A Reading List for National Poetry Month 2023
Our 2023 partners, sponsors, and advertisers present some of their new titles to help celebrate National Poetry Month! Join us in reading poetry this April and beyond.
|
|
|
|
Metabolics
by Jessica Johnson
Acre Books
March 2023, Paperback and e-Book $17
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, Paperback $18
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 longing and desire for what might have been.
|
|
|
|
Afsanah in her words
by Esma Ashraf
Archway Publishing
February 2023, Paperback, $13.99 and Kindle, $3.99
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, Paperback $17.95
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
|
|
|
|
Vinegar Hill
by Colm Tóibín
Beacon Press
April 2023, Paperback, $16.95
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, Paperback, $17.95
Sonia Sanchez shows the “razor blades” clenched in her teeth in this powerful collection of prose, prose poems, and lyric verses that is as fresh and radical today as it was when it was first published in 1984.
|
|
|
|
Weave: New and Selected Poems
by Wendy Barker
BkMk Press
December 2022, Paperback, $19.95
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, Paperback, $17.95
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, Paperback, $17; e-Book, $9.99
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, Cloth, $18.95; e-Book, $17.95
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, Paperback, $21, audiobook and e-Book, $18
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.
|
|
|
Ephemera
by Sierra DeMulder
Button Poetry
June 2023, Paperback, audiobook, and e-Book, $18
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.
|
|
|
|
Poetry by Chance: An Anthology of Poems Powered by Metaphor Dice
edited by Taylor Mali
Button Poetry
July 2023, Paperback, $25; e-Book, $18
Writers of all levels of experience have been using Metaphor Dice for years to explore and revel in the formulaic nature of metaphors. In this anthology there is no singular poetic style or voice; these poems are the brainchild of an ingenious yet simple writing tool.
|
|
|
Sweet, Young, & Worried
by Blythe Baird
Button Poetry
November 2022, Paperback, e-Book, and audiobook, $18
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.
|
|
|
|
Sonnets with Two Torches and One Cliff
by Robert Thomas
Carnegie Mellon University Press
February 2023, Paperback, $15.95
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, Paperback, $18
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, Paperback, $16.95
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, Paperback, $15.95
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, Paperback and e-Book, $18.95
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, Hardcover, $55
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, Paperback, $18
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, Paperback, $17.95
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, Paperback, $17
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, Paperback, $17
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, Paperback, $19
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, Hardcover, $39.95
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, Paperback, $24.95
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, Paperback, $17.95
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, Paperback, $20
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, Paperback, $20
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, Paperback, $15
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, Paperback, $16; e-Book, $9.99
“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, Hardcover, $26
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, Paperback, $18
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, Paperback, $17
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, Paperback, $18
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, Paperback, $17
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, Paperback, $21.95
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.
|
|
|
|
Above Ground: Poems
by Clint Smith
Little, Brown
March 2023, Hardcover, $27
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, Paperback and e-Book, $18.95
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, Paperback and e-Book, $19.95
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, Paperback and e-Book, $18.95
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, Hardcover, $35
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. Paperback, $16.95
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.
|
|
|
|
Date of Birth
by Shawn R. Jones
Persea Books
April 2023, Paperback, $15.95
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, Paperback, $16.95
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.
|
|
|
|
Trace Evidence
by Charif Shanahan
Tin House Books
March 2023, Paperback, $16.95
“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, Paperback, $21.99 and Kindle, $9.99
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.
|
|
|
|
To Be Named Something Else
by Shaina Phenix
University of Arkansas Press
April 2023, Paperback, $17.95
Winner of the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, selected by Patricia Smith
Centering the coming-of-age of Black femmes in Harlem, Shaina Phenix’s debut collection “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, Paperback and e-Book, $17
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, Paperback, $17
This collection of poems circles the U.S. Civil War and the failed Reconstruction, and Matthew 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, Paperback, $18
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, Paperback and e-Book, $14.95
"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, Paperback, $17.99
Thought-provoking poems that challenge preconceptions of form and style while focusing on themes of everyday experience, class, politics, literature, and more.
|
|
|
|
|
|
