Throughout 2020, CLMP has been gathering monthly lists of the books forthcoming from our member presses. We’re excited to share this year-end roundup of more than two hundred poetry collections published in 2020 by small literary publishers! Browse below for debut poetry collections, full-length poetry collections, and poetry chapbooks, and read our year-end roundups for fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid work as well!
Debut Poetry Collections
The Clearing by Allison Adair
Milkweed Editions | June 2020
Selected by Henri Cole for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, this debut “navigates the ever-shifting poles of violence and vulnerability with a singular incisiveness and a rich imagination.”
: once teeth bones coral : by Kimberly Alidio
Belladonna* | August 2020
According to Anne Waldman, Alidio’s debut poetry collection is “a purring queering poem machine, a mix tape spitting forth enigmas for the tongue. Plots, struggles, like shooting stars.”
Neighborhood of Gray Houses by Derek Annis
Lost Horse Press | March 2020
According to Christopher Howell, the poems in this debut collection, “even those that border on the surreal, have a direct toughness that seems to slow down the moment each poem inhabits, regardless of its dimensions, and make the reader listen to this strong and original new voice.”
Now in Color by Jacqueline Balderrama
Perugia Press | September 2020
Balderrama’s debut poetry collection “explores the multigenerational immigrant experience of Mexican-Americans who have escaped violence, faced pressures to assimilate, and now seek to reconnect to a fragmented past. “
under the aegis of a winged mind by makalani bandele
Autumn House Press | September 2020
Selected by Cornelius Eady as winner of the 2019 Autumn House Poetry Prize, this debut poetry collection is “inspired by the life and times of the jazz composer and pianist Earl ‘Bud’ Powell.
You Do Not Have To Be Good by Madeleine Barnes
Trio House Press | July 2020
According to Deborah Landau, Barnes’s debut poetry collection is “a beautiful and luminous book of lyrics out of the grit and gristle of lived experience.”
Your New Feeling Is the Artifact of a Bygone Era by Chad Bennett
Sarabande Books | January 2020
Bennett’s debut poetry collection, selected by Ocean Vuong for the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, is “a deeply personal account of loss, but more critically, a dismantling of an American history of queerness.”
Fantasia for the Man in Blue by Tommye Blount
Four Way Books | March 2020
In this debut poetry collection, Blount “orchestrates a chorus of distinct, unforgettable voices that speak to the experience of the black, queer body as a site of desire and violence.”
Night Burial by Kate Bolton Bonnic
Center for Literary Publishing/Colorado Review | November 2020
Winner of the 2020 Colorado Prize for Poetry, this debut collection is, according to Harryette Mullen, a consideration of “what it means for the living to attend to the dying.”
The River People by Polly Buckingham
Lost Horse Press | September 2020
Buckingham’s debut poetry collection is full of “tense lyrics, semi-biographical journeys and glittering elegies, rich with the surreal fabric of nightmare and dream.”
My Heart But Not My Heart by Stephanie Cawley
Slope Editions | March 2020
Solmaz Sharif, who selected this poetry collection for the Slope Editions 18th Annual Book Prize, says this is “a book of refusals. The losses and grief that refuse language, the poet’s own refusal of certain performances, the poem’s refusal of expected forms, the speaker’s refusal to slap a manicure on and understand it as self-care.”
All Heathens by Marianne Chan
Sarabande Books | March 2020
In this debut poetry collection, Chan “navigates her Filipino heritage by grappling with notions of diaspora, circumnavigation, and discovery.”
Deluge by Leila Chatti
Copper Canyon Press | April 2020
In her debut full-length collection, Chatti explores “themes of shame, illness, grief, and gender, transmuting religious narratives through the lens of a young Arab American woman suffering a taboo female affliction.”
Borderland Apocrypha by Anthony Cody
Omnidawn | April 2020
In this debut poetry collection, Cody examines a series of lynchings after the Mexican-American War, following “the collective histories of these terrors” and “excavating the traumas born of turbulence at borderlands.”
Index of Haunted Houses by Adam O. Davis
Sarabande Books | September 2020
Winner of the 2019 Kathryn A. Morton Prize, Davis’s debut poetry collection is, according to Ilya Kaminsky, “a brilliant book about our ghosts—personal, political, mythic, lyrical, and yet very real.”
Dark Braid by Dara Yen Elerath
BkMk Press | November 2020
Winner of the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, this debut collection “bridges the universal and the personal by focusing on the body, problematic relationships, illness (both mental and physical) and feelings of being an outsider.”
Pricks in the Tapestry by Jameson Fitzpatrick
Birds LLC | June 2020
In Pricks in the Tapestry, Fitzpatrick tells “the story of a young poet coming to know, belatedly and with difficulty, the insufficiencies of the self as a subject and the lyric as a mode.”
Meditations on Being by Rachel Fox
Deep Vellum | December 2020
In this poetry collection, Fox “pulls readers through life’s bittersweet journeys, one poem at a time, offering the reader a chance to pause, to reflect, and to breathe in the midst of the chaos of life.”
Thrown in the Throat by Benjamin Garcia
Milkweed Editions | August 2020
Selected by Kazim Ali as a winner of the 2019 National Poetry Series, Garcia’s debut poetry collection is “a sex-positive incantation that retextures what it is to write a queer life amidst troubled times.”
The More Extravagant Feast by Leah Naomi Green
Graywolf Press | April 2020
Selected by Li Young Lee for the Walt Whitman Award, this debut poetry collection “focuses on the trophic exchanges of a human body with the world via pregnancy, motherhood, and interconnection.”
Wound from the Mouth of a Wound by torrin a. greathouse
Milkweed Editions | December 2020
According to Aimee Nezhukumatathil, this debut poetry collection “feels like we’re holding a small thunderstorm in our hands.”
Catrachos by Roy Guzmán
Graywolf Press | May 2020
Guzmán’s debut poetry collection is “part immigration narrative, part elegy, and part queer coming-of-age story.”
Terrain by Gina Hietpas
Blue Cactus Press | September 2020
According to Kim Stafford, this debut poetry collection “delivers the visceral, highly–textured terrain of experience on home ground with all the fierce affection and honesty true residence requires.”
Though the Walls Are Lit by Emily Holt
Lost Horse Press | March 2020
In her debut collection, Holt “distills a language to confront the demons of memory, the mysteries of identity, the inheritance of a history of violence and losses.”
The Nightgown & Other Poems by Taisia Kitaiskaia
Deep Vellum | September 2020
Kitaiskaia’s debut poetry collection is “ripe with mythic awareness and dark, fairytale-turned-feminist humor.”
