The New Yorker, The Best Books of Poetry of 2016 New York Times, Critics Pick Boston Globe, Best Books listing Miami Herald, Best LGBTQ Books San Francisco Chronicle, Top 100 Books of the Year Library Journal, Best Books of 2016“There is a powerful emotional undertow to these poems that springs from Mr. Vuong’s sincerity and candor, and from his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things.”—New York Times“From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion.”—New Yorker"Extraordinary."—Los Angeles Times"Ecstatic, bawdy, haunted, and brilliant with the pressures of its arrival."—Boston GlobeOcean Vuong’s first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial “big”—and very human—subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence and unrepentant."Torso of AirSuppose you do change your life. & the body is more than a portion of night—sealed with bruises. Suppose you woke & found your shadow replaced by a black wolf. The boy, beautiful & gone. So you take the knife to the wall instead. You carve & carve until a coin of light appears & you get to look in, at last, on happiness. The eye staring back from the other side— Waiting. Read more

A vulnerable and honest collection of poems exploring lineage, love, and the pandemic, from one of the most acclaimed poets of his generation.“You are told to believe in one paradise / and then there is the paradise you come to know,” begins Rick Barot. What follows is an account of the rich and thorny valley between those poles. Moving the Bones dwells in liminal spaces—of love and memory, the pandemic’s singular domesticity, a serene cemetery of ancestral plots, dawn. In precise and tender verse, Barot captures the particularities of being in the middle of one’s life, reflecting on the joys and sorrows of the past and confronting the inevitabilities that lie ahead.For Barot, this presence of mind is an art of being lost in thought. “My mind has a slow metabolism, it is slow / to understand what anything means,” he confides, “but understands that if you look at something / long enough, it will have something / to say to you.” Appreciating a Rembrandt, standing in a Goodwill, watching a boy with a flower behind his ear—we encounter ephemeral murmurs of meaning everywhere, but only by slowing down, listening. If we take time to notice the enduring insights of daily moments, if we praise cherry blossoms, lungs, and crying, we might find it easier to bear the loss of a loved one, the sting of solitude, the body’s decline.By laying bare his own experiences, Barot brings us close enough to witness the lyrical work of consciousness. Patient and attentive, this collection illuminates the everyday and invites us to find pleasure in doing the same, at every stage of life. Read more

In Discipline, Jane Yeh depicts a haunting and hilarious variety of lives, from an endangered young rhinoceros to the denizens of the 1980s New York club scene. These multifaceted poems explore what identity isn't and is, as performance, as struggle, as change, as art with penetrating wit, channeling the voices of outsiders, artists, misfits, and others. Discipline inhabits the space between the real and the surreal, a mash-up of deadpan humor and heartbreaking imagery where novelty T-shirts and lady astronaut centaurs can coexist. The poems are triggered by videos, paintings and installations by contemporary artists, animals and city life. Imaginary landscapes converge with episodes from recent history: power, resistance, and the structures of oppression are seen inexorably in operation. These miniature dramas perform their own autopsies: ‘Sweet, then sour. My lips the colour of Doubt.' Read more

Finalist, 2022 Patterson Poetry Prize Peach State has its origins in Atlanta, Georgia, the author’s hometown and an emblematic city of the New South, a name that reflects the American region’s invigoration in recent decades by immigration and a spirit of reinvention. Focused mainly on food and cooking, these poems explore the city’s transformation from the mid-twentieth century to today, as seen and shaped by Chinese Americans. The poems are set in restaurants, home kitchens, grocery stores, and the houses of friends and neighbors. Often employing forms—sonnet, villanelle, sestina, palindrome, ghazal, rhymed stanzas—they also mirror the constant negotiation with tradition that marks both immigrant and Southern experience. Read more

In these hybrid poems, Jessica Q. Stark explores her mother’s fraught immigration to the United States from Vietnam at the end of war through the lens of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale.Told through personal, national, and cultural histories, Buffalo Girl is a feminist indictment of the violence used to define and control women's bodies. Interspersed throughout this hybrid work are a series of collaged photographs, featuring Stark’s mother’s black-and-white photography from Vietnam beautifully and hauntingly layered over various natural landscapes — lush tropical plants, dense forests, pockets of wildflowers. Several illustrations from old Red Riding Hood children’s books can also be found embedded into these pieces. Juxtaposing the moral implications of Little Red Riding Hood with her mother's photography, Stark creates an image-text conversation that attends to the wolves lurking in the forests of our everyday lives. Opening the whispered frames around sexuality and sex work, immersed in the unflattering symptoms of survival, Buffalo Girl burgeons with matrilineal love and corporeal rage while censuring the white gaze and the violence enacted through the English language. Here is an inversion of diasporic victimhood. Here is an unwavering attention to the burdens suffered by the women of this world. Here is a reimagination, a reclamation, a way out of the woods. Read more

