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
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.
A unique collection of intersectional feminist poetry-in-comics, a collaboration between cis female, trans, and non-binary poets and comics artists.
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.
A BreakBeat Poets anthology that opposes silence and re-mixes the soundtrack of the Latinx diaspora across diverse poetic traditions.
A powerful, moving anthology that celebrates the breadth of Native poets writing today.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
The debut collection from award-winning poet Morgan Parker demonstrates why she's become one of the most beloved writers working today.
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.
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.
Renowned naturalist and writer J. Drew Lanham explores his obsession with birds and all things wild in a mixture of poetry and prose.
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.
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.
The debut poetry collection from Grammy-nominated recording artist and slam poet Tarriona "Tank" Ball about infatuation, love, and heartbreak.
“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.
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.
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).