Poetry We Can’t Wait to Read in 2022
Uncovering new poetry is something I find myself battling through most years, but I remain keen to keep discovering hidden gems and inspiring prose.
Continuing with one of my favourite hobbies of a new year (unnecessarily padding out my never-ending TBR pile), here’s a short and sweet wrap of some of the poetry collections that have caught my eye in the first half of 2022.
Return Flight by Jennifer Huang
Published: Milkweed Editions, January 2022
Winner of the 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Return Flight is a reckoning, “with inheritance, with body, with trauma, with desire―and with the many tendons in between.” This gorgeous debut collection from Huang is textured with mythological creatures, folklore settings and mystical beings. Drawing on her cultural history, Huang’s “thrumming” verses travel through generations across Taiwan, China and America. Teaching us how history can both harrow and heal, this is an intimate and dreamy collection to kick off your poetry reading in 2022.
Overlap by Valerie Bence
Published: The Emma Press, January 2022
Bence’s debut poetry pamphlet focuses on family history, intergenerational relationships and the too-often-forgotten key ingredient in these narratives: grandmothers. Rich in mid-20th century detail (think Babycham and Coty L'Aimant perfume), Bence’s vivid vignettes, “transport us from the poet's childhood up to her own experience of becoming a grandmother during the Covid-19 pandemic.” Described as a beautiful meditation on grandmothers and a testament to ordinary lives, this is another warm-hearted release from UK-based indie fav, The Emma Press.
Muscle Memory by Kyle Carrero Lopez
Published: PANK Magazine, January 2022
Kyle Carrero Lopez’s Muscle Memory won the 2020 Little Book Contest and has been long-awaited in print. Covering a breadth of inquiry from money and work, Blackness and anti-blackness to the art world, queerness, and violence - from the governmental to the interpersonal. Described as a collection that “crosses borders in flesh and mind, political and experimental and codifies a personal realism,” Lopez interrogates the various complications of earthly living in a sharp, fresh voice. Afro-Cuban drumming and disco and Solange commune as these poems “ping-pong between reverent softness and unsparing critique.”
Revenants by Adam Aitken
Published: Giramondo Publishing, February 2022
With a title that suggests spirits and ghosts who return to the human world, “not to haunt it, but to remind the living that the present and the past are intertwined,” this collection draws on Aitken’s memories of his father. A commemoration of his life and death, Aitken’s prose traverses Asia, Australia, Hawai’i, and France, reflecting on the legacy of colonialism as inherited experience. Aitken shares “his awareness of secret histories and local knowledge, stories of migration, the vestiges of forgotten people and places.”
Clean by Scott-Patrick Mitchell
Published: Upswell, March 2022
Scott-Patrick Mitchell was a previous runner-up in the Aniko Press quarterly flash fiction competition, and this will be a hotly anticipated collection for anyone who has engaged with Mitchell’s work. I’ve seen him deliver spoken-word poetry a couple of times, and am eager to see his impressive handling of language on the page even more. In this volume, Mitchell “propels us into the seething mess of the methamphetamine crisis in Australia today.” These poems roil and scratch, “exploring the precarious life of addiction and its sleep deprivation.” Taking us from the unsteady and unsavoury though to the joy of recovery, Mitchell directs us always towards love and tenderness.
Acanthus by Claire Potter
Published: Giramondo Publishing, March 2022
This new collection from the Australian poetry scene favourite, Claire Potter, offers dive into the landscapes of the northern and southern hemispheres, “evoking myth and fantasy and romance as they move between observation and imagination.” Potter explores the power of transformation and the ripples of consequence transformation brings - “celestial and the physical, the imagined and the real closer to hand.” Serving up the surreal, repetition, mystical and mythical, this collection is a bold mix of poetry, quotation, dream and prose.
And to Ecstasy by Marjon Mossammaparast
Published: Upswell, March 2022
Described as a “poetic journey through space and time, projecting a transcendental element of reality,” this exquisite collection from Mossammaparast explores our physical experiences of being human alongside the belief in our existence as spirit beings. Through her prose, Mossammaparast attempts to “move beyond the limitations of bodies and into an expanded metaphysical notion of identity, carried by intuition.”
The Jaguar by Sarah Holland-Batt
Published: UQP, May 2022
Drawing their core theme from a portrait of a father’s Parkinson’s Disease and a daughter forged by grief, Holland-Batt’s newest “bold, electrifying” collection is compromising, raw and deeply humane. Opening and closing with elegies set in the moments before and after a death Holland-Batt fearlessly probes “the body’s animal endurance, appetites and metamorphoses”. Marked by her signature “lyric intensity and linguistic mastery” this is a ruthless view of a form of love rarely explored.
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.
