Button Poetry: 23 books

Neil Hilborn's highly anticipated second collection of poems, The Future, invites readers to find comfort in hard nights and better days. Filled with nostalgia, love, heartbreak, and the author's signature wry examinations of mental health, this book helps explain what lives inside us, what we struggle...

The Crown Ain't Worth Much, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib's first full-length collection, is a sharp and vulnerable portrayal of city life in the United States. A regular columnist for MTV.com, Abdurraqib brings his interest in pop culture to these poems, analyzing race, gender, family, and the love that...

One of the most original performance poets of her generation, Melissa Lozada-Oliva has captivated crowds across the country and online with her vivid narratives. Humorous and biting, personal and communal, self-deprecating and unapologetically self-loving, peluda (meaning “hairy” or “hairy...

We Slept Here is a case study in vulnerability and honesty. In this sequence of memoir-esque poems, Sierra DeMulder pulls at the threads of a past abusive relationship and the long road to forgiveness. The poems themselves become that which was taken from her. These are hard poems, made up of clarity and healing, which attempt to share some of their peace with the world.

Clatter is a chapbook by Neil Hilborn, produced in the aftermath of his severe concussion in a bicycle accident. Written in museums, ex-girlfriends’ kitchens, and Mexico, the chapbook showcases Hilborn’s breadth of style as well as his humor, and represents a unique glimpse into the writer's early work.

Jacqui Germain’s poems in When the Ghosts Come Ashore situate St. Louis as the archetypal American city: it’s here she explores the intersections of race, gender, and violence, here she finds the ghosts of those who still hunger for freedom. But Germain still carves out space for love. As Phillip...

Forgive my bluntness, but...Goddamn, Sam Sax can write some poems. Devastating, comic, inventive, weird, dangerous, smart as hell. I could talk about the diction sometimes glass and sometimes bouquet. Or the syntax jagged here, balletic there. Or the metaphors, good lord. But the bottom line is that...

Dave Harris's stellar debut takes a nuanced look at the complexities of black masculinity. Patricide weighs those complexities and how they impact a lineage of black boys who fight to become men in the image of their fathers. More than just a book about fear or death centered on being black in America,...

The violence of men, the delicacy of their broken bodies, the religiosity of the town that raised them: all of these influence Highway or Belief, which documents an America we rarely see. In J. Scott Brownlee's Llano, Aron Anderson is the king of baseball and meth. High school football heroes become...