A Reading List for National Poetry Month 2024
Our 2024 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.
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Bad Mexican, Bad American
by Jose Hernandez Diaz
Acre Books
March 2024, Paperback, $17
Rooted in more than one culture, this debut showcases the minimalist, working-class aesthetic of a “disadvantaged Brown kid,” which takes wing in prose poems that recall and celebrate that form’s ties to Surrealism.
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36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem
by Nam Le
Alfred A. Knopf
March 2024, Hardcover, $28
An explosive and devastating debut collection, as self-indicting as it is scathing, from the acclaimed author of The Boat. “Capable of shaking Western self-regard to its foundations.” —J.M. Coetzee, Nobel Laureate 2003
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Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere
by Anastacia Renee
Amistad
March 2024, Paperback, $17.99
In this bold hybrid collection of poetry, flash fiction, and Afrofuturism sci-fi, the award-winning interdisciplinary writer Anastacia Renee explores what happens when god is a black woman.
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Someone Birthed Them Broken
by Ama Asantewa Diaka
Amistad
April 2024, Hardcover, $26.99
A visceral and candid portrait of today’s Ghanaian youth, told in interconnected short stories by acclaimed spoken-word artist and author of the poetry collection Woman, Eat Me Whole Ama Asantewa Diaka.
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The Span of a Small Forever
by April Gibson
Amistad
April 2024, Paperback, $17.99
With echoes of Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, an extraordinary debut collection from a prize-winning poet that chronicles a Black woman’s journey through disability, the byzantine healthcare system, life-giving, taking, and sacrifice.
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Before You Know It
by S.K. Williams
Andrews McMeel Publishing
April 2024, Paperback and e-Book, $16.99
Sometimes, beneath the weight of the world, we find ourselves drowning. Let this collection of poetry breathe life back into your lungs and remind you of everything that you’ve already overcome.
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Eclipse
by Wilder Poetry
Andrews McMeel Publishing
March 2024, Paperback and e-Book, $16.99
Eclipse illustrates a magical journey of love between the sun and moon. Experience a cosmic
love story like no other, told through a collection of stunning poetry and enchanting imagery.
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LVOE. Volume II
by Atticus
Andrews McMeel Publishing
April 2024, Paperback and e-Book, $18.99
Three-time New York Times bestselling author Atticus invites readers to take a deeper look behind the mask as he continues his powerful journey inward in search of love, peace, and acceptance.
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Seraphim
by Angelique Zobitz
CavanKerry Press
April 2024, Paperback, $18
This isn’t a book about the pain of being a Black womxn. This is about Black womxn and joy. About celebration. If you’ve ever wondered how Black womxn can burn with such vibrance and exuberance, Seraphim is the answer.
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Mountain Amnesia
by Gale Marie Thompson,
Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University
December 2023, Paperback, $16.95
Mountain Amnesia rebuilds a new world—and self—in the wake of destruction and loss. Influenced by the landscape of rural Appalachia, these poems depict a nature relentlessly working on its own disappearance for survival.
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My Body Is Paper: Stories and Poems
by Gil Cuadros
City Lights Books
June 2024, Paperback and e-Book, $17.95
A recently discovered treasure from Gil Cuadros, My Body Is Paper dives into the complexities of sex, family, and the betrayals of the body.
“One of the most important writers I’ve ever read.”—Justin Torres
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Good Want
by Domenica Martinello
Coach House Books
May 2024, Paperback, $23.95
What if poetry and prayer are the same: intimate and inconclusive, hopeful and useless, a private communion that hooks you to the thrashing, imperfect world?
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Ember Days
by Mary Gilliland
Codhill
March 2024, Paperback, $16
Woolf’s pen runs dry, Tesla holes up, Lincoln emerges in yet another bardo, and the rest of us tunnel through Wednesday’s jammed boulevards, Friday’s cash worthless, Saturday’s prodigal feet: “a radiant testimony—and a triumph—of an unerring ear.”—Ishion Hutchinson
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The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry
by Arthur Sze
Copper Canyon Press
April 2024, Paperback, $18
In The Silk Dragon II, National Book Award–winning poet Arthur Sze presents a sophisticated vision of the vitality, diversity, and power of the Chinese poetic tradition.
