Amid these first days of school and turns in the trees, a wealth of new poetry collections are arriving this fall.

Two impressive debut collections, Good Dress by Brittany Rogers (Oct., Tin House) and Saints of Little Faith by Megan Pinto (Sept., Four Way), both use curious forms and at least one longer series to account for grief painfully and beautifully: what men do to women over time (over lives), inheritances of motherhood and daughterhood, and what psychiatry offers or refuses to the ill. Both are strong, sure, and memorable, remembering past needs to please others in refiguring what pleasure means to the speakers as they age. 

Several second and third books impressively extend the energy of a writer’s first: 

The season’s translated volumes include selected collections from known and debuting authors with notable translators:

Two other selected collections from US poets are from Cheryl Clarke and Kimiko Hahn. Each of these volumes highlight the known favorites alongside lesser-known greats in the two bodies of work of women who have helped shape poetry for so many through writing, thinking, and teaching. They also shape their past work here, each including revisions to previously published poems: 

Archive of Style by Cheryl Clarke (Aug., Triquarterly) brings together the work of the Black lesbian feminist from the 1980s to present in a thorough volume. She connects drone strikes abroad to domestic anti-Black policing, lists memories of queer history that feel far and near, and memorializes loved ones alongside strangers who have become beloved. Many of her poems were published through feminist presses and queer journals, some of which no longer exist; this comprehensive book echoes such histories and those contemporaries in a present form. 

The Ghost Forest by Kimiko Hahn (Oct., Norton) represents the best of over three decades of poems in reverse chronological order, from the prolific author’s most recent Foreign Bodies to her debut Air Pocket. New poems are contextualized in the themes and styles of Hahn’s intelligent forms: ghazal of found lines, erasures of articles, classic forms borrowing lines from Bishop and Millay. The book begins, this way, acknowledging all the ghosts and forests before and with the author, language of and with the world. The selections of 11 collections that follow make for a consistent, thorough read, with eerie threads that run through the entire collection: roots, glass, waiting. Unlike the predictable selections that have standardized this genre, Hahn’s poems are changed in the edition, each section opening with an introductory page (usually itself a poetic achievement), and sometimes a cento of lines from that book, lines shifted, rewired, and ghosted. 

Another way to think about translation is within a writer’s work, as with the latest collections from two poets that work (and are read on) an international scale: 

Two books out with Phoenix Poets establish a translation debut within a still-debuting series: 

The Great Zoo by Nicolás Guillén, translated by Aaron Coleman (Oct.) from Spanish contains mostly pithy poems that create in-jokes with themselves, a world of systemic critique told only through and with great pleasures of language. The zoos and greatnesses occur at every level and kind, and they are loud, fun, true. How is seeing shaped by messaging, by guarding? Guillén points to the ironies and ends of authority, of the dishonesty of the zoo or museum, with an anger that amplifies humanity. 

Slashing Sounds by Jolanda Insana is translated by Catherine Theis (Oct.), who notes that “the impulse to translate Italian poems stemmed from a desire to hear old voices.” In poems that often take the form of lists and intimacies, the author, a translator herself, is translated with purposeful style.  

The Phoenix Poets Series that published Anne Winters first in the 80s, James McMichael first in the 90s, and Dan Chiasson in the 2000s was relaunched in 2021 and significantly revitalized. Srikanth Reddy led this shift, with consulting editors Katie Peterson, Douglas Kearney, and Rosa Alcalá; this poetry all-star team chose two books from this first public call for manuscripts in fall 2021, which arrived in spring 2023: Dong Li’s marvelous debut The Orange Tree, and Annelyse Gelman’s second book, the long poem Vexations chosen by aracelis girmay and Solmaz Sharif for the James Laughlin prize. These were followed up by known entities like C.S. Giscombe, whose inquisitive and forensic Negro Mountain (2023) finds glory in plainness (“Vividness can be misleading,” reads a line from a series of dreams), among inventive newer multidisciplinary voices like Mandible Wishbone Solvent by Asiya Wadud (2024), gathering to its press poets writing impressive and strange books, each in their own way. As fall’s publications indicate translation as another heart, these books find themselves in the spirit of the original series’ best moments and within an evolving, alive taste across and between the new editors. 

They weave intensity with efficiency and humor and perhaps intimate what John Berger’s exhaustive mind may have made of spending more time on poems. The writings are adapted from lectures given through the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry in 2015; Wave began publishing a selection of these in 2018, resulting in tight, astute volumes relevant to any poetry lover. Reddy’s book joins Douglas Kearney’s exceptional Optic Subwoof (2022) and Terrance Hayes’s thorough account of Etheridge Knight, To Float in the Space Between (2021). 

Another prose work of interest to poets is No One Knows Their Blood Type, a dazzling, brisk novel by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat translated by Hazem Jamjoun (Oct., CSU Poetry Center). Her most recent English publication was a new and selected poetry collection called You Can Be the Last Leaf, translated by Fady Joudah. The novel continues Abu Al-Hayyat’s gorgeous attention to language as a woman learns on the day of her father’s death that she is not his biological daughter; the mother, A, and the father, O, could only make O, like one daughter, but not B or AB, like the other daughter. The mother’s account of a marriage’s aftermath told on Facebook Messenger, the fear of sisters being separate, and hospital visits follow. The Palestinian family moves through place and time: calling Ramallah and Ammam, moving the corpse from Jerusalem to Nablus, narrating from Tunis and Beirut, friends returning to Gaza and Tulkarem. The Return is difficult to conceive of for the young women who have been expelled through generations, but they carry on the communal desire with layers of grief: “All he can talk about now is going back to Palestine. He’d rather move to a sewer in Nablus than a palace anywhere else.”  

Fall also sees lovingly anticipated rereleases of poetry collections, including To After That (TOAF) by Renee Gladman (Sept., Dorothy) which makes the 2008 original new again. Some volumes have become anti-canonically canonical since their first publications:

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Zong! (Oct.) are both out with new material at Graywolf (the former moving press, the latter originally with the press). m. nourbeSe Philip’s Zong! is an epic that exclusively uses language from a legal document presumed to be the only existing language about a 1781 massacre of African people enslaved and murdered for insurance money. Some pages are sparse with thin poems acknowledging the fragmentation therein, while others are dense and require the connecting of the edges of pages to make out words, pointing to the struggle and projection of narrative—its luxury. A thorough preface by the author about process and product begins the 15^th-anniversary edition, quotes and an interesting graphic included. A difficult book that hopes to give life, or at least language, back to the dead, this reads like a celebration of what the book’s impact, including new prose by Katherine McKittrick and Saidiya Hartman, who writes that the book is “a phonography of the hold…an open text, a chant shout from the abyss.” 

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is “an American lyric,” bridging genre and weaving TV screens, depression, and ripping grief. It did not receive the global attention that her next book Citizen did, but is as superlative, and key to her continuing work as an artist and writer 20 years later. The author describes the book’s becoming in a preface, referring to the book as Lonely and tracking its shifting relevance and the role it had in her poetry (“watershed”). The collection is concise, curious, and sure, now updated with full color pages and a size that matches Rankine’s more recent books. 

As with the rerelease of Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (2023, UC) in the spring–which recently featured in a critical essay by Critic at Large Summer Farah–readers, teachers, and gifters of these books can rejoice at the reasonable price points and direct accessibility these rereleases bring.

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Edited by Cindy Juyoung Ok and Nanya Jhingran