Memory serves as a bridge to the past and an entry point for thinking about countries and conflicts, in this season’s poetry collections.
Top 10
Another Day: Sabbath Poems 2013–2022
Wendell Berry. Counterpoint, Apr. 2 ($27, ISBN 978-1-64009-639-4)
Berry’s companion volume to This Day is his first collection since 2016 and includes a new selection of Sabbath poems that address spirituality, politics, and memory in the voice of “The Mad Farmer.”
Being Reflected Upon
Alice Notley. Penguin, Apr. 2 ($20 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-14-313797-9)
Connecting events in the present and past, Notley’s memoir in verse explores her life in Paris and travels abroad between 2000 and 2017, when she finished treatment for her first breast cancer.
The Invention of the Darling
Li-Young Lee. Norton, May 14 ($26.99, ISBN 978-0-393-86719-0)
Lee contemplates the relationship between the physical and spiritual, the sacred and the secular, and the exceptional and the mundane in poems that seek union with “The Beloved.”
Light Me Down: The New & Collected Poems of Jean Valentine
Jean Valentine. Alice James, Apr. 9 ($39.95, ISBN 978-1-949944-60-0)
Spanning the poet’s entire career, this volume includes Valentine’s 12 published collections, as well as a new, unpublished manuscript. Her prayerlike poems consider mortality, love, loss, transition, and connections across generation.
Mirror Nation
Don Mee Choi. Wave, Apr. 2 ($25 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-950268-93-1)
Completing the KOR-US trilogy, Choi’s latest utilizes a memory of her father on the Glienicke Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam as a starting place for the poet’s exploration of the violent colonial and neocolonial contemporary history of South Korea.
Modern Poetry
Diane Seuss. Graywolf, Mar. 5 ($26, ISBN 978-1-64445-275-2)
The latest from Seuss takes its title from her first poetry textbook and a course taken in college. Forms and terms from music and poetry—ballad, fugue, aria, refrain, coda—appear frequently.
The Moon That Turns You Back
Hala Alyan. Ecco, Mar. 12 ($17.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-06-331747-5)
Alyan explores the effects of displacement and war on memory, family, and time in poems that chart a path between Brooklyn, Beirut, and Jerusalem.
Spellbound: Poems of Magic and Enchantment
Edited by Kimiko Hahn and Harold Schechter. Everyman’s Library, Mar. 12 ($20, ISBN 978-0-593-53631-5)
Collecting poems from around the world and across centuries, this anthology revels in magic and magicians, superstition, and entertainment.
With My Back to the World
Victoria Chang. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Apr. 2 ($26, ISBN 978-0-374-61113-2)
Inspired by the work of Agnes Martin, Chang explores feminism, art, depression, time, grief, and loss through the artist’s abstract paintings and writings.
Wrong Norma
Anne Carson. New Directions, Feb. 6 ($18.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-8112-3034-6)
Carson’s first prose poetry collection since 2016 features images created by the poet. Among its considerations are Flaubert, Guantánamo, snow, Roget’s Thesaurus, and Carson’s family.
Poetry longlist
Amistad
The Span of a Small Forever by April Gibson (Apr. 2, $17.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-06-331917-2). Recording a Black woman’s experiences with disability, the healthcare system, and sacrifice, this debut engages with identity, socioeconomics, race, and chronic illness.
And Other Stories
Pitch & Glint by Lutz Seiler, trans. by Stefan Tobler (Apr. 2, $19.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-913505-76-9). Published in Germany in 2000, this collection draws from memories of Seiler’s childhood home, an East German village exploited by Soviet uranium extraction, to survey the rural sidelines of European history.
Andrews McMeel
What I Should’ve Texted by Pierre Alex Jeanty (Mar. 5, $16.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-5248-8065-1) explores the unspoken, hidden, and suppressed in poems that deal with heartbreak and the process of coming to terms with emotions.
Archipelago
The Brush by Eliana Hernández-Pachón, trans. by Robin Myers (Mar. 5, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-953861-86-3). This debut tackles ecology and collective trauma with a focus on the mass killings in the village of El Salado, Colombia, in February 2000.
Autumn House
Nest of Matches by Amie Whittemore (Mar. 22, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-63768-089-6). The third collection from Whittemore examines the complexities of queer identity, nature, landscape, and desire in poems that celebrate the dichotomies of experience.
Beacon
Migration Letters by M. Nzadi Keita (Apr. 2, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-8070-0807-2) draws from the poet’s early life with her Black family in 1960s Philadelphia to interrogate cross-generational Black history, culture, identity, and the complexity of relationships.
Book*hug
Medium by Johanna Skibsrud (Mar. 5, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-77166-873-6). In performative poems, Skibsrud portrays the lives and perceptions of women mediums who informed the arc of history, including Helen of Troy, Hypatia of Alexandria, Anne Boleyn, Marie Curie, Chien-Shiung Wu, and Shakuntala Devi.
Carnegie Mellon Univ.
Accounting for the Dark by Peter Cooley (Feb. 20, $20 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-88748-699-9). These postpandemic poems question the political dimensions of Covid in New Orleans, as well as elegiacally speaking to the deaths of friends and family, and writing’s power to memorialize and redeem.
