Book Review | 31 Outstanding Poetry Books from 2024: Alcalá to Zarin

Every year since 2014, I’ve set aside a couple of months to sit down with what amounts to a long shelf of poetry published in the past 12 months. My goal is to review 31 single-author volumes, one for each day in December. It’s exhausting, certainly, but also a lot of fun, and it’s a great way to see how well-aligned my personal aesthetics and preponderances are with the poetry world in general.

This year, I felt pretty much in tune with what was being published. Obviously, there are hundreds of quality books published each year that I will never have the chance to read, but in 2024, I sensed a movement away from the book-length poem of sententious seriousness toward volumes privileging the lyric. Granted, a number of the books I reviewed are new and selected volumes covering the careers of well-established writers. However, even younger poets seemed to be thinking in terms of brevity and density, trying to compress experience and music and ideas into as few lines as possible rather than allowing language to drift like smoke in great clouds of wavering meaning.

As always, my reviews are intentionally very short. Ideally, each one contains just enough information — an appreciative observation, say, or a striking quotation — to kickstart readers into searching out the book under discussion. Happy holidays, and happy reading!

YOU by Rosa Alcalá (Coffee House)

In the introductory poem to YOU, Rosa Alcalá asks herself, “Isn’t the second person a form of hiding? Why not just use the I?” And yet this book of prose poems about the poet’s “mother and her mother before her // other mothers and other daughters” has in part been made possible by that pronoun shift and the transition from lineated poetry to prose. Clearly, Alcalá benefits from the resulting freedom. In “How You Became a Poet,” she writes: “The day your father slammed the door shut as your mother was trying to leave. The day he struck her face. The click of the bolt… You were learning not that a woman can’t move up but that she can’t move out.” This trauma is recorded in the poet’s “chest and in the breath” and in nearly all the poems in this powerful book.

Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali (Alice James)

Sarah Ghazal Ali writes with a light but sharp touch about a number of subjects, including family relationships, history, and the natural world, but her chief theme in Theophanies — that is, visible manifestations of God to human beings — is her complex and often vexed relationship to religion. She seems to be neither a thoroughgoing skeptic nor a true believer, and in poem after poem, she refuses easy answers. She writes in “My Faith Gets Grime under Its Nails”: “Even when I posture piety / I blink steady, lashes keeping count of the hand- / knotted flowers fringing the rug // rather than God’s pristine names.” And in “Ghazal on the Day of”: “Like God, I’ll create in my image. Go on, pass judgement / — like I’m not already waiting for judgment, // like I don’t tease, don’t taunt to turn His eye my way.”

Paper Boat by Margaret Atwood (Knopf)

Margaret Atwood is, appropriately, best known as one of the great novelists of the past half-century, but she is also the author of 16 volumes of poetry, some of which are now out of print. Paper Boat collects the best of these books, 550 pages’ worth of poetry, in a volume that showcases both the variety of her subject matter — everything from “Ava Gardner Reincarnated as a Magnolia” to the song of a rat to a woman skating on a “A lake sunken among / cedar and black spruce hills” — as well as the continuity of her craft. Atwood tends to write a spare but musical free verse punctuated by lines of surprise, pleasure and despair. An example of the later can be found in the conclusion of “The Disasters of War: A Sequel”: “Some have survived, / though not intact. / No one comes back.”

Solutions for the Problems of Bodies in Space by Catherine Barnett (Graywolf)

In the ninth part of “Studies in Loneliness,” a series running through Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space like a leitmotif, Catherine Barnett writes: “Which is to say what you already know through experience: that loneliness happens even in the midst of people. / That possessions are a common placebo. That my dining room table faces a wall of books. / ‘Could anyone be lonely with all these books?’ I ask my son, who likes silence more than I do.” It’s a vivid image of someone with a comfortable life who nevertheless suffers acutely from emotional solitude, and versions of that conundrum are found throughout this beautiful, carefully crafted book.