Glaring by Benjamin Krusling
Wendy’s Subway | December 15, 2020
This debut poetry collection “investigates the things that haunt daily life and make love difficult, possible, necessary.”
The Minuses by Jami Macarty
University of Colorado Press | March 2020
This poetry collection “beckons attention to ecological and feminist issues and the co-incidence of eating disorders, sexual harassment, family and intimate partner violence, homelessness, suicide, environmental destruction, and other forms of endangerment.”
The Life Assignment by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado
Four Way Books | September 2020
According to Emily Skillings, Maldonado’s bilingual debut poetry collection “asks us to consider how we as readers and citizens reconcile self and state, body and landscape, desire and capital, language and communication.”
In Accelerated Silence by Brooke Matson
Milkweed Editions | February 2020
Selected by Mark Doty as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, this debut poetry collection “investigates the multidimensional nature of grief and its blurring of boundaries.”
Upend by Claire Meuschke
Noemi Press | March 2020
This poetry collection “loosely navigates the archived immigration trial of Hong On, a biracial Alaska Native-Chinese man, in 1912 on Angel Island, CA during the Chinese Exclusion Act. “
Thresholes by Lara Mimosa Montes
Coffee House Press | May 2020
This poetry collection is, according to Bhanu Kapil, “a training manual for grief and desire, for which no remedies exist except this one: running towards what will burn you up anyway, like a star.”
A Brief History of Burning by Cait O’Kane
Belladonna* | August 2020
O’Kane’s debut poetry collection “discloses the moral crises of addiction, debt affliction, and an ascendant police state against communities of resistance in North Philadelphia and New York City.”
Dears, Beloveds by Kevin Phan
Center for Literary Publishing/Colorado Review | November 2020
Phan’s debut collection of prose poems “offers a fine-grained meditation on grief—personal, familial, ecological, and political.”
Loosen by Kyle Potvin
Hobblebush Books | December 2020
According to Linda Pastan, in this debut poetry collection “looks at the difficult world of sadness and pain and shows us with fine imagery… the beauty we often fail to see.”
Oliver Reed by Hannah Regel
Montez Press | April 2020
Regel’s first full-length poetry collection is, according to Sam Riviere, “pitiless, discomforting poems that explore our own creatureliness with a deadly curiosity.”
Suitor by Joshua Rivkin
Red Hen Press | September 2020
The poems in Rivkin’s debut collection “ask what it means to be a suitor in the fullest sense–to follow, to pursue, to chase the inexplicable hunger at the heart of desire.”
Hotel Almighty by Sarah J. Sloat
Sarabande Books | September 2020
Sloat’s debut poetry collection, “visually arresting and utterly one-of-a-kind,” is a mixed-media book-length erasure of pages from Misery by Stephen King.
A Nail the Evening Hangs On by Monika Sok
Copper Canyon Press | March 2020
In her debut poetry collection, Sok “illuminates the experiences of Cambodian diaspora and reflects on America’s role in escalating the genocide in Cambodia.”
A Grave Is Given Supper by Mike Soto
Deep Vellum | June 2020
Soto’s debut poetry collection is a series of interlinked poems covering “themes from the ongoing drug war taking place in a fictional U.S./Mexico border town.”
Savage Pageant by Jessica Q. Stark
Birds LLC | March 2020
In her debut poetry collection, Stark “explores the concept of US American spectacle and its historic ties to celebrity culture, the maternal body, racist taxonomies, the mistreatment of animals, and ecological violence.”
The Land of the Dead Is Open for Business by Jacob Strautmann
Four Way Books | March 2020
This poetry collection, Strautmann’s first, is “an extended elegy for Jacob Strautmann’s home state of West Virginia and its generations of inhabitants sold out by the false promise of the American Dream.”
Voice Message by Katherine Barrett Swett
Autumn House Press | March 2020
Winner of the 2019 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, selected by Erica Dawson, this debut poetry collection “engages the art of Vermeer to guide and contextualize personal pain, exploring how can art offer motivation, comfort, and release.”
Was Body by Billie R. Tadros
Indolent Books | June 2020
Focused around a single love affair, this new poetry collection contains, in Sandra Beasley’s words, “poems of loss and reckoning; yet these nimble poems also claim life, in tooth and claw, and the possibilities of love.”
Salat by Dujie Tahat
Tupelo Press | November 2020
According to Kaveh Akhbar, the poems in Tahat’s debut collection are “written in a compelling new form of the poet’s own invention that participate, fully — they praise, weep, spit, beg, laugh, choke, sing.”
Open the Dark by Marie Tozier
Red Hen Press | August 2020
According to Elizabeth Bradfield, this debut poetry collection “clearly is emplaced in family, community, geography, history, and the seasonality of animals and plants in Western Alaska.”
The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer by Eric Tran
Autumn House Press | March 2020
In this debut poetry collection, selected by Stacey Waite as the winner of the 2019 Rising Writer Contest, Tran “contends with the aftermath of a close friend’s suicide while he simultaneously explores the complexities of being a gay man of color.”
Full-Length Poetry Collections
Shifting the Silence by Etel Adnan
Nightboat Books | October 2020
Adnan’s latest book is “a heart-rending meditation on aging, grief, and the universal experience of facing down death.”
Shackled Freedom by Dasan Ahanu
Aquarius Press/Willow Books | November 2020
This new poetry collection by Dasan Ahanu explores “black living in the modern American South.”
The Migrant States by Indran Amirthanayagam
Hanging Loose Press | July 2020
The poems in Amirthanayagam’s new poetry collection are, according to Terence Winch, “hellos and goodbyes, obituaries, salutations, and celebrations addressed to his children, his friends and heroes.”
Women of the Big Sky by Liliana Ancalao
The Word Works | March 2020
Translated by Seth Michelson, this collection by a leading Mapuche poet—published in a trilingual edition featuring Spanish, English, and Mapuzungun—is, according to the translator, “teaching us to reclaim our language(s) with tenderness, hope, and precision, and to respect those of others.”
(V.) by Anastacia-Renée
Black Ocean | October 2020
The poems in this collection are “stories of blackness, of queerness, of womanhood, and of all the identities we hold externally and internally that create the tapestry of who we are and who we want to be.”
The Last Orgasm by Nin Andrews
Etruscan Press | September 2020
Andrews’s poetry collection “presents a fresh and often humorous look at the themes of sexuality, womanhood, and beauty by giving the orgasm its own platform to speak for itself.”
This Way to the Grand As-Is: New and Selected Poems by Aaron Anstett
Sagging Meniscus Press | May 2020
This selection from Anstett’s previous six poetry collections, along with several new poems, is “driven by a restless attention and lyrical ear.”
