We’re excited to share this year-end roundup of poetry anthologies, chapbooks, and full-length collections published in 2023 by independent literary publishers! (Read our year-end roundups for fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, and art and drama as well.)
Poetry Anthologies
A House Called Tomorrow: 50 Years of Poetry
Copper Canyon Press | February 28, 2023
This anthology, edited by Michael Wiegers and celebrating Copper Canyon Press’s 50th anniversary, “is a collection of beloved poems from books spanning half a century.”
Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry
University of Nebraska Press | March 1, 2023
Edited by Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Breaking the Silence collects work “from the 1800s to the present, including poets and emerging young writers exploring contemporary literary traditions with African and African diaspora poetry that transcends borders.”
I Sing the Salmon Home: Poems from Washington State
Empty Bowl Press | April 4, 2023
Edited by Rena Priest, this anthology “sings of salmon—lamented and praised, hooked, and netted, spawned out and dammed from home; of their magnificence and generosity, of how the fish continue to give and of what they gave.”
Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology
Sarabande Books | June 20, 2023
Edited by Joy Priest, this poetry anthology “showcases the polyvocal communities of Louisville, Kentucky, a city celebrated for its bourbon, basketball, and horseracing, but long fraught with racial injustice, police corruption, and social unrest.”
Belle Point Press | August 29, 2023
Edited by C. T. Salazar and Casie Dodd, this anthology includes “many conventional and experimental approaches to the sonnet form,” by poets from across the American South.
Copper Canyon Press | September 26, 2023
Edited by Michael Wiegers and Kaci X. Tavares, Come Shining is “a compendium of stories about the importance of poems in people’s lives, accumulating a remarkable history of Copper Canyon Press.”
Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction & Deliverance
Sarabande Books | October 24, 2023
Edited by Kaveh Akbar and Paige Lewis, this anthology “on the lived experience of addiction” includes poems by Joy Harjo, Afaa Michael Weaver, Diane Seuss, Layli Long Soldier, and more.
Loving & Lasting: A FEMS Anthology
Game Over Books | October 24, 2023
Loving & Lasting: A FEMS Anthology is a poetry anthology “that celebrates our generative and varied relationships to femininity.”
Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems That Matter Most
Copper Canyon Press | October 24, 2023
Edited by Carl Phillips and Erin Belieu, this anthology features “fifty-eight author-selected poems and accompanying essays that explain how and why each poet chose a poem as their ‘personal best.'”
Audre Lorde at Fassett Studio, 1970
Fonograf Editions | November 7, 2023
This 12” LP features a recording of a reading Audre Lorde gave in May 1970 at Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, alongside a liner notes booklet featuring poems by Fred Moten and Pamela Sneed and essays by Tongo Eisen-Martin, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Carl Phillips.
Poetry Chapbooks
Helen of Troy is High AF by Sonia Greenfield
Harbor Editions | January 5, 2023
These persona poems “in the voices of the women of The Odyssey take a merciless look at the misogyny that informs the epic—and our contemporary culture as well.”
All Things Are Born to Change Their Shapes by Jennifer Martelli
Harbor Editions | January 12, 2023
Martelli’s poetry chapbook is a reminder “that women have been mythologized as a means to control, and, therefore, it is best to lean into this mythology and adopt the guise of the witch we are so often accused of being, or risk eclipse.”
The Commonplace Misfortunes of Everyday Plants by Renee Emerson
Belle Point Press | January 17, 2023
In her poetry chapbook, Emerson “evokes the sacramental through the most ephemerally permanent materials around us.”
Slate Roof Press | January 30, 2023
According to Jeffrey Thomson, this poetry chapbook “is a book of wonder, blood, and holy longing for flowers and seeds and wind and stone and their echoes in the human form.”
In Life There Are Many Things by Lucy Wainger
Black Lawrence Press | February 1, 2023
In Life There Are Many Things is “a portrait of adolescent mental illness after the end of history.”
electric infinities by Ashley Cline
Variant Literature | February 10, 2023
This poetry chapbook “grants readers reprieve in a landscape of wildflowers and feral gardens, bites of summer peaches and sips of dandelion wine.”
Belle Point Press | February 21, 2023
In this poetry chapbook, “the wildness of the Arkansas Ozarks comes vividly to life” and “motherhood becomes a song tinged with grief.”
All the Woods’ Wild: The Story of the Swamp Witch of Maurepas by Jack B. Bedell
Belle Point Press | March 1, 2023
In this poetry chapbook, “Bedell crafts a story through sonnets that leaves us feeling like we know a woman who never lived—and never died.”
Not Yet a Jedi by Partridge Boswell
Kallisto Gaia Press | March 14, 2023
This poetry chapbook “rockets through the late 20th century and into the present with its diction in hyperdrive, fusing whimsy to seriousness, blunt statement to syntactic complexity.”
House Work by Cindy Juyoung Ok
Ugly Duckling Presse | March 15, 2023
These poems “are charmed by containment and estranged by domesticity both in a specific house and in the imagined abstraction of home.”
Ordinary Light by Laura Maher and L.I. Henley
Bamboo Dart Press | March 25, 2023
This poetry chapbook “traces a correspondence of the growing connections of two strangers, uncovering a shared archeological dig of lost loves, regrets, questions, and other half-buried artifacts of memory.”
Black Lawrence Press | March 15, 2023
Lupine is “a gathering of feminist prose poetry engaging themes of ecology, animality, and the human unknown.”
Never Picked First For Playtime by Dustin Brookshire
Harbor Editions | March 17, 2023
According to James Allen Hall, this chapbook “shows us that Barbie’s essence is very much part of her performance: her naturalness is a feature, another thing you can pose and style.”
Casualties of Honey by Madison Gill
Middle Creek Publishing & Audio | April 8, 2023
According to Juan J. Morales, in this poetry chapbook Gill “embraces worry for wildfires, she laments broken economies, she praises Hygeia, and she slips into multiple lifetimes with a lover.”
The Living Room, Rearranged by Yael Grunseit
Harbor Editions | April 18, 2023
According to Sarah Sassoon, “Grunseit audaciously reframes Rabbinic Talmudic text and inserts a young woman’s experiences of sexuality and desire.”
Texas Review Press | June 1, 2023
This poetic sequence “inhabits a dreamscape filled with fragments of conversation, remembered loved ones, and the profound disorientation that accompanies loss.”
Cervena Barva Press | June 1, 2023
This chapbook features poems “prompted by films that range from the lowest of the B-Movies of the 50s to A-list horror to Biblical epics.”
Ugly Duckling Presse | June 1, 2023
Using a typewriter from the 1940s, powell “mucks up orthography to investigate disorienting practices of refusal and wade through the fundamental feltness and unintelligibility of thingness.”
Santa Fe Writers Project | July 1, 2023
In Roadmap, a “radical twenty-first century choreopoem, Dorian, a young American Black man, is tasked by an ancestral spirit to thwart his inevitable murder.”
Pliny and Other Problems by Emily Fernandez
Bamboo Dart Press | July 7, 2023
This poetry chapbook “starts with the problems of ordinary life—a mother’s midlife crisis—and the doings (and undoings) of aging and loss.”
Phantasmal Flowers in The Eden Where O
nly I Know by Yuu Ikeda
Black Sunflowers Poetry Press | July 14, 2023
This poetry chapbook “presents a curious, poetic directory of what it is to be a bloom.”
The Body’s Owner Speaks by Leo Smith
Black Sunflowers Poetry Press | July 14, 2023
According to Tiana Clark, Smith’s poetry chapbook “shines with sharp, visceral imagery and illuminating vulnerability.”
Consider the Gravity by Linda Enders
Choeofpleirn Press | July 15, 2023
According to Joseph Zaccardi, in this poetry chapbook, Enders “weaves the elements of the natural and human worlds.”
The Capture of Krao Farini by Nay Saysourinho
Ugly Duckling Presse | September 1, 2023
This poetry chapbook “dissolves the line between algorithm and spectacle to reveal the ultimate consolation prize—to be acclaimed as human enough.”
Loving the Dying by Len Verwey
University of Nebraska Press | September 1, 2023
In this chapbook, Verwey “looks at a person’s life from youth and growing up to aging and dying, considering what the ineluctable reality of death might imply about how we should think about our lives.”
Small Harbor Publishing | September 7, 2023
According to Brontez Purnell, “the constant through line in this collection, of course, is rage, and the voice takes an unapologetic tone as such.”
Under the Canopy of Unpruned Leaves by Nina Prater
Belle Point Press | September 19, 2023
In this debut chapbook, “domestic and outdoor worlds converge in the internal life of a speaker attuned to the transformative potential within everyday moments.”
Refused a Second Date by Maya Williams
Small Harbor Publishing | September 23, 2023
These poems “center on first date impressions, intergenerational patterns of dating and intimate partner violence, racism in dating, mental health, religion as it relates to sex, and queerness.”
A Belief in Cosmic Dailiness by Angela Acosta
Red Ogre Review | October 1, 2023
Acosta’s poetry chapbook “roots space-age dreams in centuries-old human tradition, inflected with flicks of humor.”
Unicorn Death Moon Day Planner by Zachary Cahill
Red Ogre Review | October 1, 2023
According to Corinne Halbert, this poetry chapbook “delicately guides us through the fermented sadness of a wounded heart.”
Rescue is Elsewhere by Donald Illich
Red Ogre Review | October 1, 2023
The aliens in Illich’s chapbook of science-fiction poetry “represent something beautiful and otherworldly, something that can lift us out of the humdrum day-to-day focus on ourselves.”
GRAB by Kendra Preston Leonard
Red Ogre Review | October 1, 2023
According to Jack B. Bedell, each poem in this chapbook “builds myth line by line, linking us to ancient truths, mapmaking to lead us forward into our future.”