Moving the Bones by Rick Barot (Milkweed)

Moving the Bones is bookended by thoughtful poems about love and immigration, art and loss, but the heart of the book is a series of prose poems titled “During the Pandemic.” Each of the 30 poems begins with the phrase “During the pandemic … ” and is followed by a statement that vividly evokes the emotions, quandaries and curiosities of that time: “ … I thought about abstract art”; “ … I noticed the pencils”; “ … I understood how far away I was from things I once knew with forensic intensity”; “ … I listened”; “ … I came to understand that excess is the first quality of the imagination”; “ … I prayed as I had not since childhood”; “ … I had days when I felt like I was by myself on a shore drained of the tide, dragging a stick across miles of wet sand.” Most of us want to forget that dark time, but Barot reminds us of the value of memory and reflection.

An Authentic Life by Jennifer Chang (Copper Canyon)

In the book’s title poem, Jennifer Chang writes: “For most of my life / I did not know or understand / the names of things I saw every day … / I mistook ignorance for wonder, / wonder for grace.” Later in the poem, she tells us, “My family was not poor, / exactly. We simply had no imagination / for pleasure. / To us, it was hard enough being American.” In many ways, An Authentic Life is a response to her family’s lack of vocabulary and inspiration. Chang dives deeply into patriarchy and war, politics and parenting, religion and philosophy in poems about physical peril as well as “the ache that is all / mind.” Her search for the power of truth and the truth of power is uncompromising: “You run the books, you run your mouth, / you run the world.”

The Trouble with Light by Jeremy Michael Clark (Arkansas)

In the book’s Preface, Patricia Smith writes: “In the midst of a country’s fervent undertaking to render the Black voice inconsequential to both that country’s backdrop and its future, Jeremy Michael Clark’s insistence upon light — troubled though it may be — is imperative and rebelliously wrought.” And that light is, indeed, troubled — by abuse and alcoholism, self-loathing and self-doubt. The conclusion of “One Year Sober” is representative of the painful ambiguity evident in so much of Clark’s poetry: “I stare at that familiar spot / on the wall: those newly laid bricks / in the shape of a door.” As Clark writes in “After the Crest,” “One of the spared, I’m left / to wonder, Why me.”

Sorry About the Fire by Colleen Coco Collins (Biblioasis)

“Admit them / these strange arrangements,” Colleen Coco Collins writes in “Fast Drogues,” and readers interested in entering her manically creative world must be prepared to relinquish their preconceptions of how words and sentences ought to be linked together. Collins’s project is very much in keeping with Ezra Pound’s dictum to “Make it new.” Sorry About the Fire is a short book, but it covers a lot of territory, from a “Bullish House” to “the river in an oxygen tank” to “the essential mushroom / forthing from the ground.” Collins loves unusual words, and we can see why in “Haustoria” (the slender projections from parasitic plants) when she tells us: “I wanted a good bewildering, / down deep, / as the keep of a castle.”

Bad Mexican, Bad American by Jose Hernandez Diaz (Acre)

While there are some lineated poems in Bad Mexican, Bad American, the book is really a celebration of the prose poem in its most wondrous and comical forms. James Tate, whom the author meets in a carnival in heaven in one poem, is clearly a guiding light, and Hernandez Diaz celebrates and channels the late poet’s zany inventiveness. Here are just a few of my favorite opening lines, which all lead to equally satisfying poems: “A man in a Rage Against the Machine shirt overthrew the government — of his house.” “A man in a Neil Young & Crazy Horse shirt drank coffee at 4 a.m. because there was nothing else to do.” “I am at the funeral for Van Gogh’s ear.” “I met Octavio Paz on the planet Jupiter last fall.” “After I fell down the stairs last Easter, I was suddenly able to speak French.” Who says a good poem can’t be funny?

The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket by Kinsale Drake (Georgia)

“I am so starved // for words,” Kinsale Drake writes in “Navajo-English Dictionary,” and a love for language, especially as it manifests itself in the life of a young Diné woman, is apparent throughout The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket. Kinsale’s is a hybrid world, with NDN (sound it out) traditions often clashing with but also sometimes harmonizing with white culture, as in “Put on that KTNN,” a poem about driving and knowing “I am nearing home / when the pop music crackles / into KTNN, licks // of fluent Navajo flitting between / Loretta Lynn and Johnny Cash.” But ultimately Kinsale is searching for “ndn rock ‘n’ roll in her // purest form,” and these poems make it plain that, despite her young age, she has already developed a rhythm and rhetoric that is entirely her own.

