15 New Poetry Collections Releasing This Summer
No matter the season, any time is a great time to pick up a new poetry book and dive into its pages. From debut authors to seasoned favorites, there is no doubt there’s something out there for everyone to enjoy in the coming months!
Check out our list of 15 new poetry books you should add to your list this summer:
Ephemera by Sierra DeMulder
DeMulder’s newest poetry collection releases June 6 from Button Poetry. The book “detail[s] intimate experiences from the painful deaths of family members who clung to life, to passionate love she feels for her own mortal wife,” per the publisher’s site. She is also the author of several other collections of poetry, including Today Means Amen and We Slept Here.
Toska by Alina Pleskova
This debut full-length poetry collection comes out June 13 from Deep Vellum Publishing. The book “explores a sense of rootlessness and a sort of anti-nationalism,” per the publisher, “ in addition to “documenting and noticing the multivalence of desire — its delights and pitfalls alike.” Pleskova is also the author of the chapbook What Urge Will Save Us.
Bone Language by Jamaica Baldwin
Another debut, this collection is forthcoming June 15 from YesYes Books. The book “is a testament to the specific ways women survive the world and its attacks on their bodies,” per the publisher. Her work can be found in Poetry Northwest, RHINO, Guernica, and elsewhere.
Fantasy of Loving the Fantasy by Jennifer Funk
Funk’s debut collection releases June 20 from Bull City Press. The book “is a sensuous investigation of the failings and thrills of trying to sate the insatiable,” per the publisher. Her work can be found in The Boiler, Kenyon Review, and more.
I Do Everything I’m Told by Megan Fernandes
This eagerly-awaited book from Fernandes comes out June 20 from Tin House. The collection “explores disobedience and worship, longing and possessiveness, and nights of wandering cities,” per the publisher. She is also the author of Good Boys and the chapbook The Kingdom and After. (Also be on the lookout for our interview with Fernandes in June!)
Hydra Medusa by Brandon Shimoda
Forthcoming June 27 from Nightboat Books, this collection is filled with “poetry, dreams and speculative talks, collected from the psychic detritus of living in the US-Mexico borderlands,” per the publisher. Shimoda is also the author of numerous other books, including The Grave on the Wall, O Bon, and Evening Oracle.
The Diaspora Sonnets by Oliver de la Paz
Forthcoming July 18 from Liveright, de la Paz’s newest collection “eloquently invokes the perseverance and myth of the Filipino diaspora in America,” per the publisher. He is currently the Poet Laureate for Worcester, MA, and is the author of several poetry collections, including The Boy in the Labyrinth, Requiem for the Orchard, and Furious Lullaby.
Console by Colin Channer
Channer’s second collection releases July 18 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The book “reorganizes our sense of time, collapses and rebreaks the remembered and certain, renames the familiar, reaches for settled etymologies, and turns words inside out,” per the publisher. He is also the author of Providential, in addition to several novellas and novels.
So to Speak by Terrance Hayes
Hayes’s newest, highly-anticipated poetry collection comes out July 25 from Penguin Poets. The book “explore[s] how we see ourselves and our world, mapping the strange and lyrical grammar of thinking and feeling,” per the publisher. A National Book Award winner for his poetry collection Lighthead, Hayes is also the author of several other books, including American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, HowTo Be Drawn, and Wind in a Box.
The Kingdom of Surfaces by Sally Wen Mao
Mao’s upcoming poetry collection releases August 1 from Graywolf Press. In it, she “examines art and history—especially the provenance of objects such as porcelain, silk, and pearls—to frame an important conversation on beauty, empire, commodification, and violence,” per the publisher. Mao is also the author of Oculus and Mad Honey Symposium.
The Border Simulator by Gabriel Dozal
This debut collection releases August 15 from One World. The book, which features a bilingual format of both English and Spanish, “reimagines the U.S.-Mexico border as both a real place and a living simulation—and tells the story of a pair of siblings trapped between the two,” per the publisher. Dozal’s poems can be found in Poetry, The Iowa Review, and Poetry Is Currency, among others.
The Ferguson Report: An Erasure by Nicole Sealey
Sealey’s newest collection comes out August 15 from Knopf. The book, which revisits the Justice Department’s investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, redacts the report, per the publisher, “an act of erasure that reimagines the original text as it strips it away.” She is also the author of Ordinary Beast and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named.
I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times by Taylor Byas
Byas’s debut full-length collection releases August 22 from Soft Skull Press. Inspired by The Wiz, the book “celebrates South Side Chicago and a Black woman’s quest for self-discovery—one that pulls her away from the safety of home and into her power,” per the publisher. She is the author of the chapbooks Bloodwarm and Shutter.
I Love Information by Courtney Bush
Releasing August 22 from Milkweed Books, this forthcoming collection “is a vigorous examination of knowledge, belief, and which begets which,” per the publisher. Bush is also the author of Every Book Is About the Same Thing.
Fixer by Edgar Kunz
Kunz’s upcoming second collection releases August 22 from Ecco. The book “fixes its eye on the strangeness of labor, through poems that are searching, keen, and wry,” per the publisher. Kunz is also the author of Tap Out.
Which books are on your summer TBR list?