Swimming in Gilead by Cassie Premo Steele
Yellow Arrow Publishing | October 10, 2023
This poetry chapbook follows “the journey of a woman who, empowered to express herself through the feminist spirit of a writing group, explores what it means to be a woman and an ally in an era of uncertainty.”
Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora by Meghan Sterling
Harbor Editions | October 11, 2023
Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora “braids poems detailing Sterling’s life in modern-day America as a secular Jew raising her daughter, named after her beloved grandmother, with poems of her great-grandparents’ and grandparents’ experiences navigating a new country after fleeing wars across the ocean.”
Threesome in the Last Toyota Celica & Other Circus Tricks by m. mick powell
Host Publications | October 21, 2023
This poetry chapbook “sings about Black queer femmehood in harmonies of multiple voices, asserting the self as ever-changing and voluminous.”
We Were More Than Kindling by Jessica Morey-Collins
Black Lawrence Press | October 24, 2023
This chapbook follows “the speaker’s reckoning of an intimate history of persistent sexualization and consent violation with the disillusion of coming of age in an era when abuse of power is a feature, not a bug.”
Demolition Suite by Willa Carroll
Split Rock Press | November 1, 2023
This innovative sequence “engages climate change, environmental degradation, and hazardous exposure with unexpected poetics.”
How to Keep Things Alive by Beth Gordon
Split Rock Press | November 1, 2023
Gordon “continues to explore themes of loss and grief, this time through her relationships with the living and the dead.”
Split Rock Press | November 1, 2023
In this single, segmented poem, “the speaker wanders the woods and fields near her New England home, navigating the ephemeral, intoxicating landscape of spring and new desire.”
How to Become the God of Small Things by Fiona Lu
Map Literary | November 2, 2023
In her debut chapbook, Lu “vividly extracts the storms of familial relationships and weaves them into a work filled with feminine strengths, landscapes of fragility, and humanized gods.”
Belle Point Press | November 14, 2023
The speaker in this chapbook “evokes a sacramental vision that grace may continue to abound whether we are prepared to welcome it or not.”
Driftwood at the River’s Edge by Peter Wortsman
Bamboo Dart Press | November 15, 2023
According to Wortsman, “Like driftwood, words, phrases and severed sentences come floating by. Part fisherman, part scavenger, I spread my net and rescue these bits of debris from the deep.”
What You Refuse to Remember by MT Vallarta
Small Harbor Publishing | December 21, 2023
According to Stephen Hong Song, the poems in this chapbook explore “racial, gendered, queer, and postcolonial subjections; personal and structural traumas; the many metamorphoses of our kinship filiations; and the crucial need for aesthetic rejuvenations.”
Poetry Collections
Keorapetse Kgositsile: Collected Poems, 1969–2018 by Keorapetse Kgositsile
University of Nebraska Press | January 1, 2023
Edited by Phillipa Yaa de Villiers and Uhuru Portia Phalafala, this comprehensive collection by South Africa’s second poet laureate spans almost fifty years.
Story & Bone by Deborah Leipziger
Lily Poetry Review Books | January 10, 2023
According to Adam Sol, “Story & Bone dives deep into language in search of identity, memory, intimacy, and connection.”
Future Botanic by Christina Olivares
Get Fresh Books Publishing | January 15, 2023
Olivares’s poems are “lyrical meditations—in some cases, spells—that embody, vivify and reckon with the geography of the Americas and the centuries-long postcolonial condition.”
Fierce Geometry by Mary Brancaccio
Get Fresh Books Publishing | January 15, 2023
Brancaccio’s poetry collection “travels the emotive back roads and roadside attractions along one woman’s journey through longing, love and loss.”
The Little Deaths by Mercy Tullis-Bukhari
Get Fresh Books Publishing | January 15, 2023
In The Little Deaths, Mercy Tullis-Bukhari “shows the influence of existential rebirths in the human interactions of the everyday.”
Boundless as the Sky by Dawn Raffel
Sagging Meniscus Press | January 17, 2023
Raffel’s poetry collection in two parts “is a book of the invisible histories that repose beneath the cities we inhabit, and the worlds we try to build out of words.”
It’s About Time by J.R. Solonche
Deerbrook Editions | January 20, 2023
According to David Mark Williams, “Solonche is revealed as a philosopher in the mould of Wittgenstein: aphoristic, charismatic, acerbic and oddly mystical.”
Hood Vacations by Michal ‘MJ’ Jones
Black Lawrence Press | January 21, 2023
This debut collection “is a rhythmic and quiet rumbling—an unflinching recollection of Blackness, queerness, gender, and violence through lenses of family lineage and confessional narrative.”
Exquisite by September by Shayla Hawkins
EastOver Press | January 24, 2023
Hawkins “merges the female form’s everyday with the exotic, acknowledging the male gaze through ekphrastic poems inspired by the artwork of men who were inspired by women.”
Arboretum in a Jar by Frances Donovan
Lily Poetry Review Books | January 27, 2023
According to Kevin Prufer, “Donovan weaves lyric poetry with memoir, dramatic personae with careful self-reflection, all in complex meditation on trauma, sexual awakening, recovery, and femininity.”
The Cracker Box Poems by Joe Benevento
Mouthfeel Press | January 30, 2023
According to Larry D. Thomas, “Benevento continues his laser-like depiction of the blue-collar, Italian American culture of his Queens childhood, coming of age, and subsequent adulthood spent in other locales.”
Autofocus Books | January 31, 2023
Caine’s poetry collection “attempts (and maybe fails) to define “home” in an era when the future is uncertain and everything feels a little bit off.”
The Palace of Unbearable Feeling by Anne Riesenberg
Lily Poetry Review Books | February 1, 2023
This collection of concrete poetry “explores the materiality of language while addressing personal and collective issues of loss, right action, consciousness, and possible avenues of renewal.”
Gunpowder Press | February 1, 2023
Soto’s latest book of poetry is a “collection of 47 new poems written during and inspired by the pandemic.”
Particles of a Stranger Light by Anthony Sutton
Veliz Books | February 3, 2023
Sutton’s debut poetry collection “employs a wide array of approaches and forms to obsessively dissect issues of memory, identity, culture, and history.”
Reading Berryman to the Dog by Wendy Taylor Carlisle
Belle Point Press | February 7, 2023
Originally published in 2000, Carlisle’s debut collection “explores the weight of memory, the risks of love, and the life that remains possible through loss.”
Meet Me at the Lighthouse by Dana Gioia
Graywolf Press | February 7, 2023
In this poetry collection, Gioia “invites us back to old Los Angeles, where the shabby nightclub of the title beckons us into its noirish immortality.”
Insomniac Sentinel by Abraham Smith
Baobab Press | February 7, 2023
Smith’s poetry collection “is a collision of meter, speed, and experience into auditory sensations that range from the elegiac to the ecstatic to the venomous.”
Game Over Books | February 7, 2023
Weiss’s second full-length collection “explores faith, death, body, queerness, marriage, and blockbuster movies.”
CavanKerry Press | February 7, 2023
Boy is “a sequence of poems that explores how death and loss color memory and influence the ways family members relate to each other and to their shared history.”
The Goddess Fortune: To Proper Is to Die by R. L. Edmondson Vance
Tofu Ink Arts Press | February 9, 2023
The poetry in this collection “is inspired from the found object and the objet d’art: fortune cookies, passing billboards, teenage diaries, made up songs sung around the house, overheard conversations, mistaken musical lyrics from childhood, and all other manner of serendipitous encounters.”
Black Metamorphoses by Shanta Lee Gander
Etruscan Press | February 14, 2023
This poetry collection “explores the Black psyche, body, and soul, through inversion and brazen confrontation of work that has shaped Western civilization.”
I’m Always So Serious by Karisma Price
Sarabande Books | February 14, 2023
This debut poetry collection, anchored in New Orleans and New York City, “is an extended meditation on Blackness, on family, on loss.”
The Views from Mount Hunger by Marjorie Ryerson
Green Writers Press | February 14, 2023
The poems in this collection “look in a broad array of directions, with subject matter that covers topics ranging from the natural world to climate change, from reflections on the past to healing, hope, and humor about the present.”
Subterranean Address: New & Selected Poems by Judith Skillman
Deerbrook Editions | February 14, 2023
According to David Kirby, this poetry collection “is a guide to everything we could possibly know and see in this beautiful, crazy cosmos.”
Texas Review Press | February 15, 2023
Audsley’s debut poetry collection examines “the consequences of the international transracial adoptee experience—her own” and “finds more questions than solid answers.”
Texas Review Press | February 15, 2023
This poetry collection “bears witness to traumas—cultural, personal, and spiritual—as well as moments of revelatory transport.”
Frozen by Fire: A Documentary in Verse of the Triangle Factory Fire of 1911 by Donald Kentop
Black Heron Press | February 21, 2023
These connected poems “compose a documentary novel about the famous Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in Manhattan in 1911.”
Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers by Kelly McQuain
Texas Review Press | February 15, 2023
McQuain’s poems “are far roaming in setting and far ranging in style, depicting the richness of a rural West Virginia upbringing as well as contemporary adulthood in the big city and abroad.”
Accidental Garden by Catherine Esposito Prescott
Gunpowder Press | February 21, 2023
According to Emma Tresses, Prescott “assembles a glowing collection of poems that seam the quotidian with the ethereal; for this poet, they are one and the same.”
Divination with a Human Heart Attached by Emily Stoddard
Game Over Books | February 21, 2023
The poems in this debut collection “challenge the space between the divine and the stories we invent—or inherit—about what to believe and why.”
Fonograf Editions | February 21, 2023
Early Works “collects Alice Notley’s first four out of print poetry collections, along with 80 pages of previously uncollected material.”
The Speak Angel Series by Alice Notley
Fonograf Editions | February 21, 2023
The Speak Angel Series “is composed of six full-length books in various forms but towards the achievement of a unifying epic narrative in which the poet, as character, leads all the souls of all the living and dead to a point zero where the remaking of the cosmos can be performed.”
