15 Poetry Books for the Upcoming Sealey Challenge

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

Poetry is rarely light and fluffy, but it takes a deft hand to focus on the darkest of subjects like in this collection. If you have witnessed death up close or silently longed for it, this collection will speak most to you. Wunderlich doesn’t dwell in this nothingness, though, but finds paths to human resiliency and hope here. Solitude and survival walk hand-in-hand through these verses.

Homie isn’t even the actual name of this collection, but it’s the name Smith allows white people to say and write. Living at the intersection of Black and queer, just like Danez themself, 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 elusive, looking at people trying to live peacefully within systems that are trying to destroy them. Akbar is a Muslim living in a country beset by Islamophobia, but this theme is not limited to religion. Race, gender, and afflictions like addiction all create these juxtapositions, and Pilgrim Bell 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 Latine poet writing against the erasure of all of her identities. Not since Alan Ginsberg’s Howl have I read a poem (or poems) with so much force blended with so much beauty.

With his fourth collection, Seshadri has decided to take poetry and use it to turn the universe on its head. Or tail. The title alone should tell you that there’s something wibbly-wobbly about this collection. Time and space, paradoxes, and purposefully destabilized poetic forms really make this a poet’s collection of poetry, and that’s not a bad thing.

This second collection from Ocean Vuong is deeply personal, meditating on the recent death of his mother. How do we sit with the grief, let it fill us appropriately, and yet find the will to move on and live? It’s a paradox at the core of Time is a Mother. This book of poems also plays with the themes found in his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, in case you want to break up the poetry with a little prose.

So much of what is both right and wrong in America is often chalked up to tradition, as this collection from Jericho Brown so astutely observes. Brown blends pastorals with the history of slavery that created those scenes. He questions freedom and safety in a nation that didn’t really mean “all” men when it said, “…all men are created equal.” Brown even invents a new form, the duplex, in this incredible collection.

Some poets believe that strict forms take all of the creative energy out of poetry. Others, like Victoria Chang, seem to revel in these constraints. Her newest collection is composed mostly of the Japanese form called wakas. Still reeling from the deaths 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.