For National Poetry Month, we scoured submissions, asked poets to recommend new voices, and read as many as we could. Here are the ones that caught our eye, in alphabetical order.
Afterlight by Caleb Nolen
Available July 6, 2026 – Pre-Order Now
Read a Q&A with Nolen about how the cover of Afterlight was created
From the publisher: Interwoven throughout are letters to saints and biblical figures: pleas for intercession and understanding that echo the speaker’s search for grace amid violence and loss. By the book’s end, the lost boys and the saints share the same hallowed space, their stories entwined. Written in plain, unsparing language, these poems reveal the tenderness within troubled masculinity and the ache of trying to love what has already vanished.
What others are saying: “Caleb Nolen’s Afterlight chronicles a harrowing adolescence, reviewed retrospectively in the light of a faith that illuminates but will neither explain nor assuage. Rarely do I encounter poems written with such styptic care. Suspended between exorcism and elegy, each of these poems is a razor held in a living hand, waiting for the what-comes-next but already caught in the what-comes-after.”–G.C. Waldrep, author of The Opening Ritual
Antediluvian by Kameryn Alexa Carter
From the publisher: Antediluvian engages with themes of the ecstatic, desire, mental illness, and spirituality. Overall, the landscape of the collection is a deep dive into the speaker’s psyche, and what it means to push past the confines of one’s oppressive interior.
What others are saying: Kameryn Alexa Carter casts an unforgettable spell in the divine and decadent Antediluvian. She explores physical and spiritual longing as well as mental and physical health with candor and verve. This is a poet unafraid to sing in the dark and to listen for what calls back.–Derrick Austin, author of Tenderness
Atria by DS Waldman
Available Now!
Discover 7 Collections of Prose Poems, Recommended by Waldman
From the publisher: Exploring presence and absence, proximity and distance, this “gorgeous, speculative” (David Baker, author of Whale Fall) debut announces D.S. Waldman as an intrepid new voice in poetry.
What others are saying: An understated, exquisite work of intellect and lucid attention, a minor geography made of language, suggestion, and absence. With Atria, it is clear that we are in the presence of a formidable and beautiful imagination.–Aracelis Girmay, author of the black maria
Bloodroom by Kay E. Bancroft
Available June 9, 2026 – Pre-Order Now
Read a Q&A with Bancroft about how the cover of Bloodroom was created.
From the Publisher: This collection aims to explore intergenerational trauma, familial inheritance, queerness, the body, identity & sexuality, through historical documents, photographs, and pop-horror films from the ‘90s to the present.
Blue Selvage by Preeti Parikh
Available November 1, 2026 – Pre-Order Now
From the publisher: The poems in Blue Selvage weave lyric, essay, documentary fragments, and historical reckoning into an exploration of skin, cloth, color, and form as living archives–where the gendered, racialized, and colonial histories inscribed on the body are continually exposed, resisted, and re-stitched through memory, touch, and language itself.
What others are saying: “Poetry as the work of embodiment, of transformation–this principle manifests as a gorgeous new expression in Blue Selvage. But as Preeti Parikh shows, the arc towards self-realization is also about the tensions between raveling and unraveling, stitching and unstitching, text and lacuna. Delving into the intimacy of memory and the violence of history, Parikh understands that “opacity and translucence” are both necessary to deep testimony. Bold in its forms and defiant in its truths, Blue Selvage is a radiant debut.” — “Rick Barot, Author of Moving the Bones”
Cloud Builder by Weston Morrow
Available September 1, 2026 – Pre-Order Now
From the publisher: These poems reawaken long-dead painters and musicians, collapsed bridges, derelict ferries, and dormant volcanoes, confronting him with his failure, at times, to ask what it is we owe the living. What do the dead want from us? Or, conversely, is it we who haunt “the past, who can’t stop turning back / for one last look”?
What others are saying: The only thing I wanted to do after reading Cloud Builder was read it again. Morrow gives a master class in how to write a spare, lively lyricism that will speak to readers about fathers, sons, history, place, and how we go on living despite our losses. Elegiac, poignant, tender, and always surprising. This is the real deal: poems that feel and that make you look at your own life and family anew. –Janice N. Harrington “award-winning author of Yard Show and Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone”
Continental Drift by Mai-Linh Hong
Available July 1, 2026 – Pre-Order Now
From the publisher: Whether luxuriating in the small joys of nature and of existence, or marveling at the process of geological shift, these artfully crafted poems bring the reader into the complex promises and griefs of migration, navigation, and claiming space in a postcolonial world.
