The Poetry Book to Read in 2024

As a reader, I love this moment when we look ahead to the new year’s literary landscape, considering and prioritizing what to read first, wondering what will enthrall us. Sure, an anticipated list can have the delicious capriciousness of an amuse-bouche; in the end, it doesn’t tell you much about the full menu. But isn’t that the joy of it? There’s still so much left to discover.

David Woo and I have gathered a little more than a baker’s dozen of titles for you from a year that will also offer Marie Howe’s New and Selected (Norton); new collections from Andrea Cohen (The Sorrow Apartments, Four Way Books) and Geffrey Davis (One Wild World Away, BOA); and a slate of debuts that includes Diego Baez’s Yaguareté White (University of Arizona Press); Sarah Ghazal Ali’s Theophanies (Alice James Books); and Yalie Saweda Kamara’s Besaydoo (Milkweed). Forgive us, readers, we aren’t very good at anticipation: when we had the books in hand, we dove in. Welcome to our poetry preview for 2024, and please come back every month for more.

Rebecca Morgan Frank

“Close, closer,” Diane Seuss writes in her new book Modern Poetry, “to that sheeted edge.” As I turn the pages of poetry books in 2024, I hope to see glimpses of that edge, the edge of something in extremis, perhaps, but also the edge of the piece of paper, which is also the edge of a poet’s mind. Strange transfigurations of form, startling intensifications of moral and political perception, unexpected evocations of consciousness—I anticipate a full range of astonishments in the new year.

Some of the books will be extensions of oeuvres I’ve pleasurably followed for years by poets seeking to achieve the next culmination in the life of their artistry, like Victoria Chang’s With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Don Mee Choi’s Mirror Nation (Wave Books), Kwame Dawes’s Sturge Town (Norton), Tracy Fuad’s Portal (University of Chicago), Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles (Nightboat Books), Carl Phillips’s Scattered Snows, to the North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Donald Revell’s Canandaigua (Alice James Books), and Corey Van Landingham’s Reader, I (Sarabande). Other books will be by poets who are new to me and, I hope, new to themselves, finding their edge for the reader’s astonishment.As a reader, I love this moment when we look ahead to the new year’s literary landscape, considering and prioritizing what to read first, wondering what will enthrall us. Sure, an anticipated list can have the delicious capriciousness of an amuse-bouche; in the end, it doesn’t tell you much about the full menu. But isn’t that the joy of it? There’s still so much left to discover.

David Woo and I have gathered a little more than a baker’s dozen of titles for you from a year that will also offer Marie Howe’s New and Selected (Norton); new collections from Andrea Cohen (The Sorrow Apartments, Four Way Books) and Geffrey Davis (One Wild World Away, BOA); and a slate of debuts that includes Diego Baez’s Yaguareté White (University of Arizona Press); Sarah Ghazal Ali’s Theophanies (Alice James Books); and Yalie Saweda Kamara’s Besaydoo (Milkweed). Forgive us, readers, we aren’t very good at anticipation: when we had the books in hand, we dove in. Welcome to our poetry preview for 2024, and please come back every month for more.

Rebecca Morgan Frank

“Close, closer,” Diane Seuss writes in her new book Modern Poetry, “to that sheeted edge.” As I turn the pages of poetry books in 2024, I hope to see glimpses of that edge, the edge of something in extremis, perhaps, but also the edge of the piece of paper, which is also the edge of a poet’s mind. Strange transfigurations of form, startling intensifications of moral and political perception, unexpected evocations of consciousness—I anticipate a full range of astonishments in the new year.

Some of the books will be extensions of oeuvres I’ve pleasurably followed for years by poets seeking to achieve the next culmination in the life of their artistry, like Victoria Chang’s With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Don Mee Choi’s Mirror Nation (Wave Books), Kwame Dawes’s Sturge Town (Norton), Tracy Fuad’s Portal (University of Chicago), Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles (Nightboat Books), Carl Phillips’s Scattered Snows, to the North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Donald Revell’s Canandaigua (Alice James Books), and Corey Van Landingham’s Reader, I (Sarabande). Other books will be by poets who are new to me and, I hope, new to themselves, finding their edge for the reader’s astonishment.As a reader, I love this moment when we look ahead to the new year’s literary landscape, considering and prioritizing what to read first, wondering what will enthrall us. Sure, an anticipated list can have the delicious capriciousness of an amuse-bouche; in the end, it doesn’t tell you much about the full menu. But isn’t that the joy of it? There’s still so much left to discover.

David Woo and I have gathered a little more than a baker’s dozen of titles for you from a year that will also offer Marie Howe’s New and Selected (Norton); new collections from Andrea Cohen (The Sorrow Apartments, Four Way Books) and Geffrey Davis (One Wild World Away, BOA); and a slate of debuts that includes Diego Baez’s Yaguareté White (University of Arizona Press); Sarah Ghazal Ali’s Theophanies (Alice James Books); and Yalie Saweda Kamara’s Besaydoo (Milkweed). Forgive us, readers, we aren’t very good at anticipation: when we had the books in hand, we dove in. Welcome to our poetry preview for 2024, and please come back every month for more.

Rebecca Morgan Frank

“Close, closer,” Diane Seuss writes in her new book Modern Poetry, “to that sheeted edge.” As I turn the pages of poetry books in 2024, I hope to see glimpses of that edge, the edge of something in extremis, perhaps, but also the edge of the piece of paper, which is also the edge of a poet’s mind. Strange transfigurations of form, startling intensifications of moral and political perception, unexpected evocations of consciousness—I anticipate a full range of astonishments in the new year.

Some of the books will be extensions of oeuvres I’ve pleasurably followed for years by poets seeking to achieve the next culmination in the life of their artistry, like Victoria Chang’s With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Don Mee Choi’s Mirror Nation (Wave Books), Kwame Dawes’s Sturge Town (Norton), Tracy Fuad’s Portal (University of Chicago), Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles (Nightboat Books), Carl Phillips’s Scattered Snows, to the North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Donald Revell’s Canandaigua (Alice James Books), and Corey Van Landingham’s Reader, I (Sarabande). Other books will be by poets who are new to me and, I hope, new to themselves, finding their edge for the reader’s astonishment.