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?

Evie Shockley's new poems invite us to dream―and work―toward a more capacious "we"

In her new poetry collection, Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes towards openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious "we." How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are, we are in relation to each other? Beginning with the visionary art of Black women like Alison Saar and Alma Thomas, Shockley's poems draw and forge a widening constellation of connections that help make visible the interdependence of everyone and everything on Earth.

perched

i am black, comely,
a girl on the cusp of desire.
my dangling toes take the rest
the rest of my body refuses. spine upright,
my pose proposes anticipation. i poise
in copper-colored tension, intent on
manifesting my soul in the discouraging world.

under the rough eyes of others, i stiffen.

if i must be hard, it will be as a tree, alive
with change. inside me, a love of beauty rises
like sap, sprouts from my scalp
and stretches forth. i send out my song, an aria
blue and feathered, and grow toward it,
choirs bare, but soon to bud. i am
black and becoming.

        ―after Alison Saar's Blue Bird

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.

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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.

For numerous migrants who ventured westward in the twentieth century in search of greater opportunities, the glitter of California often proved to be mere fool’s gold—promising easy riches but frequently resulting in dispossession and displacement. Poet Wendy M. Thompson is descended from two of these migrant waves—post-1965 Chinese immigrants and Black southerners of the Second Great Migration—whose presence has permanently transformed the region.

In this arresting debut poetry collection, Thompson traces the past and present of California’s Bay Area, exploring themes of family, migration, girlhood, and identity against a backdrop of urban redevelopment, advanced gentrification, and the erasure of Black communities. Traveling down both familiar highways and obscure side streets, her poems map a region where race, class, and language are just some of the fault lines that divide communities and produce periodic tremors of violence and resistance.

Confronting assimilationist myths of the American Dream, Black California Gold depicts a setting that is less a melting pot than a smelting pot, subjecting different ethnic groups to searing trials and extreme pressures that threaten to break them down entirely. Yet, it also celebrates the Black residents of the Bay Area who have struggled to sustain home and hope amid increasingly desperate conditions.

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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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

The debut collection from a 2021 Whiting Award and Guggenheim Fellow recipient whose “astounding, dolorous, rejoicing voice is indispensable” (Tracy K. Smith)
  
The Sobbing School, Joshua Bennett’s mesmerizing debut collection of poetry, presents songs for the living and the dead that destabilize and de-familiarize representations of black history and contemporary black experience. What animates these poems is a desire to assert life, and interiority, where there is said to be none. Figures as widely divergent as Bobby Brown, Martin Heidegger, and the 19th-century performance artist Henry Box Brown, as well as Bennett’s own family and childhood best friends, appear and are placed in conversation in order to show that there is always a world beyond what we are socialized to see value in, always alternative ways of thinking about relation that explode easy binaries.

Edited by the magazine’s poetry editor, Kevin Young, a celebratory selection from one hundred years of influential, entertaining, and taste-making verse in The New Yorker

Seamus Heaney, Dorothy Parker, Louise Bogan, Louise Glück, Randall Jarrell, Langston Hughes, Derek Walcott, Sylvia Plath, W. S. Merwin, Czesław Miłosz, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Strand, E. E. Cummings, Sharon Olds, Franz Wright, John Ashbery, Sandra Cisneros, Amanda Gorman, Maggie Smith, Kaveh Akbar: these stellar names make up just a fraction of the wonderfulness that is present in this essential anthology.

The book is organized into sections honoring times of day (“Morning Bell,” “Lunch Break,” “After-Work Drinks,” “Night Shift”), allowing poets from different eras to talk back to one another in the same space, intertwined with chronological groupings from the decades as they march by: the frothy 1920s and 1930s (“despite the depression,” Young notes), the more serious ’40s and ’50s (introducing us to the early greats of our contemporary poetry, like Elizabeth Bishop, W. S. Merwin, and Adrienne Rich), the political ’60s and ’70s, the lyrical ’80s and ’90s, and then the 2000s’ with their explosion of greater diversity in the magazine, greater depth and breadth. Inevitably, we see the high points when poems spoke directly into, about, or against the crises of their times—the war poetry of W. H. Auden and Karl Shapiro; the remarkable outpouring of verse after 9/11 (who can forget Adam Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World”?); and more recently, stunning poems in response to the cataclysmic events of COVID and the murder of George Floyd.

The magazine’s poetic influence resides not just in this historical and cultural relevance but in sheer human connection, exemplified by the passing verses that became what Young calls “refrigerator poems”: the ones you tear out and affix to the fridge to read again and again over months and years. Our love for that singular Billy Collins or Ada Limón poem—or lines by a new writer you’ve never heard of but will hear much more from in the future—is what has made The New Yorker a great organ for poetry, a mouthpiece for our changing culture and way of life, even a mirror of our collective soul.

Shane McCrae, “peer to the peerless” (New York Journal of Books), takes up and turns on its head the mantle of Dante in this contemporary vision of Hell.

Of death the muse is death the muse of Hell
Is death the muse of Heaven I don’t know
O muse of where howcan I hope to go
To where I pray I’ll go sing at least tell

Shane McCrae, one of the most prophetic and powerful poetic voices of our time, has created a twenty-first-century epic in New and Collected Hell. As David Woo wrote in Poetry, “McCrae’s poems allude to literary precursors like Dante, Milton, and the Bible, but the voice is unabashedly of our time . . . By seeking to heal the rift in his own identity, McCrae has listened intently to the literary echoes emanating from the English language and transmuted them through his own dynamic voice.” Here, he gathers new and previous work as a culmination of his long-standing poetic project: a new and unforgettable journey through Hell. McCrae’s work is indelible, and this collection brings his searing vision to new depths.

