Top 10
Diary of Small Discontents: New & Selected Poems 1974–2024
John Yau. Omnidawn, Oct. 6 ($23.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-63243-175-2)
This career-spanning collection showcases the wide range of Yau’s subjects and forms, including traditional and invented structures, such as sestinas, pantoums, and lists exploring Chinese American identity, violence,
cultural memory, and art.
Mesopotopia
Anne Waldman. Penguin Books, Aug. 12 ($20 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-14-313702-3)
Myth, ritual, and speculative vision coalesce as Waldman blends poetic traditions, including troubadour songs, sacred texts, mantra, and canonical prayers, in poems that engage with time, language, and cultural and spiritual inquiry.
The New Book: Poems, Letters, Blurbs, and Things
Nikki Giovanni. Morrow, Sept. 2 ($26, ISBN 978-0-06-344752-3)
The final collection by Giovanni, who died in 2024, features poems, letters, and short prose that address contemporary political unrest, systemic racism, personal and cultural memory, and everyday life.
The New Economy
Gabrielle Calvocoressi. Copper Canyon, Oct. 14 ($22, ISBN 978-1-55659-721-3)
Survival and renewal are at the heart of Calvocoressi’s exploration of childhood memories, the ungendered body’s aging, and the commitment to living through fear and pain.
Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs
John Berryman, edited by Shane McCrae. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Dec. 9 ($28, ISBN 978-0-374-61794-3)
McCrae presents over 100 previously unpublished poems by Berryman, expanding his Dream Songs sequence and including both drafts and completed works featuring Henry, the recurring character from earlier volumes.
Paper Crown
Heather Christle. Wesleyan Univ., Aug. 5 ($26.95, ISBN 978-0-8195-0201-8)
Drawing on Christle’s nonfiction, these poems assume a kind of dream logic as they explore personal and world events.
Penitential Cries
Susan Howe. New Directions, Sept. 2 ($18.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-8112-3982-0)
Structured in four parts, including a long prose piece called “Penitential Cries,” the latest from Howe comprises a series of word collages and poems on aging, memory, family, and mortality.
Regaining Unconsciousness
Harryette Mullen. Graywolf, Aug. 5 ($18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64445-349-0)
In her first collection in 12 years, Mullen explores climate change, AI, the destruction of the environment, and other societal calamities.
Resting Bitch Face
Taylor Byas. Soft Skull, Aug. 26 ($16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-59376-787-7)
Byas reflects on Black women and the idea of the artistic object and muse in poems that interrogate art and film criticism, subjectivity, and historical notions of “watching.”
Startlement: New and Selected Poems
Ada Limón. Milkweed, Sept. 30 ($28, ISBN 978-1-63955-051-7)
Gathering new poems alongside selections from six previous books, Limón explores mortality, impermanence, and the unknown.
Longlist
Acre
Common Disaster by M. Cynthia Cheung (Nov. 15, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-946724-98-4). Weaving in historical accounts of erasure and reframing Chinese texts, this debut recounts the Covid-19 pandemic from the perspective of a frontline physician.
Akashic
82nd Division by D.M. Aderibigbe (Dec. 2, $18.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-63614-242-5) contains villanelles, sonnets, blues poems, odes, and dramatic monologues about Nigeria and the lives of West African soldiers who fought alongside the British in WWII.
American Poetry Review
Bloodmercy by I.S. Jones (Sept. 9, $16 trade paper, ISBN 979-8-9875852-3-8). Cain and Abel are reimagined as sisters in this debut that combines the Old Testament and modern language as it considers family dynamics after exile from Eden.
Andrews McMeel
The Heart of You: Poetry About Hope and Persistence, Vol. 3 by Iain S. Thomas (Aug. 19, $18.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-5248-9380-4). The third and final installment of the Souls Trilogy includes ink illustrations alongside poems about sorrow, self-discovery, and hope.
