Best 2017, Best Books, Best Year-End, Poetry

The Best Poetry Books of 2017 (A Year-End List Aggregation)

“What are the best Poetry books of 2017?” We aggregated 19 year-end lists and ranked the 223 unique titles by how many times they appeared in an attempt to answer that very question!

There are thousands of year-end lists released every year and like we do in our weekly Best Book articles, we wanted to see which books appear the most. The top 28 books, all of which appeared on 2 or more best Poetry lists, are ranked below with images, summaries, and links for more information or to purchase. The remaining 175+ books, as well as the top book lists, are at the bottom of the page.

Make sure to take a look at our other Best of 2017 book lists:

You can also take a look at our Best Poetry books from last year as well as all the other Best 2016 articles!

Happy Scrolling!

 



Top 28 Poetry Books Of 2017



28 .) Debths by Susan Howe

Lists It Appears On:

  • Amber Sparks
  • New Yorker

A collection in five parts, Susan Howe’s electrifying new book opens with a preface by the poet that lays out some of Debths’ inspirations: the art of Paul Thek, the Isabella Stewart Gardner collection, and early American writings; and in it she also addresses memory’s threads and galaxies, “the rule of remoteness,” and “the luminous story surrounding all things noumenal.”

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27 .) Field Theories by Samiya Bashir

Lists It Appears On:

  • Entropy
  • Vol1 Brooklyn

Field Theories wends its way through quantum mechanics, chicken wings and Newports, love and a shoulder’s chill, melding blackbody theory (idealized perfect absorption, as opposed to the whitebody’s idealized reflection) with real live Black bodies. Albert Murray said, “the second law of thermodynamics ain’t nothing but the blues.” So what is the blue of how we treat each other, ourselves, of what this world does to us, of what we do to this shared world? Woven through experimental lyrics is a heroic crown of sonnets that wonders about love and intent, identity and hybridity, and how we embody these interstices and for what reasons and to what ends.

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26 .) Good Bones by Maggie Smith

Lists It Appears On:

  • Entropy
  • The Washington Post

Maggie Smith writes out of the experience of motherhood, inspired by watching her own children read the world like a book they’ve just opened, knowing nothing of the characters or plot. These poems stare down darkness while cultivating and sustaining possibility and addressing a larger world.

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25 .) Hard Child by Natalie Shapero

Lists It Appears On:

  • Chicago Tribune
  • Entropy

Thought-provoking and sardonically expressive, Shapero is a self-proclaimed “hard child”—unafraid of directly addressing bleakness as she continually asks what it means to be human and to bring new life into the world. Hard Child is musical and argumentative, deadly serious yet tinged with self-parody, evoking the spirit of Plath while remaining entirely its own.

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24 .) Her Body And Other Parties: Stories by Carmen Maria Machado

Lists It Appears On:

  • Luna Luna Magazine
  • NPR Books

“In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.

A wife refuses her husband’s entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store’s prom dresses. One woman’s surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella “Especially Heinous,” Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naïvely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.

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23 .) House of Lords and Commons by Ishion Hutchinson

Lists It Appears On:

  • Amber Sparks
  • The Guardian

“In House of Lords and Commons, the revelatory and vital new collection of poems from the winner of the 2013 Whiting Writers’ Award in poetry, Ishion Hutchinson returns to the difficult beauty of the Jamaican landscape with remarkable lyric precision. Here, the poet holds his world in full focus but at an astonishing angle: from the violence of the seventeenth-century English Civil War as refracted through a mythic sea wanderer, right down to the dark interior of love.

These poems arrange the contemporary continuum of home and abroad into a wonderment of cracked narrative sequences and tumultuous personae. With ears tuned to the vernacular, the collection vividly binds us to what is terrifying about happiness, loss, and the lure of the sea. House of Lords and Commons testifies to the particular courage it takes to wade unsettled, uncertain, and unfettered in the wake of our shared human experience.”

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22 .) In the Language of My Captor by Shane McCrae

Lists It Appears On:

  • Bustle
  • Entropy

Acclaimed poet Shane McCrae’s latest collection is a book about freedom told through stories of captivity. Historical persona poems and a prose memoir at the center of the book address the illusory freedom of both black and white Americans. In the book’s three sequences, McCrae explores the role mass entertainment plays in oppression, he confronts the myth that freedom can be based upon the power to dominate others, and, in poems about the mixed-race child adopted by Jefferson Davis in the last year of the Civil War, he interrogates the infrequently examined connections between racism and love.

