Button Poetry: 23 books

"I hear people talk about the dimming prospects of making a living as a poet, about the small and insular readership we can expect, about how poetry is dead. I think somebody forgot to tell the poets." -Michael MlekodayIn 2013, the following poems topped 200,000 views on the Button Poetry YouTube:...

Cameron Awkward-Rich's Transit, runner-up for the 2014 Button Poetry Prize, takes the reader on a constantly surprising journey through gender and identity in contemporary America. Awkward-Rich's academic prowess shines throughout, as does his remarkable ability to condense an essay's worth of thought...

Aaron Coleman's St. Trigger, winner of the 2015 Button Poetry Prize, investigates race and gender in contemporary America through a constantly shifting series of structures, forming its own boundaries in one poem only to break and reshape them in the next. Narrative shatters into pure lyric and reforms in an instant. Coleman's poems define themselves -- sharp and blazing and wholly new.

Still Can't Do My Daughter's Hair is the latest book by author William Evans, founder of Black Nerd Problems. Evans is a long-standing voice in the performance poetry scene, who has performed at venues across the country and been featured on numerous final stages, including the National Poetry Slam...

Helium is the debut poetry collection by internet phenom Rudy Francisco, whose work has defined poetry for a generation of new readers. Rudy's poems and quotes have been viewed and shared millions of times as he has traveled the country and the world performing for sell-out crowds. Helium is filled...

Acclaimed poet Mahogany L. Browne triumphs again with her latest poetry collection SMUDGE, a powerful, intimate, and complex portrait of a girl who deserves more than what she is given: a world in which our hero is both painfully invisible and vulnerably exposed. Browne masterfully invites us into this...

Written after the death of his mother, Donte Collins’s Autopsy establishes the poet as one of the most important voices in the next generation of American poetry. As the book unfolds, the reader journeys alongside the author through grief and healing. Named the Most Promising Young Poet in the country...

Nothing is Okay is the second full-length poetry collection by Rachel Wiley, whose work simultaneously deconstructs the lies that we were taught about our bodies and our beings, and builds new ways of viewing ourselves. As she delves into queerness, feminism, fatness, dating, and race, Wiley molds...

Nate Marshall was paying close attention when Chuck D said, 'Rap is CNN for Black people.' In his hard-hitting chapbook, BLOOD PERCUSSION, Marshall takes the Hard Rhymer's words and masterfully applies them to poetry, turning his eye toward gun play, free lunches, skull caps, prayers, and praise songs....

When you're dumb enough for long enough, you're gonna meet someone too smart to love you, and they're gonna love you anyway, and it's gonna go so poorly, Neil Hilborn writes in his debut full-length collection, OUR NUMBERED DAYS. In 2013, Hilborn's poem "OCD" went viral, and has amassed...

These harrowing poems make montage, make mirrors, make elegiac biopic, make 'a dope ass trailer with a hundred black children / smiling into the camera & the last shot is the wide mouth of a pistol.' That's no spoiler alert, but rather, Smith's way—saying & laying it beautifully bare. A way of desensitizing...

One part mixtape, one part disorientation guide, and one part career retrospective, Kyle "Guante" Tran Myhre's debut looks you directly in the eye and doesn't let you flinch. Ranging from justice to love, community action to personal reflection, A Love Song, A Death Rattle, A Battle Cry...

Depression & Other Magic Tricks is the debut book by Sabrina Benaim, one of the most-viewed performance poets of all time, whose poem "Explaining My Depression to My Mother" has become a cultural phenomenon with over 50,000,000 views. Depression & Other Magic Tricks explores themes of mental health,...

One of the most recognizable young poets in America, Olivia Gatwood dazzles with her tribute to contemporary American womanhood in her debut book, New American Best Friend. Gatwood's poems deftly deconstruct traditional stereotypes. The focus shifts from childhood to adulthood, gender to sexuality, violence...