8 (More) Poetry Collections We Can’t Wait to Read in 2022
“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.” — Rita Dove
The more I prioritise poetry on my reading lists, the more I discover and the more I fall in love with it. There is so much power to be found in the form and so many subtle nods to all the ways one might find to be human.
If you managed to tick off everything from our first list of poetry recommendations for this year, have no fear - here’s a new selection of new and upcoming releases for 2022 to help you keep discovering and feeling seen!
Petals Fall by Anita Patel
Publisher: Recent Work Press
Publish Date: July 2022
The second poetry collection from Anita Patel transports us into her history, heritage, mythology and family. Offering glimpses of “past worlds and present realities”, Patel’s poems drift across the themes they attempt to grab hold of, bringing tensions and insights to the surface when they do. Paying tribute to migrant experiences, the fragility of home and belonging, and the “tensile strength of women”, Patel examines the completeness of relationships, language landscapes and all the stories that ultimately make up a self across a single lifetime.
Exactly As I Am by Rae White
Publisher: UQP
Published Date: July 2022
Described as a “defiant, unflinching exploration of gender identity, gender discrimination, and gender euphoria”, Exactly As I Am is White’s second poetry collection that takes its stance from their own lived experiences as a non-binary transgender person. With the brilliant wit and powerful prose White has come to embody, they unflinching dissect the spaces transgender people are assigned and denied across contemporary society. White has never shied away from the things that need to be said, but in this collection, they also use their words to extend a hand of companionship, pulling us into their community and calling us to stand with them. White leads the way for a new conversation in the gender space, and this will be a hit for old and new fans alike of their work.
In the Roar of the Machine by Zheng Xiaoqiong, translated by Eleanor Goodman
Publisher: Giramondo Publishing
Publish Date: July 2022
Collecting some of Xiaoqiong’s most influential and moving work into one collection, In the Roar of the Machine is a dramatic culmination of the Chinese poet’s experience of working in the newly created factories and warehouses of one of the largest manufacturing centres in southern China. An utterly revelatory and unique perspective showcases the “details of days and nights spent in physical labour, the din of the workshops, the acute dangers associated with working with heavy machinery, and the exploitation, abuse, and indignity workers are subject to given the pressures of global capitalism and a lack of oversight and protection.” But Xiaoqiong’s poetry also speaks of human connection, love and hope, as well as her passion for her home and the natural environment of her native Huangma Mountains in central Sichuan. A vividly told worldview that few will have ever encountered, this is a must-read collection for everyone.
Mirabilia by Lisa Gorton
Publisher: Giramondo Publishing
Publish Date: August 2022
The latest collection from acclaimed poet and novelist Lisa Gorton seeks to “test the relationship between art and politics”. Inspired by historical narratives, political perspectives and famous artworks, these ekphrastic poems also reflect on the “experience of the female muse, wife, or mother.” From the pangolin (the world's most trafficked animal) to nuclear testing and da Vinci, Gorton covers an incredible breadth of worlds, perspectives, and experiences in this fascinating collection.
Leave Me Alone by Harry Reid
Publisher: Cordite Books
Publish Date: August 2022
In Leave Me Alone, Reid subverts the familiar narrative of the workplace office - “its customs, its dialects, its equipment, the roles of its people” - and flips them to uncover their whole, uncanny reality. Readers are invited to enter a “nondescript door down a laneway and casually apply the secret knock. This is not the door to the reception or the main office; it’s the door to the sly-grog palace of language inside our minds.” Your induction into Reid’s world begins - and perhaps ends - here. A superbly realised collection.
Totality by Anders Villani
Publisher: Recent Work Press
Publish Date: August 2022
This is the second collection of work from Melbourne-based Anders Villani, providing a “stunning formal range and architectural design.” Exploring how “violence engenders selfhood”, Totality creates a narrative arc built around hypermasculinity through poising a series of urgent questions of self-inquiry - “What does it mean to suffer in a body that also symbolises power? How can poetry, alert to the ‘blur’ and the ‘panorama’, trace this moral dissonance at its subtlest and most intimate? How do notions of illness and recovery, victim and perpetrator, rest on fraught archetypes, and what alternate understandings emerge when these foundations waver?”. Described as “sensuous and searching”, Villani offers a unique and lyrical perspective through his prose.
Bluest Nude by Ama Codjoe
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publish Date: September 2022
Exploring how the “archetype of the artist complicates the typical expectations of women”, Codjoe creates a dialogue between art and the self. Offering “alternative ways of holding and constructing” who we are, Codjoe reflects on the work of contemporary and ancestral artists to create a “choreography of Codjoe’s making”. With a focus on all the different ways we see and are seen, publicly and privately, Codjoe’s prose is “precise and halting … startling and seductive”. A meditative, subtly intense collection that sounds like just the kind of work to get lost amongst on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Call It in the Air by Ed Pavlic
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publish Date: October 2022
Described as somewhere between “elegy and memoir, poetry and prose”, Call It in the Air traces the life and death of Pavlic’s older sister, Kate. Focusing on the small moments, objects and places that made up “a brilliant, talented, tormented woman who lived on her own terms to the very end, " Pavlic has created an intimate record of love, loss, grief, shame and memory. A testimony to how love never really leaves us and how the bonds that shape us are transformed to be rediscovered in unsuspecting moments.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in nipaluna (Hobart), Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under www.wordswithelaine.com.
