THE OCTOPUS MUSEUM: Poems, by Brenda Shaughnessy. (Knopf, $25.) In her capacious fifth collection, Shaughnessy turns largely to prose poems to envision a near future ravaged by climate change, in which humans have wrecked the environment and ceded control of their destiny to “the Octopodes,” a conglomerate of semi-benevolent cephalopods. “If they are often bleak, Shaughnessy’s poems are also very funny,” Elisa Gabbert writes in her review, identifying the book’s central question as what we owe our children and humanity writ large. “Shaughnessy can also write the kind of line that is confusing in its beauty, whose beauty exceeds its sense, which is the thing I go to poetry for — lines that can be read and reread without exhausting their potential meaning.”

THE FARM, by Joanne Ramos. (Random House, $27.) Ramos’s debut novel imagines what might happen were surrogacy taken to its high-capitalist extreme: Clients pay for “hosts” to carry their children, and those hosts move to a facility named Golden Oaks for the duration of their pregnancies. The book follows four women in what amounts to a group portrait of female striving — for survival, for status, for purpose. “‘The Farm’ may be an ‘issue’ book, but it wears the mantle lightly,” our reviewer, Jen McDonald, writes. “Ambiguity may be the point. Ramos’s characters articulate both sides of the surrogacy argument.”

SWIFT: New and Selected Poems, by David Baker. (Norton, $26.95.) Covering nearly 40 years of work, this career retrospective reveals Baker as a peerless poet of the natural world who never stops trying to see things as if for the first time. “Transience and interconnectedness are his big themes,” Eric McHenry writes in his review. “All of Baker’s poems are rich in observation, imagination and memory. … In his best poems, generously represented here, he builds something lovely and durable from that brokenness.”

A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II, by Sonia Purnell. (Viking, $28.) You’ve probably never heard of Virginia Hall, the coolheaded, one-legged operative who infiltrated Vichy France, but her story deserves to be celebrated. Purnell’s excellent biography should help make that happen. “If Virginia Hall herself remains something of an enigma — a testament, perhaps, to the skills that allowed her to live in the shadows for so long — the extraordinary facts of her life are brought onto the page here with a well-judged balance of empathy and fine detail,” Mick Herron writes in his review. “This book is as riveting as any thriller, and as hard to put down.”

GHOSTS OF GOLD MOUNTAIN: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, by Gordon H. Chang. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28.) A work of history and remembrance, bringing to light the arduous and often tragic work of Chinese immigrants on America’s transcontinental railroad. “While the contours of this history may be familiar, the lived experience of the Railroad Chinese has long been elusive, partly because no sources written in their own hand survive,” Andrew Graybill notes in his review. “Chang thus looks elsewhere for information about their daily lives — how they dressed, what they ate, when they rested — making use of photographs and material objects, in addition to newspaper accounts and business records. From this intrepid research, a composite portrait begins to emerge.”