Staff Picks
#BroaderBookshelf 2023 - Poetry After 2003 - Debut Titles
- Mahogany S.
- Monday, January 09, 2023
Collection
Check out one of these titles and fulfill the #BroaderBookshelf 2023 Reading Challenge prompt "read a collection of poetry published since 2003".
This list is part of the #BroaderBookshelf 2023 Reading Challenge. Find more lists here.
Calling a Wolf a Wolf ; Poems
Published in 2017
""The struggle from late youth on, with and without God, agony, narcotics and love is a torment rarely recorded with such sustained eloquence and passion as you will find in this collection." -Fanny Howe. This highly-anticipated debut boldly confronts addiction and courses the strenuous path of recovery, beginning in the wilds of the mind. Poems confront craving, control, the constant battle of alcoholism and sobriety, and the questioning of the self and its instincts within the context of this never-ending fight. From "Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before": Sometimes you just have to leave whatever's real to you, you have to clomp through fields and kick the caps off all the toadstools. Sometimes you have to march all the way to Galilee or the literal foot of God himself before you realize you've already passed the place where you were supposed to die. I can no longer remember the being afraid, only that it came to an end. Kaveh Akbar is the founding editor of Divedapper. His poems appear recently or soon in The New Yorker, Poetry, APR, Tin House, PBS NewsHour, and elsewhere. He is the author of the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry). The recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives and teaches in Florida"-- Provided by publisher.
Against Heaven
Poems
Published in 2022
Kemi Alabi's transcendent debut reimagines the poetic and cultural traditions from which it is born, troubling the waters of some of our country's central and ordained fictions--those mythic politics of respectability, resilience, and redemption. Instead of turning to a salvation that has been forced upon them, Alabi turns to the body and the earth as sites of paradise defined by the pleasure and possibility of Black, queer fugitivity. Through tender love poems, righteous prayers, and vital provocations, we see the colonizers we carry within ourselves being laid to rest. Against Heaven is a praise song made for the flames of a burning empire--a freedom dream that shapeshifts into boundless multiplicities for the wounds made in the name of White supremacy and its gods. Alabi has written an astonishing collection of magnificent range, commanding the full spectrum of the Black, queer spirit's capacity for magic, love, and ferocity in service of healing--the highest power there is.
If They Come for Us
Poems
Published in 2018
"This imaginative, soulful debut poetry collection captures the experiences of being a young Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America. Orphaned as a child, Fatimah Asghar grapples with coming of age and navigating questions of sexuality and race without the guidance of a mother or father. These poems at once bear anguish, joy, vulnerability, and compassion, while also exploring the man facets of violence: how it persists within us, how it is inherited across generations, and how it manifests itself in our relationships. In experimental forms and language both lyrical and raw, Asghar seamlessly braids together marginalized people's histories with her own understanding of identity, place, and belonging."-- From publisher's description.
Trouble the Water
Poems
Published in 2016
"Rich in religious and artistic imagery, Trouble the Water is an intriguing exploration of race, sexuality, and identity, particularly where self-hood is in constant flux. These intimate, sensual poems interweave pop culture and history--moving from the Bible through several artistic eras--to interrogate what it means to be, as Austin says, fully human as a "queer, black body" in 21st century America"-- Provided by publisher.
Depression & Other Magic Tricks
Published in 2017
Depression & Other Magic Tricks is the debut book by Sabrina Benaim, one of the most-viewed performance poets of all time, whose poem Explaining My Depression to My Mother has become a cultural phenomenon with over 5,000,000 views. Depression & Other Magic Tricks explores themes of mental health, love, and family. It is a documentation of struggle and triumph, a celebration of daily life and of living. Benaim's wit, empathy, and gift for language produce a work of endless wonder.
Strange Borderlands
Poems
Published in 2013
"Ben Berman's wonderful first book, Strange Borderlands, is a masterful study in the power and limits of empathy, of respect for difference in tension with the urgent need for common ground. Beyond his formal and stylistic range, linguistic flexibility, eye for detail, irrepressible wit and powerful feeling, what's most impressive about this terrific book is Berman's inclusive generous spirit, the dealy serious imaginative play he exercises in every line of every poem ... These are poems that weigh, consider, and restore some flesh-and-blood meaning to the experience of multiculturalism ... Ben Berman's lyric poems mostly set in Zimbabwe dig deep into the casual and the casualty of daily life: the hammer striking the sheep's head, the sustenance that follws; disciplinary beatings that students, giggly and protesting, could count and count on to fade. Unassuming but wise, compassionate yet wildly, unpredictably funny at times, Berman delivers to us escalating hardships that somehow elevated us toward the sacred; the pathetic harvest and sweetness that comes from the least likely of places. This least likely of places is where Berman thrives, calling on closely observed facts to chronicle the perimeters of tenderness and cruelty ... Strange Borderlans, chronicles in startling and ungorgettable poems his sojourn in Zimbabwe and his immersion in a culture that both embraces and exiles him, attracts and reproaches, changing him forever. Using a variety of poetic approaches: rhymed couplets, prose paragraphs, sonnets, free verse--he gives us a multi-tonal description of landscapes that are as elusive as they are inviting, as unfamiliar to most of us as they are intuitively recognizable ..."--Back cover.
