Poetry

Selected by Amaud Jamaul Johnson for the 2023 Jake Adam York Prize, Yalie Saweda Kamara's Besaydoo is an elegantly wrought love song to home--as place, as people, as body, and as language.A griot is a historian, a living repository of communal legacies...

A new poetry and fine art collection by award-winning poet and artist JoAnne McFarland attempts to counteract violent acts with creative output.A companion piece to the poet and artist's gorgeous and powerful PULLMAN (Grid Books, 2023), A DOMESTIC...

In WATCHNIGHT, we accompany Johnson's unnamed protagonist on a psychedelic quest across myriad forms, places, and times marked by climate crisis, exodus, and Black trans identity-making. In exhilarating lyric poems and chiseled prose blocks, Cyrée...

A Black poet performs a shamanic soul retrieval of the seven-hundred-year-old diasporic Black arts traditionContinuing her search for a neotropical mythos in this brilliant second collection, poet fahima ife articulates various scenes of subduction...

Intimate and sweeping poetry that examines race and lineageRoom Swept Home serves as a gloriously rendered magnifying glass into all that is held in the line between the private and public, the investigative and generative, the self and those who came...

A poignant and rousing debut book of poetry from the acclaimed, best-selling author of the novel Nightcrawling, also the former Youth Poet Laureate of Oakland, CA. Leila Mottley follows her trailblazing first novel with a perfectly pitched first...

A beautiful artist's book documenting a mother and son's intimate exchange across time and mediumsThis tenderly wrought artist's book is a collaboration between American conceptual artist Rashid Johnson (born 1977) and his mother, historian Cheryl...

To foil the context was to outrun the authority's imagination. And to refuse all explanations of why what we felt was not real.To disarm the wolf every time at every gate. Unthread its learnedness and don the lonely pelt.The poems of Alt-Nature move in...

In A Journey Through Love, you'll find a comforting melody of love, a strength only given from God above and a reason to keep moving forward.

A poetry collection that reflects on intimate aspects of Black history, culture, and identity, revealing an uncommon gaze on working-class Philadelphia from the 1960s to the present day In 55 poems, Migration Letters straddles the personal and public...

With echoes of Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals and Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor, an extraordinary debut collection from a prize-winning poet that chronicles a Black woman's journey through disability, the byzantine healthcare system, life-giving,...

A book of loss, looking back, and what binds us to life, by a towering poetic talent, called "one of the poetry stars of his generation" (Los Angeles Times). "We sleep long, / if not sound," Kevin Young writes early on in this exquisite gathering of...

Tender Headed, selected by Camille Rankine as a winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series, is a musical and formally playful meditation on Black identity and masculinity"In Tender Headed, Olatunde Osinaike asks the question, what makes a man, and what...

This beautiful, slender collection--small and weighted like a coin--is Rowan Ricardo Phillips at his very best. These luminous, unsparing, dreamlike poems are as lyrical as they are virtuosic. "Not the meaning," Phillips writes, "but the meaningfulness...