13 Recent Poetry Collection To Pick Up If You’re Trying To Get Into Poetry
Chrome Valley by Mahogany L. Browne
In these poems of Black girlhood and womanhood, Browne rejects a simple either-or narrative. Instead, she explores intergenerational legacies of trauma alongside intergenerational legacies of Black joy, creativity, and sweetness. She writes about Southern girlhood, intense teenage friendship, motherhood, American racism, and intimacies shared between Black women from generation to generation. Raging and bountiful and humming with irresistible music, this is a powerful new collection from a prolific cross-genre writer.
From From by Monica Youn
Youn’s fourth collection complicates Asian American identity, replacing the reductive question of “where are you from?” with an expansive exploration of history, geography, culture, and language. Youn’s formal inventiveness is a pleasure, and the often unexpected connections she makes between mythology, art, literary history, pop culture, and politics make this her most ambitious and invigorating collection yet.
Judas Goat by Gabrielle Bates
Bates’s debut collection wrestles with motherhood and memory and the unfixed boundaries of what makes a place — or a person — feel like home. There’s a sparse, stark formality in these poems that gives them a certain gravity. They are rooted in Southern geography, in the anatomy of animals and desire, in haunting landscapes and scenes of strained domesticity. Bates writes: “I’m a creature / most at home / replenishing my venom under rock.” This collection bites, and soothes, and bites again — you won’t be able to quite catch your breath, and you won’t want to.
Above Ground by Clint Smith
In his newest collection, award-winning poet Smith ventures into the unpredictable terrain of fatherhood. He’s interested in the textures of ordinary life, in the ways fatherhood has changed him, and in that perpetual conundrum: how to live and love, especially as a parent, in a world full of so much terror. These confessional poems offer an intimate portrait of Smith’s early years as a father. They are an invitation to all of us to hold each other close and marvel at every moment of beauty we encounter.
Feast by Ina Cariño
In their debut collection, 2022 Whiting Award winner Cariño explores what it means to be from, and live within, a complicated place. These poems are bright, lush, and inventive, ripe with images of rice and fruit, bodies and mountains. Cariño’s language is continually surprising; many poems rooted in Filipine food traditions unexpectedly transform into beautiful meditations on lineage, geography, desire, and survival. “how much can the body take?” the speaker of one poem asks. In another, Cariño writes: “this wish: / that the world’s full blossoming / might unhinge such absurd thievery.” This gorgeous, visceral debut dances in the tension between too much and not enough, that murky space that is both celebration and elegy.
God Themselves by Jae Nichelle
Fans of fresh, accessible poetry in the lineage of Staceyann Chin and Black Girl, Call Home will love spoken word poet Nichelle’s newest collection. It’s a loud, exuberant celebration of Black womanhood, queer love, and lives stitched into wholeness despite legacies of violence, trauma, and religious anti-gay bias. Wise, tender, and funny, these conversational poems create a joyful, holy space for anyone who has felt othered and alienated by traditional religious practices.
Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco by K. Iver
This extraordinary debut begins with a prose poem composed of sentences still rattling around inside my brain, images now imprinted in my heart. “In the beginning, the grass and trees and birds are already tired of their assigned names,” the poem’s speaker writes. This relentless energy continues through the entire book, which feels more like a spell than a collection of poetry. With startling clarity, in language that sparks off the page, Iver writes of queer and trans childhood and young adulthood in the South. The stories these poems tell are full of grief, wonder, and queer possibility. I dare you to read this book without crying.
Trace Evidence by Charif Shanahan
In his second collection, Shanahan delves into and expands upon the themes that run through his first book, Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing. He meditates on Blackness and multiracial identity, diasporic communities, colonial violence, displacement, queer intimacy, and complex familial relationships. The collection is anchored by the spectacular “On the Overnight From Agadir,” a multipage poem about a bus accident Shanahan survived in Morocco. By turns wry, philosophical, and cutting, Shanahan lays bare the woes of contemporary America while offering glimpses of embodied joy.
Sex Depression Animals by Mag Gabbert
Poets have been writing bestiaries for as long as there’s been poetry, and it’s a form always ripe for reinvention. Blending myth, dream, and realism, Gabbert reimagines the bestiary as a catalog of unexpected monsters and wondrous transformations. These fierce, vibrant poems center womanhood in all its messiness and ask tangled questions about desire, power, femininity, memory, and bodily autonomy.
Buffalo Girl by Jessica Q. Stark
In a collection that’s as visual as it is textual, Jessica Q. Stark retells the story of her mother’s immigration from Vietnam to the US, using fairy-tale motifs from Little Red Riding Hood to reimagine the way we talk and think about victimhood and sexual violence. Interspersed with the poems are photographic collages that blend her mother’s photography from Vietnam, images of the natural world, and illustrations from old editions of Little Red Riding Hood. This is a haunting, visually stunning book that bends genre into new, exciting shapes.
Freedom House by KB Brookins
In their full-length debut, Brookins interrogates what it means to be free — in America, in a Black trans body, as a queer person living in Texas. In angry, piercing poems, full of bold imagery and chilling line breaks, they explore American politics, queer masculinity, and the strangeness and magic of transition. This inventive collection is an astonishing achievement; Brookins’s poems range from long lyrical verses to gutting erasure poems, and every one is breathtaking.
Nomenclatures of Invisibility by Mahtem Shiferraw
These beautiful poems trace complicated paths across the globe, mapping the blurry intersections of migration, language, body, belonging, and home. Shiferraw’s poems move through her own history, as well as the history of her family and her homelands, Ethiopia and Eritrea, naming these places and stories beyond colonial and imperial understandings of borders and geography. This is a lyrical, melancholic, and deeply vulnerable book.
Promises of Gold by José Olivarez, translated by David Ruano
If you think a book of love poems has to be about romantic love only, think again. In his second collection, published in a dual English/Spanish edition (and beautifully translated by poet David Ruano), Olivarez writes love poems to friends and family, places and moments, ex-lovers and comrades, past and future versions of himself. His understanding of love is expansive and joyful, encompassing the work of healing, living in community, and showing up, day in and day out.
