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The New Testament

10 best books like The New Testament (Jericho Brown): Deaf Republic: Poems, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Magical Negro, When My Brother Was an Aztec, Don't Call Us Dead, Wade in the Water: Poems, Oceanic, [insert] boy, Like a Beggar

Deaf Republic: Poems
AuthorIlya Kaminsky
ISBN1555978312
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...
When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities
AuthorChen Chen
ISBN1942683332
In this ferocious and tender debut, Chen Chen investigates inherited forms of love and family—the strained relationship between a mother and son, the cost of necessary goodbyes—all from Asian American, immigrant, and queer perspectives. Holding all accountable, this collection fully embraces...
Night Sky with Exit Wounds
AuthorOcean 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...
Magical Negro
AuthorMorgan Parker
ISBN1947793187
Magical Negro is an archive of Black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. They...
When My Brother Was an Aztec
AuthorNatalie 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,...
Don't Call Us Dead
AuthorDanez Smith
ISBN1555977855
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...
Wade in the Water: Poems
AuthorTracy K. Smith
Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize
Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection

The extraordinary new poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United States Even the men in black armor, the ones
Jangling handcuffs and keys, what elseAre they...
Oceanic
AuthorAimee Nezhukumatathil
ISBN1556595263
In her fourth collection, Aimee Nezhukumatathil hums a bright blue note—a sensuous love song to the Earth and its inhabitants. Oceanic is both a title and an ethos of radical inclusion, inviting in the grief of an elephant, the icy eyes of a scallop, “the ribs / of a silver silo,” and the bright flash...
[insert] boy
AuthorDanez 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...
Like a Beggar
AuthorEllen Bass
Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist, 2015

Featured on NPR's The Writer's Almanac

“Ellen Bass’s new poetry collection, Like a Beggar, pulses with sex, humor and compassion.”—The New York Times

“Bass tries to convey everyday wonder on contemporary experiences...
Eye Level: Poems
AuthorJenny Xie
ISBN1555978029
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...
Black Movie
AuthorDanez Smith
Poetry. African American Studies. These harrowing poems make montage, make mirrors, make elegiac biopic, make "a dope ass trailer with a hundred black children/ smiling into the camera & the last shot is the wide mouth of a pistol." That's no spoiler alert, but rather, Smith's way saying &...
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
AuthorTerrance Hayes
ISBN0143133187
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....
The Carrying: Poems
AuthorAda Limon
ISBN1571315128
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...
Not Here
AuthorHieu 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...
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