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Poetry: New and Not-to-Miss Anthologies and Collections

 

A list of new and not-to-miss poetry anthologies and collections in celebration of National Poetry Month. National Poetry Month was inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996. Over the years, it has become the largest literary celebration in the world with schools, publishers, libraries, booksellers, and poets celebrating poetry’s vital place in our culture.

Anthologies

Cover of African American Poetry: 2
Kevin
Young, editor

One of the great American art forms, African American poetry encompasses many kinds of verse: formal, experimental, vernacular, lyric, and protest.  This volume captures the power and beauty of this diverse tradition and its challenge to American poetry and culture. The volume also features biographies of each poet and notes that illuminate cultural references and allusions to historical events. 

Cover of Embodied: An Intersectiona
Wendy Chin-Tanner
Tyler Chin-Tanner, editors

A unique collection of intersectional feminist poetry-in-comics, a collaboration between cis female, trans, and non-binary poets and comics artists.

 

Cover of How To Carry Water: Select
Lucille
Clifton

How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton celebrates both familiar and lesser-known works by one of America's most beloved poets, including 10 newly discovered poems that have never been collected. These poems celebrating black womanhood and resilience shimmer with intellect, insight, humor, and joy, all in Clifton's characteristic style.

Cover of LatiNext
José Olivarez, Willie Perdomo
Felicia Rose Chavez, editors

A BreakBeat Poets anthology that opposes silence and re-mixes the soundtrack of the Latinx diaspora across diverse poetic traditions.

Cover of Living Nations, Living Wor
Joy
Harjo, editor

A powerful, moving anthology that celebrates the breadth of Native poets writing today.

 

Cover of You Don't Have To Be Every
Diana
Whitney, editor

Poetry awakens your inner world and makes all your feelings come alive. The poems in this collection-- chosen with girls in mind-- sing of diversity, self-discovery, and self-acceptance.

Poetry Collections

Cover of American Melancholy: Poems
Joyce Carol
Oates

The first poetry collection in twenty-five years by the National Book Award-winning author observes the human heart and mind while exploring subjects ranging from politics and racism to poverty and loss.

Cover of Call Us What We Carry
Amanda
Gorman

The presidential inaugural poet--and unforgettable new voice in American poetry--presents a collection of poems that includes the stirring poem read at the inauguration of the 46th President of the United States.

Available to download: eBook  Audio

Cover of Floaters: Poems
Martin
Espada

From the winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize come masterfully crafted narratives of protest, grief, and love. Whether celebrating the visions of fallen dreamers and poets or condemning the devastation of Hurricane Maria and official negligence in his father's Puerto Rico, Espada invokes ferocious, incandescent spirits

Cover of In Light, Always Light: Po
Angela
Trudell Vasquez

From current Madison Poet Laureate, Angela Trudell Vasquez, In Light, Always Light honors the illuminating power of poetry, while also speaking eloquently of racial injustice and the dark 'inherited grief' that is its offspring.

Cover of Journey To Wisconsin: Afri
Fabu

With Journey to Wisconsin: African American Life in Haiku, past Madison Poet Laureate Fabu weaves a story of strength, growth, spirituality, and love in her depiction of one family’s journey from Africa, to the American South, to the cold reaches of Wisconsin.

Cover of Machete: Poems
Tomás Q.
Morín

This fresh voice in American poetry wields lyric pleasure and well-honed insight against a cruel century that would kill us with a thousand cuts. In these poems, culture crashes like waves and leaves behind Billie Holiday and the CIA, disco balls and Dante, the Bible and Jerry Maguire. They are long, lean, and dazzle in their telling.

Cover of Other People's Comfort Kee
Morgan
Parker

The debut collection from award-winning poet Morgan Parker demonstrates why she's become one of the most beloved writers working today.

Cover of Owed
Joshua
Bennett

Owed is a book with celebration at its center. Its primary concern is how we might mend the relationship between ourselves and the people, spaces, and objects we have been taught to think of as insignificant, as fundamentally unworthy of study, reflection, attention, or care. Spanning the spectrum of genre and form--from elegy and ode to origin myth--these poems elaborate an aesthetics of repair.

Cover of Playlist For The Apocalyps
Rita
Dove

In her first volume of new poems in twelve years, Rita Dove investigates the vacillating moral compass guiding America's, and the world's, experiments in democracy.

Cover of Sparrow Envy: Field Guide
J. Drew
Lanham

Renowned naturalist and writer J. Drew Lanham explores his obsession with birds and all things wild in a mixture of poetry and prose.

Cover of Stones: Poems
Kevin
Young

A book of elegy, loss, and what binds us to life, by a towering poetic talent.

Cover of  Summer Snow: New Poems
Robert
Hass

The first collection of new materials in ten years from the previous U.S. Poet Laureate. Hass's trademark careful attention to the natural world, his subtle humor, and the delicate but wide-ranging eye he casts on the human experience are on display in this collection, touching on topics of loss, beauty, and the mutability of desire.

Cover of Time is a Mother
Ocean
Vuong

Ocean Vuong's second collection of poetry looks inward, on the aftershocks of his mother's death, and the struggle - and rewards - of staying present in the world.

Cover of Vulnerable AF: Poems
Tarriona “Tank”
Ball

The debut poetry collection from Grammy-nominated recording artist and slam poet Tarriona "Tank" Ball about infatuation, love, and heartbreak.

Cover of What The Chickadee Knows =
Margaret
Noodin

“Recognize yourselves in shared water," writes Margaret Noodin in Apenimonodan (Trust) as the poems of What the Chickadee Knows open into an Anishinaabemowin world, asking us to listen, to be present in what we notice.

Cover of The Wild Fox Of Yemen: Poe
Threa
Almontaser

By turns aggressively reckless and fiercely protective, always guided by faith and ancestry, Threa Almontaser's incendiary debut asks how mistranslation can be a form of self-knowledge and survival. A love letter to the country and people of Yemen, a portrait of young Muslim womanhood in New York after 9/11, and an extraordinarily composed examination of what it means to carry in the body the echoes of what came before.

Cover of Worldly Things
Michael
Kleber-Diggs

With uncompromising candor, Kleber-Diggs documents the many ways America systemically fails those who call it home while also calling upon our collective potential for something better (provided courtesy of the publisher).