Millennial and Gen Z Poets You Need to Know

This fresh voice in American poetry wields lyric pleasure and well-honed insight against a cruel century that would kill us with a thousand cuts. Tomás Morín hails from the coastal plains of Texas, and explores a world where identity and place shift like that ever-changing shore.

Featuring 119 haikus inspired by the Periodic Table (yes, that one from intro to Chemistry), Mary Soon Lee’s collection hums with imagination. Within its pages, Boron (described as “no fireworks, no fuss”) urges us to consider the power of focus and diligence while “Lithium” highlights the importance of connection with others and our connection to ourselves (“empower my phone, my car. / Banish depression.”). Each element is an invitation to reckon with the wonder of the world that surrounds us. Each page is a celebration.

When Darius told Angel he loved her, she believed him. But five weeks after the incident, Angel finds herself in Brooklyn, far from her family, from him, and from the California life she has known. Angel feels out of sync with her new neighborhood. The only place that makes sense is Ms. G’s class. There, Angel’s classmates share their own stories of pain, joy, and fortitude. This stunning novel weaves together prose, poems, and vignettes to tell the story of Angel, a young woman whose past was shaped by domestic violence but whose love of language and music and the gift of community grant her the chance to find herself again.

For Olivia Gatwood, poetry is a powerful tool, one that can “help us feel less alone in the dark.” The poems in Life of the Party prove this—each stanza offering light to those who are willing to embrace it. Throughout the collection, Gatwood’s knack for tapping into the vulnerability and wonder of human emotion with empathetic clarity is unshakable. Poems like “No Baptism” feel like a mirror that reminds readers that “Once, everything was a gift. Once, anything / resembling the things we wanted was the we wanted.”

Like a match, Yrsa Daley-Ward’s poetry captivates the eye and emanates light. Each line is luminous and unabashedly fierce, even when wielded through two short lines. Throughout bone, Daley-Ward dares to explore her inner shadow, the contradictions of intimacy, and the many histories that have shaped her. With ease, she compels her audience to bear witness to the complexity and limitless iterations of Black womanhood. bone‘s stanzas exorcise, invoke, and conjure. Daley-Ward’s poems will banish whatever binds you.

Fatimah Asghar’s debut collection is a fearless meditation on the way history, faith, and family can shape an individual’s identity and their sense of home. When Asghar confesses, “I whisper my country my country my country / & my hands stay empty” in “When the Orders Came,” the limits of the American dream are confronted along with the dangers of existing in a nation where “the cost / of looking the other way” can be fatal. Urgent and illuminating, Asghar’s collection is a necessary salve.

Colloquial and incantatory, the poems in Patricia Lockwood’s second collection address the most urgent questions of our time, like: Is America going down on Canada? What happens when Niagara Falls gets drunk at a wedding? Is it legal to marry a stuffed owl exhibit? Why isn’t anyone named Gary anymore? Did the Hatfield and McCoy babies ever fall in love? The steep tilt of Lockwood’s lines sends the reader snowballing downhill, accumulating pieces of the scenery with every turn. The poems’ subject is the natural world, but their images would never occur in nature. This book is serious and funny at the same time, like a big grave with a clown lying in it.

This luminous poetry collection by author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, this beautifully designed volume features poems in many inventive styles and structures and shines a light on a moment of reckoning.

It’s Not Magic by Jon Sands offers its audience an earnest exploration of identity, memory, and the irrevocable nature of intimacy. In poems like “Ode to My Mother’s Hip” and “I Should Be Writing the Story,” Sands peels back the veneer of post-modern apathy and delves deep into an immersive spectrum of human emotion, which in turn, encourages his readers to do the same. A satisfyingly searing portrait of selfhood and coming of age, It’s Not Magic is a spell in its own rite.

In Garous Abdolmalekian’s first collection to appear in English, the surreal takes center stage. Filled with incandescent stanzas and cinematic imagery, Abdolmalekian’s Lean Against This Late Hour sifts through the intricacies of loss, grief, desire, and how we must reckon with the past as we live in the present and reach toward the future. When Abdolmalekian writes, “This time send us a prophet who listens,” readers can’t help but pay attention. This collection commands you to put your ear to the ground.

