Beautiful and brutally honest, Mary Lambert's poetry is a beacon to anyone who's ever been knocked down—and picked themselves up again. In verse that deals with sexual assault, mental illness, and body acceptance, Ms. Lambert's Shame Is an Ocean I Swim Across emerges as an important new voice in poetry, providing strength and resilience even in the darkest of times.

2018 Goodreads Choice Awards - Best Poetry Book Finalist Helium is the debut poetry collection by internet phenom Rudy Francisco, whose work has defined poetry for a generation of new readers. Rudy's poems and quotes have been viewed and shared millions of times as he has traveled the country and the world performing for sell-out crowds. Helium is filled with work that is simultaneously personal and political, blending love poems, self-reflection, and biting cultural critique on class, race and gender into an unforgettable whole. Ultimately, Rudy's work rises above the chaos to offer a fresh and positive perspective of shared humanity and beauty.

In nectar, Chisala guides readers through a beautiful process of growth and renewal. These poems celebrate our always complex, sometimes troubled roots while encouraging us to grow through and beyond them toward a passionate self-love. Chisala’s hope is that her words will encourage readers to sow seeds of change in their own lives and the lives of others.

Rebecca Elson's A Responsibility to Awe reissued as a Carcanet Classic. A Responsibility to Awe is a contemporary classic, a book of poems and reflections by a scientist for whom poetry was a necessary aspect of research, crucial to understanding the world and her place in it, even as, having contracted terminal cancer, she confronted her early death. Rebecca Elson was an astronomer; her work took her to the boundary of the visible and measurable. 'Facts are only as interesting as the possibilities they open up to the imagination,' she wrote. Her poems, like her researches, build imaginative inferences and speculations, setting out from observation, undeterred by knowing how little we can know.

"Special Education is a new teacher's journey to understanding herself, her students, and her world through the hard lessons her work life offers up. Questions of identity, failure, family, and connection surface as Mar's primary speaker (a queer, neurotypical, Asian American woman) navigates the shifting divides of race, class, gender, and disability through poetry"--

This collection about obsession and love is the 99th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Richard Siken's Crush, selected as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by obsession and love. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism. In the world of American poetry, Siken's voice is striking.

Winner of the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize The exploits you find in my comics are no more probable than snow in Sunnyvale. I'm not as black as you dream. —from "Luke Cage Tells It Like It Is Missing You, Metropolis With humor and the serious collector's delight, Gary Jackson imagines the comic-book worlds of Superman, Batman, and the X-Men alongside the veritable worlds of Kansas, racial isolation, and the gravesides of a sister and a friend.