Poetry Month Book Recs
Recent contributors share new and old favorites.
BY The Editors
To close out National Poetry Month, we invited reading recommendations from some recent contributors. First, we asked for a recent collection that they've enjoyed. Then we asked for an older collection that remains a touchstone, the book that comes to mind first when they're asked for a poetry rec. — The Editors
The rapidfire wit and pithiness of Sylvia Jones’ debut, Television Fathers (Meekling Press, 2024), almost belie its ambitious scale and scope. This collection of short poems—packed with biting social commentary, humor, pop culture, and intertwined reckonings with present-day and historical inequities—skilfully shifts between poetic forms and tonal registers, impressing me more each time I read it.
Bernadette Mayer's book-length poem Midwinter Day (1982) reminds me that the quotidian is what makes a life, actually, and that the daily is all that's needed to make poetry—that is, a poet's particular way of observing, processing, and rendering the stuff of everyday life. A turn away from gravitas, elevated language, the epiphanic, etc. that I found very affirming and foundational—and still do!
Read Alina's "To Delight and Surprise: Remembering Jim Cory"
The title of To the Most Beautiful by Mette Moestrup, translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen (co•im•press, 2024), references the apple that the goddess Strife throws down among goddesses to kick off the Trojan War. This endlessly ingenious book arms itself with tense, spiky glamor and makes you think big cosmic thoughts like: maybe lyric, like flame, is what humans stole from the gods so that we can get away with what they get away with—or die trying.
I return to the sleek, beguiling sequence of Pink Reef (Canarium, 2013) by Robert Fernandez once or twice a year. Art, the body, the world, other people, cars, climate, sex, that thing the light is doing, out there in the bay, and whatever that thing is in the water, right there, with its sharp vivid eye and dumb flank—all that mundane ultimateness each moment must try to survive, and can't, like the lyric itself, and like us.
Read Joyelle's "The Art Life"
Claire DeVoogd’s Via (Winter Editions, 2023) was one of the most impressive debuts from the past few years. A poet whose erudition comes off as natural, she can seamlessly integrate a hermetic system of references into our apocalyptic world, seeking beauty while creating a theology of her own.
No one does poetry in Latin America like Chileans, but the Chileans owe their tradition to the Spanish mastermind Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga. The Araucana (trans. Cyrus Moore for Eikonica Press, 2022), an epic poem written from prison that Cervantes praised as the best of his generation, narrates the guerrilla-like war that native mapuche tribes led against the Spanish during the conquest of Chile—a forceful military account filled with rage and a subversive spirit that inspired generations.
Read Julia's "Born on a Day When God Was Ill"
In the introduction to Wonder & Wreckage: New & Selected Poems, 1993-2023 (Poetry Atlanta Press, 2024), Collin Kelley shares that his earliest poetic education came from musicians and cinema. This influence is evident as his words sing on the page and his imagery sears, capturing lovers, parents, pop culture, and the losses of the AIDS crisis. These poems aren’t just a casual compilation of greatest hits—they are carefully structured into a narrative that reveals a poet’s drive, desire, and life thus far. The book serves as both an excellent introduction to Kelley’s work and a compelling read for those revisiting it.
The Wellspring: Poems (Knopf, 1996) was the first book I read by Sharon Olds, and it was a revelation. She writes of poor parenting with a rare balance, holding both the weight of injustice and the complexity of a child's love. There’s an empathic understanding in her work, an acknowledgment of personal wounds without sensationalism, tempered by just enough sentimentality. Each time I revisit it, I feel the same thrill I did on my first reading, discovering not just another way to relate to the past, but another way to tell it.
Read Steven's "This Be the Place: The Hobbit Hole"
Jennifer Horgan’s recently published first collection, Care (Doire Press, 2025), is at once raw and reflective, and full of powerful images that act as objective correlatives for family, Irish society and history, and the unwritten life of women, “the half the renaissance missed,” imaged in the present moment when a boy cannonballs onto the teenaged speaker: “The shock of his hold on me beneath water has stayed”—and it blooms into wider resonance.
Yusef Komunyakaa's very short book Dien Cai Dau (Wesleyan Poetry Series, 1988), about the experience of African-American soldiers in the Vietnam War, has been important to me since I first read it in 2010, not only because of its lessons in imagery and metaphor but precisely because it is a unitary book of poems and not a collection.
Read David's "You Could Go Further: Remembering Breyten Breytenbach"
Scorched Earth by Tiana Clark (Simon & Schuster, 2025). I've read it several times already, and every time I am impressed by something new. I think I'll carry this book with me for a long time.
When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). This is the book I recommend to everyone. It's my favorite book of poems ever.
Read José's collaboration with Jon Sands, "Rapturously Audacious: Remembering Aziza Barnes"
A Little Daylight Left by Sarah Kay (Penguin Random House, 2025). This new collection from a national treasure is the very intersection of heart and brain. All bangers, no skips.
Smoking Lovely: The Remix by Willie Perdomo (Haymarket Books, 2003). Dextrous, heartfelt, and positively singular, there's no one else like Willie Perdomo.
Read Jon's collaboration with José Olivarez, "Rapturously Audacious: Remembering Aziza Barnes"
The Dutch writer Simone Atangana Bekono's latest poetry collection, Marshmallow (De Arbeiderspers, 2024), is tender, funny, a little creepy, and includes an homage to Kim Hyesoon, showing the intimate spaces that international feminist poetry can construct and co-inhabit. Bekono's novel The Confrontations has been published in English translation, and I hope Marshmallow will soon follow.
CAConrad's A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon (Wave Books, 2012) comes up in almost every course I teach, with "The Right to Manifest Manifesto" being for me the touchstone text on biopolitics-as-poetics: "We are here relying on one another whether or not we wish it."
Read Mia's "Poets on Translation: The (Alter)Native Speaker"
Diana Garza Islas's Black Box Named Like to Me (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024)—in Cal Paule's extraordinary renditions from Spanish into English—reminds me that poetry and translation can offer dynamic, inventive, and otherworldly ways to speak our humanity in the continuous present.
Alice Oswald's astonishing wreath of deaths and epic similes from The Iliad, which make up the entirety of her book Memorial (Norton, 2012), makes me feel the the likeness of all things, including everyone's sorrows, whenever I open to any page of this timeless and always timely masterpiece.
Read Srikanth's "Walking the Fault Line"
The editorial staff of the Poetry Foundation. See the Poetry Foundation staff list and editorial team masthead.