Archipelago
Say Fire by Selma Asotić (Sept. 30, $16 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-962770-43-9). Born in war-torn Bosnia and Herzegovina, Asotić explores family history and the wake of historical calamity.
Arsenal Pulp
Crohnic by Jason Purcell (Sept. 9, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-83405-010-2) is a lyrical exploration of chronic illness that uses medical records and ecological perspectives to weave in reflections on nature, pain, life, and death.
Atlantic Editions
The Singing Word: 168 Years of Atlantic Poetry, edited by Walt Hunter (Sept. 9, $25, ISBN 978-1-63893-298-7), collects poems from the magazine’s first issue in 1857 to the present 50,000-copy announced first printing.
Backwaters
Wolves in Shells by Kimberly Ann Priest (Oct. 1, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4962-4370-6) reflects on family heritage through the tale of a woman dealing with past and present pain, including homelessness and leaving a violent partner.
Biblioasis
We’re Somewhere Else Now by Robyn Sarah (Oct. 7, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-77196-686-3) ruminates on the Covid-19 pandemic in meditative poems of grief and change that shift from first to third person to a collective we.
Blair
All These Ghosts by Silas House (Sept. 9, $22.95, ISBN 978-1-958888-69-8) contains poems about growing up in Appalachia, the past, and House’s relationship to the natural world.
Book*hug
Reckless by Andrea MacPherson (Oct. 28, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-77166-945-0). In candid poems about reproductive rights, motherhood, and relationships, MacPherson critiques and interrogates how women’s experiences are nullified or ignored in
contemporary society.
Carnegie Mellon Univ.
No by Idea Vilariño, trans. by María José Zubieta (Oct. 7, $20 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-88748-720-0). The final collection from Uruguay’s Vilariño deals with love, loss, and time in honest and spare poems.
Central Avenue Poetry
The Never Was by Tyler Knott Gregson (Sept. 23, $23 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-77168-421-7). Honoring imperfection and authenticity, Gregson blends poetic fragments and new work in a tribute to neurodivergence, complexity, and potential. 60,000-copy announced first printing.
City Lights
Grime: Spotlight Series No. 25 by Thea Matthews (Sept. 9, $15.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-87286-913-4). Set in San Fran-cisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, Matthews’s poems on grief and survival explore urban
living, including addiction and poverty, through traditional and experimental forms.
Copper Canyon
Wildness Before Something Sublime by Leila Chatti (Sept. 2, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-55659-716-9). The second collection from Chatti explores desire, loss, illness, the body, and divinity through dreams, centos, and fragmented forms.
You Must Live: New Poetry from Palestine, edited by Sherah Bloor and Tayseer Abu Odeh (Sept. 16, $22 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-55659-720-6). This bilingual anthology of poems from Palestine features works written during the ongoing war with Israel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
The Poems of Seamus Heaney, edited by Bernard O’Donoghue and Rosie Lavan (Nov. 18, $35, ISBN 978-0-374-23523-9), brings together all of the Nobel Prize winner’s poetry in a single volume.
Fordham Univ.
The Years of Blood by Adedayo Agarau (Sept. 2, $19.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-5315-1161-6). Set in rural Ibadan, Nigeria, the debut from Agarau examines the country’s ritual killings and child abductions from recent history to the present.
Four Way
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Matthew Tuckner (Sept. 15, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-961897-54-0) mines elegy and literary history as the poet reflects on his best friend’s illness and death from cancer.
Graywolf
Algarabía: The Song of Cenex, Natural Son of the Isle Alarabíyya/La Canción de Cenex, Hijo Natural de la Ínsula Alarabíyya by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera (Sept. 2, $25 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64445-351-3). In this bilingual edition from Puerto Rican poet Rivera, a trans being named Cenex recounts his life on a colony of Earth in a parallel universe.
Harper Perennial
How About Now by Kate Baer (Nov. 4, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-06-330608-0) explores middle age, motherhood, discovery, resilience, and the changing self.
