These collections cast an eye on the future through the lens of the past, inviting readers to look at the world with fresh eyes in order to forge a path forward.
Top 10
Blizzard: Poems
Henri Cole. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Sept. 1 ($24, ISBN 978-0-374-11438-1)
The 10th collection from Cole considers the human condition through quiet poems that contend with history, disaster, love, and the anxieties and difficulties of modern life.
Dearly: New Poems
Margaret Atwood. Ecco, Nov. 10 ($27.99, ISBN 978-0-06-303249-1)
Exploring love, loss, and time’s passage, Atwood’s first collection of poetry in over a decade observes and reflects on the writer’s life.
Finna: Poems
Nate Marshall. One World, Aug. 11 ($17 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-593-13245-6)
Marshall’s poems celebrate black vernacular’s impact on pop culture and its relationship to survival and storytelling. The poet defines finna through poems that consider the violence against black lives and oppressed groups in modern America.
The Historians: Poems
Eavan Boland. Norton, Oct. 13 ($26.95, ISBN 978-1-324-00687-9)
This posthumous collection by Boland (who died in April) returns to the themes the poet has long been celebrated for, including the lives and stories of women, and the ways they affect one’s understanding of the past.
How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton
Edited by Aracelis Girmay. BOA Editions, Sept. 8 ($28, ISBN 978-1-950774-14-2)
Celebrating one of America’s most beloved poets, this selected includes 10 newly discovered, previously unpublished poems that explore black womanhood and strength through Clifton’s distinctive voice, humor, and insight.
Little Big Bully
Heid E. Erdrich. Penguin Books, Oct. 6 ($20 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-14-313592-0)
In poems that confront the history of persecution and oppression of Native Americans, Erdrich interrogates humanity’s path to the present moment through personal myths and allegories that yield unexpected lessons and truths.
My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems
Yi Lei, trans. by Tracy K. Smith. Graywolf, Nov. 3 ($18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64445-040-6)
Presented in the original Chinese alongside English translations by Changtai Bi and Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Tracy K. Smith, this selected introduces American readers to poems that rejoice in the body, human empathy, and the natural world.
Runaway: New Poems
Jorie Graham. Ecco, Sept. 1 ($26.99, ISBN 978-0-06-303670-3)
Graham, whom PW called “our most formidable nature poet,” explores nature and humanity in urgent, formally experimental poems that address environmental destruction and societal disorder.
That Was Now, This Is Then: Poems
Vijay Seshadri. Graywolf, Oct. 6 ($24, ISBN 978-1-64445-036-9)
Seshadri’s fourth collection (and his first since winning the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for 3 Sections) addresses contradictions of space and time, longing, and grief through the lyric and elegy.
Whale Day: And Other Poems
Billy Collins. Random House, Sept. 29 ($26, ISBN 978-0-399-58975-1)
The 13th collection from Collins gathers more than 50 new poems that delve into life and mortality, as well as the familiar and everyday, while leaving room for the imagination to conceive of things in playful and unexpectedly new ways.
Listings
Academic Studies
“Quiet Spiders of the Hidden Soul”: Mykola (Nik) Bazhan’s Early Experimental Poetry by Mykola Bazhan, edited by Oksana Rosenblum, Lev Fridman, and Anzhelika Khyzhnya (Sept. 22, $24.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64469-395-7). This bilingual Ukrainian-English collection features poems by Bazhan, one of the major Ukrainian poets of the 20th century, many of which have not previously been published.
Alice James
Arrow by Sumita Chakraborty (Sept. 8, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-948579-11-7). In poems that focus on gender and race-based violence, environmental destruction, and grief, Chakraborty investigates the unknown, unexpected, and unexplained.
The Voice of Sheila Chandra by Kazim Ali (Oct. 6, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-948579-12-4). Titled after a singer left nearly without voice by a rare neurological condition, these poems, part research-based, celebrate survival and perseverance.
Amber
Book of Songs (Shi-Jing): A New Translation of Selected Poems from the Ancient Chinese Anthology by Confucius, trans. by James Trapp (Oct. 6, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-78274-944-8). This dual-language edition of the oldest existing anthology of Chinese poetry, believed to have been compiled by Confucius, features 25 poems collected in a book produced using traditional Chinese bookbinding techniques, with a hand-sewn spine, uncut pages, and a cloth cover.
Andrews McMeel
DKMH by Dacre Montgomery (Oct. 27, $16.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-5248-6165-0). The debut by Stranger Things star Montgomery digs into themes of ego, love, anger, and anxiety through poetry and prose that draws from Montgomery’s podcast, DKMH.