"Small Wars Manual is a masterpiece, one of those books I read and know at once I’ll be coming back to the rest of my life.”—Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!From award-winning poet Chris Santiago, a far-reaching collection of erasures and original poems examining the long shadow of American militarism and imperialism.Stemming in part from a disturbingly mundane military document of the same name, Small Wars Manual is a how-to for imperialism that critically dismantles itself with each passing line, “a pidgin // containing elements // of animus and // insubordination.” In its wake, the very boundaries of oppression and resistance, art and justice, and power and truth are exploded.Highly conceptual yet gut-wrenching, this meticulous and visionary masterpiece of erasure poetry and other forms sinks into the cold mechanics of American warfare in the Philippines and Vietnam to reveal a brutal rhetoric. In more autobiographical sections, Chris Santiago’s own Filipino immigrant background reveals hard-lived experiences, where “stars can guide // either bayonets // or refugees” and “even small wars waged // on the living room floor” cause trepidation and harm.This righteous collection redeems the vulnerable from the aggressors—empire, army, their systems and tools—and transforms everything in the process. In the hands of Santiago, the deconstructive becomes the eviscerating, condemning all wars that upend countries and mark generations. Here are shining poems that make shelter of chaos, by one of the most skillful and intrepid poets writing today. Read more

YOU WILL NOT ERASE MEA Memoir in Poetry, Protest, and SurvivalBy Emmy-winning filmmaker and global storyteller Lisa Russell, MPHFor every woman who’s been erased.For every artist asked to create without credit.For every voice that refuses to stay silent.In this bold, genre-defying collection, Emmy-winning filmmaker and global storyteller Lisa Russell fuses poetry and personal narrative into a searing memoir of injustice, survival, and creative resistance.As an Asian American woman with two decades in the global UN and NGO space, Lisa has spent her life amplifying silenced voices while often being silenced herself. From war zones to global stages, from quiet betrayals to bold acts of defiance, You Will Not Erase Me explores what it means to be erased by systems yet remembered through art.This is not a pity story.Not vengeance in verse.This is survival as testimony.Protest as poetry.A reclamation of labor, voice, and legacy.Inside these pages, you’ll find:• A raw, lyrical journey through erasure and resilience• A collection that blurs the line between art and activism• A call to artists, advocates, and dreamers who are done asking for permissionThis book is for:• The women who upheld feminism but were left behind by it• The storytellers whose creative labor changed the world without acknowledgment• The global advocates who built the room but weren’t handed the mic• The cultural workers, disruptors, and survivors who write themselves back into historyIf you’ve ever been told to stay quiet, to play small, or to wait your turn, this book is for you.Because when the world tries to erase you,you write yourself back into it.Praise for You Will Not Erase Me“You are a true poet… these poems are beautiful and touching.”Countess Albina du Boisrouvray, global philanthropist and founder of FXB International“The emotional impact of your memoir is, for me, on the level of immersing in Seamus Heaney’s prose. I’m truly blown away. This is a masterpiece.”Paul Ellingstad, Managing Partner, PTI Advisors“Lisa Russell has used poetry to great effect, creating a poignant memoir that is visually and lyrically beautiful.”Fiona Leonard, author, playwright, and former diplomat Read more

“Yoon unflinchingly illustrates the horrors suffered by Korean ‘comfort women’ and grapples with trauma both experienced and inherited.” —The Paris ReviewIn her arresting debut collection, urgently relevant for our times, poet Emily Jungmin Yoon confronts the histories of sexual violence against women, focusing in particular on Korean so-called “comfort women,” women who were forced into sexual labor in Japanese-occupied territories during World War II.In wrenching language, A Cruelty Special to Our Species unforgettably describes the brutalities of war and the fear and sorrow of those whose lives and bodies were swept up by a colonizing power, bringing powerful voice to an oppressed group of people whose histories have often been erased and overlooked. “What is a body in a stolen country,” Yoon asks. “What is right in war.”Moving readers through time, space, and different cultures, and bringing vivid life to the testimonies and confessions of the victims, Yoon takes possession of a painful and shameful history even while unearthing moments of rare beauty in acts of resistance and resilience, and in the instinct to survive and bear witness.“Reaching back to a historical trauma well before her own time, Emily Jungmin Yoon finds language to convey its horror and violence—painfully and unsparingly but somehow also with a delicacy, precision, and attention that does not impose the true (literal) brutality on the reader . . . This is an engaging, urgent book by a writer we must listen to.” —Amy Tan, #1 New York Times–bestselling author “A heart-wrenching debut.” —The Washington Post“Lovely, moving, and ultimately devastating.” —Chang-rae Lee, New York Times–bestselling author Read more