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21 .) In the Still of the Night by Dara Wier

Lists It Appears On:

  • Entropy
  • Publishers Weekly

Dara Wier is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including You Good Thing, Selected Poems, Remnants of Hannah, Reverse Rapture, Hat On a Pond, and Voyages in English. Also among her works are the limited editions (X In Fix) in Rain Taxi’s Brainstorm Series, Fly on the Wall, and The Lost Epic, co-written with James Tate. She teaches workshops and form and theory seminars and directs the MFA program for poets and writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-directs the University of Massachusetts’ Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action.

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20 .) Lessons on Expulsion by Erika L. Sánchez

Lists It Appears On:

  • Entropy
  • Vol1 Brooklyn

An award-winning and hard-hitting new voice in contemporary American poetry.The first time I ever came the light was weak and carnivorous.Covered my eyes and the night cleared its dumb throat. Heard my mother wringing her hands the next morning. Of course I put my underwear on backwards, of course the elastic didn’t work.What I wanted most at that moment was a sandwich.But I just nursed on this leather whip.I just splattered my sheets with my sadness.From “Poem of My Humiliations”.“What is life but a cross / over rotten water?” Poet, novelist, and essayist Erika L. Sánchez’s powerful debut poetry collection explores what it means to live on both sides of the border―the border between countries, languages, despair and possibility, and the living and the dead. Sánchez tells her own story as the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants and as part of a family steeped in faith, work, grief, and expectations. The poems confront sex, shame, race, and an America roiling with xenophobia, violence, and laws of suspicion and suppression. With candor and urgency, and with the unblinking eyes of a journalist, Sánchez roves from the individual life into the lives of sex workers, narco-traffickers, factory laborers, artists, and lovers. What emerges is a powerful, multifaceted portrait of survival. Lessons on Expulsion is the first book by a vibrant, essential new writer now breaking into the national literary landscape.

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19 .) Madness by Sam Sax

Lists It Appears On:

  • Entropy
  • Vol1 Brooklyn

In this ­­­powerful debut collection, sam sax explores and explodes the linkages between desire, addiction, and the history of mental health. These brave, formally dexterous poems examine antiquated diagnoses and procedures from hysteria to lobotomy; offer meditations on risky sex; and take up the poet’s personal and family histories as mental health patients and practitioners. Ultimately, Madness attempts to build a queer lineage out of inherited language and cultural artifacts; these poems trouble the static categories of sanity, heterosexuality, masculinity, normality, and health. sax’s innovative collection embodies the strange and disjunctive workings of the mind as it grapples to make sense of the world around it.

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18 .) My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter by Aja Monet

Lists It Appears On:

  • Bustle
  • Entropy

Textured with the sights and sounds of growing up in East New York in the nineties, to school on the South Side of Chicago, all the way to the olive groves of Palestine, these stunning poems tackle racism, sexism, genocide, displacement, heartbreak, and grief, but also love, motherhood, spirituality, and Black joy.

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17 .) The Happy End / All Welcome by Monica de la Torre

Lists It Appears On:

  • Entropy
  • Publishers Weekly

THE HAPPY END / ALL WELCOME is set in a job fair inspired by the Nature Theater of Oklahoma from Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika: the largest theater company in the world is recruiting all kinds of employees. De la Torre builds, fastens, cuts, pastes, performs, and extrudes a variety of poems to suit this most serious situation comedy: poems as job interviews, poems as postings, poems as questionnaires, reports, speeches, lyrical rants… At its heart, this playful bricolage explores the norms of the workplace and its notions of competence, while tackling office design, performativity, and skilled vs. deskilled creative labor.

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16 .) The Sun and Her Flowers by Rupi Kaur

Lists It Appears On:

  • Bustle
  • Goodreads

“From Rupi Kaur, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of milk and honey, comes her long-awaited second collection of poetry. A vibrant and transcendent journey about growth and healing. Ancestry and honoring one’s roots. Expatriation and rising up to find a home within yourself.

Divided into five chapters and illustrated by Kaur, the sun and her flowers is a journey of wilting, falling, rooting, rising, and blooming. A celebration of love in all its forms.”