Moments in Place by Paul B. Roth
Rain Mountain Press | February 27, 2023
In this collection of prose poetry, Roth “threads the reader right through the eye of his natural surroundings, where he not only allows us to witness nature but become part of it.”
The Lady of Elche by Amanda Berenguer
Translated from the Spanish by Kristin Dykstra
Veliz Books | March 1, 2023
Presented bilingually for the first time, this 1987 poetry collection “drips with prophecy still relevant to our own time.”
Migrations and Other Exiles by Letisia Cruz
Lost Horse Press | March 1, 2023
Winner of the Idaho Prize for Poetry, Migrations and Other Exiles “questions the contradictory nature of human love.”
In the Cities of Sleep by Elizabeth C. Herron
Fernwood Press | March 1, 2023
In the Cities of Sleep is “a collection of poems centered on the ramifications of a warming world.”
Black Square Editions | March 1, 2023
This book reflects a year or so of Robert Kelly’s “concentration on the poem as structure, poem as house.”
A Violin from the Other Riverside by Dmytro Kremin
Translated from the Ukrainian by Svetlana Lavochkina
Lost Horse Press | March 1, 2023
Each poem in this bilingual collection is “akin to a dictionary entry on Ukraine composed in complex and intellectually laden—yet colourful and virtuosic—light-footed verse.”
Mine Mine Mine by Uhuru Portia Phalafala
University of Nebraska Press | March 1, 2023
Mine Mine Mine is “a personal narration of Uhuru Portia Phalafala’s family’s experience of the migrant labor system brought on by the gold mining industry in Johannesburg, South Africa.”
This Far North by Jason Tandon
Black Lawrence Press | March 1, 2023
According to Water~Stone Review, these poems “are timeless and prodigious with a thundering, spiritual stirring of heart and mind.”
Autumn House Press | March 2, 2023
This poetry collection is “a collage of the journeys and interior lives of various wanderers—from Ishmael, the son of Hagar, to Melville’s Ishmael, and from Pierre of The Ambiguities to Pierre Guyotat.”
Heating the Outdoors by Marie-Andrée Gill
Translated from the French by Kristen Renee Miller
Book*hug Press | March 7, 2023
This collection of micropoems “describes the yearnings for love, the domestic monotony of post-breakup malaise, and the awkward meeting of exes.”
Maker of Heaven & by Jason Myers
Belle Point Press | March 7, 2023
This debut poetry collection “explores the implications of how we might experience the Imago Dei in the midst of a culture fraught with racism, violence, and the simple limits of our human frailty.”
The History Hotel by Baron Wormser
CavanKerry Press | March 7, 2023
“Touching on topics such as the Jewish resistance, Godard films, and the National Football League,” The History Hotel “opens the door to both political and personal histories.”
Graywolf Press | March 7, 2023
In Youn’s latest poetry collection, “one sequence deconstructs the sounds and letters of the word ‘deracinations’ to create a sonic landscape of micro- and macroaggressions, assimilation, and self-doubt.”
Lily Poetry Review Books | March 8, 2023
According to Johan Gallaher, in this lyric essay “Archuleta is witnessing the contemporary, but believing in more.”
The Scorpion’s Question Mark by J. D. Debris
Autumn House Press | March 9, 2023
In this debut poetry collection, Debris “focuses on characters who live on society’s outskirts and demand greater visibility in the face of marginalization.”
Every Transmission by Adam Deutsch
Fernwood Press | March 8, 2023
This debut poetry collection “is about the erosion of our mechanical relationships and the movement to natural forms.”
Wood-Solace, a Return to Belonging by Lisa Lundeen
Plants and Poetry | March 8, 2023
This collection of poetry and photography “models meditation through creativity, encouraging the reader-beholder to savor each pairing in contemplative, restorative stillness and celebration.”
Helen of Bikini by Phoebe Reeves
Lily Poetry Review Books | March 8, 2023
According to Cynthia Bargar, Reeves “showers us with the hard rain of atomic fallout, juxtaposed with a compendium of flora and fauna.”
She Calls the Moon by Its Name by Lonnie Hull DuPont
Fernwood Press | March 13, 2023
This series of poems “follows a nineteenth-century farm woman in spiritual isolation as she finds strength in naming what is alive around her-or even hidden in plain sight.”
The Glue Trap and Other Poems by Julio Marzán
Fernwood Press | March 14, 2023
The Glue Trap and Other Poems is “a volume in which range should be read as trajectory, the personal and the social as reciprocal metaphors.”
If Some God Shakes Your House by Jennifer Franklin
Four Way Books | March 15, 2023
In her third collection, Franklin “reimagines an Antigone for our times.”
To the Boy Who Was Night by Rigoberto González
Four Way Books | March 15, 2023
To the Boy Who Was Night collects the poetry published by Rigoberto González since 1999, including selections from five previous books as well as new work.
Romantic Comedy by James Allen Hall
Four Way Books | March 15, 2023
Hall’s poems “resist the formulaic while paying homage to the oeuvre, a formal balancing act that celebrates queer life.”
When There Was Light by Carlie Hoffman
Four Way Books | March 15, 2023
The poems in Hoffman’s second collection “map out a topography where global movements of diaspora and war live alongside personal reckonings.”
Proximal Morocco by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine
Translated from the French by Jake Syersak
Ugly Duckling Presse | March 15, 2023
Originally published in 1975, this book is “at once a powerful outcry to fellow artists for international solidarity of the colonized and outcast and a documentation of the pain and struggle of exile.”
Four Way Books | March 15, 2023
In this poetry collection, Leigh “strives to reconcile the disconnect between her past and her present as she confronts the inherited violence mired in the body’s history.”
Four Way Books | March 15, 2023
So Long “fleshes out a full elegiac register, sitting with the mourning of farewell while holding onto gratitude, remembrance, and a permeating love.”
Four Way Books | March 15, 2023
Childcare “explores the paradox at the root of raising kids: the joy of new life accompanies an awareness of potential loss.”
When I Reach for Your Pulse by Rushi Vyas
Four Way Books | March 15, 2023
In this debut collection, “lyric works to untangle slippery personal and political histories in the wake of a parent’s suicide.”
Awaiting by Charisse Pearlina Weston
Ugly Duckling Presse | March 15, 2023
“Part autobiography, part play, part fictive dream as long poem,” Awaiting “begins by detaching phrases and motifs from two seemingly disparate plays (Lorraine Hansberry’s What Use are Flowers? and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot).”
The Cloud Notebook by Ada Smailbegović
Litmus Press | March 21, 2023
This debut collection “is a long poem that unfolds from the narrative instability and fracturing that occurs from experiences of forced displacement and war, and from configurations of gender and power.”
My Dear Comrades by Sunu Chandy
Regal House Publishing | March 28, 2023
In this poetry collection, Chandy “includes stories about her experiences as a woman, civil rights attorney, parent, partner, daughter of South Asian immigrants, and member of the LGBTQ community.”
This Conversation Is Being Recorded by Hannah Kezema
Game Over Books | March 28, 2023
Kezema’s hybrid debut is “a vibrant collection of poems and erasures of painted, dirtied, and flora-filled legal documents and interview notes from her experiences as an investigator and editor in the insurance fraud industry.”
Autumn House Press | April 2, 2023
This debut poetry collection “considers the notions of home and family and how to survive the changes and losses associated with both.”
Iggy Horse by Michael Earl Craig
Wave Books | April 3, 2023
Craig’s poetry collection “articulates the sadness and strangeness of American life with the poetic observations of true satire.”
Saltwater Demands a Psalm by Kweku Abimbola
Graywolf Press | April 4, 2023
This poetry collection “creates a cosmology in search of Black eternity governed by Adinkra symbols—pictographs central to Ghanaian language and culture in their proverbial meanings—and rooted in units of time created from the rhythms of Black life.”
Odes to the Ordinary by Emily Benson-Scott
Green Writers Press | April 4, 2023
In Odes to the Ordinary, Benson-Scott “employs a poetic form dating back to ancient Greece to valorize the commonplace.”
Wave Books | April 4, 2023
Božičević’s latest poetry collection “is Dantesque in its ability to commune with the dead without becoming fixed in the past.”
Fire Index by Bethany Breitland
Green Writers Press | April 4, 2023
Fire Index “measures the interior life of a survivor against the world she creates through her own fractured marriage, motherhood, and religion.”
Book*hug Press | April 4, 2023
This poetry collection explores “domestic and artistic life amidst the environmental crisis and the surprising ways that every philosophical quandary—large and small—converges in the home, in small objects, conversations, and moments.”
Green Writers Press | April 4, 2023
This collection of poems “celebrates the sense of mystery, wonder, and comfort that is integral to the natural world as well as relations with others.”
Black Ocean | April 4, 2023
Hall’s poetry collection “braids the panic-inducing catastrophes of now with a long view of solidarity in struggle.”
Human Time: Selected Poems by Kim Haengsook
Translated from the Korean by Susan K, Léo-Thomas Brylowski, Hannah Quinn Hertzog, Joanne Park, Soohyun Yang, Soeun Seo, and Jiyoon Lee
Black Ocean | April 4, 2023
In this selection drawing on her work across her career and five books in Korean, Haengsook’s “poetic spaces are shrouded in a magic fog that is clarifying instead of obscuring.”
instead, it is dark by Cynthia Hogue
Red Hen Press | April 4, 2023
In her tenth book of poetry, Hogue “speaks a complex truth and casts a laser light on violence, resilience, survival, and—the heart of this collection—love.”
Interglacial Narrows by Pierre Joris
Contra Mundum Press | April 4, 2023
Interglacial Narrows gathers a range of Joris’s poems written between 2015 and 2021, including “a diaristic sequence of poems and notes started during the spring of 2020.”
