Poem-a-Day - 2023 Summer Books List

Linden Word
by Robert Kelly 
Black Square Editions
March 2023, Paperback $25 

“Robert Kelly’s body of work is singular because of the various, particular and omnidirectional vision it offers us of how it is to be a human on earth.” —Kimberly Lyons

Nomenclatures of Invisibility 
by Mahtem Shiferraw
BOA Editions 
April 2023, Paperback $17

Through a personal, historical, and political lens, Mahtem Shiferraw attends to the collective experiences inherited through deeply-rooted ancestry, tracing patterns of movement and migration, sorrow and invisibility, and the resulting complicated notions of home.

Flare, Corona 
by Jeannine Hall Gailey
BOA Editions
May 2023, Paperback $17

Against a constellation of solar weather events and an evolving pandemic, Jeannine Hall Gailey’s Flare, Corona paints a self-portrait of the ways in which we prevail and persevere through health adversities while facing an uncertain future.

Ephemera
by Sierra DeMulder
Button Poetry 
June 2023, Paperback $18; e-Book and Audiobook $10

If every experience lasted forever there would be nothing to immortalize in writing. In Sierra DeMulder’s melancholic yet hopeful poetry collection, Ephemera, she writes with the wisdom of someone who has learned to love and lose.

The Collected Poems of Anselm Hollo
by Anselm Hollo, edited by John Bloomberg-Rissman and Yasmina Ghiasi
Coffee House Press
August 2023, Hardcover $55

Over 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 is not just an art, but a way of life.

Deal: New and Selected Poems 
by Randall Mann 
Copper Canyon Press
May 2023, Paperback $20

Deal: New and Selected Poems harnesses five previous volumes and includes expansive new works rooted in an age of Wi-Fi. His newest poems move us word by word until we arrive at a stark reality.

You Look Like Hell
by Schuyler Peck
Game Over Books
June 2023, Paperback $18

You Look Like Hell is an arson-charred, sultry-eyed, bump-in-the-night book of poems that provides room to revel in your villain curiosity.

Shrines
by Sagaree Jain
Game Over Books
June 2023, Paperback $18

This book is full of shrines. Fiery, devotional, and sparking with wit, these poems journey through love in all its forms. 

Fire Index
by Bethany Breitland
Green Writers Press
April 2023, Paperback $15.95

Fire Index measures the interior life of a survivor against the world she creates through her own fractured life and religion. Using hybrid/persona fragments, Breitland confronts the trauma of her brother’s death and childhood abuse.

Quick to Bolt
by Mary Fister
Green Writers Press
April 2023, Paperback $15.95

Quick to Bolt celebrates the sense of mystery, wonder, and comfort that is integral to the natural world and captures those moments when the beauty in nature arrests us, and we must look or listen closely. 

Odes to the Ordinary
by Emily Benson-Scott
Green Writers Press
April 2023, Paperback $15.95

Brimming with sensual language and densely layered imagery, these poems remind us to have gratitude for the beauty that infuses even the most seemingly insignificant objects or unpleasant circumstances—from bad breakups to bad weather.

Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond
edited by Ostap Kin, 
translated by John Hennessy
and Ostap Kin
Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature
May 2023, Hardcover $39.95; Paperback $16

This collection brings together, for the first time, the responses to the tragic events at Babyn Yar in September 1941 by Ukrainian poets, written from 1941 to 2018 and presented here in the original and in English translation by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin.

The Voices of Babyn Yar
by Marianna Kiyanovska,
translated by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky
Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature
August 2022, Hardcover $39.95; Paperback $16

With this collection of stirring poems, Marianna Kiyanovska—an award-winning Ukrainian poet—honors the victims of the Holocaust as she writes their stories of horror, death, and survival by projecting their own imagined voices, presented here in the original and in masterful translation by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky. 

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.

Imago
by Brian Swann
Johns Hopkins University Press
March 2023, Paperback and e-Book, $21.95

In language dense and rich, this vital collection traverses realms both rural and urban, foreign and domestic. Tracing the vagaries of the self, it
transmutes biography from that of an English youth to the trials of aging
in the United States.

human/nature poems 
by Tracie Morris 
Litmus Press
May 2023, Paperback $22

“Tracie Morris’s human/nature poems calls us to deep and spacious attention for everyday rituals of wonder – our ‘small seam of certainty’ in the midst of gray breath and human ceremony.” —Ching-In Chen

Bullet Points: A Lyric 
by Jennifer A Sutherland
River River Books
June 2023, Paperback $18

A single book-length prose poem/lyric essay, Bullet Points traces a trial lawyer’s experiences of an American courthouse shooting, its aftermath, and its echoes in law, history, and capitalism.

I, Boombox
by Robert Glück
Roof Books
April 2023, Paperback $20

“I, Boombox is fashioned from my misreadings. In that sense, it’s an autobiography in which I dream on the page.”

This is a sexy poem of bellicose minimalism with a sly sense of prosody.

Excursive 
by Elizabeth Robinson
Roof Books
April 2023, Paperback $20

The poems in Excursive are practical essays in the manner of Francis Bacon or Montaigne and in the spirit of Robert Duncan what goes on daily in the poet’s world of archetypes.

EtC
by Laura Mullen
Solid Objects
November 2023, Hardcover $18

“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

The Burning Key: New & Selected Poems (1973–2023) 
by Beatrix Gates
Thera Books
August 2023, Paperback $22.95

“Like witnessing a holy physics, this collection grabs our greatest potentials of mind, soul, and revolutionary praxis. A deft hand takes us on a brilliant journey of humanization through the rare power to synthesize a multiplicity of threaded subjects. Gates’s talent for motion through convergence makes all phenomena music. You will exit this collection transformed.” –Tongo Eisen-Martin

I Do Everything I’m Told 
by Megan Fernandes
Tin House Books 
June 2023, Paperback $16.95

“Fernandes’s poems are loving and messy but always precise, her insights the kind that make you reevaluate your entire life. I Do Everything I’m Told is a perfect entry point to Fernandes’s captivating and irreverent style.” ―Vulture




 

Coriolis 
by A. D. Lauren-Abunasser
The University of Arkansas Press
November 2023, Paperback and e-Book, $17.95

Winner of the 2023 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. “This is one of the most memorable, immaculate, and singular poetry debuts I’ve ever read.” —George Abraham



 

banana [ ] 
by Paul Hlava Ceballos
University of Pittsburgh Press
September 2022, Paperback and e-Book, $18

Winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, 
banana [ ] “seeks to illuminate dark chapters of our interconnected histories.” —Yes Magazine

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.

The Second Stop Is Jupiter
by upfromsumdirt
Wayne State University Press
September 2023, Paperback $19.99

This collection is a deep engagement with the cultural narrative, populated with Black hero figures who will fuel the imagination. upfromsumdirt invites us to ask, what if, with characters and poetic motifs rooted in existing narratives of Black life and fable.

What to Count
by Alise Alousi 
Wayne State University Press
August 2023, Paperback $17.99

With heart and insight, Alise Alousi’s poems speak to coming of age as an Iraqi American during the Gulf War; the joy and complexity of motherhood and daughterhood; and what it means to live a creative life.