What others are saying: “Mai-Linh Hong’s Continental Drift shimmers with joy and sorrow that arrives post-war and post-loss. These expansive poems remind us of the ways that language can transform us, mapping geographies of wonder, startlingly sumptuous and alive in their clarity. How lucky we are to get to celebrate this book. Continental Drift is a marvel–just pure magic.” –Cathy Linh Che, author of Becoming Ghost
Desire Path by Migwi Mwangi
Available September 8. 2026 – Pre-Order Now
From the publisher: Desire Path explores how everyday life, memory, history, and politics work against and toward each other across communities and national boundaries. This collection pleats numerous lives: a boy sent to the shops, a neighborhood thief, widows, gravediggers, debtors, and inheritors. There are multifoliate Englishes and silences, glimpses of music by icons such as Bi Kidude and Kanda Bongo Man. There is eros, storytelling, and haunting joy here.
What others are saying: “One of the most exciting, capacious, and daring debuts I’ve read in years. Migwi Mwangi is a true one–and here to stay.” –Ocean Vuong, author of Time is a Mother
Glassful of Prayer by Anthony Ceballos
From the publisher: A stunning debut collection, Anthony Ceballos’ Glassful of Prayer, wrestles with questions of identity against the backdrop of loss, heritage, family ties, addiction, nature, and urban Minneapolis.
HUM by Sanam Sheriff
Available October 1, 2026 – Pre-Order Now
Read a Q&A with Sheriff about how the cover of HUM was created.
From the publisher: Enriched by Urdu lyric traditions of love, and love mourned, HUM raises the queer erotic to the heavens, even as the grief of separation lingers as paradise lost. Here, Sheriff weaves together the two most potent threads of human life: pain and love, strummed until they sing.
What others are saying: “Daring, inventive, and deeply human, HUM helped restore my faith in what imagination and language can do, even as those in power work to corrode both. This is a book I needed to read by a poet I feel fortunate to be living alongside.”–Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones and You Could Make This Place Beautiful
I Can Tell You the Version That Will Make You Take My Side by J Brooke
Available June 2, 2026 – Pre-Order Now
Read a Q&A with Brooke about how the cover of I Can Tell You the Version… was created.
From the publisher: J Brooke’s I Can Tell You the Version That Will Make You Take My Side begins in a rich and specific New York City childhood full of binaries, then catapults into a fully realized, self-aware adulthood where the speaker experiences parenting, a breast cancer scare, and the complicated questioning of top-surgery.
What others are saying: “A beautiful book of poetry following one human’s journey towards themselves, illuminating gender identity and the culture that surrounds us all-insightful and inspiring!” Rosie O’Donnell
Low Flying Planes by Hajjar Baban
Available August 25, 2026 – Pre-Order Now
From the publisher: Wielding a breakable and cautious syntax, Baban writes with a precision that highlights the complexity of interiority under surveillance and the tension between safety and yearning. Our speaker is hypervigilant and uncommonly observant, seeking to understand what language cannot capture: layered volumes of loss, the unshakable instinct to hide, “a name for how my father looks / at the sky.”
What others are saying: “LOW FLYING PLANES underscores that to write poems in English is to deploy one tongue of American military violence. Hajjar Baban evades empire’s surveillant logics by rendering the lyric especially gemlike: translucent, hard-edged, cut into dazzling facets. Refracting the individual and collective losses of Afghans and Kurds, her lines open the given light into unprecedented spectra. Grace breaks forth from this book infused with faith. I go in awe of it.”–Brian Teare, author of Poem Bitten by a Man
Madness Belongs to the People by Jody Chan
Available September 22, 2026 – Pre-Order Now
From the publisher: With gentle fervour and precise language that speaks to the nonverbal, the gestural, the sonic, Jody Chan’s third collection of poetry mobilizes the intimate, the historical, the revolutionary, and the mundane to confront the instrumentalization of disability as a surplus class.
What others are saying: “Like Tyehimba Jess’s Olio or Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Jody Chan’s Madness Belongs to the People enlivens, with its interactive and interdisciplinary elements, the possibilities of what a book of poems can do and be. Taking madness as a series of guiding energies, formal possibilities, and generative constraints, these stirring, participatory poems are wise, layered, and full of gifts to such an extent I find myself finishing the collection eager, immediately, to reread them all. This erudite, passionate work evidences a deeply embodied politicization that understands, in relation to liberatory movements, both the powers and limits of language. Here are words that touch you, singing: ‘may language move you to action.'”–Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat
Maybe the Body by Asa Drake
Read Drake’s My Reading Life Q&A.
What publishers are saying: A brilliant debut poetry collection by National Poetry Series finalist Asa Drake that explores the lineage and future lineage of a body shaped by economic, ecological, and political dissonance.
