“What are the best Poetry books released in 2019?” We looked at 137 of the top Poetry books, aggregating and ranking them so we could answer that very question!
The top 16 books, all appearing on 2 or more “Best Poetry” book lists, are ranked below by how many times they appear. The remaining 100+ titles, as well as the sources we used, are in alphabetical order on the bottom of the page.
Our other Best Of 2019 Articles:
Our Other Years: 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015
Happy Scrolling!
Lists It Appears On:
After the Formalities explores ideas of division and dominance, incorporating history, science and philosophy alongside autobiographical narratives to examine how race, class and masculinity is shaped in contemporary Britain. Technically achieved, emotionally transformative and razor-sharp.
Lists It Appears On:
A stunning new volume from the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States, informed by her tribal history and connection to the land. In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississip
Lists It Appears On:
Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry Carmen Giménez Smith dares to demand renewal for a world made unrecognizable Be Recorder offers readers a blazing way forward into an as yet unmade world. The many times and tongues in these poems investigate
Lists It Appears On:
“A new collection of poems by Mary Ruefle, the author of My Private Property, Trances of the Blast, Madness, Rack, and Honey, Selected Poems, The Most of It, and A Little White Shadow”–
Lists It Appears On:
“A major debut that feels timely and timeless.” –KATHY FAGAN
Lists It Appears On:
A vernacular debut that uncompromisingly journeys towards its sole destination: the decolonization of the imagination
Lists It Appears On:
In her striking second collection, Natalie Scenters-Zapico sets her unflinching gaze once again on the borders of things. Lima :: Limón illuminates both the sweet and the sour of the immigrant experience, of life as a woman in the U.S. and Mexico, and of t
Lists It Appears On:
*Shortlisted for Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2019* *Winner of the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry* Jay Bernard’s extraordinary debut is a fearlessly original exploration of the black British archive: an enquiry into the New Cross Fire o
Lists It Appears On:
“When an author’s unmitigated brilliance shows up on every page, it’s tempting to skip a description and just say, Read this! Such is the case with this breathlessly powerful, deceptively breezy book of poetry.” —Booklist, Starred Review In his much-antici
Lists It Appears On:
A stirring and confident examination of mixed-race identity, violence, and history skillfully rendered through the lens of motherhood. In this timely, assured collection, Tina Chang confronts the complexities of raising a mixed-race child during an era of
Lists It Appears On:
From the breakout author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé comes a profound and deceptively funny exploration of Black American womanhood. ‘2019 justly belongs to Morgan Parker. Her poems shred me with their intelligence, dark humor and black
Lists It Appears On:
This collection of bold and scathingly beautiful feminist poems imagines what comes after our current age of environmental destruction, racism, sexism, and divisive politics. Informed by Brenda Shaughnessy’s craft as a poet and her worst fears as a mother,
Lists It Appears On:
A brilliant second collection by Sally Wen Mao on the violence of the spectacle—starring the film legend Anna May Wong In Oculus, Sally Wen Mao explores exile not just as a matter of distance and displacement but as a migration through time and a reckoning
Lists It Appears On:
Choi pairs complex pain with striking images, wrapping readers in mystical interpretations and then captures them within reality.
