Collection: Poetry

From the author of The Arsonists' City and The Twenty-Ninth Year, a new collection of poetry that traces the fragmentation of memory, archive, and family-past, present, future-in the face of displacement and war.

A diaspora of memories runs through this poetry collection--a multiplicity of voices, bodies, and houses hold archival material for one another, tracing paths between Brooklyn, Beirut, and Jerusalem. Boundaries and borders blur between space and time and poetic form--small banal moments of daily life live within geopolitical brutalities and, vice versa, the desire for stability lives in familiarity with displacement.

These poems take stock of who and what can displace you from home and from your own body--and, conversely, the kind of resilience, tenacity, and love that can bring you back into yourself and into the context of past and future generations. Hala Alyan asks, What stops you from transforming into someone or something else? When you have lived a life in flux, how do you find rest?

Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry.

This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project--including Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, and Layli Long Soldier, among others--to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands. The chosen poems reflect on the theme of place and displacement and circle the touchpoints of visibility, persistence, resistance, and acknowledgment. Each poem showcases, as Joy Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, "that heritage is a living thing, and there can be no heritage without land and the relationships that outline our kinship." In this country, poetry is rooted in the more than five hundred living indigenous nations. Living Nations, Living Words is a representative offering.

2021 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST

Finalist for the Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature

Editors Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel offer We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics as an experiment into how far literature, written from an identitarian standpoint, can go as a fellow traveler with social movements and revolutionary demands. Writing in dialogue with emancipatory political movements, the intergenerational writers assembled here imagine an altogether overturned world in poems that pursue the particular and multiple trans relationships to desire, embodiment, housing, sex, ecology, history, pop culture, and the working day.

This award-winning debut interrogates the fragile, inherited ways of approaching love and family from Asian American, immigrant, and queer perspectives.

"Blood Orange" is a highly emotional, important and timely poetry collection by Mx. Yaffa (They/She), a trans Muslim displaced Indigenous Palestinian. Their writings probe the yearning for home, belonging, mental health, queerness, transness, and other dimensions of marginalization while nurturing dreams of utopia against the background of ongoing displacement and genocide of indigenous Palestinians.

The collection came quickly and relentlessly, drawn from the depths of the author's soul during a movement for a free Palestine and aligned with a solar eclipse. It beckons readers to re-evaluate what is perceived as immutable and to imagine pathways toward Utopia.

"Blood Orange"- the title an homage to the Yaffa Oranges (which were appropriated first by the British and subsequently by Israel) refers to the author themselves, their homeland and blood spilled in the name of settler colonialism.

This highly charged and cathartic body of work confronts the anguish and loss inflicted by genocide but also embraces a vision of a world free of it. The poems within "Blood Orange" were a means of working through and processing the grief caused by recent events and serve as an act of protest and defiance against settler colonialism as a whole.

The first major literary anthology for queer poets of color in the United States In 2014, Christopher Soto and Lambda Literary Foundation founded the online journal Nepantla, with the mission to nurture, celebrate, and preserve diversity within the queer poetry community, including contributions as diverse in style and form, as the experiences of QPOC in the United States. Now, Nepantla will appear for the first time in print as a survey of poetry by queer poets of color throughout U.S. history, including literary legends such as Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, June Jordan, Ai, and Pat Parker alongside contemporaries such as Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Robin Coste Lewis, Joy Harjo, Richard Blanco, Erika L. Sánchez, Jericho Brown, Carl Phillips, Tommy Pico, Eduardo C. Corral, Chen Chen, and more!

A rousing, beautifully observed, and tender-hearted debut poetry collection about identity, culture, home, and belonging--for fans of Jasmine Mans and Fatimah Asghar

"We, children of plátanos, always gotta learn to play in everyone else's backyard and somehow feel at home."

Poet and musician Melania Luisa Marte opens PLAINTAINS AND OUR BECOMING by pointing out that Afro-Latina is not a word recognized by the dictionary. But the dictionary is far from a record of the truth. What does it mean, then, to tend to your own words and your own record--to build upon the legacies of your ancestors?

In this imaginative, blistering poetry collection, Marte looks at the identities and histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti to celebrate and center the Black diasporic experience. Through the exploration of themes like self-love, nationalism, displacement, generational trauma, and ancestral knowledge, this collection uproots stereotypes while creating a new joyous vision for Black identity and personhood.

Moving from New York to Texas to the Dominican Republic and to Haiti, this collection looks at the legacies of colonialism and racism but never shies away from highlighting the beauty--and joy--that comes from celebrating who you are and where you come from. PLANTAINS AND OUR BECOMING is "a full-throated war cry; both a request for anointment and the responding bendición" (Elizabeth Acevedo).

In the powerful follow up to her critically acclaimed debut collection, poet and activist Fariha Róisín is writing, praying, clawing, and scratching her way out of the grips of generational trauma on the search for the freedom her mother never received and the kindness she couldn't give.

This collection of poetry asks a kaleidoscope of questions: Who is my family? My father? How do I love a mother no longer here? Can I see myself? What does it mean to be Bangladeshi? What is a border? Innately hopeful and resolutely strong, Fariha's voice turns to the optimism and beauty inherent in rebuilding the self, and in turn, the world that the self moves through. Ubiquitous to the human experience, Survival Takes a Wild Imagination is an illuminating breath of fresh air from a powerful poetic voice.

From the brilliantly talented National Poetry Series and James Laughlin Award winner comes a third collection of poems that uses the humble pig as a lens to explore the body, faith, desire, and power.

This imaginative and singular poetry collection interrogates the broadest ideas surrounding the humble pig--farm animal, men/masculinity, police and state violence, desire, queerness, global food systems, religion/Judaism and law--to reimagine various chaotic histories of the body, faith, ecology, desire, hygiene, and power.

