Volume 267
Issue 50
12/07/2020
Ruminative and searching, brash and brave, these collections ask and recast questions of identity while exploring the richness of contemporary life.
Top 10
American Melancholy
Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco, Feb. 9 ($26.99, ISBN 978-0-06-303526-3)
The first collection of poems from Oates in 25 years explores the heart and mind, and the challenges of contemporary life, with an emphasis on poverty, bigotry, and political unrest.
The Essential June Jordan
June Jordan, edited by Jan Heller Levi and Christoph Keller. Copper Canyon, May 4 ($18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-55659-620-9)
The late Jordan’s vital body of work addressed police brutality, sexism, and solidarity with marginalized voices. This selection showcases her finest poems from 1971 to 2001.
Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001–2021
Yusef Komunyakaa. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Feb. 2 ($35, ISBN 978-0-374-60013-6)
Pulitzer-winner Komunyakaa has long been celebrated for his vivid depictions of the Vietnam War and his childhood in the American South, and here his works from the past 20 years are collected.
The Life
Carrie Fountain. Penguin Books, May 4 ($18 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-14-313601-9)
The third collection from Fountain explores the domestic sphere in poems that balance humor and profundity.
Mule Kick Blues: And Last Poems
Michael McClure. City Lights, Apr. 13 ($16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-87286-814-4)
The final book by the late beat poet McClure draws its title from a sequence of poems that pay tribute to blues legends, among them Leadbelly, Willie Dixon, and Howlin’ Wolf.
Parallel Movement of the Hands: Six Unfinished Longer Works
John Ashbery. Ecco, June 15 ($26.99, ISBN 978-0-06-296885-2)
This posthumous collection features Ashbery’s trademark playfulness with language and range of tones and styles, gathering book-length projects and long poems written between 1993 and 2007.
The Perseverance
Raymond Antrobus. Tin House, Mar. 30 ($16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-951142-42-1)
The debut from British-Jamaican poet Antrobus considers history, language, and grief in elegiac poems that examine race and culture through a variety of poetic forms.
Smoking Lovely: The Remix
Willie Perdomo. Haymarket, Apr. 6 ($16 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64259-463-8)
This radically revised version of Perdomo’s 2004 poem explores the role of community in defining the self, as well as the wider objectification of African culture.
Vertigo & Ghost
Fiona Benson. Norton, June 15 ($26.95, ISBN 978-0-393-54186-1)
A sequence of poems in the first half of Benson’s collection imagines Zeus as a rapist preying on women, while the second half of the book offers a meditation on depression, family life, and motherhood.
Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey
Craig Morgan Teicher. BOA, Apr. 6 ($17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-950774-25-8)
Exploring themes of middle age, fatherhood, and partnership, as well as caring for a disabled child, Teicher’s collection chronicles a family’s past and present, and the realities of life in the suburbs.
Poetry Listings
Akashic
New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set, edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani (June 1, $34.95 box set, ISBN 978-1-61775-950-5). Thirteen new African poets are showcased in this limited-edition box set sponsored by the African Poetry Book Fund.
Andrews McMeel
Shine Your Icy Crown by Amanda Lovelace and Ladybookmad (Mar. 16, $14.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-5248-5194-1). In accessible feminist poems, Lovelace encourages women to stand against societal restrictions.
Archipelago
Acrobat by Nabaneeta Dev Sen, trans. by Nandana Sen (Feb. 9, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-939810-80-9). Bengali poet Dev Sen meditates on themes of womanhood, love, childbirth, and community.
Arsenal Pulp
Nedí Nezu˛ (Good Medicine) by Tenille Campbell (Apr. 13, $14.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-55152-846-5) explores romantic and familial relationships and Indigenous culture in poems that look unflinchingly at dating, sex, and love.
Bauhan
DM Me, Mother Darling by Alexa Doran (Apr. 6, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-87233-330-7). Parenthood is the central theme of Doran’s collection as she reflects on motherhood, and the joy and grief it brings.
Berkley
Black Girl, Call Home by Jasmine Mans (Mar. 9, $15 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-593-19714-1). Race, feminism, and queer identity are explored in this second book by spoken word poet Mans.
Biblioasis
The Debt by Andrea Callanan (Apr. 6, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-77196-417-3) juxtaposes the past and the present in poems that consider what humanity owes to nature, and what individuals owe to one another.
Blair
Woodsmoke by Wayne Caldwell (Feb. 23, $18.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-949467-39-0). These poems of witness and place conjure Mt. Pisgah in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
BOA
How to Be Better by Being Worse by Justin Jannise (Apr. 13, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-950774-23-4). The Poulin Prize–winning debut from Jannise questions the self-help model while celebrating queer experience, identity, and forgiveness.