Lists It Appears On:
Jericho Brown’s daring poetry collection The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the inc
Lists It Appears On:
Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry Ilya Kaminsky’s astonishing parable in poems asks us, What is silence? Deaf Republic opens in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the
| # | Books | Authors | Lists |
| 17 | A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland | Goodreads | |
| 18 | A PLACE TO RETURN TO | John Allison | New Zealand Listener |
| 19 | A Sand Book | Ariana Reines | Entropy |
| 20 | Advantages of Being Evergreen | Oliver Baez Bendorf | Entropy |
| 21 | All That Beauty | Fred Moten | Entropy |
| 22 | Almost Home: Poems | Goodreads | |
| 23 | American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin | Terrance Hayes | Five Books |
| 24 | Aphrodite Made Me Do It | Goodreads | |
| 25 | Austerity | Marion Bell | Entropy |
| 26 | Black Is The Body: Stories From My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, And Mine | Emily Bernard | NPR |
| 27 | Blood Box | Zefyr Lisowski | Entropy |
| 28 | Brute | Emily Skaja | Entropy |
| 29 | Careen | Grace Shuyi Liew | Entropy |
| 30 | Casting Deep Shade: An Amble | C.D. Wright | Entropy |
| 31 | COLLECTED POEMS | Fleur Adcock | New Zealand Listener |
| 32 | Collected Poems: In English | Arun Kolatkar | Five Books |
| 33 | Contains Mild Peril | Telegraph | |
| 34 | Coventry: Essays | Rachel Cusk | NPR |
| 35 | Cyborg Detective | Jillian Weise | NPR |
| 36 | Doomstead Days | Brian Teare | Entropy |
| 37 | EEK, YOU REEK!: POEMS ABOUT ANIMALS THAT STINK, STANK, STUNK | Eugenia Nobati | Kirkus Reviews |
| 38 | Empty Bottles Full of Stories | Goodreads | |
| 39 | Erato | Guardian | |
| 40 | Everything Inside: Stories | Edwidge Danticat | NPR |
| 41 | Exhalation: Stories | Ted Chiang | NPR |
| 42 | Extratransmission | Andrea Abi-Karam | Entropy |
| 43 | Feed | Tommy Pico | Entropy |
| 44 | Felon: Poems | Reginald Dwayne Betts | NPR |
| 45 | Furthest Ecology | Adam Fagin | Entropy |
| 46 | Great Goddesses: Life Lessons from Myths and Monsters | Goodreads | |
| 47 | Grief Sequence | Prageeta Sharma | Entropy |
| 48 | Growing Things And Other Stories | Paul Tremblay | NPR |
| 49 | Hall of Waters | Berry Grass | Entropy |
| 50 | Have You Been Feeling Blue These Days | Kim Eon Hee | Entropy |
| 51 | Heart Like A Window, Mouth Like A Cliff | Sara Borjas | Entropy |
| 52 | Hoodwitch | Faylita Hicks | Entropy |
| 53 | Hysteria | Kim Yideum | Entropy |
| 54 | I Like To Watch: Arguing My Way Through The TV Revolution | Emily Nussbaum | NPR |
| 55 | I Miss You When I Blink: Essays | Mary Laura Philpott | NPR |
| 56 | I REMEMBER: POEMS AND PICTURES OF HERITAGE | Lee Bennett Hopkins | Kirkus Reviews |
| 57 | I: New and Selected Poems | City of Asylum Bookstore | |
| 58 | I’m Not Your Paper Princess: Poems | Goodreads | |
| 59 | If All the World and Love Were Young | Telegraph | |
| 60 | In Nearby Bushes | Telegraph | |
| 61 | In the Months of My Son’s Recovery | Kate Daniels | Library Journal |
| 62 | Kingdomland | Guardian | |
| 63 | Knitting the Fog | Claudia D. Hernández | Entropy |
| 64 | LAY STUDIES | Steve Toussaint | New Zealand Listener |
| 65 | Let It Ride | Timothy Liu | Entropy |
| 66 | Life of the Party | Goodreads | |
| 67 | LION OF THE SKY: HAIKU FOR ALL SEASONS | Mercè López | Kirkus Reviews |
| 68 | LISTENING IN | Lynley Edmeades | New Zealand Listener |
| 69 | Lord of the Butterflies | Goodreads | |
| 70 | Losing Miami | Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué | Entropy |
| 71 | LOST AND SOMEWHERE ELSE | Jenny Bornholdt | New Zealand Listener |
| 72 | Lot: Stories | Bryan Washington | NPR |
| 73 | Love Looks Pretty on You | Goodreads | |
| 74 | Love Poems For Married People | John Kenney | NPR |
| 75 | Make It Scream, Make It Burn: Essays | Leslie Jamison | NPR |
| 76 | Meet Me There: Normal Sex & Home in three days. Don’t wash. | Samuel Ace & Linda Smukler | Entropy |
| 77 | Mitochondrial Night | Ed Bok Lee | Entropy |
