The Year the City Emptied
by Daisy Fried

Fried follows Poems and Advice with a collection that assembles translations and loose interpretations of poems by the 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire. In the collection’s foreword, Fried admits: “I don’t know French well and I don’t like Baudelaire much—he oozes with decay, pestilence, death, and adjectives.” Reworking his poems “without the grave difficulty of confronting a completely blank page” helped Fried make sense of political unrest, the illness and death of a spouse, and the global lockdown of 2020. 

Winter recipes from the collective
by 1943- Glück, Louise

The 2020 Nobel Prize winner’s haunting new book is the voice containing all of our lifetimes—“all the worlds, each more beautiful than the last.”

Breath better spent : living Black girlhood
by DaMaris B. Hill

In Breath Better Spent, DaMaris B. Hill hoists her childhood self onto her shoulders, together taking in the landscape of Black girlhood in America. At a time when Black girls across the country are increasingly vulnerable to unjust violence, unwarranted incarceration, and unnoticed disappearance, Hill chooses to celebrate and protect the girl she carries, using the narrative-in-verse style of her acclaimed book A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing to revisit her youth. 

A hundred lovers : poems
by Richie Hofmann

A gay man's erotic journal in poems, from a young and rising star in the poetry scene, author of the highly acclaimed debut collection Second Empire. A Hundred Lovers is a catalogue of encounters, sublime, steamy, and frank. Inspired by French autofiction, the poems feel both sharp and diaristic; their lyrical, intimate world brings us everyday scenes imbued with sex. 

Stepmotherland
by Darrel Alejandro Holnes

Darrel Alejandro Holnes's first full-length collection, is filled with poems that chronicle and question identity, family, and allegiance. This Central American love song is in constant motion as it takes us on a lyrical and sometimes narrative journey from Panamá to the USA and beyond. The driving force behind Holnes's work is a pursuit for a new home, and as he searches, he takes the reader on a wild ride through the most pressing political issues of our time and the most intimate and transformative personal experiences of his life. Exploring a complex range of emotions, this collection is a celebration of the discovery of America, the discovery of self, and the ways they may be one and the same.

A thousand times you lose your treasure
by Hoa Nguyen

Hoa Nguyen’s latest collection is a poetic meditation on historical, personal, and cultural pressures pre- and post-“Fall-of-Saigon” and comprises a verse biography on her mother, Diep Anh Nguyen, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-woman Vietnamese circus troupe. Multilayered, plaintive, and provocative, the poems in A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure are alive with archive and inhabit histories. In turns lyrical and unsettling, her poetry sings of language and loss; dialogues with time, myth and place; and communes with past and future ghosts.

Then the war : and selected poems, 2007-2020
by Carl Phillips

Then the War sees Carl Phillips turn his sharp and subtle gaze inward, charting the changing landscapes of his life and work in a collection of new and selected poems.

Path of totality : poems
by Niina Pollari

This collection is about the sudden eviscerating loss of a child, the hope that precedes this crisis, and the suffering that follows. Spare, plain, sometimes startling in their snatches of humor, Pollari's poems careen into the "tilted reality" of grief. This is poetry dredged from shock and rage, then dissected with pointillistic precision. A shattering experience rendered with candor and immediacy, Path of Totality is a book "for anyone who ever expected anything."

Zoom rooms : poems
by Mary Jo Salter

Both timeless and timely, and directing us to moments we may otherwise miss, this brilliant collection of poems considers the strangeness of our recent existence, together with the enduring constants in our lives.

Bless the daughter raised by a voice in her head : poems
by Warsan Shire

A collection of poems from the award-winning Somali British poet who served as the first Young Poet Laureate of London that depict a young girl’s stumbling journey into womanhood as she navigates the experiences of refugees and immigrants. 

Time Is a Mother
by Ocean Vuong

In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother's death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with personal loss, the meaning of family, and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, Vuong's poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.