We’re excited to share this year-end roundup of poetry anthologies, chapbooks, and full-length collections published in 2022 by independent literary publishers! (Read our year-end roundups for fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, and art and drama as well.)
Poetry Anthologies
Bone & Marrow: An Anthology of Irish Poetry from Medieval to Modern
Wake Forest University Press | March 17, 2022
Edited by Samuel K. Fisher and Brian Ó Conchubhair, Bone & Marrow: An Anthology of Irish Poetry from Medieval to Modern “is the most inclusive and comprehensive anthology of Irish-language poetry to date.”
The Country Where Everyone’s Name Is Fear by Boris and Lyudmyla Khersonsky
Lost Horse Press | April 15, 2022
Edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris, these poems from Ukraine at the start of the 21st century “speak about the memory of historical trauma and witness stark individual voices that pierce through the wall of complacency.”
Deerbrook Editions | April 26, 2022
The ten Maine writers featured in this anthology edited by Jeffrey Haste, Martin Steingesser, and Judy Tierney “investigate those profound memories that shape us throughout our lives and examine the natural world that can transform us every day.”
Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology
Autumn House Press | May 11, 2022
Edited by Michael Walsh, this anthology featuring more than 200 queer writers “amplifies and centers LGBTQIA+ voices and perspectives in a collection of contemporary nature poetry.”
And Blue Will Rise Over Yellow: An International Poetry Anthology for Ukraine
Kallisto Gaia Press | December 6, 2022
According to Ilya Kaminsky, this anthology—edited by John Bradley—”shows us that human spirit survives, in the midst of bombardments, facing death, there is a voice that cannot be taken away, a voice that joins the chorus of other voices, across the globe.”
Poetry Chapbooks
The Body Has Memories by Adrienne Danyelle Oliver
Nomadic Press | February 5, 2022
In this debut chapbook, Oliver “is very aware that the act of remembering is a much greater collective process. It is the historical dialogues among the ancestors and the living.”
Changeable Gods by Richard Wollman
Slate Roof Press | March 1, 2022
Wollman’s poetry collection “compels the reader through a sequence of beautifully imagistic love poems, in which the changing hues of early morning and the gods themselves emerge and recede.”
I Have Seen the Bluest Blue by Natalee Cruz
Ugly Duckling Presse | March 15, 2022
In this debut poetry chapbook, Cruz “uses loose translations and manipulated language to tell the story of a step-mother’s deportation and a father’s heaviness without her.”
Hey Girl, Are You in the Experimental Group? by Shareen K. Murayama
Harbor Editions | April 8, 2022
According to Arielle Greenberg, Murayama “explores the complex notions of the model minority and privilege and their bearing on Asian-American identity.”
The most beautiful garden by Nikita Rimal Sharma
Yellow Arrow Publishing | April 12, 2022
In this poetry chapbook, Sharma “walks us through the people, places, and experiences that shaped her becoming.”
The Optimist Shelters in Place by Kimberly Ann Priest
Harbor Editions | April 14, 2022
According to Lisa Fay Coutley, Priest “embraces love and grief through the lens of collective tragedy and the lived experience of a woman alone, attempting to steady self by tending plants and to-do lists and maintaining bonds with her grown kids over FaceTime.”
I Wear My Face in the Field by Ryan Downum
Dream Pop Press | April 26, 2022
According to Johannes Göransson, “this frighteningly assured, sharp-aimed little book of animal poems gets at the weirdness of nature.”
Dream Pop Press | April 26, 2022
Jennifer Hasegawa says, “The poems in BLUE 4 U are a journey through a shape-shifting house of dream, risk, and longing.”
A Song by the Aegean Sea by Mohamed Metwalli
Translated from Arabic by Gretchen McCullough
Laertes Books | May 17, 2022
According to Jennifer Horne, Metwalli’s poems “are set in the ancient coastal city of Izmir and peopled by lovers, tourists, fishermen, prostitutes, construction workers, musicians, gypsies, card players, lunatics, and ghosts.”
If Rust Can Grow on the Moon by Joan Kwon Glass
Milk & Cake Press | June 1, 2022
If Rust Can Grow on the Moon is a “brave recounting of addiction and recovery through unsparingly direct language and vivid vignettes.”
Bamboo Dart Press | June 10, 2022
The poems in this collection “will lead you across a bridge made of bread, through a door in the forest, to a paddock containing stories.”
Choeofpleirn Press | July 8, 2022
In this poetry chapbook, Schumer “explores several epiphanic moments, from learning what her weight would be on other planets and the sun to realizing that love, even the unconditional kind, can be painful.”
when the daffodils die by Darah Schillinger
Yellow Arrow Publishing | July 12, 2022
In this debut poetry collection, Schillinger explores “young love, a mother’s love, self-love, spiritual love, all-encompassing love.”
City Slicker by Stephanie Barbé Hammer
Bamboo Dart Press | July 15, 2022
In this poetry collection, Barbé Hammer “runs in and out of sprinklers in a Manhattan playground, picks up a slug by accident in the Cascades, reads about sequoia on 5th avenue, make an uncomfortable journey to the Hôpital américain in Paris, strolls a surprisingly sensual Geneva Switzerland at 2 am,” and more.
Choeofpleirn Press | July 15, 2022
Lerman’s poetry chapbook was selected by Laura Read as winner of the Jonathan Holden Poetry Chapbook Contest.
The Future Perfect: A Fugue by Eric Pankey
Tupelo Press | August 1, 2022
Winner of the Snowbound Chapbook Award, this long polyphonic poem is, according to John Yau, “an intricate work of decisive oscillation, of tender and careful attention shifting swiftly and precisely between the infinitesimal and the vast.”
Dearth & God’s Green Mirth by Cody-Rose Clevidence
Fonograf Editions | August 9, 2022
The two projects in this chapbook “discard formalisms—even their own—to investigate the relationship between the space of the whole universe and god.”
Missing Shaun by Thomas R. Thomas
Bamboo Dart Press | August 10, 2022
According to Alexis Rhone Fancher, “Thomas has created a loving tribute to his son Shaun, whose cut-short life is both mourned and celebrated in this exquisite, moving collection.”
She, Self-Winding by Luu Dieu Van
Ugly Duckling Presse | September 15, 2022
This collection explores “the trajectory of an immigrant girl from a remote village who endures the aftermath of a civil war as she makes her escape by boat, leaves behind a home country, copes with domestic violence and abuse as a teenager, and grows up in a democratic Western society as a woman forming her own social and sexual paradigms, all in times of incredulity.”
space neon neon space by luna rey hall
Variant Literature | September 17, 2022
In this poetry collection, “gender is transformed and painted in the brightest lavender, and the speaker must learn to escape the societal violence of labeling anything they fear enough to try and contain.”
fifth wheel press | October 7, 2022
COMRADE is a poetry chapbook “tracing a queer personal history and interrogating a relationship between a father and his son as immigrants in a new country.”
Gazing Down on It by Lauren de Sá Naylor
Ugly Duckling Presse | October 15, 2022
This poetry chapbook is “a collection of dream narratives, of language as weapon or prayer, compiled in the plague year of 2020.”
Belle Point Press | October 25, 2022
In this poetry chapbook, “whether confronting the reality of a sick sister, recalling traumatic experiences, or wandering the streets of New Orleans, Hush hums with a tenderness that stays with you long after the lights go out.”
Why Misread a Cloud by Emily Carlson
Tupelo Press | November 1, 2022
This poetry chapbook is both “an exploration of the mind’s ability to turn what is into something else, in order to survive, and the mind’s ability to resist the effects of psychosocial warfare—imposed by the military and the police.”
Where the Men Come From by N. W. Downs
fifth wheel press | November 4, 2022
Where the Men Come From is a poetry chapbook “exploring religion’s conflict with the queer body, asking whether either of them remain sacred after [god] has been called in to account for his actions.”
The Alpinist Searches Lonely Places by Kyle Vaughn
Belle Point Press | November 9, 2022
In this poetry chapbook, “Vaughn is speaking to someone who shifts as quickly as the locations of these poems.”
Bird/Diz [an erased history of be-bop] by Warren C. Longmire
BUNNY/Fonograf Editions | November 15, 2022
This erasure chapbook “navigates the personal and artistic lives of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie through the author’s own roving imagination.”
Split Rock Press | November 16, 2022
The poems in this chapbook “are meditations on the slippery, intangible notion of home.”
Autobiography by Rebecca Macijeski
Split Rock Press | November 16, 2022
Macijeski’s poetry chapbook is “a celebration of the experience of discovering, recovering, and re-envisioning the self.”