| 78 | Moira of Edges, Moira the Tart | Moina Pam Dick | Entropy |
| 79 | MOTH HOUR | Anne Kennedy | New Zealand Listener |
| 80 | NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field | Billy-Ray Belcourt | Library Journal |
| 81 | Near, At | Jennifer Soong | Entropy |
| 82 | NIGHT AS DAY | Nikki-Lee Birdsey | New Zealand Listener |
| 83 | Nightingale | Paisley Rekdal | NPR |
| 84 | Nobody’s Looking At You: Essays | Janet Malcolm | NPR |
| 85 | Nox | Anne Carson | Five Books |
| 86 | Oceanic | Aimee Nezhukumatathil | Entropy |
| 87 | One Lark, One Horse | Michael Hofmann | Five Books |
| 88 | Orange World And Other Stories | Karen Russell | NPR |
| 89 | Other Words For Home | Jasmine Warga | NPR |
| 90 | Our Weather Our Sea | Samuel Ace | Entropy |
| 91 | Personal Volcano | Laura Moriarty | Entropy |
| 92 | Ridiculous Light: Poems | Valencia Robin | Library Journal |
| 93 | Several Rotations | Jesse Seldess | Entropy |
| 94 | SHOUT | Goodreads | |
| 95 | Significant Other | Telegraph | |
| 96 | Sing To It: New Stories | Amy Hempel | NPR |
| 97 | Skin Can Hold | Telegraph | |
| 98 | Someone Who Will Love You In All Your Damaged Glory: Stories | Raphael Bob-Waksberg | NPR |
| 99 | Song For The Unraveling Of The World | Brian Evenson | NPR |
| 100 | SONGS IN THE SHADE OF THE CASHEW AND COCONUT TREES: LULLABIES AND NURSERY RHYMES FROM WEST AFRICA AND THE CARIBBEAN | Judith Gueyfier | Kirkus Reviews |
| 101 | Space Struck | Paige Lewis | Entropy |
| 102 | Street Gloss | Brent Armendinger | Entropy |
| 103 | Syncope | Asiya Wadud | Entropy |
| 104 | Take Me With You, Wherever You’re Going | Jessica Jacobs | Library Journal |
| 105 | The Caiplie Caves | Telegraph | |
| 106 | The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays | Esmé Weijun Wang | NPR |
| 107 | THE DAY THE UNIVERSE EXPLODED MY HEAD: POEMS TO TAKE YOU INTO SPACE AND BACK AGAIN | Anna Raff | Kirkus Reviews |
| 108 | The Forward Book of Poetry | Telegraph | |
| 109 | The Girl Aquarium | Goodreads | |
| 110 | The Half-God of Rainfall | Telegraph | |
| 111 | The House With Only an Attic and a Basement | Kathryn Maris | Five Books |
| 112 | The Mermaid’s Voice Returns in This One | Goodreads | |
| 113 | THE PROPER WAY TO MEET A HEDGEHOG: AND OTHER HOW-TO POEMS | Paul B. Janeczko | Kirkus Reviews |
| 114 | The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs of Freedom | Magdalena Zurawski | Entropy |
| 115 | The Truth About Magic | Goodreads | |
| 116 | The Twenty-Ninth Year | Hala Alyan | BookMarks |
| 117 | The Unexploded Ordnance Bin | Rebecca Foust | Entropy |
| 118 | The Witches Are Coming | Lindy West | NPR |
| 119 | The World Doesn’t Require You: Stories | Rion Amilcar Scott | NPR |
| 120 | The Year of Blue Water | Yanyi | Entropy |
| 121 | Thick: And Other Essays | Tressie McMillan Cottom | NPR |
| 122 | Time | Etel Adnan | Entropy |
| 123 | TO THE OCCUPANT | Emma Neale | New Zealand Listener |
| 124 | To the Wren: Collected & New | Jane Mead | Publishers Weekly |
| 125 | Trick Mirror: Reflections On Self-Delusion | Jia Tolentino | NPR |
| 126 | TWO OR MORE ISLANDS | Diana Bridge | New Zealand Listener |
| 127 | UNDER GLASS | Gregory Kan | New Zealand Listener |
| 128 | Valuing | Christopher Kondrich | Library Journal |
| 129 | Vertigo & Ghost | Telegraph | |
| 130 | What I Knew | Eleni Sikelianos | Entropy |
| 131 | What My Mother And I Don’t Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break The Silence | Michele Filgate (editor) | NPR |
| 132 | What’s in a Name | Ana Luísa Amaral | Entropy |
| 133 | When You Ask Me Where I’m Going | Goodreads | |
| 134 | while they sleep | Entropy | |
| 135 | Whip-hot & Grippy | Telegraph | |
| 136 | Witch | Telegraph | |
| 137 | Woods and Clouds Interchangeable | Michael Earl Craig | Library Journal |
| Source |
| BookMarks |
| City of Asylum Bookstore |
| Entropy |
| Five Books |
| Goodreads |
| Guardian |
| Kirkus Reviews |
| Library Journal |
| New Zealand Listener |
| NPR |
| Publishers Weekly |
| Telegraph |
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