CavanKerry
Glitter Road by January Gill O’Neil (Feb. 6, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-960327-01-7). Mississippi landscapes provide a backdrop for these poems that reflect on womanhood, the end of a marriage, loss and grief, and new love. O’Neil also revisits the history and legacy of Emmett Till and its ongoing relevance.
Central Avenue Poetry
Fat Girl Magic by Kat Savage (Feb. 13, $17.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-77168-362-3) reflects on perceptions, labels, and judgments of bodies and the journey toward acceptance and self-love.
City Lights
Isthmus to Abya Yala: City Lights Spotlight Series #23 by Roberto Harrison (Apr. 2, $15.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-87286-911-0). Referring to the American continent, “Abya Yala” (“land of life”) is a pre-Columbian term of the Guna people of Panamá and Colombia. Harrison wrestles with language, racism, and humanity in political and spiritual poems.
Coffee House
Alt-Nature by Saretta Morgan (Feb. 6, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-56689-697-9) deals with desert landscapes, geography, and dreams of the American Southwest while addressing violence, environmental destruction, and incarceration.
Copper Canyon
Black Bell by Alison C. Rollins (Apr. 23, $22 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-55659-700-8). Inspired by the 19th-century image of an enslaved woman wearing iron horns and bells, Rollins’s poems engage with archives, images, and historical figures, including Phillis Wheatley, Eliza Harris, Henry “Box” Brown, and Lear Green.
Fugitive/Refuge by Philip Metres (Apr. 9, $22 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-55659-669-8) pairs traditional and experimental forms in poems that investigate past and present migration, the idea of home, and the journey of Metres’s refugee ancestors from Lebanon to Mexico to the U.S.
Dial
Magic Enuff by Tara M. Stringfellow (June 25, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-593-44743-7). Celebrating Black Southern womanhood, Stringfellow offers poems that weave magic, relationships between women, survival, healing, and revolution as they explore Black femininity.
Everyman’s Library
German Romantic Poets by Charlotte Lee (Apr. 2, $20, ISBN 978-1-101-90835-8). Goethe, Schiller, Schlegel, and Heine are among the poets included in this survey of the romantic movement. Also included are poems by the most famous women writers of the era, including Karoline von Günderrode and Sophie Mereau.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Acts by Spencer Reece (May 28, $27, ISBN 978-0-374-10083-4) tackles all formsof love in poems that celebrate the language and literature of Spain, Reece’s family’s home in Old Lyme, Conn. and Little Compton, R.I. He looks to humanity, beauty, grief, art, and the epistolary form as sources of connection.
Silver by Rowan Ricardo Phillips (Mar. 5, $26, ISBN 978-0-374-61131-6). The fourth collection from Phillips features dreamlike poems in a variety of forms, including blank verse, terza rima, rhyme royal, and rap, that contemplate the power of poetry in today’s world.
Fordham Univ.
Sailing Without Ahab: Ecopoetic Travels by Steve Mentz (Apr. 2, $19.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-5315-0632-2) presents a cycle of 138 ecopoetic poems, one for each chapter of Moby-Dick.
David R. Godine
When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance by Joan Baez (Mar. 12, $25.95, ISBN 978-1-56792-801-3). This autobiographical collection from musician and activist Baez reflects on her contemporaries (Judy Collins, Bob Dylan, and Jimi Hendrix) and childhood while offering personal recollections of family, places, nature, and art.
Graywolf
Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space by Catherine Barnett (May 7, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64445-287-5). Barnett’s metaphysical poems explore loneliness and belonging, eros, beauty, grief, bewilderment, and hope.
Harbour
The White Light of Tomorrow by Russell Thornton (Mar. 26, $18.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-990776-53-3). Imagination guides Thornton’s meditations on water and light in poems that allude to ancient sites, the Bible, and classical myth.
Harvard Univ.
The Sea of Separation: A Translation from the Ramayana of Tulsidas by Tulsidas, trans. by Philip Lutgendorf (Feb. 13, $19.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-674-29566-7). Per PW’s review, this is a “dynamic” and “impressive” new translation of the ancient Indian Sanskrit epic Ramayana, recounting Ram’s exile and his adventures, as retold by the 16th-century poet Tulsidas in a dialect of classical Hindi.
Haymarket
A Map of My Want by Faylita Hicks (July 9, $17 trade paper, ISBN 979-8-88890-097-0). Inspired by Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic,” Hicks’s second collection studies desire and belonging, following a nonbinary femme as they explore polyamory and sexual freedom after leaving a religious cult.
Alice James
Canandaigua by Donald Revell (June 11, $18.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-949944-62-4). The 15th collection from Revell inquires about the role of empathy in a violent world and explores humanity’s complex culture stemming from its technological advancement and communication.
Knopf
Pacific Power & Light by Michael Dickman (Feb. 6, $28, ISBN 978-0-593-53649-0). The Pacific Northwest is the backdrop for sound-driven poems that focus on the working-class Portland, Ore., neighborhood of Lents, where Dickman was raised by a single mother.