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15 .) The Yellow House by Chiwan Choi

Lists It Appears On:

  • Entropy
  • Vol1 Brooklyn

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14 .) They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Willis

Lists It Appears On:

  • Luna Luna Magazine
  • NPR Books

“In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib’s is a voice that matters. Whether he’s attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown’s grave, or discussing public displays of affection at a Carly Rae Jepsen show, he writes with a poignancy and magnetism that resonates profoundly.

In the wake of the nightclub attacks in Paris, he recalls how he sought refuge as a teenager in music, at shows, and wonders whether the next generation of young Muslims will not be afforded that opportunity now. While discussing the everyday threat to the lives of black Americans, Willis-Abdurraqib recounts the first time he was ordered to the ground by police officers: for attempting to enter his own car.”

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13 .) Thousand Star Hotel by Bao Phi

Lists It Appears On:

  • Entropy
  • NPR Books

Thousand Star Hotel confronts the silence around racism, police brutality, and the invisibility of the Asian American urban poor.

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12 .) Together and By Ourselves by Alex Dimitrov

Lists It Appears On:

  • Bustle
  • Entropy

Together and by Ourselves, Alex Dimitrov’s second book of poems, takes on broad existential questions and the reality of our current moment: being seemingly connected to one another, yet emotionally alone. Through a collage aesthetic and a multiplicity of voices, these poems take us from coast to coast, New York to LA, and toward uneasy questions about intimacy, love, death, and the human spirit. Dimitrov critiques America’s long-lasting obsessions with money, celebrity, and escapism—whether in our personal, professional, or family lives. What defines a life? Is love ever enough? Who are we when together and who are we by ourselves? These questions echo throughout the poems, which resist easy answers. The voice is both heartfelt and skeptical, bruised yet playful, and always deeply introspective.

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11 .) Transnational Battlefield by Heriberto Yepez

Lists It Appears On:

  • Chicago Tribune
  • The Rumpus

Famous for picking fights with a range of writers, both living and dead, Tijuana author Heriberto Yépez is in full provocateur-mode in this collection of work written in English over the last fifteen years. An explosive, genre-bending Molotov cocktail of poetic critique.

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10 .) Unaccompanied by Javier Zamora

Lists It Appears On:

  • Bustle
  • Entropy

Javier Zamora was nine years old when he traveled unaccompanied 4,000 miles, across multiple borders, from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents. This dramatic and hope-filled poetry debut humanizes the highly charged and polarizing rhetoric of border-crossing; assesses borderland politics, race, and immigration on a profoundly personal level; and simultaneously remembers and imagines a birth country that’s been left behind.

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9 .) Ordinary Beast: Poems by Nicole Sealey

Lists It Appears On:

  • Entropy
  • Luna Luna Magazine
  • NPR Books

“The existential magnitude, deep intellect, and playful subversion of St. Thomas-born, Florida-raised poet Nicole Sealey’s work is restless in its empathic, succinct examination and lucid awareness of what it means to be human.

The ranging scope of inquiry undertaken in Ordinary Beast—at times philosophical, emotional, and experiential—is evident in each thrilling twist of image by the poet. In brilliant, often ironic lines that move from meditation to matter of fact in a single beat, Sealey’s voice is always awake to the natural world, to the pain and punishment of existence, to the origins and demises of humanity. Exploring notions of race, sexuality, gender, myth, history, and embodiment with profound understanding, Sealey’s is a poetry that refuses to turn a blind eye or deny. It is a poetry of daunting knowledge. “

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8 .) There are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé by Morgan Parker

Lists It Appears On:

  • Entropy
  • Goodreads
  • Vol1 Brooklyn

The only thing more beautiful than Beyoncé is God, and God is a black woman sipping rosé and drawing a lavender bath, texting her mom, belly-laughing in the therapist’s office, feeling unloved, being on display, daring to survive. Morgan Parker stands at the intersections of vulnerability and performance, of desire and disgust, of tragedy and excellence. Unrelentingly feminist, tender, ruthless, and sequined, these poems are an altar to the complexities of black American womanhood in an age of non-indictments and deja vu, and a time of wars over bodies and power. These poems celebrate and mourn. They are a chorus chanting: You’re gonna give us the love we need.

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7 .) When I Grow Up I Want to be a List of Future Possibilities by Chen Chen

Lists It Appears On:

  • Bustle
  • Entropy
  • Library Journal

In this ferocious and tender debut, Chen Chen investigates inherited forms of love and family–the strained relationship between a mother and son, the cost of necessary goodbyes–all from Asian American, immigrant, and queer perspectives. Holding all accountable, this collection fully embraces the loss, grief, and abundant joy that come with charting one’s own path in identity, life, and love.

