Lavender Lullaby Herbal Tea & Anthropocene Lullaby by K. A. Hays
From the publisher:
The poems of Anthropocene Lullaby move from the micro to the macro, from dragonflies to galaxies, from the intersecting forces of climate change, capitalism, and digital technologies to intersecting anxieties of selfhood and motherhood. These lyric and prose poems track change—underway and inevitable, personal and impersonal, generative and apocalyptic.
Our pairing:
This blend of chamomile, lavender, roses, sweet orange peel, and calendula petals is sweet, floral, and soothing—a tea to keep you company through change and transition.
Green Tea Chai & Bestiary by Donika Kelly
From the publisher:
Across this remarkable first book are encounters with animals, legendary beasts, and mythological monsters—half human and half something else. Donika Kelly’s Bestiary is a catalog of creatures—from the whale and ostrich to the pegasus and chimera to the centaur and griffin. Among them too are poems of love, self-discovery, and travel from “Out West” to “Back East.” Lurking in the middle of this powerful and multifaceted collection is a wrenching sequence that wonders just who or what is the real monster inside this life of survival and reflection. Selected and with an introduction by the National Book Award Winner Nikki Finney, Bestiary questions what it is that makes us human, that makes us whole.
Our pairing:
Spicy-sweet and with a touch of citrus, Green Tea Chai blends green tea leaves with lemongrass, cinnamon, coriander, fennel, cumin, and cardamom. A little unexpected, a little innovative, full of unique flavor combinations that mirror the multifaceted nature of Kelly's poems.
Blueberry Pomegranate Herbal Tea & Lo by Melissa Crowe
From the publisher: Lo maps the deprivation and richness of a rural girlhood and offers an intimate portrait of the woman—tender, hungry, hopeful—who manages to emerge. In a series of lyric odes and elegies, Lo explores the notion that we can be partially constituted by lack—poverty, neglect, isolation. The child in the book’s early sections is beloved and lonely, cherished and abused, lucky and imperiled, and by leaning into this complexity the poems render a tentative and shimmering space sometimes occluded, the space occupied by a girl coming to find herself and the world beautiful, even as that world harms her.
Our pairing:
Bright, tart, and fruity, Blueberry Pomegranate blends blueberry, pomegranate, apple, and hibiscus.
Alice's Peppermint Party Herbal Tea & Space Struck by Paige Lewis
From the publisher:
Consider this glowing debut from Paige Lewis a menagerie of near-extinction. Space Struck explores the wonders and cruelties occurring within the realms of nature, science, and religion, with the acuity of a sage, the deftness of a hunter, and a hilarious sensibility for the absurd. The universe is seen as an endless arrow “. . . and it asks only one question: How dare you?”
The poems are physically and psychologically tied to the animal world, replete with ivory-billed woodpeckers, pelicans, and constellations-as-organisms. They are also devastatingly human, anchored in emotion and self-awareness, like art framed in a glass that also holds one’s reflection.
Our pairing:
Alice's Peppermint Party combines peppermint, spearmint, ginger, rose hips, rooibos, and flower petals for a bold, playful blend. Fresh and minty, with floral, fruity, and nutty notes.
Genmaicha Matcha Green Tea & Soft Science by Franny Choi
From the publisher:
Soft Science explores queer, Asian American femininity. A series of Turing Test-inspired poems grounds its exploration of questions not just of identity, but of consciousness—how to be tender and feeling and still survive a violent world filled with artificial intelligence and automation. We are dropped straight into the tangled intersections of technology, violence, erasure, agency, gender, and loneliness.
Our pairing:
Genmaicha Matcha blends several green teas together for a tasty hybrid cup of tea! This tea features Sencha, Bancha, toasted rice kernels, and matcha. Toasty and warming, with sweet alfalfa, nutty, and oceanic notes.
Lemon Mint Menage Black Tea & frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss
From the publisher:
“The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without,” Diane Seuss writes in this brilliant, candid work, her most personal collection to date. These poems tell the story of a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, from Seuss’s working-class childhood in rural Michigan to the dangerous allures of New York City and back again. With sheer virtuosity, Seuss moves nimbly across thought and time, poetry and punk, AIDS and addiction, Christ and motherhood, showing us what we can do, what we can do without, and what we offer to one another when we have nothing left to spare. Like a series of cels on a filmstrip, frank: sonnets captures the magnitude of a life lived honestly, a restless search for some kind of “beauty or relief.” Seuss is at the height of her powers, devastatingly astute, austere, and—in a word—frank.