Four in Hand by Alicia Mountain
BOA Editions | April 4, 2023
Four in Hand “is both formal and experimental, ranging from lyric romantic and familial narratives to blank verses of reconfigured found text pulled from financial newsletter emails.”
Material Exercises by Blanca Varela
Translated from the Spanish by Carlos Lara
Black Sun Lit | April 4, 2023
This bilingual poetry collection “is a display of the vatic exorcism of the unconscious and a phenomenological investigation of space and intersubjective incarnation.”
Wail Song: or wading in the water at the end of the world by Chaun Webster
Black Ocean | April 4, 2023
Webster’s book “is a multi-form long poem that offers an extended contemplation on being that lays bare how the construction of the human and the animal both rely on black objection.”
When Did We Stop Being Cute? by Martin Wiley
CavanKerry Press | April 4, 2023
This novel in poetic form “tells the story of a young man dealing with the challenges of growing up mixed-race in 1980s suburbia.”
All of This Was Once Under Water by Natalie Padilla Young
Quarter Press | April 4, 2023
According to Dan O’Brien, this illustrated poetry book is “a collection of poetic dispatches from a terrain of lost faith and ecological decline.”
From Unincorporated Territory [Åmot] by Craig Santos Perez
Omnidawn | April 5, 2023
Winner of the 2023 National Book Award in Poetry, this book “explores how storytelling can become a symbolic form of åmot, offering healing from the traumas of colonialism, militarism, migration, environmental injustice, and the death of elders.”
Book*hug Press | April 6, 2023
This debut poetry collection “traces fragments of family, becoming and unbecoming against the shifting shorelines of loss, multigenerational migration, and (un)belonging.”
Sea Crow Press | April 7, 2023
In Erzinger’s poems, “revelations are made in the middle of the night, during a pandemic, in the heart of the forest, at the seaside and in food, snapshots of past and present.”
AUTHOR OF ALL ILL by Charlie Perseus
Fifth Wheel Press | April 11, 2023
This poetry collection is “both an ode to and an elegy for the author’s own falling.”
Good Grief, the Ground by Margaret Ray
BOA Editions | April 11, 2023
In this poetry collection, Ray “is pulling back the curtains on our societal performance of culture, guiding an exposing light to the daily performance that is life in a woman’s body.”
Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility by Anna Laura Reeve
Belle Point Press | April 11, 2023
These poems “are wide-ranging in subject—postpartum depression, ecopoetics, creative manifestoes—yet all are rooted in the Southern Appalachia sprawl that she has made her home.”
Grid Books | April 11, 2023
Terranova’s seventh collection “charts inner landscapes in poems that read like memories surfaced in reflection and refracted through the lens of dreams.”
A Fire in the Hills by Afaa M. Weaver
Red Hen Press | April 11, 2023
According to Rajiv Mohabir, “A Fire in the Hills burns through violences internal and external—whether in Chicago, in schools, in public pools, by police against Black folks—while writing back to America.”
The Flowers of Nonchalance by Dan Smart
Kallisto Gaia Press | April 14, 2023
Smart’s debut collection is “a snapshot of a turning year in his life as an artist—from spring through winter, and back again to spring.”
Portraits as Animal by Victoriano Cárdenas
Bloomsday Literary | April 14, 2023
In this collection “in conversation with Taos’s rich artistic tradition and the brutal, binding legacy of colonization, Cárdenas “writes through his transition, acknowledging that ‘to become a man means a lifetime of needles like the man who raised me.'”
The Art of Bagging by Joshua Gottlieb-Miller
Conduit Books & Ephemera | April 14, 2023
According to Kevin Prufer, “Gottlieb-Miller considers the grocery store as a site for meditations on vast economies, complex labor systems, and the ordinary, often nearly invisible, people who work within them.”
Down Low and Low Down: Timothy Liu’s Bedside Bottom-Feeder Blues by Timothy Liu
Barrow Street Press | April 15, 2023
The poems in Liu’s latest collection “are unruly, naughty, looking for trouble, not poems you’d want to recite at a traditional Thanksgiving table where proper etiquette rears its gagged head.”
The Song Cave | April 15, 2023
Nicholson’s third collection “is filled with the perverse and the sacred, whether the subject is art, love, or sex, whether it’s ancient or contemporary.”
Landscape with Missing River by Joni Wallace
Barrow Street Press | April 15, 2023
Wallace’s poetry collection “traces the late life, addiction, and death of the speaker’s father, a Los Alamos scientist, living along the banks of the Animas River in rural northern New Mexico.”
Red Hen Press | April 18, 2023
Cárdenas’s poems “transgress illusory borders between lands, languages, humans and the rest of the natural world, waking and dreaming, and the living and the dead as they unearth traces of experience that shape and haunt us.”
Outside the Frame by Catherine Pritchard Childress
EastOver Press | April 18, 2023
In these poems Childress “gives full-throated voice to those who are historically silenced, while bearing witness to a complex culture that both perpetuates that silence and cries out to be heard and to be seen.”
Sleeping as Fast as I Can by Richard Michelson
Slant Books | April 18, 2023
Michelson’s poems “explore the boundaries between the personal and the political-and the deep connections between history and memory.”
Buffalo Girl by Jessica Q. Stark
BOA Editions | April 18, 2023
In these hybrid poems, Stark “explores her mother’s fraught immigration to the United States from Vietnam at the end of war through the lens of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale.”
Black Lawrence Press | April 21, 2023
These poems “examine the life of before and after: when something is excised from you, it was you, and you are what remains.”
Trouble Funk by Douglas Manuel
Red Hen Press | April 25, 2023
Set in Anderson, Indiana, Trouble Funk “exposes ways Black Love is thwarted but never destroyed by racism, classism, and sexism.”
Nomenclatures of Invisibility by Mahtem Shiferraw
BOA Editions | April 25, 2023
In these poems, “Shiferraw attends to personal and collective experiences of migration, motherhood, and immigration’s complicated notions of home.”
Invisible Publishing | April 25, 2023
Siklosi’s poetry collection is “a work of salvaging and selving, of salvaging a self from disparate elements.”
Come Back for a Little Bit by Elle Warren
Game Over Books | April 25, 2023
Come Back for a Little Bit is “a surreal and daydreamy collection asking the question ‘what if?’ in the face of momentous grief.”
Tender Machines by J. Mae Barizo
Tupelo Press | May 1, 2023
The poems in Tender Machines “swing between the domestic and the surreal, charting motherhood, desire and an immigrant family’s haunted inheritance.”
Because I Love You I Become War by Eileen R. Tabios
Marsh Hawk Press | May 1, 2023
According to E. San Juan, Jr., this collection of poems and prose “weaves the semiotic subtleties of icon, index, and symbol into epiphanies and discoveries that are, indeed, new additions to our world as we know it so far.”
Deep Are These Distances between Us by Susan Atefat-Peckham
CavanKerry Press | May 2, 2023
In these poems, Atefat-Peckham “troubles preconceptions of nationhood and fixed systems of power by bringing the reader into the Iranian American home, offering glimpses of familial love and intimacy.”
Wave Books | May 2, 2023
Donnelly’s fourth collection of poems “ferries the reader toward an endless horizon of questioning that is both philosophical and deeply embodied.”
Spellbook for the Sabbath Queen by Elisheva Fox
Belle Point Press | May 2, 2023
“Part psalter, part Sapphic verse,” this debut poetry collection “evokes the spirit of Emily Dickinson while calling the reader to prayer for a life fully lived.”
Ways of Being by Sati Mookherjee
MoonPath Press | May 2, 2023
According to Rena Priest, these poems “reveal a bold voice that brings us on a tour through emotional and literal landscapes as fluid as the tides.”
Still Falling by Jennifer Grotz
Graywolf Press | May 2, 2023
In this collection, Grotz “carries the weight of losses and their aftermaths—the deaths of the poet’s mentors, friends, and mother; the endings of relationships; and the enclosures of a life spent in attendance to the world in a state of wanting rather than truly living.”
perennial fashion presence falling by Fred Moten
Wave Books | May 2, 2023
The poems in this collection “hold an innate quantum curiosity about the infinitude of the present and the ways in which one could observe the history of the future.”
West: A Translation by Paisley Rekdal
Copper Canyon Press | May 2, 2023
This hybrid collection of poems and essays “draws a powerful, necessary connection between the railroad’s completion and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882–1943).”
What Small Sound by Francesca Bell
Red Hen Press | May 9, 2023
What Small Sound “is a book of plentiful sorrows but also of small and sturdy comforts, a book that chronicles the private, lonely life of the body as well as its tender generosities.”
the nature machine! by Tyler Gillespie
Autofocus Books | May 9, 2023
In this poetry collection, Gillespie “merges poetic forms with interstitial moments of sound and visual technologies to playfully theorize the now and to seriously contemplate the future.”
Flare, Corona by Jeannine Hall Gailey
BOA Editions | May 9, 2023
Flare, Corona “paints a self-portrait of the layered ways that we prevail and persevere through illness and natural disaster.”
Deal: New and Selected Poems by Randall Mann
Copper Canyon Press | May 9, 2023
Deal: New and Selected Poems “contains the most memorable of Mann’s previous five collections and presents new poems of disco, lament, and formal invention.”
We Sailed on the Lake by Bill Carty
Bunny Presse | May 9, 2023
The poems in We Sailed on the Lake “are closely observed, finding unexpected affinities within urban and natural environments alike.”
Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses by Ronald Johnson
The Song Cave | May 15, 2023
In this “underground classic of visionary and queer poetics,” Johnson “weaves together texts to show the world from multiple angles of vision, not only his own.”
Red Hen Press | May 16, 2023
Flame’s poetry collection “imagines a love that sits comfortably at the crossroads of commitment and freedom.”
Copper Canyon Press | May 16, 2023
Eilbert’s third poetry collection “uses snapshots of violence to survey loss of family, of habitat, of consent—the discarded tools used to arrest climate change activists, the skin marked with crescent moons and photographed by a forensic nurse.”
