Feel ALL the feels with these 15 acclaimed contemporary poetry collections to make you laugh, cry, flutter, and ache. These contrastingly different poetry books (published in the past few years) take you all over the map - geographically and emotionally - to put words on an America and Humanity that is still evolving. Through illness, war, politics, aging, parenting, and art, each book is a record of deep observation, on what it means to be alive, to survive, and be moved by our circumstances.
Self-deprecating, and spanning topics as wide as American democracy, astrology, dating, and body acceptance in middle age, Oakland author/dancer/director Brontez Purnell's laugh-out-loud collection of poems manages to be both spicy and sincere. Gay,…
Bursting with revolutionary fervor, Alma Rosa Azul's poems buzz with desire for a more just and beautiful world for women, Chicanas specifically, and Americans in general. "The world is like a Huipil / like Mexican embroidery" -- "When I grow up to…
Debt, organ harvesting, rising oceans, spyware, and authorianism collide in this dystopian poetry collection about life in the throes of Late Capitalism by Chilean-American poet/translator Daniel Borzutsky. Blending science fiction, horror, and…
A love-letter to Black Minneapolis and searching personal inventory of whether artists can be complicit in covering up hate crimes, Danez Smith wonders aloud in this collection if they have allowed personal success as a poet to help institutions…
Chatty, laugh-out-loud poetry in the tone of Frank O'Hara, Chen Chen's poems relish in awkward social situations between teachers and students, boyfriends and in-laws, and adult children learning to see their parents as imperfect, complicated human…
In April Gibson's account of chronic illness, she finds herself in clinical settings subject to diagnosis (and misdiagnosis) of Crohn's Disease, casting a cool, analytic gaze on doctors and hospitals while sharpening her inner voice and sense of…
Set between North and South America, Diego Báez - a poet raised in the US - weaves together childhood family memories with jaguar myths and missionary tourist reviews to animate a portrait of his father's homeland, a Guaraní-speaking indigenous…
Updating the Nature Poetry genre for those whose contact with Nature might only be a tree in an city sidewalk, this new nature poetry collection (commissioned for the Library of Congress by United States Poet Laureate Ada Límon) makes Awe at the…
The poet reflects on her broken mental health as a teenager, and how being placed in a psychiatric ward as a young person warped her mind further, by cutting her off from connections to friends, family, schooling, and comforts of home. Using…
A newly reprinted and updated poetry collection from the 1990's, based on his book "Ceremonies." Essex Hemphill passed away in 1995, but his unapologetic poetry about being a gay Black man at the height of AIDS epidemic left a mark on American…
A light book of poetry that reads at first like "Boomer dad humor" by a middle-aged poetry teacher, this collection reads easy, then goes deeper, to notice an America being threatened from within. Between playful poems about entertainment…
Expansive poems on trans freedom, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza's poems dissolve spirit into nature, only to be made hyper visible again as a trans woman in urban life. "You build a city for yourself inside your body in the moments it takes to clear a…
Mosab Abu Toha sifts through the remnants of destroyed homes, neighborhoods, soccer fields, book collections and family memories in Gaza since 2023, both performing and resisting the role of narrator for readers who want him to explain Palestine as…
Elisa A. Garza visualizes her body's fight against cancer on a cellular level, combatting the fear that accompanies diagnosis with a renewed grit for survival. The effect is like "Star Wars," meets the 1980's movie "Inner Space," with overtones of…
Tiana Clark writes about divorce from a marriage that no longer served her, a desire to love the "ugly" parts of her body, and curiosity about her romantic choices throughout her life. Along the way she muses about the first Black "Bachelorette" on…
