September is packed with new poetry releases for your bookshelves. From Instagram’s beloveds like Amanda Lovelace, Atticus, and Nikita Gill to stunning debuts exploring trauma, grief, sexual assault, and mixed identity, this is a month to truly get excited about poetry and its magical universal, inclusive powers.
Great Goddesses: Life Lessons From Myths and Monsters by Nikita Gill — September 3
Beloved poet, writer, Instagrammer and author of Fierce Fairytales and Wild Embers, Nikita Gill drops a brand new collection of poems and stories this September. Great Goddesses: Life Lessons From Myths and Monsters uses the history of Ancient Greece to explore and share the stories of the mothers, warriors, creators, survivors, and destroyers who shook the world.
In pieces that burn with empathy and admiration for these women, Gill unearths the power and glory of the very foundations of mythology and culture that have been too-often ignored or pushed aside.
With hand-drawn illustrations throughout the collection, Gill’s poetry and stories weave old and forgotten tales of might and love into an empowering collection for the modern woman. Don’t miss this one.
Help in the Dark Season by Jacqueline Suskin — September 5
The poems in Help in the Dark Season expose lessons of adult and childhood trauma, relationship joys and failures, and the all-around hard work of true togetherness. Each poem walks us into Jacqueline Suskin’s world where dreams and sacred visions are just as important as reality, where planet earth is an active character and spouse, and every attempt at love adds up as wisdom worth remembering.
She explores the pathway of human love as it begins in the dark, moves into parental hands, transfers into experiments of the heart, grows, breaks, and ultimately transforms us more than any other experience we withstand. These poems act as a road map of personal process, healing, the importance of human connection, and the beauty of risk.
Everything Is A Deathly Flower by Maneo Mohale –September 6
One of the most anticipated debut collections of the years, Everything is a Deathly Flower by Maneo Mohale reckons boldly with the experience of – and the reconstruction of life after – a sexual assault.
This timely and unapologetic collection showcases Mohale’s disarming voice, rooted in contemporary southern African tradition. Taking her work in a queer and radical new direction, Everything Is A Deathly Flower explores the seldom complete process of healing: where relations must be chosen as well as made; where time becomes non-linear and language insufficient; where nothing is what it seems, yet everything is what it is. Mark your calendars. This poetry collection drops on September 6.
To Start an Orchard by Michael Hettich — September 6
Known for his dreamlike stories and whimsical prose, Michael Hettich seeks to remind us how little we truly see and how often we sleep through the day’s deep revelations. To Start an Orchard is a long poem that is also a call to arms, demanding consciousness, responsibility, and love of the fraught and fragile natural world that is ours to inhabit, nourish, and preserve. Humans turn into animals as his poems merge with wildness, even as wildness is disappearing.
The Truth About Magic: Poems by Atticus — September 10
Internationally bestselling Instagram sensation, Atticus, author of The Dark Between Stars and Love Her Wild, returns with another romantic and deeply moving collection. The Truth of Magic explores finding ourselves, finding our purpose, and the simple joys of life with grace, wit, and longing. Through love and heartbreak, Atticus aims to show us that there is magic everywhere—we just have to look for it.
to drink coffee with a ghost by Amanda Lovelace — September 17
New from the bestselling, award-winning poetess and one of our personal favorites, Amanda Lovelace, comes the finale of her illustrated duology, “things that h(a)unt.” In the first installment, to make monsters out of girls, Lovelace explores the memory of being in a toxic romantic relationship. In to drink coffee with a ghost, Lovelace unravels the memory of the complicated relationship she had with her now-deceased mother while seeking to answer the ever-lingering question: What happens when someone dies before they’re able to redeem themselves?
Mixed Feelings: Poems and Stories by Avan Jogia — September 17
We are very excited to finally share the raw and moving collection of poetry, stories, and art by actor and writer Avan Jogia. Mixed Feelings explores the lives of mixed-race people in a world that is increasingly fixated on racial identity. Jogia explores his complicated emotions around religion, race, family, and identity. Through drawings, interviews, and stories, Mixed Feelings serves as a timely conversation starter for difficult topics that now, more than ever, need to be discussed.
Grief Sequence by Prageeta Sharma — September 17
Offering a series of poems rooted in the profoundly narrative yet disorienting experience of losing a loved one, Prageeta Sharma, in Grief Sequence, summons all of her resources in order to attempt a clear sense in trauma. She asks pressing questions about what is contained in the poetic ‘I,’ exploring where it transgresses as it navigates through frustration, logic, and grief. These poems are ripe with the intellectual and emotional processing of how poetry can help makes sense of confusion and loss.
Odes to Lithium by Shira Erlichman — September 17
September brings us another debut, this one by Shira Erlichman. Odes to Lithium is a love letter to Lithium, her medication for Bipolar Disorder. With inventiveness, compassion, and humor, she thrusts us into a world of unconventional praise. From an unexpected encounter with her grandmother’s ghost to a bubble bath with Bjӧrk to her plumber’s confession that he, too, has Bipolar Disorder, Erlichman bravely topples stigmas against mental illness and what it means to live within that body. Accompanied by her drawing and collages, Odes to Lithium is about self-acceptance, resilience, healing and what makes us human.