Fifth Wheel Press | May 16, 2023
Traum/A is an “abecedarian catalogue of experimental, visual and prose poetry on the causes and symptoms of trauma.”
American Scapegoat by Enzo Silon Surin
Black Lawrence Press | May 19, 2023
American Scapegoat is “a book of painstakingly honest and chilling poems about America’s neglectful relationship with its own history.”
Fates by Ann Pedone, Katherine Soniat, and D. M. Spitzer
Etruscan Press | May 23, 2023
This Tribius includes Ann Pedone’s The Medea Notebooks, Katherine Soniat’s ekphrastic collection Starfish Wash-up, and D. M. Spitzer’s “queering translation of an Old Testament text from the Septuagint.”
Judas & Suicide by Maya Williams
Game Over Books | May 23, 2023
This poetry collection approaches topics of “religion and suicidality… through the lens of Black family and community, sadness, medication, sexual violence, the prison industrial complex, media, and Bible verses.”
Things I Didn’t Do with This Body by Amanda Gunn
Copper Canyon Press | May 23, 2023
Things I Didn’t Do with This Body “sings in myriad voices and forms—ragged columns rich with syncopated internal rhyme, crisp formal sonnets, and the angular shapes of a stream-of-pill-induced-consciousness.”
Sarabande Books | May 23, 2023
This poetry collection “troubles the meaning of a racehorse, in particular the broodmare and the foals she carries.”
The Book of Redacted Paintings by Arthur Kayzakian
Black Lawrence Press | May 26, 2023
This collection’s narrative arc “follows a boy in search of his father’s painting, but it is unclear whether the painting exists or not.”
Ghost Apples by Katharine Coles
Red Hen Press | May 30, 2023
In her ninth poetry collection, Coles “interrogates and celebrates her relationship with the natural world and the various creatures who inhabit it, and in doing so asks what it means to be sentient and mortal on a fragile planet.”
Meta-Verse!: It’s going to be interesting to see how yesterday goes by Joann Renee Boswell
Fernwood Press | June 1, 2023
Illustrated by Joey Hartmann-Dow and Jay Williams, this poetry collection is “a coloring, pick-your-own poem, space-time romp exploring pandemic, parenting, politics, personal, past.”
The Tavern of Lost Souls by Alan Britt
Cervena Barva Press | June 1, 2023
In this collection, Britt’s “everyday world is never lost, even while tethered to high-flying multi-imaged phrases and clauses.”
Fernwood Press | June 1, 2023
Foley’s poetry collection “contemplates relationships, identity, love, loss, and radical transformation, finding acceptance, joy, and growing peace, as the speaker practices meditation, and falls more deeply in love with her wife.”
Feast of the Ass by Jahan Khajavi
Ugly Duckling Presse | June 1, 2023
“Drawing extensively on Iranian poetic traditions and the history of their reception in English translation,” Feast of the Ass “presents a series of verses that play in the fields of love poetry’s address.”
Passager Books | June 1, 2023
Longley’s debut poetry collection “gives voice to the passion, wisdom and freedom age brings.”
Wind—Mountain—Oak: The Poems of Sappho
Translated from the Greek by Dan Beachy-Quick
Tupelo Press | June 1, 2023
Of his translation of Sappho’s surviving fragments, Beachy-Quick writes, “The hope, far-fetched as it might be, is to give a reader in English some semblance of how an ancient Greek listener might hear these songs.”
Joan of Arkansas by Milo Wippermann
Ugly Duckling Presse | June 1, 2023
Joan of Arkansas is “an election-season closet drama about climate catastrophe, divine gender expression, the instructions of angels, and heavenly revelation relayed via viral video.”
Church Ladies by Renee Emerson
Fernwood Press | June 2, 2023
This poetry collection is “an invitation into the lives of women in the church-prophetesses, wives, saints, mothers, martyrs, daughters, and anyone who has been a tender of a family or community.”
Resurrection Song by George Wallace
Roadside Press | June 3, 2023
According to Ellyn Maybe, Wallace’s latest book of poetry is “a deeply moving and powerful collection with an electric vocabulary.”
Fool in a Blue House by Katherine Gaffney
University of Tampa Press | June 5, 2023
In this poetry collection, Gaffney “crafts carefully appointed rooms, both interior and exterior, alongside familial and romantic love, loss and near loss of beloveds, selves, and even neighborhood rabbits.”
Wave Books | June 6, 2023
In these poem-essays, “writing is a physical act where writing and lived experience support one another in bodies—animal, plant, mineral, and word bodies—that are injured and heal, that die and continue in new forms, playing new roles.”
You Look Like Hell by Schuyler Peck
Game Over Books | June 6, 2023
You Look Like Hell is “an arson-charred, sultry-eyed, bump-in-the-night book of poems that provides room to revel in your villain curiosity.”
Heat Death of the Universe by Leela Raj-Sankar
fifth wheel press | June 6, 2023
Heat Death of the Universe is “a collection about the body and its long, dizzy slide from childhood to adulthood.”
A Plucked Zither by Phuong T. Vuong
Red Hen Press | June 6, 2023
Vuong’s poetry collection “explores what happens to language and thus emotions and relationships under conditions of migration, specifically refugee migration from Vietnam, and its aftermath.”
American Queers by Jesse Mavro Diamond
Cervena Barva Press | June 10, 2023
According to Judson Evans, “Diamond’s poetry combines a keen resistance to heteronormative culture with a lyric eroticism that evokes Sappho.”
neverwell by Darren C. Demaree
Small Harbor Publishing | June 11, 2023
Demaree “masterfully controls compressed language to explore the many multitudes a person can contain.”
Bottomlands by Madeline Trosclair-Rotolo
Belle Point Press | June 13, 2023
These poems “manifest the Louisiana Gulf Coast and all its capacity for an environment experienced in full color.”
u know how much i hate being alone in social situations// by Stephon Lawrence
Futurepoem | June 14, 2023
According to Diamond Sharp, “This book presents an unvarnished take on intimacy in the contemporary world in all of its disjointed glory.”
Bone Language by Jamaica Baldwin
YesYes Books | June 15, 2023
Baldwin’s debut poetry collection “is a testament to the specific ways women survive the world and its attacks on their bodies.”
Translated from the Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida
Ugly Duckling Presse | June 15, 2023
This abecedarian “is a maelstrom of voices cast in the underwater shadows and nuclear light of the Anthropocene.”
A Brief Natural History of Women by Sarah Freligh
Small Harbor Publishing | June 18, 2023
According to Kim Magowan, “Freligh’s girls and women grieve, rant, stumble and topple, pour each other shots, desert each other, catch each other mid-fall.”
The Boxer of Quirinal by John Barr
Red Hen Press | June 20, 2023
In Barr’s poems “the success of the heron hunting, the albatross breeding, the inchworm spinning give proof of life.”
Kindness Separates Night From Day by Marija Dejanović
Translated from the Croatian by Vesna Maric
Sandorf Passage | June 20, 2023
This poetry collection “is a marvel of refined verse that explores the concept of the eternal stranger: the self.”
Remnants of a Full Moon by Michelle Gonzalez
Bamboo Dart Press | June 20, 2023
Remnants of a Full Moon is “a collection of poems that take you on a journey with a daughter, wife, and mother.”
Game Over Books | June 20, 2023
These poems “are shrines to a mother’s tenderness, to a lover’s leaving words, to every colorful queer who has found themselves in the glowing image of another.”
What It Means To Be Happy by Gary Margolis
Green Writers Press | June 27, 2023
In his ninth book of poetry, Margolis “invites us to consider how it is we come to a meaningful happiness, with all the shades of experience in our joyful and grieving lives.”
Self-Portrait as Homestead by Jeri Theriault
Deerbrook Editions | June 29, 2023
Theriault’s latest book of poetry is a “rare and powerful collection with inventive forms.”
Nothing and Too Much to Talk About by Nancy Patrice Davenport
Roadside Press | July 1, 2023
According to Bill Gainer, Davenport “offers a glimpse of what it is to touch the mysteries of a grateful heart.”
Live in Suspense by David Groff
Trio House Press | July 1, 2023
In these poems, Groff “writes about living between beginnings and endings, about always expecting the next mortal thing to happen.”
Tupelo Press | July 1, 2023
In this poetry collection, Lala “struts through our contemporary wasteland—detritus of culture and commerce strewn everywhere, day’s minutiae grown Dionysiac, allusion rapt in a visionary elusiveness.”
Trio House Press | July 1, 2023
The Fight “showcases Manthey’s experience with adoption, alongside the actions of Varina Davis, history’s only First Lady of the Confederate States.”
A Northern Spring by Matt Mauch
Trio House Press | July 1, 2023
This collection of prose poems “transcends genre and form to depict splinters of humanity under the duress of plague and political destruction.”
Kaan and Her Sisters by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Trio House Press | July 1, 2023
This poetry collection “illuminates the work of grief and survival, the sordid legacies of official historical record and the liberatory practice of intimate narration.”
States of Arousal by Sunshine O’Donnell
Trio House Press | July 2, 2023
In O’Donnell’s poetry collection, “the reader is confronted by the brutality of the modern world while simultaneously comforted by the delicate displays of the human spirit.”
The Truth Is by Vivienne Shalom
Choeofpleirn Press | July 2, 2023
This poetry collection “knows well the complicated relationships children have with their parents, especially the relationship daughters have with their mothers.”
Dreams Are My Social Life by Rupert Wondolowski
Publishing Genius Press | July 4, 2023
Wondolowski’s poetry collection “bursts with ecstatic language and includes numerous tributes to the characters who populate the Baltimore literary world.”
Wonder About The by Matthew Cooperman
Middle Creek Publishing & Audio | July 7, 2023
Wonder About The “represents Colorado stitched by threads of the water cycle, specifically the Cache la Poudre River, explored with an intimacy and depth.”
