Poetry

Jameela F. Dallis's Encounters for the Living and the Dead is a sensual journey that sweeps the tangible world and the poet's beloveds into its arms--fiercely, tenderly, joyfully. Invoking ancestors and constructing altars to lost loved ones, this...

2019 Over the Rainbow Booklist Selection for Nonfiction.Poets Audre Lorde and Pat Parker first met in 1969; they began exchanging letters regularly five years later. Over the next fifteen years, Lorde and Parker shared ideas, advice, and confidences...

BRANCHES OF THE TREE OF LIFE is the first comprehensive volume of poems by Abiodun Oyewole, many of them never before published. Oyewole's poems are powerful, often political, always lyrical and profoundly moving. Over the course of his forty-year career...

SORROWLAND ORACLE by Ayodele Nzinga is a compendium of spells, incantations, prayers, and their translations into the event of being Black in modernity while standing at the crossroads of revolutionary transformation and the birthing of a new paradigm on...

"Jasmine Reid writes a shapeful, theoretical work involved in the rigorous attending to emergent selves and the languages made in calling them into being." --aracelis girmayInterlocutor Goddess explores the creation of a trans language for selfhood...

"Patricia Smith is the greatest living poet. Every book is better than the last." --Danez Smith, The Guardian A collection of the finest new and selected poems from one of the most groundbreaking voices in contemporary poetry, a "masterful performer and...

Steeped in the myths we spin about self, family, and nation, the poems of All the Possible Bodies attend to the complexities of violence in America, racial justice, and the intersection of personal and national identity. Pollock's third collection is an...

*The Whiting Award-winning poet returns*Written over the span of a decade, GREEN OF ALL HEADS is a work of formal range and emotional urgency. In the coinciding wakes of tragic loss and new motherhood, Aracelis Girmay examines the entangled temporalities...

Winner of The 2024 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, selected by Diane Seuss Fenestration excavates public and private history. The poems here bristle with striking clarity and immediacy while compellingly confronting subjects such as the transatlantic slave...

From addiction and familial dysfunction to gentrification and police brutality, GRIME examines harsh realities through an activist lens with a rare deftness of poetic form."Thea Matthews is our sacred underground; the only host of our ascension."--Tongo...

Selected by Nicole Sealey as the winner of the 2025 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Bloodmercy is a must-read debut that reimagines the tale of Cain and Abel as sisters."Violence is a failure of communication" opens this book as an omen and foregrounds a...

The acclaimed poetic force celebrates the practice of poetry as healing and prayer in this vital, life-affirming collection about surviving the void and touching the divine--the second book in a creative collaboration between Amistad and Moore Black...