2021 Featured Fall Books from our Partners, Sponsors, & Advertisers

Luminous Blue Variables and Other Major Poems
by Michelle Boisseau
BkMk Press
November 2021
Paperback, $15.95

“Of whom or what does she not speak? Pliny the Elder, the Stasi and the Berlin Wall, Voltaire, slavery, the Gestapo, her father, and, in a language that glistens, Danaë in her ‘tower of light.’”—Alice Friman

You Better Be Lightning
by Andrea Gibson
Button Poetry
November 2021
Paperback & e-Book, $18

A queer, political, and feminist collection guided by self-reflection. One of the most celebrated poets and performers of the last two decades, Andrea Gibson’s trademark honesty and vulnerability are on full display.

Her Kind
by Cindy Veach 
CavanKerry Press
October 2021
Paperback, $18

Her Kind is a book about women: women viewed as witches; making their own choices; fighting for freedom—innocents used/and or culturally disregarded. This narrative weaves historical events (Salem Witch Trials), personal history, and contemporary political circumstances.

Uncertain Acrobats
by Rebecca Hart Olander
CavanKerry Press
November 2021
Paperback, $18

Musical, genuine, and human, Uncertain Acrobats is a meditation on divorce, family, coming of age, and mortality. In this intimate collection, both the living and dying fumble for balance as life’s end and grief draw near.

ink earl
by Susan Holbrook
Coach House Books
September 2021
Paperback, $21.95

ink earl takes the popular subgenre of erasure poetry to its illogical conclusion.




 

Lightning Falls in Love
by Laura Kasischke
Copper Canyon Press
September 2021
Paperback, $17

Expanding her narrative prose prowess, Laura Kasischke balances surrealism and introspection to chart human transgression and its consequences in her twelfth poetry collection, Lightning Falls in Love.

A God at the Door
by Tishani Doshi
Copper Canyon Press
November 2021
Paperback, $16

Forward Poetry Prize winner Tishani Doshi crafts an intimate fourth collection of poems that reclaims the body as a site of immense struggle and beauty.

Winter Phoenix
by Sophia Terazawa
Deep Vellum Books
October 2021
Paperback, $16

A profound debut collection blending testimony and tribunal, Winter Phoenix creates a courtroom for colonial and linguistic reckoning after the Vietnam War. 

Habitus
by Radna Fabias,
translated by David Colmer
Deep Vellum Books
September 2021
Paperback, $15.95

Subversive, visual, and bold, Curaçao-born Dutch Radna Fabias’ explosive debut collection Habitus marks the entry of a genre-altering poet, the most acclaimed debut ever in the Dutch language. 

Maroon Choreography
by fahima ife
Duke University Press
August 2021 
Paperback & e-Book, $21.95

“fahima ife has written a funky, rigorous, and lyrical investigation of what it is to have and not have a body. An incredible tempest of a book.” —Fred Moten

No One’s Witness
by Rachel Zolf
Duke University Press
August 2021 
Paperback & e-Book, $24.95

“No One’s Witness shows in brilliant and moving ways how language must change to come close to registering the living aftermath of destruction.” —Judith Butler

Problematica: New and Selected Poems 1995 - 2020
by George Murray
ECW Press
September 2021
Hardcover, $29.95

Problematica— a scientific term describing species that defy classification. Problematica brings together the best of Murray’s earlier poems and his new work, delving into what it means to arrive, live, and leave. 

The Book of Anna
by Joy Ladin
EOAGH Books
March 2021
Paperback, $20

Prose diary entries and autobiographical poems tell the story of Anna Ascher, a fictional Czech-German Jew and Holocaust survivor. Written during Joy Ladin’s gender transition, this book was pivotal for the development of her poetics. 

Dark Side of the Fence
by LaMar S. Giles
First Edition Design Publishing
September 2021
Hardcover, $18.95

Dark Side of the Fence was sparked by a recent chain of events, leading to the explosion of racial turmoil. This collection explores hunger & homelessness, racism, American society, and the intricacies of music. This collection sheds light on the inequities facing the downtrodden members of society. 

Gentefication
by Antonio de Jesús López
Four Way Books
September 2021
Paperback, $18.00

Winner of the Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry, selected by Gregory Pardlo. From its titular portmanteau, Gentefication represents Latinx death as a loss first encountered through language. It asks, “what are the hauntings of a tongue coerced to speak English?” and celebrates linguistic resistance, solidarity, and triumph. 

