January 1, 2024
A Poetry Collection for Every Kind of New Year's Resolution Maker
by Shannan Mann
Featuring seven amazing poetry collections released in 2023
The Traditionalist
You’ve had your New Year’s resolutions planned out for a few months now. These are classic and achievable goals like exercising more, better time management, or reading more books.
Millner does an incredible job with rhyme and meter without it ever feeling forced. Plus, she’s writing about very raw, very modern themes around queer love and sex. This book kind of took the poetry world by storm when it first came out. And rightly so.
The GOALIE
Extremely ambitious and driven, you’re entering 2024 with a bullseye on your goals. You’re aiming for some lofty things, but you’ll damn well hit the mark this year!
This book hits the heart and the head at the same time. It’s a drug, a rush, and a sweet flower. Fernandes doesn’t shy away from anything here, and her poetic voice is unnervingly confident and bold while still exuding self-love.
The REALIST
You know that not all of your New Year’s resolutions are going to translate into, well, reality. But you still have a neat, short, and sensible list that you’ll try fairly hard for (at least in the first couple of months).
She’s won the Pulitzer. She knows how to wield the short line in a long poem. She asks serious questions about the world’s insane situation today and in the future we can or cannot imagine. See what I mean:
The Serial Resolutionist
The point of setting resolutions is the setting of said resolutions. Unfinished goals are just another beautiful artefact of time. Yeah, you’ve got your resolutions for this year. Yeah, they’ll probably be abandoned. And duh, you’ll set more again for 2025. That’s the point, remember.
How Bob Hicok manages to be at once irreverent, hilarious, absurd and then again deeply melancholic, serious, sincere…I don’t know if I’ll ever find out, but I’m happy to die trying if that means I can keep reading his poetry. Hard to pick favorites from this collection, which is really a novella in verse — they’re each better than the last!
The HABIT-RABBIT
You love hopping from one set of positive things to the next, trying on any hat that might help you shape up your life in the way you want it. Whether it’s mindfulness, yoga, crocheting, or poetry — you’ve got a specific set of resolutions centered around a new habit you want to integrate with your routine.
This book’s central theme of betrayal is explored from every angle imaginable and you’re still left wanting to re-read Bates’ amazing collection again.
The Listless Bucket-Lister
You don’t do New Year’s resolutions. Let’s be real, you had no idea it was the new year until you read this, did you?
Dr. Byas places herself in Dorothy’s sparkling red heels and whisks us away to a magical, fearsome, fierce, outrageous, beautifully reimagined Oz, exploring black womanhood, sexuality, intergenerational trauma and self-renewal along the way.
The It’s-2024-Already-Oh-Dear-God-No
You’ve had your New Year’s resolutions planned out for a few months now. These are classic and achievable goals like exercising more, better time management, or reading more books.
Leigh Chadwick is your favorite poet. She’s my favorite poet. She’s the 2024 poet laureate of 2023. She is also not a poet. She is the not-iest poet of all the not-poets. She is poetry. That’s all folks. Read it. Love it. Enjoy, or whatever.