The Poetry Collections I’m Reading During National Poetry Month

One of the benefits of working for Book Riot is my continued exposure to things that I wouldn’t normally read. For the longest, I, like many people, didn’t read as much poetry as I do now. After editing all the lists of great poetry written by our contributors, I finally got my life together and started picking up more poetry collections.

Its ability to get right, straight to the crux of the thing in as few words as possible feels low-key mystical at times, and I’m sure today’s poets were yesteryears’ shamans. This magical quality is what I love about poetry, and I really wish more people would read it. If you don’t normally reach for chapbooks or poetry collections when you, I hope you reconsider at least once during National Poetry Month. You can even get started with the collections below.

We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word, ed. by Franny Choi, Bao Phi, Noʻu Revilla, and Terisa Siagatonu This collection includes Asian and Pacific Islander poets, yes, but they’re also intergenerational and challenge the label of “AAPI” (which I have always thought felt way too reductive). Pro tip: Haymarket Books has this on sale for 40% off at the time of writing.

A Map of My Want by Faylita Hicks Here’s another book I found while perusing Haymarket’s sale. It comes courtesy of the author of HoodWitch, and is a descendant of Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic.” Through it, we see a nonbinary femme’s exploration of sexuality—both personal and political—after they escape from a religious cult.

Song of My Softening by Omotara James James’s poems explore the dynamic we have with the self and expand it to the dynamic between the world and Black queerness. The words here cut to the quick in terms of how they call out the ways we express ourselves and how society views bodies.

All Access members, continue on for 18 books out this week by BIPOC authors

The following comes to you from the Editorial Desk.

This week, we’re highlighting a post that had our Managing Editor Vanessa Diaz feeling a type of way. Now, even five years after it was published, Vanessa is still salty about American Dirt. Read on for an excerpt and become an All Access member to unlock the full post.

Picture it: The United States, January 2020. A book with a pretty blue and white cover is making the rounds on the bookish internet. The blue ink forms a beautiful hummingbird motif against a creamy background, a bird associated with the sun god Huitzilopochtli in Aztec mythology. Black barbed wire, at once delicate and menacing, cuts the pattern into a grid resembling an arrangement of Talavera tiles. The package is eye-catching, ostensibly Mexican in feel, and evocative of borders and the migrant experience. 

The book tells the story of a bookstore owner in Acapulco, Mexico, who is forced to flee her home when a drug cartel murders everyone in her family except for her young son at a quinceañera. She and the boy are forced to become migrants and embark on a treacherous journey north to the U.S. border, evading the cartel and befriending fellow migrants along the way. The book is being lauded not just as the “it” book of the season but as the immigration story. It gets the Oprah treatment and is praised by everyone from Salma Hayek to the great Sandra Cisneros, who called it “the great novel of Las Américas.” 

It’s been over five years, and this book is still the bane of my existence.

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