Listening for Low Tide by James P. Cooper
Choeofpleirn Press | November 19, 2022
Listening for Low Tide is a collection of twenty-five poems “set in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Northern Ireland, with references as well to Montana, England and Adak, Alaska.”
lunduzinho by Tatiana Nascimento
Translated from the Portuguese by Natália Affonso
Ugly Duckling Presse | December 15, 2022
According to Akilah White, “lunduzinho is tatiana nascimento’s living testament, demiurgic engine, and praise poem to the boundless possibilities inherent in a queer Afro-Brazilian poetical philosophy.”
OUTSIDE TEXTS by Eleonora Requena
Translated from the Spanish by Guillermo Parra
Ugly Duckling Presse | December 15, 2022
Textos por fuera / Outside Texts is “a collection of poems that question themselves, the Spanish language, the poetic self, and the author’s personal geographies within and beyond Venezuela and Argentina.”
IT GOT SO DARK by Benjamin Krusling
Ugly Duckling Presse | December 15, 2022
According to Simone White, Krusling’s writing “is sensitive, skittish, seems to have no proper skin; its unmediated effects are both intoxicating and mystifying.”
Poetry Collections
Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens by Corey Van Landingham
Tupelo Press | January 1, 2022
This poetry collection “considers the way that the absence of touch—in acts of war via the drone, in acts of love via the sext, in aesthetics itself—abstracts the human body, transforming it into a proxy for the real.”
The Lantern Room by Chloe Honum
Tupelo Press | January 1, 2022
According to Allison Titus, The Lantern Room “is stunning and harrowing, built of poems that interrogate the wound of grief, the wound of love, and insist on asking an impossible question.”
White Bull by Elizabeth Hughey
Sarabande Books | January 4, 2022
Winner of the 2020 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry judged by Alberto Ríos, this poetry collection is “composed entirely of words taken from the letters and public statements of the notorious segregationist Bull Connor.”
Zephyr Press | January 4, 2022
Presented bilingually in Burmese and English, these poems by Ko Ko Thett “bring oddball lists, linguistic inventiveness, and sardonic humor to the brutal contradictions of life and history in and outside of his native Burma.”
Complete Poems by Jim Harrison
Copper Canyon Press | January 11, 2022
Introduced by Terry Tempest Williams, this collection “contains every poem Harrison published over his fifty-year career and displays his wide range of poetic styles and forms.”
Shaking the Persimmon Tree by Marc Woodward
Sea Crow Press | January 17, 2022
In his new collection, Woodward “writes of time spent in Italy, India and elsewhere, as well as drawing from the rural environment of his home in Devon, England.”
All I See Is Your Glinting: 90 Days in the Pandemic by Gianna Russo
Madville Publishing | January 18, 2022
This dialogue between Russo’s poems and photographs by Jenny Carey “documents each day of the last quarter of 2020.”
The Tradition: Civic Dialogue Edition by Jericho Brown
Copper Canyon Press | January 25, 2022
In this special edition of the Pulitzer Prize–winning poetry collection, which includes a discussion guide and an interview with the author, readers “are invited to participate in an urgent dialogue—sparked by poetry—about what it means to be human.”
The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez by Iliana Rocha
Tupelo Press | February 1, 2022
This collection “chronicles an obsession with the 1971 unsolved murder of Rocha’s grandfather while interrogating the true crime genre, tabloid culture, immigrant identity, the phenomena of missing and murdered women, troubled relationships with law enforcement, and the intersection of prose and poetry.”
The Song Cave | February 1, 2022
Estes’s “achingly personal second collection unfolds to reveal an uncertain past, present, and future that is by turns mysterious and beautiful.”
Poetry Is Life: Writing with Yellow Arrow
Yellow Arrow Publishing | February 1, 2022
Poetry Is Life: Writing with Yellow Arrow is a collection of prompts and poems by Ann Quinn and eight poets from Quinn’s monthly workshop sponsored by Yellow Arrow Publishing.
The King’s Touch: Poems by Tom Sleigh
Graywolf Press | February 1, 2022
The poems in Sleigh’s new collection “are charged with a powerful sense of premonition, as if the future is unfolding before us, demanding something greater than the self.”
Down the Foggy Streets of My Mind-Portal to Dissociation by Kelliane Parker
Nomadic Press | February 5, 2022
Parker’s poetry collection “is an ode to those of us who live with Dissociative Disorders such as PTSD and DID” and “an unapologetic anthem for survivors of sexual violence to rid themselves of being shamed and blamed in silence.”
fool[ishly optimistic] by Katie Aliféris
Nomadic Press | February 5, 2022
This poetry collection is “a deep-dive into soul-shaking, life-changing love” and “an invitation to own, honor, and process the truths of our bravest and most beautiful feelings of the heart.”
Hell/a Mexican by Kevin Madrigal Galindo
Nomadic Press | February 5, 2022
“An appreciation of the tragicomedy that is existing on American soil with foreign roots,” this poetry collection explores “the boundless experience of living and learning through your identity.”
Nomadic Press | February 5, 2022
Subia’s poetry collection is “an ode to all the simple moments of pleasure that pull us back to the shoreline, that despite our surmounting darkness will always and inevitably find our joy again.”
Hot Thicket by Cassandra Rockwood Ghanem
Nomadic Press | February 5, 2022
According to Kimi Sugioka, this poetry collection “succeeds by exposing and deposing the violation of the feminine that permeates our personal and societal mythologies.”
Loss and the Other Rivers that Devour by Gustavo Barahona-López
Nomadic Press | February 5, 2022
In this poetry collection, Barahona-López “struggles with and is shaped by loss and its many hauntings: toxic masculinity, colonial erasures of language and heritage, and the legacy of the United States’ xenophobic immigration policies.”
Nomadic Press | February 5, 2022
Green’s poetry collection “has many recurring themes—non-binary gender, queer and bi+ sexuality, and childhood and psychiatric trauma.”
Nomadic Press | February 5, 2022
This poetry collection “examines through verse uncontrolled corporate power and executives’ need for more at our Earth’s expense.”
Nomadic Press | February 5, 2022
REVENGE BODY “traces moments in the aftermath of survival and rebuilding toward a more livable future for survivors.”
Voodoo Libretto: New and Selected Poems by Tim Seibles
Etruscan Press | February 15, 2022
Seibles’s latest poetry collection “is in many ways a book of memories, a chronicle of both the personal and the political sensibility of a black baby-boomer.”
Desgraciado: (The Collected Letters) by Angel Dominguez
Nightboat Books | February 15, 2022
The epistolary poems in this collection “exorcise and explore the material violence and generational trauma of colonization and systemic racism stored within queer Latinx memory.”
The World That the Shooter Left Us by Cyrus Cassells
Four Way Books | February 15, 2022
Cassells “explores, in his most fearless book to date, the brutality, bigotry, and betrayal at the heart of current America.”
Four Way Books | February 15, 2022
In this poetry collection, Redel “interrogates the idea of paradise within the historical context of borders, exile, and diaspora that brought us to the present global migration crisis.”
Hotel Oblivion by Cynthia Cruz
Four Way Books | February 15, 2022
Cruz’s poetry collection “chronicles the subject’s repeated attempts at locating an exit from capitalist society via acts of negative freedom and through engagement with the death drive, whose aim is complete destruction in order to begin all over again.”
Four Way Books | February 15, 2022
Aunt Bird is “an astonishing, hybrid poetry of witness that observes and testifies to social, political, and historical realities through the recovery of one life silenced by the past.”
PLEASURE by Angelo Nikolopoulos
Four Way Books | February 15, 2022
Nikolopoulos’s PLEASURE is “a book-length poem which muses on the phenomenology of solitude in a pastoral landscape, written in a diaristic, lyric mode, where the queer ‘I’ alternately savors the decadence of isolation and stands at the precipice of despair.”
indecent hours by James Fujinami Moore
Four Way Books | February 15, 2022
In this debut poetry collection, “sensual, political, and imagined worlds collide, tracing a history of diaspora and trauma that asks: what do we do in the aftermath of violence, and why do we long to inflict it?”
Four Way Books | February 15, 2022
This posthumous collection gathers “the poems written by beloved science editor and journalist David Corcoran in the latter part of his life.”
Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking by C. T. Salazar
Acre Books | February 15, 2022
In this debut poetry collection, “the speaker is situated in the tradition of Southern literature but reimagines its terrain with an eye on the South’s historic and ongoing violence.”
Systems Thinking with Flowers by Krystal Languell
Fonograf Editions | February 15, 2022
In two sections, this poetry collection “chronicles the complex emotional gymnastics required for existence in male-dominated and colonialist environments, such as professional sports, museums, and other institutions.”
No Time for Death by Harris Gardner
Červená Barva Press | February 16, 2022
Gardner’s fourth poetry collection “is divided into three sections: An Argument with Time; Contemplating Mortality Instead of My Navel; and Negotiating for An Afterlife.”
