October is Filipino American History Month! To help bookstores and libraries celebrate, we’ve put together this roundup of 10 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 Filipino American History Month for more books to feature!)
Nightboat Books | August 15, 2023
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
ISBN: 9781643621739
Comprising three long poems, this collection is “an autohistoriography of felt time that arises from subversive hearing practices and the emotional prosody of a mother tongue one does not understand but activates in another poetic language.”
Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet by Rhoni Blankenhorn
Trio House Press | July 1, 2025
Distributor: Publishers Group West
ISBN: 9781949487350
In this poetry collection, “the beauty and comedy of daily life becomes a provocation into nonlinearity, sexuality, family history, and multiracial selfhood.”
Alice James Books | March 7, 2023
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
ISBN: 9781948579315
According to Hilary Sun, this collection “reminds us that we can break this cycle of bitterness and transform it into beautiful, imagined futures. To be eaten does not have to be othering; it can be a way of knowing and understanding.”
Leaving Biddle City by Marianne Chan
Sarabande Books | July 30, 2024
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
ISBN: 9781956046298
This coming-of-age collection “details one Filipina American speaker’s experience of growing up amid a white, Midwestern suburbia mythologized as ‘Biddle City.’”
My Love Is Water by Rob Macaisa Colgate
Ugly Duckling Presse | June 1, 2025
Distributor: Asterism Books
ISBN: 9781946604347
In this hybrid collection of drama and poetry “tracing the disintegration of a recent relationship,” the narrator “traverses a Chicago apartment filled with gay ghosts and broken Tagalog.”
Caulbearer by Luisa A. Igloria
Black Lawrence Press | August 20, 2024
Distributor: Independent Publishers Group
ISBN: 9781625570789
Igloria’s collection weaves “poems exploring the veiled intervals of transition experienced by those in the diaspora—or by anyone who has felt a severing from their origins.”
Near Your Mirror Home (Stay On) by Paolo Javier
Poets of Queens | November 1, 2024
Distributor: Ingram
ISBN: 9798990473324
Javier’s collection features both “a serial poem that revels in/reveals the slipperiness of desire and separation from place and language in the Dreaming, and a long poem that roars at white supremacy, misogyny, and horizontal hate.”
Beyond the Galleons by Isabel Cristina Legarda
Yellow Arrow Publishing | April 9, 2024
Distributor: IngramSpark
ISBN: 9798988317616
This collection is “a meditation on Filipino experiences of colonization, ancestral connection, alienation, and the ghosts that haunt people living in geographic or psychological diasporas.”
American Inmate: The Album by Justin Rovillos Monson
Haymarket Books | March 12, 2024
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
ISBN: 9781642599732
Monson’s debut collection “subverts contemporary discourse and representations of incarceration, of hip-hop, and of Asian American culture and literature.”
Baobab Press | April 8, 2025
Distributor: Publishers Group West
ISBN: 9781936097562
The speaker in this poetry collection “seems to ask, ‘Why were we born? How do we live with the circumstances of our birth, both historically and culturally?’”
