Best 2017

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



 

# Books Authors Lists
(Titles Appear On 1 List Each)
29 300 Arguments: Essays Sarah Manguso NPR Books
30 A Bargain with the Light, Poems after Lee Miller Jacqueline Saphra
Stephen Kirk Daniels
31 A Collection of Sky Stories Gail MacKay CBC Books
32 A Dialectical Discussion with Self Upon Meeting Her Husband’s Mistress a Week After a Failed IVF Attempt Una McDonnell CBC Books
33 A Long Curving Scar Where the Heart Should Be Quintan Ana Wikswo
Luna Luna Magazine
34 A People’s History of Chicago Kevin Coval
Chicago Review Of Books
35 A Social History of Tone Deafness Rob Winger CBC Books
36 A Turkish Dictionary Andrew Wessels Entropy
37 Adam Cannot Be Adam Kelli Anne Noftle Entropy
38 Adrenalin Ghayath Almadhoun Entropy
39 Advice from the Lights Stephanie Burt
Large Hearted Boy
40 Afterland Mai Der Vang Entropy
41 Afterland: Poems’ Mai Der Vang Bustle
42 All My Heroes Are Broke Ariel Francisco
Luna Luna Magazine
43 An Aviary of Small Birds
The Guardian
44 Anemal Uter Meck Mg Roberts Entropy
45 Angel Hill
The Guardian
46 Autopsy: Poems Donte Collins NPR Books
47 Bad Dreams And Other Stories Tessa Hadley NPR Books
48 Beast Meridian Vanessa Angélica Villarreal Entropy
49 Before Isadore Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick
Luna Luna Magazine
50 biography New Yorker
51 Blackout
Chicago Tribune
52 Blud Rachel McKibbens
Luna Luna Magazine
53 Bone Yrsa Daley-Ward Bustle
54 Boundless Jillian Tamaki NPR Books
55 Carry Sarah Kabamba CBC Books
56 Certain Magical Acts Alice Notley
Amber Sparks
57 Choose Your Own Poem Laura Farina CBC Books
58 Collected Poems 1991-2000
Chicago Tribune
59 Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons
Chicago Tribune
60 Crawlspace
Chicago Tribune
61 Daylight Hangs On Claudia Coutu Radmore CBC Books
62 Deep Well Dan Bellm
The Rumpus
63 Depression & Other Magic Tricks Sabrina Benaim Goodreads
64 Desgraciado Ángel Domínguez Entropy
65 Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver Mary Oliver
The Washington Post
66 Difficult Women Roxane Gay NPR Books
67 Dust Bunny City Bud Smith & Rae Buleri
Luna Luna Magazine
68 Earth on The Ocean’s Back Daniel Cowper CBC Books
69 Earthling’ James Longenbach Bustle
70 fast Jorie Graham Entropy
71 Fen: Stories Daisy Johnson NPR Books
72 Field Glass Joanna Howard & Joanna Ruocco Entropy
73 First Days in Residential School Richard Behn CBC Books
74 fitting a witch//hexing the stitch Jacklyn Janeksela
Luna Luna Magazine
75 Five-Carat Soul James McBride NPR Books
76 Flowers & Sky Aaron Shurin
The Rumpus
77 Fresh Complaint: Stories Jeffrey Eugenides NPR Books
78 from THE BOOK OF SMALLER rob mclennan CBC Books
79 Full Circle Catherine Lafferty CBC Books
80 Genevieves Henry Hoke
Luna Luna Magazine
81 Glossa for Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” Sonja Arntzen CBC Books
82 Gnome Robert Lunday Entropy
83 Godot Siobhan Jamison CBC Books
84 Good Stock Strange Blood Dawn Lundy Martin Entropy
85 Gray Market Krystal Languell Entropy
86 H Alix Longland CBC Books
87 Hacker Aase Berg
Amber Sparks
88 Here High Note, High Note Catherine Blauvelt Entropy
89 Hermit God Spot Tammy Armstrong CBC Books
90 holiness of the heart’s affections New Yorker
91 Hollywood Forever Harmony Holiday Entropy
92 Home and Native Land Heather Nolan CBC Books
93 How Lovely the Ruins: Inspirational Poems and Words for Difficult Times’ edited Annie Chagnot and Emi Ikkanda Bustle
94 I Am Flying Into Myself: Selected Poems 1960-2014 Bill Knott Bustle
95 I Love It Though Alli Warren Entropy
96 I Remember Nightfall Marosa di Giorgio Entropy
