If you’re doing The Sealey Challenge this year — reading one book of poetry per day in the month of August — and looking for a few more books to explore this month, we’re here today to suggest these 10 brilliant poetry books by TSW contributors, all released within the last year and sure to be your next favorite read.
Sneha Subramanian Kanta‘s chapbook, Ancestral-Wing (Porkbelly Press, 2024):
Ancestral–Wing juxtaposes ancestral remembrance and gratitude while meditating on place. This collection of poems mingles ecology, tradition, and everyday. In devotion and through inventive syntax, these poems take the reader on a journey of recollecting our ancestors through grace. Language begins to take different shapes in the narrative. The collection of poems is a hymn, a prayer, an ode.
Read Sneha’s poem “Greening” from Issue 15: Root Systems.
Saba Keramati‘s debut poetry collection, Self-Mythology (The University of Arkansas Press, 2024):
“So many writers are telling these stories — or making their best attempts to. Keramati avoids the many pitfalls of addressing a complex identity — you won’t find confounding DIY tanglings of language or an unwavering eye fixed on the myriad metaphors of culture clash. Self-Mythology’s poems unreel with revelation, undaunted soul-searching, and crisp, deliberate lyric.” — Patricia Smith
Read Saba’s poem “There Is No Other Way to Say This” from Issue 14: Economies of Harm.
Jody Chan‘s collection, impact statement (Brick Books, 2024):
“What a maestrapiece of disabled Mad queer Asian longing and making Jody Chan has written with impact statement. In this time of death and constant attack on our lives and dreams, Chan’s work is the courageous alternative future present we need. The disabled longing for things as vital and ordinary as chosen family driving without ID or arrest, flower markets blooming on the graves of former institutions, our lives. Damn, this book. Wow. Is this part of the next wave of disability justice, Mad writing? Yes. This book breaks code.” — Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Read two poems by Jody Chan from Issue 16: Proximities.
Ivy Raff‘s debut chapbook, Rooted and Reduced to Dust (Finishing Line Press, 2024):
“Ivy Raff writes a poetry of relentless inquiry into the past. She subjects her ‘generational history of displacement’ to a restorative poetic justice and joy. The investigation scrutinizes. It is lacerating, honest, an inquest, finally, into the strength of love as it is conducted through the body into the poem. I find these poems fearless in tracing the map of the journey from Jerusalem to Far Rockaway to Detroit, establishing a new place full of potential. These poems are alive.” — Bruce Smith
Read Ivy’s poem “No Children” from Issue 16: Proximities.
Omotara James‘s debut collection, Song of My Softening (Alice James Books, 2024):
“Omotara James has used the page, the word and this wonderful book, Song of My Softening, to etch a particular achy wandering silence that is as loud and brilliant as any book I’ve read. One can only argue whether an abundance of skill or will was most necessary to pull off this literary feat. One cannot, and should not, ever argue about the book’s multilayered longing boom.” — Kiese Laymon
Read two poems of Omotara’s that we published in Issue 6: Dangerous Bodies.
Rachel Edelman‘s debut collection, Dear Memphis (River River Books, 2024):
“In Dear Memphis, Rachel Edelman probes the shifting meaning of the intersection of whiteness and Jewishness in the US South. Refusing the romance of suffering, these poems enter the terrain of ongoing struggle that is history and insist that there is nothing inherently liberatory about having been oppressed. Where white Jewish accumulation takes place alongside entrenched anti-Blackness, what might the intergenerational trauma of antisemitism mean for the possibilities of solidarity? Punctuated with epistolary poems, Edelman’s searching text recalls that to address is to traverse a distance and seek a closeness, that reckoning is a profound intimacy, that to leave is also the condition of return. ‘Who did I choose / when I wished myself elsewhere?’ Edelman asks. Holding to the possibility of transformation in encounter, Dear Memphis shimmers with the difficult work of love.” — Claire Schwartz
Read three poems of Rachel’s that we published in Issue 13: Rebellious Joy.
Sarah Ghazal Ali‘s debut collection, Theophanies (Alice James Books, 2024):
“Ali’s is one of the most sure-footed debuts I’ve had the pleasure to encounter in many years. Wrought with precision, control, and an astute humility before the wondrous, the profound and profane, these poems feel crafted from the sum total of history, then realized at the crest of the poet’s matrix of experiences. A truly fearless and tender gem of a collection.” — Ocean Vuong
Read Sarah’s poem “Matrilineage [Recovered]” from Issue 13: Rebellious Joy.
River 瑩瑩 Dandelion’s debut chapbook, remembering (y)our light:
“River 瑩瑩 Dandelion’s remembering (y)our light will awaken you into dreaming. These poems are medicinal and nourishing, full of visceral, herbaceous language: ‘we listened with our mouths / open vermicelli dangling.’ With Toisanese woven throughout with radical reclamation, River’s poems speak to resistance, queer and trans safety, historical reckonings, home and belonging, survival, oral histories, gardens, invocations, and songs for healing. Formally abundant with elegies of ancestral tenderness, generous pantoums, and heart-held recipes, remembering (y)our light was so familiar in my gurgling gut, as a Toisanese American poet myself… These poems will stay with you across lifetimes, in the deepest layers of memory and the flowering folds of the future.” — Jane Wong
Read River’s poem “When I Close My Eyes” from Issue 10: Willful Innocence.
Erin Marie Lynch‘s debut collection, Removal Acts (Graywolf Press, 2023):
“Critical, capacious, and ingenious turn after turn, Removal Acts honors and embodies fraught complexities while maintaining keen aim and propulsive momentum. . . . Erin Marie Lynch has given us a gift of extraordinary proportions. I look forward to learning from this collection’s rigorous heart and marvels of form for the rest of my life.” — Gabrielle Bates
Erin Marie Lynch was a reader at two of TSW’s events over the years: at our celebration for Issue 9: What We Lose, in 2019, and at Seven by Seven: a poetry reading, at AWP in 2023.
Ariana Benson‘s debut collection, Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press, 2023):
“Black Pastoral is not playing nice. In this landscape, even sweetness stings. On every page you’ll stumble over an image, a line, a truth, that will take your breath away. These poems refuse to paint ‘nature’ as a beautiful, healing space untouched by human hungers, violences, and losses. Ariana Benson uses all the linguistic wizardry, emotional honesty, and formal dazzle at her disposal to bring us the fields and forests as she finds them: colonized, exploited, but still wild, and filled with what history has made Blackness mean.” — Evie Shockley
Read Ariana’s poem “HTML Color Swatches in Black [Girl]” from Issue 14: Economies of Harm.
We hope your August is full of poetry that will take you places near and far. And if you’re able to purchase these books, we thank you for continuing to support our writers and the arts. Lastly, if you are a past TSW contributor who has published a poetry book or chapbook within the past year that we haven’t listed here — or if you have a collection due out soon — be sure to email us at info@seventhwavemag.com. We’d love to hear from you!