Our pairing:
Lemon Mint Ménage is a flavorful blend that marries mint and lemongrass. Lively and bright, this tea is a great choice for starting your day or powering through the afternoon. It also makes a wonderful iced tea!
Honeybush Hot Cider Herbal Tea & The Orchard by Brigit Pegeen Kelly
From the publisher:
This stunning collection was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Richly allusive, the poems in Brigit Pegeen Kelly's The Orchard evoke elements of myth in distinctive aural and rhythmic patterns. Her poetic strength lies in her ability to cast poems as modern myths and allegories. Propelled by patterned repetitions and lush cadences, the poems move the reader through a landscape where waking and dream consciousness fuse.
Our pairing:
Think a windfall of late fall apples, woodsmoke in the air, the orchard empty and echoing. Honeybush Hot Cider combines honeybush with apple, cinnamon, orange peel, and licorice root for a sweet, lightly spiced blend reminiscent of mulled cider.
Earl Grey Lavender Black Tea & Judas Goat by Gabrielle Bates
From the publisher:
Gabrielle Bates’s electric debut collection Judas Goat plumbs the depths of intimate relationships. The book’s eponymous animal is used to lead sheep to slaughter while its own life is spared, and its harrowing existence echoes through this spellbinding collection of forty poems, which wrestle with betrayal and forced obedience, violence and young womanhood, and the “forbidden felt language” of sexual and sacred love. These poems conjure encounters with figures from scriptures, domesticated animals eyeing the wild, and mothering as a shapeshifting, spectral force; they question what it means to love another person and how to exorcise childhood fears.
Our pairing:
Crisp, floral, and with a hint of bite, Earl Grey Lavender blends black tea, French lavender blossoms, cornflower petals, and bergamot essential oil.
Lavender Mint Herbal Tea & Pine by Julia Koets
From the publisher:
Pine maps a secret relationship between two women in the South, where certain kinds of desire—queer desire, in particular—have historically been hidden and feared. Creating new landscapes of identity by reimagining form, modifying villanelles, sonnets, elegies, thank-you notes, and dictionary entries, Pine's imagistic and metaphorical associations between the body and the natural world form a queer ecology of longing and loss.
Our pairing:
Lavender Mint blends calming lavender blossoms with cooling peppermint for a fresh, lightly floral cup.
Vanilla Rooibos Herbal Tea & Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco by K. Iver
From the publisher:
In small-town Mississippi, before the aughts, a child “assigned ‘woman’” and a boy “forced to call / himself a girl” love one another—from afar, behind closed doors, in motels. The child survives an injurious mother and the beast-shaped men she brings home; the boy becomes a soldier. Years later, the boy—the eponymous beloved, Missy—dies by suicide, kicking up a riptide of memory. This is where K. Iver writes, at the confluence of love poem and elegy.
“I say to the water if you were here, / you’d be here.” With cinematic precision, they conjure dorm room landlines, the lingering sweetness of shared candy, a ballet strap and “soft / fingers tracing it, afraid to touch / the skin.” They punctuate depictions of familial abuse and the cruel politics of the Deep South with fairy tales: a girl who endures abuse refusing to grow into a mother who inflicts it herself, queer youth kissing fearlessly, bodies transcending the violence of a reductive gender binary. In these fantasies, “there’s no / reason to leave town no hidden / torches waiting for us to fall asleep.”
Buy Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco
Our pairing:
Smooth, rich, and sweet, Vanilla Rooibos blends rooibos tea leaves with warming vanilla.
Raspberry Lemonade Herbal Tea & All the Flowers Kneeling by Paul Tran
From the publisher:
Visceral and astonishing, Paul Tran’s debut poetry collection All the Flowers Kneeling investigates intergenerational trauma, sexual violence, and U.S. imperialism in order to radically alter our understanding of freedom, power, and control. In poems of desire, gender, bodies, legacies, and imagined futures, Tran’s poems elucidate the complex and harrowing processes of reckoning and recovery, enhanced by innovative poetic forms that mirror the nonlinear emotional and psychological experiences of trauma survivors. At once grand and intimate, commanding and deeply vulnerable, All the Flowers Kneeling revels in rediscovering and reconfiguring the self, and ultimately becomes an essential testament to the human capacity for resilience, endurance, and love.