On Earth As It Is by Michael Todd Steffen
Červená Barva Press | February 20, 2022
This poetry collection “upholds the wonders of life on our lonely blue planet, bringing new inflections to the voice of eco-poetry, while formal and topical surprise from poem to poem defies genre.”
Ultramarine by Wayne Koestenbaum
Nightboat Books | February 22, 2022
Ultramarine “distills four years of Koestenbaum’s trance notebooks (2015–2019) into a series of tightly-sewn collage-poems, filled with desiring bodies, cultural touchstones, and salty memories.”
Tanto Tanto by Marina Carreira
CavanKerry Press | March 1, 2022
This poetry collection “highlights two queer daughters of immigrants and the struggles they face in a romantic relationship in the presence of oppressive, culturally sanctioned heteronormativity.”
Before The Dark Comes by Arturo Mantecón
Nomadic Press | March 1, 2022
In this poetry collection written under the pseudonym José Primitivo Charlevoix, “Arturo Mantecón, translator and bibliophile, chances upon a strange leather-bound book found in a vast private library.”
Crow Funeral by Kate Hanson Foster
EastOver Press | March 8, 2022
According to Kristin Hersh, “Foster’s world is a beautiful barn, a frightening mind, and a shimmering street. A timeless America.”
Book*hug Press | March 15, 2022
In this poetry collection, “akin to a poetic memoir, past and present are in conversation with each other as the narrator moves from Ireland to San Fernando, and finally to Canada.”
The Support Verses: Earliest Sayings of the Buddha
Translated from Pali and Sanskrit by Christopher Carter Sanderson
Sagging Meniscus | March 15, 2022
In this translation of The Dhammapada, Sanderson “aims to artistically transmit the essence of Buddha’s sayings in a form useful for meditation.”
Heartbreak Tree by Pauletta Hansel
Madville Publishing | March 15, 2022
Hansel’s poetry collection is “a poetic exploration of the intersection of gender and place in Appalachia.”
The Azure Cloister by Carlos Germán Belli
Translated from the Spanish by Karl Maurer
Swan Isle Press | March 15, 2022
Belli’s poetry collection “tempers a dark, ironic vision of worldly injustice with the ‘red midnight sun’ of hope.”
Palm-Lined with Potience by Basie Allen
Ugly Duckling Presse | March 15, 2022
Allen’s debut poetry collection is “by turns political and lyrical, charting both physical and emotional landscapes, making maps of paintings and paintings of maps.”
Behind the Tree Backs by Iman Mohammed
Translated from Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida
Ugly Duckling Presse | March 15, 2022
This poetry collection “excavates war and displacement through a constellation of animate memories carved out of deep pleasure as well as brutality, the ancient and the institutional, the everyday and the geopolitical.”
CavanKerry Press | March 21, 2022
The poems in this collection “use the literal metaphor of the highway as an intersecting ‘half-life’ point of America, Asia, and the globe to portray journeys from the Korean and Vietnam War eras to current times.”
The Sun of Always by Liliana Ancalao
Translated from Spanish by Seth Michelson
Eulalia Books | March 22, 2022
Published trilingually in Mapudunzun, Spanish, and English, this poetry collection is “a reckoning and interrogation of the narrative of the benevolent (Western/-minded) naturalist.”
This Could Take Some Time by Clara Muschietti
Translated from Spanish by Curtis Bauer
Eulalia Books | March 22, 2022
According to Robin Myers, “Muschietti’s poems have the immediacy of photographs, but also their disquiet: they present themselves candidly to the reader before revealing, bit by bit, their strangeness, their secluded disturbances, their expressive shadows, even their humor.”
i take your voice by Marina Blitshteyn
Switchback Books | March 23, 2022
Winner of the 2021 Gatewood Prize, selected by Joy Priest, this book-length poem “reaches towards bridging languages and generations, mother and daughter, both of whom are given unfiltered voice.”
let the dead in by Saida Agostini
Alan Squire Publishing | March 26, 2022
Agostini’s debut collection “is an exploration of the mythologies that seek to subjugate Black bodies, and the counter-stories that reject such subjugation.”
Sea Crow Press | March 29, 2022
The poems in Edmonds’s collection “immerse themselves in the glittering, turbulent waters of Cape Cod to see what can be salvaged and salvage what can be seen.”
The Birthday of the Dead by Rachel Abramowitz
Conduit Books & Ephemera | March 31, 2022
In this poetry collection, Abramowitz “sings of our fallen world, its forgotten seedpods and smoldering fires, and the terrible, steaming coats of ancient wolves, unearthed from glacier-melt.”
Autumn House Press | March 31, 2022
In her debut poetry collection, Sears “navigates the challenges of growing out of girlhood and into womanhood with its potential dangers, interrogating the male gaze, beauty standards, and confidence and identity.”
Tupelo Press | April 1, 2022
According to Cole Swensen, City Scattered “offers a range of spliced voices that construct a multi-perspectival musing on ‘the new woman’ as she emerged in the labor and consumer culture of Germany between the wars.”
April at the Ruins by Lawrence Raab
Tupelo Press | April 1, 2022
Donald Revell says, “This is a book of summonings: into the dark wood; into the night music which might be, if memory proves to be something other than an abyss, the frontier of eternity.”
Today in the Taxi by Sean Singer
Tupelo Press | April 1, 2022
According to Laurie Sheck, “Sean Singer’s radiant and challenging body of work involves, much like Whitman’s, nothing less than the ongoing interrogation of what a poem is.”
The Song Cave | April 1, 2022
Collins’s second book of poems is “a deeply personal collection that explores the ways our notions of daily life touch the presence of the eternal.”
All the Stars Aflame by Malik Abduh
Get Fresh Books Publishing | April 1, 2022
In his debut poetry collection, Abduh “relates the brutal legacy of U.S. racial violence, including lynchings, riots, uprisings, & political assassinations, told in the voices of those who experienced these tragedies firsthand.”
A Mouthful of Sky by Anu Mahadev
Get Fresh Books Publishing | April 1, 2022
According to Sarah Vap, in this poetry collection “sensual and sexual pleasures, joys, and freedoms are woven together with gendered inequities, misogyny, and cruelty.”
Receta by Mario José Pagán Morales
great weather for MEDIA | April 4, 2022
This debut collection “is a story of becoming a poet. This poet. Boricua and part of a proud tradition of Nuyorican poets before and around him.”
Lunar Tides by Shannon Webb-Campbell
Book*hug Press | April 4, 2022
The poems in this collection “explore the primordial connections between love, grief, and water, structured within the lunar calendar.”
Bags and Tools by Michael Fleming
Green Writers Press | April 4, 2022
Vievee Francis writes, “Fleming effectively uses the tools of craft to take us along on this narrow path that widens and promises to open into broad understanding.”
Content Warning: Everything by Akwaeke Emezi
Copper Canyon Press | April 5, 2022
The poems in this collection “travel from home to homesickness, tracing desire to surrender and abuse to survival, while mapping out a chosen family that includes the son of god, mary auntie, and magdalene with the chestnut eyes.”
Graywolf Press | April 5, 2022
According to Franny Choi, “With abundant sonics, formal virtuosity, and a rigorous queer erotic, Alabi proves that every inheritance can be both wound and portal.”
Red Hen Press | April 5, 2022
In these poems, Morgan “explores the discovery, or recovery, of the true Self—the Self that abides within and survives the changes of time, memory, and circumstance.”
Mausoleum of Flowers by Daniel B. Summerhill
CavanKerry Press | April 5, 2022
Summerhill’s second poetry collection “grabs fate by the throat and confronts it, placing the focus on what it means to live despite your friends dying beside you.”
Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence by Alexus Erin
Baobab Press | April 5, 2022
This poetry collection “is a meditation on being a creator while feeling utterly like a caricature—a cartoon, an exaggeration, an actualization of a metaphor.”
How Chet Baker Died by Barry Gifford
Seven Stories Press | April 5, 2022
In his latest collection, Gifford surprises “his readers in kaleidoscopic prisms of color, turning every breath into a story, and himself into his most colorful character.”
Black Sun Lit | April 5, 2022
This poetry collection “is a pointillist portrait that catalogs a tripartite digestion process of being-in-the-world.”
After Beowulf by Nicole Markotić
Coach House Books | April 5, 2022
According to Wayde Compton, “Markotić takes the original English-language epic and reprocesses it. That is, she rereads, rewrites, reimagines, rethinks, and retells it, all at the same time.”
Heady Bloom by Andrew Faulkner
Coach House Books | April 5, 2022
This poetry collection explores “Faulkner’s world of the never-ending, low-grade headache, a medical issue resolved only by striking up a committed relationship with the slippery miracle that is Advil.”
BOA Editions | April 5, 2022
In her latest collection of poems, Meitner “explores memory, passion, and the various ways the body sees and is seen.”