Archipelago
Allegria by Giuseppe Ungaretti, trans. by Geoffrey Brock (Oct. 6, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-939810-64-9). In this dual-language translation, Brock’s English versions appear alongside Ungaretti’s Italian originals. Ungaretti (1888–1970) was a proponent of the hermetic style, in which the sounds of words are of equal import as their meanings.
Arsenal Pulp
Render by Sachiko Murakami (Sept. 29, $15.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-55152-827-4) examines addiction and recovery, and the dream’s role in how a person outlives and overcomes trauma, channeling it through art.
The Backwaters
Foxlogic, Fireweed by Jennifer K. Sweeny (Sept. 1, $15.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4962-2269-5). In this lyric sequence, Sweeney considers the natural world, violence, motherhood, daily life, and human relationships.
Basic
Dog-Eared: Poems about Humanity’s Best Friend, edited by Duncan Wu (Oct. 27, $28, ISBN 978-1-5416-7293-2). Compiling poems about dogs by Homer, Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy, Emily Dickinson, and Gwendolyn Brooks among others, this collection celebrates man’s best friend and its multifaceted, intimate, and longstanding relationship to people.
Batsford
A Nature Poem for Every Night of the Year, edited by Jane McMorland Hunter (Oct. 6, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-84994-622-3). Offering 365 poems alongside illustrated seasonal scenes, this collection celebrates the natural world. Words-worth, Keats, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Bridges are among the many poets featured.
BOA Editions
Mother Country by Elana Bell (Oct. 6, $17, trade paper, ISBN 978-1-950774-19-7) centers on the complex relationships between mothers and daughters. The speaker confronts the slow death of her mother to early onset Parkinson’s disease and asks questions about loss and grief.
Book*hug
Without Ceremony by Angela Carr (Oct. 14, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-77166-629-9) looks at the everyday while interrogating what it means to know, which types of knowledge are privileged over others, and the role of language in the world.
City Lights
Funeral Diva by Pamela Sneed (Oct. 20, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-87286-811-3). Poet and performer Sneed revisits her coming-of-age during the late 1980s as a black lesbian during the AIDS era in New York City, and considers the lasting role of art through writing that invokes her literary forebears, including James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison.
Cleveland State Univ. Poetry Center
Dream Boat by Shelley Feller (Oct. 13, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-73481-670-9). Feller’s debut takes on non-binary identity through experimental writing that challenges sense-making and predictable forms. Feller’s speakers aim to reinvent contemporary cultural references, including emojis, chants, pop songs, and camp.
Coffee House
Gold Cure by Ted Mathys (Sept. 15, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-56689-581-1). Exploring the various cultural, colonialist, and capitalist roles of gold (from mines, the mythical city of El Dorado, fracking wells), Mathys confronts the relationship between resources, exploitation, and dreams.
Copper Canyon
Cardinal by Tyree Daye (Oct. 6, $16 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-55659-573-8). Poems appear alongside photographs from Daye’s life as the poet reflects on ideas of departure and return, offering a guide for black motorists.
Essential Ruth Stone by Ruth Stone, edited by Bianca Stone (Sept. 29, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-55659-608-7) spans Stone’s 12 books and 50-year career as one of America’s most influential and respected poets, from a snapshot of the poet’s early formalism to the poems inspired by science in her final collection.
Deep Vellum
The Nightgown & Other Poems by Taisia Kitaiskaia (Sept. 22, $15.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64605-027-7). The debut from Kitaiskaia considers mysticism and myth, drawing from the transformations of Slavic and Western European fairy tales, tarot, and medieval history.
Ecco
Field Music by Alexandria Hall (Oct. 6, $16.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-06-300838-0). Winner of the 2019 National Poetry Series, Hall’s work examines the borders and constraints of language through a consideration of place, including daily life in rural Vermont.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Frederick Seidel’s Selected Poems by Frederick Seidel (Dec. 1, $30, ISBN 978-0-374-26081-1) provides readers with a compressed edition of the poet’s innovative, uncanny poems.
Music for the Dead and Resurrected by Valzhyna Mort (Nov. 3, $25, ISBN 978-0-374-25206-9) addresses death and mourning through a series of letters to the dead, with a particular interest in mourning those killed by violence, and contemplates the role of propaganda in shaping public memory.
Fordham Univ.
My Daily Actions, or the Meteorites by S. Brook Corfman (Sept. 1, $22 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-8232-8949-3). Generated from a daily writing practice, these poems highlight ordinary moments, weighing gender, violence, and capitalism in the process, with a foreword by Cathy Park Hong.