"This book is an overwhelming feast, a treasure, and more than enough proof that Sze is a major poet." —NPRNational Book Award winner Arthur Sze is a master poet, and The Glass Constellation is a triumph spanning five decades, including ten poetry collections and twenty-six new poems. Sze began his career writing compressed, lyrical poems influenced by classical Chinese poetry; he later made a leap into powerful polysemous sequences, honing a distinct stylistic signature that harnesses luminous particulars, and is sharply focused, emotionally resonant, and structurally complex. Fusing elements of Chinese, Japanese, Native American, and various Western experimental traditions—employing startling juxtapositions that are always on target, deeply informed by concern for our endangered planet and troubled species—Arthur Sze presents experience in all its multiplicities, in singular book after book. This collection is an invitation to immerse in a visionary body of work, mapping the evolution of one of our finest American poets. Read more

Born of a personal ache, an unquenchable desire to animate the shadow archive, Saito’s journey unfolds in lyric correspondences and epistolary poems that sing with rage, confusion, and, ultimately, love. In these works, descendants of wartime incarceration exchange dreams, mothers become water goddesses, and a modern daughter haunts future ruins. To enter this book is to enter the slipstream of nonlinear time, where mystical inclinations, yellow cedars, and sisterhood make a balm for trauma’s scars. Altogether, the work enacts a dialogue between the past and the present; the radical ancestor and the future child; and the desert prison and the family garden, where Saito’s father diligently gathers stones. Read more

On the cusp of her thirtieth birthday, Mei-Mei returns to her hometown to find it swarmed by the mysterious 17-year cicada, which last appeared when she was twelve and on the edge of adolescence. The emergences of these biblical Mid-Atlantic insects intersect with Mei-Mei's evolving understanding of an absent grandmother, a mixed-race heritage, and the long shadow of suicide, giving her the tools to connect these profound threads together.In poetry and lyric prose, Year of the Cicada delicately charts one woman's coming of age between two appearances of the heralding insect, through which the speaker navigates heavy silences, intimate moments, and the terror of uncertainty. Read more

In her debut collection, Monica Sok uses poetry to reshape a family’s memory about the Khmer Rouge regime—memory that is both real and imagined—according to a child of refugees. Driven by myth-making and fables, the poems examine the inheritance of the genocide and the profound struggles of searing grief and PTSD. Though the landscape of Cambodia is always present, it is the liminal space, the in-betweenness of diaspora, in which younger generations must reconcile their history and create new rituals. A Nail the Evening Hangs On seeks to reclaim the Cambodian narrative with tenderness and an imagination that moves towards wholeness and possibility. Read more

The energies animating Saints of Little Faith, Megan Pinto’s electrifying debut in poetry, are a forceful quiet, a loud stillness, the caesura between a lightning strike and the sound of thunder. Everywhere, the speaker sees the numinous power of language, the incipience of things to come, even a kind of catastrophic grace in desolation and destruction — as if within the terrain of her own obsession, she recognizes the familiar, ever-changing seasons. Fierce and intimate, this poet’s meditative transformations engage with South Asian experiences of addiction, domestic violence, and mental illness, refusing to ignore narratives treated as unspeakable and overlooked by the English canon. Mapping the collision of abuse, psychosis, and rage, Pinto sees beyond them, buoyed by an inscrutable but abiding faith in the holiness of life itself, in a cold God nevertheless capable of gentleness. Once, “desire was an arrow, but now desire / is the field.” Pinto presides over this expanse, deciding, “I have three choices: to drift through life / anesthetized, to soften. . .” In that unspoken “or,” the merciful lacuna of that ellipsis, reside the lyrical mystery and medicine that feed this astonishing collection and strengthen resolve, both ours and the speaker’s: “The lake looks frozen, but it is not.”  Read more

A debut poetry collection in which non-binary poet and drag performer Wo Chan recounts stories from their queer childhood and adolescence.Togetherness sends out sparks from its electric surface, radiating energy and verve from within its deep and steady emotional core: stories of the poet’s immigrant childhood spent in their family’s Chinese restaurant, culminating in a deportation battle against the State. These narrative threads weave together monologue, soaring lyric descants, and document, taking the positions of apostrophe, biography, and soulful plaint to stage a vibrant and daring performance in which drag is formalism and formalism is drag—at once campy and sincere, queer, tender, and winking. Read more

