There are times when everything, including poetry, feels like a young person’s game. And it’s undeniably impressive when a poet in their twenties—or even younger—lands a poem in a prestigious journal or publishes their first book. But this list celebrates debut collections published when their authors were over 40, some much older. Publishing a first book later in life is a distinctive achievement, celebrated by contests both longstanding (like American Poetry Review’s
When my debut full-length poetry collection, Law of the Letter, is published this spring, I’ll be 42. If you’d told me this when I was twenty-two, I would have been devastated. But while I kept writing throughout my twenties and thirties, I didn’t pursue or really even understand the mechanisms of publishing, MFAs, or self-promotion. After I started to apprehend how things worked (mostly due to the community and low-cost, low-time commitment opportunities I found through Women Who Submit and the AWP Writer to Writer mentoring program), it still took me years to assemble a manuscript and find it a home with Inlandia Books. And while the book does contain one (revised) poem from my senior thesis, it is not a book I could have written twenty years ago.
These collections, all debuts from poets over 40, stand apart from those written earlier in life, carrying the depth, reflection, and perspective that come with time. They’re a testament to the fact that creativity has no expiration date—and that some of the most remarkable voices gain recognition later in life, along with the insight that comes with time.
Sister Tongue زبان خواهر by Farnaz Fatemi
In Sister Tongue, selected by Tracy K. Smith for The Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, Farnaz Fatemi reflects on and integrates years of experiences about language and inheritance, about what can be translated and what cannot. Fatemi looks at multiple facets of these subjects from many angles, sifting new meaning from each. In between poems about language, family, and femininity, she chronicles a journey to Iran, filled with the subtleties of a child of immigrants returning to the motherland: “I am trying to explain what it feels like to have not come from a place and to have come from the very same place.” The feeling she evokes is so familiar—like straining to hear words coming from another room and not quite catching them. Trying carefully to use the right words in another language, but knowing you will never be truly fluent. The story that unfolds in many tongues, both physical and metaphorical, is about the lifelong attempt to understand oneself in the context of family and culture. As Fatemi writes: ”I want the foreigner in me / to meet the foreigner in me.”
Things I Didn’t Do With This Body by Amanda Gunn
Amanda Gunn’s debut collection also takes a long view, starting with a section of family portraits, and moving into a series of poems about Harriet Tubman. Ancestry and inheritance root this collection in such specific and tender ways. Relationships are captured with striking and resonant detail—“She was eleven years old / too old to measure her worship with the span of her arms, / to say, I love you this much, / but still aching to.” These lines represent the very much embodied nature of Gunn’s poems, also reflected in the book’s title. Gunn draws skillfully on taste and smell, which of course are the senses linked most strongly with memory, to evoke places and people—Shalimar and Oscar de la Renta perfumes, the sensory details of baking. Form-wise, Gunn leaps expertly from prose poem to syllabic stanzas to sonnets I didn’t realize at first were sonnets because of their subtle rhymes, and the incorporation into iambic pentameter of words like fritillary. In the title poem and others, Gunn reflects on a body that has experienced a seasoned spectrum of experiences, from loss and disappointment to sexiness and danger.
I Was a Bell by M. Soledad Caballero
“It’s going to take bodies; it always does.” This opening line of M. Soledad Caballero’s poem “What It Takes” lies at the intersection of several of the themes of her collection I Was a Bell: migration from the terror of Pinochet’s rule in Chile, the ravages of cancer, and the sometimes grueling process of simply living. Like all good poets, Caballero approaches these topics from bracingly original angles; there’s nothing maudlin or self-pitying here. There is instead a gallows sensibility—sometimes humor, but more often a clear-eyed, Dickinsonian acknowledgement that death (of humans, animals, empires) is always around the corner. The speakers in these poems imagine and experience worst-case scenarios while the world continues—elections unfold, hair is lost to chemotherapy, and birds travel throughout the book while the poet watches and names them. The title poem, which unfolds in four searing sections, considers a specific female body, how the perceptions of it by both its owner and others change over time and through disease. “You were a musician. / I was a bell” is one in a list of equally powerful images, rendered unblinkingly.