Four Way
The Life Assignment by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado (Sept. 8, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-945588-54-9) looks at history, bicultural heritage, and identity through bilingual poems in Spanish and English that explore relationships and the concept of home, providing a portrait of the past and present.
Graywolf
Fugitive Atlas by Khaled Mattawa (Oct. 20, $16 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64445-037-6). Mattawa’s poems about refugee crises, military occupations, and the demise of the natural world offer a vision of a world on the brink. The speakers in these poems find consolation in elegy and prayer.
Harper
How to Fly (in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) by Barbara Kingsolver (Sept. 22, $24.99, ISBN 978-0-06-299308-3). Bestselling novelist Kingsolver looks to the everyday in her second collection of poems, reflecting on both the concrete and the otherworldly. A series of how-to poems tackles such subjects as hope, marriage, and flying, as well as praying to unreliable deities.
Harper Perennial
What Kind of Woman by Kate Baer (Nov. 10, $16.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-06-300842-7) investigates the multiple roles played by women as mothers and wives, sisters and friends, and celebrates the power and agency women might find through and around the roles in their lives.
Haymarket
I Remember Death by Its Proximity to What I Love Most by Mahogany L. Browne (Jan. 5, $16 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64259-264-1) questions America’s prisons in this long-form poem, widening the growing public discourse on the violence, inequity, and social impacts of the U.S. prison system.
Library of America
African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, edited by Kevin Young (Sept. 15, $45, ISBN 978-1-59853-666-9). The biggest anthology of black poetry ever published collects 250 works by poets from the colonial period to today, offering a sweeping survey of African American poetry.
Morrow
Make Me Rain by Nikki Giovanni (Oct. 20, $19.99, ISBN 978-0-06-299528-5) gives readers a snapshot of private and public life, black heritage, and the ongoing effects of racism and white nationalism in America.
Norton
The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, edited by Roxane Gay (Sept. 8, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-324-00461-5). Lorde was a central voice in 20th-century literature and intersectional feminism, and this reader includes her seminal essays and more than 60 poems.
Omnidawn
This Red Metropolis What Remains by Leia Penina Wilson (Oct. 1, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-63243-085-4) investigates the nature of confession through a mythical, apocalyptic narrative. Wilson considers themes of violence, tragedy, and authority through a troubling and transformative landscape.
Penguin Books
Owed by Joshua Bennett (Sept. 1, $20 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-14-313385-8). The second book from Bennett celebrates and questions relationships between individuals, pushing for greater collective attention and reflection.
Princeton Univ.
Hosts and Guests by Nate Klug (Sept. 15, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-691-20353-9) reflects on shifting environments and modern life in poems that vary in their focus, settings, and scope, from a San Francisco tech bar to the Shakers and St. Augustine.
Sarabande
Stay Safe by Emma Hine (Jan. 5, $15.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-946448-68-2). Three sisters are at the heart of Hine’s debut, which catalogues family stories and terrors. The speakers of these poems forge a fantasy world that combines imagination and grief.
Tin House
Anodyne by Khadijah Queen (Aug. 18, $15.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-947793-80-4). Queen’s poems examine ordinary moments, as well as the looming threat of catastrophe, all while paying careful attention to history, survival, and longing, and the paradoxical conditions of joy and pain.
Univ. of Nebraska
Some Are Always Hungry by Jihyun Yun (Sept. 1, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4962-2218-3). Colonization, history, survival, and trauma are central themes in Yun’s collection, which offers an account of a family’s survival in wartime and immigration.
Univ. of Nevada
Riddle Field by Derek Thomas Dew (Oct. 6, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-948908-76-4) takes on sexual trauma and recovery in poems that overlay voices of a fictional town about to be irrevocably altered by the destruction of a dam.
Univ. of Wisconsin
Fractures by Carlos Andrés Gómez (Oct. 13, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-299-32994-5) considers race, gender, sexuality, and violence as Gómez delves into contemporary issues and social injustices. Focusing both on cruelty and gentleness, Gómez’s poems meditate on fear and grief.
Wayne State Univ.
What the Chickadee Knows by Margaret Noodin (Sept. 15, $16.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-8143-4750-8) studies the natural world, history, tradition, and human relationships in poems that situate the central place of the author’s tribe (Anishinaabe) in the past and present.
Yale Univ.
That Light, All at Once: Selected Poems by Jean-Paul de Dadelsen, trans. by Marilyn Hacker (Sept. 22, $30, ISBN 978-0-300-21420-8). Dadelsen (1913–1957) was a pan-European poet whose work wrestled with religion after WWII and who took on personas as various as King Solomon and Bach.
