abuse resurfaces. Dedicated to her manic alter ego, Bianca is the testimony of Leigh’s resilience.
Fierce Geometry by Mary Brancaccio
Get Fresh Books, January 2023
Fierce Geometry travels the emotive back roads and roadside attractions along Brancaccio’s journey through longing, love, and loss. Ultimately, these poems map out lyrical digressions through family history and experience as she searches for healing.
Future Botanic by Christina Olivares
Get Fresh Books, January 2023
Christina Olivares interrogates inheritance, history, legacy, queer love, and what is owed. These poems are lyrical meditations—in some cases, spells—that embody, vivify, and reckon with the geography of the Americas and the centuries-long postcolonial condition.
The Little Deaths by Mercy Tullis-Bukhari
Get Fresh Books, January 2023
These poems reveal self-discovery and the human connection to Earth and nature. Meanwhile, Catholic beliefs and ideologies whither under the weight of life’s realities. Through disillusionment and trauma, the speaker explores uncharted avenues of beauty.
Saltwater Demands a Psalm by Kweku Abimbola
Graywolf Press, April 2023
“In an era of sloganeering and solipsism, Saltwater Demands a Psalm is a healing, a diasporic divination, an elegy of ancestral elegance.” —Tyehimba Jess, judge’s statement for the Academy of American Poets First Book Award
A “Working Life” by Eileen Myles
Grove Atlantic, April 2023
From “one of the essential voices in American poetry” (New York Times) comes a rich new collection of expansive, light-footed, and cheerfully foreboding poems oddly in tune with our strange and evolving present.
ballast by Quenton Baker
Haymarket Books, April 2023
A poetic sequence using the only successful, large-scale 1841 slave revolt aboard the ship Creole, ballast attempts incomplete redress and is a testament to the vitality of Black lives in the afterlife of slavery.
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.
Por Siempre by José Olivarez
Haymarket Books, April 2023
Por Siempre is a force. José Olivarez’s poetic series “speaks” in its own way—to, of, with, and beyond the subjects of Antonio Salazar’s gritty yet tender photos—with humor, honesty, and compassion.
Remedies for Disappearing by Alexa Patrick
Haymarket Books, June 2023
Alexa Patrick’s luminous debut explores family history, the heartbreaks of navigating a predominantly white high school into adulthood, and the experiences that echo those of an expansive and intricate history of Black girls and women.
So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth edited by Aracelis Girmay
Haymarket Books, February 2023
In this brave and devastatingly beautiful anthology, the poet and editor Aracelis Girmay gathers complex and intimate pieces that illuminate the nuances of personal and collective histories, analyses, practices, and choices surrounding pregnancy.
Sunny Ways by Ryan Fitzpatrick
Invisible Publishing, April 2023
Standing waist-deep in the massive tailing ponds of Alberta’s Tar Sands, Sunny Ways wades through the tangled complexities of climate catastrophe, grappling with the failure of political hope and the intransigence of climate change denialism.
Selvage by Kate Siklosi
Invisible Publishing, April 2023
Pieces of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the language of trees, familial stories, and rumminations on motherhood are sutured together forming a collage of what it’s like to live in a fragmented world.
Above Ground: Poems by Clint Smith
Little, Brown, March 2023
A vibrant and compelling new collection of poems that traverse the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood, exploring how becoming a parent has recalibrated his sense of the world from New York Times bestselling author Clint Smith.
Why Fathers Cry at Night: A Memoir in Love Poems, Letters, Recipes, and Remembrances by Kwame Alexander
Little, Brown, May 2023
This powerful memoir from a #1 New York Times-bestselling author features poetry, letters, recipes, and other personal artifacts that provide an intimate look into his life and the loved ones he shares it with.
Divine Ratios: Poems by Jacqueline Osherow
LSU Press, February 2023
With striking juxtapositions of natural and cultural wonders, the enrapturing Divine Ratios asks, what is the right proportion—or “ratio”—for living in a world of such splendors, horrors, and possibilities?
Leviathan: A Poem by Michael Shewmaker
LSU Press, January 2023
Leviathan reimagines the book of Job. Set in the landscape of modern East Texas, the poem unfolds in four cycles of interchanging monologues, each compounding the difficulties of a faith placed in a distant God.
I Can Show You Better than I Can Tell You by Mahdi Asim
Lulu, September 2022
I Can Show You Better than I Can Tell You is a three-volume poetry series by Mahdi Asim that delivers harsh perspectives on even harsher realities. Asim's work shines with humor, strength, courage, and emotional depth.
Kissing the Wound: Poems and Fragments by J.D. Isip
Moon Tide Press, January 2023
These poems ask us to look at “this long life” through a multiversal lens. Consider how our lives, loves, traumas, and triumphs fold in on one another; how it all, ultimately, connects.
Phantom Pain Wings by Kim Hyesoon
New Directions, May 2023
An iconic figure from South Korea, the feminist poet Kim Hyesoon pushes the poetic envelope into the furthest reaches of the lyric universe in this powerful new poetry collection channeling the language of birds.
Sprawl by Andrew Collard
Ohio University Press, March 2023
Hollis Summers Poetry Prize Winner. These lyrical poems about growing up and becoming a parent in Detroit reflect deeply felt connections to places and experiences that inevitably fall victim to irrevocable change.
So to Speak by Terrance Hayes
Penguin Books, July 2023
A powerful, timely, and dazzling new collection of poems from the National Book Award–winning author of Lighthead.
Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong
Penguin Press, June 2023
“In his bestselling second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother’s death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it.”
