Poetry

Diana Arterian’s Agrippina the Younger is a poetry collection that reaches across two thousand years to hold a conversation with one of Rome’s most complicated women. Agrippina the Younger, mother of Nero, sister of Caligula, wife of Emperor Claudius, has been reduced by most historical accounts to a schemer, a seductress, or a cautionary tale….

Ada Limón’s Bright Dead Things arrives like a letter written in the aftermath of a life’s reshuffling — a book about moving from New York City to Kentucky, about love and horses and grief and the strange wildness that persists in the body even as the mind tries to settle down. It is Limón’s fourth…

Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith is a devastating and luminous collection that confronts Black death, queer desire, and the search for a world beyond violence with breathtaking lyrical urgency. About the Book Danez Smith’s second full-length collection opens with a sequence that imagines an afterlife specifically for Black boys killed by police—a heaven…

Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong is a debut poetry collection of such ferocious beauty and emotional precision that it announced one of the most important voices in American literature — a book where grief, war, sexuality, and tenderness collide in language that feels both ancient and utterly new. About the Book Ocean…

A landmark ecopoetic and decolonial collection from Chamoru poet Craig Santos Perez, weaving together fatherhood, colonial history, and Pacific environmental grief into one of the essential ongoing poetry projects in American literature.