Our pairing:
Raspberry Lemonade blends raspberry, apple, hibiscus, lemon peel, rosehip peels, chamomile, and strawberry leaves for a fruity, tart tea that's delicious hot and excellent iced.
Pomegranate Lemon Black Tea & Persephone in the Late Anthropocene by Megan Grumbling
From the publisher:
This ecopoetic collection interweaves the voices of Persephone, Demeter, and a human chorus with a range of texts, including speculative cryptostudies that shed light on the culture of the “Late Anthropocene.” These voices speak of decadence and blame, green crabs and neonicotinoids, mysteries and effigies. They reckon with extreme weather, industrialized plenty, and their own roles in ecological collapse.
Tonally, the poems of this book range between the sublime and the profane; formally, from lyric verse and modern magical-realist prose poems to New Farmer’s Almanac riddles and pop-anthropology texts. At the heart of this varied and inventive collection is story itself, as Demeter deconstructs “whodunits,” as the chorus grasps that mythmaking is an act of “throwing their voices,” and as their very language mirrors the downward spiral of destruction. Together, the collected pieces of Persephone in the Late Anthropocene form a narrative prism, exploring both environmental crisis and the question of how we tell it.
Buy Persephone in the Late Anthropocene
Our pairing:
Pomegranate Lemon blends black tea leaves with pomegranate and lemon for a tart, bright, slightly astringent tea that shines when iced.
Daily Darjeeling Black Tea & Then the War by Carl Phillips
From the publisher:
Then the War includes a generous selection of Phillips’s work from the previous thirteen years, as well as his recent lyric prose memoir, “Among the Trees,” and his chapbook, Star Map with Action Figures.
Ultimately, Phillips refuses pessimism, arguing for tenderness and human connection as profound forces for revolution and conjuring a spell against indifference and the easy escapes of nostalgia. Then the War is luminous testimony to the power of self-reckoning and to Carl Phillips as an ever-changing, necessary voice in contemporary poetry.
Our pairing:
Daily Darjeeling is fresh and slightly astringent, with a soft mouthfeel, slightly nutty flavor, and floral and muscatel notes.
Peachy Keen White Tea & Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay
From the publisher:
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitudeis a sustained meditation on that which goes away—loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it—that tries to find solace in the processes of the garden and the orchard. That is, this is a book that studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard, those places where all—death, sorrow, loss—is converted into what might, with patience, nourish us.
Buy Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude
Our pairing:
Peachy Keen revels in the joys of late summer bounty, peach season, abundant sweetness. This tea is light and fruity, with notes of citrus and spice.
Tuscan Sun Herbal Tea & Second Empire by Richie Hoffman
From the publisher:
This debut's spare, delicate poems explore ways we experience the afterlife of beauty while ornately examining lust, loss, and identity. Drawing upon traditions of amorous sonnets, these love-elegies desire an artistic and sexual connection to others—other times, other places—in order to understand aesthetic pleasures the speaker craves. Distant and formal, the poems feel both ancient and contemporary.
Our pairing:
Light and floral, reminiscent of a sunny meadow in Tuscany, Tuscan Sun blends apple, linden blossoms, lemon balm, lavender, rose petals, blackberry leaves, orange blossoms, and blue mallow blossoms.
Midnight Rose Black Tea & Our Lady of the Ruins by Traci Brimhall
From the publisher:
Winner of the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize, Our Lady of the Ruins tracks a group of women through their pilgrimage in a mid-apocalyptic world. Exploring war, plagues, and the search for a new God in exile, these poems create a chorus of wanderers haunted by empire, God, and personal trauma.
Our pairing:
Midnight Rose blends black tea leaves with rose petals for an aromatic, flavorful cup with a sweet, floral character.
Winter Forest Green Tea & Arrow by Sumita Chakraborty
From the publisher:
"Chakraborty writes poems that are full of life and joy even when she is thinking through violence and grief, but in their sweep, they defy easy notions of aboutness."
—Elisa Gabbert for The New York Times
Our pairing:
Light and mild, with notes of fruit, spice, and almonds, Winter Forest is a walk in snow-covered woods—something to keep you warm on your journey through the forest.
Peppermint Herbal Tea & Too Bright to See & Alma by Linda Gregg
From the publisher:
Linda Gregg's first two books are, at long last, available again—this time in a single volume. In this book, we witness the awakening of one of the finest American poets of her generation.