Throughout Forage, Rose McLarney reflects on the implications of embodiment, nature, and ecology in unexpected and unshakable ways. Crafted with precision and heart, McLarney’s poems announce themselves, each stanza possessing a voice of its own that slips with ease into the ears of its listener and quickly takes root. Forage is a compelling rumination on mortality and our ever-changing environment. Its urgency has something to teach us. This collection is one that you will return to again and again.

In these short, captivating lyrics, Catherine Cohen, the one-woman stand-up chanteuse who electrified the downtown NYC comedy scene in her white go-go boots, and who has been posting poignant, unfiltered poems on social media since before Instagram was a thing, details her life on the prowl with her beaded bag. A Dorothy Parker for our time, a Starbucks philosophe with no primary-care doctor, she’s a welcome new breed of everywoman–a larger-than-life best friend, who will say all the outrageous things we think but never say out loud ourselves.

From the  acclaimed poet featured on Forbes Africa’s “30 Under 30” list, this powerful novel-in-verse captures one girl, caught between cultures, on an unexpected journey to face the ephemeral girl she might have been. Woven through with moments of lyrical beauty, this is a tender meditation on family, belonging, and home.

When Ada leaves home for her freshman year at a Historically Black College, it’s the first time she’s ever been so far from her family—and the first time that she’s been able to make her own choices and to seek her place in this new world. As she stumbles deeper into the world of dance and explores her sexuality, she also begins to wrestle with her past—her mother’s struggle with addiction, her Nigerian father’s attempts to make a home for her. Ultimately, Ada discovers she needs to brush off the destiny others have chosen for her and claim full ownership of her body and her future.

Much like The After Party, No Matter‘s pages offer readers a gripping investigation of memory, reinvention, and imagination. Reminiscent of Italo Calvino’s Cities and the fictive visions of Renee Gladman, the poems within No Matter defy predictability and boldly reconfigure traditional forms like the sonnet alongside immersive free verse and newly imagined modalities. Visceral, unapologetic, political, and intimate, Prikryl’s poetry possesses a “magnetic nearness” that gently encourages you to lean in closer.

A true American epic in verse, Walking Gentry Home tells the story of Alora Young’s ancestors, from the unnamed women the historical record has forgotten but Young brings to life through imagination; to Amy, the first of her foremothers to arrive in Tennessee, buried in an unmarked grave unlike the white man who enslaved her and fathered her child; through Young’s great-grandmother Gentry, unhappily married at fourteen; to her own mother, the teenage beauty queen rejected by her white neighbors; down to Young in the present day. Each poem is a story-in-verse and together they form an arresting saga. Both heart-wrenching and inspiring, this unique family memoir finds joy and pride where others might only see despair.

Intimately immersive and unflinchingly self-aware, Andrea Gibson’s lyrical Take Me With You grapples with the interwoven ramifications of longing, family, gender, and reconciliation. Amplified by enthralling line drawings by Sarah J. Coleman, each section of this book maps out a body politic that reveals what it means to be wounded and find healing in the forever changing landscape of a post-millennial world. Gibson’s poetry is a cathartic silver lining to the ever-present anxieties of our era.

From spoken word poet Jasmine Mans comes an unforgettable poetry collection about race, feminism, and queer identity. With echoes of Gwendolyn Brooks and Sonia Sanchez, Mans writes to call herself—and us—home. Each poem explores what it means to be a daughter of Newark, and America—and the painful, joyous path to adulthood as a young, queer Black woman.

Sabrina Benaim, author of Depression & Other Magic Tricks, has connected deeply with readers and reached millions of viewers through her poetry, breaking down the stigma around mental illness. Now, she dives into challenging and universal territory: grief over a relationship’s end, loneliness in a world under lockdown, and the anxiety of caring for a loved one from afar in the wake of a serious diagnosis.