After Rubén by Francisco Aragón
Red Hen Press | May 2020
Aragón’s latest collection “unfolds as a decades-long journey in poems and prose, braiding the personal, the political & the historical, interspersing along the way English-language versions & riffs of a Spanish-language master: Rubén Darío.”
The Rudiments of Poetry: New Poems 2017-2018 by Ivan Arguelles
Sagging Meniscus Press | June 2020
These poems, written in 2017 and 2018, carry “an oceanic breadth and impact unique in American poetry, rich with history, myth, vision, soul and sound.”
The Fish & The Dove by Mary-Kim Arnold
Noemi Press | April 2020
According to Diana Khoi Nguyen, in this poetry collection Arnold’s “lyrical scope sweeps across intersecting terrains, moving through time to capture the history of occupation and legacy war in Korea.”
Stop and Frisk: American Poems by Jabari Asim
Bloomsday Literary | June 2020
In this poetry collection, Asim “ruthlessly interrogates entrenched injustice and its insidious echoes,” and dramatic monologues “expose the dark heart of our nation and call for a reckoning.”
The Galleons by Rick Barot
Milkweed Editions | February 2020
A New York Public Library Best Book of 2020, Barot’s latest poetry collection works to contextualize “the immigrant journey of his Filipino-American family in the larger history and aftermath of colonialism.”
Arrows by Dan Beachy-Quick
Tupelo Press | July 2020
Dan Beachy-Quick’s latest poetry collection is, according to Bruce Bond, “a bag of gems—intricate, chiseled architectures of light—whose smallness belies their generosities of heart and mind.”
AND SO WAX WAS MADE & ALSO HONEY by Amy Beeder
Tupelo Press | December 2020
According to Dana Levin, Beeder’s third poetry collection “offers worlds past and contemporary in diction nearly Elizabethan, in poems as witty and sly as any from that virtuosic literary era.”
Mother Country by Elana Bell
BOA Editions | October 2020
Bell’s poetry collection is, according to Aracelis Girmay, “a breathtaking and mythical account of the complex, everyday, and porous realms of death and birth.”
My Mother’s Red Ford: New and Selected Poems by Roy Bentley
Lost Horse Press | September 2020
This selection of Bentley’s poetry represents six books from 1986 to 2020 and is, according to Grant Clauser, full of “rich storytelling and family histories.”
Birds by William Benton
Nightboat Books | June 2020
This reissue of the classic book of concrete poems by William Benton depicts, according to Peter Matthiessen, “quirky and comical birds.”
13th Balloon by Mark Bibbins
Copper Canyon Press | February 2020
Mark Bibbins’s book-length poem sequence “brings the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ’90s into new light—an account that approximates, with stunning lyricism, ‘what music sounds like / just before the record skips.’”
Sense Violence by Helena Boberg
Black Ocean | April 2020
Translated by Johannes Görannson, this book-length poem “hinges on the dichotomy of a masculine will to power and a call to action for a feminine collective to confront it on all corners—from mythologies to cultural tropes and ingrained hierarchies.”
Scar by Bruce Bond
Etruscan Press | October 10, 2020
In this trilogy of sonnet sequences, Bond “explores trauma and self-alienation and the power of imaginative life to heal.”
Worship the Pig by Gaylord Brewer
Red Hen Press | June 16, 2020
Brewer’s eleventh poetry collection follows the poet “from his Tennessee home to the Inside Passage of Alaska, then detours sharply south in a return to his beloved Costa Rica, then onward finally to the qualified paradise of Brazil’s Ilhabela.”
Let’s Become a Ghost Story by Rick Bursky
BOA Editions | April 2020
Bursky’s latest poetry collection “reaches into the peculiarities of human relationships with emotional accuracy, charm, and a touch of surrealism.”
Took House by Lauren Camp
Tupelo Press | August 2020
Camp’s fifth book of poetry is “a disquieting book about intimate relationships and what is seen and hidden.”
Sonnet(s) by Ulises Carrión
Ugly Duckling Presse | November 2020
First published in 1972, this translated poetry collection is, according to Lucy R. Lippard, “an example of how Ulises Carrión and his peers defined what we used to call the avant-garde.”
OBIT by Victoria Chang
Copper Canyon Press | April 2020
According to Rick Barot, Chang’s new poetry collection “marshals all the resources of poetry against the relentless emotional cascade that’s associated with death,” arriving “at a kind of momentary stalemate against that cascade.”
DMZ Colony by Don Mee Choi
Wave Books | April 2020
This poetry collection, which incorporates poems, prose, photographs, and drawings, “is a tour de force of personal and political reckoning set over eight acts.”
In a January Would by Lonely Christopher
Roof Books | April 2020
This verse series “uses poetry as a durational art” to chronicle the end of a relationship, focusing “the grief of lost love to develop complex emotional themes in a refreshing rococo style.”
The Newest Employee of the Museum of Ruin by Charlie Clark
Four Way Book | September 2020
Clark’s poetry collection “interrogates masculinity, the pastoral, the lasting inheritance of one’s lineage, and the mysterious every day.”
To Make Room for the Sea by Adam Clay
Milkweed Editions | March 2020
Clay’s latest poetry collection is, according to Traci Brimall, a reminder “that no matter the losses we face, we hold on because, like blossoms, our survival depends on it.”
How to Carry Water by Lucille Clifton
BOA Editions | September 2020
Selected and introduced by Aracelis Girmay, this selection of Clifton’s poems “celebrates both familiar and lesser-known works by one of America’s most beloved poets, including 10 newly discovered poems that have never been collected.”
Guillotine by Eduardo C. Corral
Graywolf Press | August 2020
Corral’s second poetry collection “traverses desert landscapes cut through by migrants, the grief of loss, betrayal’s lingering scars, the border itself—great distances in which violence and yearning find roots.”
Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World by Kathryn Cowles
Milkweed Editions | March 2020
The poems in Cowles’s latest collection “both puzzle over and embrace the valley between literature and lived experience.”
Guidebooks for the Dead by Cynthia Cruz
Four Way Books | March 2020
In her sixth poetry collection, Cruz “returns to a familiar literary landscape in which a cast of extraordinary women struggle to create amidst violence, addiction and poverty”—offering “both homage to these women and a manifesto for how to survive in a world that seeks to silence those who resist.”
Until They Catch Fire by Deborah Cummins
Deerbrook Editions | October 2020
According to David Jauss, this poetry collection is “a gallery of stunning mind-paintings, many of them about the heart-rending loss of her brother and mother.”