On the Overnight Train: New and Selected Poems by Alice Friman (LSU)

In the Introduction to On the Overnight Train, Stephen Corey imagines writing a single sentence that sums up Alice Friman’s poetry; he comes up with this: “You have never read nor will you ever read another poetry collection that can stop you so often in your emotional and musical tracks.” That’s quite a claim, and while I’m not sure I would entirely agree, there’s no doubt Friman has a sensitive ear for the sounds of English and writes lines that are absolutely arresting. Take, for instance, “Leonardo’s Roses”: “Leonardo was convinced / sperm came down from the brain / through a channel in the spine. / So much for genius.” Or the end of “Rock-a-Bye,” in which the poet receives a phone call from her daughter “to say she’s found a lump. What an ugly word / to take over this poem. To squat / on its one-syllable immensity / and not move.”

After Image by Jenny George (Copper Canyon)

In the opening of After Image, we learn that the speaker’s beloved has died, and the rest of the book attempts to cope with, explain, and wrestle against that grief. Not surprisingly, Orpheus and Eurydice make repeated appearances, but most of the poems are striking for their immediacy and apparent simplicity. However, simplicity here is only another word for clarity: “The dead live / in clear pools, inside language.” A trio of poems entitled “Jenny George” pokes fun at the author’s obsessions. In one, Jenny George “Is a failure in the garden. / Wherever she makes a hole / the earth slides back in urgently.” The final poem, “Tin Bucket,” is Instagram-famous, but unlike most poems in that category, it is a genuine work of art, one that reminds us that “The world is not simple. / Anyone will tell you.” A spectacular book.

How Will They Name Us by Teresa Godfrey (Revival)

Teresa Godfrey writes poems of great specificity and economy about the people and places she observes. She begins one such poem: “The man who repaired / my washing machine / told me he had three daughters / and it started me thinking / about his socks, his vests, / his manly underpants / mixed up with theirs.” She also has an eye for the allegorical, though for her, myth is grounded in the everyday reality of landscape and architecture and weather. Often the poems’ setting is Northern Ireland, where she lives, and nearly always some small moment of acute perception has much larger implications, as in her poem “Grouse Farm,” here in its entirety: “Sometimes you see one / running desperately / through an open field, / and you wish it well / though you know / it can never survive.”

Coachella Elegy by Christian Gullette (Trio House)

The poems in Coachella Elegy are mostly about California, and they are mostly quite wonderful in their salty and irreverent look at the Golden State. What makes Christian Gullette’s snark so elegant is his insatiable appetite for details. While eating an expensive fish dinner, his “view includes / the hotel loading dock: / a catering truck unloads / clean, bone-colored napkins.” The host at an Airbnb posts the rules for heating the pool “on the refrigerator / under a magnet shaped / like a martini.” And in the prescient “Election Night”: “A queen takes the stage, steeped in mimosa light, / beard glitter-dipped, // lip-syncs ‘Let the Sunshine In,’ / a song I never realized was about heartbreak.”

Far District by Ishion Hutchinson (FSG)

It would be easy to compare Ishion Hutchison to Derek Walcott, another Caribbean poet of great power, though the Nobel Prize winner’s deft weaving of Western culture and island life can be seen in poems like Hutchinson’s “At Bay,” which gives us “coffee-mouth / Cavafy and sea-frisky Seferis, // themselves not lovers, / just timeless and youthful, / fleshed into marble busts, // left on a hot terrace, / sunbathing and overlooking / the vacant bay, // where startled umbrellas / open to the spectrum / of the light’s aging.” In fact, Hutchinson’s poetry is both more precise and stranger than Walcott’s, though just as musical. In a poem about an Ophelia-like drowned woman pulled from a river, Hutchinson, noting the deceased’s hands “clasped on her chest,” remarks: “This was the work of devotion, not art — the silver of love, cracked. / Ants draped her eyelids, indifferent / to the sun and us staring down.”

