Poem-a-Day - 2022 Featured Fall Books List

“This book is miraculous! Remica Bingham-Risher weaves together a book of knowledge, illumination, and song unlike any I have known but that I might have dreamed.”—Elizabeth Alexander

Shirali investigates the ongoing practice of witch (“daayan”) hunting in India. A timely and important work, summonings comments on power & patriarchy, on authorial privilege & the shifting role of witness, and ultimately on an ethical poetics.

With wonder, empathy, and even rage, Dialect of Distant Harbors explores the ties of family and home as well as the challenges of global migration and violence against women around the world.





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Poetry that navigates the science of cold waterways to consider the warmth of the poet’s Chinese Mauritian family ties.

Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems 
by Dionne Brand
Duke University Press
October 2022, Hardcover $29.95

Nomenclature features a new long poem, “Nomenclature for the Time Being,” and collects eight volumes of Brand’s poetry published between 1982 and 2010 as well as a critical introduction by literary scholar and theorist Christina Sharpe. 

Any reader of poetry, Black critical thought, music theory, or experimental autobiography will find life in this work and will be compelled and captivated by it.” —Dawn Lundy Martin, author of Good Stock Strange Blood

With uncanny wit, inventive beauty, and numinous surprise, The Most Charming Creatures explores the contemporary and its language, considering our wonder, sorrow, bewilderment, anxiety, and tenderness.

The eleventh book of poetry, from America’s philosopher-poet John Koethe is an intimate, searching collection that gives life to the mundane and lends words to our most interior and abstract musings.
 

Scaling the cliff face of adulthood, this collection transcribes the paradox of individual life in a dizzying world, where we find that each of us is only ourselves and yet delicately interconnected with everyone, everything else.

Observing pop culture, interrogating history, and resisting contemporary injustice, the poems of Muse Found in a Colonized Body range far and wide in content but share the spinal cord of unflinching love.

Shaped around moments of puncture and release, Jenny Xie’s stunning second collection registers what leaks across the breached borders between past and future, background and foreground, silence and utterance.

“One of the finest American poets working today,” writes poet and editor Adrian Matejka, “A writer of unparalleled lyric and formal integrity.” Indeed, these qualities gird Platt for this masterful eighth collection.

A unique anthology of poetry, drama, and prose examining pathos and feeling, giving a well-timed rehab to the word pathetic. Composed by award-winning poet Eileen Myles and featuring titans of global literature, queer icons, revolutionaries, and up-and-coming writers.

 

In these haunting, layered poems, Lucien Darjeun Meadows subverts traditional poetic forms to show how a childhood for a queer boy of both Cherokee and European heritage happens within and outside dominant narratives of Appalachia.

Threads of Trust is a manifestation of an ordinary person’s effort to discover love, sensuality, separation, and itself. Each poem lingers in the duality of life between the erotic and exotic, the lost and the aware, the breaking and the healing, and the life and the death itself.

Come Kingdom: Poems
by Derrick Harriell
LSU Press
August 2022, Paperback $18.95


This third collection of poetry from Derrick Harriell chronicles a Black man’s journey toward an ever-elusive American dream with poems anchored in the trenches of personal crossroads ranging from child conception to substance abuse and racism.

The Evangelist
by David Armand
Mercer University Press
October 2022, Paperback $18

Deceptively simple, clear, and colloquial, yet dense with meaning and universal significance, Armand fashions poems of great lyrical beauty and potent symbolism that remind his readers of the importance of memory and of a shared language.

Shaped by the displaced cadences of the Appalachian mill workers and the folkways of Virginia, these poems examine the economic and racial violence of rural America, where whiteness is a fraught and often dysfunctional identity.

