Best Asian-American Poetry

Following the success of her breakout poem, Sarah Kay releases her debut collection of poetry featuring work from the first decade of her career. In this collection she will give you moments so intimate and beautifully rendered you will come to know them as your own. Sarah Kay is a poet from New York City.

“Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition. His lines are both long and short, his pose narrative and lyric, his diction formal and insouciant. "Night Sky with Exit Wounds establishes Vuong as a fierce new talent to be reckoned with...This book is a masterpiece that captures, with elegance, the raw sorrows and joys of human existence. "This original, sprightly wordsmith of tumbling pulsing phrases pushes poetry to a new level...A stunning introduction to a young poet who writes with both assurance and vulnerability. Visceral, tender and lyrical, fleet and agile, these poems unflinchingly face the legacies of violence and cultural displacement but they also assume a position of wonder before the world.”—2016 Whiting Award citation. "Vuong’s powerful voice explores passion, violence, history, identity—all with a tremendous humanity. “In his impressive debut collection, Vuong, a 2014 Ruth Lilly fellow, writes beauty into—and culls from—individual, familial, and historical traumas. Poems float and strike in equal measure as the poet strives to transform pain into clarity. ". The poems in Mr. Vuong's new collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, possess[es] a tensile precision reminiscent of Emily Dickinson's work, combined with a Gerard Manley Hopkins-like appreciation for the sound and rhythms of words...There is a powerful emotional undertow to these poems that springs from Mr. Vuong's sincerity and candor, and from his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things." "Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition....His lines are both long and short, his pose narrative and lyric, his diction formal and insouciant. "In Vuong's "Night Sky," the entry and exit wounds are real, torn open by gunshot and "misfired" words, but his poems insist we can be made whole by rapture." --San Francisco Chronicle "Vuong's major contribution in Night Sky With Exit Wounds is to push back against the inclination to let fear define the exile's life." '[O]ne reason Vuong's debut collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds feels so exquisite, so necessary, is that he offers another way to hold the present moment.'. --Georgia Review "Vuong's powerful voice explores passion, violence, history, identity--all with a tremendous humanity." --Rain Taxi "Vuong's pitch-perfect approach, through the legacy of war and forced displacement, shows us why we can't afford to let him remember them alone." "At a time when poets are resigned to making boredom a commodity, [Vuong] reminds us that the limits of intimacy are an exhilarating frontier, and that the most urgent communications begin with the overture of letting down one's defenses."

Winner of the 1990 Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award. In this outstanding first book of poems, Lee is unafraid to show emotion, especially when writing about his father or his wife.

The book explores the relationship between femininity and body hair as well as the intersections of family, class, the immigrant experience, Latina identity, and much more, all through Lozada-Oliva’s unique lens and striking voice. Melissa Lozada-Oliva is a spoken word poet & educator living in Boston whose fierceness and charm have made her a poetry phenomenon, with her work appearing on Upworthy, Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, and countless other media outlets.

A fast-paced debut that draws upon reservation folklore, pop culture, fractured gospels, and her brother’s addiction to methamphetamine. Natalie Diaz: Natalie Diaz was born and raised on the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation in Needles, California.