The Most Anticipated Poetry to Look Forward To For 2024
As we approach a new year, the world of poetry continues to flourish with new talents and fresh perspectives. With so much to look forward to in the coming years, it’s exciting to think about what the future of poetry holds. Lets take a glimpse into the crystal ball and explore some of the most anticipated poetry releases for 2024. From debut collections to the latest works from established poets, get ready to add some new titles to your reading list.
Bad Mexican, Bad American: Poems
by Jose Hernandez Diaz
This collection of poems by Jose Hernandez Diaz showcases the unique style that has made him a rising star in the poetry community.
In Bad Mexican, Bad American, the minimalist, working-class aesthetic of a “disadvantaged Brown kid” takes wing in prose poems that recall and celebrate that form’s ties to Surrealism. With influences like Alberto Ríos and Ray Gonzalez on one hand, and James Tate and Charles Baudelaire on the other, the collection spectacularly combines “high” art and folk art in a way that collapses those distinctions, as in the poem “My Date with Frida Kahlo” “Frida and I had Cuban coffee and then vegetarian tacos. We sipped on mescal and black tea. At the end of the night, I tried to make a move on her. She feigned resistance at first but then aggressively kissed me back. We kissed for about thirty minutes beneath a protest mural by David Alfaro Siqueiros.”
Bad Mexican, Bad American demonstrates how having roots in more than one culture can be both unsettling and rich: van Gogh and Beethoven share the page with tattoos, graffiti, and rancheras; Quetzalcoatl shows up at Panda Express; a Mexican American child who has never had a Mexican American teacher may become that teacher; a parent’s “broken” English is beautiful and masterful. Blending reality with dream and humility with hope, Hernandez Diaz contributes a singing strand to the complex cultural weave that is twenty-first-century poetry.
Dirt Songs
by Kari Gunter-Seymour
In her third full-length collection, Dirt Songs, Kari Gunter-Seymour’s poems are full-throated, raw, deceptively simple, and rippling with candor, providing readers an insider’s lens into the larger questions surrounding the many aspects of Appalachian culture, including identity, the impact of poverty, generational afflictions, and the brunt of mainstream America’s skewed regard for the region. Readers will discover a musicality of language, a stoic sense of honor, a richly detailed tapestry of experiences, and an inspiring display of humility and courage.
Throughout the book there is an overarching determination to endure, to be the last truth teller left standing, arm raised in solidarity with the land and its people. Dirt Songs does what journalists and mainstream media have failed to do: provide a uniquely intimate look at landscape and family generated from within Appalachia, recognizing that one story cannot accurately represent a region or its people.
Night of the Hawk: Poems
by Lauren Martin
When I have wandered long enough what am I still beholden to?
Ifá. Nature. Illness. Love. Loss. Misogyny. Aging. Africa. Our wounded planet. In this sweeping yet intensely personal collection, Lauren Martin tells the untold stories of the marginalized, the abused, the ill, the disabled–the different. Inspired by her life’s experiences, including the isolation she has suffered as a result both of living with chronic illness and having devoted herself to a religion outside the mainstream, these poems explore with raw vulnerability and unflinching honesty what it is to live apart–even as one yearns for connection.
But Night of the Hawk is no lament; it is powerful, reverential, sometimes humorous, often defiant–“Oh heat me and fill me / I rise above lines“–and full of wisdom. Visceral and stirring, the poems in this collection touch on vastly disparate subjects but are ultimately unified in a singular quest: to inspire those who read them toward kindness, compassion, and questioning.
Spectral Evidence: Poems
by Gregory Pardlo
A powerful meditation on Blackness, beauty, faith, and the force of law, from the beloved award-winning author of Digest and Air Traffic.
Elegant, profound, and intoxicating–Spectral Evidence, Gregory Pardlo’s first major collection of poetry after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Digest, moves fluidly among considerations of the pro-wrestler Owen Hart; Tituba, the only Black woman to be accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials; MOVE, the movement and militant separatist group famous for its violent stand-offs with the Philadelphia Police Department (“flames rose like orchids . . . / blocks lay open like egg cartons”); and more.