New and Selected Poems by Marie Howe (Norton)

Over the course of 37 years, Howe has published just four books of poetry, along with the 20 new poems in this collection, and yet, like Elizabeth Bishop, that scarcity of output has made each poem its own little treasure. Howe’s work is deceptively simple, and individual sentences may seem unremarkable. Yet each poem displays a deep concentration and often a deep, barely concealed sorrow. The poems in What the Living Do about the AIDS-related death of her brother John are wrenching, and in “The Copper Beech,” she writes: “Immense, entirely itself, / it wore that yard like a dress, // with limbs low enough for me to enter it / and climb the crooked ladder to where // I could lean against the trunk and practice being alone.” It was an excellent year for poetry, but if I could have only one new book of poems this year, it would be this one.

Certain Shelter by Abbie Kiefer (June Road)

Abbie Kiefer lives in and writes about New England with a voice that is hard-bitten and sardonic and yet deeply tender and lyrical. You get the feeling she would be an equally good companion at a bar, a bowling alley, a doctor’s appointment, or a funeral. In “After She Dies, My Mom Keeps Getting Mail,” she writes, “Her last issue / of Eating Well / unless she acts immediately // Inside, a three-pea sauté / with mint and Aleppo pepper // I read the instructions five times // Commit them to memory.” Her prose poem “I Don’t Like Baseball, Just the Red Sox” concludes, “I liked them better when they were bad. Every spring could be our season. Every fall, spring.” There’s a little universe in this book, one well worth visiting.

The Winter Dance Party by David Kirby (LSU)

In “A Dream in the Presence of Reason,” his introduction to The Winter Dance Party, David Kirby explains that the reason his poems can’t be grouped thematically is because “when I write a poem, more often than not I whip up a free-standing cosmos (which is probably why so many of these poems are so long) that relates only tangentially to the thought or experience or the poem that comes before or after it.” The result, not surprisingly, is a selection from his 15 previous books of poetry that is all over the map. Three random titles should suggest this variety: “Walt Whitman Floors It.” “I Think I Am Going to Call My Wife Paraguay.” And “To a Poet Living Two Billion Years from Now.” Yet whatever topics Kirby’s poems address, he always does so with the frantic energy of someone who wants to miss out on nothing and is therefore dancing like this will be the last party of his life.

A History of Western Music by August Kleinzahler (FSG)

Readers looking for a scholarly history of Western music will find something like the opposite in August Kleinzahler’s new book. The epigraph is Louis Armstrong’s famous quote about jazz, “Man, if you have to ask what it is, you’ll never know,” and the same might be said of Kleinzahler’s aesthetic and methodology as a poet. Fortunately, for those of us addicted to his combustible, flip and lippy poetry, one dazzling surprise after another leaps off the page. Kleinzahler’s disregard for anything like a canonical guide to music announces itself in the very first poem, “Chapter 63 [Whitney Houston],” which is mostly about shopping at odd hours while Whitney’s power ballads play over the grocery store’s PA. Other highlights include “Chapter 81 (Saranac Lake),” where Kleinzahler ribs Béla Bartók (“He is notating birdsong and calculating the vibrations of a hummingbird”), and “Chapter 77 (30, Rue Duluth),” where he has some nasty fun at the expense of Elvis: “Every so often he’d soil his white cape, / and only, it turns out, in in Vegas and while onstage. / Now, that’s what I call a showman.”

Raft by Ted Kooser (Copper Canyon)

Kooser has always been concerned with isolating moments and places that would have been easily missed or forgotten had he not chosen to memorialize them. People, of course, have played a significant part in those poems, but Raft is particularly keen to remind us of the importance of our fellow humans who have been relegated to the margins. In a trio of poems in the early middle of the book, for instance, we are introduced to a brother and sister sorting through “the mold and clutter left in the wake / of their [deceased] maiden aunt.” “In Cemetery Winter,” a gravedigger drops down into the hole he’s dug with his backhoe: “How he’ll ever be able // to pull himself out is anyone’s guess.” And in the most doleful poem, we meet a man in a waiting room “so very ordinary … that were he not alone he’d be invisible.”

Old Stranger by Joan Larkin (Alice James)

Joan Larkin has been publishing poetry with small presses since the early 1970s, but this is only her sixth full-length collection, and her first in 10 years, so it truly deserves the appellation “long awaited.” The poems in Old Stranger are both blunt and enigmatic. We’re given an assertion or set of circumstances, and then the poet’s imagination darts from thought to thought, never ending where you would expect it to. “I want to be that featureless dove / tucked in the saint’s armpit,” she writes in a poem about a fresco by Cimabue, and “I heard her over the seething / river of cars, and her terrible / soft whine willed me  / to turn back in the dark” in a poem about a homeless woman in New York. You’ll never guess where she goes from there: Larkin can take you further in 15 or 20 lines than most poets go in an entire book.