Certain Shelter by Abbie Kiefer
Two intertwined subjects constitute many of the poems in Abbie Kiefer’s collection: the death of the speaker’s mother, and the speaker’s hometown in Maine. Kiefer uses them to deftly illuminate each other, describing place and grief intimately and specifically, and reminding us that nothing ever remains the same. The word “certain” in the title emphasizes the only certainties in life: death and the passage of time. Time is a an integral mechanism of Certain Shelter’s progression: “When My Mom Has Been Dead Eight Months, They Tear Down Lucky Candlepin” appears early in the book, and then, later: “When My Mom Has Been Dead Two Years, the Old Bowling Alley Lot Is Still Empty.” Several poems describe revitalization efforts that make it further than the bowling alley, but can’t compare to what once was; the image that stirs the most hope in the speaker is a bonfire made of industrial remnants. Kiefer writes: “I’m so tired / of writing all these sad, sad poems. / As if my life is only a meditation on its own end.” But poets have always written about grief and death, and these are powerful meditations on both.
Susto by Tommy Archuleta
In the afterword to Susto, Tommy Archuleta reveals the stimulus for the collection: a homemade book of curanderismo found among his mother’s possessions after she died. Interspersed throughout Susto are remedies that could be found there: rituals to call a soul back from the dead, to contact the dead, to ward off unwelcomed visions. Their pace and sequencing parallel the flow of grief in stages, in waves. The rest of Archuleta’s book is made up mostly of short, untitled poems that read like compact sonnets with devastating voltas, like this one about a soldier: “He’s home now / for good / says his mother / Yes home now / for good / say the wolves.” The poems are full of ghosts and talismans, of disquiet over who will honor the dead and how. The book’s epigraph comes from another book about curanderismo and defines “sus” as 1) shock and 2) magical fright. In Susto, Archuleta illuminates the ways that both of these ideas permeate and shape grief.
The Edge of Known Things by Kelly Madigan
“Sometimes you won’t see a person for miles,” Kelly Madigan writes in The Edge of Known Things. It’s true of that poem but also of this collection, in which the natural world is the only truly knowable world. Where humanity does show up to intersect with nature, there is often violence, conveyed in startling images and sharp language—young boys poking a possum with a stick, the shape of a tarantula’s heart. The realms of memory and perception are much less reliable in Madigan’s poems. There’s something just off-balance about every attempt to remember or sense—a feeling particularly striking in the poem “Memory as Lighthouse, Memory as Bomb” and in the final poem, “Reliquary,” which imagines other forms death might take besides a tunnel of light. Lines repeat in different poems throughout the collection, creating a sense of disorientation. It’s not an unpleasant sensation, but an invigorating one.
The Kingfisher by Amy Clampitt
The Kingfisher, the first of five collections published during Amy Clampitt’s lifetime, came out when she was 63. The poems are incredibly meticulous; part of the marvel of reading them is discovering their inventive rhyme schemes and compact sonnet or sonnet-like forms. Clampitt rolls out phrase after chewy phrase without being too precious about their cleverness: “carnivorous rubies,” “shuddering orifices of summer,” “rancor of cypresses,” “castles’ elephantine hooves.” A longtime reference librarian at the Audubon Society, her details (whether domestic or natural) are intensely observed. The book’s epigraph is from Hopkins, while Marianne Moore is named in the first poem, and Clampitt clearly draws from their exuberance and precision, respectively. What struck me on this reading, though, is the central character of time. Time prevents the speaker from reintegrating into the Midwest of her childhood, from observing firsthand the centuries required to make sea glass. Clampitt ends the poem “A Procession at Candlemas” with the heart-piercing line “the sorrow / of things moving back to where they came from.”
Voyage of the Sable Venus by Robin Coste Lewis
You probably don’t need anyone to tell you about Voyage of the Sable Venus, the first debut by a Black author to win the National Book Award for poetry. But in case you’ve never read it: the book is anchored by the title poem, a long assemblage whose lines are made up entirely of the titles of art and artifacts that depict, or are created by, Black women. Lewis leads into the poem by describing the rules she used to choose the titles. The poem represents a mind-boggling amount of labor and art, using repetition and forced proximity, among other techniques, to yield such gems as “measuring and pacing Playland–Comrades! / The Sun God and the Poet / swinging in the park.” In the first section of two that bookend the central poem, Lewis meditates on ancestry, beauty, and history in specific, embodied ways. It’s formally adventurous, some poems using rearrangement or cento-like forms, but there are also sonnets, tercets, and an ekphrastic series about The Wiz. The last section plumbs nearly-unspeakable depths of trauma, and how childhood educations (formal and informal) shaped the poet’s ideas about family, violence, and text. In “Art & Craft,” for example, Lewis hits us with: “A B was good, but an A was too good. They’d kick your ass, call your big sister/ slow, then stare over your desk, as if you’d // snaked out of a different hole.” It’s a momentous book, one that warrants several re-reads.
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