5 Phenomenal October 2024 Releases
Much like the month of October, which contains both warm days still reminiscent of late summer and crisp nights that will have you reaching for your tea and fuzzy socks, this month’s poetry releases strike a perfect and fascinating in-between, featuring both new and familiar voices. Readers will find new releases from beloved voices in the genre, plus revamped editions of their old and comforting favorites. Alongside these mainstays, expect promising debuts and fresh names to add to your shelf. Here’s the phenomenal works we recommend.
The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder Through Science and Poetry, edited by Maria Popova
Release date: Oct. 1
In the wide-ranging and wondrous collection The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder Through Science and Poetry, writer and curator Maria Popova brings together science and poetry to reveal the connections between the two and the similar, urgent questions they raise. By intersplicing essays about dark matter and octopus brain activity with poems by W.H. Auden, Maya Angelou, Tracy K. Smith, and others, Popova emphasizes the role of mystery and discovery in both science and poetry—a rigorous, interdisciplinary delight.
The Inward Trilogy by Yung Pueblo
Release date: Oct. 1
As his nearly 3 million Instagram followers shows, Yung Pueblo has captivated an audience thanks to his meditative, inspiring words, which detail how to connect more with others and your environment by first connecting with and understanding yourself. Fans may have read all or some of the titles in Yung Pueblo’s best-selling Inward trilogy—Inward, Clarity & Connection, and The Way Forward—but this collective box set adds to the series’ beauty. It’s the perfect way to add both a literary and decorative touch.
Milk and Honey: 10th Anniversary Collector’s Edition by Rupi Kaur
Release date: Oct. 1
Similarly, almost every poetry lover has heard of Rupi Kaur. It’s hard to believe that it’s been a decade since Milk and Honey catapulted to the top of bestseller lists and revolutionized the poetry genre, but this collector’s edition celebrates that milestone. It also expands upon what readers love about Milk and Honey, Kaur’s words, with 40 new vulnerable poems and 20 accompanying illustrations. Plus, annotations from Rupi and other writers shed more light on what Milk and Honey has meant to them.
An Authentic Life by Jennifer Chang
Release date: Oct. 15
How do we form our view of life and how can we change it? This is the sweeping and essential question at the center of Jennifer Chang’s third collection, An Authentic Life. Chang, who has won honors like the PEN Open Book Award and the William Carlos Williams Award, takes on entrenched and powerful institutions in her latest release—including religion, academia, the nuclear family, and more. She pushes back on the patriarchy that informs these structures and wades through the many ways it has influenced her, all as she interrogates how we can unlearn it.
Good Dress by Brittany Rogers
Release date: Oct. 15
The coming-of-age poetry collection is a classic of the genre, one Brittany Rogers twists and reinvents in her evocative and wholly original debut collection. Good Dress introduces its readers to Black Detroit, a city and culture Rogers celebrates for being “audacious.” The collection’s speaker explores how these surroundings shaped her adolescence and her ideas about womanhood and class. Arguments and reflection about these big, structural ideas come through in the small, personal moments and portraitures Good Dress depicts.
Happy reading! Need more fall reading recs? Check out our roundup of Halloween poems and poems to help you embrace the changes of fall.
