Yalie Saweda Kamara’s Besaydoo is an elegantly wrought love song to home—as place, as people, as body, and as language. Yalie Saweda Kamara writes for a new America, where praise is plentiful and Black lives flourish.
Reading Lists
29 Lists
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The latest in the Seedbank series, the debut in English of a groundbreaking Indigenous poet of the Americas. Steely lyrics fuse cosmology, lineage, feminism, and environmental activism into a singular body of work that stands for the self and the…
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A polyphonic new entry in Multiverse, JJJJJerome Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies beautifully rewrites history, creating a world that blooms backward, reimagining what it means for Black and disabled people to have taken, and to continue to take, their…
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Spending time in wild places with their children, Chris Dombrowski learns that their youthful sense of wonder at the beauty and connectivity of the more-than-human world is not naivete to be shed, but rather wisdom most of us lose along the way…
- Longlisted for for the Griffin Poetry Prize Longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize
An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. -
Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward—toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics.
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Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Jackson Holbert’s Winter Stranger is a solemn record of addiction and the divided affections we hold for the landscapes that shape us.
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Concrete and evocative, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a testament to persistence, even when the body is not allowed to thrive.
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From U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón comes The Carrying—her most powerful collection yet.
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Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Ryann Stevenson’s Human Resources is a sobering and perceptive portrait of technology’s impact on connection and power.
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A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow
A Ohiana Award Finalist in Poetry
A Williams Carlos Williams Award RecipientFrom Kingsley Tufts Award finalist Kathy Fagan comes Bad Hobby, a perceptive collection focused on memory, class, and might-have-beens.
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This winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize is an elegant debut that searches widely to ask what it means to exist in a state of loss.
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The winner of the inaugural Max Ritvo Poetry Prize is an assured debut collection about grace—the places we search for it, and the disjunction between what we seek and where we arrive.
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Assigned to write an exposé on one of the most elusive and corrupt figures in the conservation world, a journalist finds himself on a plane to the Congo. His harrowing search leads him into an underground network of sinners and saints.
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When young Deni’s mother leaves his charismatic father, the boy learns of his father’s true identity: André Béchard was once a bank robber—and so Deni’s imagination is set on fire. This deeply affecting memoir is at once a highly unconventional…
- Beloved author Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s celebrated work of nonfiction, now including additional essays and illustrations in paperback.
- A sweeping and richly evocative debut novel of a family bound by memory and legacy, love and loss, and a homeland forever changed.
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Ask the Brindled is an intergenerational reclamation of the narratives foisted upon Indigenous and queer Hawaiians.
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From poet Victoria Chang, a collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations.
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“Birds are my almanac. They tune me into the seasons, and into myself.” So begins this lively collection of essays by acclaimed filmmaker and novelist Priyanka Kumar.
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In building relationships with his former neighbors, Ali explores questions of land and power―and in remembering a lost connection to this place, finally finds a home he might belong to.
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Selected by Jos Charles as the winner of the Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Return Flight is a lush reckoning: with inheritance, with body, with trauma, with desire—and with the many tendons in between.
- Winner of the 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, this engrossing debut interrogates history, identity, and the power of poetry to elucidate both.
- A vulnerable and honest collection of poems exploring lineage, love, and the pandemic, from one of the most acclaimed poets of his generation.
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In The Galleons, Rick Barot widens his scope, contextualizing the immigrant journey of his Filipino-American family in the larger history and aftermath of colonialism.
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These poems take a piercing, witty, and ferocious look into the heart of the Fukushima Daiichi plant disaster, showing us survivors, victims, and Tsunami: a force of nature, femme fatale, and “annihilatrix.”
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This collection offers a singular perspective on our nation of immigrants and the tensions pulsing in the margins where they live and work.
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A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Big Reads Selection
A 2024 NPR “Books We Love” SelectionPublished in association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of fifty…
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Tula: a ruined Toltec capital; a Russian city known for its accordions; Tagalog for “poem.” Inspired by the experiences of the second-generation immigrant who does not fully acquire the language of his parents, the winner of the 2016 Lindquist &…
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Heian-period Japanese women writers, science fiction, and the author’s own experience as a second-generation immigrant: these are some of the sources these poems use to explore the connection between identity and language. Wonderfully lyrical and…
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From the intersection of Onondaga, Japanese, Cuban, and Appalachian cultures, this collection arrives brimming with personal and political histories.