Book*hug
Duct Taped Roses by Billeh Nickerson (Apr. 15, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-77166-690-9). Examining themes of reparation and loss with humor and candor, these poems catalog experiences with family, mental illness, and queer identity, as well as community and daily life.
Carnegie Mellon Univ.
The Knives We Need by Nava EtShalom (Feb. 19, $15.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-88748-667-8). Set in Palestine and the U.S., EtShalom’s short lyric poems offer a coming-of-age narrative that wrestles with genealogy, national identity, and the concept of home.
Central Avenue
The Grief We’re Given by William Bortz (Feb. 2, $16.99, ISBN 978-1-77168-219-0) studies public and private grief in poems on relationships, loss, and the environment, while searching for hope and recognizing past pain.
Chronicle
She Holds a Cosmos: Poems on Motherhood, edited by Mallory Farrugia, illus. by Karolin Schnoor (Apr. 27, $16.95, ISBN 978-1-7972-0989-0). Combining poems and illustration, this collection aims to empower and celebrate the experience of motherhood; foreword by Kimiko Hahn.
Coffee House
Homes by Moheb Soliman (June 8, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-56689-609-2). Soliman contemplates the coasts of the Great Lakes region in this travelogue of poems about the relationship between identity and environment.
Copper Canyon
The Complete Stories by Noah Warren (May 18, $16 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-55659-616-2) examines public and private history while offering a path forward marked by responsibility and hope.
Love and Other Poems by Alex Dimitrov (Feb. 9, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-55659-599-8). The third book from Dimitrov speaks directly to the reader as it praises the world and everything in it over the 12 months of the year.
Deep Vellum
Ross Sings Cheree & the Animated Dark by Ross John Farrar (Apr. 6, $16 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64605-053-6). Farrar contemplates life beyond his musical career as a member of the band Ceremony, along with the 2016 election, personal relationships, and the landmarks of San Francisco, his hometown.
Everyman’s Library
Buzz Words: Poems About Insects, edited by Kimiko Hahn and Harold Schechter (Apr. 6, $15.95, ISBN 978-1-101-90826-6). Spanning the ages and the globe, this anthology celebrates the diversity of the insect world and presents writing from the Tang dynasty and Japanese haiku alongside poems by John Donne, Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver, and Kevin Young, among others.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
More Anon: Selected Poems by Maureen N. McLane (July 20, $27, ISBN 978-0-374-60198-0). In this selected, poems from McLane’s first five books showcase her stylistic range and formal experimentation.
Fsg Originals
Field Study by Chet’la Sebree (June 1, $16 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-374-53902-3). Sebree’s prose poems contemplate identity, black femininity, and the end of a relationship while drawing inspiration from the Black thinkers that inspire her, among them Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, and Tressie McMillan Cottom.
Four Way
Prometeo by C. Dale Young (Feb. 15, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-945588-70-9). Inherited, personal, and collective trauma are illuminated by a speaker who is a proverbial “child of fire.”
Graywolf
Purgatorio by Dante Alighieri, trans. by Mary Jo Bang (July 13, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64445-057-4).This is the second installment of Bang’s adaptation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Usain Bolt, Tootsie Fruit Chews, and Gertrude Stein make cameo appearances.
Graywolf
The Renunciations by Donika Kelly (May 4, $16 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64445-053-6). A speaker called “the oracle” brings to life persistence, transformation, and survival in this collection that records and examines what is past.
Harvard Univ.
Poems of the First Buddhist Women: A Translation of the Therigatha, trans. by Charles Hallisey (Feb. 1, $19.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-674-25135-9). Part of the Pali canon of Buddhist scripture composed more than two millennia ago, this is one of the oldest surviving examples of literature written by the first Buddhist women.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
100 Poems to Break Your Heart by Edward Hirsch (Mar. 30, $28, ISBN 978-0-544-93188-6). Hirsch collects and explicates 100 of the most poignant and inspirational poems on heartbreak, loss, and grief written over the past 200 years from around the globe.
House of Anansi
Intruder by Bardia Sinaee (Apr. 6, $19.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4870-0871-0) looks at the problems of contemporary life, including xenophobia and the isolation of the Covid-19 lockdown.
Knopf
God I Feel Modern Tonight: Poems from a Gal About Town by Catherine Cohen (Feb. 2, $18, ISBN 978-0-593-31833-1). Comedian Cohen delivers a collection full of tragicomic verse contemplating bad dates, education, commerce, and other topics in the zeitgeist. 50,000-copy announced first printing.
New Directions
Personhood by Thalia Field (Mar. 2, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-8112-2973-9). Through poems that cross genres and interrogate the role of language, Field traces the struggles between humans and nonhumans, and the greater role of power and violence in the world.
New York Review Books
Exhausted on the Cross by Najwan Darwish, trans. by Kareem James Abu-Zeid (Feb. 23, $16 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-68137-552-6). Histories, cultures, and geographies, as well as struggle and oppression, are questioned by Darwish in this second collection of his poetry to be translated into English.
