10 Poets to Watch

Yes, it may feel like the world is ending. But the world has died so many times before. Franny Choi manages to capture this premise in a lyrical masterpiece with her most recent poetry collection -- one of the best of 2023. Her time-bending poems reckon with the fact that while we keep waiting for the apocalypse, in many ways it is already present for marginalized people. Yet, hope echoes throughout the book as Choi looks toward a future in which disparate communities can carve new paths of togetherness..

Named a Best Book of 2023 by publications like the New York Times, Bomb Magazine, and Publishers Weekly, the National Book Award-shortlisted From From is an unbelievably inventive look at Asian American identity. Its central concept of deracination, the sense of being uprooted from one's own cultural, social, or geographical environment, is consistently subverted and anatomized in both poetry and personal essay, with Youn's initimate and unrelenting voice.

Victoria Chang first came to the poetry forefront with Obit, her collection of poems written in the form of newspaper obituaries. Her ability to transform one of the most unpoetic forms of writing into a deeply personal take on the death of her mother, her father’s stroke, and other losses in our lives was nothing short of extraordinary. With her first poetry collection to come out since then, Chang has found a muse in the art of Agnes Martin, a minimalist abstract painter and writer whose work has served as beautiful ekphrastic inspiration for poems on grief, art, and feminism.

This National Book Award-winning collection is sublime deconstruction of colonialism and environmental injustice in the Pacific Islands, utilizing multilingual strategies and beautiful visuals to create a unique poetry mosaic. It was glorious to see this book, the latest in Craig Santos Perez's unincorporated territory series, get the much deserved credit that the Chamoru poet merits.

This new collection from Michael Chang sees the acclaimed poet dipping into themes of sexuality, identity, and literacy all with just the right dose of humor and heart. Synthetic Jungle builds on Chang's earlier work to create poems that can read as scathing and gut-busting, echoing Ashberry and Dickinson as they prance between personal and philosophical.

Diana Khoi Nguyen's collection, Ghost Of, was a startling and bittersweet meditation on the loss of her brother that incorporated visual elements, including the family photos Nguyen's brother cut himself out of. In her latest collection, Root Fractures, named one of LitHub's Poetry to Books to Read this year, she expands her scope to the legacy of her family and previous generations, examining her mother and father's journey as immigrants to America and the ever-present shadow of her brother.

Shortlisted for the National Book Award, Anthony Cody's Borderland Apocrypha became an immediate experimental classic, with its groundbreaking approach to concrete and visual poetry dissecting Mexican immigration and the borderlands region between the US and Mexico. With his most recent collection, The Rendering, Cody continues to push boundaries by confronting the history of the Dust Bowl while drawing a parallel to our current climate crisis. Cody asks us to reconsider both our world and poetry itself with his radical acts of pagemaking.

Aria Aber has been making waves on poetry Twitter ever since publishing Hard Damage, her multilingual debut, which is a fragmentary exploration of the self, citizenship and trauma through the lens of Afghan-American relations. Keep your eyes peeled for her first novel, GOOD GIRL, coming 2025 from Hogarth Press.

A finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in Poetry, Marwa Helal's Ante body continues to explore and expand on migration, trauma, and globalism after her stellar first collection, Invasive Species. Ante body is a singular reading experience cycling through Arabic and prose poetry making for an unforgettable new series of poems.

Wandering across the terrains of geography, memory, and intimacy, Megan Fernandes' I Do Everything I'm Told is a witty and honest romp across the globe. Fernandes traverses thousands of miles across Shanghai, Paris, Philadelphia and elsewhere in a quest for fulfilling her desire for adventure, punctuated by explorations of loss, identity, and sexuality.