This past December, NYPL presented our Best Books of 2020 list comprised of books selected by our librarians across many genres for adults, teens, and children. One of those genres was poetry and, in honor of National Poetry Month, we wanted to highlight these titles, selected by NYPL's Poetry Committee. Friendship, race, motherhood, nature, womanhood, trauma, identity: these topics and many more are explored within the pages of our staff's favorite poetry books.

Finna by Nate Marshall

These poems consider the brevity and disposability of Black lives and other oppressed people in our current era of emboldened white supremacy, and the use of the Black vernacular in America's vast reserve of racial and gendered epithets. Finna explores the erasure of peoples in the American narrative; asks how gendered language can provoke violence; and finally, how the Black vernacular, expands our notions of possibility, giving us a new language of hope.

Poetry Committee: "Marshall examines and celebrates African America vernacular with an open and conversational attitude."

The Galleons by Rick Barot

With nods toward Barot’s poetic predecessors—from Frank O’Hara to John Donne—The Galleons represents an exciting extension and expansion of this virtuosic poet’s work, marrying “reckless” ambition and crafted “composure,” in which we repeatedly find the speaker standing and breathing before the world, “incredible and true.”

Poetry Committee: "In simple language, Barot explores the Spanish colonial and postcolonial periods in Phillipine history, looking for his place in the world."

Grimoire by Cherene Sherrard

Named after a magical textbook, Cherene Sherrard's Grimoire is a poetry collection centered on the recovery and preservation of ancestral knowledge and on the exploration of Black motherhood. Incorporating experiences of food preparation, childrearing, and childbearing, the book begins with a section of poems that re-imagine recipes from one of the earliest cookbooks by an African-American woman: Mrs. Malinda Russell's A Domestic Cookbook. Mrs. Russell's voice as a nineteenth century chef is joined in conversation with a contemporary amateur cook in poetic recipes that take the form of soft and formal sonnets, introspective and historical lyric, and found poems. In the second section, the poet explores Black maternal death and the harrowing circumstances surrounding birth for women of color in the United States. (Publisher summary)

Poetry Committee: "One cup history, two spoonfuls memoir, a dash of modern folklore."

Gut Botany by Petra Kuppers

Poetry that inhabits and queers bodies and lands in an ecosomatic investigation. (Publisher summary)

Poetry Committee: "Visceral poetry about the natural world exposes an internal human landscape teeming with life."

Homie by Danez Smith

Homie is Danez Smith’s magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. (Publisher summary)

Poetry Committee: "An intimate tribute to friendship weaves stories of community building and breaking with brilliant wit."

Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry by John Murillo

John Murillo's second book is a reflective look at the legacy of institutional, accepted violence against Blacks and Latinos and the personal and societal wreckage wrought by long histories of subjugation. (Publisher summary)

Poetry Committee: "A wrathful and personal analysis of American myths, Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry is a new classic."

My Baby First Birthday by Jenny Zhang

Radiant and tender, My Baby First Birthday is a collection that examines innocence, asking us who gets to be loved like a baby and who has to deplete themselves just to survive. My Baby First Birthday is about existence and non-existence. It's about being born-without consent. Jenny Zhang writes about accepting pain, about the way we fetishize womanhood and motherhood, and reduce women to their violations, traumas, and body parts. She questions the way we feminize and racialize nurturing, and live in service of other people's dreams. How we idealize birth and being baby, how it's only in our mothers' wombs that we're still considered innocent, blameless, and undamaged, because it's only then that we don't have to earn love. (Publisher summary)

Poetry Committee: "Radiant and tender, Zhang's collection examines innocence, asking who gets to be loved like a baby and who must struggle just to survive."

A Nail the Evening Hangs On by Monica Sok

In her debut collection, Monica Sok uses poetry to reshape a family’s memory about the Khmer Rouge regime—memory that is both real and imagined—according to a child of refugees. Driven by myth-making and fables, the poems examine the inheritance of the genocide and the profound struggles of searing grief and PTSD. Though the landscape of Cambodia is always present, it is the liminal space, the in-betweenness of diaspora, in which younger generations must reconcile their history and create new rituals. A Nail the Evening Hangs On seeks to reclaim the Cambodian narrative with tenderness and an imagination that moves towards wholeness and possibility. (Publisher summary)

Poetry Committee: "Sok uses fast and chaotic poetry to describe the intergenerational trauma of the Khmer Rouge and the lingering silence among families and communities."

The Nancy Reagan Collection by Maxe Crandall

Poetry. Hybrid Genre. Performance Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. The Nancy Reagan Collection is a response to growing up queer and trans under the rise of HIV-AIDS. Crossing genres and generations, this performance novel remixes the AIDS archive through an ever-spiraling politics and aesthetics of mourning. Alternating chapters offer up a narrative throughline composed of hallucinogenic episodes from the perspective of a nameless, grieving protagonist in the midst of the global carnage of the Reagan dynasty. Part revenge, part fantasy, the book experiments with poetic practices that challenge conceptions of memory and morality, activism and escapism, grief and beauty. (Publisher summary)

Poetry Committee: "Nancy Reagan gets her hair done while the AIDS epidemic gets ignored."

Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz

Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness. (Publisher summary)

Poetry Committee: "Diaz explores identity and desire in this mordant and funny collection, which moves seamlessly from the personal to the universal and back again."