April 17, 2026 – April marks the 30th annual National Poetry Month! Celebrate by picking up one of these books of recently published poetry and dive into the lyrical side of language.
Browse the books below, and put them on hold in our catalog by clicking on their covers.
"Death of the First Idea" by Rickey Laurentiis (2025)
Longlisted for the National Book Award, a mythic, lyric, decade-in-the-making new collection of masterful poems that probe the meanings of trans/formation and re-creation, a new classic about gender and love. In the past decade, as Laurentiis has transitioned, her ideas of the lyric and poetry have transformed, as has the America in which she lived. This book is a record of that ten-year journey. Laurentiis meditates on what it means to be trans and Black in this nation and in her own body, when both demarcations are often excuses for violence. She goes further, examining pleasure and deep-felt pain, in a rhythmic, wild embrace of life, an act of spirit work and self-grace.
"Night Watch" by Kevin Young (2025)
Kevin Young's new collection, written over the span of sixteen years, shapes stories of loss and legacy, inspired in part by other lives. After starting in the bayous of his family's Louisiana, Young journeys to further states of mind in 'All Souls.' Another central sequence, 'The Two-Headed Nightingale,' is spoken by Millie-Christine McCoy, the famous conjoined African American 'Carolina Twins.' Born into enslavement, stolen, and then displayed by P. T. Barnum and others, the twins later toured the world as free women, their alto and soprano voices harmonizing their own way. Young's poem explores their evolving philosophical selfhood and pluralities. In 'Darkling,' a cycle of poems inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy, Young expands and embroiders the circles of Hell, drawing a cosmology of both loneliness and accompaniment.
"Poetry is Not a Luxury: Poems for all Seasons" (Anonymous) (2025)
From the creator of the beloved @PoetryIsNotaLuxury Instagram account, a gorgeously wrought poetry anthology that is a gift and a guide for readers through every season of life. Each poem within has been chosen from centuries of verse from around the world, with an emphasis on living poets. Friends old and new await, with selections from Rita Dove, Victoria Chang, Ross Gay, Naomi Shihab Nye, C.D. Wright, Eileen Myles, Ada Limón,Ilya Kaminsky, Jos Charles, and more. From love poems to elegies, from the heights of new love to the furrows of anxiety, from special occasions to a morning pick-me-up, there is something here for longtime poetry lovers and novices, in any season of need.
"A Suit or a Suitcase" by Maggie Smith (2026)
Author and poet Maggie Smith returns with a new collection of poems on the sometimes-blurry distinction between mind and body, and how the self shifts and moves through time and space. Poems turn over the strange relationships between the body and the mind, the self and the world. With her signature tenderness and clarity of observation, and with stunning swoops of imagination, Smith considers – and reconsiders – what it is to be human: Does one life matter in the grand scheme of space and time? How can it be that we are the same people we were ten, twenty, or thirty years ago, but also different people? And could there be more to life, just beyond the borders of we can experience? Each poem is an ode to the power of our minds and proof that both a life and a self, whether within a suit or a suitcase, is infinitely expandable.
"About Time" by David Duchovny (2025)
From acclaimed author, actor, and singer-songwriter David Duchovny, a deeply personal, existential, and insightful debut poetry collection. David Duchovny's seventh published-and first poetic-work covers a range of intimate themes and topics, including love, the loss of love, parenting, Duchovny's own parents (in particular his father, who looms large throughout the work), alienation, and other emotional quandaries. Fans of Duchovny's fiction will recognize the insightful and clever play of words that, in this new form, distill to an emotionally impactful portrayal of what the author holds most dear.
"Blue Opening" by Chet'la Sebree (2025)
"Blue Opening" grapples with origins – of illness, of language, of the universe – as the speaker contemplates whether she, too, can be a site of origin through motherhood. Navigating chronic health challenges alongside grief and questions about the nature of knowledge and religion, she searches personal history and the cosmos for answers to the unknowable. With startling clarity and vivid tenderness, "Blue Opening" calls into question not only where to begin, but how to create, across thirty-two poems that press the fluid boundaries of form through sonnets, prose poems, odes, and two unforgettable poetic sequences. As the speaker traverses loss, possibility, and the choice, or often the lack of choice, in the direction of her future, she determines to press forward even as she is "unsure of the shape this language should take / and hulling, from blue rock, faith."
"How About Now" by Kate Baer (2025)
Renowned poet Kate Baer returns with a bold and compassionate collection that confronts the march of time in a shifting world. With her trademark candor and curiosity, Baer explores what it means to grow older, to release children into the wildness of their own lives, and to reclaim the ever-evolving self. Raw, luminous, and urgent, this collection channels Baer’s own journey to middle age into poems that are profoundly intimate yet resound universally, identifying the beauty, resilience, and fragility that arrive in every stage of life. "How About Now" is a striking declaration of ongoing transformation and self-discovery. From the poet who has captured the heartbeat of the modern woman, this collection reaffirms Kate Baer’s place among the most vital voices of our era.
"The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems" by Patricia Smith (2025)
National Book Award winner "The Intentions of Thunder" gathers, for the first time, the essential work from across Patricia Smith's decorated career. Here, Smith's poems, affixed with her remarkable gift of insight, present a rapturous ode to life. With careful yet vaulting movement, these poems traverse the redeeming landscape of pain, confront the frightening revelations of history, and disclose the joyous possibilities of the future. The result is a profound testament to the necessity of poetry – all the careful witness, embodied experience, and bristling pleasure that it bestows – and of Smith's necessary voice.
"Startlement: New and Selected Poems" by Ada Limón (2025)
An essential collection spanning nearly twenty years of emphatic, fearlessly original poetry from one of America’s most celebrated living writers, the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. Drawing from six previously published books as well as vibrant new work, "Startlement" exalts the mysterious. With a tender curiosity, Ada Limón wades into potent unknowns – the strangeness of our brief human lives, the ever-changing nature of the universe – and emerges each time with new revelations about our place in the world. From the chaos of youthful desire, to the waxing of love and loss, to the precarity of our environment, to the stars and beyond, Limón’s poetry bears witness to the arc of all we know with patient lyricism and humble wonder.
"The Distance of a Shout: Selected Poems" by Michael Ondaatje (2026)
The poetry of Michael Ondaatje begins in memory: distant landscapes, myths from childhood, fleeting interactions with loved ones, and characters from history itself. In poems that are spare as often as they are fable-like – as tender as they are heart-wrenching – the poet navigates the past, looks toward the future, and unearths inevitable truths about the world. Assembling Michael Ondaatje's finest poems in one brilliant volume, "Selected Poems" chronicles the poet's journey – moving book to book, moment to moment, border to border – and leads the reader through the threshold of discovery itself.