Liveright
Skip Tracer by Jive Poetic (July 9, $20 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-324-09316-9). Poetry, prose, music, and genealogy are blended in this memoir organized as a “hybrid sound system” that examines Blackness in the Americas, weaving in Jive’s research into his family’s connections to Jamaica, Panama, Brazil, and Cuba.
New Directions
Chimera by Phoebe Giannisi, trans. by Brian Sneeden (July 2, $15.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-8112-3782-6). The third collection in English by Greek poet Giannisi considers chimeric poetics that combine recordings, archives, and ancient texts. Giannisi draws from the language of the Vlachs and a three-year field research project on the nomadic group’s goat-herding practices.
Nightwood Editions
Crushed Wild Mint by Jess Housty (Mar. 26, $19.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-88971-450-2). Textural poems rooted in the poet’s motherland of Bella Bella, British Columbia, grapple with nature, animals, transformation, sexuality, community, and parenthood.
Norton
New and Selected Poems by Marie Howe (Apr. 2, $28.99, ISBN 978-1-324-07503-5). Observations of everyday life interweave with and become the sacred in this volume that gathers pieces from Howe’s four previous collections alongside new work.
Omnidawn
Whosoever Whole by Elizabeth Scanlon (July 6, $22.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-63243-129-5). Assuming an anticapitalist perspective on life, self, and womanhood, Scanlon proposes questions about culture, consumption, parenthood in the time of climate change, and the complex lives of contemporary women.
Paraclete
Dear Dante by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell (Apr. 9, $21 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64060-937-2). O’Donnell paid tribute to the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death by embarking on a three-month pilgrimage through the 100 cantos of The Divine Comedy, reading one canto per day. These poems engage in an imagined conversation with the medieval poet.
Penguin Books
Mother by m.s. RedCherries (July 16, $20 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-14-313783-2). In poetry and prose, an unnamed narrator tells the story of a Cheyenne child adopted and raised by a non-Native family and their journey to piece together their origins.
Princeton Univ.
The Shield of Achilles by W.H. Auden, edited by Alan Jacobs (May 7, $22.95, ISBN 978-0-691-21865-6). This critical edition of Auden’s 1956 National Book Award–winning collection threads together themes of war, heroism, nature, and humanity in carefully wrought formal poems.
Pushkin
Change Your Life by Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. by Martyn Crucefix (Feb. 27, $19.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-78227-858-0). These new translations of 142 of Rilke’s most essential poems interrogate love and death, the modern world, the spirit, art, and nature.
Semiotext(e)
Stubble Archipelago by Wayne Koestenbaum (Mar. 12, $15.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-63590-206-8). Organized as 36 linguistically playful poetic bulletins, Koestenbaum’s collection incorporates a wide variety of subjects, including urban events, freedom, and bodily sensations and experiences.
Skinner House
Spilling the Light by Julián Jamaica Soto (Apr. 2, $14 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-55896-918-6). The debut collection from Soto contemplates queer, disabled, and brown identity, and the role of community, freedom, and memory in human survival.
Soft Skull
Domestirexia by JoAnna Novak (July 16, $18.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-59376-763-1) considers quarantine, domesticity, sensuality, death, and the idea of making a home.
Tin House
The Palace of Forty Pillars by Armen Davoudian (Mar. 19, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-959030-36-2). Gay adolescence, an Armenian in Iran, and an immigrant in America are primary motifs in the first collection from Davoudian, who pays witness to the tragic acts of global violence in poems that reflect on the past and place.
Tupelo
Beautiful Immunity by Karen An-Hwei Lee (Feb. 1, $21.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-961209-07-7). Writing in the shadow of catastrophic wildfires, economic recession, and a public health crisis, Lee looks to human resilience to offer hope and inspiration in spite of hardship.
Univ. of Chicago
Portal by Tracy Fuad (Feb. 19, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-226-83153-4). The sophomore volume from Fuad examines the complicated experience of parenthood in a world shadowed by climate anxiety and postcolonial tradition. These pieces wrestle with technology, etymology, language, and biology.
Univ. of Minnesota
Anishinaabe Songs for a New Millennium by Marcie R. Rendon (July 2, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-5179-1743-2). A member of the White Earth Nation, Rendon evokes the songs of ancestors in poem-songs that reflect on the present and future.
Univ. of Nebraska
Origins of the Syma Species by Tares Oburumu (Mar. 1, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4962-3702-6). Syma, an oil-producing region of Nigeria, provides the backdrop for poems that consider music, religion, political critique, and single parenthood.
Univ. of Wisconsin
The Story of Your Obstinate Survival by Daniel Khalastchi (Mar. 12, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-299-34804-5). This genre-bending book overturns narrative conventions in pieces that question the line between public and private.
Wesleyan Univ.
Septet for the Luminous Ones by Fahima Ife (Feb. 6, $26, ISBN 978-0-8195-0093-9). The second collection from Ife pays tribute to the Caribbean Americas and Black English while addressing such themes as desire, diaspora, and landscape.