At times cerebral and at other times warm, inviting and deeply personal, Spectral Evidence compels us to consider how we think about devotion, beauty and art; about the criminalization and death of Black bodies; about justice–and about how these have been inscribed into our present, our history, and the Western canon: “If I could be / the forensic dreamer / . . . / . . . my art would be a mortician’s / paints.”
Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt: A Memoir in Verse
by Brontez Purnell
From the beloved author of 100 Boyfriends, a wrenching, sexy, and exhilaratingly energetic memoir in verse.
In Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt, Brontez Purnell–the bard of the underloved and overlooked–turns his gaze inward. A storyteller with a musical eye for the absurdity of his own existence, he is peerless in his ability to find the levity within the stormiest of crises. Here, in his first collection of genre-defying verse, Purnell reflects on his peripatetic life, whose ups and downs have nothing on the turmoil within. “The most high-risk homosexual behavior I engage in,” Purnell writes, “is simply existing.”
The thirty-eight autobiographical pieces pulsing in Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt find Purnell at his no-holds-barred best. He remembers a vicious brawl he participated in at a poetry conference and reckons with packaging his trauma for TV writers’ rooms; wrestles with the curses, and gifts, passed down from generations of family members; and chronicles, with breathless verve, a list of hell-raising misadventures and sexcapades. Through it all, he muses on everything from love and loneliness to capitalism and Blackness to jogging and the ethics of art, always with unpredictable clarity and movement.
Tender Headed
by Olatunde Osinaike
Tender Headedtakes its time in asserting the realization that growth remains ever ahead of you. Examining the themes of Black identity, accountability, and narration. We encounter a series of revealing snapshots into the role language plays in chiseling possibility. Olatunde Osinaike’s startling debut sorts through the many-minded masks behind Black masculinity. At its center lies an inquiry about the puzzling nature of relationship. How ceaseless wonder can be in its challenge of a truth. In the name of music and self-identity, the speaker weaves their way through fault and how it amends Black life in America.
This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets
by Kwame Alexander
In this comprehensive and vibrant poetry anthology, bestselling author and poet Kwame Alexander. Curates a collection of contemporary anthems at turns tender and piercing and deeply inspiring throughout. Featuring work from well-loved poets such as Rita Dove, Jericho Brown, Warsan Shire, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Browne puts it in her titular poem, is “a jubilee of a people dreaming wildly.”
This essential collection, in the tradition of Dudley Randall’s The Black Poets and E. Ethelbert Miller’s In Search of Color Everywhere, contains poems exploring joy, love, origin, race, resistance, and praise. Jacqueline A.Trimble likens “Black woman joy” to indigo, tassels, foxes, and peacock plumes. Clint Smith and Cameron Awkward-Rich enfold us in their intimate musings on love and devotion.
A Wild Path
by Douglas Wood
A Wild Path is author Douglas Wood’s highly anticipated followup to the critically acclaimed memoir Deep Woods, Wild Waters. He again leads readers along a meditative path through a wilderness of many dimensions. From the lakes and islands of his beloved Canoe Country to rugged ocean coasts to a mountain chasm. From camping on the Canadian Shield to listening to the soft strains of Beethoven in the pines. The pain of childhood wounds to appreciation for a life rich with nature. As on every good journey, there is plenty of laughter, warmth, and humor on the trail.
With the generosity and compassion of a good wilderness guide. Douglas Wood welcomes readers to accompany him as he navigates his life-path. From struggling student and “worst reader in the class” to prolific writer and best-selling author. He offers courage and hope to those who feel different or left behind. He shares how he found, through the counsel of rocks, trees, and waters. His own way toward joy and wonder and an unshakable sense of belonging.
Wrong Norma
by Anne Carson
Published here in a stunning edition with images created by Carson. Several of the twenty-five startling poetic prose pieces have appeared. In magazines and journals like The New Yorker and The Paris Review. The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them ‘wrong.'”
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