April is National Poetry Month, and the Yale University Press is prepared to celebrate with an outstanding selection of new titles related to the fine art of verse.

In her foreword to Arda Collins’ It is Daylight, the 2008 winner of the annual Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, contest judge Louise Glück calls Collins’ volume “savage, desolate, brutally ironic . . . a
book of astonishing originality and intensity, unprecedented,
unrepeatable.” A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Collins has previously published her work in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, and A Public Space, among other magazines and journals. Both tender and sly, It is Daylight is a disarming and highly original debut, available now in paperback and a cloth limited edition.

Geoffrey Hill has been called “England’s best hope for the Nobel Prize.” In a new selection of his work, readers will now be able to appreciate the arc of his more than 50-year career in a single volume. Beginning with Hill’s striking debut For the Unfallen and concluding with selections from his acclaimed Without Title, also published by the Yale University Press, Selected Poems presents an authoritative collection of work by a poet who is not afraid to face his work head on.

Finally, the poet Taha Muhammad Ali may not be a household name; however, after reading Adina Hoffman’s vividly written My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness, readers will no doubt feel a great connection with the man and his work. Born in 1931 in the Galilee village of Saffuriyya, Muhammad Ali was
forced to flee during the war in 1948. He traveled on foot to Lebanon
and returned a year later to find his village destroyed. An autodidact,
he has since run a souvenir shop in Nazareth, at the same time evolving
into a writer whom National Book Critics Circle Award–winner Eliot
Weinberger has dubbed “perhaps the most accessible and delightful poet
alive today.” To see Muhammad Ali read his poem “Revenge” with translator Peter Cole at the 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival, please click here.