With Fatal Flaw’s first-ever poetry contest underway, we thought it would be fun to ask our guest judge, Carla Ferreira, about her favorite poetry books. Read on to learn about Carla’s top 10 must-read poetry collections in her own words, including why each book earned a spot on this list. And make sure to enter the contest here!

‍

1. Teeth by Aracelis Girmay 

In “The Black Maria,” a poem written much later than Teeth, her debut, Aracelis Girmay writes “& so to tenderness I add my action.” This ars poetica is wholly embodied by this luminous debut. Teeth was the first book by a living poet that I ever read, when I was 17 years old, and it forever changed my understanding of what poems could do, how language could be homecoming, protest, celebration, whether an ode to a watermelon as resistance or gratitude for a third-grader’s letter. Poems that are at once tenderness and action—Girmay first taught me this possibility in this unforgettable collection, one that has been a compass to me as a poet and as a person.

2. Starshine & Clay by Kamilah Aisha Moon

Kamilah Aisha Moon is a poet I wish I had met in person, but before she died way too young, my encounter with her poems brought me out of a long hiatus from writing my own. I remember reading this book the summer before I began writing and submitting poems again. It felt like her poems were calling me back home to poetry, a space in writing that had felt as natural to me as swimming freely in open, clear water, which is also the sensation that one might feel reading Moon’s delightful and moving poetry. Moon’s gorgeous language, in the tradition of extraordinary poet Lucille Clifton, whose poetry the title of this collection honors, reminded me of the joy and heartbreak that great poems can bring. This book and Moon’s legacy are lights that will not fade.

‍3. Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency by Chen Chen 

I hold my breath a bit when a poet whose debut I loved comes out with their second collection because rarely do I find it as dazzling as their first. But no, this doesn’t dazzle: this explodes! Chen’s debut, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions 2017), blew me away. His second collection transported me to another planet where every poem is vibrant and alive and so funny and so sad all at once. Many poems that I adore in this book, but first place in my heart is “I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party,” the poem I teach that has students who start the semester adamantly saying they don’t like poetry discovering that hey, maybe, they do. This is a box of treats so delicious, bubblegum chews and salty sweet delights: open it up and let it break and remake your heart.

‍4. Citizen Illegal by José Olivarez 

Speaking of poems that I like to teach, this book is a forever favorite whether teaching high school or college. I love the way these poems made my students feel seen, particularly my English language learners and those of us who live between languages, worlds, and cultures. I dislike the word “necessary” when it’s used to describe poetry, but it is an understatement to say how much I needed to read this book. I learned a great deal from Olivarez on how to write poems of gratitude and joy, as well as poems that intricately cross between languages to create something new. Citizen Illegal is a joyous celebration and you should invite all your friends.

‍5. Judas Goat by Gabrielle Bates 

I seem like the kind of person who easily cries because of a good poem. Truth be told, I am not. And yet, the first poem, “The Dog,” in Bates’s stunning debut had me in tears: it’s a poem about the senseless violence we witness, about the distance between what we share and what we repress, about the longing to bridge that gap. The vulnerability in this poem echoed throughout the collection, which kept me riveted and hungry. The word “unflinching” is used too often to describe poetry books like this one: no, this collection flinches, expertly so; it is dramatically human, yet with uncommon precision of language and detail. Easily the best poetry book I read in 2023.

‍‍6. Girl’s Guide to Leaving by Laura Villareal 

This is another debut that left me feeling breathless and so seen. I love the intimacy of Villareal’s narratives and the weavings of different geographies from Newark to Texas. Yes, it is a book of departures, but also of turning back and of the strength and courage to do so, all while asking questions about what it means to exist within a family and on your own, what we keep from those we leave, and what we can transform. There are many favorites, but the standout for me is her sequence of prose poems in “Solar Eclipse // Myself in Orbit” transporting us across the times and spaces of journey across the speaker’s selves. Particularly a delight to read during this year’s recent eclipse.

‍7. Always a Relic Never a Reliquary by Kim Sousa 

I was lucky enough to work with Kim Sousa on editing a virtual anthology of immigrant and first-generation American poetry, No Tender Fences, to raise money for RAICES-Texas, an immigrant rights organization. Sousa’s advocacy continues in this brilliant debut, writing poetry that captures immigrant longings across borders. Sousa’s poetry does not just transcend borders, it actively supports their abolition. Sousa’s poems do so in language that at once reminds us of what it is to remain and what it is to leave behind, as its extraordinary ending makes clear: “Yes, I will carry your cells—always. / Yes, my body is still a church. / Relic, reliquary, I walk away on the pads of my feet.” Then, a blank page, then: “Not a trace left behind.” An ending that haunts you and blesses you.

‍8. Save the Bathwater by Marina Carreira 

The first time I ever heard another Portuguese-American poet read poetry, I was already in my late twenties, at the 2018 Dodge Poetry Festival in my hometown of Newark, New Jersey. It was Marina Carreira, whom I would later have the joy of editing No Tender Fences with alongside Kim Sousa. Edwidge Danticat wrote that as children we need “mirrors and windows” in the literature we read. For so long, I had been looking out windows. With Carreira’s poetry, I finally found a mirror: no other poet has sung the music of my childhood, of my coming of age, as the daughter of Portuguese immigrants in our shared and beloved Ironbound. I adored Carreira’s second collection, Tanto Tanto (Cavankerry Press 2022) and her chapbook Desgraçada (Bottlecap Press 2023), both exceptional works to follow this, but I chose this first book because it is where my journey with Carreira’s poetry began and it changed me beyond words as a poet, helping me find my own voice to sing my stories.

‍9. Customs by Solmaz Sharif 

Villareal, Sousa, and Carreira’s debuts act to me as a kind of divine trinity of immigrant coming of age poetry told through voices on the margins of whose stories normally get told. Sharif’s Customs, which I devoured in a single sitting, questions who makes the rules for those margins and extends our understanding of the longings across geographies as an indictment of empire and cruelty. In Customs, Sharif dizzies us with language that breaks against custom, her sharp line breaks and precise vision asking that we not let ourselves become accustomed to systems of power that restrict the movement of some while letting others move freely to harm with impunity. The whole collection is remarkable, but a favorite is “He, Too,” in which Sharif transforms an interaction with a customs agent who “hate[s] poetry” into “a poem / where the argument will be / anti-American.” This argument is one the speaker cannot state in the moment, and thus the poem itself becomes at once protest and witness.

‍10. Cruel Fiction by Wendy Trevino 

“A border, like race, is a cruel fiction.” When choosing the title for my debut collection, A Geography That Does Not Hurt Us (River River Books 2024), Trevino’s words in this line informed what I hoped to convey: that we must create a world that values human lives more than imaginary lines in the sand, lines that are upkept by “violence / Always threatening a new map.” So much of the poetry that I love contends with distances and longing, but the poetry that I love and that makes an unforgettable impact is that which questions and undermines these distances, that speaks against the suffering caused to feed cruel and unjust empires. Trevino’s poetry does just that and in sonnets like this one she, like Sharif, asks us not to become accustomed to cruelty. In fact, that is the work of all these poets whose collections I have strongly recommended: they ask us to create a kinder world. As Girmay first wrote, let us to our “tenderness … add [our] action.”

‍

Submissions to our summer poetry contest close on July 19th. Make sure to submit your poem on submittable before the deadline! Click here to learn more about the contest and prizes.