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6 .) Electric Arches by Eve L. Ewing

Lists It Appears On:

  • Chicago Review Of Books
  • Goodreads
  • Luna Luna Magazine
  • NPR Books

“Blending stark realism with the surreal and fantastic, Eve L. Ewing’s narrative takes us from the streets of 1990s Chicago to an unspecified future, deftly navigating the boundaries of space, time, and reality. Ewing imagines familiar figures in magical circumstances―blues legend Koko Taylor is a tall-tale hero; LeBron James travels through time and encounters his teenage self. She identifies everyday objects―hair moisturizer, a spiral notebook―as precious icons.

Her visual art is spare, playful, and poignant―a cereal box decoder ring that allows the wearer to understand what Black girls are saying; a teacher’s angry, subversive message scrawled on the chalkboard. Electric Arches invites fresh conversations about race, gender, the city, identity, and the joy and pain of growing up.”

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5 .) Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 by Frank Bidart

Lists It Appears On:

  • Bustle
  • Entropy
  • New Yorker
  • The Washington Post

Gathered together, the poems of Frank Bidart perform one of the most remarkable transmutations of the body into language in contemporary literature. His pages represent the human voice in all its extreme registers, whether it’s that of the child-murderer Herbert White, the obsessive anorexic Ellen West, the tormented genius Vaslav Nijinsky, or the poet’s own. And in that embodiment is a transgressive empathy, one that recognizes our wild appetites, the monsters, the misfits, the misunderstood among us and inside us. Few writers have so willingly ventured to the dark places of the human psyche and allowed themselves to be stripped bare on the page with such candor and vulnerability. Over the past half century, Bidart has done nothing less than invent a poetics commensurate with the chaos and appetites of our experience.

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4 .) Nature Poem by Tommy Pico

Lists It Appears On:

  • Chicago Review Of Books
  • Entropy
  • Large Hearted Boy
  • Vol1 Brooklyn

Nature Poem follows Teebs―a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet―who can’t bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He’d slap a tree across the face. He’d rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; he’d rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole. While he’s adamant―bratty, even―about his distaste for the word “natural,” over the course of the book we see him confronting the assimilationist, historical, colonial-white ideas that collude NDN people with nature. The closer his people were identified with the “natural world,” he figures, the easier it was to mow them down like the underbrush. But Teebs gradually learns how to interpret constellations through his own lens, along with human nature, sexuality, language, music, and Twitter. Even while he reckons with manifest destiny and genocide and centuries of disenfranchisement, he learns how to have faith in his own voice.

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3 .) Whereas by Layli Long Soldier

Lists It Appears On:

  • Amber Sparks
  • Bustle
  • Entropy
  • Library Journal
  • NPR Books
  • The Washington Post

WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. “I am,” she writes, “a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation―and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.” This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.

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2 .) Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar

Lists It Appears On:

  • Amber Sparks
  • Entropy
  • Large Hearted Boy
  • Library Journal
  • Luna Luna Magazine
  • NPR Books
  • Vol1 Brooklyn

This highly-anticipated debut boldly confronts addiction and courses the strenuous path of recovery, beginning in the wilds of the mind. Poems confront craving, control, the constant battle of alcoholism and sobriety, and the questioning of the self and its instincts within the context of this never-ending fight.

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1 .) Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith

Lists It Appears On:

  • Amber Sparks
  • Book Riot
  • Bustle
  • Chicago Review Of Books
  • Entropy
  • Library Journal
  • Publishers Weekly
  • The Washington Post
  • Vol1 Brooklyn

Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality―the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood―and a diagnosis of HIV positive.

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The 175+ Additional Best Poetry Books Of 2017



 

