New Poetry Month Picks and New Releases

Clint Smith, author of the award-winning How the Word is Passed, reflects on the changing powers of fatherhood in this latest collection of poetry. He explores how we are shaped by our families, as well as the pressures of society at large, but then this established form is disrupted when children are born. Once you become a parent, Smith explores how you start to see the world again, through a different perspective, and how this new view helps you grow with your child.

This YA novel combines vignettes and poems to tell the story of two Bribri brothers. One day Jay and Max rush to the aid of their cousin when they hear trouble in the woods. They find her and their high school’s popular soccer player, who they think is hurting her, and beat him so badly that other kids at school ostracize them and they have to go to a series of counseling sessions. The incident also makes them have an existential crisis — are they just as bad as their abusive father, who they can’t trust, even with their mother? As the brothers reckon with their internal struggles, they grow apart, but also realize that Bribri traditions may help them mend.

Jones ponders on the current state of the world and determines that we’ve been living in an apocalypse. The everyday stressors of our lives, like racism and grief, chip away at us little by little until we are in our own, personal dystopia. But there is sweetness here, too, even as Jones plumbs the depths.

This is another new poetry release that deals with the idea of apocalypses (surprise!) and what they mean for marginalized people. Like Jones, Choi’s poems show how the end of the world has always felt just around the corner for people subjected to colonialism, police brutality, and all the other descendants of colonialism. Where Jones’ collection is more self-based, Choi’s zooms out and crosses through time, looking at everything from the Korean Comfort Women of WWII to pop music.

Amber McBride absolutely kills it with her YA novels in verse. Her debut, Me (Moth) was a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. In this January release, we meet Whimsy, who is in the hospital again for clinical depression. When she meets another former patient, Faerry, who is a Fae, the two start to see how interconnected their lives are. But then Faerry goes missing in the terrifying forest at the end of their street. Witches, princesses, and fairy tales lie in the path Whimsy must take to save him, but she’s also aided by some of the forest’s inhabitants, and by her own practice of Hoodoo.