Norton
Gigantic Cinema: A Weather Anthology, edited by Paul Keegan and Alice Oswald (May 4, $19.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-393-54075-8). Keegan and Oswald collect poems on the weather written by voices ancient and modern and as various as Pliny the Younger, Frank O’Hara, and Elizabeth Bishop.
Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry, edited by Joy Harjo (May 4, $15 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-393-86791-6). Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. poet laureate, gathers poems by contemporary Native poets including Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, and Layli Long Soldier.
Paraclete
Flying Yellow by Suzanne Underwood Rhodes (Apr. 1, $19 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64060-402-5). Rhodes investigates her own personal injuries, as well as those of historical figures, alongside poems that consider the natural world.
Penguin Books
Somebody Else Sold the World by Adrian Matejka (July 6, $20 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-14-313644-6) contemplates the dangers and joys of contemporary existence, as well as the lasting effects of racial inequality.
Persea
Tributary by Carey Salerno (Apr. 20, $15.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-89255-529-1). Family stories and heartbreaks are brought to the surface in this second collection by Salerno that weaves fact and myth to explore public and private struggles of faith and morality.
Sarabande
Even Shorn by Isabel Duarte-Gray (May 4, $15.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-946448-74-3). Duarte-Gray’s poems are full of images and voices drawn from western Kentucky, her family history, and folklore.
Seven Stories
Duende: Poems, 1966–Now by Quincy Troupe (Mar. 16, $19.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64421-046-8). Spanning over 50 years, this selected offers poems by the poet, biographer, and friend of Miles Davis.
State Univ. of New York
Qorbanot: Offerings by Alisha Kaplan and Tobi Kahn (Apr. 1, $23.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4384-8292-7). Combining text and images, these poems explore the notion of sacrifice and the role of faith in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
Storey
How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope by James Crews (Apr. 13, $14.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-63586-386-4). Uplifting, accessible poems by Joy Harjo, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith, and others feature in this collection devoted to beauty and joy.
Univ. of Chicago
Topsy-Turvy by Charles Bernstein (Apr. 15, $25 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-226-78360-4) combines a variety of forms—among them elegies, pastorals, and translations—and tonal registers to unpack contemporary struggles and life in general.
Univ. of Massachusetts
How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It by Lara Egger (Apr. 30, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-62534-571-4) examines longing and disgrace in associative poems that attempt to address the many layers and complications of being.
Univ. of Massachusetts
Patmos by Bruce Bond (Apr. 30, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-62534-561-5). Bond’s book-length poetic sequence reflects on human attitudes toward endings using the revelations of John of Patmos as one of its lenses.
Univ. of New Mexico
Duende de Burque: Albuquerque Poems and Musings by Manuel González (Feb. 15, $18.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-8263-6267-4). Poems about Albuquerque, the Sandia Mountains, the Rio Grande Bosque, and its citizens feature in this collection by Albuquerque’s poet laureate.
Univ. of Wisconsin
Blood Aria by Christopher Nelson (Mar. 9, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-299-33154-2) questions the origins and types of 21st-century violence, including environmental destruction, gun violence, and homophobic attacks, while also searching for redemption.
Conditions of the Wounded by Anna Leigh Knowles (Mar. 9, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-299-33144-3). Suburban violence haunts Knowles’s debut, a study of pain and terror, as well as perseverance and survival.
Wave
Giant Moth Perishes by Geoffrey Nutter (May 4, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-950268-19-1) contemplates various landscapes through poems that examine both the intricate and the ordinary.
A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure by Hoa Nguyen (Apr. 6, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-950268-17-7) draws from the historical and cultural moment before and after the fall of Saigon, and includes a verse biography of the poet’s mother, Diep Anh Nguyen, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-woman Vietnamese circus troupe.
White Pine
Under the Capsized Boat We Fly: New & Selected Poems by Gail Wronsky (Apr. 13, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-945680-45-8). Over four decades’ worth of Wronsky’s poems appear in this collection that explores gender, the environment, and death.
Yale Univ.
What Noise Against the Cane, Vol. 115, by Desiree C. Bailey (Apr. 13, $20 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-300-25653-6). Winner of the 2020 Yale Series of Younger Poets, Bailey examines Black life in America through poems that conjure Caribbean folklore, as well as themes of immigration, the fight for freedom during the Haitian Revolution, and womanhood.
Words as Grain: New and Selected Poems by Duo Duo, trans. by Lucas Klein (May 25, $30, ISBN 978-0-300-22739-0). This career-spanning anthology by one of China’s most prominent contemporary writers offers poems that reflect on the Chinese political landscape and the Zen Buddhist tradition, among other subjects.
