Flies

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

Ocean Vuong

The most beautiful part of your body
is where it's headed, & remember
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.

To read Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds is to be dazzled by gorgeous lyricism. I picked this up as part of my exploration of contemporary poetry I have...

Author

Jericho Brown

In The New Testament, Jericho Brown continues his tender examination of race, masculinity, and sexuality. These poems bear witness to survival in the face of brutality, while also elegizing two brothers haunted by shame, two lovers hounded by death, and an America wounded by war and numbered by religion....

Author

Natalie Díaz

"I write hungry sentences," Natalie Diaz once explained in an interview, "because they want more and more lyricism and imagery to satisfy them." This debut collection is a fast-paced tour of Mojave life and family narrative: A sister fights for or against a brother on meth, and everyone from Antigone,...

Author	Danez Smith
ISBN	1555977855

Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten...

Author	Patrick Phillips
ISBN	0385353758

The poet Patrick Phillips brings us a stunning third collection that is at its core a son’s lament for his father. This book of elegies takes us from the luminous world of childhood to the fluorescent glare of operating rooms and recovery wards, and into the twilight lives of those who must go on. In one...

Author

Danez Smith

The next time someone tells you spoken word poets can’t make poems come to life on the page, send them to Danez Smith’s [insert] boy, a remarkable debut collection that puts that tired notion to bed once and for all. In these poems, Smith opens the reader to a world of desire, longing, and deep mourning...

Author	Maggie Nelson
ISBN	1933368802

Maggie Nelson's fourth collection of poems combines a wanderer's attention to landscape with a deeply personal exploration of desire, heartbreak, resilience, accident, and flux. Something Bright, Then Holes explores the problem of losing then recovering sight and insight -- of feeling lost,...

Author	Max Ritvo
ISBN	1571314903

Published shortly after his death in August 2016 at age 25, Max Ritvo's collection of poetry is reverent and profane, entertaining and bruising. When Max Ritvo was diagnosed with cancer at age sixteen, he became the chief war correspondent for his body.

The poems of Four Reincarnations are...

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	Matthew Dickman
ISBN	0393081192

From a dazzling, award-winning young poet, a collection that paints life as a celebration in the dark.

At the center of Mayakovsky’s Revolver is the suicide of Matthew Dickman’s older brother. “Known for poems of universality of feeling, expressive lyricism of reflection, and heartrending...

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....