“Patricia Smith is the greatest living poet. Every book is better than the last.” —Danez Smith, The Guardian

A collection of the finest new and selected poems from one of the most groundbreaking voices in contemporary poetry, a “masterful performer and poet of voices too little heard” (Poetry Foundation).

The Intentions of Thunder gathers, for the first time, the essential work from across Patricia Smith’s decorated career. Here, Smith’s poems, affixed with her remarkable gift of insight, present a rapturous ode to life. With careful yet vaulting movement, these poems traverse the redeeming landscape of pain, confront the frightening revelations of history, and disclose the joyous possibilities of the future. The result is a profound testament to the necessity of poetry—all the careful witness, embodied experience, and bristling pleasure that it bestows—and of Smith’s necessary voice.

Lyrical and sly, meditative and volcanic, The Intentions of Thunder stunningly explores the fullness of living. The inimitable poetry of Patricia Smith radiates in The Intentions of Thunder—reaffirming Smith’s place as one of the indispensable poets of our time.

Publishers Weekly’s Top Ten Fall 2024 Poetry Books

From Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, a stunning collection of early works—both polished poems andraw, unfinished, works-in-progress written from 1921-1927—curated by award winning poet and National Book Award finalist, Danez Smith.

Before Langston Hughes and his literary prowess became synonymous with American poetry, he was an eighteen-year-old on a train to Mexico City, seeking funds to pursue his passion. His early poems see Hughes finding his voice and experimenting with style and form. Beloved verses like “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” were written without formal training, often on the back of napkins and envelopes, and were inspired by the sights and sounds of Black working-class people he encountered in his early life. 

Blues in Stereo is a collection of select early works, all written before the age of twenty-five, in which we see Langston Hughes with fresh eyes. From the intimate pages of his handwritten journals, you will travel with Hughes outside of Harlem as he ventures to the American South and Mexico, sails through the Caribbean, and becomes the only Harlem renaissance poet to visit Africa. His poems and journal entries celebrate love as a tool of liberation. His songs showcase the musicality of verse poetry. And the collection even includes a play he cowrote with Duke Ellington with a full score that experiments with rhythm and structure.

Blues in Stereo portrays a young man coming of age in a changing world. Page by page, a young, fresh-faced Hughes contends with matters beyond his years with raw talent. And by keeping his original, handwritten notations found in archival material, we get to witness a genius’s earliest thought process in real time. National Book Award-nominated poet Danez Smith offers their insight and notes on themes, challenges, and obsessions that Hughes early work contains. Beautifully rendered and thoughtfully curated, Blues in Stereo foreshadows a master poet that will go on to define literature for centuries to come.

A love letter to his fans, My Dear Wildflower finds New York Times bestseller r.h. Sin at his best, guiding readers through the journey out of despair and back to self-worth with the honest relatability that fans worldwide have come to know him for.

My Dear Wildflower is the latest poetic offering from prolific writer r.h. Sin. A revisit to the themes and style that fans first fell in love with when he debuted his Whiskey Words and A Shovel series in 2015. In My Dear Wildflower, Sin speaks directly to readers with his signature kindness and honesty, expounding on ideas of love, regret, heartbreak, and the journey to rediscovering self-worth.
 
Sure to resonate, this collection is a perfect entry point to readers new to Sin’s world and a nostalgic reach back for those who have been here since the beginning.

Following the tradition of Nikky Finney, Krista Franklin, and Morgan Parker, Good Dress documents the extravagant beauty of Black relationships, language, and community.

In her debut poetry collection, Brittany Rogers explores the audacity of Black Detroit, Black womanhood, class, luxury and materialism, and matrilineage. A nontraditional coming-of-age, Good Dress witnesses a speaker coming into her own autonomy and selfhood as a young adult, reflecting on formative experiences.

With care and incandescent energy, the poems engage with memory, time, interiority, and community. The collection also nudges tenderly toward curiosity: What does it mean to belong to a person, to a city? Can intimacy and romance be found outside the heteronormative confines of partnership? And in what ways can the pursuit of pleasure be an anchor that returns us to ourselves?

EVENT DEETS

When: February 26 at 6:00 PM CST

Where: Kindred Stories (2304 Stuart Street, HTX 77004)

How: RSVP to save your spot. Books will be on sale at the event!

