Book picks similar to
After by Jane Hirshfield
poetry
favorites
tbr-poetry
poems
Mouthful of Forevers
Clementine von Radics - 2015
Titled after the poem that burned up on Tumblr and has inspired wedding vows, paintings, songs, YouTube videos, and even tattoos among its fans, Mouthful of Forevers brings the first substantial collection of this gifted young poet’s work to the public.Clementine von Radics writes of love, loss, and the uncertainties and beauties of life with a ravishing poetic voice and piercing bravura that speak directly not only to the sensibility of her generation, but to anyone who has ever been young.
Our Numbered Days
Neil Hilborn - 2015
To date, it has been watched over 10 million times. Our Numbered Days is Neil’s debut full-length poetry collection, containing 45 of Neil’s poems including “OCD”, “Joey”, “Future Tense”, “Liminality”, “Moving Day”, and many, many never-before-seen poems.
Refusing Heaven
Jack Gilbert - 2005
In Refusing Heaven, Gilbert writes compellingly about the commingled passion, loneliness, and sometimes surprising happiness of a life spent in luminous understanding of his own blessings and shortcomings: “The days and nights wasted . . . Long hot afternoons / watching ants while the cicadas railed / in the Chinese elm about the brevity of life.” Time slows down in these poems, as Gilbert creates an aura of curiosity and wonder at the fact of existence itself. Despite powerful intermittent griefs–over the women he has parted from or the one lost to cancer (an experience he captures with intimate precision)–Gilbert’s choice in this volume is to “refuse heaven.” He prefers this life, with its struggle and alienation and delight, to any paradise. His work is both a rebellious assertion of the call to clarity and a profound affirmation of the world in all its aspects. It braces the reader in its humanity and heart.From the Hardcover edition.
Ghost Of
Diana Khoi Nguyen - 2018
Nguyen’s debut is not an exorcism or un-haunting of that which haunts, but attuned attention, unidirectional reaching across time, space, and distance to reach loved ones, ancestors, and strangers. By working with, in, and around the photographs that her brother left behind (from which he cut himself out before his death), Nguyen wrestles with what remains: remnants of memory, physical voids, and her family captured around an empty space. Through lyric meditation, Nguyen seeks to bridge the realms of the living with the dead, the past with the present. These poems are checkpoints at the border of a mind, with arms outstretched in bold tenderness.
I Know Your Kind: Poems
William Brewer - 2017
In these poems, William Brewer demonstrates an immersive, devastating empathy for both the lost and the bereaved, the enabled and the enabler, the addict who knocks late at night and the brother who closes the door. He shows us the high, at once numbing and transcendent: "this warm moment when I forget which part of me / I blamed." He shows us the overdose, when "the poppies on my arms / bruised red petals." And he shows us the mourner, attending his high school reunion: "I guess we were underdressed: / me in my surf shoes / you in an urn." Underneath and among this multiplicity of voices runs the Appalachian landscape--a location, like the experience of drug addiction itself, of stark contrasts: beauty and ruin, nature and industry, love and despair.Uncanny, heartbreaking, and often surreal, I Know Your Kind is an unforgettable elegy for the people and places that have been lost to opioids.
Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced
Catherine Barnett - 2004
This series of elegies records the transit of grief, observing with an unflinching eye how a singular traumatic event can permanently alter our understanding of time, danger, the material world and family. Marked by clarity and restraint, these lyric poems narrate a suspenseful, wrenching story that explores the depths and limits of empathy.“Living Room Altar”Except for the shirt pulled from the ocean,except for her hands, which keep folding the shirt,except for her body, which once held their bodies,my sister wants everything back now—If there were a god who could out of empty shellscarried by waves to shoremake amends—If the ocean saved in a jarcould keep from turning to salt—She’s hearing things:bird calling to bird,cat outside the door,thorn of the blackberry against the trellis."These heart-breaking poems of an all-too-human life stay as absolute as the determined craft which made them. There is finally neither irony nor simple despair in what they record. Rather, it is the far deeper response of witness, of recognizing what must be acknowledged and of having the courage and the care to say so." —Robert Creeley
Your Soul is a River
Nikita Gill - 2012
Directions: apply to your soul gently, whilst sitting under the stars.
Sixty Poems
Charles Simic - 2008
Here are sixty of Charles Simic's best known poems, collected to celebrate his appointment as the fifteenth Poet Laureate of the United States.
Something Bright, Then Holes
Maggie Nelson - 2003
Something Bright, Then Holes explores the problem of losing then recovering sight and insight -- of feeling lost, then found, then lost again. The book's three sections range widely, and include a long sequence of Niedecker-esque meditations written at the shore of a polluted urban canal, a harrowing long poem written at a friend's hospital bedside, and a series of unsparing, crystalline lyrics honoring the conjoined forces of love and sorrow. Whatever the style, the poems are linked by Nelson's singular poetic voice, as sly and exacting as it is raw. The collection is a testament to Nelson's steadfast commitment to chart the facts of feeling, whatever they are, and at whatever the cost.
Shame Is an Ocean I Swim Across
Mary Lambert - 2018
In verse that deals with sexual assault, mental illness, and body acceptance, Ms. Lambert's Shame Is an Ocean I Swim Across emerges as an important new voice in poetry, providing strength and resilience even in the darkest of times.
The Dogs I Have Kissed
Trista Mateer - 2015
Known for her eponymous blog and her confessional style of writing, this is Trista Mateer's second collection of poetry.
The Collected Poems
Sylvia Plath - 1981
The aim of the present complete edition, which contains a numbered sequence of the 224 poems written after 1956 together with a further 50 poems chosen from her pre-1956 work, is to bring Sylvia Plath's poetry together in one volume, including the various uncollected and unpublished pieces, and to set everything in as true a chronological order as is possible, so that the whole progress and achievement of this unusual poet will become accessible to readers.