Asterism by Ae Hee Lee (Tupelo)

Born in South Korea, raised in Peru, and now living in Wisconsin, Ae Hee Lee draws on her lived experience in work that is evocative of place and deeply personal. In “Self-Study through Homes” she writes, “Instead of calling home by the name of a country, I imagine calling it by people’s names or pronouns. Hello, I’m from Sang-Hee. I’m going back to Alejandra. Have you ever visited Daniel?” The book achieves a delicate balance between experimentation and tradition, ire and love. “Once I read each heart knows / its own bitterness, // and no one else / can share its joy,” she observes in “El Milagro :: Edges,” but she doesn’t quite believe that’s true. In “Green Card :: Evidence of Adequate Means of Financial Support,” she writes, “I needed money. There’s no poetic way to say this,” but, in fact, she has found a poetic way to say just about everything.

Ash Keys: New Selected Poems by Michael Longley (Wake Forest)

Michael Longley’s Collected Poems has long been one of my favorite books of poetry, but it was published back in 2007, and this prolific poet of often very short poems has published five more books since then. Granted, Collected Poems, which includes all the poems in individual books, is fuller, and longer, than Ash Keys: New Selected Poems, but there’s obviously no reason why a reader can’t own both. The new poems are occasionally about politics (“How can you murder millions and not know?” “Primo’s Question” asks) but the natural world continues to be Longley’s chief inspiration, as he writes about moths and butterflies, dandelions and snowdrops, sedge-warblers and wrens. That love of the outdoors is one he shares with his wife, Edna, as seen in the last stanza of a poem celebrating their fifty years together: “We have tracked otter prints to Allaran / And waited for hours on our chilly throne, / For fifty years, man and wife, voices low, / Counting oystercatchers and sanderlings.”

Glitter Road by January Gill O’Neil (CavanKerry)

America, you never had it from the start is something January Gill O’Neil doesn’t actually say, but might have, in her simmering collection Glitter Road. Holding a light up to the dark goings-on of the worst of her fellow citizens, she also salutes the good work of the best. In “Black Women” she writes, “Caretakers since the diaspora, we show up and show out, / deliver a nation; grieve and reclaim the forgotten names / along the way.” These are political poems, to be sure — what else would you expect from a piece with the found (from U.S.A. Today) title “Three white Old Miss students use guns to vandalize a memorial to lynching victim Emmett Till,” with its lacerating conclusion, “lifetimes / of getting away with it”? — but they are poems first and foremost. O’Neil has a keen eye for detail and an uncompromising way with language that marks her as someone to watch closely in the future.

Querida by Nathan Xavier Osorio (Pittsburgh)

“Querida América, my lonely days are over,” writes Nathan Xavier Osorio, though that’s not exactly true. In fact, one of the glories of Querida is Osorio’s ability to “listen closely to the ruins / of civilizations razed to folklore, / how to become the waterless rivers / and cindery hills and erupt in bloom.” These lines are from one of the four poems entitled “The Last Town Before the Mojave,” but if Osorio’s world is on the edge of the desert, its remoteness is relieved by family, friends and community. There’s Papi, who “loves to say drink the beer, don’t let it drink you,” and Mami, who believes “men can do better,” and the poet’s brother, with whom he prayed “beneath quilt forts” as a child. The concluding sequence, a series of surreal rituals rendered in English and Spanish, shows Osorio at his best, “hungry and tired, overworked and begging for silence.”

Blue on a Blue Palette by Lynne Thompson (BOA)

“Maybe we are each a poem about forgetting,” Lynne Thompson speculates in her new book, and there is, indeed, a thread of loss and lamentation running through Blue on a Blue Palette. Poems like “Dirge for Murdered Black Girls,” for Breonna Taylor, and “Boketto,” for Sandra Bland, face ugly truths head-on. However, Thompson is ultimately a poet who loves and celebrates life, as she does so quite memorably in “A Woman’s Body, Aging, Still Loves Itself,”: “kisses the air that surrounds it, loves / the lips in full pout, famous birthplace of all kisses, / the belly, brown, round, kisses its inverted button / & the shoulders — oh, how I kiss my shoulders!” Or, as she puts it in “Say Hallelujah,” “Praise / for the inhale, the ex-, the little heave of chest, praise this too-short life.”

