Something in life are overhyped. Other’s correctly hyped. These are our underrated poetry books!
They’re with poets and poetry collections growing more and more popular on social media, some poetry collections grab all the media attention. They are featured on must-read lists, they find their way to shelves at Target, and they are highlighted through exciting interviews with the poets in online and in print. But what about all the collections that don’t get all the hype – the underrated poetry books? It’s unjust.
We are here to course correct.
Sometimes, the best poetry flies under the radar. Collections filled with emotional and evocative prose find themselves waiting patiently for readers to stumble upon them in the poetry section of a bookstore. These hidden gems offer spectacular imagery and thought-provoking messages that deserve a place on your bookshelf.
From debut collections from up in coming poets to older collections from veterans of verse, these underrated poetry collections are masterpieces just waiting to be discovered.
Love Ends in A Tandem Kayak by Derrick Brown
Love Ends in A Tandem Kayak is a fantastical and visceral collection, veering from gut-punch imagery to heartache with unforgettable impact.
Divided into three chapters, it navigates the realms of love, memory, loneliness, and sorrow, ultimately seeking hardcore joy. This thoughtfully edited book showcases Brown’s most complete and stunning work, offering an economical beauty in its pages.
It discards academic fluff and embraces honest, raw expressions without trite wisdom, delving into self-love, grief, and the complexities of being human with both humor and weight.
If you’re seeking solace for deep wounds, this book will try to hold your hand and guide you to needle and thread.
Date & Time by Phil Kaye
2018 Foreword Reviews INDIES Book of the Year Honorable Mention Winner
Phil Kaye’s debut collection is a stunning tribute to growing up, and all of the challenges and celebrations of the passing of time, as jagged as it may be. Kaye takes the reader on a journey from a complex but iridescent childhood, drawing them into adolescence, and finally on to adulthood. There are first kisses, lost friendships, hair blowing in the wind while driving the vastness of an empty road, and the author positioned in the middle, trying to make sense of it all. Readers will find joy and vulnerability, in equal measure. Date & Time is a welcoming story, which freezes the calendar and allows us all to live in our best moments.
Opened Ground by Seamus Heaney
As selected by the author, Opened Ground includes the essential work from Heaney’s twelve previous books of poetry, as well as new sequences drawn from two of his landmark translations, The Cure at Troy and Sweeney Astray, and several previously uncollected poems. Heaney’s voice is like no other–“by turns mythological and journalistic, rural and sophisticated, reminiscent and impatient, stern and yielding, curt and expansive” (Helen Vendler, The New Yorker)–and this is a one-volume testament to the musicality and precision of that voice. The book closes with Heaney’s Nobel Lecture: “Crediting Poetry.”
Poukahangatus by Tayi Tibble
An acclaimed young poet explores her identity as a twenty-first-century Indigenous woman.
Poem by poem, Tibble carves out a bold new way of engaging history, of straddling modernity and ancestry, desire and exploitation.
Intimate, moving, virtuosic, and hilarious, Tayi Tibble is one of the most exciting new voices in poetry today. In Poūkahangatus (pronounced “Pocahontas”), her debut volume, Tibble challenges a dazzling array of mythologies–Greek, Māori, feminist, kiwi–peeling them apart, respinning them in modern terms. Her poems move from rhythmic discussions of the Kardashians, sugar daddies, and Twilight to exquisite renderings of the natural world and precise emotions (“The lump in her throat swelled like a sea that threatened to take him from her, and she had to swallow hard”). Tibble is also a master narrator of teenage womanhood, its exhilarating highs and devastating lows; her high-camp aesthetics correlate to the overflowing beauty, irony, and ruination of her surroundings.
These are warm, provocative, and profoundly original poems, written by a woman for whom diving into the wreck means taking on new assumptions–namely, that it is not radical to write from a world in which the effects of colonization, land, work, and gender are obviously connected. Along the way, Tibble scrutinizes perception and how she as a Māori woman fits into trends, stereotypes, and popular culture. With language that is at once colorful, passionate, and laugh-out-loud funny, Poūkahangatus is the work of one of our most daring new poets.
Field Study by Chet’la Sebree
I am society’s eraser shards–bits used to fix other people’s sh*t, then discarded. Somehow still a wet nurse, from actual babes to Alabama special elections.
Winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets
“Layered, complex, and infinitely compelling, Chet’la Sebree’s Field Study is a daring exploration of the self and our interactions with others–a meditation on desire, race, loss and survival.” –Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Memorial Drive
Chet’la Sebree’s Field Study is a genre-bending exploration of black womanhood and desire, written as a lyrical, surprisingly humorous, and startlingly vulnerable prose poem
Seeking to understand the fallout of her relationship with a white man, the poet Chet’la Sebree attempts a field study of herself. Scientifically, field studies are objective collections of raw data, devoid of emotion. But during the course of a stunning lyric poem, Sebree’s control over her own field study unravels as she attempts to understand the depth of her feelings in response to the data of her life. The result is a singular and provocative piece of writing, one that is formally inventive, playfully candid, and soul-piercingly sharp.
I Do Everything I’m Told by Megan Fernandes
Restless, contradictory, and witty, Megan Fernandes’ I Do Everything I’m Told explores disobedience and worship, longing and possessiveness, and nights of wandering cities. Its poems span thousands of miles, as a masterful crown of sonnets starts in Shanghai, then moves through Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Lisbon, Palermo, Paris, and Philadelphia–with a speaker who travels solo, adventures with strangers, struggles with the parameters of sexuality, and speculates on desire.
Across four sections, poems navigate the terrain of queer, normative, and ambiguous intimacies with a frank intelligence: “It’s better to be illegible, sometimes. Then they can’t govern you.” Strangers, ancestors, priests, ghosts, the inner child, sisters, misfit raccoons, Rimbaud, and Rilke populate the pages. Beloveds are unnamed, and unrealized desires are grieved as actual losses. The poems are grounded in real cities, but also in a surrealist past or an impossible future, in cliché love stories made weird, in ordinary routines made divine, and in the cosmos itself, sitting on Saturn’s rings looking back at Earth. When things go wrong, Fernandes treats loss with a sacred irreverence: “Contradictions are a sign we are from god. We fall. We don’t always get to ask why.”
Bodega by Su Hwang
Finalist for the 2021 Kate Tufts Discovery Award
Winner of the 2020 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry
Against the backdrop of the war on drugs and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, a Korean girl comes of age in her parents’ bodega in the Queensbridge projects, offering a singular perspective on our nation of immigrants and the tensions pulsing in the margins where they live and work.
In Su Hwang’s rich lyrical and narrative poetics, the bodega and its surrounding neighborhoods are cast not as mere setting, but as an ecosystem of human interactions where a dollar passed from one stranger to another is an act of peaceful revolution, and desperate acts of violence are “the price / of doing business in the projects where we / were trapped inside human cages–binding us / in a strange circus where atoms of haves / and have-nots always forcefully collide.” These poems also reveal stark contrasts in the domestic lives of immigrants, as the speaker’s own family must navigate the many personal, cultural, and generational chasms that arise from having to assume a hyphenated identity–lending a voice to the traumatic toll invisibility, assimilation, and sacrifice take on so many pursuing the American Dream.
“We each suffer alone in / tandem,” Hwang declares, but in Bodega, she has written an antidote to this solitary hurt–an incisive poetic debut that acknowledges and gives shape to anguish as much as it cherishes human life, suggesting frameworks for how we might collectively move forward with awareness and compassion.
Hard Damage by Aria Aber
Hard Damage works to relentlessly interrogate the self and its shortcomings. In lyric and documentary poems and essayistic fragments, Aria Aber explores the historical and personal implications of Afghan American relations. Drawing on material dating back to the 1950s, she considers the consequences of these relations—in particular the funding of the Afghan mujahedeen, which led to the Taliban and modern-day Islamic terrorism—for her family and the world at large.
Invested in and suspicious of the pain of family and the shame of selfhood, the speakers of these richly evocative and musical poems mourn the magnitude of citizenship as a state of place and a state of mind. While Hard Damage is framed by free-verse poetry, the middle sections comprise a lyric essay in fragments and a long documentary poem. Aber explores Rilke in the original German, the urban melancholia of city life, inherited trauma, and displacement on both linguistic and environmental levels, while employing surrealist and eerily domestic imagery.
Nox by Anne Carson
Nox is an epitaph in the form of a book, a facsimile of a handmade book Anne Carson wrote and created after the death of her brother. The poem describes coming to terms with his loss through the lens of her translation of Poem 101 by Catullus “for his brother who died in the Troad.” Nox is a work of poetry, but arrives as a fascinating and unique physical object. Carson pasted old letters, family photos, collages and sketches on pages. The poems, typed on a computer, were added to this illustrated “book” creating a visual and reading experience so amazing as to open up our concept of poetry.
