“Vulnerability as a Valid Way.” 7 New Poetry Collections to Read This June

I’m thrilled to be joining Rebecca Morgan Frank as co-poetry columnist—I’ll be here every other month with seven new poetry collections.

“In a Dark Time” by Theodore Roethke is perhaps my favorite poem; a great teacher gave it to me decades ago to cast some light into a shadowy teenage year, and I’ve returned to it ever since when I need to be reminded of how to survive and why, and of how language really can transform experience so that we can live through and in it. “In a dark time,’ writes Roethke, “the eye begins to see.”

Times are indeed dark, and thankfully our poets are seeing.

When I read a lot of new poetry, I remember why it is that poetry is so necessary, especially in times of unrest: it opens another dimension of conversation, of inner life made public, which is to say poetry lets us share some of that inner and outer unrest, to bear it together, in a kind of virtual community that stretches across time and space.

In Let the Forest Go (University of Kentucky), Justin Wymer posits “vulnerability as a valid way of communicating, despite the totalizing autocracy threatening to erase marginalized people.” I’d say it’s our best hope against the swirling cruelty, injustice, and hatred.  Vulnerability, expressed one voice at a time, is the surest way to fight the din.

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Carl Dennis, Earthly Virtues
(Penguin)

I was obsessed with Carl Dennis in college, his first few books; for a while, he was my one true Oracle, penetrating into the deep mysteries of disappointment and beyond, toward a kind of transcendence. Then, by the time I was into my twenties, his poems all seemed cranky to me, willfully old. So I approached this new collection with skepticism. Dennis’s new poems are still conversational, philosophical, sometimes preachy, and cranky, and there is a fresh kind of transcendence here, one that has almost forgotten about disappointment. In one beautiful poem, he imagines visiting the art museum on behalf of his dead friend, “to volunteer to be his agent /… / …and imagine what he might tell me now.” Elsewhere, Dennis is “ inspired to explain / How the work of worms helps to sustain us.” Behind the chronic dissatisfaction, these poem reveal a gentle empathy with a wide embrace.

Nicholas Goodly, Star Power
(Scribner)

“Poetry is queer,” writes Nicholas Goodly in his boiling and philosophical second book, which smears boundaries of all kinds—between women and men, timeless and hip—as it makes a case for multiplicity and community amidst this moment’s horrors. In “Star Power,” the first of many poems that transform the words of our fame- and click-obsessed culture into empowering metaphors, Goodly writes, “It is my duty / to put the abyss in drag.” Never before has the abyss so desperately needed a makeover. Tumbling with a momentum that is equal parts fury and joy, these deep, often hilarious, and always interesting meditations on politics, gender, anger, and love argue, finally, that it’s our capacity for change, our passion for it, really, that will save us, if anything will.

Fanny Howe, This Poor Book
(Graywolf)

Fanny Howe (1940-2025) made an art form out of beckoning: her poems seem to exist in a kind of liminal layer between inner monologue and speech, suggesting, winking, sharing an absolute intimacy absent most of the facts and even, often, the images that conjure a particular situation. In this posthumously published final book, Howe rearranges poems from previous collections—plus a few unpublished ones—into a new arc that loosely, vaguely follows the contours of a life–or of lives—in which “long white days / have gone by with no recording. / Therefore they are free. / But what about the injustices/ viewed from the window?” The reader is meant to fill those abstractions—what injustice is? which window?—with meanings and particulars: Howe constantly urges us to participate, as if the poems will vanish without us to hold them from our end. They recall war, escape, monks, markets crashing, and plain days in a century “like a director who prefers his script to his actors.” Howe suggests many possible paths through the past: “To die for love / to die of love / to die in love / to die with love.” The old poems tell a new story now, and soon they will tell a different one.

Nick Martino, Scrapbook
(Alice James)

In his gorgeous and arresting debut, Nick Martino hurtles through a variety of forms—from sonnets to visual poems to works of visual art—to vividly portray and reflect on a teenager’s world during and after the speaker’s parents’ divorce and his father’s incarceration. “Is there a new way of seeing?” Martino asks. “I look / for fugitive beauty in the bulldozed.” The broken family opens into a kind of broken pastoral, but there’s more than that. This is a fragmented world most movingly evoked in Martino’s short lyric poems in which cars “chew down the highway”; there is “a trench the crop fire of love / can’t leap”; and “Desire is only possible when I’m alone.” Various selves seem to converse–in the stunning opening sonnet, one interior voice talks to another on the precipice of a drug trip that threatens to become an overdose: “I hate this feeling in my lungs / but I love the name you give to shatter.” Erasures from his the poet’s journals narrate the speaker’s visit to his father in prison through the pinhole of what’s left of memory. This collection, really a book-length work, is haunted, haunting, and simply beautiful.

Amanda Nadelberg, Shake Until Cloudy
(The Song Cave)

Amanda Nadelberg is a genius of meaningful whimsey. In short, associative poems packed with odd aphoristic lines, Nadelberg considers the relationship between poetry and life (“a stanza / is one way to open day”) and spirals giddily with existential dread: “I wondered / what attention was, yours, mine, the / hours I displaced in proximity / learning a metal song.” Separating her buoyant lyrics are two sets of very short poems that exemplify the dark quirkiness of Nadelberg’s wit, such as this haiku titled “Mother’s Wisdom”: “You had a great run / Some things are icky / But you had a great run.” All the action happens in the word “But,” which introduces a note of sadness. This note rings through all of Nadelberg’s poems; they’re not as giddy as they seem.

Gregory Orr, We Interrupt This Broadcast
(Norton)

Over the course of Gregory Orr’s long career, his poems have become increasingly incantatory, more and more like chants or psalms, repeating, reformulating, reaching for the edges of the same rich metaphors. This collection of poems—Orr’s thirteenth—bears bitter witness to environmental degradation, moral corruption, and the aging of a body and of a generation, all viewed from a bird’s eye, wrapped in the language and tone of myth. The language here sometimes feels slack, and the repetitions repetitive, but the stakes are as high as ever in poems that ask, in various ways, “How witness all this / Diminishing / And still / Be able to sing?” [5] Frantic mea culpas over the messes his generation left for the next and some outdated pandemic poems feel a bit like shrugs: “And now it’s all come to a halt. / Everyone’s guilty, and it’s no one’s fault.” But when Orr revisits the taproot story of his life and his poetry—he accidentally shot and killed his brother on a childhood hunting trip–he finds an unlikely kind of closure in openness.

Justin Wymer, Let the Forest Go
(University of Kentucky)

“Appalachia is not simply a shifting geographic border, subject to the frivolity of politics, but rather a way of perceiving the world, even from a continent away,” [x] contends Justin Wymer is his unusual second book. Based on journals kept while the author, a queer poet from West Virginia, was living abroad in Spain from 2015-2017, these poems observe the rise of Trump from afar, reeling. These prose blocks and stacks of aphoristic lines, brief outcries, cover the terrifying touchpoints of the last decade, the cascading crises that have added up to right now: “Overnight, 24 million in the states were sentenced to death. Their bodies don’t matter to powerful men in offices.” In language full of elisions and inversions, Wymer seeks liminal spaces where one can rest between the straining polarities, “To leave my body: pearl / through simple air.” The book does often feel like a recording of a mental jam session, but there is also a sense of being guided by a kind of hesitating yet urgent voice that needs to get things figured out. There is a momentum that sweeps the reader, and abiding empathy that urges us to “Look for light, even here.”