ABOUT THE EVENT

ABOUT POETS

Jasminne Mendez is a Dominican-American poet, playwright, educator and award-winning author. Mendez has had poetry and essays published by The Acentos Review, The New England Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and others. She is an alumni of the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University and the author of several books for children and adults including Island of Dreams which won an International Latino Book Award in 2015. She is a faculty member with the Goddard College MFA Creative Writing Program and she lives in Houston, TX. 

Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina poet & a daughter of immigrants. She received her MFA from Drew University in Poetry & Poetry in translation. She is CantoMundo graduate fellow and a 2020 NYFA fellow. Her work has been published in Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast and in Best of American Poetry 2021 and forthcoming in Best of American Poetry 2022. Her first collection The Pink Box is published by Willow Books & was longlisted for a PEN award. Her second collection Muse Found in a Colonized Body is forthcoming from Four Way Books, 2022. She lives in Harlem, NY.

Raina J. León, PhD is Black, Afro-Boricua from Philadelphia (Lenni Lenape ancestral lands). She is a mother, daughter, sister, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education. She seeks out communities of care and craft and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo. She is the author of Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn,  sombra : (dis)locate, and the chapbooks, , profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She publishes across forms in visual art, poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and scholarly work.  She has received fellowships and residencies with the Obsidian Foundation, Community of Writers, Montana Artists Refuge, Macdowell, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale, among others. She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. She educates our present and future agitators/educators as a full professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California, only the third Black person (all Black women) and the first Afro-Latina to achieve that rank there.  She is additionally a digital archivist, emerging visual artist, writing coach, and curriculum developer.  

The long form poem is tethered in folklore and personal narrative, detailing the impact of the destructive mass incarceration system.

Mahogany L. Browne’s evocative book-length poem explores the impacts of the prison system on both the incarcerated and the loved ones left behind.

I Remember Death by Its Proximity to What I Love is an expansive poetic meditation on who we think is bound by incarceration. The answer: all of us. Weaving personal narrative, case studies, and inventive form, Browne invokes the grief, pain, and resilience in the violent wake of the prison system. This poem is dirge work but allows us to revel in the intricacies of our human condition. Written by a beloved and prolific writer, organizer, and educator, this work serves as a practice of self-reflection and accountability. Browne steps into the lineage of Sonia Sanchez’s Does Your House Have Lions? with the precision of a master wordsmith and the empathy of an attentive storyteller.

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In fierce, agile poems, Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration—canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace—and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of post-incarceration existence in traditional and newfound forms, from revolutionary found poems created by redacting court documents to the astonishing crown of sonnets that serves as the volume’s radiant conclusion.

A vital and surprising hardcover collection of poems about, and inspired by, jazz music. AN EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY POCKET POET. Selected and Edited by Kevin Young.

Ever since its first flowering, jazz has had a powerful influence on American poetry; this scintillating anthology offers a treasury of poems that are as varied and as vital as the music that inspired them.

From the Harlem Renaissance to the beat movement, from the poets of the New York school to the contemporary poetry scene, the jazz aesthetic has been a compelling literary force—one that Jazz Poems makes palpable. We hear it in the poems of Langston Hughes, E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Frank O’Hara, and Gwendolyn Brooks, and in those of Yusef Komunyakaa, Charles Simic, Rita Dove, Ntozake Shange, Mark Doty, William Matthews, and C. D. Wright. Here are poems that pay tribute to jazz’s great voices, and poems that throb with the vivid rhythm and energy of the jazz tradition, ranging in tone from mournful elegy to sheer celebration.

Includes:

• “Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret” by Langston Hughes
• “God Bless the Child” by Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog, Jr.
• “Jazz Fantasia” by Carl Sandburg
• “Ol’ Bunk’s Band” by William Carlos Williams
• “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks
• “Chasing the Bird” by Robert Creeley
• “Victrola” by Robert Pinsky
• “Pres Spoke in a Language” by Amiri Baraka
• “The Day Lady Died” by Frank O’Hara
• “Art Pepper” by Edward Hirsch
• “Snow” by Billy Collins
 
Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

“Jasmine Reid writes a shapeful, theoretical work involved in the rigorous attending to emergent selves and the languages made in calling them into being.” —aracelis girmay

Interlocutor Goddess explores the creation of a trans language for selfhood within an exilic state of "ecstatic grief."

