15 Books of Poetry for the Next Sealey Challenge

Kemi Alabi uses her poetry in this debut collection to recast American poetic and cultural traditions. As a black and queer poet, Alabi sees salvation not in external forces, but in the body and the Earth. These poems encompass a variety of forms and approaches to this theme, from tender love poems to provocations against the colonizers.

This is another debut collection, this one focused on the lived horrors and lasting effects of colonialism in Nin’s native Angola. Seamlessly blending prose and poetry, Nin explores queer and familial love, as well as how faith collides with oppression. Personal and generational traumas resonate throughout the pages here.

Another debut? Why not? This collection has to do with transformation, almost with anthropomorphism. Loneliness becomes the vulnerable opening of language. Absence turns into fire and snow. Eros, mourning and intimacy are the common threads between these poems, written in English while always maintaining the lyricism and musicality of Chinese poetry.

Akwaeke Emezi is an award-winning author who is making a splash in poetry with this collection. Leading with spirit, these poems celebrate the parts of ourselves that we cannot kill or reduce. Surrender, abuse, survival, and nostalgia are all themes at play in these poems that really need every content warning imaginable.

I love when a collection of poetry has a focused theme or narrative like this. Here, Sharif focuses on the liminal space of an arrivals terminal in the United States. The checkpoints, the searches, the questions and the officers seem endless and identical. This isolated little world is a touchstone for Sharif to examine American culture, the English language, and the customs of our society. You definitely need this on your list of poetry books for the next Sealey Challenge.

In astrophysics, the event horizon is the point at which light cannot escape the gravity of a black hole. The light and everything else seems to fade. Cate Marvin takes patriarchy in one hand, feminism in the other, and examines when we disappear into our own experiences. These poems combine razor-sharp wit and biting humor in a delightful new collection.

This book of poetry, written during the height of the pandemic lockdowns, looks at what comes next. What must come next. These poems take the wonders of life and translate them into stories of wonder and free movement, poems that focus on connecting with what is most important in our lives. Politics and the news cycle are oppressive, and this collection offers respite without mere escape.

Poetry is rarely light and fluffy, but it takes a deft hand to focus on the darker themes like in this collection. Whether you’ve witnessed death up close or longed for it in silence, this collection will speak to you more. However, Wunderlich does not dwell in this nothingness, rather he finds paths to human resilience and hope here. Loneliness and survival walk hand in hand through these verses.

Sidekick It’s not even the actual name of this collection, but it is the name that Smith allows white people to say and write. Living at the intersection of black and queer, much like Danez himself, this collection looks unflinchingly at America and how it treats people. Deeply personal in nature, these poems speak to larger injustices in our world with laser focus.

The central theme of Kaveh Akbar’s second collection is evasive, looking at people trying to live in peace within systems trying to destroy them. Akbar is a Muslim who lives in a country plagued by Islamophobia, but this issue is not limited to religion. Race, gender, and afflictions such as addiction create these juxtapositions and pilgrim bell he explores them with aplomb.

This book won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2021. That should tell you to read it right there. Need more? Natalie Diaz is an indigenous and Latina poet who writes against the erasure of all her identities. Not since Alan Ginsberg Howl I have read a poem (or poems) with such force mixed with such beauty.

With his fourth collection, Seshadri has decided to take poetry and use it to turn the universe upside down. Or tail. The title alone should tell you that there is something wobbly about this collection. The time and space, the paradoxes and the intentionally destabilized poetic forms really make this a collection of poetry by a poet, and that’s not a bad thing.

This second collection from Ocean Vuong is deeply personal and reflects on the recent death of his mother. How do we sit with the pain, let it adequately fill us, and yet find the will to move on and live? It is a paradox at the center of time is a mother. This book of poems also plays with the themes found in his novel. On Earth we are briefly beautifulin case you want to break poetry with a bit of prose.

Much of what is right and wrong in America is often attributed to tradition, as this Jericho Brown collection so astutely observes. Brown combines the pastoral with the history of slavery that created those scenes. He questions freedom and security in a nation that didn’t really mean “all” men when he said, “…all men are created equal.” Brown even invents a new shape, the duplex, in this incredible collection.

Some poets believe that strict forms take all the creative energy out of poetry. Others, like Victoria Chang, seem to revel in these limitations. Her most recent collection is mainly made up of japanese form called wakas. Still reeling from the death of her parents while reveling in the lives of her children, this new collection is a celebration of language and the versatility of ancient poetic forms.