4 New Collections of Work by and About Bold, Free-Spirited Poets

Slim though it is, Nikki Giovanni's 27th book, A Good Cry (William Morrow), packs truth into every passage. Some of her poems feel like intimate secrets, others like family lore. Mining her childhood in a suburb of Cincinnati, she investigates suffering and the ways we learn to cope. But she reserves a special reverence for friendship, like the close one she had with Maya Angelou—"Doc," as she called her, who died in 2014: "A hearty laugh will / No longer be / Heard."