Reid's experimental work challenges societal norms, particularly the family as a political construct while reflecting on the trans experiences of a queer Black woman. The poems grapple with oppressive systems of separation and colonial legacies, rejecting extractive, empire-driven paradigms, and gender essentialism. Within her collection, Reid envisions alternative, ethical ways of being, rooted in unity and wholeness and finds kinship with the rhythms and lifeways of the natural world—soil, stars, and water. 

Her poetry employs a trans-lyricism, weaving together dual meanings through homonyms, homophones, and portmanteaus to create a layered, fugitive language that resists rigid classifications. At its core, Interlocutor Goddess is an act of transfiguration, a celebration of girlhood, and a reclamation of wholeness for all who exist beyond imposed boundaries.

The politics and music of the sixties and early seventies have been the subject of scholarship for many years, but it is only very recently that attention has turned to the cultural production of African American poets. 

In "After Mecca," Cheryl Clarke explores the relationship between the Black Arts Movement and black women writers of the period. Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Alice Walker, and others chart the emergence of a new and distinct black poetry and its relationship to the black community's struggle for rights and liberation. Clarke also traces the contributions of these poets to the development of feminism and lesbian-feminism, and the legacy they left for others to build on. 

She argues that whether black women poets of the time were writing from within the movement or writing against it, virtually all were responding to it. Using the trope of "Mecca," she explores the ways in which these writers were turning away from white, western society to create a new literacy of blackness.
 

Provocatively written, this book is an important contribution to the fields of African American literary studies and feminist theory.

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry
Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection

“[Smith's] poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy.”―The New Yorker

Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality―the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood―and a diagnosis of HIV positive. “Some of us are killed / in pieces,” Smith writes, “some of us all at once.” Don’t Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America―“Dear White America”―where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.

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No Sweet Without Brine is both a soulful and celebratory collection that summons sticky sweet memories with an acrid aftertaste of deep thought. Satisfying moments are captured in odes to Idris Elba’s dulcet tones on a meditation app and the satisfaction of half-priced Entenmann’s poundcake; in childlike observations of parental Black love, the coveted female form on Jet Magazine covers, and the desire for Zamunda to be a real place full of Black joy. The sour taps into an analysis of reclusiveness, silencing catcalls from men on the street, and detailed recipes and advice to the Black girls forced to endow themselves with armor against the world.

Cynthia Manick’s latest is a playlist of everyday life, introverted thoughts, familial bonds, and social commentary. In piercing language, she traces the circle of life for a narrator who dares to exist between youthful remembrances and adulthood realities. Each poem in No Sweet Without Brine is a reminder that a hint of sorrow makes the celebration and recognition of the glory of Blackness in all ways, and through all people, that much sweeter.

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A new collection of poetry from Coretta Scott King Award-winner Eloise Greenfield!

Seven-year-old Jace and his puppy, Thinker, are poets, putting everything they do into verse, from going to the park to philosophizing to playing ball. One day, they'll have the whole world figured out, but for now, Thinker has to keep quiet in public. And he can't go to school with Jace for fear he might recite a poem in front of Jace's classmates. But when Pets' Day comes, and Thinker is allowed into the classroom at last, he finds it harder than he expected to keep his rhyming skills a secret.

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In this special edition of Jericho Brown’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Tradition,you are invited to participate in an urgent dialogue—sparked by poetry—about what it means to be human. Including a discussion guide and an interview with the author, The Tradition: Civic Dialogue Editionis meant to catalyze and inspire deep and engaging community conversations.

In 2021, the Free Library of Philadelphia selected The Traditionfor their annual city-wide reading program, choosing a book of poetry for the first time ever. The vision was for neighbor to meet neighbor and discuss—in profound and transformative ways—the difficult subjects confronted so powerfully by the poems: racism, homophobia, violence, and the human resolve to compose a joyful life. To encourage other communities—cities, schools, book groups—to follow Philadelphia’s lead, Copper Canyon Press collaborated with the Free Library to create The Tradition: Civic Dialogue Edition. The dream is to tap the power of poetry to open hearts, clarify vision, spark conversation, and help make the world a more just and equitable place. And, if we’re fortunate, to laugh as freely and share as openly as the poet himself.

“Beauty is possible even when it appears impossible. An astounding book.” —Joy Harjo, author of Washing My Mother's Body

Navajo Nation Poet Laureate Jake Skeets’s highly anticipated second collection patiently tracks the impacts of climate change on the land and its myriad inhabitants.

