Liz’s Poetry Month Picks
Check out our staff spotlight for Poetry Month! We asked our Penguin Random House colleague and resident poetry connoisseur, Liz Camfiord, what poetry books she’s loving right now.
A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker: 1925-2025 by New Yorker Magazine Inc; Edited by Kevin Young
Edited by the magazine’s poetry editor, Kevin Young, a celebratory selection from one hundred years of influential, entertaining, and taste-making verse in The New Yorker.
The magazine’s poetic influence resides not just in this historical and cultural relevance but in sheer human connection, exemplified by the passing verses that became what Young calls “refrigerator poems”: the ones you tear out and affix to the fridge to read again and again over months and years. Our love for that singular Billy Collins or Ada Limón poem—or lines by a new writer you’ve never heard of but will hear much more from in the future—is what has made The New Yorker a great organ for poetry, a mouthpiece for our changing culture and way of life, even a mirror of our collective soul.
Available in Hardcover, eBook, and Audio Editions.
Listen to a Clip from the Audiobook
Dorothy Parker: Poems by Dorothy Parker
An irresistible hardcover collection of the famous humorist’s poems that range from lighthearted satire to gleeful dark comedy.
One of the Jazz Age’s most beloved poets, Dorothy Parker earned her reputation as the wittiest woman in America with her popular light verse, which was regularly published in Vanity Fair, Life, and The New Yorker. Her debut poetry collection, Enough Rope, was a runaway bestseller in 1926, and she followed it up in 1928 with the equally delightful collection Sunset Gun.
The poems gathered here range from barbed satires to lighthearted laments, all laced with Parker’s unmistakable sense of humor, one that manages to be both cynical and sparkling.
Available in Hardcover.
Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift Edited by Kristie Frederick Daugherty
An anthology of brand-new poems inspired by Taylor Swift songs, from a powerhouse group of contemporary poets, including Kate Baer, Maggie Smith, and Joy Harjo.
In a spirit of celebration and collaboration, poets have taken a cue from Swift’s love of dropping clues and puzzles for her fandom to decode, as each poem alludes to a song without using direct lyrics. Swifties will enjoy closely reading each of the poems to discover which song each poet responded to; each poem responds to only one song.
Swifties will experience the profundity and nuance of Swift’s lyrics through these poems, while having fun matching the poems to songs from all of her eras—vault tracks included! For poetry lovers, this one-of-a-kind anthology is an unparalleled collection of new work from today’s most lauded and revered poets.
Available in Hardcover, eBook, and Audio Editions.
Listen to a Clip from the Audiobook
Is This My Final Form? by Amy Gerstler
A poet renowned for her “wit and complexity” (Poetry Foundation) explores the endless evolution and malleability of life on earth in her most curious, inventive collection to date.
Aren’t we all shape-shifters? Is any animal, vegetable, or mineral—even a commonplace object—what it seems to be at any given moment? Who isn’t juggling constant transformations, conflicting roles, changing loyalties, loves, perceptions, and selves, all while being pummeled by shifting devotions, emotions, and obsessions? Do even the dead continue to evolve in surprising ways?
Reveling in these questions, Gerstler’s latest protean poetry collection includes loose sonnets, shapely praise of Mae West, the lament of an actor who can’t shed his costume, dramatic monologues, whiffs of gender slippage, a love lyric to the bride of Frankenstein, and a ten-minute play.See Less
Available in Trade Paperback, eBook, and Audio Editions.
Listen to a Clip from the Audiobook
Forest of Noise: Poems by Mosab Abu Toha
“A powerful, capacious, and profound” (Ocean Vuong) new collection of poems about life in Gaza by an award-winning Palestinian poet.
“The poems in Mosab Abu Toha’s Forest of Noise are urgent, prayerful howls in the bleakest of nights. Necessary, and wrought out of both terror and truth, these poems sing and weep in a rough and haunting harmony. Abu Toha’s work begs the reader to pay close attention as each poetic line is, at its heart, a lifeline to survival.”—Ada Limón, US Poet Laureate, author of The Hurting Kind
Available in Hardcover, eBook, and Audio Editions.
Listen to a Clip from the Audiobook