#BooksAuthorsLists
(Titles Appear On 1 List Each)
29300 Arguments: EssaysSarah MangusoNPR Books
30A Bargain with the Light, Poems after Lee MillerJacqueline Saphra
Stephen Kirk Daniels
31A Collection of Sky StoriesGail MacKayCBC Books
32A Dialectical Discussion with Self Upon Meeting Her Husband’s Mistress a Week After a Failed IVF AttemptUna McDonnellCBC Books
33A Long Curving Scar Where the Heart Should BeQuintan Ana Wikswo
Luna Luna Magazine
34A People’s History of ChicagoKevin Coval
Chicago Review Of Books
35A Social History of Tone DeafnessRob WingerCBC Books
36A Turkish DictionaryAndrew WesselsEntropy
37Adam Cannot Be AdamKelli Anne NoftleEntropy
38AdrenalinGhayath AlmadhounEntropy
39Advice from the LightsStephanie Burt
Large Hearted Boy
40AfterlandMai Der VangEntropy
41Afterland: Poems’Mai Der VangBustle
42All My Heroes Are BrokeAriel Francisco
Luna Luna Magazine
43An Aviary of Small Birds
The Guardian
44Anemal Uter MeckMg RobertsEntropy
45Angel Hill
The Guardian
46Autopsy: PoemsDonte CollinsNPR Books
47Bad Dreams And Other StoriesTessa HadleyNPR Books
48Beast MeridianVanessa Angélica VillarrealEntropy
49Before IsadoreShannon Elizabeth Hardwick
Luna Luna Magazine
50biographyNew Yorker
51Blackout
Chicago Tribune
52BludRachel McKibbens
Luna Luna Magazine
53BoneYrsa Daley-WardBustle
54BoundlessJillian TamakiNPR Books
55CarrySarah KabambaCBC Books
56Certain Magical ActsAlice Notley
Amber Sparks
57Choose Your Own PoemLaura FarinaCBC Books
58Collected Poems 1991-2000
Chicago Tribune
59Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons
Chicago Tribune
60Crawlspace
Chicago Tribune
61Daylight Hangs OnClaudia Coutu RadmoreCBC Books
62Deep WellDan Bellm
The Rumpus
63Depression & Other Magic TricksSabrina BenaimGoodreads
64DesgraciadoÁngel DomínguezEntropy
65Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary OliverMary Oliver
The Washington Post
66Difficult WomenRoxane GayNPR Books
67Dust Bunny CityBud Smith & Rae Buleri
Luna Luna Magazine
68Earth on The Ocean’s BackDaniel CowperCBC Books
69Earthling’James LongenbachBustle
70fastJorie GrahamEntropy
71Fen: StoriesDaisy JohnsonNPR Books
72Field GlassJoanna Howard & Joanna RuoccoEntropy
73First Days in Residential SchoolRichard BehnCBC Books
74fitting a witch//hexing the stitchJacklyn Janeksela
Luna Luna Magazine
75Five-Carat SoulJames McBrideNPR Books
76Flowers & SkyAaron Shurin
The Rumpus
77Fresh Complaint: StoriesJeffrey EugenidesNPR Books
78from THE BOOK OF SMALLERrob mclennanCBC Books
79Full CircleCatherine LaffertyCBC Books
80GenevievesHenry Hoke
Luna Luna Magazine
81Glossa for Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem”Sonja ArntzenCBC Books
82GnomeRobert LundayEntropy
83GodotSiobhan JamisonCBC Books
84Good Stock Strange BloodDawn Lundy MartinEntropy
85Gray MarketKrystal LanguellEntropy
86HAlix LonglandCBC Books
87HackerAase Berg
Amber Sparks
88Here High Note, High NoteCatherine BlauveltEntropy
89Hermit God SpotTammy ArmstrongCBC Books
90holiness of the heart’s affectionsNew Yorker
91Hollywood ForeverHarmony HolidayEntropy
92Home and Native LandHeather NolanCBC Books
93How Lovely the Ruins: Inspirational Poems and Words for Difficult Times’ editedAnnie Chagnot and Emi IkkandaBustle
94I Am Flying Into Myself: Selected Poems 1960-2014Bill KnottBustle
95I Love It ThoughAlli WarrenEntropy
96I Remember NightfallMarosa di GiorgioEntropy
97I Wore My Blackest Hair’Carlina DuanBustle
98I’m Just No Good At Rhyming: And Other Nonsense For Mischievous Kids And Immature Grown-UpsChris Harris, illustratedNPR Books
99I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had OnKhadijah QueenEntropy
100In Full VelvetJenny JohnsonEntropy
101InheritGinger KoEntropy
102Inside the Wave
The Guardian
103Into Each Room We Enter Without KnowingCharif Shanahan
Chicago Review Of Books
104Iraq 100: The First Anthology Of Science Fiction To Have Emerged From IraqHassan Blasim (editor)NPR Books
105Jackknife: New and Selected PoemsJan Beatty
Vol1 Brooklyn
106James Wright: A Life in Poetry
Chicago Tribune
107justNew Yorker
108Kingdom of Gravity
The Guardian
109Kingston ButtercupAnn-Margaret Lim
Large Hearted Boy
110Landscape with Sex and ViolenceLynn Melnick
Luna Luna Magazine
111Lie Down Within the NightLauren CarterCBC Books
112Light Into BodiesNancy Chen LongEntropy
113Literary Witches: A Celebration Of Magical Women WritersTaisia Kitaiskaia, illustratedNPR Books
114Literature Class, Berkeley 1980Julio Cortázar , translatedNPR Books
115Long Way DownJason ReynoldsGoodreads
116Lost City Hydrothermal FieldPeter Milne Greiner
Luna Luna Magazine
117Love Her Wild: PoemsAtticus PoetryGoodreads
118love, robotMargaret RheeEntropy
119Lunar Landing, 1966Laboni IslamCBC Books
120Magdalene: Poems’Marie HoweBustle
121Make Yourself HappyEleni Sikelianos
Large Hearted Boy
122Mancunia
The Guardian
123Map To The StarsAdrian MatejkaEntropy
124MapsJohn Freeman
The Rumpus
125Mary Wants to Be a SuperwomanErica Lewis
Vol1 Brooklyn
126Men Without Women: StoriesHaruki Murakami, translatedNPR Books
127Moon for Sale
The Guardian