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The sea is an impossible force in this collection: it is both a majestic presence that predates man, and something to carry with us wherever we go. These brilliantly translated poems, presented in both Chinese and English, introduce an important…
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When Tom Serafino’s twin sister, Teagan, suffers a debilitating brain injury, a police investigation implicates his playmate’s uncle, Shoe. Innocent of the crime but burdened by his own childhood tragedy, Shoe takes the blame—inviting the question of…
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This groundbreaking anthology presents a revelatory portrait of contemporary Vietnamese poetry. What emerges from this conversation of outsiders and insiders, Vietnamese and American voices, is a worldly sensibility descended from the geographical…
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Drawing on a dizzying array of sources—including Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Korean folklore, and Turkish proverbs—this winner of the American Book Award explores the entangled myths that accompany the experience of immigration. These poems reveal a…
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Yalie Saweda Kamara’s Besaydoo is an elegantly wrought love song to home—as place, as people, as body, and as language. Yalie Saweda Kamara writes for a new America, where praise is plentiful and Black lives flourish.
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A vibrant collection of personal and lyric essays in conversation with archival objects of Black history and memory.
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A polyphonic new entry in Multiverse, JJJJJerome Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies beautifully rewrites history, creating a world that blooms backward, reimagining what it means for Black and disabled people to have taken, and to continue to take, their…
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Ama Codjoe’s highly anticipated debut collection brings generous light to the inner dialogues of women as they bathe, create art, make and lose love. Each poem rises with the urgency of a fully awakened sensual life.
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Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward—toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics.
- An imaginative anthology of climate fiction from emerging new voices, curated by the editors of Grist Magazine.
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This memoir is a riveting exploration of the contradictions of Black identity in the rural South, asking what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity.”
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Tracing the author’s journey from the tropical forests of Trinidad to the stark landscape of rural Canada—as well as that of his personal, musical metamorphosis—this is a poignant memoir of overcoming and belonging.
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From the Bahamas, London, and Cairo, to Minnesota and Georgia—and from the intimate messages of the heart to the global immigration of African Americans—these poems explore with urgency the relationships among travel, alienation, and home. Part…
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For centuries, the richness of our world’s diverse stories has been widely overlooked by readers of environmental literature. This collection works against this blind spot, exploring the relationship between culture and place, emphasizing the lasting…
- An intimate and kaleidoscopic entry in the Multiverse series that excavates survival, storytelling, and coming to terms with an unruly mind.
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Affectionate, dynamic, and uncommonly observant, this collection mines the richness of history to create a map of identity and influence. In the South, “lard sizzles a sermon from the stove”; in Chicago, we feast on an “opera of peppers and pimento”…
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A multicultural anthology about the enduring importance and shifting associations of the hearth in our world.
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21|19 offers a re-reading of the “American Renaissance” and new possibilities for imaginative critical practice today.
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A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Big Reads Selection
A 2024 NPR “Books We Love” SelectionPublished in association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of fifty…
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A polyphonic new entry in Multiverse, JJJJJerome Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies beautifully rewrites history, creating a world that blooms backward, reimagining what it means for Black and disabled people to have taken, and to continue to take, their…
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The latest in the Seedbank series, the debut in English of a groundbreaking Indigenous poet of the Americas. Steely lyrics fuse cosmology, lineage, feminism, and environmental activism into a singular body of work that stands for the self and the…
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A haunting collection that inhabits a disquieting future where fear is the governing body, “the organ and the tissue / and the cell, the membrane and the organelle.”
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Selected by Maggie Smith for the Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, this debut collection of poems explores the aftermath of history’s most powerful forces: devotion, disaster, and us.
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An imaginative reworking of the elegy that focuses on the difficult work of being with the dying.
- Longlisted for for the Griffin Poetry Prize Longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize
An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. -
Ice indexes the findings from memory’s slow melt—stories and faces we’ve forgotten, bones hidden in frost.
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Sara Eliza Johnson’s much-anticipated second collection traces human emotion and experience across a Gothic landscape of glacial and cosmic scale.
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The North American debut of Tuệ Sỹ—poet, monk, scholar, dissident, and one of the great cultural figures of modern Vietnam—and a new bilingual edition to the Seedbank series.
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This National Poetry Series winner is an unflinching portrait of the actual west—full of beauty as well as brutality, where boys tentatively learn to become, and to love, men.
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A thoughtful new collection of poems, one that deconstructs the deceptively simple question of what it means to be good—a good person, a good citizen, a good teacher, a good poet, a good father.
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Environmental collapse. The betrayals and alliances of the animal world. The celebrities in our feeds, the stories we tell ourselves.
