Books

Desire Path explores how everyday life, memory, history, and politics work against and toward each other across communities and national boundaries. This collection pleats numerous lives: a boy sent to the shops, a neighborhood thief, widows, gravediggers, debtors, and inheritors. There are multifoliate Englishes and silences, glimpses of music by ...

Winner of the 2025 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry retrovirology oscillates between Queer childhood erasure and the AIDS epidemic, pulling from the ACT UP oral history project, informal interviews with survivors, and AIDS historians Sarah Schulman and David France. While some poems elegize key figures of AIDS history such as Larry ...

The Decadent Movement is a book-length suite of poems that spins backward in time through the early days of parenthood and the preceding nine months of pregnancy. Beginning a year after childbirth in the harried throes of marriage and parenting, the collection proceeds toward its finale “Minus Time,” which marvels ...

Equal parts sad, sexy, and searching, Abider opens with the central lament/brag of its lover-speaker, that she can never truly leave anything—or anyone—behind. The origins of this abidingness are traced in odes and elegies for a rural girlhood beset with jeopardy and scarcity and neglect. But it ...

In her first collection in a decade, Beckian Fritz Goldberg returns with The Blue Eye of Earth, her tour de force of luminous, meditative poems that measure a secret distance between person and cosmos, memory and desire, beauty and grief. Whether standing at her neighbor’s fence of desert oleander, ...

Throughout Capricorn in Flux, Glaser’s eleventh book of poetry, we hear that same voice, vivid and precise and crackling with verve and wit. To borrow a line from Robert Lowell, he is still “free-lancing out along the razor’s edge.” But this time, the sprightliness is shadowed by a ...

Translated by Nathan Fields The selected poetry of Milan Děžinský, translated by Nathan Fields, including many poems previously not published in English by the celebrated Czech poet.

Included in LitHub’s Most Anticipated Poetry of 2026 The poems in with snow pouring southward past the window turn with and for relatives and beloveds across seas and oceans, continents and nations, languages and histories. In this collection, public and personal archives work with literary translations across several dialects of ...

Antediluvian engages with themes of the ecstatic, desire, mental illness, and spirituality. Written in part during the COVID-19 pandemic, the book’s speaker calls on an intertextual constellation of artists as they attempt to wade through agoraphobia, parse out their relationship with God, and navigate falling in love. Overall, the ...

Fire is both destructive and regenerative; at times vengeful, at others cleansing. The first mention of fire in Genesis comes after Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden. In Greek mythology, Prometheus steals fire from the gods for humankind. Fire becomes metaphorically layered—as knowledge, as desire, as anger. The ...

Included in LitHub’s Most Anticipated Poetry of 2026Steeplechase explores multiple landscapes, including Mississippi and its many church steeples; countries known and unknown; cities and inhabitants both aspirational and lost. Its voice is humorous, bewildered, disillusioned, hopeful. The book’s temporal setting is the two years of extra life granted ...

Included in LitHub’s Most Anticipated Poetry of 2026 Since the appearance of his first book in 1972, Larry Levis has been one of the most original and most highly praised of contemporary American poets. In Winter Stars, a book of love poems and elegies, Levis engages in a process of relentless ...

The world is burning with fire and hatred, but at the same time it is filled with love and incredible beauty. The poems in Burn tango with why the world is so beautiful and terrible at the same time. Hamby asserts that everything is a mess—how do we walk ...

Finalist, 2026 PEN Open Book AwardFinalist for the 2026 Nossrat Yassini Poetry PrizeFeatured in Poetry Daily‘s Best Poems of 2025Winner, 2024 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry Part elegy, part poetry of witness, and part poetry of exile, No Rhododendron is a lament to the poet-speaker’s father and fatherland and a grief-wrought ...

A New Yorker Best Book of 2025Flop Era reckons with the complications of being human, and therefore, with the consequences of being fundamentally flawed. It contends with failed potential and the certain uncertainty of the future, while interrogating the past for clues that might explain why, as the speaker bemoans, “...