Don’t Touch the Bones by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach
Lost Horse Press | March 2020
According to Garrett Hongo, Dasbach’s second poetry collection “shows its author hard at work to transform the experience of cultural losses—of lands, language, and legacy—into a poetry of remembrance, homage, and power.”
Cardinal by Tyree Daye
Copper Canyon Press | October 2020
Daye’s second poetry collection “traces the South’s burdened interiors and the interiors of a black male protagonist attempting to navigate his many departures and returns home—a place that could both lovingly rear him and coolly annihilate him.”
Seize by Brian Komei Dempster
Four Way Books | September 2020
Dempster’s follow-up to his poetry collection Topaz explores “the highs and lows of fatherhood” and the speaker’s “struggles to care for his young and ailing child.”
Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz
Graywolf Press | March 2020
In Diaz’s second poetry collection, “the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic,” and “language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality.”
Selected Poems/Rogha Dánta by Máirtín Ó Direáin
Wake Forest University Press | September 2020
Edited and translated by Frank Sewell, “Simple in style, but deep in reflection, these poems beautifully convey the dilemmas of a poet of a minority language and traditional culture in a rapidly developing era.”
Not All Saints by Sean Thomas Dougherty
The Bitter Oleander Press | March 2020
This poetry collection, according to Patty Dickson Pieczka, “leads us through grit-strewn passageways to a realm of insight” and “seeks to find salvation and to balance the divine with the damaged.”
The Mercy of Distance: New and Selected Poems by Harley Elliott
Hanging Loose Press | August 2020
Translated by Saba Riazi and winner of the Loose Translations Award, this poetry collection portrays life in contemporary Tehran.
Katabasis by Lucía Estrada
Eulalia Books | October 2020
Translated from the Spanish by Olivia Lott, Katabasis is the winner of the 2017 Bogotá Poetry Prize and the first full collection of poetry by a Colombian woman to be translated into English.
Exclusions by Noah Falck
Tupelo Press | August 2020
According to Natalie Shapero, the poems in Falck’s collection “are fraught machines that crack and fizzle, that think deeply and resist the low ground, that come from a place of uncanny wildness and heft.”
When Sleep Comes: Shillelagh Songs by Jack Foley
Sagging Meniscus Press | March 2020
According to Iván Argüelles, Foley’s latest poetry collection is a “bouquet of Shillelagh songs [coming] from Foley’s Irish core” and “a dark cinematic chamber peopled with many voices and masks.”
A Sinking Ship Is Still a Ship by Ariel Francisco
Burrow Press | April 2020
Francisco’s second book of poetry, available in English and bilingual editions, “deals with climate change and the absurdities and difficulties of being a millenial Latinx in the Sunshine State.”
The Park by John Freeman
Copper Canyon Press | May 2020
In his second book of poetry, Freeman “explores the inherent contradictions that arise from a place whose purpose is derived purely from what we bring to it.”
[Elegies] by Roberto Carlos Garcia
Flower Song Press | December 2020
In his third poetry collection, Garcia “explores the complexities of modern life and death through his clear, unflinching, embodied perspective.”
Greyhound by Aeon Ginsberg
Noemi Press | October 2020
Ginsberg’s memoir-in-verse explores “the links between movement and how it influences gender identity, perception, and performance, utilizing the bus terminal as a throughway to discuss transition.”
Memories Pretend to Sleep, The Poetry of Julia Gjika by Julia Gjika
Laertes Books | April 2020
According to Petraq Risto, these poems—translated from the Albanian by Ani Gjika
—are “small pocket mirrors, where time and again each person, particularly women, sees their own expansive world with all its natural cracks.”
Sometimes in the Mist Between Sleeping and Waking by Albert Goldbarth
Lost Horse Press | March 2020
Goldbarth’s latest poetry collection is “a community of poems that makes room for other voices than the autobiographical ‘I’: some fantastical, some historical/celebrity, some the neighbors down the block.”
Triptych by Peter Grandois, James McCorkle, and Robert Miltner
Etruscan Press | May 2020
This single collection combines three books by different poets, showing, according to David Baker, “a small part of the singular diversity and range of contemporary American poetry.”
Faces and Frames by Talia An Green
Assure Press Publishing | December 9, 2020
This collection of poems “explores the complexities of eating disorder recovery, crossing the intersections of mental health, feminism, and healing.”
I Live in the Country & other dirty poems by Arielle Greenberg
Four Way Books | March 2020
This poetry collection, following a speaker who has just moved to the country, “is a visceral, erotic celebration of the cornucopia of sexual pleasures to be had in that rural life.”
The Course by Ted Greenwald and Charles Bernstein
Roof Books | April 2020
For this poetry collection, a collaboration between Greenwald and Bernstein, the two poets exchanged lines back and forth via email. Bernstein says, “The experience was of freedom within the constraints we made up intuitively for each poem.”
Persephone in the Late Anthropocene by Megan Grumbling
Acre Books | October 2020
In this poetry collection, Grumbling “vaults an ancient myth into the age of climate change.”
Between Lakes by Jeffrey Harrison
Four Way Books | September 2020
According to Jessica Greenbaum, Harrison’s sixth poetry collection “has the magic elasticity to show the wide elliptical orbit of a lifetime’s relationship between growing son and aging father.”
Collected Ghazals by Jim Harrison
Copper Canyon Press | September 2020
This posthumous collection “gathers all of Harrisons’s published ghazals into a single volume, accompanied by an afterword by poet and noted ghazal writer Denver Butson.”
You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love by Yona Harvey
Four Way Books | September 2020
The poems in Harvey’s collection “follow an unnamed protagonist on her multidimensional, Afro-futuristic journey”; this character’s story “stretches the boundaries normally constraining a black, female body like hers.”
Family Bible by Bill Henderson
The Black Mountain Press | June 2020
Henderson’s new poetry collection describes the author’s love for his parents and his relationship to the family’s Bible while growing up.
The Marathon Poet by Åke Hodell
Ugly Duckling Presse | November 2020
Translated by Fia Backström, this poetry collection from the “poet-artist of the Swedish post-war avant-garde” is an “absurd, satirical, tour-de-force” first published in 1981.
Fablesque by Anna Maria Hong
Tupelo Press | September 2020
Hong’s poetry collection harnesses folktale, fairy tale, and collage to embrace “the great feminist tradition of retelling old tales to imbue them with female subjectivity, speaking to the thoughts, desires, and outrage of contemporary American women.”
You + Me Forever by Valerie Hsiung
Action Books | April 2020
Hsiung’s second poetry collection “performs a multitude of teetering voices through a multitude of tangency points… all while the dark angel of the circus hovers above like a shadow on the page.”