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All The Time You Want
by Keith Taylor
Dzanc Books
January 2024, Paperback, $16.95
Keith Taylor, acclaimed poet of the Upper Midwest and the author of eighteen celebrated collections, delivers a stunning medley of his most lasting work: poems of Michigan, of nature, and of a love lifelong
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The Moon That Turns You Back
by Hala Alyan
Ecco
March 2024, Paperback, $17.99; e-Book, $11.99; Audiobook, $27.99
“From the author of The Arsonists’ City and The Twenty-Ninth Year, a new collection of poetry that traces the fragmentation of memory, archive, and family–past, present, future–in the face of displacement and war.”
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The Sorrow Apartments
by Andrea Cohen
Four Way Books
March 2024, Paperback, $17.95
In The Sorrow Apartments, Andrea Cohen’s eighth collection, her signature gifts are front and center, along with sly humor, relentless economy, and the hairpin curves of gut-punch wisdom.
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The Blue Mimes
by Sara Daniele Rivera
Graywolf Press
April 2024, Paperback, $17
Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, selected by Eduardo C. Corral.
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O Body
by Dan ‘Sully’ Sullivan
Haymarket Books
February 2024, Paperback, $17
O Body considers the male body—its momentum and privilege when moving through the world, but also its softness and vulnerability. Sullivan challenges wider social systems that uphold patriarchal notions of masculinity, exploring a new register of compassion, of self-love.
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Robert Frost: Sixteen Poems to Learn by Heart
by Jay Parini
Library of America
March 2024, Hardcover, $24
In this keepsake edition, acclaimed poet and biographer Parini presents sixteen of Frost’s greatest works to memorize, offering insight into what each poem can tell us about one of our most beloved and enduring poets.
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For Today
by Carolyn Hembree
LSU Press
January 2024, Paperback and e-Book, $19.95
Set in the Gulf South, For Today explores motherhood and grief through “poetry so sharp and bare it aims at nothing but the heart.”—Jericho Brown
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You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World
edited by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón
Milkweed Editions
April 2024, Hardcover, $25
Edited by Ada Limón, the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of fifty poems reflecting on our relationship to the natural world by our most celebrated writers.
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Retribution Forthcoming: Poems
by Katie Berta
Ohio University Press
April 2024, Paperback, $17.95
Using irony, humor, and associative logic, the speaker of these poems engages in a critique of capitalism and the ways women’s bodies are monitored, exploited, and expected to conform under that system.
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Exploding Head
by Cynthia Marie Hoffman
Persea Books
February 2024, Paperback, $15.95
This unsettling, image-rich memoir-in-prose-poems chronicles a lifelong journey with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which began in childhood and continues through the present day, challenging the poet’s relationship to motherhood, religion, and the larger world.
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A Geography That Does Not Hurt Us
by Carla Sofia Ferreira
River River Books
January 2024, Paperback, $18
Carla Sofia Ferreira’s A Geography That Does Not Hurt Us sings the traditions of the ode and the elegy, the prayer and the fado, ferrying its immigrant music between Portugal and Newark, New Jersey.
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Dear Memphis
by Rachel Edelman
River River Books
January 2024, Paperback, $18
The poems in Rachel Edelman’s Dear Memphis are a direct address to the city where the poet grew up, exploring questions of legacy, displacement, and belonging for a Jewish family living in the American South.
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Reader, I
by Corey Van Landingham
Sarabande Books
April 2024, Paperback, $17.95
Drawing its title from Jane Eyre, Reader, I spans the first years of a marriage, courting and eschewing nuptial myths and negotiating “between an alleged Victorian decorum and an undeniable contemporary lyricism that dazzles.” –David Baker
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Solio
by Samira Negrouche
translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson
Seagull Books
May 2024, Paperback, $19
Samira Negrouche’s poetry explores life’s perpetual motion, intertwining voices and histories in fluid landscapes. The language dances, defying definition, as the ‘I’ becomes a prophetic force, offering hope amid the swirling contradictions of self and memory.