Black girl magic & other elixirs by Shantell Hinton Hill
Yellow Arrow Publishing | July 11, 2023
This poetry collection is about “the embodied experiences of a ’90s Black girl growing up in the American South and how those experiences shaped her becoming a Black woman.”
Red Hen Press | July 11, 2023
Warren’s debut poetry collection “discloses their reality of living nonbinary in the rural context of Alaska.”
Get Fresh Books Publishing | July 15, 2023
This debut poetry collection “flies across oceans and recycles itself through tradition, blood, nature, and time—always manifesting itself in new creationism.”
Bar Guide for the Seriously Deranged by Alan Catlin
Roadside Press | August 1, 2023
This poetry collection explores Catlin’s “34 years in his unchosen profession as a barman in and around the greater Albany, New York, area.”
Night Logic by Matthew Gellman
Tupelo Press | August 1, 2023
The poems in Night Logic “deal with queer coming-of-age and desire, as well as the persistent impact that childhood trauma can have on queer relationship-building.”
Seeking Frozen Sound: PostCard Poems by Clark Lunberry
Tofu Ink Arts Press | August 1, 2023
This book contains a collection of postcards that the author’s father “collected and later carefully catalogued, as souvenirs, perhaps as a means of remembering the many places they had been.”
Showboi: Too Deep Too Care by Jimmy Cullen
Read Furiously | August 7, 2023
Cullen’s poetry collection “is a journey through sight and sound using powerful poetic narrative.”
Texas Review Press | August 8, 2023
Brown’s poetry collection “reads like a post-pandemic epilogue to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land…. panic disorders, email fatigue, and the spiritual dead end of a 23-and-Me test kit.”
The Beautiful Leaves by Karen Greenbaum-Maya
Bamboo Dart Press | August 8, 2023
This collection “consists of poems about the diagnosis, illness, and death of the author’s beloved husband, and her grief.”
God Mornings, Tiger Nights by Nuha Fariha
Game Over Books | August 15, 2023
This debut poetry collection “is an ode to the enduring spirit of the Bengal tiger and a love letter to an immigrant’s journey.”
Silverfish Review Press | August 15, 2023
According to Ellen Bass, these poems are “quietly revelatory elegies and odes for the shifting relationships of mid-life: the death of a mother, the independence of grown children, the intimacy of romance and trust between husband and wife.”
Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, Expanded Anniversary Edition by Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison
Copper Canyon Press | August 15, 2023
According to Naomi Shihab Nye, “Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry is one of the dearest, most appealing books ever published. These poems are tiny delicious American haiku affectionately exchanged between two friends.”
All the Eyes I Have Opened by Franca Mancinelli
Translated from the Italian by John Taylor
Black Square Editions | August 15, 2023
This is a bilingual edition of the winner of both the Europe in Versi Prize and the San Vito al Tagliamento Prize.
Under a Future Sky by Brynn Saito
Red Hen Press | August 15, 2023
In this poetry collection, Saito “takes her readers on a journey with her father to the desert prison at Gila River where, over 80 years ago, her grandparents met and made a life together.”
Born on Good Friday by Nathan Graziano
Roadside Press | August 18, 2023
In this poetry collection, Graziano “addresses his complicated relationship with Catholicism and guilt while staring down his vices and a veritable midlife crisis.”
Certain Silences by Michael Sharp
Clare Songbirds Publishing House | August 18, 2023
Sharp’s poetic photo album is “filled with the drama, pain, and poignancy of human existence in a time of war.”
Etruscan Press | August 22, 2023
Viscera is “map and misdirection, evidence and contradiction, free will and fate at the blackjack table. A celebration of the multitudes without and within.”
Whoever Drowned Here by Max Sessner
Translated from the German by Francesca Bell
Red Hen Press | August 22, 2023
The poems in this collection “employ a matter-of-fact magical realism to engage the profound, philosophical mysteries of the everyday.”
The Law of Conservation by Mariana Spada
Translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers
Deep Vellum | August 22, 2023
Spada’s poetry “pays subtle, incisive attention to the inextricable relationship between transformation and conservation: transformation toward the experience of honoring and protecting our deepest and most abiding truths.”
Evidence of Fire by Jennifer Maloney
Clare Songbirds Publishing House | August 25, 2023
This poetry collection “is an unfiltered look at the rawness of life and love, and how to keep going no matter what.”
The Book of Light: Anniversary Edition by Lucille Clifton
Copper Canyon Press | August 29, 2023
This special anniversary edition of The Book of Light, with an introduction by Ross Gay, “offers new meditations and insights on one of the most beloved voices of the 20th century.”
Red Hen Press | August 29, 2023
In this poetry collection, Sapan “guides us through a lifetime of love and loss as he navigates death—of loved ones, of crickets, of houseplants—in an American landscape teeming with wonder and the promise of rebirth.”
Game Over Books | August 29, 2023
In this poetry collection, Slupski “abundantly offers nuance to their own narrative—one day, despite the salt we are born from, we can learn to lavishly enjoy good food and better company.”
Read Me: Selected Works by Holly Melgard
Ugly Duckling Presse | September 1, 2023
Read Me: Selected Works features “a representative selection of Holly Melgard’s formally experimental poetic works produced between 2008 and 2018.”
Tupelo Press | September 1, 2023
Partridge’s poetry collection “explores shifting iterations of the poetic self, both in body and in perspective, within the context of rapidly changing landscapes in the American West.”
Interior Landscape by Mirta Rosenberg
Translated from the Spanish by Yaki Setton and Sergio Waisman
Ugly Duckling Presse | September 1, 2023
In this poetry collection, Rosenberg “explores questions of life and death, of changes experienced in one’s body through time and the resulting changes in perspective.”
The Future Will Call You Something Else by Natasha Sajé
Tupelo Press | September 1, 2023
According to David Wojahn, the poems in this collection “are searching, canny, whip-smart, scrupulously self-aware, and effortlessly capable of moving from wit to pathos, from worry to delight.”
Maps You Can’t Make by Mariella Saavedra Carquin
June Road Press | September 5, 2023
Carquin “confronts hard truths in this powerful debut collection, pushing through layered complexities of immigration, race, and identity to find a way forward.”
Graywolf Press | September 5, 2023
These poems and lyric fragments “make an inventory of truths that carry us through night’s reckoning with mortal hope into daylight.”
Past/Present and Other Poems by Robert Kaplan
Poets of Queens | September 7, 2023
Kaplan invites “the reader into a slice of 1980s New York City: the urban landscape, the national politics, gay exuberance and loss, and, weaving throughout, the shadow of the AIDS epidemic.”
Love Is a Shore by Hilary Sallick
Lily Poetry Review Books | September 8, 2023
According to Jennifer Barber, the poems in this collection “encompass sadness and gratitude, self and other, dream-like vision and the manifold truths of the day-to-day.”
No One Is on the Line by Mohsen Mohamed
Translated from the Arabic by Sherine Elbanhawy
Laertes Books | September 9, 2023
The poems in this collection “arose from the depths of incarceration, from the throat and intellect of Mohsen Mohamed (sentenced to five years of harsh imprisonment after a campus protest).”
Translated from the Spanish by Alexis Almeida, Daniel Beauregard, Daniel Borzutzky, Whitney DeVos, Jèssica Pujol Duran, Patrick Greaney, and Robin Myers
Ugly Duckling Presse | September 11, 2023
This poetry collection “immerses readers in the State-sponsored terror during this period and the effects it would continue to have on Chile.”
The 3rd Thing | September 12, 2023
In this poetry collection, Hart “navigates the twisting dynamics of a family that is both Native and settler.”
Love Language by Nasser Hussain
Coach House Books | September 12, 2023
According to Ilya Kaminsky, “These are poems that long to dismiss the lyric’s most recent pretty mask of polite propriety and instead take us to the lyric’s ancient roots.”
Dream Apartment by Lisa Olstein
Copper Canyon Press | September 12, 2023
In this poetry collection, Olstein “builds a world of night-rabbits, bodiless shadows, and networks of wind where ode and elegy meet.”
Empty Bowl Press | September 12, 2023
Pai “weaves poems about social unrest, conflict, solidarities, friendships, the mindset of an activist, and her experiences as a woman, mother, artist, and daughter.”
Muscadine by A. H. Jerriod Avant
Four Way Books | September 15, 2023
Avant’s debut poetry collection “cultivates the vine of familial memory, eulogizing our collective losses while exalting the succor of this human life.”
Status Pending by Adrian Blevins
Four Way Books | September 15, 2023
The poems in this collection “comprise a stenography of our lives as the buffering consciousness between voided states.”
Back to the Woods by Cynthia Cruz
Four Way Books | September 15, 2023
In this collection, Cruz “heeds the urgency of our wandering, the mandate that we must get back to the woods, not simply for the forest to devour us.”
Four Way Books | September 15, 2023
In this collection, Dumanis “expertly cultivates the multiplicity of language and makes of ‘creature’ a marvelous contronym.”
The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani
Perugia Press | September 15, 2023
Hotchandani’s debut poetry collection “is a study in shifting cultural and personal identities as well as in belonging—to our bodies, our memories, our stories, ourselves, our families, our cultures.”
Four Way Books | September 15, 2023
In these poems, Lea “affirms the luster of fruit long labored for: a resilient and happy marriage; the rewards of parenthood and, later, grandchildren; a profound intimacy with northern New England.”
Four Way Books | September 15, 2023
This collection “examines the humpback whale as a zoomorphic analog of the queer, brown, migratory speaker breaching these pages.”
The Disordered Alphabet by Cintia Santana
Four Way Books | September 15, 2023
Santana’s “poetic encyclopedia chronicles life’s ubiquitous elegies alongside the world’s innumerable wonders.”
Four Way Books | September 15, 2023
The Mansions is “an epic trilogy of book-length poems which examine exemplary 20th-century figures Georges Lemaître, Simone Weil, and Teilhard de Chardin.”