And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight by Lynn Xu
Wave Books | April 5, 2022
Xu’s book-length poem is “part protest against reality, part metaphysical reckoning, part internationale for the world-historical surrealist insurgency, and part arte povera for the wretched of the earth.”
Translated from Spanish by Robin Myers
Wave Books | April 5, 2022
Copy is “a prose poem sequence that insinuates an experience of violent removal: a person’s disappearance from a country, from normal life, and forcible reintegration into a new social and existential configuration.”
Plenitude by Daniel Sarah Karasik
Book*hug Press | April 7, 2022
This poetry collection “cartwheels towards a world that might be: a world without cops or bosses, without prisons, without oppressive regulation of gender and desire.”
Gossypiin by Ra Malika Imhotep
Red Hen Press | April 12, 2022
In these poems, Imhotep “invites us to lean in and listen good as the text interrupts the narrative silence around sexual harm, sickness, and the marks they make on black femme subjectivity.”
Grid Books | April 12, 2022
In Drive, Sexton “explores our most fragile points of connection—to lovers and family, to the living and the dead, and to oneself, one’s own life’s work—with the care and wisdom of one who knows these roads.”
Stricken: Poems in the Time of Covid by Gail Gauldin Moore
Deerbrook Editions | April 12, 2022
Moore’s latest poetry collection “takes us to the deepest places grief can touch inside our lives.”
Initial Coordinates by Monika Herceg
Translated from Croatian by Marina Veverec
Sandorf Passage | April 12, 2022
According to Miljenko Jergović, this is “the first and the last book of the new Croatian poetry.”
Whitemud Walking by Matthew James Weigel
Coach House Books | April 12, 2022
Whitemud Walking is “an Indigenous resistance historiography, poetry that interrogates the colonial violence of the archive.”
Two Brown Dots by Danni Quintos
BOA Editions | April 12, 2022
Selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, this poetry collection “carves a space for brown girls and weird girls.”
Ugly Duckling Presse | April 15, 2022
According to Anne Waldman, Elixir is “a multi-personaed action movie, a love poem, a trip down memory lane, a Kulchur lexicon, an ode to NYC and tribute to exotic ports everywhere.”
Translated from Ukrainian by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps
Lost Horse Press | April 15, 2022
The tenth volume in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series, Dream Bridge “leads us down an invisible path that keeps shifting, transforming us and our ideas of poetry.”
In Memory of a Banyan Tree: Poems of the Outside World: 1985-2022 by Michael Rothenburg
Lost Horse Press | April 15, 2022
This selection of Rothenburg’s poetry features “poems relating to nature, ecology, and eco-poetics… a watershed account of an intimate relationship with the outside world.”
Three Wooden Trunks by Virlana Tkacz
Lost Horse Press | April 15, 2022
Three Wooden Trunks is a collection of poems “about memory and the poet’s Ukrainian roots, and of the poet’s family’s pursuit of a sweeter, easier life in America.”
I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom by Kim Dower
Red Hen Press | April 19, 2022
This book collects Dower’s “poems on being a mother—childbirth to empty nest—as well as being a daughter with all the teenaged messiness, drama and conflict, to finally caring for one’s mother suffering from dementia.”
Translated from Slovenian by Matthew Moore
Black Ocean | April 19, 2022
According to Alen Hamza, “Opera Buffa stuns the reader with its imaginative flair, energetic wit, and existential reach.”
Casual Conversation by Renia White
BOA Editions | April 19, 2022
White’s debut poetry collection “strikes up a conversation, considering what’s being said, what isn’t, and where it all comes from.”
Madville Publishing | April 19, 2022
Hardin’s poems “invite us to wake to the mystery all around us, to time’s revelatory unfolding, and to how our minds might find healing, if not communion, if only we listened intently enough.”
Nightboat Books | April 19, 2022
Of Mineral is “a collection of lyric meditations cultivated from a deeply personal experience of the natural world, synthesizing the poet’s experiences of the elemental and ephemeral; presence and place.”
Now Do You Know Where You Are by Dana Levin
Copper Canyon Press| April 19, 2022
Levin’s fifth collection “is a brave and perceptive companion, walking with the reader through the disorientations of personal and collective transformation.”
Burrow Press | April 22, 2022
In this poetry collection, Siegel “investigates the in-between: windows, porches, drawers, bedrooms, and basements are portals to examine how language shapes and is shaped, and to what ends.”
The Dark Safekeeping by Gloria Nixon-John
Mayapple Press | April 22, 2022
According to Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk, in these poems Nixon-John is “elegantly observant of the natural world (as gardener, horsewoman, admirer or rescuer of all manner of wildlife).”
Cat’s Tongue by Kathleen Winter
Texas Review Press | April 22, 2022
In her latest poetry collection, Winter “engages with incidents in her Texas youth that range from traumatic to ecstatic—strewing oilfields, deer, drug dealers, and football games in between.”
new mythologies by Kym Cunningham
Dream Pop Press | April 26, 2022
According to Candice Wuehle, this poetry collection “reads like an ancient text encoded with secret wisdom, tacit magics, and the body’s truths.”
Field Notes from the Flood Zone by Heather Sellers
BOA Editions | April 26, 2022
This poetry collection is “an elegy for the two great shaping forces in a life, heartbreaking family struggle and a collective lost treasure, our stunning, singular, desecrated Florida, and all its remnant beauty.”
50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse by Karyna McGlynn
Sarabande Books | April 26, 2022
According to Cate Marvin, these poems “are like those spectacular mixed cocktails that carry our troubles away: they are spiked with the oddest ingredients and supremely intoxicating. I love their daring, their deep-diving humor.”
The Trees Witness Everything by Victoria Chang
Copper Canyon Press | April 26, 2022
In this poetry collection largely composed in various Japanese syllabic forms called “wakas,” Chang “reinvigorates language by way of concentration, using constraint to illuminate and free the wild interior.”
American Massif by Nicholas Regiacorte
Tupelo Press | May 1, 2022
According to Christopher Salerno, in this poetry collection “Regiacorte examines with a keen intimacy both the wild and the domestic, weaving a thread from the present moment back to bygone epochs.”
Diaries of a Terrorist by Christopher Soto
Copper Canyon Press | May 3, 2022
This debut poetry collection “demands the abolition of policing and human caging,” emphasizing “that police violence happens not only to individuals, but to whole communities.”
Coach House Books | May 3, 2022
The poems in this collection “bring fresh vehemence to Robertson’s ongoing examination of the changing shape of feminism, the male-dominated philosophical tradition, the daily forms of discourse, and the possibilities of language itself.”
In the River of Songs by Susan Jackson
CavanKerry Press | May 3, 2022
According to Raechel Bratnick, Jackson’s poetry collection “captures the mystical in the ordinary, making altarpieces out of the sudden moment of seeing.”
Plans for Sentences by Renee Gladman
Wave Books | May 3, 2022
Gladman’s latest book “blurs the distinctions between text and image, recognizing that drawing can be a form of writing, and vice versa: a generative act in which the two practices not only inform each other but propel each other into futures.”
Love, Lyric, and Liberation by Asantewaa Boykin
Nomadic Press | May 7, 2022
Love, Lyric, and Liberation is “a collection of reflections, epiphanies, and warnings for those who find themselves existing in the intersection of blackness, femininity, art, and resistance.”
Red Hen Press | May 10, 2022
This poetry collection “deals with refugees of many kinds—political refugees, refugees from racism, from domestic violence, from environmental destruction and disease, specifically cancer—and their stories of cruelty and courage, hardship, and hope to overcome the most daunting of circumstances.”
Glyphs by Martina Reisz Newberry
Deerbrook Editions | May 10, 2022
According to Terry Wolverton, in these poems “Newberry employs a deceptively conversational tone to wield resonant insights about the spirit of nature, faith, aging and mortality, and love.”
Swallowed Light by Michael Wasson
Copper Canyon Press | May 10, 2022
In his debut poetry collection, Wasson “writes into the gaps left by a legacy of erasure—the wholly American fracture of colonialism—where the indigenous tongue is determined to bloom against its own vanishing.”
Year of the Murder Hornet by Tina Cane
Veliz Books | May 15, 2022
The poems in Cane’s new collection “navigate the uneasy terrain of the self amid an increasingly tumultuous and fragmented world.”
Dear Selection Committee by Melissa Studdard
JackLeg Press | May 17, 2022
The poems in this collection framed as a job application “shift among registers of loss, desire, and joy as they wrestle with issues such as climate change, addiction, modern distractions, gender presentation, religious questioning, and the nature of pain.”
Smoking the Bible by Chris Abani
Copper Canyon Press | May 17, 2022
Abani’s poems “reveal the personal story of two brothers—one elegizing the other—and the larger story of a man in exile: exile of geography, culture, and memory.”
