The Contemporary Poetry You Need to Read Now

The Lights: Poems

This new collection from the National Book Award finalist communicates through a variety of forms including verse, prose, song, and voice mails, exercising both intimacy and sprawling grandeur. These poems, written over fifteen years, look to be some of the most intensely personal, gorgeously unpredictable pieces Ben Lerner has produced.

The Carrying: Poems

Powerful and beautifully rendered poems of youth, the body and acceptance from the US Poet Laureate, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Time Is a Mother

One of the most celebrated poets today searches for meaning amid personal loss, sifting through memory and fragmentation with gorgeous verse and a playful voice.

Borderland Apocrypha

Anthony Cody’s debut is an experimental masterpiece of visual and concrete poetry tracing the emotions and structures of the borderlands through the history of US/Mexico relations from the end of the Mexican-American war to the present. Shortlisted for the National Book Award.

Customs: Poems

This long-awaited follow-up to Solmaz Sharif’s terrific Look investigates the experience of an endless plethora of security, checkpoints and random searches, all the while asking us to consider what customs represent both linguistically and in the nation-states we live in.

Toska

Desire, liberation and alienation combine for this collection on rootlessness and diaspora from Moscow-born Alina Pleskova.

Repetition Nineteen

Mónica de la Torre translates the same poem with twenty-five different approaches, leading to musings on displacement, language and code-switching.

Hard Damage

This multilingual debut is a fragmentary exploration of the self, citizenship and trauma through the lens of Afghan-American relations.

Postcolonial Love Poem: Poems

The winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry is a blooming landscape of bodies, lyric and suffering rallying against the erasure of indigenous America.

Be Holding: A Poem

An epic ode to the life and legacy of the legendary basketball player Julius Erving, also known as "Dr. J," connecting his famous move in the 1980 NBA finals to music, personal histories, state violence, surveillance and more.