April is Arab American Heritage Month! To help bookstores and libraries celebrate, we’ve put together this roundup of 11 poetry collections to spotlight all month and year-round. (We publish longer reading lists each month as well—check out our most recent reading list for Arab American Heritage Month for more books to feature!)
come from by janan alexandra
BOA Editions | April 29, 2025
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 9781960145475
In this poetry collection, alexandra “invites readers into a world bristling with family, memory, home, and inheritance—all in the wake of dislocation and fracture.”
Arabic, between Love and War
trace press | January 14, 2024
Distributor: Ingram
ISBN: 978-1-775-2567-6-2
Edited by Norah Alkharashi and Yasmine Haj, this bilingual poetry anthology—in which “language dissolves into cities, landscapes, or portals that open to rubble, or only air”—features George Abraham, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Zeena Faulk, Miled Faiza, and more poets and translators writing in Arabic and English.
Wildness Before Something Sublime by Leila Chatti
Copper Canyon Press | February 9, 2025
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 9781556597169
Chatti’s poetry collection “confronts a world defined by dualities—love and loss, wonder and despair, the gift of ‘sunflowers / by the roadside’ and the pain of losing a pregnancy.”
I Want You to Know by Mona Damluji
Seven Stories Press | March 19, 2025
Distributor: Penguin Random House
ISBN: 978-1-64421-441-1
According to Aya Ghanameh, this poem with illustrations by Ishtar Bäcklund Dakhil “offers young readers a meaningful way to explore the complexities of family heritage, displacement, and the lasting effects of war.”
The Hungering Years by Summer Farah
Host Publications | February 24, 2026
Distributor: Asterism Books
ISBN: 979-8-9905483-4-3
“Through intimate conversations with fellow Arab-American writer and literary ancestor Etel Adnan,” this poetry collection “finds the courage to ask: What is art? An escape? A reflection? Another unhealthy attachment?”
Fugitive/Refuge by Philip Metres
Copper Canyon Press | April 9, 2024
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 9781556596698
In this book-length qasida, Metres “follows the journey of his refugee ancestors—from Lebanon to Mexico to the United States—in a vivid exploration of what it means to long for home.”
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[…] by Fady Joudah
Milkweed Editions | March 5, 2024
Distributor: Publishers Group West
ISBN: 978-1-63955-128-6
In these poems, Joudah “offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens—a world filled with ordinary desires, no matter how grand or tragic the details may be—and asks their reader to be changed by them.”
Voice/Poems by Susan Azar Porterfield
Trio House Press | July 1, 2025
Distributor: Ingram
ISBN: 978-1949487466
According to Zeeshan Pathan, Porterfield is a “master of restraint and deeply mines the domestic interior of her life in poem after poem.”
Mercurial, or Is That Liberty? by Rachelle Rahmé
Fonograf Editions | October 14, 2025
Distributor: NYU Press
ISBN: 978-1-964499-57-4
This debut poetry collection is “the work of a dual citizen—dual in conscience, dual in political allegiance, in exteriority, in friction with gender’s dualism, aspiration’s dualism, and the ache of the ethical.”
Monk Fruit by Edward Salem
Nightboat Books | September 23, 2025
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 978-1-64362-291-0
According to Natalie Shapero, these poems “spin absurdist nightmares of art and history, of links and screenshots and mediated engagement with atrocity, of the genocide against Palestinians and the many attendant erasures.”
Terror Counter by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi
Deep Vellum | June 24, 2025
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 978-1-64605-379-7
This poetry collection “acts against the many languages—interpersonal, legal, literary, rhetorical—constricting the lives and meanings of Palestinians.”