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This collection takes the physical, elemental world as its point of inquiry, examining how language arises from landscape. Some of these poems begin with the form of physical objects—a rock, split slate, an egg, a feather—while others emerge from a…
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To Make Room for the Sea reckons with the notion that nothing in this world is permanent.
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Sharp, searching, and ecstatically musical, The Mirrormaker is a genre-expanding exploration of boom and bust—in mining economies and in young love.
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One of the most important contemporary poets working in German makes his American debut in this compact, light-footed, and curious dual-language collection.
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Deepwater Horizon, Hurricane Katrina, Flint: this is the litany of our time, and these are the events traced in these poems, invoking the poet as moral witness. Incorporating interviews and excerpts from government documents and other sources, this…
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With firm roots in science and the natural world, the author’s poems have been compared to Emerson’s and Whitman’s. She has written about motherhood, art, science, spirituality, and the tension between humanity and wildness. This edition presents the…
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In Blue Lash, James Armstrong explores the way a physical place can be alchemically transformed into mental geographies. The world of Lake Superior comes alive and expands outward in these poems: cicadas “grind their teeth/under the blue roof of…
- From one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers, an urgent and essential collection of poems illuminating the visionary presence of Palestinians.
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Translated from the Arabic and introduced by Fady Joudah, You Can Be the Last Leaf draws on two decades of work to present the transcendent and timely US debut of Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat.
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Love poems to the lovely and unlovely, the loved and unloved, finding tenderness for the other, the dead, and the disappeared.
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From Fady Joudah, an elegant collection of poems that shifts deftly between the microscope, the telescope, and the horoscope.
![[...] book cover](/sites/default/files/styles/book_list_cover/public/2024-10/%5B...%5D_NBA_Medallion%20%281%29.jpg?h=c08ebf62&itok=Dbaj25Ek)
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In Thin Places, a luminous blend of memoir, history, and nature writing, Kerri ní Dochartaigh explores how nature kept her sane and helped her heal after The Troubles.
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Spending time in wild places with their children, Chris Dombrowski learns that their youthful sense of wonder at the beauty and connectivity of the more-than-human world is not naivete to be shed, but rather wisdom most of us lose along the way…
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A Best Book of the Year at The Vulture
A devastating memoir that sheds urgent, bracingly honest light on both the taboos surrounding disability and the limits of medical science.
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Tracing the author’s journey from the tropical forests of Trinidad to the stark landscape of rural Canada—as well as that of his personal, musical metamorphosis—this is a poignant memoir of overcoming and belonging.
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In building relationships with his former neighbors, Ali explores questions of land and power―and in remembering a lost connection to this place, finally finds a home he might belong to.
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From poet Victoria Chang, a collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations.
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This memoir is a riveting exploration of the contradictions of Black identity in the rural South, asking what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity.”
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Thrillingly written in a series of fractured vignettes, and unflinchingly honest, Mamaskatch is a heartbreaking account of how traumas are passed down from one generation to the next.
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Following his award-winning debut memoir, Mamaskatch, which masterfully portrayed a Cree coming-of-age in rural Canada, Darrel J. McLeod continues the poignant story of his adulthood.
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From sixteen-year-old Dara McAnulty, a globally renowned figure in the youth climate activist movement, comes a memoir about loving the natural world and fighting to save it.
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Orr articulates his journey in language as lyrical as it is authentic, gifting us all with a singular tale of survival, and of the transformation of suffering into art.
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This contemporary classic has inspired thousands to embrace their beginnings, no matter how humble, and to fight for the places they love. In language at once colloquial, elegiac, and informative, this memoir catalogues a people and their home—a…
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Feed a fever, starve a cold, but what do we do for cancer? Generous and bittersweet, these essays ponder the intimate connections between food, family, and illness.
- Beth Dooley arrived in Minnesota from New Jersey with preconceptions about the Midwestern food scene. Having learned to cook in her grandmother’s kitchen, shopping at farm stands and making preserves, she couldn’t help but wonder, “Do people here…
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When young Deni’s mother leaves his charismatic father, the boy learns of his father’s true identity: André Béchard was once a bank robber—and so Deni’s imagination is set on fire. This deeply affecting memoir is at once a highly unconventional…
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A trip becomes an odyssey of self-discovery. Written in gritty, honest prose, Canoeing with José is a remarkable journey.
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In this beautiful, evocative, and sometimes provocative memoir, Tim Winton explores Australia’s unique landscape, and how that singular place has shaped him and his writing.
