The Poetry Foundation’s 2024 Staff Picks

As 2024 winds down, the Poetry Foundation’s staff reflects on some standout books of the year.

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Holly Amos, Managing Editor

• Leaving Biddle City by Marianne Chan (Sarabande Books)

  There are a lot of reasons I was destined to love this book: references to Cedar Point commercials; complicated feelings about the Midwest; immense world building; and a speaker who is actively crafting the story of this city, and of herself, with a sort of affected detachment and longing that feels like it could strike a chord with any kid who grew up feeling out of place. But there’s a slyness to Chan’s writing that is the real kicker: “In high school, I performed in plays, which meant I was a new member of the sexually active.” “While screaming, we would, momentarily, not hear ourselves love one another.” “And in my body, my spirit takes up more space than any other spirit. The majority of me is me.”

Noa Fields, Public Programs Manager

• The Hormone of Darkness by Tilsa Otta, translated by Farid Matuk (Graywolf Press)

  Ever since I read her chapbook And Suddenly I Was Just Dancing (tr. Honora Spicer, Cardboard House Press, 2023), I’d been on the edge of my seat waiting for Tilsa Otta’s The Hormone of Darkness (tr. Farid Matuk). The wait was worth it. Otta's poems are imaginative, daring, irreverent dancing off the tongue. I'm obsessed. "Transimitimos el virus del lenguaje internacional del amor / Dioses paganos / Nos dieron la vida pero queremos más / Tengo tres cromosomas X pero quiero + / +++ / Quiero ser la hormona de la oscuridad." ("We transmit the viral international language of love / Pagan gods / Gave us life but we'll take more / I have three X chromosomes, but I want + / +++ / I want to be the hormone of darkness.")

Meg Forajter, Permissions Coordinator

• Gwenda, Rodney by Olivia Cronk (Meekling Press) 

  A soap opera family drama in all its dizzying junk-drawer glamor. Most certainly a wild ride.

   

• WHAT FLOODS by AM Ringwalt (Inside the Castle)

  Written by a multi-genre artist (a musician and a poet), WHAT FLOODS is a critical examination of PTSD, memory, and translation/communication between artistic modes. Elegant, intelligent, and very human.

   

• Cute Girls Watch When I Eat Aether by Maria Hardin (Action Books)

  Sick poetry for sick girls—Hardin's spare poems on chronic illness and the body are a new gurlesque for the Anthropocene. Playful and deadly.

   

• I Have A Gun by Graham Irvin (Rejection Letters)

  Darkly humorous look at the absurdity of firearm worship in America. Funny as it is unflinching in its portrait of a society holding itself hostage.

   

• No More Flowers by Stephanie Cawley (Birds, LLC)

  Cawley cuts through the compartmentalization of human problems as individual and isolated. While calling out the conditions of our postindustrial nightmare, Cawley centers eroticism (while also giving empowerment to feminine desires that are so often brutalized and unseen) as a way of fighting back against our dehumanization.

Rebeca Jurado, Grants and Awards Assistant

• Gwenda, Rodney by Olivia Cronk (Meekling Press)

  Olivia Cronk's Gwenda, Rodney is a rare blend of poetry and narrative that explores themes of art and the act of reading. Often described as a "poetry novel," Gwenda, Rodney draws inspiration from the beauty of theater, horror films, and paintings, creating a dreamlike atmosphere. With its vivid imagery and haunting style, the work captures the experience of being immersed in art and emotion. This poetry book is an intriguing and thought-provoking read for those who appreciate beautiful, experimental writing. Gwenda, Rodney was a captivating read and is one of my favorite poetry books of 2024.

Evalena Lakin, Library Assistant

• You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, edited by Ada Limón (Milkweed Editions)

  This stunning anthology, edited by our current U.S. Poet Laureate, is essentially a “Who’s Who” of contemporary poetry. The ever-brilliant Ada Limón has commissioned new poems from Hanif Abdurraqib, Jericho Brown, Victoria Chang, Camille T. Dungy, Joy Harjo, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, José Olivarez, Carl Phillips, Roger Reeves, Diane Seuss, Danez Smith, Paul Tran, and many others, all shimmering tributes to the flora and fauna from the lands they have called home. In her introduction, Limón writes, “I hope this anthology serves as a reminder that there is more time to plant trees, to write poems, to not just be in wonder at this planet, but to offer something back to it, to offer something back together. Because nature is not a place to visit. Nature is who we are.”

  (You Are Here was published in association with the Library of Congress, and is in conversation with Limón’s Poetry in Parks project, which brings poetry into our national parks in the form of picnic table art installations.)

Katherine Litwin, Library Director and Exhibitions Co-curator

• Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss (Graywolf Press)

  This book made me laugh out loud and cry. It astonished me with lines like "Oh dream, why do you do me with this way? / Again, with the digging, again with the digging up (from “Ballad”). Earthy, irreverent, and haunting, these are poems I look forward to revisiting often.
   

Shoshana Olidort, Prose Editor

• Hereafter by Alan Felsenthal (The Song Cave)

  This collection is full of surprises in its contemplation of loss and of a world where "[f]acts float on." Felsenthal's poem titles include "A Man at Sea on Earth Undone by Disturbance When He Appears Most Anchored," "Ordering a Casket from Amazon Prime," and "Shrouds Without Pockets." These atmospheric poems are by turns funny and sad, and always gorgeously wrought: "The air dressed up in prayer / has no age / carries bliss / and in the same / gust sadness." 

   

• Soon and Wholly by Idra Novey (Wesleyan University Press)

  Novey's book is in dialogue with writers like Edmond Jabès and Clarice Lispector, the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and the visual artist Erica Baum (whose works appear throughout this collection), but I also had the sense, reading it, of interlocutors who go unnamed, like Paul Celan and Sheila Heti. The book opens with "Still Life with Invisible Canoe," which begins: "Levinas asked if we have the right to be, the way I ask my sons if they can be trees"; the final poem concludes: "Now she was a tree, with no feelings except in seeds and shadows." These stunningly crafted, fable-like poems give shape to the book's central preoccupation—meaning itself. As Novey puts it in the delightful poem "That's How Far I'd Drive for It": "Meaning is a hunger. Some of us need to eat and eat it." 

Maggie Queeney, Library Adult Programs Manager

• Black Bell by Alison C. Rollins (Copper Canyon Press)

• Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing by Eleni Stecopoulos (Nightboat Books)

  Two books that I am holding close as we move from 2024 into 2025 are Alison C. Rollins's stunning second collection of poems, Black Bell, and Eleni Stecopoulos's Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing. Rollins's poems sound out the overlaps between the individual and collective bodies; past, present, and future; and reading and writing, listening and speaking, through shaped poetry, performance, and hybrid visual pieces that repurpose archival fragments. In Dreaming in the Fault Zone, Stecopoulos braids a decade of extensive field research, historical scholarship, and generative, collaborative poetics to dream new connections between bodies and the world.

Erin Watson, Product Manager

• Death Styles by Joyelle McSweeney (Nightboat Books)

  This is a gut-wrenching and tender and bleak account of the impossible depths of grief. Highly recommended for when you find yourself in your I can't go on/I'll go on era, in the surreal and desperate hours of late capitalism.