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Red Studio
by Murray Silverstein
Sixteen Rivers Press
April 2024, Paperback, $18
In a transformation as striking as it is persuasive, Matisse’s famed painting The Red Studio (L’Atelier rouge) becomes the red studio of the heart in poet Murray Silverstein’s superb third collection. There’s room in this studio for loss, doubt, and humor, but above all, there’s room for love.
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Graffitied Heart: Poems in Conversation and a Conversation
by Ellen Bass & Kendra DeColo
Slapering Hol
February 2024, Paperback, $20
Women’s bodies bleed, make love, make children. Graffitied Heart, by Ellen Bass and Kendra DeColo includes sensuous poems in conversation—plus a conversation—about actions of the flesh that mark the heart in no-holds-barred lines.
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Softly Undercover
by Hanae Jonas
The Ohio State University Press
February 2024, Paperback, $16.95
The winner of the Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize, Softly Undercover is an elliptical, lyrical debut that explores the pleasures and hazards of ritual, devotion, divination, and illusion, examining what it means to believe.
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Stranger
by Emily Hunt
The Song Cave
March 2023, Paperback, $18.95
Stranger, Emily Hunt's long-awaited follow-up to her acclaimed debut collection of poems, intimately chronicles the effects of love, labor, and grief on the life and sensibility of an artist.
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Galáxias
by Haroldo de Campos
translated by Odile Cisneros
Ugly Duckling Presse
May 2024, Paperback $20
Galáxias is Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos' chief poetic accomplishment. Translated by Odile Cisneros, this series of 50 “galactic cantos” incorporates literary allusion, citation, and phrases in a dozen languages, making Galáxias a formidable experiment in polyglot poetry.
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An Abundance of Caution
by George Witte
Unbound Edition Press
May 2023, Hardback, $24
“Incantatory…an era-encapsulating collection of stylish, deftly composed poems.”
—Kirkus Reviews
The poems in An Abundance of Caution seek grace, compassion, and clarity in a time marked by
environmental crisis, global pandemic, and personal loss.
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Origins of the Syma Species
by Tare Oburumu
University of Nebraska Press
March 2024, Paperback, $17.95
Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize, Tares Oburumu’s collection is a brief history of Syma, the neglected oil-producing region of Nigeria he came from, mixing music, religion, and political critique to evoke pasts and futures.
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No Charity in the Wilderness: Poems
by Shaun T. Griffin
University of Nevada Press
April 2024, Paperback, $18.95
Poet Shaun T. Griffin accompanies the reader on a long journey into the new American West. From the southern border to isolating two-lane highways in the desert, this collection offers a prayer of reconciliation.
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The Selected Shepherd
by Reginald Shepherd, selected and with an introduction by Jericho Brown
University of Pittsburgh Press
April 2024, Hardcover and e-Book, $30
A new retrospective on the work of an important and sometimes controversial Black, gay poet. Jericho Brown’s introduction provides additional context and insight on this groundbreaking figure in American poetry.
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Cheryl's Destinies
by Stephen Sexton
Wake Forest University Press
February 2024, Paperback, $14.95
Radicals liberate a zoo, teenagers flirt in a bowling alley, and W.B. Yeats discovers The Smashing Pumpkins. Cheryl tells our fortune, revealing how we exist in past, present, and future at once.
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Irregular Heartbeats at the
Park West
by Russell Brakefield
Wayne State University Press
January 2024, Paperback, $17.99
Bold yet vulnerable poems that traverse family, friendship, grief, Americana, and the writer’s life. Drawing on a depth of emotion, wit, and reverence for nature, this striking collection captures the beautiful and often poignant complexities of the human experience.
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Diver Beneath the Street
by Petra Kuppers
Wayne State University Press
February 2024, Paperback, $17.99
A decaying psychogeography unfurls the landscapes of the 1967–69 Michigan Murders, the 2019 Detroit serial killer, and the COVID-19 lockdown in this visceral poetry collection from author, performance artist, and disability culture activist Petra Kuppers.
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Room Swept Home
by Remica Bingham-Risher
Wesleyan University Press
February 2024, Hardcover, $26; e-Book, $20.99; and Audiobook, $21.99
Intimate and sweeping poetry that examines race and lineage, marrying meticulous archival research with Womanist scholarship and lyrical precision.
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