“For now, go out and dream of joy, we know the labor of feeling it.” 

With Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, Jake Skeets emerged as a visionary new literary voice, offering readers a queer, Indigenous poetics inextricable from a connection to land. With Horses, Skeets tracks the shifting land of the Navajo Nation: What changes and what remains the same in a place that has been inhabited for thousands of years? 

In poems employing numbers significant to Diné thought and lifeway, Skeets explores the reclamation of land, imagination, and language—a world beyond environmental apocalypse, where joy is possible and where transformation is embraced over erasure. Arranged as a quartet, Horses begins with a meditation on two hundred horses found dead, mired in mud that had once been a stock pond on Navajo land in Arizona. What was once a source of life had become a death trap for a herd living on the edge of survival. From here, Skeets’s poems radiate outward, tracing the body and its relationship to a landscape marked by geologic time and the fragile, eroding moments of the present. 

Fiercely observant, brilliantly constructed, and hauntingly incisive, Horses evokes both the end of a world and a new dawn emerging on the horizon.

The third and final installment in the Healing Verses series finds poet r.h. Sin in The Quiet After—the hard-earned peace from healing your own heart.

Across the volumes of The Healing Verses, r.h. Sin delves deep into the heart of human suffering, offering solace, understanding, and pathways to recovery through the power of words. Each book is a beacon of hope, designed to guide readers through the darkness of their experiences and toward the light of resilience, self-renewal, and ultimately healing. The carefully selected writings within these pages explore themes of loss, grief, recovery, and the rediscovery of strength within oneself, making the series a compassionate companion for anyone navigating the challenging process of healing.
 
In The Quiet After, the third and final installment of the series, Sin welcomes readers into the peace found at the end of the tunnel. The hard-earned quiet is a joyous and freeing reminder that there is life after devastation and, with a bit of resilience, it is a destination we are all able to reach because it has been buried within you the entire time.

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From its inception in California in 1974 to its highly acclaimed critical success at Joseph Papp's Public Theater and on Broadway, the Obie Award-winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country. Passionate and fearless, Shange's words reveal what it is to be of color and female in the twentieth century.

First published in 1975 when it was praised by The New Yorker for "encompassing...every feeling and experience a woman has ever had," for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf will be read and performed for generations to come. Here is the complete text, with stage directions, of a groundbreaking dramatic prose poem written in vivid and powerful language that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.

Winner of the 2022 American Book Award
Finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry 
Longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
Finalist for Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry
Named one of the Best Books of 2021 by The Boston Globe and Lit Hub

From the critically acclaimed author of Thief in the Interior who writes with "a lucid, unmitigated humanity" (Boston Review), a startling new collection about revolt and renewal

Mutiny: a rebellion, a subversion, an onslaught. In poems that rebuke classical mythos and western canonical figures, and embrace Afro-Diasporanfolk and spiritual imagery, Phillip B. Williams conjures the hell of being erased, exploited, and ill-imagined and then, through a force and generosity of vision, propels himself into life, selfhood, and a path forward. Intimate, bold, and sonically mesmerizing, Mutiny addresses loneliness, desire, doubt, memory, and the borderline between beauty and tragedy. With a ferocity that belies the tenderness and vulnerability at the heart of this remarkable collection, Williams honors the transformative power of anger, and the clarity that comes from allowing that anger to burn clean.

Finalist 2023 National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize

Black Pastoral explores the complex duality of Black peoples’ past and present relationship with nature. It surveys the ways in which our histories (both Black histories and natural/ecological histories), our suffering and our thriving, are forever wound around one another. They are painful at times and act as a salve at others. Ariana Benson’s poems meditate upon the violence and tenderness that simultaneously characterize the entangling of the two, taking the form of a series of ecopoetic musings that re-envision these confluences.

Moreover, Benson’s poems illustrate the beauty inherent to Blackness, to nature, to the remarkable relationship they share, while also refusing its permission to collect idly, like an opaque skein of film obscuring uglier, necessary truths. Black Pastoral seeks to be both love letter and elegy, both flame to raze the field and flood to nourish the land anew.

