It’s mid-January! I am patiently patiently (patiently) waiting to hear back from grad schools! I am going a little insane! I am trying to distract myself by reading (poetry: Orders of Service by Willie Lee Kinard III; (novels: Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan & The Volcano Daughters by Gina María Balibrera)! I am trying to distract myself by making a list of the poetry collections coming out this year that I’m most excited about!
Titles with a 🌱 next to them are debuts (you’ll notice that the majority of these books are debuts)!
MARCH
Primordial: Poems by Mai Der Vang
Last year, Mai Der Vang’s previous collection (a winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry), Yellow Rain, was one of the few books I took with me when I went to a month-long residency at Millay Arts. (This is saying a lot since I only brought one suitcase). For me, Yellow Rain is not only a generative text but one that teaches me something new about the dimensions of imagery each time I return to it. Primordial turns to the saola, an endangered animal native to the Annamite Mountains in Laos and Vietnam, to address the conditions of our current climate and its changing ecology and the Hmong refugee experience. Knowing how Vang lyrically dismantles what is perpetuated as fact in Yellow Rain, I’m looking forward to how she extends this gesture in her new book.
We Contain Landscapes: Poems by Patrycja Humienik 🌱
Something about Patrycja Humienik‘s work is the antidote to when I feel stuck in my writing. More than once, I’ve reached an impasse in a poem only to come across one of Humienik‘s poems on Twitter or while scrolling through an online publication and then have suddenly known what to do next in my writing. Aria Aber writes of We Contain Landscapes: “Patrycja Humienik picks up where the great Polish poets of the twentieth century left off, writing of exile, war, fragmented families, and grief for a ruined environment. And yet, her mind is utterly contemporary and new, searching and witty, always striving towards a politics of solidarity with the Other––the reader, the ancestors, the daughters of immigrants.”
APRIL
Shadow Price by Farah Ghafoor 🌱
I think Farah and I have been internet mutuals since we were both in high school, but it wasn’t until 2020 that we somehow entered a Twitter DM correspondence in which we sent each other free/low cost writing workshops that we saw online. It was also around that time that I read Farah‘s poem ”I‘m Going to Butcher This,” which I still think about whenever anyone says that phrase before saying my or someone else‘s name. Shadow Price draws its title from the finance term for the monetary value assigned to a good or service for which no market price exists. Sanna Wani praises the collection, writing: “Connected to the economic and devoted to the ecological, Shadow Price presents poems as interested in colonialism as they are ant colonies. . . With a forensic tone, this collection turns towards climate grief with devastating precision, counting birds like coins and snails like children.”
JUNE
TERROR COUNTER by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi 🌱
There are magazines I used to fantasize about being published in, awards I used to imagine winning. (At one point, I even had a loose 5-year plan google doc for achieving these goals). But seeing the way literary institutions have responded (or stayed silent) to the genocide and ongoing colonization of Palestine reoriented me. I share this in order to say that I turn to Tbakhi’s writing as a touchstone in my rearticulation of my dreams for my poetry (and the literary arts at large)—reorienting, even, my understanding of what a dream can be. What I love about his poems is that each one is engaged knowledge-making and feels like it’s offering a new theory for alternate ways of being. “TERROR COUNTER asks: where and how might a Palestinian subject escape the public consumption of American letters? And, ultimately, how can we continue to love each other amidst the endless terror of the colonial world?” (from publisher’s description).
OCTOBER
Shade is a place by MaKshya Tolbert 🌱
I still remember reading drafts—incredible drafts—from Shade is a place in 2022 when MaKshya and I were in the same Roots. Wounds. Words. workshop cohort. Shade is a place is, as they share on a craft talk on their work, both the title of their debut collection (the first in a trilogy of books) and the name they give to their curiosity around Black ecological attention and placemaking in Charlottesville, Virginia. I deeply admire Tolbert’s commitment to—in language and in community—to the trees and their shade. Selected by Maggie Millner, Shade is a place is a winner of the 2024 National Poetry Series Competition.
FALL (Release Date TBD)
Wildness Before Something Sublime by Leila Chatti
Leila Chatti’s lyric voice is like a shadow that slowly expands to cover everything. I’m thinking of the line “The wind in the tree / a negative thing” when I say that I’m forever a student of the wat Chatti observes and assembles language around and through silence(s). I’m excited to hear more about what subject Chatti will approach in Wildness Before Something Sublime.
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