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.

A powerful, timely, dazzling new collection of poems from the National Book Award–winning author of Lighthead

The three sections of Terrance Hayes’ seventh collection explore how we see ourselves and our world, mapping the strange and lyrical grammar of thinking and feeling. In “Watch Your Mouth,” a tree frog sings to overcome its fear of birds; in “Watch Your Step: The Kafka Virus,” a talking cat tells jokes in the Jim Crow South; in “Watch Your Head,“ green beans bling in the mouth of Lil Wayne, and Bob Ross paints your portrait. On the one hand, these fabulous fables, American sonnets, quarantine quatrains, and ekphrastic do-it-yourself sestinas animate what Toni Morrison called “the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some level always conscious of representing one’s own race.” On the other hand, these urgent, personal poems contemplate fatherhood, history, and longing with remarkable openness and humanity. So To Speak is the mature, restless work of one of contemporary poetry’s leading voices.

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Clint Smith’s vibrant and compelling new collection traverses the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood, and explores how becoming a parent has recalibrated his sense of the world. There are poems that interrogate the ways our lives are shaped by both personal lineages and historical institutions. There are poems that revel in the wonder of discovering the world anew through the eyes of your children, as they discover it for the first time. There are poems that meditate on what it means to raise a family in a world filled with constant social and political tumult. Above Ground wrestles with how we hold wonder and despair in the same hands, how we carry intimate moments of joy and a collective sense of mourning in the same body. Smith’s lyrical, narrative poems bring the reader on a journey not only through the early years of his children’s lives, but through the changing world in which they are growing up—through the changing world of which we are all a part.

Above Ground is a breathtaking collection that follows Smith's first award-winning book of poetry, Counting Descent.

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Walker’s complete poems, including new and previously unpublished verse, collected for the first time-with author’s notes that provide historical perspective on spiritual and political issues of the last three decades.

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A prophetic new collection of poems from Shane McCrae, “a shrewd composer of American stories” (The New Yorker).

Writing you I give the death I take
I know I should feel wounded by your death
I write to you to make a wound write back

Shane McCrae fashions a world of endings and infinites in Cain Named the Animal. With cyclical, rhythmic lines that create and re-create images of our shared and specific pasts, he writes into and through the wounds that we remember and “strains toward a vision of joy” (Will Brewbaker, Los Angeles Review of Books).

Cain Named the Animal expands upon the biblical, heavenly world that McCrae has been building throughout his previous collections; he writes of Eden, of the lost tribe that watched time enter the garden and God rehearse the world, and of the cartoon torments of hell. Yet for McCrae, these outer bounds of our universe are inseparable from the lives and deaths on Earth, from the mundanities and miracles of time passing and people growing up, growing old, and growing apart. As he writes, “God first thought time itself / Was flawed but time was God’s first mirror.”

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.

“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.

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 lion in literature’s forest"—Maya Angelou
A dazzling selection of poems from one of the most beloved American poets, whose distinctive verse resonates around the globe

Few poets in history have possessed the irrepressible humanity and abundant positivity that characterize Sonia Sanchez’s astonishing body of work.

Energetic, infectious and rich with sonic exuberance, Sanchez’s poems have radically transformed the direction of American poetry over the past six decades and have been an inspiration to readers around the world, including Toni Morrison and Chinua Achebe. Whether it’s her iconic haiku, rhythmic ballads or devastating elegies, Sanchez’s luminous verse thrums with a profound generosity and an international consciousness, rendering all of life’s agony and ecstasy.

This volume draws on Sanchez’s diverse repertoire to showcase the multiplicities of the poet’s voice—the profound and personal, the firebrand and socially conscious, the playful and formally dexterous, and the musical—to celebrate her as one of the world’s most skilled and versatile poets of the past half century.

After storming the scene with Stereo(TYPE), the PEN America Award–winning poet makes his highly anticipated return—with a virtuosic sophomore collection that plunges the reader into the tenebrous realm between dreams and reality and firmly establishes him as an essential voice in American poetry.

“I’m coming to you live,” Jonah Mixon-Webster announces early on in Promise/Threat, “from the corner of Shit Blvd. and Out o’ Luck St. / with my monkey paws.” So begins a three-part journey of a troubled rebirth, one that ushers the reader through all the torment of a Dantean comedy as it climbs unsteadily from darkness to light, navigating an internalized landscape that evokes the Flint, Michigan, of the poet’s youth.

In the long central sequence, “Territory,” Mixon-Webster sets the reader in a mirror hall of dreams, where one’s nemesis (or one’s self) is always lurking around the corner. Violences of the waking life trickle into the narrator’s sleep as he flees from vision to vision, “picking fruit in one dream and eating it in the next.” In the book’s third and final section, as the poet begins to wake, he finds that the “real poem is the life I’m writing.” Mixon-Webster’s musings turn to love and the often-destructive desires it provokes in us as he grapples with how to carry the burden of a past that threatens to sabotage the future.

These are seeking, supple poems whose forms adapt to contain their transfigured images. What emerges in this daring second collection is a surreal and haunting portrait of life in modern America, where pitfalls hide in every promise.