House of Anansi
Procession by Katherena Vermette (Sept. 30, $19.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4870-1352-3) traces intergenerational connections through reflections on the body, genealogy, and place.
Hub City
Lullaby for the Grieving by Ashley M. Jones (Sept. 16, $16 trade paper, ISBN 979-8-88574-058-6). The fourth collection from Jones reflects on the nature of personal and political grief.
Interlink
Water to Water: Gaza Renga by Marilyn Hacker and Deema K. Shehabi (Nov. 4, $20 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-62371-582-3). This collaboration began as a correspondence between two poets responding to the Israeli siege of Gaza, in the Japanese call-and-response form of renga.
Alice James
The Palace by Andrés Cerpa (Jan. 20, $24.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-949944-87-7)
tells the story of a family’s journey through real and imagined landscapes in poems that engage with violent histories, addiction,
the natural world, survival, and hope.
Liveright
The Aeneid by Virgil, trans. by Scott McGill and Susannah Wright (Aug. 12, $39.99, ISBN 978-1-324-09643-6). Rendered in an unrhymed iambic pentameter, this is the first collaborative translation of the epic poem into English.
Norton
Collected Poems of Stanley Plumly, edited by David Baker and Michael Collier (Aug. 12, $39.99, ISBN 978-1-324-10593-0), showcases the late poet’s tender poems on family, friendship, the natural world, and art.
Omnidawn
Two Appearances After the Resurrection by Shane McCrae (Oct. 6, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-63243-172-1). Experimenting with form and punctuation, McCrae explores the nature of perception in poems written from shifting perspectives, including those of an artist, a devil, and a disembodied soul.
Penguin Books
Shade Is a Place by Makshya Tolbert (Oct. 7, $20 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-14-313845-7) investigates from multiple angles the relief that trees can provide, including by considering the architectural history of malls.
Soft Skull
plastic: A Poem by Matthew Rice (Jan. 13, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-59376-803-4). This book-length poem set over a 12-hour factory night shift combines memoir, ekphrasis, and satire to depict industrial and artistic labor.
Tin House
Blue Opening by Chet’la Sebree (Sept. 16, $16.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-963108-46-0) reckons with chronic illness, language, motherhood, and belief in 32 poems of varied forms, including sonnets, prose poems, and odes.
Tupelo
Indifferent Cities by Ángel García (Jan. 19, $19.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-961209-32-9) comprises a multigenerational investigation of migration between Mexico and the U.S. using photographs, postcards, and other archival material to reflect on memory,
family, and belonging.
Two Lines Press
Hair on Fire: Afghan Women Poets, edited by Sarah Coolidge (Sept. 2, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-949641-84-4), features six poets writing in a country affected by war and exile.
Univ. of Nebraska
The Naming by Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto (Dec. 1, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4962-4470-3) considers postmodernism and ancestry in poems that draw on Ezenwa-Ohaeto’s Igbo heritage to offer a vision of the past, present, and future.
Univ. of Wisconsin
Blood Harmony by Bruce Snider (Nov. 11, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-299-35554-8). The fourth collection from Snider recounts the impact of opioid addiction on two brothers in poems about rural working-class America and family dynamics.
Wayne State Univ.
The Collected Works of Ruth Whitman, edited by David Houghton (Nov. 3, $36.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-8143-5245-8),
sets poems from Whitman’s eight previous collections alongside new work.
Wesleyan Univ.
Lola the Interpreter by Lyn Hejinian (Oct. 14, $26.95, ISBN 978-0-8195-0178-3) brings the poet’s lifelong examination of thought to an end with an experimental prose poem in which a speaker and a series of quasi-characters offer interpretations of each other and their surroundings.
Yale Univ.
Stolen Flower by Irma Pineda, trans. by Wendy Call (Nov. 18, $22 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-300-28248-1), presents a trilingual (Didxazá, Spanish, and English) poetic sequence and verse narrative on the collective response to a 2007 crime against an Indigenous woman by Mexican soldiers.