Jump the Clock by Erica Hunt
Nightboat Books | November 2020
The poems in Hunt’s latest collection sit “at the intersection of poetry and emancipatory politics—racial and gender justice, feminist ethics, and participatory democracy.”
Gentlewomen by Megan Kaminski
Noemi Press | October 2020
According to Evie Shockley, in this poetry collection “gentlewomen are bountiful, powerful, and tender, both exceeding man’s hubris and moored in the wreck it has wrought.”
Blood Feather by Karla Kelsey
Tupelo Press | October 2020
In this long poem, three women narrators “articulate a feminist philosophy of art-making and life-making for our fractured world.”
The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon by Jane Kenyon
Graywolf Press | April 2020
The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon “presents the essential work of one of America’s most cherished poets—celebrated for her tenacity, spirit, and grace.”
Beautiful and Useless by Kim Min Jeong
Black Ocean | October 2020
Translated from the Korean by Soeun Seo and Jake Levine, this poetry collection “exposes the often funny and contradictory rifts that appear in the language of everyday circumstance.”
Whale and Vapor by Kim Kyung Ju
Black Ocean | April 2020
In this poetry collection, translated by Jake Levine, the poet “ playfully turns toward the lyric in this work as a way to reconcile himself with the contemporary world by engaging in dialogue with his Korean literary ancestry.”
Blood Moon by Patricia Kirkpatrick
Milkweed Editions | April 2020
Kirkpatrick’s latest poetry collection is “an examination of racism, whiteness, and language within one woman’s life.”
Crushing It by Jennifer L. Knox
Copper Canyon Press | October 2020
The poems in Knox’s latest collection “unearth epiphanies in an unbounded landscape of forms, voices and subjects―from history to true crime to epidemiology―while exploring our tenuous connections and disconnections.”
God’s Green Earth by Noelle Kocot
Wave Books | May 2020
Kocot’s most recent poetry collection is one of “acute astonishment, tracking the intense spiritual and ecstatic elements that pervade the everyday world.”
Breathing Technique by Marija Knežević
Zephyr Press | August 2020
Translated from the Serbian by Sibelan Forrester, this bilingual poetry collection features “poems that often read as narratives, replete with characters, humor, pathos, and unexpected twists.”
Red Stilts by Ted Kooser
Copper Canyon Press | September 2020
Kooser’s new poetry collection “strives to reveal the complex beauties of the ordinary, of the world that’s right under our noses.”
Labor Day by Rebecca Kosick
Golias Books | April 2020
This poetry collection, featuring a long serial poem in fifty-six parts, covers “the natural and economic landscapes of the postindustrial Midwest at the turn of the twenty-first century.”
His Feathers Were Chains by Denise K. Lajimodiere
North Dakota State University Press | September 2020
The third volume in the Contemporary Voices of Indigenous Peoples Series, this poetry collection is an “is overt criticism of settler society… subtle, approachable, and grounded in Ojibwe knowledge and customs.”
firegarden/ jardín de fuego by Gail Langstroth
Get Fresh Publishing | 2020
Written in English and translated into Spanish by the author, this poetry collection is, according to Yona Harvey, “a collection of intimate and ‘between’ spaces through which a woman honors the life she’s lived.”
Like Bismuth When I Enter by Carlos Lara
Nightboat Books | April 2020
The winner of the 2018 Nightboat Poetry Prize, this poetry collection “captures that moment when the universe strikes you with an unmistakable reminder of mystery via the quotidian or the elemental.”
Carbon: Song of Craft by Svetlana Lavochkina
Lost Horse Press | September 2020
Told in polyphonic verse, Carbon is “a thriller, a romance, a CV, a rose of historical winds, a song of crafts, an ontology of Eastern-Ukrainian mind in one, Carbon is told in polyphonic verse—a prayer for the beloved, anguished city, Donetsk.”
Sacrificial Metal by Esther Lee
Conduit Books | March 2020
Lee’s second poetry collection, winner of the Minds on Fire Open Book Prize, is “part documentary poetics, part mourning diary, part textual choreography, and part nautical-inspired elegy.”
The Understudy’s Handbook by Steven Leyva
Washington Writers’ Publishing House | October 2020
Winner of the 2020 Jean Feldman Poetry Prize, this poetry collection “reveals a sensibility forged by a growing awareness of race and class: child’s joy and bafflement, a black Baltimore father’s worry.”
Sunday Sparrows by Song Lin
Zephyr Press | March 2020
Translated from the Chinese by Jami Proctor-Xu, this poetry collection is by “one of China’s most distinguished poets,” whose poems “explore his sojourns in several countries, the natural world outside him, and his own inner landscape.”
Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful by Matthew Lippman
Four Way Books | March 2020
The winner of the Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry, this book of poetry is, according to judge Dorianne Laux, “outrageously American, crass, funny, fast talking, unbound, and yes, sadly beautiful.”
The Candlelight Master by Michael Longley
Wake Forest University Press | December 2020
In his latest poetry collection, Longley “looks back over formative experiences, and over the forms he has given them.”
Wave If You Can See Me by Susan Ludvigson
Red Hen Press | October 2020
In this poetry collection, Ludvigson “explores the illness and death of her husband, along with her own ventures into the visual arts.”
Emporium by Aditi Machado
Nightboat Books | September 2020
Winner of the 2019 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, Machado’s second poetry collection interrogates “our entanglement in the irresistible threads of language, history, and money.”
califia’s daughter by devorah major
Willow Books | 2020
According to Toni Asante Lightfoot, the poems in this collection by San Francisco’s third poet laureate “rule a space between history and sea, relativity and dark matters, wombs and weaponry.”
Things to Do in Hell by Chris Martin
Coffee House Press | October 2020
This poetry collection “asks how we go about living in the tension between protesting lunatic politicians and picking up the kids from school, mourning a dying Earth and making soup, combating white supremacy and loving our dear ones.”
A Pageant for Every Addiction by Thomas Fink and Maya D. Mason
Marsh Hawk Press | May 2020
According to Denise Duhamel, “these poems—about death and dying, inheritance (monetarily and otherwise), and family—put the ‘Pan’ in deadpan.”
After the Body: Poems New and Selected by Cleopatra Mathis
Sarabande Books | July 2020
Mathis’s New and Selected “charts the depredations of an illness that seems intent on removing the body, piece by piece” and “reflects a brilliant career.”
Fugitive Atlas by Khaled Mattawa
Graywolf Press | October 2020
Mattawa’s latest poetry collection is “a sweeping, impassioned account of refugee crises, military occupations, and ecological degradation, an acute and probing journey through a world in upheaval.”