Bluest Nude 
by Ama Codjoe
Milkweed Editions
September 2022, Paperback $16

“How beautifully seen, tended, and rendered are our many Black lives under this poet's exquisite gaze . . . Bluest Nude is an ecstatic encounter.”—Tracy K. Smith

Ask the Brindled
by No'u Revilla
Milkweed Press
August 2022, Paperback $16

“In her debut collection, which won the 2021 National Poetry series, Native Hawaiian poet No'u Revilla explores bodies, language, the legacies of colonialism, the natural world, and grief . . . a beautiful book.”— BookRiot

Milkweed Smithereens 
by Bernadette Mayer
New Directions Press
November 2022, Paperback and e-Book $15.95

Milkweed Smithereens gathers lively, wickedly smart, intimate, and indelible Bernadette Mayer poems: the volume ranges from brand-new nature poems, pastiches, sequences, epigrams, and excerpts from her Covid Diary and Second World of Nature to early poems and sonnets found in the attic or rooted out in the UC San Diego archive.

The Way of the Earth: Poems
by Matthew Shendo
Northwestern University Press
November 2022, Paperback $18

The fourth and most personal collection by award-winner Shenoda, it explores the quotidian beauty that surrounds us despite deep loss and climate crisis. “Time never goes back,” he writes, “but the imagination must."

alone in the house of my heart
by Kari Gunter Seymour
Ohio University Press
September 2022, Paperback, $17.95 and e-Book, $17.99

With poems that are as complicated, breathtaking, and ravaged as Ohio’s southeastern foothills, Ohio Poet Laureate Kari Gunter-Seymour shares an insider’s appreciation for Appalachia’s hard-worked land and hardworking people.

Uterotopia
by Rachel Galvin
Persea Books
November 2022, Paperback $15.95

With lyric intensity, wordplay, and dark humor, Uterotopia explores sexism and aging, fertility and mortality, the bystander effect, and violence against women on an intimate and national level. In poems that converse with writers including César Vallejo, Kim Hyesoon, and W.H. Auden, urban legends and folk rituals interweave with facts, anecdotes, and news items.

Please make me pretty, I don't want to die: Poems
by Tawanda Mulalu 
Princeton University Press
September 2022, Paperback $19.95

Please make me pretty, I don’t want to die explores tactility, sound, sensuality, and intimacy. Set across the four seasons of a year, these original poems combine an inviting confessional voice and offbeat imagery.

Winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, Lives offers a panoramic exploration of our world as we know it: one of climate change and fatality, certainly, but also of celebration, hope, and love.

Chinese poetry is unique in world literature in that it was written for the best part of 3,000 years by exiles and refugees. In this anthology, we meet some poets less familiar to readers in English.

“The poems in Corrie Lynn White’s Gold Hill Family Audio have all the intimacy and urgency of prayers— prayers for a deeper connection to place, to family, to our very selves.” — Austin Smith, author of Flyover Country

In this stunning collection, Chee Brossy forges a poetics of wonder, dailiness, and transformation. Here, the “sugar cane Coke” and “the leafy houseplant[s]” of the speaker’s daily life, those artifacts of routine, are revealed as glimpses into all that is unknowable, subtle reminders of “today’s mystery.”

Part miracle, part oracle, in these poems lava speaks “with the focus of a burning glass,” lighting lyric core samples through geo-historical and cultural texts about Iceland.

Award-winning poet and scholar Linda LeGarde Grover gives poetic voice to Ojibwe family life. In English and Ojibwe, she creates a collective memoir in poetry as expansive and particular as the starry sky.

Stilettos in a Rifle Range
by Tyrone Williams
Wayne State University Press
December 2022, Paperback $17.99

Poems about the joys and struggles of complex, contemporary life. Written against a backdrop of heartbreak and spanning the geography of Cincinnati, Detroit, and New York, this is a complex, intriguing book that plays dynamically with language.

Goddesses of Water
by Jeannette L. Clariond
translated from Spanish by Samantha Schnee
World Poetry Books
September 2022, Paperback $20

Jeannette L. Clariond’s sixth book in English translation refracts the war waged against thousands of Mexican women through Nahuatl philosophy and Aztec mythology, investigating gender construction and fluidity. 

Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light
by Joy Harjo
W.W. Norton
November 2022, Hardcover $25

In this lyrical meditation, Joy Harjo, the first Native American Poet Laureate of the U.S., reflects on significant points of illumination, experience, and questioning from her fifty years as a poet.

The award-winning poet Carl Phillips shares intimate lessons about the writing life, weaving his forty years of experience with the necessary survival skills including ambition, stamina, silence, politics, practice, audience, and community.