Worrisome Creatures by Kate Sweeney
Madville Publishing | May 17, 2022
Worrisome Creatures is “a poetry collection of the body, of the failings of history and family.”
Thunderbird Inn by Collin Callahan
Conduit Books & Ephemera | May 18, 2022
According to Matthew Rohrer, in this poetry collection “there is a magic to the close observation that redeems what is often squalid.”
Accidental Hymn by Dawn Potter
Deerbrook Editions | May 20, 2022
In this poetry collection, Potter “masterfully demonstrates how opposites can be counterparts and how poetry can rise from that tension/partnership.”
Copper Canyon Press | May 24, 2022
Marvin’s fourth poetry collection “exists just outside of calamity” and asks, “at what point do we disappear into our experiences? How do we come out on the other side?”
Questions from Outer Space by Diane Thiel
Red Hen Press | May 24, 2022
This poetry collection “explores fresh and often humorous perspectives that capture the surreal quality of our swiftly changing lives on this planet.”
The Discarded Life by Adam Kirsch
Red Hen Press | May 31, 2022
Kirsch’s poetry collection “richly evoke a Gen X childhood in Los Angeles, exploring how our early recognitions shape our lives.”
DEAR GOD. DEAR BONES. DEAR YELLOW. by Noor Hindi
Haymarket Books | May 31, 2022
According to Zeina Hashem Beck, “Hindi’s searing poems navigate memory, violence, and inheritance with a candid and critical eye. Filled with heartache, tenderness, love, anger, and humor, they interrogate what it’s like to be woman, Palestinian, and American in today’s world.”
Love Poems in Quarantine by Sarah Ruhl
Copper Canyon Press | May 31, 2022
Ruhl’s latest book “is—in free verse and form, lamentation and meditation—a book of days, a survival kit for spiritual malady.”
Nightboat Books | May 31, 2022
Ante body is “an incisive poetic sequence that tracks the relationship between migration and complex traumas in this unsparing critique of the unjust conditions that brought us the global pandemic.”
The Maybe-Bird by Jennifer Elise Foerster
The Song Cave | June 1, 2022
In this poetry collection, Foerster “uses new poetic forms and a highly conceptual framework to build these poems from myth, memory, and historical document, resurfacing Mvskoke language and story on the palimpsest of Southeastern U.S. history.”
The Trickster Riots by Taté Walker
Abalone Mountain Press | June 1, 2022
In this debut poetry collection, Lakota storyteller Walker “steps into the role of a contemporary trickster to continue the purposefully disruptive legacy of a cultural icon: Iktómi, the Spider.”
Condiments & Entrails by John Durak
Sandorf Passage | June 7, 2022
According to Stephen Fry, Durak’s poetry is “hard, sensual, clear, funny, and dazzling in its clarity and directness.”
BLF Press | June 7, 2022
In this poetry collection, Gomez “contemplates her sexuality, multi-ethnic and class identities, and what it means to experience love, loss, grief, friendship, and solidarity with other women during times of political upheaval.”
Generations by Dante Di Stefano, William Heyen, and H. L. Hix
Etruscan Press | June 7, 2022
The third Tribus from Etruscan Press presents The Nazi Patrol by William Heyen, How It Is That We by H. L. Hix, and Lullaby with Incendiary Device by Dante Di Stefano.
Metamorphoses, Book XVI by Teresa Carson
Translated from Italian by Alessandro Di Mauro
Deerbrook Editions | June 9, 2022
Presented in both English and Italian, Carson’s poetry collection seeks to question and expand the traditional definition of epic poetry: “What if the ‘epic’ or ‘heroic’ deeds are the stories of everyday life? What if Time itself becomes the protagonist and our desire to conquer Time becomes the overarching theme?”
Black Ocean | June 14, 2022
In Doxsee’s fifth poetry collection, “bodies are soft sketches that could detonate at the pop of a flashbulb, diffuse into a cloud of vapor, or escape into a small recess with just enough space to breathe.”
Sarabande Books | June 14, 2022
According to Victoria Chang, this poetry collection “explores and circles around, into and out of what it means to be free and alive in a world where humans insist on war and environmental destruction.”
Why I Cannot Take a Lover by Grace Cavalieri
Washington Writers’ Publishing House | June 14, 2022
This new edition of Grace Cavalieri’s 1975 classic collection is revised and with a new foreword by editor Caroline Bock.
Translated from Chinese by James Shea and Dorothy Tse
Zephyr Press | June 14, 2022
Presented bilingually in Chinese and English, this poetry collection “refashions borrowed language, including English song lyrics, Cantonese wordplay, Chinese folk stories and poems, news reports, prayers, and slang.”
MissSettl by Kamden Ishmael Hilliard
Nightboat Books | June 14, 2022
In this debut poetry collection, “sonically vibrant, polyphonic, typographic experimentation gleefully strategizes resistance and life under white supremacist capitalism.”
Washington Writers’ Publishing House | June 14, 2022
In this new edition featuring a foreword by Jona Colson, Sklarew’s poems focus “on her love of science and natural history.”
Breaking into Air by Emily Wall
Red Hen Press | June 14, 2022
This book of poems based on collected birth stories is “a look into the story that women, for centuries, have been quietly sharing with each other.”
Standing Alone, Leaning Against by Jim Friedman and Dave Smith
Coverstory books | June 18, 2022
In this debut poetry collection, Friedman and Smith “bring to their work a full gamut of feelings, from grief to joy, humour to depth, sympathy and objective observation.”
Standard American English by Elisabeth Houston
Litmus Press | June 20, 2022
In this poetry collection, Houston “brings her readers deep into the world of baby, a persona she has been developing in performance contexts for nearly a decade.”
Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina by Dara Barrois/Dixon
Wave Books | June 21, 2022
The poems in Barrois/Dixon’s latest collection “are curious about the world we inhabit and the worlds we create.”
Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists by Laynie Browne
Wave Books | June 21, 2022
This poetry collection “playfully employs the list poem and delivers poems which evade genre and subvert the quotidian material of daily life.”
Always Alwaysland by Stanley Moss
Seven Stories Press | June 21, 2022
Moss’s new poetry collection is “a book of songs, devotion, beautiful, painful, useful truths, some work songs, spirituals, grand opera, hymns, chants to God and no God.”
Grotesque Weather and Good People by Lim Solah
Translated from Korean by Olan Munson and Oh Eunkyung
Black Ocean | June 21, 2022
The poems in this collection “explore the simultaneous intimacy and alienation of everyday life in urban Seoul.”
Red Hen Press | June 28, 2022
Set mostly in coastal Connemara, Grennan’s new poetry collection “shows again his powers of close, patient, plainspoken observation.”
Refuse to Disappear by Tara Betts
The Word Works | July 7, 2022
Betts’s poetry collection “calls up the language of both science and witchery to call roll on Black women.”
There Must Be a Reason People Come Here by Brian Foley
Black Ocean | July 12, 2022
Foley’s new poetry collection “refuses to conform to the norms of what poetry is and how it must say things.”
La Movida by Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta
Nightboat Books | July 12, 2022
In this poetry collection, Luboviski-Acosta “explores the radical love inherent in revolutionary work through cultural objects, adolescent affect, and queerness from within the fall of empire.”
Isles of Firm Ground by Ignacio Ruiz-Pérez
Translated from Spanish by Mike Soto
Deep Vellum | July 26, 2022
Ruiz-Pérez’s poems “express a metaphysical shift where the laws of heaven and earth are suspended, transformed into a terrain of the journey inward, reflecting a cosmos of the self.”
Intimacies in Borrowed Light by Darius Stewart
EastOver Press | July 26, 2022
Stewart’s poetry collection “coalesces around themes of love, addiction, violence, sexual identity, and the corporeal body to betray the intimate moments that illuminate, especially, Black gay male experiences.”
Flare Stacks in Full Bloom by Katherine Hoerth
Texas Review Press | August 1, 2022
This collection of eco-feminist poetry is “a chronicle of Hurricane Harvey—before, during, and after the storm, through formal poetry (sonnets, villanelles, and blank verse narratives).”
Swan Wife by Sara Moore Wagner
Cider Press Review | August 1, 2022
Winner of the 2021 Cider Press Review Editors’ Prize, this poetry collection “toggles between the world of fairy tales and the world we live in, both of which are gruesome and tender, beautiful and dangerous,” according to Maggie Smith.
Bodies & Words by Celia Lisset Alvarez
Assure Press | August 1, 2022
The poems in this collection “challenge gender stereotypes about love, women, marriage, desire, infidelity, and aging.”
Iguana Iguana by Caylin Capra-Thomas
Deep Vellum | August 2, 2022
This poetry collection “imagines a tough and tender soundtrack for tumbleweeds in search of roots.”
A Boy in the City by S. Yarberry
Deep Vellum | August 2, 2022
In this debut collection of poetry, “the obscure and mundane collide, a fricassee of movement, the cosmopolitan, and intimacy.”
