Four new poetry collections by local poets.

This April will mark the 25th anniversary of National Poetry Month. Founded by the American Academy of Poets in 1996, the month is meant to “(remind) the public that poets have an integral role to play in our culture and that poetry matters.”

For many poets, April is when they are most visible, giving readings and speaking on panels and in classrooms, which makes the month a way for the public to reciprocally remind the writers how much their work means — that what they do is worth paying for and worth reading; it’s worth all the heartwrenching hours they’ve spent producing it.

In celebration, here are four exciting new books from Bay Area poets past and present.

‘Now We’re Getting Somewhere’

By Kim Addonizio (W.W. Norton & Co.; 96 pages; $26.95)

This collection’s lyric poems are a particular kind of inyourface fun. The speaker weaves through love and loss, dating and politics while subtly riffing on the classics and winking from a barstool across the room (“Chardonnay is your emotional support animal”). It’s tough but inviting, carnal in a Patricia Lockwood way, and staunch in a stance that might raise some eyebrows. If there is an axis to “Now We’re Getting Somewhere,” it has to be “To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall”:

“If you ever woke in your dress at 4 a.m. ever closed your legs to someone you loved opened them for someone you didn’t moved against a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach”

The poem was made internet famous after it was read to a woman who was actually crying in a bathroom stall in 2019, and the tweeted record of the encounter went viral. The poem concludes: “listen I love you joy is coming” (ending, fittingly, without punctuation).

Addonizio lives in Oakland, and she’s the author of many poetry collections and multiple books on craft, fiction as well as nonfiction. She’s a decorated poet and widely adored. As Lucinda Williams puts it, “I don’t just hear the blues in these poems. I see the blues in these poems. I see myself in these poems.”

‘Ross Sings Cheree & the Animated Dark’

By Ross J. Farrar (Deep Vellum; 120 pages; $16) Farrar’s collection begins with an epigraph by Alan Vega, half of the protopunk band Suicide: “Cheree, cheree. Shut the door baby.” The quote, from the song “Cheree,” along with a statement in the indicia that says this is a “work of fiction,” are instructions for the reader: You’re about to embark on a realname poetry journey, and there will be music.

From “1989”:

“I’d walk home early in March, red welts from weather that sang, Cheree, cheree.” There’s a comforting circularity throughout that adds to Farrar’s tonal calm, making the collection feel like one long contemplative amble through Oakland, Los Angeles and Marin; a brief stop at Costco and an adult bookstore in San Francisco; to New York City, Paris and Chicago. We contemplate time, money, religion, music, past partners and death alongside a rotating cast of Rosses, Jameses (James Dean; James the turtle), Jimmys, Johns, Cherees (“hips gyrating & like a plea there came Cheree”) and Pauls. All the while, our speaker “I” is followed by a “Rotten Sun” and the “Planet Moon,” and in the poem “Druggie” invokes Dante on another kind of contemplative walk guided by a poet:

“I was reading The Inferno & thought how nice it’d be to be remembered as Ross, like Dante — yes. We’re a suffering bunch.”

Farrar is a singer and songwriter (Ceremony, Spice, Crisis Man). “Ross Sings Cheree & the Animated Dark” is his debut collection — a nostalgic, sometimes sad but generously funny read, and sweet.

‘If God Is a Virus’

By Seema Yasmin (Haymarket Books; 80 pages; $15.99)

Imagine writing a book about a virus in 2019, then editing it in 2020 as the world endures a pandemic. An entirely new audience is paying attention to the complicated story of vaccine development, and a huge number of people are acutely aware of the impact of epidemics and medical racism.

“If God Is a Virus” is that book, a mixedgenre work of poetry focused on the Ebola virus written by Dr. Seema Yasmin. “I wrote it thinking ‘no one wants to read poems about viruses and epidemics,’” she tweeted on May 15. “I’m editing it now thinking ‘no one wants to read poems about viruses and epidemics.’”

From one of several poems titled “If God Is a Virus”:

“She is a Muslim woman in charge of the remote control & human evolution. Eight percent of your genome is viral — we are literal cousins of ancient pathogens”

Yasmin is a medical doctor and the director of

the Stanford Health Communication Initiative. As a health and science journalist, she has covered Ebola, Zika, COVID19, and also racism, gun violence and gender violence.

From “Surrogate Marker”:

“But girls like me have been knowing the correct terminology since our first salaries were paid in lollipops, playing medical translator”

“If God Is a Virus” is a tremendous document that weaves reporting, graphics (outbreak bingo; a misdiagnosis chart; a chart of “biologically implausible” beliefs) and history (“Aspirin was tested in Nazi concentration camps”) with the raw reverberations of witnessing medical crises, and a life lived as a brown woman, a doctor and a poet.

From “Disease”:

“In her medicine ‘typical presentation’ means White patient. Everything atypical is me.”

‘Who’s Your Daddy’

By Arisa White (Augury Books; 138 pages; $16.95)

Arisa White’s poetic memoir begins, “This is a grandfather feeling: Hear these walls convert into a perpetual bloom of cherry blossoms.”

It’s an arresting statement, a gorgeous image of growth and regeneration bundled into a complex phrase full of history, family and its mysteries (“if these walls could speak, they wouldn’t”). “Who’s Your Daddy” is White’s life told in parallel to the presence of a father’s absence.

“Father isn’t a place from which I can run.” The story starts with her mother’s father — “She never heard his ‘I love you’” — and then White’s, a “married man” whom her mother met at 19. And here enters White: “born into a bracket of boys. Five years before and five years after.”

White’s narratives, which unfold chronologically if not linearly, move from New York to Florida to California to Guyana, charting a course through lovers, abuses, successes, sexualities and student debt, and revolving around a central cast of characters: mother (Denise), stepfather (Bing), father (Gerald) and partner (Mondayway), spliced by section breaks and Guyanese proverbs (“A boat which has gone/ to the waterfall cannot return”).

White is a poet, professor and Cave Canem fellow currently residing in central Maine. She is originally from New York, and was a longtime Bay Area resident. “Who’s Your Daddy” is her fifth book — it’s a tense and moving portrait of what constitutes personhood, and what a person makes from what she’s been given: “The father and mother of my poems are two pearls I nacre at any point in time.”