Selected for the National Poetry Series by Ada Limón, I Know Your Kind is a haunting, blistering debut collection about the American opioid epidemic and poverty in rural Appalachia. In West Virginia, fatal overdoses on opioids have spiked to three times the national average. In these poems, William Brewer demonstrates an immersive, devastating empathy for both the lost and the bereaved, the enabled and the enabler, the addict who knocks late...

From Lollapalooza to Carnegie Hall, Patricia Smith has taken the stage as this nation's premier performance poet. Featured in the film Slamnation and on the HBO series Def Poetry Jam, Smith is back with her first book in over a decade-a National Poetry Series winner weaving passionate, bluesy narratives into an empowering, finely tuned celebration of poetry's liberating power.

Sara Eliza Johnson's stunning, deeply visceral first collection, Bone Map, pulls shards of tenderness from a world on the verge of collapse, where violence and terror infuse the body, the landscape, and dreams: a handful of blackberries offered from bloodied arms, bee stings likened to pulses of sunlight, a honeycomb of marrow exposed. "All moments will shine if you cut them open. / Will glisten like entrails in the sun." With figurative language...

From "Portrait of the artist, gaslit" to "Portrait of the artist's ancestors" to "Portrait of the artist reading a newspaper," the poems in Harbinger reflect the many facets of the artistic self as well as the myriad influences and experiences that contribute to that identity. "Portrait of the artist as a young man" has long been the default position, but these poems carve out a different vantage point. Seen through the lens of motherhood, of working...

A winner of the 2010 National Poetry Series Prize as selected by Ilya Kaminsky (author of Dancing in Odessa, recipient of the 2004 Whiting Award, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, among other honors, and co-editor of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry), Vizsolyi's work perpetuates NPS's tradition of promoting exceptional poetry from emerging poets. For thirty years, the National Poetry Series has discovered many new voices and has been instrumental...

Written in narrow sections that blur the distinction between flash fiction and prose poetry, between memoir and meditation, Monograph veers from the elliptical to the explosive as it dissects the Gordian knot of a marriage's intellectual, sexual, and domestic lives. Invoking Raymond Chandler, Pythagoras, Joan Didion, and Virginia Woolf as presiding spirits, Simeon Berry curates the negative space of each wry tableau, destabilizing the high seriousness...

Thaw delves into the issues at the core of a resilient family: kinship, poverty, violence, death, abuse, and grief. The poems follow the speaker, as both mother and daughter, as she travels through harsh and beautiful landscapes in Canada, Sweden, and the United States. Moving through these places, she examines how her surroundings affect her inner landscape; the natural world becomes both a place of refuge and a threat. As these themes unfold, the...

Bird Eating Bird is a new collection of poems from Kristin Naca, winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series mtvU prize as chosen by Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa. Playful and serious all at once, Kristin's work explores the richness of her cultural and linguistic heritage and perpetuates NPS's tradition of promoting exceptional poetry from lesser-known poets.

Extinction Theory is a collection of pseudoscience poems that try to provide rationales for some of life's most salient mysteries. Where is God? What does it mean to belong? Who killed the dinosaurs? Kien Lam creates new worlds with new rules to better answer these perennial questions. His poetry is that of discovery, of looking at the world as if for the first time. Lam exposes the transitory and transcendent nature of things and how we find meaning. At...

"An "astounding" (Terrance Hayes) debut collection of poems - Winner of the 2016 National Poetry Series Competition In this ƯƯƯpowerful debut collection,sam sax explores and explodes the linkages between desire, addiction, and the history of mental health. These brave, formally dexterous poems examine antiquated diagnoses and procedures from hysteria to lobotomy; offer meditations on risky sex; and take up the poet's personal and family histories...