Flying Home; Daybook IV by Toni Ortner
Deerbrook Editions | August 6, 2022
According to Vincent Panella, this poetry collection “casts an unflinching eye on the cruelty of politics, on personal loss, on young love, aging, and death.”
Such Color: New and Selected Poems by Tracy K. Smith
Graywolf Press | August 16, 2022
Such Color: New and Selected Poems “traces an increasingly audacious commitment to exploring the immense mysteries and conundrums of human existence.”
Secret City by Katherine Smith
Madville Publishing | August 16, 2022
Smith’s poetry collection “explores belonging and power through the eyes of children and adults whether the relationships in question are to a family, to a religion, to a region, or to a country.”
Talking With Trees by Lucia Coppola
Plants & Poetry Journal | August 17, 2022
This collection of poetry and photography is “the story of a magical journey into the garden and the extraordinary adventure of ordinary things.”
No. Wait. I Can Explain. by Brad Rose
Pelekinesis | August 20, 2022
In this collection of prose poetry, “speakers take liberties with standard colloquial speech, invent unusual similes, and employ unconventional variants of American idioms.”
Selected Books of the Beloved by Gregory Orr
Copper Canyon Press | August 23, 2022
This poetry collection is “an expansive, lyric testament to the formidable mystery of love, spanning several previous volumes all in dedication to the beloved.”
Where Are the Snows by Kathleen Rooney
Texas Review Press | September 1, 2022
Winner of the 2021 X. J. Kennedy Prize, selected by Kazim Ali, this poetry collection “explores the questions of where we are now and where we might be going.”
The Air in the Air Behind It by Brandon Rushton
Tupelo Press | September 1, 2022
According to Donna Stonecipher, in this poetry collection “Rushton delivers a post-wonder diorama of the contemporary non-urban United States in which the vaunted American lawn is artificial.”
Tupelo Press | September 1, 2022
According to Maggie Smith, this Dorset Prize–winning poetry collection “grapples with climate change, capitalism, the horrors of human history.”
Seriously Well by Helge Torvund
The Song Cave | September 1, 2022
Translated from the Norwegian by the author, Seriously Well is “a book-length poem that explores the characteristics and limits of poetic incantation in relation to memory and illness.”
Surface Tension by Derek Beaulieu
Coach House Books | September 6, 2022
Surface Tension “updates visual poetry for our post-pandemic age, asking us rethink the verbiage around us, to imagine letters as images instead of text, to find meaning in their beautiful shapes.”
[To] The Last [Be] Human by Jorie Graham
Copper Canyon Press | September 6, 2022
Collecting Sea Change, Place, Fast, and Runaway, [To] The Last [Be] Human is “a body of work that stands as a ‘lyric record’ of the calamitous decades that began the twenty-first century.”
There Are Still Woods by Hila Ratzabi
June Road Press | September 6, 2022
This debut poetry collection is “a radiant appraisal of life at the precipice of climate crisis and a haunting elegy for all we stand to lose.”
Vox Humana by Adebe DeRango-Adem
Book*hug Press | September 8, 2022
This poetry collection is “driven by a sense of political urgency to probe the ethics of agency in a world that actively resists the participation of some voices over others.”
Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency by Chen Chen
BOA Editions | September 13, 2022
In his second poetry collection, Chen “continues his investigation of family, both blood and chosen, examining what one inherits and what one invents, as a queer Asian American living through an era of Trump, mass shootings, and the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Copper Canyon Press | September 13, 2022
In this debut poetry collection, Goodly “casts a spell to transform darkness into perfect darkness.”
An Eros Encyclopedia by Rachel James
Wendy’s Subway | September 13, 2022
The winner of the 2019 Carolyn Bush Award, this poetry collection “offers up desire and the attunement to its many objects as the atmosphere of a life.”
In the Hands of the River by Lucien Darjeun Meadows
Hub City Press | September 13, 2022
This poetry collection “subverts traditional poetic forms to show how a childhood for a queer boy of both Cherokee and European heritage happens within and outside dominant narratives of Appalachia.”
Test Piece by Sheryda Warrener
Coach House Books | September 13, 2022
The poems in this collection “engage with the process and practice of art-making, and specifically with abstract minimalist works like those by Eva Hesse, Anne Truitt, Ruth Asawa, and Agnes Martin.”
Milkweed Editions | September 13, 2022
Codjoe’s debut collection “brings generous light to the inner dialogues of women as they bathe, create art, make and lose love.”
Milkweed Editions | September 13, 2022
In this poetry collection, “Fagan writes with a kind of practical empathy, lamenting pain and brutality while knowing, also, their inevitability.”
The Wind Speaks by Elsa Johnson
Green Writers Press | September 13, 2022
According to Lisa Kwong, “Johnson dazzles with audacity; the poems ‘spread/take up space/crowd/sprawl’ across the page with their field form and deliberate spaces.”
No Way in the Skin Without This Bloody Embrace by Jean D’Amérique
Translated from the French by Conor Bracken
Ugly Duckling Presse | September 15, 2022
In this book-length poem, “each page is as brief as a hurricane’s eye, glimpsing the eerie territory his speaker traverses like an apocalyptic flâneur.”
Even the Air, Too Heavy by Riley Danvers
First Matter Press | September 15, 2022
Danvers’s poetry collection “wayfinds through the emptiness of miscarriage with words and experimental forms that examine the vacated, the absent, the lost.”
Fixed Star by Suzanne Frischkorn
JackLeg Press | September 15, 2022
According to Simone Muench, “Fixed Star is a brilliant treatise on violence, division, loss, longing, and the search for song.”
Muse Found in a Colonized Body by Yesenia Montilla
Four Way Books | September 15, 2022
This collection features poems “that range far and wide in content—observing pop culture, interrogating history, resisting contemporary injustice—but that share the spinal cord of unflinching love.”
Undress, She Said by Doug Anderson
Four Way Books | September 15, 2022
These poems “voyage from the subtle violences of a religious upbringing to complex remembrances of time served in the Vietnam War to contemporary emergencies of real and political plagues.”
Previously Owned by Nathan McClain
Four Way Books | September 15, 2022
This collection “scrutinizes one’s own culpability and responsibility in this country, interested in the natural world and beauty, as well as what beauty distracts us from.”
The Listening Skin by Glenis Redmond
Four Way Books | September 15, 2022
Redmond’s latest poetry collection “details how generational cycles of poverty, mental and physical illness, and systemic racism impact the self, the family, and the greater African-American collective.”
The Certain Body by Julia Guez
Four Way Books | September 15, 2022
In this poetry collection, “Guez aptly frames the recursive paralysis of pandemic rhetoric, whose seeming transitions always arrive at the same uncertainty.”
More Poems about Money by Daniel Wolff
Four Way Books | September 15, 2022
More Poems about Money “looks at the economic times we live in, from boom to bust, from the suburbs to the warzone, in a voice that ranges from humorous to desperate.”
Four Way Books | September 15, 2022
The speaker in this poetry collection is “accompanied throughout by the imagined presence of Joseph Merrick, the 20th Century entertainer and medical patient popularly depicted as ‘The Elephant Man.'”
Four Way Books | September 15, 2022
This poetry collection “scales the cliff-face of adulthood, that paradoxical ascent in which the longer we live the less we know of life, in which we find that each of us is only ourselves and yet delicately interconnected with everyone, everything, else.”
When You’re Deep in a Thing by Anthony Cappo
Four Way Books | September 15, 2022
When You’re Deep in a Thing “reimagines the coming of age book and the masculine tropes of the bildungsroman, suggesting that adulthood never vanquishes the kids we were.”
American Sycamore by Lisbeth White
Perugia Press | September 15, 2022
This poetry collection is “an exploration of racial identity and the natural world, rooted in the mythopoetics of wilderness and ancestry as sources of trauma, grief, wonder, and tremendous resource.”
One Row After / Bir Sira Sonra by Sonya Wohletz
First Matter Press | September 15, 2022
According to D. P. Snyder, this poetry collection “offers a way of awakening to a world in which all things breathe, probe, thrill, ache and sigh as we do.”
Between These Borders Wanders a Golem by ahuva s. zaslavsky
First Matter Press | September 15, 2022
Between These Borders Wanders a Golem is “a hybrid book of poems, flash, and short stories that present psychic investigation into repeating ideas that roam a body.”
The Rupture Tense by Jenny Xie
Graywolf Press | September 20, 2022
In her second collection, Xie “cracks open reverberant, vexed experiences of diasporic homecoming, intergenerational memory transfer, state-enforced amnesia, public secrecies, and the psychic fallout of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.”
Fire Cider Rain by Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin
Coach House Books | September 20, 2022
This poetry collection “follows the lives of three Chinese-Mauritian women on the course of dispersing, settling, and rooting over northern landscapes, and the brittle family bonds that tie them to one another and to their home country.”