Muddy Matterhorn by Heather McHugh
Copper Canyon Press | May 2020
McHugh’s new book of poetry features “the mix of high and low that is her sensibility’s signature, in matters practical and philosophical, semantic and stylistic, mortal and transitory, amorous and political, hilarious and heartbreaking.”
In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays by Rebecca McClanahan
Red Hen Press | September 2020
In her personal memoir about a move to New York City, McClanahan “tracks the heartbeat of New York, finding in each face she meets the cumulative loss, joy, and stubborn resilience of a city that has claimed her for its own.”
Shrapnel Maps by Philip Metres
Copper Canyon Press | April 2020
Metres’s fourth poetry collection examines “the wounds and reverberations of the Israel/Palestine conflict,” integrating “documentary flyers, vintage postcards, travelogues, cartographic language, and first person testimonies.”
Can You Smell the Rain? by Patricia Cleary Miller
BkMk Press | July 2020
According to James Engell, this poetry collection demonstrates “compassion, conflict, love, faith, music, grief, history, and an unwavering observation of both a wider world and the recesses of the human heart.”
Altar for Broken Things by Deborah A. Miranda
BkMk Press | November 2020
According to Heid E. Erdrich, each poem in this collection is “a ripeness offered—to unknown gods—in fruit, flower, feathers, even flesh ended in rampage.”
Lovemaking in the Footnotes by Mahsa Mohebali
Hanging Loose Press | August 2020
Translated from the Persian by Saba Riazi and winner of the Loose Translations Award, this collection about life in contemporary Tehran is banned in Iran.
Liberamerica by Monchoachi
Ugly Duckling Presse | December 15, 2020
The first translation of Martinican poet Monchoachi’s work into English, this collection “presents a world full of ancestors and other creatures, a liminal space between languages, life and death, male and female, land and water, body and spirit.”
Newsworthy by Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton
Bloomsday | 2020
This poetry collection “wrestles with living in a culture infected by white supremacy where current media is distrusted, cursory, and impossible to escape.”
Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry by John Murillo
Four Way Books | March 2020
Kwame Dawes says Murillo’s second poetry collection, forthcoming in March, demonstrates “a dogged Americanness, a poet determined to assert himself within an America that has sought to deny his song and the songs from the rich African American tradition. And what songs these are! They are songs of irresistible vulnerability, tough truth-telling, cutting wit, and formal command.”
Some Girls Walk Into the Country They Are From by Sawako Nakayasu
Wave Books | October 2020
In this poetry collection, “an unsettling diaspora of ‘girls’ is deployed as poetic form, as reclamation of diminutive pseudo-slur.”
Blood Memory by Gail Newman
Marsh Hawk Press | May 2020
In this poetry collection, Newman revisits the Holocaust; Marge Piercy writes, “To make fresh powerful poems rooted in Shoah is amazing.”
SorrowLand Oracle by Ayodele Nzinga
Nomadic Press | November 2020
This poetry collection is “a compendium of spells, incantations, prayers, and their translations into the event of being Black in modernity.”
Wite Out: Love and Work by Linda Norton
Hanging Loose Press | May 2020
According to John Keene, “Linda Norton breaks fresh ground as an autoobiographical poemoirist”; Norman Fischer calls it “a memoir about a single working mother coping in a rough world she sees all too clearly.”
the she said dialogues: flesh memory by Akilah Oliver
Nightboat Books | November 2020
First published in 1999, this poetry collection “investigates the non-linear synapses between desire, memory, blackness (as both a personal iden- tity and a non-essentialist historical notion), sexuality and language.”
Year of the Dog by Deborah Paredez
BOA Editions | April 2020
Forthcoming in April, Paredez’s second poetry collection “tells her story as a Latina daughter of the Vietnam War,” incorporating historical texts, images, and myths and “never forgetting the outcry and outrage that women’s voices have carried across time.”
The Age of Discovery by Alan Michael Parker
Tupelo Press | September 2020
Parker’s latest poetry collection is, according to Randall Mann, “a devastating take on the ways we stave off panic.”
Let It Be Broke by Ed Pavlić
Four Way Books | March 2020
Pavlić’s most recent book of poetry, Patricia Spears Jones says, is “fragmentary, incantatory, and emotionally dangerous—as he looks at the very broken psychic and physical landscape of America.”
The Miracle Machine by Matthew Pennock
Gival Press | 2020
Winner of the 2020 Gival Press Poetry Award, this poetry collection, according to Timothy Donnelly, “invents its hero’s journey from automaton to autonomy.”
Habitat Threshold by Craig Santos Perez
Omnidawn | April 2020
Perez’s latest poetry collection “explores his ancestry as a native Pacific Islander, the ecological plight of his homeland, and his fears for the future.”
The Horse Who Bears Me Away by Jim Peterson
Red Hen Press | September 2020
Peterson’s latest poetry collection “challenges readers to consciously embrace the dark side of their American psyche and to reach past it to a new way of being at peace with both the known and the unknown, which is called freedom.”
White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia by Kiki Petrosino
Sarabande Books | May 2020
In her fourth poetry collection, Petrosino “turns her gaze to Virginia, where she digs into her genealogical and intellectual roots, while contemplating the knotty legacies of slavery and discrimination in the Upper South.”
Dear Z by Diane Raptosh
Etruscan Press | June 2020
Raptosh’s latest poetry collection gathers “verse-letters to a newly fertilized zygote—not quite a person, nor even an embryo, but rather, the great human maybe.”
Underworld Lit by Srikanth Reddy
Wave Books | August 2020
Reddy’s third poetry collection is “a multiverse quest through various cultures’ realms of the dead.”
The Malevolent Volume by Justin Phillip Reed
Coffee House Press | April 2020
In this poetry collection, Reed “engages darkness as an aesthetic to conjure the revenant animus that lurks beneath the exploited civilities of marginalized people.”
Letters to a Young Brown Girl by Barbara Jane Reyes
BOA Editions | September 2020
Reyes’s latest poetry collection “answers the questions of Filipino American girls and young women of color with bold affirmations of hard-won empathy, fierce intelligence, and a fine-tuned B.S. detector.”
For Now by James Richardson
Copper Canyon Press | June 2020
Richardson’s ninth poetry collection “takes seriously the task of lightening and illuminating our experience” through long and short poems in various classic and contemporary forms.
The Close Chaplet by Laura Riding
Ugly Duckling Presse | July 2020
First published in 1926, Laura Riding’s first book demonstrates her “early desire to depart from ‘the close and well-tilled ground’ of traditional lyric poetry.”
