Duende

Author	Ilya Kaminsky
ISBN	1555978312

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry
Finalist for the T. S. Eliot Prize
Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection

Ilya Kaminsky’s astonishing parable in poems asks us, What is silence?

Deaf Republic opens in an occupied country in a time of political...

Author	Jericho Brown
ISBN	1556594860

Jericho Brown’s daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation?...

Author	Solmaz Sharif
ISBN	1555977448

*Finalist for the 2017 PEN Open Book Award*
*Finalist for the 2016 National Book Award*Solmaz Sharif's astonishing first book, Look, asks us to see the ongoing costs of war as the unbearable loss of human lives and also the insidious abuses against our everyday speech. In this virtuosic array of...

Author	Kaveh Akbar
ISBN	1938584678

"The struggle from late youth on, with and without God, agony, narcotics and love is a torment rarely recorded with such sustained eloquence and passion as you will find in this collection." —Fanny Howe

This highly-anticipated debut boldly confronts addiction and courses the strenuous...

Author	Camonghne Felix
ISBN	1608466116

2019 National Book Award Longlist

A poetic exploration of trauma, healing, and survival from award-winning poet Camonghne Felix.

"With Build Yourself a Boat, Camonghne Felix heralds a thrillingly new form of storytelling, as much investigation as it is song, as broken as it is...

Author	Joy Harjo
ISBN	1324003863

In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory, which is now part of Oklahoma. Two hundred years later, Joy Harjo returns to her family’s lands and opens a dialogue with history. In An American Sunrise, Harjo finds...

Author	Diana Khoi Nguyen
ISBN	1632430525

Ghost Of is a mourning song, not an exorcism or un-haunting of that which haunts, but attuned attention, unidirectional reaching across time, space, and distance to reach loved ones, ancestors, and strangers. By working with, in, and around the photographs that her brother left behind (from which...

Author	Mai Der Vang
ISBN	1555977707

The 2016 winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, selected by Carolyn Forché

When I make the crossing, you must not be taken no matter what
the current gives. When we reach the camp,

there will be thousands like us.
If I make it onto the plane, you must...

Author	Jenny Xie
ISBN	1555978029

Jenny Xie’s award-winning debut, Eye Level, takes us far and near, to Phnom Penh, Corfu, Hanoi, New York, and elsewhere, as we travel closer and closer to the acutely felt solitude that centers this searching, moving collection. Animated by a restless inner questioning, these poems meditate on...

Author	Forrest Gander
ISBN	0811226050

WINNER OF THE 2019 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2018 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
Publishers Weekly Best Poetry Book of 2018

Drawing from his experience as a translator, Forrest Gander includes in the first, powerfully elegiac section a version of a poem by the Spanish mystical...

Author	Terrance Hayes
ISBN	0143133187

In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country's past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares....

Author	Ada Limon
ISBN	1571315128

From National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Ada Limón comes The Carrying—her most powerful collection yet.

Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the...

Author	Justin Phillip Reed
ISBN	1566895146

Intricate, Intimate, Difficult, and Confrontational Poems That Push at the Boundaries of Selfhood, Skin, Culture, Sexuality, and Blood.

Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity...

Author

Hieu Minh Nguyen

My review, as well as my other thoughts on reading, also can be found on my blog.

Over the course of a few dozen poems, Nguyen confronts his relationship to space, memory, and pain as a queer Vietnamese-American man. The collection consists of a mix of long and short pieces, addressing everything...