Sam Sax draws on autobiography and history to create poems that explore topics ranging from drag queens and Miss Piggy to pig farming and hog lagoons. Collectively, these poems, borne of Sax's obsession, offer a varied picture of what it means to be a human being. Delivered in a variety of forms, infused with humor, grace, sadness, and anger, Pig is a wholly unique collection from a virtuosic and original poet.

From the wild imagination of Tyler Gaca, also known as TikTok's Ghosthoney, comes a beautiful compendium of poems, images, personal stories, and vignettes that explore magic, queerness, Tyler's unique story, and the enchantment and comfort to be found in the weird, the dark, and the different.

In this raw yet enchanting collection of poems, essays, photographs, and artworks, Tyler Gaca dreamily navigates themes of magic and queerness, offering readers an intimate look inside his mind and his worlds, real and imagined.

The writings in Gentle Chaos reflect on growing up queer and in love with magic, discovering yourself and your place in the world, and daring to seek out love and hope. The artworks are dedicated to salvaged antique photographs, haircuts, dead moths, the creatures we dream up, and much more. The result is a whimsical, vulnerable, and transporting journey into the gentle chaos within us all.

"An astounding debut."
--Adrienne Raphel, The New York Times Book Review

A dazzling love story in poems about one woman's coming-out, coming-of-age, and coming undone
A woman lives an ordinary life in Brooklyn. She has a boyfriend. They share a cat. She writes poems in the prevailing style. She also has dreams: of being seduced by a throng of older women, of kissing a friend in a dorm-room closet. But the dreams are private, not real.

One night, she meets another woman at a bar, and an escape hatch swings open in the floor of her life. She falls into a consuming affair--into queerness, polyamory, kink, power and loss, humiliation and freedom, and an enormous surge of desire that lets her leave herself behind.

Maggie Millner's captivating, seductive debut is a love story in poems that explores obsession, gender, identity, and the art and act of literary transformation. In rhyming couplets and prose vignettes, Couplets chronicles the strictures, structures, and pitfalls of relationships--the mirroring, the pleasing, the small jealousies and disappointments--and how the people we love can show us who we truly are.

"An endlessly inventive, wise, exhilarating book."
--Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You

The bestselling, widely acclaimed translation from Stephen Mitchell

"Mitchell's rendition of the Tao Te Ching comes as close to being definitive for our time as any I can imagine. It embodies the virtues its translator credits to the Chinese original: a gemlike lucidity that is radiant with humor, grace, largeheartedness, and deep wisdom." -- Huston Smith, author of The Religions of Man

In eighty-one brief chapters, Lao-tzu's Tao Te Ching, or Book of the Way, provides advice that imparts balance and perspective, a serene and generous spirit, and teaches us how to work for the good with the effortless skill that comes from being in accord with the Tao--the basic principle of the universe.

WINNER OF THE 2023 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY

A new collection of poems from one of America's most essential, celebrated, and enduring poets, Carl Phillips's Then the War

I'm a song, changing. I'm a light
rain falling through a vast

darkness toward a different
darkness.

Carl Phillips has aptly described his work as an "ongoing quest"; Then the War is the next step in that meaningful process of self-discovery for both the poet and his reader. The new poems, written in a time of rising racial conflict in the United States, with its attendant violence and uncertainty, find Phillips entering deeper into the landscape he has made his own: a forest of intimacy, queerness, and moral inquiry, where the farther we go, the more difficult it is to remember why or where we started.

Then the War includes a generous selection of Phillips's work from the previous thirteen years, as well as his recent lyric prose memoir, "Among the Trees," and his chapbook, Star Map with Action Figures.

Ultimately, Phillips refuses pessimism, arguing for tenderness and human connection as profound forces for revolution and conjuring a spell against indifference and the easy escapes of nostalgia. Then the War is luminous testimony to the power of self-reckoning and to Carl Phillips as an ever-changing, necessary voice in contemporary poetry.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
Named one of NPR's Books We Love

"How many bad lovers have gotten poems? How many crushes? No disrespect to romantic love--but what about our friends ? Those homies who are there all along--cheering for us and reminding us that love is abundant."

In this groundbreaking collection of poems, José Olivarez explores every kind of love--self, brotherly, romantic, familial, cultural. Grappling with the contradictions of the American Dream with unflinching humanity, he lays bare the ways in which "love is complicated by forces larger than our hearts."

Whether readers enter this collection in English or via the Spanish translation by poet David Ruano González, these extraordinary poems are sure to become beloved for their illuminations of life--and love.

" Cuántas malas parejas han inspirado poemas? Cuántos crush es? Sin faltarle el respeto al amor romántico--pero qué hay de los amigos? Esos compas que están ahí todo el tiempo--animándonos y recordándonos que elamor es abundante".

En esta innovadora colección de poemas, José Olivarez explora cada tipo de amor--el propio, fraternal, romántico, familiar, cultural. Lidiando con las contradicciones del sueño americano, con una humanidad inquebrantable, deja al descubierto las maneras en que "el amor se va complicando por fuerzas más grandes que nuestros corazones".

Ya sea que los lectores entren a esta colección en inglés o a partir de la traducción al español del poeta David Ruano González, estos extraordinarios poemas serán amados seguramente por sus iluminaciones sobre el amor y la vida.

Maggie Smith, bestselling author of the viral poem "Good Bones" and the memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, delivers a lyrical and reassuring picture book perfect for calming active minds at bedtime (or anytime).

At bedtime, when lights go out...sometimes thoughts stay on.

Scary things and worries flutter and flap around. It's so hard to sleep!

But a little imagination (and a lot of love) can create a cozy nest for happy thoughts--and sweet dreams for little ones.