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Intimate poems that explore feminine shame and violence and imagine what liberation from these threats might look like, from the award-winning author of The January Children

In Girls That Never Die, award-winning poet Safia Elhillo reinvents the epic to explore Muslim girlhood and shame, the dangers of being a woman, and the myriad violences enacted and imagined against women’s bodies. Drawing from her own life and family histories, as well as cultural myths and news stories about honor killings and genital mutilation, she interlaces the everyday traumas of growing up a girl under patriarchy with magical realist imaginings of rebellion, autonomy, and power. 
 
Elhillo writes a new world: women escape their stonings by birds that carry the rocks away; slain girls grow into two, like the hydra of lore, sprouting too numerous to ever be eradicated; circles of women are deemed holy, protected. Ultimately, Girls That Never Die is about wrestling ourselves from the threats of violence that constrain our lives, and instead looking to freedom and questioning:
 
[what if i will not die]
 
[what   will govern me then]

A book of loss, looking back, and what binds us to life, by a towering poetic talent, called “one of the poetry stars of his generation” (Los Angeles Times).

“We sleep long, / if not sound,” Kevin Young writes early on in this exquisite gathering of poems, “Till the end/ we sing / into the wind.” In scenes and settings that circle family and the generations in the American South—one poem, “Kith,” exploring that strange bedfellow of “kin”—the speaker and his young son wander among the stones of their ancestors. “Like heat he seeks them, / my son, thirsting / to learn those / he don’t know / are his dead.”
 
Whether it’s the fireflies of a Louisiana summer caught in a mason jar (doomed by their collection), or his grandmother, Mama Annie, who latches the screen door when someone steps out for just a moment, all that makes up our flickering precarious joy, all that we want to protect, is lifted into the light in this moving book. Stones becomes an ode to Young’s home places and his dear departed, and to what of them—of us—poetry can save.

Bestselling poet r.h. Sin takes readers on an all-new journey sure to flush your cheeks. A quiet exploration of desire, seduction, and vulnerability, Soft Hunger is the slow-burn first half of a sensual poetry duology.

Soft Hunger and Wild Surrender exist as two halves, an intimate duology tucked into the same sensual world. Soft Hunger is the slow burn; Wild Surrender is the fire it becomes.

Here in book one, Sin captures the quiet ache before fulfillment—the fantasy and anticipation, the restraint and imagination, the unspoken desire that lives between thought and touch. Each piece explores the moments before the act, when yearning itself becomes the art form.

Delicate yet charged, Soft Hunger awakens the senses and stirs the soul—begin the slow burn.

Finalist, Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry

Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry is a twenty-first-century paean to the sterling love songs humming throughout four hundred years of black American life. National Book Award winner Nikky Finney’s fifth collection contains lighthouse poems, narrative hotbeds, and treasured artifacts—copper coins struck from a new matrix for poetry, one that testifies from the witness stand and punctuates the occasional lyric within a new language of “docu-poetry.”
 
The ancestors arise and fly, and the black female body is the “insurgent sensualist,” hunted but fighting to live and love in the ways it wants and knows best: “I loved being / a black girl but had not yet learned / to play dead . . .”
 
The tenderness of a father’s handwritten notes shadows the collection like a ghost, while the treasured, not-for-sale interiority of a black girl’s fountainhead takes over every page. “One yellaw gal with an all-black tongue has gone missing.” Finney has composed a new black spiritual, and one of the great voices of our time again stamps her singular sound into the new day.

From an award-winning poet praised for his “rhapsodic, rigorous” work (The New Yorker) comes an immersive meditation on kindship, collectivity, and environmental thought

We (The People of The United States) is a book-length poem made to the measure of the modern world. Composed of 55 sections, it features a breathtaking range of characters and concerns: The Beach Boys, Gwendolyn Brooks, the invention of the typewriter, Zora Neale Hurston, Sun Ra, life on Mars, Robert Frost, experimental physics, The Jackson 5. Throughout the collection, Bennett summons Virgil’s Georgics as a lens through which to not only tell the story of his family, but a much larger one about the “form of the American mind,” our relationship to the natural world, and the pursuit of a dignified, abundant life. Published the year of the nation’s 250th anniversary, it is a collection that is right on time. One that calls us, as Langston Hughes once did, toward a future America that is not yet here, “and yet must be.”