Names and Rivers by Shuri Kido
Translated from Japanese by Forrest Gander and Tomoyuki Endo
Copper Canyon Press | September 20, 2022
Presented bilingually in English and Japanese, Names and Rivers “brings the poems of Shuri Kido to readers in North America for the first time.”
Seed Celestial by Sara R. Burnett
Autumn House Press | September 22, 2022
Burnett’s debut poetry collection “weaves together themes of motherhood, immigration, social transformation, and interrogation.”
Intimacies, Received by Taneum Bambrick
Copper Canyon Press | September 27, 2022
Bambrick’s second poetry collection “moves through streets and fields, households and years, following a survivor of sexual assault as she painstakingly reassembles a narrative of self.”
A Shiver in the Leaves by Luther Hughes
BOA Editions | September 27, 2022
Hughes’ debut poetry collection “wrestles with the interior and exterior symbiosis of a gay Black man finding refuge from the threat of depression and death through love and desire.”
Martian: The Saint of Loneliness by James Cagney
Nomadic Press | September 27, 2022
In his second collection, Cagney “storms through American fields blooming with artillery and anger on his thirsty quest for love, peace, and acceptance, in the smallest, most precious gestures.”
You Cannot Save Here by Anthony Moll
Washington Writers’ Publishing House | September 28, 2022
Winner of the 2022 Jean Feldman Award in Poetry, this poetry collection is “about how we live when each day feels like the world is ending.”
Empty Bowl Press | September 30, 2022
Old Growth “gathers a generous selection of the best of O’Connor’s original lyric poetry along with a sampling of new and uncollected poems.”
Making Water by Laura Jaramillo
Futurepoem | October 1, 2022
According to Farid Matuk, “This is a work of the slow, dark magic language can be when a writer lets words fall—in fragments or spiraling syntax—down into the wet loam of memory and presence, down into the susceptible body.”
Ore Choir: The Lava on Iceland by Katy Didden
Tupelo Press | October 1, 2022
In this poetry collection, “lava speaks ‘with the focus of a burning glass,’ lighting lyric core samples through geo-historical and cultural texts about Iceland.”
Architects of the Imaginary / Los arquitectos del imaginario by Marta López-Luaces
Translated from the Spanish by G. J. Racz
Gival Press | October 1, 2022
According to Peter Gizzi, in this bilingual poetry collection “the world and its phenomena are respected, named, and given their proper occupation.”
Disputed Site by Kate Monaghan
Gival Press | October 1, 2022
According to Henri Cole, the poems in this collection “yearn for a planet without hateful border stations, floating-trash islands, and elaborate human grief.”
In the Same Light: 200 Poems for Our Century from the Migrants & Exiles of the Tang Dynasty
Translated from the Chinese by Wong May
The Song Cave | October 1, 2022
This collection features “70 sections that span the millennia,” in which Wong May “traverses continents and civilizations to retrieve the text of Tang Poetry for our century.”
We Are Mermaids by Stephanie Burt
Graywolf Press | October 4, 2022
Burt’s poems “revel in their multiplicity, their interconnectedness, their secret powers to become much more than they at first seem.”
Black Ocean | October 4, 2022
In this poetry collection, Jones “conjures the longue durée of the Middle Sea and the Middle Passage, by excavating history through its vanishing figures and the always already erasure of voice.”
When I Was the Wind by Hannah Lee Jones
June Road Press | October 4, 2022
This debut poetry collection is “a richly textured map of love and loss, a tapestry of hard-won truths both personal and universal.”
Translated from the Portuguese
Nightboat Books | October 4, 2022
Porneia “features a selection of works by Eduardo Kac realized in the context of the Porn Art Movement, a vanguard that emerged in 1980 under a military dictatorship in Brazil.”
Late Summer Ode by Olena Kalytiak Davis
Copper Canyon Press | October 4, 2022
In these poems, Davis writes from “a heightened state of ambivalence, perched between past and present tensions.”
I Dreamed I Was Emily Dickinson’s Boyfriend by Ron Koertge
Red Hen Press | October 4, 2022
In these poems, “a mannequin joins the Me Too movement, a summer job turns into a lesson in class distinctions, and Jane Austen makes a surprise appearance at a mall.”
Dialect of Distant Harbors by Dipika Mukherjee
CavanKerry Press | October 4, 2022
Mukherjee’s poetry collection “summons a shared humanity to examine issues of illness and family.”
Grid Books | October 11, 2022
In this poetry collection, Platt “makes a study of life’s inevitable transitions, from love’s astonishing evolutions, to aging and its attendant losses.”
The End of Michelangelo by Dan Gerber
Copper Canyon Press | October 11, 2022
This poetry collection reminds readers “that the very fact of being alive—experiencing our fleeting, fragile existence—is our only source of joy, our only avenue of consolation.”
A Tinderbox in Three Acts by Cynthia Dewi Oka
BOA Editions | October 11, 2022
In her fourth poetry collection, Oka “performs a lyric accounting of the anti-Communist genocide of 1965, which, led by the Indonesian military and with American assistance, erased and devastated millions of lives in Indonesia.”
Bittering the Wound by Jacqui Germain
Autumn House Press | October 12, 2022
This debut poetry collection is “a firsthand account of the 2014 Ferguson uprising that challenges how we document and report on political unrest.”
Book*hug Press | October 13, 2022
Hargreaves’ latest collection “explores feelings of being distanced from loved ones, physically and emotionally; striving to be better (at chores, at intimacy); and tending to the things that fracture.”
Acre Books | October 15, 2022
In this poetry collection, “sonnets, ghazals, pantoums, villanelles, and a ‘failed georgic’ weave in contemporary subject matter, including social-media comment threads, Pap smears, eclipse glasses, and gun violence.”
Your Face My Flag by Julian Gewirtz
Copper Canyon Press | October 18, 2022
In this poetry collection, “Gewirtz explores the place of poetry in a globalized era, shaped by escalating geopolitical tensions between China and ‘the West.'”
A Brilliant Loss by Eloise Klein Healy
Red Hen Press | October 18, 2022
This poetry collection, written after the poet’s experience with Wernicke’s aphasia, “is a poetic journey into the loss of language and the reclaiming of it.”
stemmy things by imogen xtian smith
Nightboat Books | October 18, 2022
The poems in this collection “build towards an expansive world celebrating fluidity while casting a critical lens on state power, ecological precarity, and the yearning for queer utopia on stolen land.”
Copper Canyon Press | October 25, 2022
Freeman’s latest book of poetry is “a politically urgent yet timeless collection that studies the devastating failings of humanity and the redemptive possibilities of love.”
Wave Books | October 25, 2022
This poetry collection “tells a continuum story of a homeland under erasure, in an ethos of erosion, in a multitude of encroaching methane, ice floe, and rising temperatures.”
Slight Return by Rebecca Wolff
Wave Books | October 25, 2022
In this poetry collection, Wolff “voyages in the myopia of American consumer consciousness—erotic regard, spiritual FOMO, gentrification, branding—without destination.”
Little Mr. Prose Poem: Selected Poems of Russell Edson by Russell Edson
BOA Editions | October 25, 2022
Edited by Craig Morgan Teicher, this selection of poems spanning Edson’s career presents “a new and contemporary view of a poet of startling imagination and strangeness.”
In the Zero of Sky by Tamra Plotnick
Assure Press | October 25, 2022
The poems in this collection “course the dialectic between freedom and containment, banging up against elements and identities along the way.”
Passager Books | October 30, 2022
In this poetry collection, according to Molly Peacock, Elber “draws us in with wordplay, long Ginsbergian lines, angst, and charm.”
Book*hug Press | November 1, 2022
In this novel-in-verse, “the speaker trembles on the verge of discovery, pushing her physical limits through practices of pain, permission, and pleasure.”
Copper Canyon Press | November 1, 2022
In this collection, Gander responds to the photographs of Jack Shear in “a profound dialogue
between word and image, observation and inspiration, imagination and intellect.”
The Strings Are Lightning and Hold You In by Chee Brossy
Tupelo Press | November 1, 2022
According to Jon Davis, “history and tribal knowledge appear naturally in these poems, as do the pleasures of life on the reservation—the food, the light, the air, the sights and sounds and smells.”
Futurepoem | November 1, 2022
Joyelle McSweeney writes, “In Jessica Laser’s Planet Drill, human language is like the slime-mold quietly recreating the subway map of Tokyo: deft, resourceful, pliant, responsive, and finally, collectively, wise.”
Wolf Whistles Behind the Dumpster by Dan Provost
Roadside Press | November 1, 2022
According to John Sweet, in these poems “big moments nestle casually against smaller, everyday observations, and everything is treated with the same amount of respect.”
