Craig Morgan Teicher

Three new collections by mid-career poets lay claim to stories of identity, suffering and hope, to a kind of collective subjectivity, to the inner life of a country in the throes of deep pain and uncertainty.

April always brings some of the years' biggest poetry collections. So as it wraps up, we wanted to bring you two favorites — retrospective collections from Marie Howe and Jean Valentine.

New collections The Gone Thing, Silver and Modern Poetry offer, if not a solution to trying times in America, then a kind of truth-telling companion, a mirror with a real person on both sides of it.

Here are three of the first poetry collections to register the still-unfolding social and physical fallout of the pandemic and Trump-era politics.