Not Go Away Is My Name by Alberto Ríos
Copper Canyon Press | May 2020
Ríos’s sixteenth book is “a book about past and present, changing and unchanging, letting go and holding on” in which the “borderline between Mexico and the U.S. looms large.”
The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons by Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers
Acre Books | February 2020
Rogers’s second poetry collection “imagines a human mission to Mars, a consequence of Earth’s devastation from climate change and natural disaster.”
Raising King by Joseph Ross
Aquarius Press/Willow Books | September 2020
According to poet and literary activist E. Ethelbert Miller, this poetic biography—which is endorsed by the Martin Luther King, Jr. Estate—“has given us words that capture the thunder and sounds of protest.”
44 Poems for You by Sarah Ruhl
Copper Canyon Press | February 2020
This poetry collection by the award-winning playwright and essayist “answers our collective longing for direct connection in an era of digital anonymity.”
Life in Space by Galina Rymbu
Ugly Duckling Presse | November 2020
Translated by Joan Brooks, the poems in this collection “employ history as a discursive tool to understand the present—stories of revolution, movement in time and space, life, and livelihood emerge.”
The Distant Sound by Eliot Schain
Sixteen Rivers Press | April 2020
This poetry collection is “a prismatic meditation upon what it means to be human, especially when the body and mind seek their own paths to heaven.”
Goodbye, Apostrophe by Peter Schmitt
Regal House Publishing | November 2020
According to Denise Levertov, in his latest collection Schmitt “gives his attention generously to what he observes, to detail as to mass. A real poet.”
Hold Me Tight by Jason Schneiderman
Red Hen Press | May 2020
This book of five poetic sequences “considers life in a new age of anxiety as technology and violence inform new forms of selfhood and apocalypse seems always around the corner.”
The Marble Bed by Grace Schulman
Turtle Point Press | October 2020
In her latest poetry collection, Schulman moves “from mourning to joyful wonder of existence as she meditates on an injured world.”
That Was Now, This Is Then by Vijay Seshadri
Graywolf Press | October 2020
Seshadri’s fourth poetry collection “takes on the planar paradoxes of time and space, destabilizing highly tuned lyrics and elegies with dizzying turns in poems of unrequitable longing, of longing for longing, of longing to be found, of grief.”
Cinderbiter: Celtic Poems by Martin Shaw and Tony Hoagland
Graywolf Press | July 2020
Cinderbiter “collects tales and poems originally composed and performed centuries ago in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, when notions of history and authorship were indistinguishable from the oral traditions of myth and storytelling.”
My Village: Selected Poems 1972–2014 by Wu Sheng
Zephyr Press | June 2020
The poems in this collection, translated from the Chinese by John Balcom, are “rooted in the soil, imbued with an unshakable affinity for the people who till it, sweat over it, and eventually are buried in it.”
Grimoire by Cherene Sherrard
Autumn House Press | September 2020
This poetry collection is “centered on the recovery and preservation of ancestral knowledge and on the exploration of black motherhood.”
Floral Mutter by Ya Shi
Zephyr Press | March 2020
Translated from the Chinese by Nick Admussen, these poems “stand outside conventional structures and forms of Chinese poetry, and find their roots instead in the independent spirit, folk imagination and tough music of the people of Sichuan.”
Itinerario del olvido / Itinerary of Forgetting by Nelson Simón
Skull + Wind Press | 2020
Translated from the Spanish by Lawrence Schimel and Simón’s first publication in English, this sixteen-part series “tackles both homosexuality & politics… while at the same time situating itself within the lyric traditions of both Cuba and the larger Spanish-speaking world.”
Homie by Danez Smith
Graywolf Press | January 2020
Smith’s latest poetry collection “acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive.”
Two Half Faces by Mustafa Stitou
Deep Vellum | November 2020
Translated by David Colmer, Stitou’s English-language debut “spans the career of an adventurous, exalted poet, a master of the Dutch language and a prophet of his time.”
Travelers Leaving for the City by Ed Skoog
Copper Canyon Press | May 2020
Skoog’s latest poetry collection is “a long song of arrivals and departures, centered around the murder of the poet’s grandfather in 1955 in a Pittsburgh hotel.”
A Rising & Other Poems by David Sloan
Deerbrook Editions | April 2020
Sloan’s second poetry collection features, according to Patricia Smith, “deftly-spun poems probing what consoles and disquiets us—inexplicable loss, love that illuminates, the quirks and quandaries of the natural world.”
Multiverse: New and Selected Poems by Tzveta Sofronieva
White Pine Press | June 2020
Edited and with an introduction by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, this poetry collection brings together decades of work by the multilingual Bulgarian poet known for her wide range of styles.
What Is in the Blood by Ellen Stone
Mayapple Press | February 2020
In this poetry memoir about growing up in rural Pennsylvania, Stone—according to Eric McHenry—”transfigures pain and trauma into poems of startling loveliness and immediacy.”
The Essential Ruth Stone by Ruth Stone
Copper Canyon Press | September 2020
Edited by Bianca Stone, this selection of Ruth Stone’s poetry “bears witness to a vivid fifty-year career of one of America’s most influential and pioneering poets.”
Fables, Foibles & Other ‘Merican Sins by Amoja Sumler
Aquarius Press/Willow Books | September 2020
According to Matt Sedillo, this poetry collection is “revolutionary, intersectional, internationalist, insurrectionary and above all unapologetically opposed to any and all threats to Black life.”
Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved by Adeeba Talukder
Tupelo Press | March 2020
Winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, this poetry collection “sets out to recreate the universe of Urdu and Persian poetic tradition, its tropes both lenses and mirrors for the speaker’s reality.”
Back to the Wine Jug: A Comic Novel in Verse by Joe Taylor
Sagging Meniscus Press | June 2020
In his new novel in verse, Taylor explores the convergence of underworld and reality when “Diogenes, still toting his lantern in search of one honest (wo)man, is appointed by Lord Hades himself to teleport up to lovely Birmingham, Alabama.”
Ova Completa by Susana Thénon
Ugly Duckling Presse | December 15, 2020
Translated by Rebekah Smith, Thénon’s Ova Completa is “a collection full of stylistic innovation, language play, dark humor, and socio-political insight.”
Repetition Nineteen by Mónica de la Torre
Nightboat Books | March 2020
“Based on slippages between languages and irreverent approaches to translation,” the poems in Repetition Nineteen “riff on creative misunderstanding in response to the prevailing political discourse.”
My Name Is Immigrant by Wang Ping
Hanging Loose Press | May 2020
Wang’s latest poetry collection is a “song for the plight and pride of immigrants around the globe.”