Thresh & Hold
Published in 2022
"Marlanda Dekine's debut collection is a holy, radical unlearning and reclamation of self. What does it mean to be a Gullah-Geechee descendant from a rural place where a third of the nation's founding wealth was harvested by trafficked West and Central Africans? Dekine's poems travel across age and time, signaling that both the past and future exist in the present. Through erasure and persona, Dekine reimagines and calls to task the Works Progress Administration narratives, modern-day museums, and intergenerational traumas. Beyond gospel music, fear, and the stories of generations past, Thresh & Hold offers magic, healing, and innovative pathways to manifest intimacy. Dekine remembers, remakes, and brings forth their many selves, traveling far in order to deeply connect to a spiritual home within and all around them, calling: "I am listening to Spirit. I am not dying today." Marlanda Dekine is the winner of the 2021 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize"-- Provided by publisher.
Un-American
Published in 2020
"Poetry that investigates definitions of belonging in relation to migration, religion, language, and loss, tracing a family history between Nigeria and the United States"-- Provided by publisher.
Border Vista
Poems
Published in 2022
"In Border Vista, winner of the 2021 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry, Anni Liu intimately narrates experiences of being undocumented, or precariously documented, in America, in poems that move between China and the United States"-- Provided by publisher.
Spit Back a Boy
Poems
Published in 2011
"Iain Haley Pollock's poems cover the ground from a woman late to catfish supper to an ancient queen who howls, "Sea, you is ugly," from the creaking of slave ships launched from Lancaster to gunfire on a contemporary Philadelphia street. Such lyric moments find grounding in stories woven through this book--in one story line, a boy with a black mother and white father wishes he could shed his white skin or carve into what lies beneath: "I flung my almost white self / into my mother's embrace--that brown / embrace I hoped would swallow me whole / and spit back a boy four shades darker." Another thread follows a marriage and a woman intertwined with hunger and the blues, a woman who hears a whale song in a refrigerator's hum, who cries hard like the lonely barking of a fox. Even when these poems soften, they can't be complacent about good fortune: for all the maple seedpods and snow fluttering down here, the poems are always aware of wreckage and car bombs there, and they keep conscious of the mustard gas of old wars and the losses of recent ones. Punctuated with lives that end early, such as those of Hart Crane and Mikey Clark, a high-school classmate who once swiped the Communion wine, Pollock's collection earns its vitality and romance without closing its eyes to violence and sorrow." -- Publisher.
Fieldglass
Published in 2021
"A candid exploration of sexual identity, female friendship, family dynamics, and queer experiences of love, this book is a collection of poems about obsession, addictions, and a life given over to making art"-- Provided by publisher.
Indecency
Published in 2018
"Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful--the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us."--Amazon.com.
Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers
Poems
Published in 2019
Selected by Kathy Fagan as a winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers is a debut collection of poems by a dazzling geologist of queer eros. Drunktown, New Mexico, is a place where men 'only touch when they fuck in a backseat.' Its landscape is scarred by violence: done to it, done on it, done for it. Under the cover of deepest night, sleeping men are run over by trucks. Navajo bodies are deserted in fields. Resources are extracted. Lines are crossed. Men communicate through beatings, and football, and sex. In this place, 'the closest men become is when they are covered in blood / or nothing at all.' But if Jake Skeets's collection is an unflinching portrait of the actual west, it is also a fierce reclamation of a living place'full of beauty as well as brutality, whose shadows are equally capable of protecting encounters between boys learning to become, and to love, men. Its landscapes are ravaged, but they are also startlingly lush with cacti, yarrow, larkspur, sagebrush. And even their scars are made newly tender when mapped onto the lover's body: A spine becomes a railroad. 'Veins burst oil, elk black.' And 'becoming a man / means knowing how to become charcoal.' Rooted in Navajo history and thought, these poems show what has been brewing in an often forgotten part of the American literary landscape, an important language, beautiful and bone dense. Sculptural, ambitious, and defiantly vulnerable, the poems of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers are coal that remains coal, despite the forces that conspire for diamond, for electricity.
Three Poems
Published in 2020
"A British poet's debut collection, winner of the 2018 T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry"-- Provided by publisher.
Ecologia
Published in 2021
"Sophia Anfinn Tonnessen's debut collection, noteworthy for its experimental forms, long poems, and intentional repetitions, explores the intersections of gender, identity, and memory across time. Tonnessen is transgender, and her work captures the intense undeniability of an emerging self searching for a new ecology, both biological and political."--Publisher's website.
The Year of Blue Water
Published in 2019
How can a search for self-knowledge reveal art as a site of community? Yanyi's arresting and straightforward poems weave experiences of immigration as a Chinese American, of racism, of mental wellness, and of gender from a queer and trans perspective. Between the contrast of high lyric and direct prose poems, Yanyi invites the reader to consider how to speak with multiple identities through trauma, transition, and ordinary life. These poems constitute an artifact of a groundbreaking and original author whose work reflects a long journey self-guided through tarot, therapy, and the arts. Foregrounding the power of friendship, Yanyi's poems converse with friends as much as with artists both living and dead, from Agnes Martin to Maggie Nelson to Robin Coste Lewis. This instructive collection gives voice to the multifaceted humanity within all of us and inspires attention, clarity, and hope through art-making and community.