First Matter Press | September 16, 2023
According to Corinne Manning, Diamond’s collection “shows how reality, even belonging, is ‘poised for adaptation.’”
ten-cent flower & other territories by Charity E. Yoro
First Matter Press | September 16, 2023
According to Michele Glazer, Yoro’s poems “perform a richly textured quick-step that is bold, sly, funny, tender, fierce.”
Bruising Bone: life in bloom by Perry Gasteiger and Rebecca Payne
fifth wheel press | September 19, 2023
Bruising Bone: life in bloom is “a book of art and poetry that examines the nostalgia, anxiety, and angst of growth and loss.”
Tumbling for Amateurs by Matthew Gwathmey
Coach House Books | September 19, 2023
This poetry collection features “anaphoras, list sonnets, erasures, palimpsests and concrete poems, all working from tumbling’s limited vocabulary and central focus of acrobatics and gymnastics.”
Next Time You Come Home by Lisa Dordal and Milly Dordal
Black Lawrence Press | September 22, 2023
Dordal “distills one hundred eighty letters she received from her mother over a twelve-year period (1989-2001) into short, meditative entries.”
Red Hen Press | September 26, 2023
The poems in this collection are “confrontationally queer, urgently wounded, deeply political, and metaphysically transported.”
Public Abstract by Jane Huffman
Copper Canyon Press | September 26, 2023
Public Abstract “examines illness and recovery, loss and addiction: the ripples of influence an addict has on their family circle, and vice versa.”
The King of Terrors by Jim Johnstone
Coach House Books | September 26, 2023
Johnstone’s poetry collection is “a meditation on living with illness and the forces required to heal.”
The Beloved Community by Patricia Spears Jones
Copper Canyon Press | September 26, 2023
In her fifth poetry collection, Jones “interrogates the necessity and fragility of human bonds: sensual, familial, societal.”
Walk With Me by Madeleine Kunin
Green Writers Press | September 28, 2023
In this poetry collection, the “three-term Vermont governor invites the audience to step into her world, to slow down and find new serenity in older age and unexpected love.”
Under Normal Conditions by Karl Koweski
Roadside Press | September 29, 2023
According to Rebecca Schumejda, Koweski “brings us on a voyeuristic journey into the grit and strife of an everyday working-class man, showing what it takes to transcend daily struggles into an artful interpretation of an industrialized landscape.”
Details of an Hourglass: Poems from the Gulag by Mykola Horbal
Translated from the Ukrainian by Myroslava Stefaniuk
Lost Horse Press | September 30, 2023
Details of an Hourglass: Poems from the Gulag “chronicles the anti-world of Soviet prison camps in miniature-poem reflections.”
Winter King by Ostap Slyvynsky
Translated from the Ukrainian by Vitaly A. Chernetsky and Iryna Shuvalova
Lost Horse Press | September 30, 2023
Winter King “presents a selection from a decade and a half worth of work by one of Ukraine’s most prominent contemporary voices in poetry.”
Codhill Press | October 1, 2023
Rupture “weaves together the history of enslaved women in the Americas and themes of life, love, and loss.”
The Shape of Things to Come by John Blair
Gival Press | October 1, 2023
In this poetry collection, Blair “offers us penetrating meditation on the Manhattan Project and its consequences, in terms both historically recuperative and, mindful of a cautionary anxiety, deeply psychological.”
Songs for the Spirit / Canciones para el Espiritu by Robert L. Giron
Gival Press | October 1, 2023
Giron’s bilingual version of the psalms is, according to George Klawitter, “both refreshing to the soul and beautifully crafted.”
Charlotte Lit Press | October 1, 2023
In her fourteenth poetry collection, Haskins “remembers poets who preceded her, Sappho to Blake to Merwin.”
Texas Review Press | October 1, 2023
This poetry collection “is a book of reckoning, a book of ghosts, a book of lineal fracture and generational fatherlessness.”
A Reaction to Someone Coming In by Wendy Lotterman
Futurepoem Books | October 1, 2023
In this poetry collection, “sex and love, girlhood and motherhood, are always in transition, dematerialized, and slightly comic.”
Airlie Press | October 1, 2023
This poetry collection “draws on the poet’s early training in visual art and film, as well as the form of the lament in Greek culture, both ancient and contemporary.”
Conduit Books & Ephemera | October 1, 2023
This poetry collection “is a quiet yet expansive celebration, not just of life but the fractures within it, too.”
The Gathering of Bastards by Romeo Oriogun
University of Nebraska Press | October 1, 2023
In this collection, “the poet himself is the perpetual migrant embarked on forced journeys that take him across nations in West and North Africa, through Europe, and through American cities.”
A Rupture in the Interiors by Valerie Witte
Airlie Press | October 1, 2023
A Rupture in the Interiors is “a rapturous exploration of im/perfection, threading innovative form and histories of value—of the female body, especially, and of material worth—with dream logic and associative mastery.”
Lily Poetry Review Books | October 2, 2023
The poems in this collection “hold the various facets of joy and mourning, and the spectrum in between.”
Leda’s Daughters by K. Avvirin Berlin
Washington Writers’ Publishing House | October 3, 2023
The poems in this collection “traverse and transgress the temporal, re-envisioning African American and Native American women’s history as a history of poetics.”
The Confessions by Fabián O. Iriarte
Translated from the Spanish by Lawrence Schimel
Entre Ríos Books | October 3, 2023
Iriarte’s poems in The Confessions “are often elegiac and grieving as he struggles to give meaning to the newly missing.”
Floriography Child by Lisa C. Krueger
Red Hen Press | October 3, 2023
Krueger’s memoir-in-poems is “a book about salvation: what gives people strength in the face of adversity, not just to endure, but to move through and beyond our myriad human sufferings.”
Wave Books | October 3, 2023
Lasky’s latest poetry collection “is an ekphrastic horror lyric that shapes an entirely unique feminist psychological landscape.”
Removal Acts by Erin Marie Lynch
Graywolf Press | October 3, 2023
The poems in Lynch’s debut collection “trace a path through the labyrinth of distances and absences haunting the American colonial experiment.”
Copper Canyon Press | October 3, 2023
“An unflinching study of death,” Prufer’s ninth poetry collection “invites us to consider what it means to matter.”
El Rey of Gold Teeth by Reyes Ramirez
Hub City Press | October 3, 2023
In this poetry collection, Ramirez “explores living in America as a first-generation American of Salvadoran and Mexican descent, living among conflicting histories.”
Leave Nothing Behind by Martin Willitts, Jr.
Fernwood Press | October 3, 2023
This poetry collection is “shaped by the techniques of Impressionism—light and shadow, the momentary, how no two moments are the same, and where light is forever chasing light.”
Discordant by Richard Hamilton
Autumn House Press | October 7, 2023
Hamilton’s second poetry collection offers “multilayered examinations of injustices—from mass incarceration to failing schools and right-wing fascism.”
Woman at the Crossing by Susan Okie
Grid Books | October 7, 2023
According to Garrett Hongo, the poems in this debut collection are “gathered from the passionate witnessing of human survival within creation’s natural splendors.”
Kingdom of Glass & Seed by Jules Jacob
Lily Poetry Review Books | October 9, 2023
Jacob’s poetry collection features “scenes of hardscrabble tenderness and sometimes unbearable cruelty, scavenged and placed ever so carefully side by side in memory’s reliquary.”
Winter Season by Carolina Esses
Translated from the Spanish by Allison deFreese
Entre Ríos Books | October 10, 2023
This bilingual poetry collection is “a journey into the darkest season where familial remembrance and longing become entangled in the memory of nature itself.”
Indigo Angel by Jeanne Heuving
Black Square Editions | October 10, 2023
In three meditations, Indigo Angel “takes its lead from different jazz modalities as these ray out into other arts, the natural world and human history.”
Building a Nest from the Bones of My People by Cara-Lyn Morgan
Invisible Publishing | October 10, 2023
In these poems, Morgan “explores the complexities of generational and secondary abuse, intertwined as they are with the impacts of colonization.”
Autofocus Books | October 10, 2023
Oquendo’s poetry collection “is a sigil where each stroke of trauma and healing manifests in language.”
Searching for Home by Robert Pack
Slant Books | October 10, 2023
This poetry collection features “sequences of poems about three figures, each a seeker after some physical or conceptual home where uncertainties are overcome.”
Invisible Publishing | October 10, 2023
This fifteenth anniversary edition of the “haunting lifeline between archive and memory, law and poetry” features a new introduction by M. NourbeSe Philip.
The Thomas Salto by Timmy Straw
Fonograf Editions | October 10, 2023
This poetry collection “takes its name from a difficult and dangerous move in gymnastics, a leaping triple flip popularized during the last years of the Cold War.”
June Road Press | October 10, 2023
Whitney’s second poetry collection “juxtaposes the conflicted emotions of motherhood and domesticity with the intoxicating promises of transgression.”
Choosing to be Simple: Collected Poems by Tao Yuanming
Translated from the Chinese by Red Pine
Copper Canyon Press | October 10, 2023
This bilingual collection of over 160 verses “chronicles Tao Yuanming’s path from civil servant to reclusive poet during the formative Six Dynasties period (220-589).”
People You Know, Places You’ve Been by Hana Shafi
Book*hug Press | October 12, 2023
Shafi’s poetry collection “offers a sense of shared recognition and nostalgia, ultimately asking: what if seemingly mundane places are actually the foundations of who you are?”
Queers Like Me by Michael V. Smith
Book*hug Press | October 12, 2023
Smith’s latest collection is “a broad tapestry that explores growing up queer and working class, then growing into an urban queer life.”
Small Harbor Publishing | October 13, 2023
These poems “will take you to Fire Island dunes, Jamaica Bay marshes, inside a glacial moraine, and beneath the forest to the mycorrhizal network.”