The Way A Line Hallucinates Its Own Linearity by Danielle Vogel
Red Hen Press | June 2020
Vogel’s new poetry collection exists “in a fragmented, diaphanous state, glowing in the space between the poem and essay.”
Mountain and Flower: Selected Poems by Mykola Vorobiov
Lost Horse Press | September 2020
Translated from the Ukrainian by Maria G. Rewakowicz, this poetry collection spans more than fifty years of Vorobiov’s poems, which “hover around the issues of existence on all possible levels—plants, animals, humans, inanimate objects, and the universe.”
Little Hill by Alli Warren
City Lights Publishers | March 2020
Warren’s third full-length poetry collection “comprises seven long poems written with propulsive prosody in a daybook fashion, examining our present, politically charged moment.
Caw by Michael Waters
BOA Editions | September 2020
Waters’s new poetry collection features “passionate poems about sin, obsession, and mortality.”
Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems by Patricia Jabbeh Wesley
Autumn House Press | March 2020
Kwame Dawes describes Wesley’s New and Selected as “a remarkable selection of some of the most urgent poems to emerge out of the wars of Liberia. Here is work of incredible joy, deepest lamentation, and necessary hope. It is a sure testament.”
Scenes of Life at the Capital by Philip Whalen
Wave Books | May 2020
Written from 1969 to 1971 and edited by David Brazil, this posthumous poem is “a lasting testament to the ambition, range, powers, and devotion of this crucially important American voice.”
The Wendys by Allison Benis White
Four Way Books | March 2020
White’s fourth book of poetry delves into “five women named Wendy as a way into the complex grief that still lingers after the death of a sixth Wendy, the author’s long-absent mother.”
Iridescent Guest by Sarah White
Deerbrook Editions | July 2020
According to Karen Garthe, this poetry collection “pays homage to the art gods, the kitchen gods, and to the children.“
Selected Poems by Oksana Zabuzhko
Arrowsmith Press | 2020
This selection of poems from a celebrated Ukrainian poet “stands alongside the finest and most important work to emerge from Europe in the last half century.”
A New Orthography by Serhiy Zhadan
Lost Horse Press | March 2020
Translated from the Ukranian by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin, this poetry collection “focuses on daily life during the Russo-Ukrainian war, rendering intimate portraits of the country’s residents as they respond to crisis.”
Poetry Chapbooks
New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set (Saba)
Akashic Books | July 2020
An African Poetry Book Fund project edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani, this collection of chapbooks features Michelle Angwenyi, Afua Ansong, Adedayo Agarau, Fatima Camara, Sadia Hassan, Safia Jama, Henneh Kyereh Kwaku, Nadra Mabrouk, Nkateko Masinga, Jamila Osman, and Tryphena Yeboah.
You Should Feel Bad by Laura Cresté
Poetry Society of America | 2020
The poems in this chapbook, selected by Stephanie Burt for the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, “hold wisdom, implied or explicit, reassuring or unsettling, nostalgic or forward-looking or scary.”
Through the New Body by Isabella DeSendi
Poetry Society of America | 2020
Selected by Evie Shockley for the 30 & Under Chapbook Fellowship, this chapbook places us “in the world in the body of a girl-becoming-woman, an American with Cuban matrilineage, a sufferer who causes suffering.”
Everything Begins Somewhere by Amanda Doster
Slate Roof Press | July 2020
Winner of the Slate Roof Press Chapbook Award, Everything Begins Somewhere “harnesses a deceptively simple narrative with common events to reveal a luminous generosity of spirit.”
Village of Knives by Helli Fang
Driftwood Press | February 2020
According to Chen Chen, these poems—written by Fang, an undergraduate at Bard College—“listen to immigrant life and dream, to gendered expectation and subversion, to desire, to the body’s surging, briny rhythms.”
Other Small Histories by Darien Hsu Gee
Poetry Society of America | 2020
Selected by Patricia Smith for the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, this is “a lush and lyrical chronicle of a walking back, a mesmerizing merge of research, vision and invention.”
God Is a Bitch Too by María Paz Guerrero
Ugly Duckling Presse | December 15, 2020
Translated by Camilo Roldán, this poetry chapbook is, according to Alberto Bejarano, “a poetry of delirium, of dark alleyways, of scorched lizards, of lab rats in Paris.”
Night Animals by Yusef Komunyakaa
Sarabande Books | June 2020
The poems in Komunyakaa’s new chapbook “climb so deeply into the being of various beasts, from cricket to leopard to snowy owl, that we read them with an uncanny shiver of recognition.”
Living with Wolves by Anne Haven McDonnell
Split Rock Press | October 2020
The poems in this chapbook are inspired “by interviews, encounters, and experiences that inhabit different perspectives of the complex collisions when wolves and people co-exist.”
Circle / Square by T. J. McLemore
Autumn House Press | September 2020
In this chapbook, McLemore “renders the language of physics and theoretical science into poetry to illuminate the mysterious ways we experience reality.”
Hearing/s by Tyler Morse
No, Dear | August 2020
Published through the Archive Series in collaboration with Small Anchor Press, this debut chapbook is, according to Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, “a playful record of memory’s cosmic entanglement with future.”
Hexenhaus by Sarah Nichols
Milk and Cake Press | November 2020
This new chapbook “mines horror films, witchcraft, the mother/daughter relationship, and the death of the mother.”
The Last Glacier at the End of the World by Vivian Faith Prescott
Split Rock Press | October 2020
The poems in Prescott’s chapbook “act as glacial bandings marking time and place, imagining a near future in the Anthropocene.”
Suit of Cups by Roi
No, Dear | August 2020
According to t’ai freedom ford, this debut chapbook, published through the Archive Series in collaboration with Small Anchor Press, is “a solemn meditation on a humble vessel that contains all of who we are—our blood, spit, tears, and sweat.”
Here I Am O My God by Dujie Tahat
Poetry Society of America | 2020
Selected by Fady Joudah for the 30 & Under Chapbook Fellowship, this is “a spiritual text laden with swerves, gravity, and tragicomedy. It’s an echo of the Abrahamic contract with the divine concerning the eternally elemental we each carry within.”
Slick Like Dark by Meg Wade
Tupelo Press | April 2020
Winner of the Snowbound Series Chapbook Award, Wade’s first chapbook is “fueled by questions of faith and desire, and steeped in the Southern Gothic.”
There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife by JinJin Xu
Radix Media | November 2020
The winner of the Own Voices Chapbook Prize, this poetry chapbook is “an elegiac illumination of personal and political histories misremembered and censored.”
