Founded in 1955, with nearly 300 books in print, City Lights publishes cutting-edge fiction, poetry, memoirs, literary translations and books on vital social and political issues.

It's April, and we're celebrating National Poetry Month! Below you'll find a selection of some our favorite City Lights poetry titles. Poetry has been integral to our mission since City Lights's founding. And be sure to check out the books we'll be publishing soon!

Imprints & series include:

Pocket Poets Series Open Media Series City Lights/Sister Spit Spotlight Series

Featured Titles from City Lights Publishers

City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology
60th Anniversary Edition

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

A comprehensive selection from Ferlinghetti's famed City Lights Pocket Poets Series, published on the 60th anniversary of its founding.

Pictures of the Gone World
Pocket Poets Number 1

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Published to celebrate forty years of City Lights publishing, which began with the letterpress printing of this book in 1955. It was Lawrence Ferlinghetti's first book, and it has been reprinted twenty-one times, having never been out of print. The...

Lunch Poems: Pocket Poets Series Number 19
50th Anniversary Edition

Frank O'Hara

Exquisite 50th anniversary hardcover gift edition of the groundbreaking poetry collection by the leader of the "New York School" of poetry.

Fast Speaking Woman: Chants and Essays
Pocket Poets Number 33

Anne Waldman

This expanded edition of Anne Waldman's poems and essays adds 20 poems and three essays to the original. Published in City Lights' Pocket Poets series, the collection is the perfect size to carry in a pocket or purse. The poems, however, are...

Blood on the Fog
Pocket Poets Series No. 62

Tongo Eisen-Martin

Radical, outraged, knowing, wry, and deeply humane, poems of survival that soar with a vision of collective liberation.

Heaven Is All Goodbyes
Pocket Poets Series No. 61

Tongo Eisen-Martin

"This is resistance as sound."—Claudia Rankine

The Essential Neruda
Selected Poems

Pablo Neruda

This collection of Neruda's most essential poems will prove indispensable. Selected by a team of poets and prominent Neruda scholars in both Chile and the U.S., this is a definitive selection that draws from the entire breadth and width of Neruda's...

The Poetry Deal
San Francisco Poet Laureate Series No. 5

Diane di Prima

Rest in Peace. Diane di Prima (1934 - 2020)

Pieces of a Song
Selected Poems

Diane di Prima

"Diane di Prima, revolutionary activist of the 1960s Beat literary renaissance, heroic in life and poetics: a learned humorous bohemian, classically educated and twentieth-century radical, her writing, informed by Buddhist equanimity, is exemplary in...

Invocation to Daughters
City Lights Spotlight Series No. 16

Barbara Jane Reyes

Volume 16 in the City Lights Spotlight Series: Feminist experimental poetry in the tradition of Audre Lorde and Theresa Kyung Cha from a prominent Filipina American poet.

Little Hill

Alli Warren

Despite the dystopian now, Alli Warren finds promise in the smallest human instances of tenderness, ecological connection, and political solidarity. Little Hill is about learning to live and love in the 21st century while not shying away from all there is to struggle against.

Mule Kick Blues
And Last Poems

Michael McClure, Garrett Caples

The final book of poems from a Beat Generation legend, Mule Kick Blues finds McClure restlessly innovating until the end.