“I consider Linda Gregg one of the best American poets, and I value the neatness of design in her poems, as well as the energy of each line.”—Czeslaw Milosz
Our pairing:
Like Gregg's poems, there's a simplicity to our Peppermint herbal tea, a sharpness and brightness and clarity. Minty and cool, this tea will wake you up and set your sense alight.
Caramel Pu-erh Tea & Apocrypha by Catherynne Valente
From the publisher:
Catherynne M. Valente's first full-length poetry collection, where freaks, emperors, bodhisattvas, beasts, witches, wicked stepmothers, Greek heroes, told seductively and wickedly in poem and prose, jostle and vie for supremacy.
Our pairing:
This dark, rich tea combines the sweet decadence of caramel with the earthy depth of flavor of an aged pu-erh.
Solstice Spice Black Tea & Bone Map by Sara Eliza Johnson
From the publisher:
Selected for the National Poetry Series by Martha Collins, Sara Eliza Johnson’s stunning, deeply visceral first collection pulls shards of tenderness from a world on the verge of collapse.
Here violence and terror infuse the body, the landscape, and dreams: a handful of blackberries offered from bloodied arms, bee stings likened to pulses of sunlight, a honeycomb of marrow exposed. “All moments will shine if you cut them open. / Will glisten like entrails in the sun.” With figurative language that makes long, associative leaps, and with metaphors and images that continually resurrect themselves across poems, Bone Map builds and transforms its world through a locomotive echo—a regenerative force—that comes to parallel the psychic quest for redemption that unfolds in its second half. The result is a deeply affecting composition that establishes Sara Eliza Johnson as a vital new voice in American poetry.
Our pairing:
Solstice Spice blends black tea with apple, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, orange slices, and pink pepper—a winter solstice kind of tea.
Matcha Latte & Ceremonial by Carly Joy Miller
From the publisher:
In her debut poetry collection, Carly Joy Miller surprises and enraptures on every page. The visceral poems of Ceremonial figure the body at its most sublime and at its most feral, with equal attention. With an unflinching eye, Miller crafts psalms of petition and praise from the raw material of life.
Our pairing:
Our ceremonial grade matcha is oceanic and grassy, with a hint of natural sweetness.
Kabusecha Green Tea & Last Psalm at Sea Level by Meg Day
From the publisher:
"Lovely does not suffice, nor does lyric. Eloquence is only a grasping in the space of ineffable air. There are few words or phrases that do justice to the soul singing its own revelations. That place is where Last Psalm at Sea Level lives, where it is as solid as gold burning itself into light."
—Afaa Michael Weaver, Contest Judge
“The vivid impermanence of the body is like kindling catching, a source of fire for Meg Day, a poet whose fearless heart is tethered to the world. This is a commanding book and a portent for the vitality of poetry.”
—D.A. Powell
Our pairing:
We once heard this tea described as "for those who long for the sea"—Kabusecha is beguilingly oceanic, with grassy and umami notes and a lingering sweetness.
Chimayo Chai Black Tea & Obscura by Frank Paino
From the publisher:
In his long-anticipated third poetry collection, Frank Paino sheds his singular light on the most obscure corners of history and human nature, assembling a hagiography of unorthodox saints. Paino’s poems teach us to look deeply at the unsettling realities from which we instinctually look away—and they show us the rich rewards of beauty and wisdom we can gain by doing so.
Our pairing:
This tea takes its name from Chimayo, New Mexico, where the Santuario de Chimayo is located. Chimayo Chai blends black tea leaves, chai spices, and a little crushed red chile for a fiery take on chai.
Chocolate Strawberry Herbal Tea & Crush by Richard Siken
From the publisher:
Selected by Nobel Prize laureate and competition judge Louise Glück as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, Richard Siken’s Crush is a powerful collection of poems driven by obsession and love. [...] In her introduction to the book, Glück hails the “cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness” of Siken’s poems. She notes, “Books of this kind dream big. . . . They restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form.”
Our pairing:
Chocolate Strawberry blends cocoa peel, strawberry, apple, rosehips, hibiscus, and orange peel for a fruity, juicy tea with a touch of sweetness.
Milk Oolong & Guillotine by Eduardo Corral
From the publisher:
Guillotine traverses desert landscapes cut through by migrants, the grief of loss, betrayal’s lingering scars, the border itself—great distances in which violence and yearning find roots. Through the voices of undocumented immigrants, border patrol agents, and scorned lovers, award-winning poet Eduardo C. Corral writes dramatic portraits of contradiction, survival, and a deeply human, relentless interiority. With extraordinary lyric imagination, these poems wonder about being unwanted or renounced. What do we do with unrequited love? Is it with or without it that we would waste away?