2000 Blacks by Ajibola Tolase (Pittsburgh)

The title of Nigerian poet Ajibola Tolase’s new book is taken from Fela Kuti and Roy Ayers’s 1980 song “2,000 Blacks Got to Be Free,” an urgent, upbeat 18-and-a-half-minute jam that both acknowledges the harsh reality of forthcoming struggles while also emanating strength and optimism for the future. The song is an appropriate touchstone for Tolase’s book of poems, which address both despair and hope. Of the former, we see plenty  —in a sonnet for the 300 refugees who died when their boat sank off the island of Lampedusa, in a poem about the “necklacing” with burning tires of four boys in Aluu, and in the poems about Tolese’s father, a broken man who “wore a suit in this sleep / behind the steering wheel.” And yet 2000 Blacks ends on a note of qualified faith: “Imagine / the land without the conflicts. // Outside — the field in the rain, / children jumping ropes.”

Sleeping with Bashō by David Trinidad (BlazeVOX)

For fans, like me, of David Trinidad’s Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera, in which every episode of the long-running TV series was encapsulated in a haiku, a Trinidadian updating of all 1,012 of Bashō’s short poems is irresistible. The goal, Trinidad says in his Preface “was to capture the essence of the original and add a sparkle of my own.” That process, he acknowledges, meant that “Sometimes I found it necessary to deviate from Bashō’s meaning altogether.” But when you’re having this much fun, who cares about literal accuracy? Trinidad’s drollery enlivens every page, so I’ll just quote two examples from near the end of the book: “Poor Fit (980): “Round moon, / square window” And “Suburbia (981): “A persimmon tree / in every yard.”

Light Me Down: New & Collected Poems by Jean Valentine (Alice James)

Jean Valentine, who died in 2020, was one of the major poets of her generation. The winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, a National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, she was a “poet’s poet” — that term of both approbation and dismissal — who clearly deserves a wider audience. Valentine’s poems tend to be elliptical and short, and in this volume, which gathers all 12 of her books, as well as 28 new poems, it’s not unusual to find multiple poems on a single page. The effect can be a bit overwhelming, especially as most of her verse resists easy interpretation. A Valentine poem takes some work, but it’s nearly always worth it. Any number of these poems could serve as an epitaph for the poet herself, but I’m partial to “A Bone Standing Up”: “A bone standing up / she worked for words / word by word / up Mt. Fear till / she got to her name: it was / ‘She Sang.’”

Museum of the Soon to Depart by Andy Young (Carnegie Mellon)

There is a lot of despair and death in Andy Young’s Museum of the Soon to Depart. “I used to think I would die / of sadness but have learned there is no such luck,” she writes in the opening poem, “Grief during Carnival Season,” and things don’t get any cheerier. The poet’s mother has a tumor removed the “size of a child’s fist,” but the prognosis is not good. A number of ekphrastic poems based on photographs depict death in various guises, and another group of poems describes life in Cairo during the counterrevolution of 2012 and 2013, after the promises of the Arab spring had gone sour and, as one poem would have it, “It Is Better to Pray than to Sleep.” This book is not for the faint-hearted, but then again, who can afford to be faint-hearted these days?

Next Day: New and Selected Poems by Cynthia Zarin (Knopf)

Cynthia Zarin was educated at Harvard and Columbia and teaches at Yale, so it’s not surprising that a hint of Ivy League erudition is an integral part of her poetry. That’s not so say, though, that these poems are snobbish or out of touch with the real world. Far from it. Zarin is deeply attuned to the natural world, and she’s a wordsmith extraordinaire. Take the opening lines of her sonnet “Meltwater,” for instance: “A gang of foxes on the wet road, fur / gaggle, the gutter a Ganges, gravel / rutting the glacier’s slur and cant.” Have “g” and “r” sounds ever worked so effectively to evoke the effects of running water on a group of animals? Plenty of similar delights await the reader of this generous selection of her best work.

This review originally appeared in the California Review of Books.

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