Poem-a-Day - 2022 Summer Books List

Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology 
by Michael Walsh
Autumn House Press
May 2022
Paperback, $24.95

Showcasing over 200 LGBTQIA+ writers, Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology expands upon the canon of nature poetry while also offering new lenses through which to view queerness and the natural world.
 

Seed Celestial
by Sara R. Barnett
Autumn House Press
October 2022
Paperback, $16.95

Sara R. Barnett’s debut poetry collection, Seed Celestial, weaves together themes of motherhood, immigration, and social transformation. Barnett writes haunting reflections on origins—of myth and memory, language and country, earth and mothers.

Feelings Of And
by Barry Schwabsky
Black Square Editions
March 2022
Paperback, $20

“The poems seem to yield to poetry rather than trying to snare or create it - poetry inundates and the reader is like a component drifting through…”—Richard Hell

Infinite Criteria
by Joseph Donahue 
Black Square Editions
May 2022
Paperback, $25

“…Donahue, master of seriality and the extended lyric, has transformed the haiku from the inside out. A devout Blakean, he instinctively understands what it means ‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand’.”—Norman Finkelstein

“Exhilarating freedom and subtle command, lyric surprise and electric movement of mind—all that and more runs through every line of Billie Chernicoff’s Minor Secrets.”—Peter Cole

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.

I’ll Fly Away uses Francisco’s invented lexicon as the palette to paint an intimate portrait of Black life in America―one that praises joy without shying away from the hard truths confronting us today.

So, Stranger
by Topaz Winters 
Button Poetry 
May 2022
Paperback, e-Book, & Audiobook $18 

So, Stranger speaks between histories and futures of being a daughter, being an artist, and being an immigrant. If its reader begins as a stranger, they end as part of a lineage: one both of grief and glory, of distance and arrival.

Boat
by Lisa Robertson
Coach House Books
May 2022
Paperback, $21.95

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 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.

“This book has killer atmosphere, fragrances fine and foul. It growls with the cavernous hunger of our ‘graveyard Nation’ mid-pandemic.”—Jennifer Moxley

The Body Family
by Hope Wabuke 
Haymarket Books
April 2022
Paperback, $17

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.

DEAR GOD. DEAR BONES. DEAR YELLOW.
by Noor Hindi
Haymarket Books
May 2022
Paperback, $17

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.

Super Sad Black Girl
by Diamond Sharp
Haymarket Books
October 2022
Paperback, $17

Super Sad Black Girl lyrically explores the in-between spaces of a time and place where the speaker can live safely and freely, in this compassionate and ethereal depiction of mental illness from a promising and powerful poet.

Plan B: A Poet’s Survivors Manual
by Sandy McIntosh
Marsh Hawk Press
May 2022
Paperback, $18

“Plan B: A Poet’s Survivors Manual is a wonderful book, an important book, a book aspiring writers of fiction and poetry should read.”—David Lehman, Editor, The Oxford Book of American Poetry

In Beauty We Are Made Visible
by Christine Morro
Middle Creek Publishing
May 2022
Paperback, $18

Christine Morro reads the subtle space between the human and the Earth and exquisitely translates it. She misses nothing, and her poems open us up more fully to the mystery of every moment.

The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez chronicles an obsession with the 1971 unsolved murder of Rocha’s grandfather while interrogating the true crime genre, tabloid culture, immigrant identity, the phenomena of missing and murdered women, troubled relationships with law enforcement, and the intersection of prose and poetry.