128Mother, What Should We Do?Claire KellyCBC Books
129MothersMichael JohnsonCBC Books
130MyOTHER TONGUERosa AlcaláEntropy
131Net LossesMark MilnerCBC Books
132New American Best FriendOlivia GatwoodGoodreads
133Oh You’re NativeKaris Jones-PardCBC Books
134Open EpicJulia DrescherEntropy
135OrnamentAnna Lena Phillips Bell
Large Hearted Boy
136Out Of Wonder: Poems Celebrating PoetsKwame Alexander, Chris Colderley and Marjory Wentworth, illustratedNPR Books
137OutplaceLital KhaikinEntropy
138Palm Frond With Its Throat CutVickie VértizEntropy
139PerceptionChristina Pugh
Chicago Review Of Books
140Photograph by Hieu Minh NguyenNew Yorker
141PhrasisWendy Xu
Chicago Review Of Books
142Pizza and WarfareNikki WallschlaegerEntropy
143PlumHollie McNishGoodreads
144Postcards for my SisterAlessandra NaccaratoCBC Books
145ProsopopoeiaFarid TaliEntropy
146Raising CanadaSwati RanaCBC Books
147recombinantChing-in ChenEntropy
148Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now EditedAmit MajmudarEntropy
149ReversibleMarisa Crawford
Luna Luna Magazine
150Rita Dove: Collected Poems 1974-2004Rita Dove
The Rumpus
151Saying the Names ShantyHarold RhenischCBC Books
152Scar On / Scar OffJennifer Maritza McCauley
Luna Luna Magazine
153Seasonal Disturbances
The Guardian
154Shelter ObjectStephanie BolsterCBC Books
155Shrinking UltravioletRebecca Bird
Stephen Kirk Daniels
156SightingNolan Natasha PikeCBC Books
157Signals: New And Selected StoriesTim GautreauxNPR Books
158SistersAyelet TsabariCBC Books
159Slicing Lemons in AprilMichelle PorterCBC Books
160SoloKwame AlexanderGoodreads
161Some BeheadingsAditi MachadoEntropy
162Some Say
Library Journal
163Sort of a Cento: The LabyrinthsMark WagenaarCBC Books
164Sour HeartJenny ZhangNPR Books
165South And West: From A NotebookJoan DidionNPR Books
166Starshine & ClayKamilah Aisha Moon
Luna Luna Magazine
167StoneEmily CarringtonCBC Books
168Sunshine State: EssaysSarah GerardNPR Books
169Swimmer Among the StarsKanishk TharoorNPR Books
170Symphony for Human Transport
The Guardian
171Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay In 40 QuestionsValeria LuiselliNPR Books
172Tender: StoriesSofia SamatarNPR Books
173TestifySimone JohnBustle
174The Amputee’s Guide to SexJillian Weise
Luna Luna Magazine
175The Book of Disquiet
Chicago Tribune
176The Book of EndingsLeslie HarrisonEntropy
177The Complete Poems of A.R. AmmonsEdited by Robert M. West
Publishers Weekly
178The Complete Stories Of Leonora CarringtonLeonora CarringtonNPR Books
179The Dark Dark: StoriesSamantha HuntNPR Books
180The Dinner Party: And Other StoriesJoshua FerrisNPR Books
181The Essential MerwinW.S. Merwin
The Rumpus
182The Flayed CityHari AlluriEntropy
183The God BabyHilda Sheehan
Stephen Kirk Daniels
184The Happy BusLouisa Campbell
Stephen Kirk Daniels
185The King Is Always Above The People: StoriesDaniel AlarcónNPR Books
186the magic my body becomesJess RizkallahEntropy
187The Messenger Is Already DeadJennifer MacBain-Stephens
Vol1 Brooklyn
188The Most Foreign CountryAlejandra PizarnikEntropy
189The Mother Of All QuestionsRebecca SolnitNPR Books
190The Mountain: StoriesPaul YoonNPR Books
191The Muddle in the MiddleElisabeth HarvorCBC Books
192The Nagasaki ElderAntony Owen
Stephen Kirk Daniels
193The NightlifeElise Paschen
Chicago Review Of Books
194The Poems of Dylan ThomasDylan Thomas
The Rumpus
195The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women WritersHollis Robbins and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (editors)NPR Books
196The Radio
The Guardian
197The RefugeesViet Thanh NguyenNPR Books
198The Sea Migrations: Tahriib
The Guardian
199The sky is crackedSarah L Dixon
Stephen Kirk Daniels
200The Songs We Know BestNew Yorker
201The Tantramar Re-VisionKevin IrieCBC Books
202The Truth is Told Better This WayLiz Worth
Luna Luna Magazine
203The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and FeeblemindedMolly McCully BrownEntropy
204Theia ManiaDallas Athent
Luna Luna Magazine
205This Is Just to SayNew Yorker
206Thousands’Lightsey DarstBustle
207ThrustHeather Derr-SmithEntropy
208Ticker-tapeRishi Dastidar
Stephen Kirk Daniels
209To Love the Coming EndLeanne DunicEntropy
210Too Much And Not The Mood: EssaysDurga Chew-BoseNPR Books
211Total Mood Killermerritt k/Nina Pollari
Vol1 Brooklyn
212Tourists Stroll A Victoria WaterwayCornelia HooglandCBC Books
213Uncommon Type: Some StoriesTom HanksNPR Books
214
Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams
New Yorker
215
Vladimir Mayakovsky’ & Other Poems
Chicago Tribune
216Wait Till You See Me Dance: StoriesDeb Olin UnferthNPR Books
217We Come ApartSarah CrossanGoodreads
218We’re On: A June Jordan ReaderEdited by Christoph Keller and Jan Heller Levi
Publishers Weekly
219What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky: StoriesLesley Nneka ArimahNPR Books
220What’s Hanging on the HushLauren RussellEntropy
221Whatever Happened To Interracial Love?: StoriesKathleen CollinsNPR Books
222Witch WifeKiki Petrosino
Vol1 Brooklyn
223You’ve never seen a doomsday like itKate Garrett
Stephen Kirk Daniels


