If you’re wondering what poetry to read, look no further. Here’s a shortlist of five niche offerings for this year, released and forthcoming. Light enough to throw in your bag and rich enough to spend hours on, this is the best of small and breakout poets.
The Twenty-Ninth Year – Hala Alyan
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Alyan’s book explores her life as it is now, while also wandering through the earlier years of her life with a tone of distant, soft-focus nostalgia. Spanning nations and years, this spare, lyrical, and highly personal, Twenty-Ninth Year uses highly individual stories to capture some element of the human experience and growing older.
“It takes a romantic to leave a city; I understand this now.” Hala Alyan, The Twenty-Ninth Year
If My Body Could Speak – Blythe Baird
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Baird’s poetry is characterized by sparsity and organization, and covers girlhood, culture, and identity. It’s an exploration of the things we overlook, the things we make of ourselves, compassion, and how we forgive others and ourselves. It’s a record of healing, from the one side of suffering to the end of the tunnel.
“You do not owe your progress to anyone.” Blythe Baird, If My Body Could Speak
In a Dream You Saw a Way to Survive – Clementine von Radics
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Von Radics writes with patience and with astounding feeling. Compassion, heartbreak, and survival are measured out and deployed with the most precise diction. This is the hard work after you’ve gotten through the heart of something unbearable, but triumphant. It’s not about the moment, but about all the moments after, when you’re stronger but still reaching for the light.
“No one else can decide what your tough looks like.” Clementine von Radics, In a Dream You Saw a Way to Survive
Life of the Party – Olivia Gatwood
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This book is forthcoming August 20th, but you can expect Gatwood’s passion and her reverence for the mundane. She writes about youth and about looking back, about the things we overlook, about the ugly things we do that aren’t really so bad. This is a book about fear, but Gatwood never lets fear get of the best of her.
“I want to know what it means to survive something.” Olivia Gatwood, Life of the Party
Swallowtail – Brenna Twohy
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This book is forthcoming October 1st, and you definitely have to pick it up. Twohy’s poetry is modern and funny and tragic and electric. It dissects the strangeness of life, of loss, of becoming someone else. It takes not just the ordinary but the boring and makes it into something worth thinking about, something that tells you more about yourself. Her topics may not initially seem like the basis for poems, but she always finds the through line of universal feeling.
“You’ve just never seen the close-up of a haunting.” Brenna Twohy, Swallowtail
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