C. Dale Young, Winner of the 2017 Hanes Award in Poetry from The Fellowship of Southern Writers, brings together decades of work in Building the Perfect Animal: New and Selected Poems. These lyrics cut cleanly and exquisitely, performing a sacrifice at the altar of language. Remedying the inaccurate reports missionaries left in their “filthy journals,” “Memento” imagines instead the surgical precision Aztec priests must have used to “slice from the umbilicus up and through the diaphragm,” keeping the heart “while discarding the body, the feeble thing / tumbling down the steps of the pyramid.” As a tenured artist and veteran doctor, Young writes with a dual awareness of life’s fragility and the lyric’s endurance, presenting readers with new work that is entirely fresh even as it speaks to his broader legacy and dialogues with his preceding oeuvre. This book unfolds like the poet’s experience of time: “‘All my life.’ It sounds so odd to say that out loud. / But strange thing after strange thing transpired.” Representing the still-warm heart, what will one day be the only surviving memento of the outlasted body that bore them, these poems explore the author’s simultaneous embrace of mortality’s richness and resignation to death’s inevitable decay. Young surveys the perpetual ultimatum of his roles: as an oncologist, the patients (including his parents) he couldn’t save; as an artist, the self he intends to confront honestly as his body ages; and, as a mortal raised with stories of the Taino gods, the impossibility of building the perfect animal. When teaching bedside manner, how to break the news to a patient that their cancer will kill them, Young’s student “wants a guide, a checklist,” he says, “but nothing like that exists. It has never existed.” Building the Perfect Animal is a monument to that inconceivable instruction manual, honoring the ceaselessly unprecedented work and gift of being now alive.   Read more

Bird Eating Bird is a new collection of poems from Kristin Naca, winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series mtvU prize as chosen by Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa. Playful and serious all at once, Kristin’s work explores the richness of her cultural and linguistic heritage and perpetuates NPS’s tradition of promoting exceptional poetry from lesser-known poets. Read more

This poetry book takes readers on the journey of life. I had different pains and joys throughout my years of living and this collection of poems is a reflection of those emotions. We often disregard the emotions we feel when we were younger, this story gives light to each and every stage of life. Each story is a story of life; life is the story of all ages. Read more

Offering a series of poems rooted in the profoundly narrative yet disorienting experience of losing a loved one, Prageeta Sharma, in Grief Sequence, summons all of her resources in order to attempt any semblance, poetic or otherwise, of clear sense in trauma. In doing so she shows that grief, frustrating to logic and yet as real as any experience we might know, is ripe for the sort of intellectual and emotional processing of which poetry is most capable. Read more

Discover the Sunday Times bestselling collection from the TikTok sensation and author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous'One of the most important poets of his generation'ANDREW MCMILLAN, author of Physical'Powerful'DUA LIPA'Redefines our idea of what an elegy can do it, what it is for'ILYA KAMINSKY, author of Deaf RepublicIn this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother's death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Vivid, brave and propulsive, Vuong's poems contend with personal loss, the meaning of family, and the value of joy in a perennially fractured American spirit.The author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize and a 2019 MacArthur fellow, Vuong writes directly to our humanity without losing sight of the current moment. Bold and prescient, and a testament to tenderness in the face of violence, Time is a Mother is a return and a forging-forth all at once. Read more

Included in this audio-enhanced edition are recordings of the U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey reading Native Guard in its entirety, as well as an interview with the poet from the HMH podcast The Poetic Voice, in which she recounts what it was like to grow up in the South as the daughter of a white father and a black mother and describes other influences that inspired the work. Experience this Pulitzer Prize–winning collection in an engaging new way. Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Former U.S. Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard is a deeply personal volume that brings together two legacies of the Deep South.Through elegaic verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South—--where one of the first black regiments, The Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War.The title of the collection refers to the black regiment whose role in the Civil War has been largely overlooked by history. As a child in Gulfport, Mississippi, in the 1960s, Trethewey could gaze across the water to the fort on Ship Island where Confederate captives once were guarded by black soldiers serving the Union cause.The racial legacy of the South touched Trethewey’s life on a much more immediate level, too. Many of the poems in Native Guard pay loving tribute to her mother, whose marriage to a white man was illegal in her native Mississippi in the 1960s. Years after her mother’s tragic death, Trethewey reclaims her memory, just as she reclaims the voices of the black soldiers whose service has been all but forgotten.Trethewey's resonant and beguiling collection is a haunting conversation between personal experience and national history. Read more