“Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.” —Audre Lorde

April is National Poetry Month. To celebrate, we put together a list of poetry books that tell stories of resistance, sorrow, solidarity and hope in our struggles to change the world.  Take 40% off all the books on our list. Also enjoy a free Ebook* and free shipping on orders over $25 in the US.

Like A Hammer is an anthology of poems that unearths the shared traumas produced by America’s incarceration system.

An anthology of poetry on Nikkei incarceration, written by descendants of the WWII prisons and camps.

A debut collection of lyric poems interrogating the generational implications of the Great Migration to Northern California. 

A beautiful anthology featuring some of the brightest voices in contemporary American poetry who challenge, expand, and illuminate the meaning of the label “Asian American and Pacific Islander” in today’s world.

From one of the most imaginative and radical voices in contemporary poetry, a debut collection of fierce tenderness, political acuity, and powerful lyricism.

From the critically acclaimed author of HoodWitch, Faylita Hicks’s second collection explores the question, Where do our desires take us?

A visual and verbal narrative of the grit and gentleness in Southwestern Latinx communities through photography by Antonio Salazar and poetry by José Olivarez, author of Citizen Illegal.

A rigorous and defiant collection that subverts contemporary discourse and representations of incarceration, of hip-hop, and of Asian American culture and literature. 

A collection of moving and tender poems that delves into questions of masculinity, fatherhood, home, and learning to live in and love one’s own body. 

Encompassing the breadth of Cheryl Boyce-Taylor’s astounding career, The Limitless Heart is a time capsule of the boundless love, care, grief, and fortitude that make her work so stirring.

In their latest collection of poems, Cave Canem Poetry Prize winner Brionne Janae dives into the deep, unsettled waters of intimate partner violence, queerness, grief, and survival.

A collection of poetry that moves from family history and the heartbreaks of navigating a predominantly white high school into adulthood, exploring the ways the speaker’s experiences echo those of an expansive and intricate history of Black girls and women.

A poetic sequence using the 1841 slave revolt aboard the brig Creole as a lens through which to view the vitality of Black lives and the afterlife of slavery. 

In this brave and devastatingly beautiful anthology, the illustrious poet and editor Aracelis Girmay gathers complex and intimate pieces that illuminate the nuances of personal and collective histories, analyses, practices, and choices surrounding pregnancy.  

Diamond Sharp’s Super Sad Black Girl is a love letter to her hometown of Chicago, where the speaker finds solace and community with her literary idols in hopes of answering the question: What does it look like when Black women are free? 

This lyrical and imagistic poetry collection tells the story of a family’s journey to flee the murderous reign of Uganda’s Idi Amin only to land in a racist American landscape.

In this defiant and urgent collection, Palestinian-American poet Noor Hindi interrogates Arab womanhood, migration, colonialism, and queerness with striking and evocative lyricism.

All the Blood Involved in Love is an urgent and evocative collection—featuring complex and compelling poems about the choices we make surrounding home, freedom, healing, partnership, and family. 

There Are Trans People Here is a testament to the healing power of community and the beauty of trans people, history, and culture.

Rifqa is Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd’s ode to his late grandmother, and to the Palestinian struggle for liberation. ‘Jerusalem is ours.’

The long form poem is tethered in folklore and personal narrative, detailing the impact of the destructive mass incarceration system.

Merging documentary poetry from the epicenter of an epidemic with the story of viruses in the evolution of humanity, If God Is A Virus gives voice to the infected and the virus.

In his highly anticipated second poetry collection, Doppelgangbanger, Cortney Lamar Charleston examines the performance of Black masculinity in the U.S., and its relationship to family, love and community.

Smoking Lovely's explorations of poetry and the neoliberal city at the intersection of community and commodity.

Krista Franklin draws on Pan African histories, Black Surrealism, Afrofuturism, pop culture, art history, and the historical and present-day micro-to-macro violence inflicted upon Black people and other people of color, working to forge imaginative spaces for radical possibilities and visions of liberation.  

Text Messages is the first multi-genre collection by Montreal-based Iraqi hip-hop artist, activist, and professor Yassin "Narcy" Alsalman. Composed entirely on a smartphone during air travel and married to artwork from comrades, Narcy 's writing speaks of the existential crises experienced by diasporic children of war before and during imperialism in the age of the Internet.

An anthology that opposes silence and re-mixes the soundtrack of the Latinx diaspora across diverse poetic traditions. 

From award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing, reflections on race, class, violence, segregation, and the hidden histories that shape our divided urban landscapes. 

Powerhouse, world-renowned LGBTQ poet and spoken-word artist Staceyann Chin curates the first full-length collection of her poems.

Citizen Illegal is a revealing portrait of life as a first generation immigrant, a celebration of Chicano joy, a shout against erasure, and a vibrant re-imagining of Mexican American life.

A refreshing, unapologetic intervention into ongoing conversations about the line between sexual freedom and sexual exploitation.

An anthology to celebrate and canonize the words of Black women across the diaspora.

An anthology of writings by Muslims who are women, queer, genderqueer, nonbinary, or trans.

Powerful, poetic meditations on motherhood, sisterhood, spirituality, solidarity, displacement/gentrification, racism, and sexism.

Combining the tongue-in-cheek and the irreverent with the melancholy and incisive, Idris Goodwin’s poetry samples and re-purposes pop-culture—from Back to the Future to Prince, Missy Elliot to Dominique Wilkins—in order to reflect and remix the stories we tell ourselves and each other in order to live.

Faculty and instructors interested in adopting Haymarket titles for their courses can request Exam and Desk copies directly from our distributor, here.