A Poetry Reading List for the 25th Anniversary of National Poetry Month from our Partners & Sponsors

Mister Toebones
by Brooks Haxton
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
March 2021
Hardcover, $28

Award-winning poet Haxton turns a searching gaze toward the inter-twined habitat and fates of man and animal. He looks through time, down at the soil, up at the stars, and deeply into his personal relationships. 

Iron Goddess of Mercy
by Larissa Lai
Arsenal Pulp
April 2021
Paperback, $17.95

Summoning the ghosts of history (the Japanese and British occupations of Hong Kong), politics, and ongoing pro-democracy protests, this long poem explores the complexities of “Asian” identity through the lens of rage and empowerment.

 

Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey
by Craig Morgan Teicher
BOA Editions, Ltd.
April 2021
Paperback, $17.00

Neo-confessional poems from Lenore Marshall Poetry Prizewinning poet Craig Morgan Teicher about entering middle-age, moving back to the suburbs, raising a family, sustaining a marriage, and reckoning with the past while hoping for the future.

 

Places We Return To: A Celebration of Twenty Years Publishing Fine Literature 
edited by Joan Cusack Handler & Gabriel Cleveland 
CavanKerry Press 
December 2020
Paperback, $28.00

CavanKerry Press has published fine literature exploring the emotional and psychological landscape of what it means to be human through insightful, accessible writing since 2000. This unique collection celebrates our first 104 deeply resonant books. 


 

West : Fire : Archive 
by Iris Jamahl Dunkle 
Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University 
March 2021
Paperback $16.95, e-Book $13.95 

West : Fire : Archive mends the erasure of Jack London’s wife, Charmian Kittredge London, a woman who broke gender norms, traveled the world, and wrote about it.

Mule Kick Blues, and Last Poems
by Michael McClure
City Lights Books
April 2021
Paperback, $17.95

The final poetry book from a Beat Generation legend finds McClure innovating until the end. “I can’t think of any contemporary artist who explores the inside-out of the dharma as magically as McClure.” —Eileen Myles

Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018
by Daniel Borzutzky 
Coffee House Press
March 2021
Hardcover, $21.95

National Book Award winner Daniel Borzutzky pens an incandescent indictment of capitalism’s moral decay. Bleak but not hopeless, Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 is an unflinching poetic reckoning with the twenty-first century.

 

Why to These Rocks: 50 Years of Poems from the Community of Writers 
edited by Lisa Alvarez
The Community of Writers
March 2021
Hardcover, $28.00

The Community of Writers celebrates fifty years of its annual poetry workshop with this collection featuring some of this country’s most prominent contemporary poets. Foreword by former Poet Laureate Robert Hass, introduction by Lisa Alvarez.

The Essential June Jordan
by June Jordan, ed. by Jan Heller Levi & Christoph Keller
Copper Canyon Press
May 2021
Paperback, $18.00

This definitive volume, featuring an afterword by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jericho Brown, distills the enduring legacy of a powerful voice for radical love and justice. June Jordan is a poet for the ages.





 

Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works
by John Ashbery 
Ecco
June 2021
Hardcover, $26.99

A stunning collection of work from beloved poet John Ashbery, his first posthumous book.

 

Pink
by Sylvie Baumgartel
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 
February 2021
Hardcover, $24.00

A sharp, visceral new collection of poetry that touches on art, history, sex, bodies, language, and the color pink.



 

Averno 
by Louise Glück 
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 
March 2021
Hardcover (reissue), $25.00

2006 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry. 

 

Poems 1962-2012 
by Louise Glück 
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 
March 2021
Hardcover (reissue), $40 

The collected works of the inimitable Pulitzer- and Nobel Prize-winning poet. 

 

Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth 
by Yusef Komunyakaa 
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 
April 2021
Hardcover, $35.00

Selected poems from the past twenty years of Yusef Komunyakaa’s work, as well as new poems from the Pulitzer Prize winner. 
 

The Complete Memoirs
by Pablo Neruda
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
June 2021
Paperback, $20.00

The classic memoir by the Nobel Prize-winning poet, now expanded with newly discovered material.
 

Field Study
by Chet'la Sebree
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
June 2021
Paperback, $16.00

A genre-bending exploration of Black womanhood and desire, written as a lyrical, surprisingly humorous, and startlingly vulnerable prose poem. Winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award.

 

Renditions
by Reginald Gibbons
Four Way Books
February 2021
Paperback, $16.95 

An energetic exploration of the expanse of language translated and otherwise transformed.



 

Prometeo
by C. Dale Young 
Four Way Books 
February 2021
Paperback, $16.95 

An unflinching reckoning with the traumas of one’s life and those inherited through a history of exacted injustices.

Water / Music
by Peter Filkins
Johns Hopkins University Press
April 2021
Paperback & e-Book, $19.95

A diverse display of formal dexterity, narrative power, and lyrical resonance, Peter Filkins’s latest collection of poems explores the fraught relationship between the natural world and the human.



