12 of the Best Poetry Collections from 2023

In awe of how this author plays with form, one of my most-admired poems by The Sealey Challenge’s founder include “Cento for the Night I Said, ‘I Love You’” from Ordinary Beast. In the poet’s second full-length work, the whole of The Ferguson Report, the Department of Justice’s investigation of Ferguson’s police department and court system following Michael Brown’s death in Missouri during 2014, is observable. The words redacted by Sealey appear in gray, struck-through text, and what remains arises in black. Near the book’s end, the eight poems — “lifted” — reappear, lineated and punctuated. About this project, Sealey writes in the final pages, “Reimagining a reality in which the outcome is often death is perhaps a step toward bringing about an alternative reality, one in which life might prevail.”

Organized into four sections, Gonzalez’s first collection of poetry touches on weather and the sea, anger and loneliness, and pleasure and dreams. Beginning with “Notes Toward an Elegy” and ending with “Present Wonders,” I came back to this title at midnight, and my body and brain wouldn’t let me sleep until I finished. My pen ran out of ink with all of the praise I left in the margins. I heard people leaving bars, a train’s whistle, the gate lifting at a nearby factory. Through the curtain slits and door cracks, I witnessed the sky brightening. That feeling when a book you adored surpasses the greatness you remembered.

Highlighting a variety of poems — concrete, prose, and ode, this gorgeous anthology ruminates on beauty, desire, loss, and place. Three of the poems I dog-eared consist of Ruth Awad’s “The Sleepwalker,” Carolina Ebeid’s “Auscultation,” and Noor Hindi’s “The World’s Loneliest Whale Sings the Loudest Song & Other Confessions.” Compiling poems by Zeyn Joukhadar, Leila Chatti, George Abraham, and more, don’t miss out on these love poems. In fact, send them to someone you love. (A copy waits for me to wrap and snail mail to my soul sister.) I must stress: browse the bios. Learning the poets’ loves, from “seashells” (Amanda Ghazale Aziz) to “meaningful conversations on a rainy day” (Mariam Gomaa) to “soup in every season” (Zein Sa’dedin), inspired such joy.

Chosen by Solmaz Sharif, the author of Customs and Look, as one of the five winners of the National Poetry Series in 2022, Chung’s striking debut reflects on appearances, devotion, obsession, and memory. In the whirlwind of autumn, I happened upon this book’s spine in San Antonio’s The Twig and added it to my haul without a thought other than, Lucky me! Within days, I gobbled this, appreciating the forms — a ghazal, diptych, and crown of sonnets — and discovering fast favorites such as “Poetics,” “The Day You Left, I Remembered,” and “Lullaby.” Can I leave you with a remarkable sentence? From “Feral Spice”: “Say I chose this.”

(In this blurb, I capitalize all “Plants” to celebrate Ellis’s capitalization of them in the collection.) With a bouquet I serendipitously arranged with a sprig of Goldenrod, a member of the Aster family, waving at me from my coffee table, I listened to the audiobook while reading along with my eyes, which I highly recommend. The third installment in Milkweed’s “Multiverse” series and Ellis’s second poetry title, the ebook boasts astounding purple illustrations of “Elder Yarrow” to “Elder Chokeberry,” and the audiobook streams music. Unfolding in five parts, this honors ancestry, names, language, and stuttering. A sentence I keep thinking about: “My stutter is a form of thirst, a calling in the throat, a seeking after the only thing that will quench me: sound, thunder, god.”

After “Bush River Blues,” I needed to put Kinard’s electric debut down, open with its pages kissing the blue couch’s edge. Within reach and ready to read because I wanted a moment to sit with the piece swimming in me as much as I intended to pick the book up again. Told in four sections and including “Hymn”s, elegy, erasures, and more, these crescendoing poems delve into family and Greek mythology, sex and song, and superstition and the South. Seconds into the opening poem, “Self-Portrait as the Cricket,” I dog-eared the page and highlighted eight lines in blue, and, dear reader, that wonder never wavered.