National Network for Equitable Library Service

An NPR Best Book of the Year. A new collection of poetry from one of our most acclaimed contemporary poets, Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham.—In her formidable and clairvoyant new collection, Runaway, Jorie Graham deepens her vision of our futurity. What of us will survive? Identity may be precarious, but perhaps love is not?

Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco, selected by Tyehimba Jess for the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, is an aching tribute to the power and precarity of queer love. In small-town Mississippi, before the aughts, a child “assigned ‘woman’” and a boy “forced to call / himself a girl” love one another—from afar, behind closed doors, in motels. The child survives an injurious mother and the beast-shaped men she brings home; the boy becomes a soldier. Years later, the boy—the eponymous beloved, Missy—dies by suicide, kicking up a riptide of memory. This is where K.

A fourth collection from a prize-winning poet whose "gift is breathtaking" (Naomi Shihab Nye). Eugene Gloria's Sightseer in This Killing City captures the surreal and disorienting feelings of the present. In the wake of recent presidential elections in the United States and in the Philippines, Gloria's latest collection sharpens his obsession with arrivals and departures, gun violence, displacement, cultural legacy, and the bitter divisions in America.

Precise, taut, minimalist poems are Toliver's Yellow Wallpaper — using the thud and drone of language to evoke the suffocation of a marriage gone sour, sound bouncing back, and creating patterns that are an inhibiting force in themselves. There's a pulse to her work — one that harnesses the energy on the page to transcend binaries and boundaries of the self.

A new collection from a poet of "wily verve" whose work is "filled with more satire and jeopardy than anything going today" (Terrance Hayes). Mark Yakich's fifth collection of poetry is a dynamic and discerning journey of devotion and temptation in pursuit of the divine. Not trifling in ambiguity but diving headlong into it, Spiritual Exercises wrestles with popular gods as much as with personal ghosts.

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 poems, "Till the end / we sing / into the wind." In scenes and settings that circle family and the generations in the American South—one poem, "Kith," exploring that strange bedfellow of "kin"—the speaker and his young son wander among the stones of their ancestors.

The award-winning poet weaves a tapestry of literary heritage and intimate reflection as she pays tribute to women artists and mentors – and circles the ongoing mysteries of friendship, love, art, and loss. In this powerful gathering of poems about her own "influencers," as well as poems on Dadaist artist Méret Oppenheim and the young choreographer Lauren Lovette, Brenda Shaughnessy dwells in memories of the women who set her on her artistic path.

"A truly moving book." — John Ashbery Jana Prikryl’s The After Party journeys across borders and eras, from Cold War Central Europe to present-day New York City, from ancient Rome to New World suburbs, constantly testing the lingua francas we negotiate to know ourselves. These poems disclose the tensions in our inherited identities and showcase Prikryl’s ambitious experimentation with style. “Thirty Thousand Islands,” the second half of the collection, presents some forty linked poems that incorporate numerous voices.

In this gorgeous third collection, Sandra Lim investigates desire, sexuality, and dream with sinewy intelligence and a startling freshness. Truthful, sensuous, and intellectually relentless, the poems in The Curious Thing are compelling meditations on love, art making, solitude, female fate, and both the mundane and serious principles of life.

The Morning After is Margaret Randall's 30th poetry collection and eleventh with Wings Press. The title poem was written, as so many in this country were, the morning after the November 8, 2016 presidential election: "I wish there was a pill for that," is one of its lines. But Randall doesn't stay with anger, irony, or a pamphleteering voice. Her work goes much deeper, grappling with ageless concerns and unexpected details.