It’s the season of curling up with words that cut straight to the bone. This year’s most anticipated poetry and short story collections invite us to slow down, look closer, and feel deeper, whether it’s the thrum of memory, the sting of loss, or the quiet joy of being alive. These are the books that will keep you company as the leaves turn.
Ladies in Waiting
This playful anthology reimagines Jane Austen’s overlooked characters with wit, heart, and plenty of surprises. From Caroline Bingley’s snobbery to a modern-day descendant of Eliza Williams, these stories skip across centuries and oceans while honoring Austen’s timeless sparkle. If you love Austen’s work, you’ll be delighted as this supporting cast finally takes center stage.
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How About Now by Kate Baer
In this luminous new collection, Kate Baer captures the ache and beauty of middle age. From releasing children to reclaiming self, and reckoning with time’s relentless march. With her signature candor, she sketches poems that feel both intimate and universal, as if she’s speaking directly to the pulse of modern womanhood.
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A Bright and Borrowed Light by Courtney Kampa
Courtney Kampa’s posthumous collection glows with intimacy, wit, and a tenderness that lingers long after the page. Her poems feel like confessions whispered by a friend who sees you completely. It’s a work that converts even skeptics into poetry lovers, leaving you feeling “anointed with a bright and borrowed light.”
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The Intentions of Thunder by Patricia Smith
A career’s worth of brilliance is gathered in Patricia Smith’s The Intentions of Thunder, where pain, joy, history, and possibility collide. Each piece brims with her unmatched lyrical power, moving effortlessly from meditative stillness to volcanic force. This collection is both a testament to the necessity of poetry and a masterclass from one of the most vital voices of our time.
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Little Alleluias by Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver’s Little Alleluias is a gift for both longtime poetry lovers and newcomers. Here, swans fly through storms, stillness hums with transcendence, and gratitude rises from every page. Prepare to be swept into Oliver’s luminous gaze, finding peace, awe, and a renewed connection to the natural world and themselves.
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Dear Orchid: Letters and New Beginnings—True Stories and Fiction filled with Heart, Humor, and Hope by Carol Van Den Hende
This lyrical, letter-style collection blends memoir and fiction exploring loss, love, identity, disability, and belonging through intimate missives to people like a girl freed from East Berlin, an aunt lost to borders, and Purple Heart heroes. With tenderness and flashes of humor, Goodbye Orchid dives into healing and a second-chance romance, offering closure while celebrating love in all its forms.
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The World After Rain by Canisia Lubrin
A sweeping elegy to her mother, this collection threads love, grief, and time into poetry that feels both intimate and cosmic. Lubrin’s epic, lyrical vision transforms sorrow into astonishment, holding grief up to history and the present like a prism.
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What Remains After A Fire by Kanza Javed
In eight searing stories, Javed lays bare lives balanced on the edge of survival, desire, and displacement. From Lahore’s alleys to small-town Appalachia, her characters wrestle with ghosts, violence, obsession, and fragile hope.
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Sex of the Midwest by Robin Ryle
When a mysterious email invites a small Indiana town to disclose its private habits, the result is a kaleidoscope of secrets, confessions, and humanity in all its messy glory. Robin Ryle maps post-pandemic life through the eyes of basketball coaches, bartenders, bureaucrats, and more, all bound by one unlikely survey. Sex of the Midwest is equal parts wit, warmth, and sharp social satire.
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Groceries by Nora Claire Miller
In Groceries, Nora Claire Miller turns the seemingly mundane into the stuff of existential wonder. This book-length poem asks: do the things we collect save us, destroy us, or simply define us? Readers will love the mix of humor, urgency, and strange beauty in a work that makes the everyday feel special.
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Same by Hannah Rosenberg
Hannah Rosenberg debuts with a collection that’s equal parts heartfelt, relatable, and impossible not to share. Her poems capture the universal ache to be seen through details so familiar they’ll make you nod in recognition. Rosenberg’s voice feels like a conversation with a friend who just gets it.
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