97 I Wore My Blackest Hair’ Carlina Duan Bustle
98 I’m Just No Good At Rhyming: And Other Nonsense For Mischievous Kids And Immature Grown-Ups Chris Harris, illustrated NPR Books
99 I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On Khadijah Queen Entropy
100 In Full Velvet Jenny Johnson Entropy
101 Inherit Ginger Ko Entropy
102 Inside the Wave
The Guardian
103 Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing Charif Shanahan
Chicago Review Of Books
104 Iraq 100: The First Anthology Of Science Fiction To Have Emerged From Iraq Hassan Blasim (editor) NPR Books
105 Jackknife: New and Selected Poems Jan Beatty
Vol1 Brooklyn
106 James Wright: A Life in Poetry
Chicago Tribune
107 just New Yorker
108 Kingdom of Gravity
The Guardian
109 Kingston Buttercup Ann-Margaret Lim
Large Hearted Boy
110 Landscape with Sex and Violence Lynn Melnick
Luna Luna Magazine
111 Lie Down Within the Night Lauren Carter CBC Books
112 Light Into Bodies Nancy Chen Long Entropy
113 Literary Witches: A Celebration Of Magical Women Writers Taisia Kitaiskaia, illustrated NPR Books
114 Literature Class, Berkeley 1980 Julio Cortázar , translated NPR Books
115 Long Way Down Jason Reynolds Goodreads
116 Lost City Hydrothermal Field Peter Milne Greiner
Luna Luna Magazine
117 Love Her Wild: Poems Atticus Poetry Goodreads
118 love, robot Margaret Rhee Entropy
119 Lunar Landing, 1966 Laboni Islam CBC Books
120 Magdalene: Poems’ Marie Howe Bustle
121 Make Yourself Happy Eleni Sikelianos
Large Hearted Boy
122 Mancunia
The Guardian
123 Map To The Stars Adrian Matejka Entropy
124 Maps John Freeman
The Rumpus
125 Mary Wants to Be a Superwoman Erica Lewis
Vol1 Brooklyn
126 Men Without Women: Stories Haruki Murakami, translated NPR Books
127 Moon for Sale
The Guardian
128 Mother, What Should We Do? Claire Kelly CBC Books
129 Mothers Michael Johnson CBC Books
130 MyOTHER TONGUE Rosa Alcalá Entropy
131 Net Losses Mark Milner CBC Books
132 New American Best Friend Olivia Gatwood Goodreads
133 Oh You’re Native Karis Jones-Pard CBC Books
134 Open Epic Julia Drescher Entropy
135 Ornament Anna Lena Phillips Bell
Large Hearted Boy
136 Out Of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets Kwame Alexander, Chris Colderley and Marjory Wentworth, illustrated NPR Books
137 Outplace Lital Khaikin Entropy
138 Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut Vickie Vértiz Entropy
139 Perception Christina Pugh
Chicago Review Of Books
140 Photograph by Hieu Minh Nguyen New Yorker
141 Phrasis Wendy Xu
Chicago Review Of Books
142 Pizza and Warfare Nikki Wallschlaeger Entropy
143 Plum Hollie McNish Goodreads
144 Postcards for my Sister Alessandra Naccarato CBC Books
145 Prosopopoeia Farid Tali Entropy
146 Raising Canada Swati Rana CBC Books
147 recombinant Ching-in Chen Entropy
148 Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now Edited Amit Majmudar Entropy
149 Reversible Marisa Crawford
Luna Luna Magazine
150 Rita Dove: Collected Poems 1974-2004 Rita Dove
The Rumpus
151 Saying the Names Shanty Harold Rhenisch CBC Books
152 Scar On / Scar Off Jennifer Maritza McCauley
Luna Luna Magazine
153 Seasonal Disturbances
The Guardian
154 Shelter Object Stephanie Bolster CBC Books
155 Shrinking Ultraviolet Rebecca Bird
Stephen Kirk Daniels
156 Sighting Nolan Natasha Pike CBC Books
157 Signals: New And Selected Stories Tim Gautreaux NPR Books
158 Sisters Ayelet Tsabari CBC Books
159 Slicing Lemons in April Michelle Porter CBC Books
160 Solo Kwame Alexander Goodreads
161 Some Beheadings Aditi Machado Entropy
162 Some Say
Library Journal
163 Sort of a Cento: The Labyrinths Mark Wagenaar CBC Books
164 Sour Heart Jenny Zhang NPR Books
