April is national poetry month, a month to celebrate the craft and its importance to our culture. Women especially, such as Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, and Sylvia Plath, have shown how their usage of the medium has given them a greater voice and challenged the status quo of society. Since then, there has been a long line of female and non-binary poets who have used poetry to articulate their personal experiences and liberate themselves and their communities. As we approach the end of National Poetry Month, here are four newly released poetry books written by up-and-coming poets to watch that explore topics such as sex, immigration, Beyoncé, and marriage.
I’M ALWAYS SO SERIOUS BY KARISMA PRICE
(Sarabande, 83 pp., paperback, $16.95)
Karisma Price’s debut collection is a portrait of home: the resilience that grew out of a Hurricane-destroyed New Orleans. Price has a strong command over both the technical and the emotive: using imagery, sound, and diction to share meaningful histories. The collection is filled with portraits of important figures including Price’s mother, father, James Booker, and Beyoncé. Price’s poems carry multitudes—they aren’t simply observations of her surroundings, but how “everything around us is measured by blood.” The book experiments with both visual and textual elements, such as adopting the perspectives of figures like James Booker to expand their legacies and biographies.
PRESCRIBEE BY CHIA-LUN CHANG
(Nightboat Books, 88 pp., paperback, $17.95)
In her debut collection, poet Chia-Lun Chang writes in her second language to articulate her ambivalence about the American Dream. She describes the process of assimilation, focusing specifically on the conflicting pain, betrayal, and power that comes with adopting a new tongue. Chang explores her disillusionment with a shattered American dream fantasy, saying “Go back to your country / which I would very much wish,” and declaring, “No one should be coerced / To prove I belong.” Prescribee is a powerful collection in which you can see tongues mixing with oceans and what it means to sacrifice language to make love.
NEW LIFE BY ANA BOŽIČEVIĆ
(Wave Books, 112 pp., paperback, $18)
New Life is a witty book that is not afraid to use clichés. Božičević’s poems are packed with humor and joy. “It’s night mornings like this I wish I could travel in time / Just to slap my own ass when I was born,” she writes in “Person.” New Life is utterly relatable as she talks about bed bugs, and then coming in the same bed. Božičević seventh collection is mature, grounded, and full of love in unexpected places.
JUDAS GOAT BY GABRIELLE BATES
(Tin House, 104 pp., paperback, $16.95)
Gabrielle Bates’s debut collection follows the titular animal through lyric explorations of what it means to be a mother, daughter, and partner. Bates brings readers back and forth between her upbringing in Alabama and shows how it bleeds into the core of her present identity. This collection features the past in the form of “bodies of birds, goats, and men” and “the tender hole where I was once attached to my mother.”
