Poetry

A new Penguin Classics series that recovers and rediscovers the work of African American poets from the 19th and 20th centuries, curated by Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy A Penguin Classic As scholars of African American literature and cultural...

The poems in this bracing debut do not shy away from incomprehensible tragedies: racism, poverty, abuse, and addiction, incest, and infidelities of the body and mind. Yet the world depicted by Shawn R. Jones has moments of humor and playfulness--for...

Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, selected by Tyehimba Jess. In Ghana's Akan tradition, on the eighth day of life a child is named according to the day of the week on which they were born. This marks their true birth. In Kweku...

Self-made poet and social media sensation Pierre Alex Jeanty provides the final piece to his stunning 3-book collection, HER. The much-anticipated final piece in the HER series, HER III is a collection of poetry written for women in an attempt to capture...

A bold, mesmerizing debut collection exploring womanhood, the body, mental illness, and what it means to move between cultures Renowned for her storytelling and spoken-word artistry, Ama Asantewa Diaka is also an exultant, fierce, and visceral poet whose...

A prophetic new collection of poems from Shane McCrae, "a shrewd composer of American stories (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker) Writing you I give the death I takeI know I should feel wounded by your deathI write to you to make a wound write back Shane...

A coming-of-age collection set to the music of the 1980s and 90s. This novel in poetic form tells the story of a young man dealing with the challenges of growing up mixed-race in 1980s suburbia. In this time of change, both for himself and the world...

Diamond Sharp's Super Sad Black Girl is a love letter to her hometown of Chicago, where the speaker finds solace and community with her literary idols in hopes of answering the question: What does it look like when Black women are free? Lorraine...

In her first volume of new poems in twelve years, Rita Dove investigates the vacillating moral compass guiding America's, and the world's, experiments in democracy. Whether depicting the first Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Venice or the contemporary...

The poems in Best Barbarian roam across the literary and social landscape, from Beowulf's Grendel to the jazz musician Alice Coltrane, from reckoning with immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border to thinking through the fraught beauty of the moon on a...