165 South And West: From A Notebook Joan Didion NPR Books
166 Starshine & Clay Kamilah Aisha Moon
Luna Luna Magazine
167 Stone Emily Carrington CBC Books
168 Sunshine State: Essays Sarah Gerard NPR Books
169 Swimmer Among the Stars Kanishk Tharoor NPR Books
170 Symphony for Human Transport
The Guardian
171 Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay In 40 Questions Valeria Luiselli NPR Books
172 Tender: Stories Sofia Samatar NPR Books
173 Testify Simone John Bustle
174 The Amputee’s Guide to Sex Jillian Weise
Luna Luna Magazine
175 The Book of Disquiet
Chicago Tribune
176 The Book of Endings Leslie Harrison Entropy
177 The Complete Poems of A.R. Ammons Edited by Robert M. West
Publishers Weekly
178 The Complete Stories Of Leonora Carrington Leonora Carrington NPR Books
179 The Dark Dark: Stories Samantha Hunt NPR Books
180 The Dinner Party: And Other Stories Joshua Ferris NPR Books
181 The Essential Merwin W.S. Merwin
The Rumpus
182 The Flayed City Hari Alluri Entropy
183 The God Baby Hilda Sheehan
Stephen Kirk Daniels
184 The Happy Bus Louisa Campbell
Stephen Kirk Daniels
185 The King Is Always Above The People: Stories Daniel Alarcón NPR Books
186 the magic my body becomes Jess Rizkallah Entropy
187 The Messenger Is Already Dead Jennifer MacBain-Stephens
Vol1 Brooklyn
188 The Most Foreign Country Alejandra Pizarnik Entropy
189 The Mother Of All Questions Rebecca Solnit NPR Books
190 The Mountain: Stories Paul Yoon NPR Books
191 The Muddle in the Middle Elisabeth Harvor CBC Books
192 The Nagasaki Elder Antony Owen
Stephen Kirk Daniels
193 The Nightlife Elise Paschen
Chicago Review Of Books
194 The Poems of Dylan Thomas Dylan Thomas
The Rumpus
195 The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers Hollis Robbins and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (editors) NPR Books
196 The Radio
The Guardian
197 The Refugees Viet Thanh Nguyen NPR Books
198 The Sea Migrations: Tahriib
The Guardian
199 The sky is cracked Sarah L Dixon
Stephen Kirk Daniels
200 The Songs We Know Best New Yorker
201 The Tantramar Re-Vision Kevin Irie CBC Books
202 The Truth is Told Better This Way Liz Worth
Luna Luna Magazine
203 The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded Molly McCully Brown Entropy
204 Theia Mania Dallas Athent
Luna Luna Magazine
205 This Is Just to Say New Yorker
206 Thousands’ Lightsey Darst Bustle
207 Thrust Heather Derr-Smith Entropy
208 Ticker-tape Rishi Dastidar
Stephen Kirk Daniels
209 To Love the Coming End Leanne Dunic Entropy
210 Too Much And Not The Mood: Essays Durga Chew-Bose NPR Books
211 Total Mood Killer merritt k/Nina Pollari
Vol1 Brooklyn
212 Tourists Stroll A Victoria Waterway Cornelia Hoogland CBC Books
213 Uncommon Type: Some Stories Tom Hanks NPR Books
214
Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams
New Yorker
215
Vladimir Mayakovsky’ & Other Poems
Chicago Tribune
216 Wait Till You See Me Dance: Stories Deb Olin Unferth NPR Books
217 We Come Apart Sarah Crossan Goodreads
218 We’re On: A June Jordan Reader Edited by Christoph Keller and Jan Heller Levi
Publishers Weekly
219 What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky: Stories Lesley Nneka Arimah NPR Books
220 What’s Hanging on the Hush Lauren Russell Entropy
221 Whatever Happened To Interracial Love?: Stories Kathleen Collins NPR Books
222 Witch Wife Kiki Petrosino
Vol1 Brooklyn
223 You’ve never seen a doomsday like it Kate Garrett
Stephen Kirk Daniels


19 Best Poetry Book Sources/Lists Of 2017



Source Article
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

 

A.M. Anderson

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