Cutlish
by Rajiv Mohabir 
Four Way Books
June 2021 
Paperback, $18.95

In Cutlish, a title referencing the rural recasting of the cutlass, Rajiv Mohabir creates a form migrated from chutney music in order to verse the precarity of a queer Indo-Caribbean speaker in the United States. 

Yellow Rain
by Mai Der Vang
Graywolf Press
September 2021 
Paperback & e-Book, $17

In poems that sing, lament, contend, and question, Vang restores a vital Hmong narrative in danger of being lost, and explores what it means to access truth and how marginalized groups are often forbidden that access.

I Remember Death by its Proximity to What I Love
by Mahogany L. Browne
Haymarket Books
September 2021
Paperback, $16

I Remember Death by its Proximity to What I Love is an evocative book-length poem that explores the impacts of the prison system on both the incarcerated and the loved ones left behind.

RIFQA
by Mohammed El-Kurd
Haymarket Books
October 2021
Paperback, $16

With razor-sharp wit and glistening moral clarity, Mohammed El-Kurd traces his grandmother, Rifqa’s, exile from Haifa to his family's current dispossession in Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem, exposing the cyclical and relentless horror of the Nakba. 

There are Trans People Here
by H. Melt
Haymarket Books
November 2021
Paperback, $16

With humor and generosity, H. Melt’s debut poetry collection pushes against the belied silence of trans people, looks at trans resilience and joy, and the connection between trans activism and other liberation movements.

Czesław Miłosz: A California Life
by Cynthia L. Haven
Heyday Books
October 2021
Hardcover & E-book, $26 

Filled with original research and written with the grace and liveliness of a novel, Czesław Miłosz: A California Life is both an essential volume for his most devoted readers and a perfect introduction for newcomers.

Years of Fire and Ash: South African Poems of Decolonisation
edited and introduced by Wamuwi Mbao
Jonathan Ball Publishers
March 2021
Paperback, $18.00

In Years of Fire and Ash: South African Poems of Decolonisation, fifty years of protest poetry are brought together in one volume by literary critic and lecturer Dr. Wamuwi Mbao.

Molière: The Complete Richard Wilbur Translations
by Molière,
translated by Richard Wilbur
Library of America
November 2021
Hardcover, $64.40

For the 400th anniversary of the great French playwright's birth, all ten of Richard Wilbur’s unsurpassed translations of Molière’s plays—towering achievements in English verse—are brought together for the first time in this two-volume gift set.

Vestigial
by Aja Couchois Duncan
Litmus Press
August 2021
Paperback, $18.00

“Vestigial is a flesh epic braiding time and bodies... At scales simultaneously intimate and monumental, the poet resists the figurative to orchestrate eros, violence, and corporeal transformation. This is visionary work.” — Douglas Kearney

Body Was
by Isabelle Garron,
translated by Eléna Rivera
Litmus Press
October 2021
Paperback, $18

“In this massive work of tantalizing minimalism, precise specifics work in counterpoint to fluid abstractions... Shore, fire, you—they all return us to the body... Rivera’s translation gorgeously captures… the architecture of sound that holds the whole work aloft.”—Cole Swensen

Masquerade
by Carolyne Wright
Lost Horse Press
October 2021
Paperback, $21

Carolyne Wright’s ambitious new collection, Masquerade, recounts the arc of a decades-ago love affair. In the course of the narrative, the poet considers how we return to the wonder and force of feelings, how we try to tame sorrow and regret with words, how words are required to approach the body’s understanding. There are poems here of undeniable formal mastery, and there’s no escaping a kind of almost courageous will to transcend loss and look accountability in the face. 

Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief
by Victoria Chang
Milkweed Editions
October 2021
Hardcover, $25

“A tender exploration of grief, an excavation into stories untold, memories unshared, the treasures that await our discovery if we trace the lives that held ours.”—Kao Kalia Yang

Philomath: Poems
by Devon Walker-Figueroa
Milkweed Editions
September 2021
Paperback, $16

“Walker-Figueroa’s work is powerful, at times mysterious, and a thrilling study of memory, time and events both quotidian and historic . . . Philomath is sure to be a notable debut.” —Chicago Review of Books

The Echo Chamber: Poems
by Michael Bazzett
Milkweed Editions
October 2021
Paperback, $16

“The poems in The Echo Chamber boom and toll with history and myth, and into the scorching present tense...The Echo Chamber is a masterwork of truth-telling.”—Diane Seuss

English Lit
by Bernard Clay
Ohio University Press
August 2021
Paperback, $18.95

Affrilachian Poet Bernard Clay narrates his West-Side Louisville upbringing and the complexities of Black Appalachian identity in this debut collection of poems compiled from more than twenty years of work.

