Book picks similar to
Splay Anthem by Nathaniel Mackey


poetry
national-book-award
award-winners
1

All Along You Were Blooming: Thoughts for Boundless Living


Morgan Harper Nichols - 2020
    An encounter with grace. A restoration of the heart. A healing of wounds. An anthem of freedom. All Along You Were Blooming is the ultimate love letter from the pen of popular Instagram poet Morgan Harper Nichols to your mind, heart, soul, and body.On Instagram @morganharpernicols, Morgan has over a million followers. Fans can add Morgan's beautiful artwork and thoughts for boundless living to their library.All Along You Were Blooming is a striking collection of illustrated poetry and prose, inviting you to "stumble into the sunlight" and delight in the wild and boundless grace you've been given. Morgan reminds you:There is a purpose in every seasonNo matter how you want to race through this day or run away from this place, you are invited to live fully--right here, right nowLight will always find you, even when the sun sets and you sit awaiting the dawnThat you are always blooming in the way you were meant toAll Along You Were Blooming is perfect:For men and women of all agesFor teachers to share with classrooms during poetry focused lessonsValentine's Day, Mother's Day, National Best Friend Day, birthdays, and holiday giftingIn each small moment, whether in the light or the dark, you can make room for becoming, for breathing, for stumbling, and for simply being--for there is grace, today and every day.

All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake


Tiya Miles - 2021
    Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the bag in spare yet haunting language—including Rose’s wish that “It be filled with my Love always.” Now, in this illuminating, deeply moving new book inspired by Rose’s gift to Ashley, historian Tiya Miles carefully unearths these women’s faint presence in archival records and draws on objects and art, to follow the paths of their lives—and the lives of so many women like them—in a singular and revelatory history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States.All That She Carried is a poignant story of resilience and of love passed down through generations of women against steep odds. It honors the creativity and fierce resourcefulness of people who preserved family ties even when official systems refused to do so.

, said the shotgun to the head.


Saul Williams - 2003
    The greatest Americans Have not been born yet They are waiting quietly For their past to die please give blood Here is the account of a man so ravished by a kiss that it distorts his highest and lowest frequencies of understanding into an Incongruent mean of babble and brilliance...

Discipline


Dawn Lundy Martin - 2011
    The work interrogates the social and linguistic space between regimes of power enacted on the body, and thereby the soul.

The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar


Paul Laurence Dunbar - 1913
    Sixteen of these were found in manuscript form.Paul Laurence Dunbar's work achieved wide recognition in the first part of the twentieth century. The author of six volumes of poetry, as well as novels, librettos, songs, and essays, he was nationally known and accepted by black and white readers alike.As Joanne M. Braxton points out in her substantive introduction to this edition, a reconsideration of Dunbar's work and influence is long overdue: "We reclaim, in Paul Laurence Dunbar, a significant American author whose career transcends race and locality even while he makes use of racialized and regional cultural materials to create an African-American aesthetic and a unique black poetic diction."

Failure


Philip Schultz - 2007
    He evokes other lives, too--family, beaches, dogs, the pleasures of marriage, New York City in the 1970s, "when nobody got up before noon, wore a suit/or joined anything"--and a mind struggling with revolutions both interior and exterior. Failure is a superb new collection from one of America's great poets.One called him a nobody.No, I said, he was a failure.You can't remembera nobody's name, that's whythey're called nobodies.Failures are unforgettable.--from "FAILURE"