Books of Poetry You Should Read Right Now

mother is a work rooted in an intimate fracture: an Indigenous child is adopted out of her tribe and raised by a non-Indian family. As an adult finding her way back to her origins, our unnamed narrator begins to put the pieces of her birth family’s history together through the stories told to her by her mother, father, sister, and brother, all of whom remained on the reservation where she was born. Through oral histories, family lore, and imagined pasts and futures, a collage of their community emerges, raising profound questions about adoption, inheritance, and Indigenous identity in America.

The poems in Doyali Islam’s heft contemplate the paradoxical nature of right now: natural beauty versus technological advancement; health versus sickness; pain versus hope. Through personal explorations and uncanny observations, Islam’s second collection proves her to be a vital and enriching poet of our time.

In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of personal and social loss, embodying the paradox of sitting in grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with the meaning of family and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, these poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break. Bold and prescient, and a testament to tenderness in the face of violence, Time Is a Mother is a return and a forging forth all at once. See his latest novel, The Emperor of Gladness.

In poems that range from wry, tongue-in-cheek observations about contemporary life to more nuanced meditations on her ancestors —some of the earliest Black pioneers to settle in the western United States after Reconstruction — Golden Ax invites readers to re-imagine the West, Black womanhood, and the legacies that shape and sustain the pursuit of freedom.

In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country’s past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered—the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning.

Poet, screenwriter, and one-time-prisoner-turned-activist Jimmy Santiago Baca’s latest is an epic narrative poem about an El Salvadorian mother’s horrifying and traumatic experiences at the Mexican border and with ICE. Sophia’s harrowing story is a haunting wake-up call to what’s happening right now.