Date of Birth by Shawn R. Jones
Persea Books, April 2023
Winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, this collection of vignettes about those betrayed by family and country is a testament to strength and resilience in the face of racism, poverty, abuse, and neglect.
I’m Always So Serious by Karisma Price
Sarabande Books, February 2023
Anchored in New Orleans and New York City, the poems of Karisma Price’s stunning debut braid personal and public histories to offer an extended meditation on Blackness, on family, and on loss.
Delicates by Wendy Guerra, translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson and Esperanza Hope Snyder
Seagull Books, April 2023
In these music-infused poems imbued with a sensuality reminiscent of the work of Anaïs Nin, critically acclaimed Cuban writer Wendy Guerra takes readers on an exhilarating journey through the cities of love.
Piano in the Dark by Nancy Naomi Carlson
Seagull Books, May 2023
This latest book of wonders from poet-translator Nancy Naomi Carlson seduces us with the promise of the joy yet to be had, were we to look in the right places.
Bone Wishing by Tara Flint Taylor
Slapering Hol Press, March 2023
“Bone Wishing names the shapes of grief: ‘a dark umbrella shaken / after hard rain,’ the ‘empty pot on the stove tinged pink.’ From the ruins emerges… this profound and deeply felt collection.” —Linda Tomol Pennisi
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
April by Sara Nicholson
The Song Cave, April 2023
Deadpan, heartfelt, and everything in between, Sara Nicholson is a reluctant mystic who can both make us laugh and point us toward magical truths within a single poem.
Judas Goat by Gabrielle Bates
Tin House Books, January 2023
Bates’s electric debut plumbs the depths of intimate relationships. The book’s eponymous animal is used to lead sheep to slaughter while its own life is spared, wrestling with betrayal and forced obedience, violence and womanhood.
Trace Evidence by Charif Shanahan
Tin House Books, March 2023
“A truly magical achievement.” —Ocean Vuong
In Trace Evidence, the urgent follow-up to his award-winning debut, Charif Shanahan continues his piercing meditations on mixed-race identity, queer desire, time, mortality, and the legacies of anti-Blackness in the U.S. and abroad.
God's Seasons: Steadfastly Reaping Until the Harvest by Valerie Yvette Peterson
Trilogy Christian Publishing, November 2022
A praying woman is a powerful woman; just as she is aware that God is in pursuit of her, so is the enemy. God’s Seasons offers encouragement to remain steadfast in God's promises when trials abound.
Paperback, $21.99, and Kindle, $9.99
Awaiting by Charisse Pearlina Weston
Ugly Duckling Presse, March 2023
Part autobiography, play, fictive dream, and long poem, Awaiting begins by detaching phrases and motifs from Lorraine Hansberry’s What Use Are Flowers? and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and entangling them into bold experimental text.
Lotería by Elizabeth Torres
University of Arizona Press, February 2023
Lotería is a collection of deeply evocative coming-of-age poems that take the reader on a voyage through the intimate experiences of displacement. Colombian American poet Elizabeth Torres won the Ambroggio Prize for this bilingual collection.
To Be Named Something Else by Shaina Phenix
University of Arkansas Press, April 2023
Winner of the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, selected by Patricia Smith
Centering the coming-of-age of Black femmes in Harlem, Phenix’s debut “enlivens the everyday—the everyday miraculous, the everyday hallelujah, the numbing everyday love, the everyday risk of just being Black and living.”
Joyful Orphan: Poems by Mark Irwin
University of Nevada Press, February 2023
Through poems of witness, species and habitat extinction, war, pandemic, technology, history, and race, this collection of poetry explores the collision between metropolis and wilderness and engages with forms of spirit that cannot be bound.
The Reckoning of Jeanne d’Antietam: Poems by Matthew Moore
University of Nevada Press, February 2023
This collection of poems circles the U.S. Civil War and the failed Reconstruction, and Moore makes incursions into the histories and beliefs of the era through architectures of sound and histories stacked upon histories.
The Anxiety Workbook: Poems by Christina Olson
University of Pittsburgh Press, January 2023
The Anxiety Workbook explores contemporary anxiety, grief, and familial dynamics through the lenses of science and history. These poems grapple with the collective and individual trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic while seeking answers from nature.
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.
suddenly we by Evie Shockley
Wesleyan University Press, March 2023
Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and language to chart routes toward a more capacious “we.” Beginning with the visionary art of Black women, Shockley’s poems reveal the interdependence of everyone and everything on Earth.
Redaction by Reginald Dwayne Betts and Titus Kaphar
W. W. Norton, February 2023
MacArthur Fellows Reginald Dwayne Betts and Titus Kaphar present a stunning literary and artistic collaboration that confronts the abuses of the criminal justice system.
A Map of Longings: The Life and Works of Agha Shahid Ali by Manan Kapoor
Yale University Press, February 2023
Hailed upon its release in India as “lush” and “poetic,” this is the story of an extraordinary poet, the works he left behind, and the legacy of his singular poetic vision.
Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author by Sophus Helle
Yale University Press, March 2023
The first complete translation of the poems of priestess Enheduana, the world’s first known author, newly translated from the original Sumerian.
Mass for Shut-Ins by Mary-Alice Daniel, foreword by Rae Armantrout
Yale University Press, March 2023
The latest volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, in which Mary-Alice Daniel confronts tricontinental culture shock and her curious placement within many worlds.
Rapture and Melancholy: The Diaries of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Edna St. Vincent Millay, edited by Daniel Mark Epstein
Yale University Press, April 2023
The first publication of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s private, intimate diaries, providing “a candid self-portrait of the ‘bad girl of American letters.’” (Kirkus Reviews)