A Bank Street College Best Children's Book of the Year | A Book Page Best Book of the Year, Middle Grade | An NCTE Best Poetry Book of the Year | A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, Poetry | A Kirkus Prize Finalist, Young Readers' Literature

At a time of rapid change in the early 20th century, women writers carved out their space as artists and intellectuals. During the Harlem Renaissance, African-American writers made some of the most lasting contributions to American literature. However, a century later, the gifted women poets of this time period are little known compared to their male counterparts.

In this poetry collection, bestselling author Nikki Grimes uses “The Golden Shovel” method to create wholly original poems based on the works of these groundbreaking women--and to introduce readers to their work.

Each poem is paired with one-of-a-kind art from today's most exciting female African-American illustrators, alongside a foreword, an introduction to the history of the Harlem Renaissance, author's note, and poet biographies.

Bernardo Wade’s A Love Tap—introduced by award-winning poet and essayist Ross Gay—reckons with complexities of racial identity, masculinity, recovery, and spirituality, revealing the narrative and psychic evolution of a poet who has found himself in the language.

Wade’s evocative debut swaggers through time, through family, through love, through the perseverance of growing up in the deep South as a Black son with a white mom. Illustrating the strangeness and cacophony of his native New Orleans, he divines sweet relief in small mercies—a rosary strung with Mardi Gras beads, a Sunday football game, Nigel Hall covering Frankie Beverly in Lafayette Square, bare feet in a stream, a mother kneading dough. In intimate, nuanced portraits of loved ones, in requiems and broken sestinas, he pushes past his trauma, troubling the years he spent in addiction or resenting his father.

As he maps out the parts he played in his life’s most formative moments, he can’t help but “retune the heart / strings of hard men,” teaching us how to become more human, often in the face of inhumanity. Here, he manages to land, not a crushing blow, but a love tap—the softest way to knuckle another’s cheek.

Here are over 800 haiku by Richard Wright, one of the early forceful and eloquent spokesmen for black Americans, author of the acclaimed Native Son and Black Boy.

Wright discovered the haiku in the last eighteen months of life. He attempted to capture, through his sensibility as an African-American, the elusive Zen discipline and beauty in depicting man’s relationship, not only to his fellow man as he had in the raw and forceful prose of his fiction, but to the natural world. In all, he wrote over 4,000 haiku.

Here are the 817 he personally chose; Wright’s haiku, disciplined and steeped in beauty, display a universality that transcends both race and color without ever denying them. Wright wrote his haiku obsessively—in bed, in cafes, in restaurants, in both Paris and the French countryside. They offered him a new form of expression and a new vision: with the threat of death constantly before him, he found in them inspiration, beauty, and insights.

Fighting illness and frequently bedridden, deeply upset by the recent loss of his mother, Ella, Wright continued, as his daughter notes in her introduction, “to spin these poems of light out of the gathering darkness.”

A finalist for the 2015 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award

In How to Be Drawn, his daring fifth collection, Terrance Hayes explores how we see and are seen. While many of these poems bear the clearest imprint yet of Hayes’s background as a visual artist, they do not strive to describe art so much as inhabit it. Thus, one poem contemplates the principle of blind contour drawing while others are inspired by maps, graphs, and assorted artists. The formal and emotional versatilities that distinguish Hayes’s award-winning poetry are unified by existential focus. Simultaneously complex and transparent, urgent and composed, How to Be Drawn is a mesmerizing achievement.

A National Book Critics Circle Poetry Award Winner!

From the breakout author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé comes a profound and deceptively funny exploration of Black American womanhood.

"Morgan Parker's latest collection is a riveting testimony to everyday blackness . . . It is wry and atmospheric, an epic work of aural pleasures and personifications that demands to be read―both as an account of a private life and as searing political protest." ―TIME Magazine

A Best Book of 2019 at TIME, Elle, BuzzFeed, the Star Tribune, AVClub, and more.

A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 at Vogue, O: the Oprah Magazine, NYLON, BuzzFeed,Publishers Weekly, and more.

Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. They connect themes of loneliness, displacement, grief, ancestral trauma, and objectification, while exploring and troubling tropes and stereotypes of Black Americans. Focused primarily on depictions of black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics―of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience. In Magical Negro, Parker creates a space of witness, of airing grievances, of pointing out patterns. In these poems are living documents, pleas, latent traumas, inside jokes, and unspoken anxieties situated as firmly in the past as in the present―timeless black melancholies and triumphs.