Acre Books | October 15, 2023
In his fourth poetry collection, Minicucci “examines masculinity and gun violence as he brings to life the grammatical concept of the dual, a number that is neither singular nor plural.”
The Art of Mercy: New & Selected Poems by Robert L. Penick
Hohm Press/Shō Poetry Journal | October 15, 2023
Penick’s first full-length collection “contains excerpts from four chapbooks, as well as fifty-seven new and previously uncollected poems.”
Taking to Water by Jennifer Conlon
Autumn House Press | October 16, 2023
The poems in this debut collection “question gender and embrace queerness through the natural world of North Carolina.”
My Modest Blindness by Russell Brakefield
Autofocus Books | October 17, 2023
In this poetry collection, Brakefield “traverses this blurry landscape, drawing connections to art, literature, natural history, and pop culture.”
English as a Second Language and Other Poems by Jaswinder Bolina
Copper Canyon Press | October 17, 2023
Bolina’s poetry collection “skewers, laments, and celebrates America with intelligence, humility, and a disarming sense of humor.”
Red Hen Press | October 17, 2023
Magowan’s eighth poetry collection is “an invitation to witness an artist’s life recounted through the warm slant of memory.”
T’shuvah by Richard Jeffrey Newman
Fernwood Press | October 17, 2023
According to Andrea Carter Brown, “Newman explores in this book the underpinnings of t’shuvah, the Jewish tradition of acceptance, reconciliation, and forgiveness.”
No Spare People by Erin Hoover
Black Lawrence Press | October 20, 2023
This poetry collection “documents the joys and perils of a tiny mother-daughter family navigating life on the margins.”
The Big Forever Swim by John Sullivan
Red Ogre Review | October 23, 2023
The hybrid pieces in this collection “blend poetry with theater scripts, with strong ecopoetry and social justice themes.”
Uninvited Guests by Donald Glazer
Green Writers Press | October 24, 2023
Glazer’s debut poetry collection is “an ode to the textures and tastes of language itself celebrating the intimate pulls of diction, language, and conversation.”
Book*hug Press | October 24, 2023
This poetry collection “offers a breathtaking, harrowing immersion in cruelty behind different veils: the medieval hunt, ecological collapse, and intimate partner violence.”
Publishing Genius | October 25, 2023
Fudge is “a collection of minimalist long poems that find holy the tedium and calamity that shapes our lives.”
The Rain Sweeps Through by John Brandi
Empty Bowl Press | October 31, 2023
The haiku in this collection “are culled from wherever they first landed: pocket pad, a paper napkin, a daily journal, the palm of the author’s hand, or in notes accompanying his field sketches.”
Glowing Animals by Amanda Hartzell
Game Over Books | October 31, 2023
The poems in Hartzell’s collection “explore love, motherhood, family, and the siren-songs we sing in this strange, unruly world.”
Phantom Captain by Kim Rosenfield
Fence Books | October 31, 2023
This poetry collection “explores the poetry of psychoanalysis, feminism and gender, questions of the 21st century self, and the accelerating pressures of standardizing capitalism upon the human mind.”
The Blue House: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer by Tomas Tranströmer
Translated from the Swedish by Patty Crane
Copper Canyon Press | October 31, 2023
The poems in this bilingual collection—which is “a stunning testament to an illustrious career”—“range from agile haiku to cinematic prose.”
Song of the Mountains by John C. Mannone
Middle Creek Publishing & Audio | November 1, 2023
Song of the Mountains is “a poetic celebration, eulogy, metaphor for Appalachia. Sometimes it dances and laughs, but too many times it cries.”
GHOST :: SEEDS by Sebastian Merrill
Texas Review Press | November 1, 2023
Winner of the 2022 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, selected by Kimiko Hahn, this book-length poem “incorporates elements of magical realism and myth to explore and trouble conceptions of gender and identity.”
the matchstick litanies by jo reyes-boitel
Next Page Press | November 1, 2023
“Blending poetic memoir and revelation,” these poems “refuse to look away from what is burning and show us that sometimes fire can create a path for self-fulfillment.”
No Small Thing by Ellen Rowland
Fernwood Press | November 1, 2023
In these poems, Rowland “summons us to presence, showing us the world through an unfiltered lens that asks us to consider the beauty and truth of the ordinary.”
Foundlings: Found Poems from Prose by DeWitt Henry
Pierian Springs Press | November 2, 2023
This collection features found poems transformed “from the original prose by twenty-nine classic and contemporary authors.”
Solid Objects | November 2, 2023
This poetry collection “explores contemporary American selfhood, socially mediated and economically motivated, within a system where we learn to see and represent ourselves as one marketable image among many.”
Time Out of Joint by Teresa Carson
Translated into the Italian by Alessandro Di Mauro
Deerbrook Editions | November 4, 2023
In Book III in The Argument of Time series, Carson “explores not only how places of the past are often scripted to elicit specific responses from visitors, but also how the stories we tell about the past are often scripted to fit a particular point of view about a past event.”
Graywolf Press | November 7, 2023
Flynn’s latest poetry collection “explores the jaggedness of memory and what is salvageable when the past is broken by loss, violence, and trauma.”
She Who Lies Above by Beatriz Hausner
Book*hug Press | November 7, 2023
In this poetry collection, Hausner “brings Hypatia of Alexandria, the fourth century Byzantine mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher, to life.”
Ascent of the Mothers by Noelle Kocot
Wave Books | November 7, 2023
Kocot’s ninth collection is “a sagacious testament to the ways in which poetry can shape personhood.”
I am the dead, who, you take care of me by Anthony McCann
Wave Books | November 7, 2023
The poems in I am the dead, who, you take care of me “are acutely aware of the ways in which language communes the living and the dead.”
Uncollected Later Poems (1968–1979) by Ernst Meister
Translated from the German by Graham Foust and Samuel Frederick
Wave Books | November 7, 2023
In these new translations of Meister’s poetry, “each line is gnomic yet ample, opening spaces of reflection on mortality and infinity.”
Limited Editions by Carole Stone
CavanKerry Press | November 7, 2023
Stone’s Limited Editions is “an end-of-life narrative journey, from her long-term marriage to the illness and death of her husband.”
Etruscan Press | November 7, 2023
This collection “charts the fluid boundaries between transgression and transcendence in narrative poems containing Waters’ signature lyrical gestures.”
Cells by Lucianna Chixaro Ramos
Burrow Press | November 14, 2023
“Using bees, hives and keepers as a central conceit,” this poetry collection “explores how language acts as imperfect material for building not only poems, but also laws and institutions.”
In Lieu of Solutions by Violet Spurlock
Futurepoem | November 15, 2023
According to Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Spurlock’s debut poetry collection is “a trans ars poetica for our zeitgeist,” featuring “a dazzling array of poetic forms, linguistic permutations, and neologisms.”
Shake the Atmosphere to Reclaim and Empty Moment by Caroline Reddy
Pierian Springs Press | November 21, 2023
This poetry collection is “based on the life of a woman who has rediscovered peace and purpose after years of depression, heartache, and trauma.”
Therapon by Dan Beachy-Quick and Bruce Bond
Tupelo Press | December 1, 2023
According to Gillian Conoley, “Therapon is an exquisitely composed collaboration between Dan Beachy-Quick and Bruce Bond, a continuous thread of 12-13 line poems that defy any attempt at knowing who wrote what.”
Made of Dream by Stephanie Borges
Translated from the Brazilian Portuguese by Stephanie Borges and Livia Azevedo Lima
Ugly Duckling Presse | December 1, 2023
In this collection of poems about dreams, Borges “observes how images and language can create experiences of freedom for Black women.”
Translated from the Filipino by Kristine Ong Muslim
Ugly Duckling Presse | December 1, 2023
This poetry collection is “a mind-bending foray into the twisted underlying logic of material reality and a rip-roaring romp through Philippine urban legends, psychogeography, and the uncomfortable, often seedy aspects of music, cinema, and art.”
dear parent or guardian by Isadoro Saturno
Translated from the Spanish by E. R. Pulgar
Ugly Duckling Presse | December 1, 2023
Saturno “proposes a rupture with the agreement of gendered language through the transcription of memory, revealing the injustice of the norm,” in this poetry collection.
When My Mother Is Most Beautiful by Rebecca Suzuki
Hanging Loose Press | December 1, 2023
Suzuki’s poetry collection “is at once a powerful love letter to a mother and to language itself, delving into complex questions of family, communication, culture, and connection.”
Mountain Amnesia by Gale Marie Thompson
The Center for Literary Publishing/Colorado Review | December 1, 2023
The poems in this collection influenced by the rural Appalachian landscape “rebuild a new world—and self—in the wake of destruction and loss.”
Passager Books | December 5, 2023
In his latest collection, Bergman “offers up poems about aging parents, love, chronic illness, and friendship.”
Girl in Tulips by Julianne DiNenna
Fernwood Press | December 5, 2023
DiNenna’s debut poetry collection “is part lyric, part incantation and prayer, part memoir of love and longing.”
The Infinite Loop / El lazo infinito by Oneyda González
Translated from the Spanish by Eduardo Aparicio
Akashic Books | December 5, 2023
This bilingual poetry collection “explores the interconnection between pain, love, and hope.”
Tender Headed by Olatunde Osinaike
Akashic Books | December 5, 2023
According to Camille Rankine, Osinaike “interrogates the inner and outer workings of masculinity in all its sharp and tender parts, and the way a Black man meets the world.”
Masculinity Parable by Myles Taylor
Game Over Books | December 5, 2023
This debut poetry collection “explores the concept of a non-toxic masculinity: if it’s possible, if it exists, and if not, how we can build it ourselves.”
Sundry Abductions by Maria Dylan Himmelman
Hanging Loose Press | December 11, 2023
According to Lynn Melnick, “These poems are funny, sophisticated, exacting while sometimes surreal, and an astonishing joy to read.”