 

African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song
edited by Kevin Young
Library of America
October 2020
Hardcover, $45.00

The most ambitious anthology of Black poetry ever published, capturing this diverse tradition in a single indispensable volume and revealing its centrality and its challenge to American poetry and culture.

 

Measurable Terms
by Arlyn LaBelle
The Main Street Rag
January 2021
Paperback, $12.00

Exploring four tonal seasons, Measurable Terms focuses on poetry as an act of intimacy, creating rich, vivid rooms for its readers to enter. It is unwaveringly attentive, skilled, brave, both harmed and—most beautifully—singing.

 

Worldly Things: Poems
by Michael Kleber-Diggs
Milkweed Editions
June 2021
Hardcover, $22

Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Worldly Things is teeming with “supple, socially responsible poems [that] seem to me a triumphant, paradoxical, luminous response to a violent time in our history.” —Henri Cole


 

Double Trio
by Nathaniel Mackey
New Directions
April 2021
Box Set, $65.00

A long poem of fugitive-making like no other: two elegiac, intertwined serial poems—“Song of the Andoumboulou” and “Mu”— that follow a mysterious, migrant “we” through the world’s rhythms with lyrical virtuosity and impassioned expectancy.
 

Curb 
by Divya Victor 
Nightboat Books 
April 2021
Paperback, $16.95 

Curb maps our post-9/11 political landscape by locating the wounds of domestic terrorism at unacknowledged sites of racial and religious conflict across cities and suburbs of the United States.



 

What Water Knows: Poems 
by Jacqueline Jones LaMon 
Northwestern University Press 
June 2021
Paperback & e-Book, $17.00

Wolf Lamb Bomb
by Aviya Kushner
Orison Books
June 2021
Hardcover & e-book, $16.00

Aviya Kushner, author of The Grammar of God, revives and reimagines the Book of Isaiah in her debut poetry collection, Wolf Lamb Bomb. These poems position the prophet Isaiah as a poet, crooner, and rival.

Shellback
by Jeanne-Marie Osterman
Paloma Press
February 2021
Paperback, $16.00 

The daughter of a WWII combat veteran remembers her father, from childhood days trying “to be his boy” to being his caregiver in old age. A portrait of love, forgiveness, and the tragedies of war.




 

Rain in Plural: Poems
by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
Princeton University Press
September 2020
Paperback, $17.95

The highly anticipated new collection from a poet whose previous book was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.





 

Even Shorn
by Isabel Duarte-Gray
Sarabande Books
May 2021
Paperback & e-Book, $15.95

Duarte-Gray mines local orature, family history, folklore, and music of Western Kentucky to create a collection that is shocking, whip smart, and truly unique.

Saturation Project
by Christine Hume
Solid Objects
January 2021
Hardcover, $20.00 Paperback, $18.00

“The genre-defying genius of Saturation Project brings memoir and essay to the land of myth… A feral, humming, windswept girlhood mapped with uncharted brilliance.” —Claudia Rankine.

On the Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing (50th Anniversary Edition) 
edited by Ben Estes & Joel Weishaus 
The Song Cave 
April 2021 
Paperback, $18.00

The Song Cave proudly presents an expanded edition of the long out of print City Lights Books classic On the Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing in celebration of its 50th anniversary.



 

I am The Rage: A Black Poetry Collection 
by Dr. Martina McGowan
Sourcebooks 
February 2021
Tradepaper, $14.99

For those who were inspired by Amanda Gorman’s The Hill We Climb, I am The Rage is a visceral, written-in-the-moment collection of poetry that captures the raw emotion of being a Black woman in America over the last year. 
 

The Body Wars 
by Jan Beatty
University of Pittsburgh Press 
September 2020
Paperback & e-Book, $17.00

What would it take to be home in one’s body, to walk around the world as oneself, knowing the pain within and without us? Beatty boldly answers by making a fire map of the body.





 

Red Obsidian
by Stephan Torre
University of Regina Press
March 2021
Paperback, $19.95

A visceral new collection grappling with the strength and complexities of life in the northwest wild lands. With new and selected poems, Red Obsidian explores the tensions between genders, and the grief of environmental loss.

When the Heart Needs a Stunt Double 
by Diane DeCillis 
Wayne State University Press 
April 2021
Paperback & e-Book, $16.99

This book takes us on a journey of what it means to be fully human and celebrates the beauty of our scars. These are love poems: to others, to the self, to the body.




 

Felon: Poems 
by Reginald Dwayne Betts 
W. W. Norton & Company 
March 2021
Paperback. $15.95 

New York Times Notable Book Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration and creates a travelogue for an imagined life. “A powerful work of lyric art.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice.




 

Asked What Has Changed 
by Ed Roberson 
Wesleyan University Press 
March 2021 
Hardcover, $24.95 

Award-winning poet Ed Roberson confronts the realities of an era in which the fate of humanity and the very survival of our planet are uncertain, drawing on what the sciences reveal about our changing world.