19 Best Poetry Book Sources/Lists Of 2017



SourceArticle
CBC Books 33 writers make the CBC Poetry Prize longlist
Goodreads Best Poetry
Publishers Weekly Poetry
The Washington Post The best poetry collections of 2017
Stephen Kirk Daniels My 8 favourite small press poetry books of 2017 – Happy Small Press Week #SPWEEK17
Library Journal Poetry
Entropy BEST OF 2017: BEST POETRY BOOKS & POETRY COLLECTIONS
Amber Sparks Best (Subjective) Books of 2017
The Guardian Carol Rumens’s best poetry books of 2017
Luna Luna Magazine THE 20 BEST BOOKS OF 2017
NPR Books NPR’s Book Concierge Our Guide To 2017’s Great Reads
Chicago Review Of Books The Best Poetry Books of 2017
The Rumpus BARBARA BERMAN’S 2017 HOLIDAY POETRY SHOUT-OUT
Bustle The 18 Best Poetry Collections Of 2017
Book Riot THEFOLLOWINGAREBOOKRIOT’SBESTBOOKSOF2017.
Large Hearted Boy Favorite Poetry Collections of 2017
Chicago Tribune Notable poetry of 2017
New Yorker The Poetry I Was Grateful for in 2017
Vol1 Brooklyn Vol.1 Brooklyn’s 2017 Favorites: Poetry