In the sequence “Testaments Scratched into a Water Station Barrel,” with Corral’s seamless integration of Spanish and English, poems curve around the surfaces upon which they are written, overlapping like graffiti left by those who may or may not have survived crossing the border.
Our pairing:
These hand-rolled leaves are a rich olive-green color and brew up into a beautiful golden liquor. Milk Oolong is soft and buttery, with a creamy mouthfeel, floral and vegetal notes, and a lightly acidic finish.
Butterfly Blue Pea Flower Herbal Tea & Bluest Nude by Ama Codjoe
From the publisher:
Ama Codjoe’s highly anticipated debut collection brings generous light to the inner dialogues of women as they bathe, create art, make and lose love. Each poem rises with the urgency of a fully awakened sensual life.
Codjoe’s poems explore how the archetype of the artist complicates the typical expectations of women: be gazed upon, be silent, be selfless, reproduce. Dialoguing with and through art, Bluest Nude considers alternative ways of holding and constructing the self. From Lorna Simpson to Gwendolyn Brooks to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, contemporary and ancestral artists populate Bluest Nude in a choreography of Codjoe’s making. Precise and halting, this finely wrought, riveting collection is marked by an acute rendering of highly charged emotional spaces.
Our pairing:
Also known as anchan, Butterfly Blue Pea Flower is light and floral. It brews up an intensely blue color, shading almost into indigo. If you add a little lemon juice, this tea will turn purple.
Peach Rooibos Herbal Tea & Auto Mechanic's Daughter by Karen Harryman
From the publisher:
Charting the vicissitudes of her own life, and the travails and triumphs of the lives of those whom she knows and loves, Harryman's poems travel great distances, both internally and geographically, from the Kentucky of her youth to the California of her present moment (with a detour in Europe). In this movement we encounter moments of wisdom and insight, the small epiphanies derived from love and loss, grief and celebration, dreams and nightmares, curses and blessings . . . from gratitude and despair. Auto Mechanic's Daughter is a lyrical journey into life's private places and the small joys encountered there.
Our pairing:
Peach Rooibos blends green rooibos and red rooibos with peach bits, blackberry leaves, and calendula petals for a juicy, fruity tea that's full of late-summer flavor. An excellent iced tea!
Vanilla Velvet Black Tea & Evelyn As by Christine Butterworth-McDermott
From the publisher:
Christine Butterworth-McDermott’s Evelyn As is a vivid, poetic account of the early life and career of late 19th and early 20th Century chorus girl, artists’ model, and actress Evelyn Nesbit. These dynamic, fraught, and textural poems provide a stunning and heartbreaking portrait of a life of stardom, violence, scandal, and survival, weaving together everything from the Persephone myth and Little Red Riding Hood to Rapunzel and Snow White—not to mention also gaze theory, the sometimes (wildly complicated) transformative power of art, and the roles we all play both willingly and un-. At its heart, Evelyn As is a compelling, gripping, and tragic blockbuster of a book, simultaneously cinematic, awe inspiring, and crushing.
Our pairing:
Rich vanilla and a hint of floral jasmine give Vanilla Velvet its depth of character. Full bodied and with a natural sweetness, Vanilla Velvet is delicious on its own or with a splash of milk, and also makes an excellent iced tea.
Ginger Peach Black Tea & Bright Dead Things by Ada Limon
From the publisher:
Ada Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a “huge beating genius machine” striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. “I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,” the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O’Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón’s work is consistently generous, accessible, and “effortlessly lyrical” (New York Times)—though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.
Our pairing:
Peach and ginger are a winning combination in this fruit-forward, slightly spicy blend.
Gyokuro Green Tea & The Body Problem by Margaret Wack
From the publisher:
The voice in Margaret Wack's remarkable debut chapbook is drenched in myth but also with the knowledge that all myths must fade in time, like every body, like every culture—like humanity itself. A vatic magnetism pulls the reader in as these poems reckon with impermanence and the impending end of the Anthropocene, but also unapologetically revel in the numinous viscerality of each present moment, insisting on making new songs to the end.
Our pairing:
Shade-grown blue-green tea leaves brew up into an emerald tea with a rich, oceanic flavor and a subtle sweetness. The Body Problem was written by ArtfulTea's own Maggie Wack!