Poetry by Season: The Best Upcoming Poetry for This Autumn
Five collections publishing this autumn share a preoccupation that feels exactly right for the season, what survives a loss, a family reshaped, a familiar place seen freshly. Here is where to start.
Photo: Lisa Stroud / Pexels
Poetry rarely gets the same seasonal fanfare as a big memoir or a prestige history book, and that has always seemed like a mistake, since autumn is the season poetry is actually built for. The light changes, something ends, and the compressed, exact language poetry works in tends to say more about that shift in a page than prose manages in a chapter. This year's crop leans hard into that instinct. Grief, ageing, blended families and a changing landscape all turn up across five very different collections, each one finding its own register for the same basic question: what survives.
Cloud Runner
Joy Harjo's Cloud Runner, out 13 October from Norton, sets personal grief directly against ecological crisis and reads them as a single continuous loss rather than two separate griefs happening at the same time. Harjo has spent a career writing through Indigenous cosmology as a living framework rather than a historical reference point, and that approach gives this collection its real weight. The landscape here is not a backdrop for the mourning. It is mourning something itself, in parallel with the speaker, which is a harder and more honest position for a nature poem to take than the consoling version usually offered.
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Editor-in-Chief
Editor-in-Chief of Rich Woman Magazine, founder of Sovereign Magazine, author of many books, Dr Marina Nani is a social edification scientist coining a new industry, Social Edification. Passionately advocating to celebrate your human potential, she is well known for her trademark "Be Seen- Be Heard- Be You" running red carpet events and advanced courses like Blog Genius®, Book Genius®, Podcast Genius®, the cornerstones of her teaching. The constant practitioner of good news, she founded MAKE THE NEWS ( MTN) with the aim to diagnose and close the achievement gap globally. Founder of many publications, British Brands with global reach Marina believes that there is a genius ( Stardust) in each individual, regardless of past and present circumstances. "Not recognising your talent leaves society at loss. Sharing the good news makes a significant difference in your perception about yourself, your industry and your community."