Genghis Chan on Drums
by John Yau
Omnidawn 
October 2021
Paperback $17.95

John Yau’s name is synonymous with esteemed/cutting-edge art criticism and poetry: arts editor for Brooklyn Rail (2007–2011), a regular writer for Hyperallergic, Professor of Critical Studies at Mason-Gross School of Arts (Rutgers).

Mutiny
by Phillip B. Williams
Penguin Books
Paperback, $20

A bold, intimate, and sonically mesmerizing new collection about revolt and renewal from Phillip B. Williams, the critically acclaimed author of Thief in the Interior who writes with “a lucid, unmitigated humanity.” (Boston Review)

The Last Thing: New & Selected Poems 
by Patrick Rosal
Persea Books
September 2021
Hardcover $26.95

A substantial playlist of new work—hard-hitting and big-hearted—along with ample selections from Rosal’s first four books. Infused with love and awe, this is essential reading from a poet of vigor and conscience.

Everything Never Comes Your Way
by Nicole Stellon O’Donnell
Red Hen Press
August 2021
Paperback, $16.95

Nicole Stellon O’Donnell explores the landscapes of memory, argument, and wilderness by deconstructing memoir, digging at the roots of philosophical argumentation, and critiquing the role of the poet as an observer of the natural world.

A Dangerous Place
by Chelsea B. DesAutels
Sarabande Books
October 2021
Paperback, $15.95

A speaker survives a pregnancy-caused cancer diagnosis in early motherhood, thrusting her into a world in which sex, pregnancy, marriage, and parenthood are simultaneously life-giving and dangerous. A Dangerous Place is elegant, moving, and transcendental.

The Moon Over Edgar
by Ian Felice
Sibling Rivalry Press
February 2022
Paperback $15.95

From the pen that crafted the lyrics of The Felice Brothers’ multiple albums, these 60 linked sonnets invite readers into realms of the strange—fairy tales, prophecies, premonitions—with a powerful sense of beauty.


 

Punks: New & Selected Poems
by John Keene
The Song Cave
December 2021
Paperback, $18.95 

Punks: New & Selected Poems is a generous gathering of astonishing poems by John Keene. “Keene’s masterfully inventive inquiry of self and history is queered, Blackened, and joyously thick with multitudes of voice and valence.”
—Tyehimba Jess

Two Murals
by Jesús Castillo
The Song Cave
October 2021
Paperback, $18.95

Through two long poems, Jesús Castillo’s Two Murals explores the personal and political sides of love, selfhood, and transformation in a wasteful age. “This book is a gathering inside one heart of many voices and the silences that divide them, a virtuoso performance, spellbinding, funny and profoundly sad.”
—D.A. Powell

Father | Genocide
by Margo Tamez
Turtle Point Press
August 2021
Paperback, $18

Tamez unites Indigenous history and her father’s struggle to “be a man” under American domination in this stunning documentation of violence on the American border.

Harm Eden
by Jennifer Nelson
Ugly Duckling Presse
October 2021
Paperback $18

Harm Eden examines how our present-day civilization is built on ordinary and timeless systemic damage, and attempts to think through and simultaneously away from it by exploiting the tension between history and poetry.

I Want Something Other Than Time
by Lewis Freedman
Ugly Duckling Presse
October 2021
Paperback, $18

Across a series of sixty-four poems, each titled with the eponymous refrain, I Want Something Other Than Time worries the problem of self-identically—the distance between the self and the self that recognizes the self.

Gumbo Ya Ya
by Aurielle Marie
University of Pittsburgh Press
September 2021
Paperback & e-Book, $18 

Aurielle Marie’s stunning debut is a cauldron of hearty poems exploring race, gender, desire, and violence in the lives of Black gxrls, soaring against the backdrop of a contemporary South. 

The Past
by Wendy Xu
Wesleyan University Press
September 2021
Paperback, $18

Born in Shandong, China, Wendy Xu immigrated to the US in 1989, three days ahead of the events of Tian’anmen Square. The Past probes the multi-generational binds of family, displacement, and immigration as psychic experience without end. 

The Uncommon Speech of Paradise: Poems on the Art of Poetry
by Robert Hedin and Jim Lenfensty
White Pine Press
September 2021
Paperback, $20

A showcase for the works of 120 poets including Heaney, Milosz, Neruda, Akhmatova, Ashbery, Dove, Oliver, Harjo, and Stevens. Together, they offer a wide variety of voices, styles, and perspectives on the theory, practice, and purpose of poetry.