Books

Dragstripping, Jan Beatty’s seventh collection of poems, takes readers to the literal dragstrip, the metaphorical dragstrip of the body, and the strip club, where the ecstatic is rescripted and where women disappear and reappear in the crosscut of gender. Transgressing into and out of poetic form, Beatty writes the ...

Winner, 2024 Cave Canem Poetry Prize | Gold Medal, 2024 Florida Book Awards in Poetry 2000 Blacks probes the complexity of economic and politically motivated migration from Africa, which has been referred to as “African Brain Drain.” In the first sequence of poems, Ajibola Tolase explores Africa’s history and encounters with the Western ...

Winner, 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize | Finalist, 2025 California Book Awards | Finalist, 2025 Norma Faber First Book Award Querida offers a place-based lyrical meditation on the poet’s immigrant parents, collective memory, language, and family in the San Fernando region of Los Angeles, California. Through a constellation of interweaving persona poems, confessional ...

Winner, 2023 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry | Co-winner, Anchorage Daily News Favorite Books of 2024 Landscape and language drive the poems in Absent Here, which explore loss, community, the changing environment, and whiteness of skin and scenery against the backdrop of the Alaskan North Slope of the author’s youth. More than ...

Co-winner, The New York Times Best Poetry Books of 2024 Drawing from all six of his collections, The Selected Shepherd offers a new retrospective on the work of an important and sometimes controversial Black, gay poet. Although well known for his erotic poems about white men, Shepherd also wrote consistently about ...

Longlist Finalist, 2023 Julie Suk Award OCTOBERS traces the four great tumults of the author’s life, all of which originated in that jagged month of different years: The US invasion and occupation of her native Afghanistan, the death of her father, the sudden end of a love, and the birth ...

That Ship Has Sailed synthesizes the serious and comic to address sex, love, loss, death, belief, the afterlife, and the past. The poems are honest and direct without sacrificing “the uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts” that Keats singles out in his notion of “negative capability,” alluded to in the title poem. ...

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 self-interrogation about his life, about losses and acceptances. ...

In Evidence is a collection of poems in the voices of allied troops who liberated Nazi concentration camps in Europe in the sprong of 1945. Barbara Helfgott Hyett heard poems in the eyewitness testimony of United States soldiers. She has shaped the words of thirty speakers into a songle narrative, a ...

• Winner of the 1987 William Carlos Williams Award presented by the Poetry Society of America With The Imaginary Lover, Alicia Suskin Ostriker takes her place among the most striking and original poets whose work is informed by feminist consciousness. Her characterization of the best poetry by women, in the New ...

Cold Comfort is a book of poems written out of deep affection and concern for the world in a dangerous time. An urbane stylist, Anderson characteristically focuses on rural and small-town America, where the events of personal history intersect those of the larger world.

Winner of the 1987 American Book Award The Essential Etheridge Knight is a selection of the best work by one of the country’s most prominent and liveliest poets. It brings together poems from Knight’s previously published books and a section of new poems.

Night Watch on the Chesapeake is Peter Meinke’s third collection of poetry. The poems traverse a wide landscape of topics from playing baseball, the death of a friend, divorce, and even poetry itself.

Kate Daniels’s central myth is that of Niobe, the mother in Greek mythology whose children were killed by the gods because of her great pride in them. She taps the lasting power of the ancient story in poems about personal loss and political insanity. Though the subjects are ...

Translated by Darwin Flakoll In Woman of the River one of the major voices in Latin American poetry confronts the political realities of contemporary Central America. Many of the poems are political, direct, and condemnatory of the United States’ presence in Latin America, and they are rich, human documents rooted ...