As the Den Burns by Forrest Rapier
Texas Review Press | November 1, 2022
This poetry collection “renders a sublime world on the verge of vanishing,” moving “from Tallahassee vigils to flooded gardens after a hurricane’s landfall.”
But I Still Have My Fingerprints by Dianne Silvestri
CavanKerry Press | November 1, 2022
In this poetry collection, Silvestri “navigates the surreal world of chemotherapy, stem cell transplantation, and subsequent threats from graft vs. host disease and serious infections from weakened immunity.”
Black Snowflakes Smothering A Torch by Ryan Stovall
Woodhall Press | November 1, 2022
This poetry collection is “a primer serving to facilitate dialogue between those who have experienced the crushing arms of war and those who have not.”
Concentrate by Courtney Faye Taylor
Graywolf Press | November 1, 2022
According to Rachel Eliza Griffiths, “Concentrate is the mouth that refuses to swallow America’s blackest desires, which have too long centered their wealth on the lives and deaths of Black girls and women.”
The Empty Form Goes All The Way To Heaven by Brian Teare
Nightboat Books | November 1, 2022
First published in 2015, this poetry collection is “a book-length meditation on chronic illness, economic precarity, healing, and the work of abstract artist Agnes Martin.”
The Dug-Up Gun Museum by Matt Donovan
BOA Editions | November 8, 2022
Donovan’s poetry collection “confronts our country’s obsession with guns to explore America’s deep-seated political divisions and issues linked to violence, race, power, and privilege.”
A Queen in Bucks County by Kay Gabriel
Nightboat Books | November 8, 2022
This poetry collection is “an epistolary sequence about sex, exchange and social space set along the Northeast Corridor.”
Flutter, Kick by Anna V. Q. Ross
Red Hen Press | November 8, 2022
In this poetry collection, Ross “plumbs motherhood, migration, childhood, and the cycles of violence and renewal that recur in each.”
Soliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile by Hussain Ahmed
Black Ocean | November 15, 2022
The war Hussain Ahmed accounts in this poetry collection “is both physical and psychological, and the survivor within these poems uses his voice as a way to tell the stories of those who were lost.”
Becoming Couldn’t Sing for Anyone by Theresa Senato Edwards
Harbor Editions | November 11, 2022
According to Cyril Wong, “these poems do not hold back in exposing the pulsing arteries of relationships and the recoveries from death and loss that make up the totality of time and existence.”
Deerbrook Editions | November 11, 2022
According to Janet Hamill, “Reis’ gift for mapping the irony, hurt, love and loss of her geography is given its best expression in Torohill.”
Suede Mantis / Soft Rage by Jennifer Soong
Black Sun Lit | November 11, 2022
According to Imogen Cassels, this poetry collection is “a series of lyric refractions which wrangle a self and the experience of the world into language.”
Nightboat Books | November 15, 2022
This poetry collection “casts world-historical hierarchies in an aspic mold and serves them back to us on a warped platter.”
Dissonance Engine by David Dowker
Book*hug Press | November 15, 2022
Dowker’s poetry collection “is an exploration of time, cognition and loss; the intersection of dream and alternate reality amidst myriad systems of control.”
Barbaro: Beyond Brokenness by Lyn Lifshin
Texas Review Press | November 15, 2022
This poetry collection, released in a second edition, “outlines the life of the champion horse before his fame, highlighting the beauty and grace of the young colt from his birth, through his youth, and finally to his time as a champion on the track.”
Secretariat: The Red Freak, The Miracle by Lyn Lifshin
Texas Review Press | November 15, 2022
This poetry collection, released in a second edition, “focuses on Secretariat’s life before the track, outlining the playfully perfect foal who found his way into the hearts of many.”
The Licorice Daughter: My Year with Ruffian by Lyn Lifshin
Texas Review Press | November 15, 2022
The Licorice Daughter, released in a second edition, is “a deeply emotional collection of poems that highlights the filly behind the legend of The Licorice Daughter, Ruffian.”
The Parting Glass by Lisa J. Parker
Madville Publishing | November 15, 2022
The poems in this collection “raise a glass to those still at the table and to those already gone, to homecomings and deployments, to the navigation of love and grief.”
Hillbilly Madonna by Sara Moore Wagner
Driftwood Press | November 15, 2022
This poetry collection “is a harrowing and ultimately hopeful lens into rural life and the opiod crisis.”
Winter Work by Stephen Meadows
Nomadic Press | November 19, 2022
Each poem in Meadows’s collection “is a clean and reverent gesture of understanding–natural elements, the damage we inflict upon the land, our history.”
Too Much Tongue by Adrienne Marie Barrios and Leigh Chadwick
Autofocus Books | November 22, 2022
Too Much Tongue is a series of prose poems “in which the writers imagine themselves into each other’s lives, stretching and bending language into constant delight and surprise.”
Concealed Words by Sin Yong Mok
Translated from the Korean by Brother Anthony
Black Ocean | November 22, 2022
This collection offers “a selection of poems from Sin Yong-mok’s earlier collections, intended to serve as an illustration of his evolution as a poet, alongside a complete translation of the poems from his fourth collection, When Someone Called Someone, I Looked Back.”
Wave Books | November 29, 2022
Simonds’s triptychs were “initially crafted in handwritten strips on rolls of receipt paper obtained at a dollar store, then assembled into three textual columns that sit side-by-side on the page.”
This Gone Place by Lisa J. Parker
Madville Publishing | November 29, 2022
In this poetry collection, Parker “moves her reader back again into the deepest recesses of the human experience, pressing us deeply down into that thing we sometimes call a ‘heart.'”
I, Caustic by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine
Translated from the French by Jake Syersak
Litmus Press | November 30, 2022
The first English-language translation of Moi, l’aigre “is a poetic call to arms against all forms of authoritarianism—written, spoken, or otherwise.”
Selected Poems by Patrick Kavanagh
Wake Forest University Press | November 30, 2022
Edited and introduced by Paul Muldoon, this collection features Kavanaugh’s “best and best-known poems, beginning with some of his earliest publications in 1930 and continuing chronologically into the 1960s with essentials from his career, as well as highlights left unpublished during his lifetime.”
Light On Water: New and Selected Poems 1972-2022 by William Benton
Marsh Hawk Press | December 1, 2022
According to August Kleinzahler, “There is a sense of ‘motion’ in the transitions from phrase to phrase, line to line, a shifting of planes, between image or observation and the abstract, which seems to me unique to the practice of this artist.”
Late-Stage Everything by Aaron Anstett
Sagging Meniscus Press | December 1, 2022
Anstett’s poetry collection has “a fragility that may also be, strangely, a kind of ‘late-stage’ freedom: a radically fractured incompleteness, tremblingly grasping towards what can no longer be held.”
Translated from the Russian by Maria Bloshteyn and Boris Dralyuk
Červená Barva Press | December 1, 2022
According to Anne Marie Macari, “Mashinski’s poems in Giornata inhabit the landscape of elegy and exile, as well as the actual landscape of rural America.”
Translated from the Russian by Alex Niemi
Zephyr Press | December 6, 2022
In these poems, Glazova “invites us to watch the world unfold—a snow-covered bud, a bee, a swamp, the fur of an animal, an ice hole—as well as the human life cycle as it turns and returns.”
Noemi Press | December 15, 2022
Tommye Blount writes, “Gorgoneion is a thousand-headed beauty lithely slithering from the past, present, and future as it examines the nature and pervasiveness of empire.”
Crisis Inquiry by Tony Iantosca
Ugly Duckling Presse | December 15, 2022
Crisis Inquiry is “a collection of poems in three parts that unsettles the lyric poem from within its constraints in ways that are both sardonic and searching.”
adjacent islands by Nicole Cecilia Delgado
Translated from the Spanish by Urayoán Noel
Ugly Duckling Presse | December 15, 2022
adjacent islands/islas adyacentes is a bilingual edition of Delgado’s artist books amoná (2013) and subtropical dry (2016), “both based on camping trips to islands in the Puerto Rican archipelago.”
Song of the Absent Brook by Sabrina Ramos Rubén
Translated from the Spanish by S. Yates Gibson
Ugly Duckling Presse | December 15, 2022
Ramos Rubén’s first English publication “explores wild landscapes and architectural ruins, personal anguish and individual wonder.”
Translated from the Spanish by Michelle Gil-Montero
Ugly Duckling Presse | December 15, 2022
According to Jeannine Marie Pitas, “Rather than focusing on her personal biography or engaging directly with politics and history, Negroni evokes exile from an ontological perspective.”
The Human Engine at Dawn by Jim Daniels
Wolfson Press | December 15, 2022
William Trowbridge writes, “The ghost behind these haunted and haunting poems is the bittersweet and stunningly detailed memory of his formative years in blue-collar Detroit, echoed sometimes in his present home of Pittsburgh.”