What others are saying: “Maybe the Body is a radiant collection, a generous offering full of flora and fury, plums, and caterpillars. These poems are a field of inheritance where language, history, and lineage collide, and in Drake’s capable hands, the body becomes both question and altar.” —Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders and Bite by Bite
Replica by Lisa Low
From the publisher: Stand-up comedy, a celebrity non-apology, observations of racism, and the slipperiness of nostalgia underpin Replica. In poignant, witty poems, Lisa Low navigates the tensions of solidarity and hostility in white spaces as she sets out to write differently about race.
What others are saying: “A haunting study in self-portraiture. Low’s wry, winning humor mixes with her unsparing poignancy, bidding us to see each other, and ourselves, better.” –Philip Metres
Revelator by Ellie Black
Available September 1, 2026 – Pre-Order Now
From the publisher: Ellie Black’s Revelator transforms shards of language, pop culture, and literature into tightly wound poems of excess and incantation.
Run It Back by Kortney Morrow
From the publisher: Kortney Morrow’s luminous debut collection, Run It Back, creates an iridescent dreamscape where early 2000s nostalgia is intricately woven into rigorous questioning around belonging, borders, fugitivity, and freedom.
Slipstream by Diana Cao
Available August 15, 2026 – Pre-Order Now
From the publisher: The poems in Slipstream deal with the slippery concept of home, with robots and the internet and other human inventions, and with what we can learn from the natural world around us.
Song in Tammuz by Avia Tadmor
Available October 1, 2026 – Pre-Order Now
From the publisher: Winner of the International Berkshire Prize, this collection draws from an incredible range of literary forms, from familiar couplets and tercets to footnotes, dictionary definitions, and luminous lyric fragments.
What others are saying: “Song in Tammuz gives us a lyric voice that speaks–no, sings!–back to tradition, sings with devotion (to a “god attached to the end of your name / like the tail of a mare”), yes, but also with questioning (and whose letters are “the last telegraphs to be sent before the city surrenders”). There is grief yet awareness that as she writes, “a last good lemon hangs from its tree.” There is an incredibly memorable persona, Ruth, both mythical–and our own. There is a story of horror sewn out of silences, out of the unsaid. And, always, there is a song: “first anger, then hunger, then song.” This is a marvelous first book.” — Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa
Soulmate as a Verb by Kelsey L. Smoot
From the publisher: Poems of tender knowledge, buoyant survival, and Black, trans embodiment.
What others are saying: “SOULMATE AS A VERB navigates intimate and communal relationships through the lens of a Black, transmasculine, queer, radical, vulnerable AF speaker. I felt pulled into the music, voice, and lyrical diversity of these poems.” —KB Brookins, award-winning author of Pretty: A Memoir
Splashed Things by Leigh Lucas
Discover 7 Elegiac Books, Recommended by Lucas
From the publisher: Selected by Maya C. Popa as winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize for its emotional courage, inventive language, and haunting beauty, Leigh Lucas’s Splashed Things marks the arrival of a powerful new voice in contemporary poetry.
What others are saying: “Leigh Lucas transmits the lasting shockwaves of grief: the anger and bitterness, blame and shame, its landsickness, and the empty shapes into which we accumulate the things left, inside the private rooms we build around the negative space grief leaves in our lives. The memories called up again and again, involuntary, changing shape each time, words once spoken replaced with new words, drawing us both closer and farther away from who and what we miss. These poems are falling apart for love, are devastatingly honest, naked, bleeding, and brutally self-searching. I’ll think about them forever.” –Sarah Gerard, author of Carrie Carolyn Coco
Squirming by Monika Ostrowska
From the publisher: Monika Ostrowska’s provocative, plainspoken debut tracks its speaker’s intensifying sexual fantasies as they become at once more intellectualized and embodied, tracing a desperate need for enlightenment. Squirming is a primal meditation on embracing the erotic, challenging the complexities of womanhood, and bridging the chasm between self-awareness and external perception.
Women in Marigold by Mansi Dahal
Available September 22, 2026 – Pre-Order Now
From the publisher: A debut collection confronting the ache of dislocation, the longing to be in two places at once, and the tension between life as a daughter in Nepal and a future as an artist in America
Work Lunch by Lee Bains
Available October 13, 2026 – Pre-Order Now
From the publisher: In his debut poetry collection, Alabama poet and musician Lee Bains draws on his own experience at the intersection of work and food–the daily ritual of a workday lunch.
What others are saying: “Work Lunch is not simply the best of what poetry can be; it is proof that blues, soul and some god somewhere are real. This is what writing, witnessing with your senses, and giving a fuck can do. Lee Bains is one of them ones, yall.” –Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division