Book picks similar to
The Book of Ruin by Rigoberto González


poetry
latinx-writing
favorites
za-o-lit-caribbean-latin-american-d

Song for His Disappeared Love/Canto a Su Amor Desaparecido


Raúl Zurita - 1985
    It was filled with hundreds of niches, one over the other. There is a country in each one; they're like boys, they're dead." In this landmark poem, written at the height of the Pinochet dictatorship, major Chilean poet Raul Zurita protests with ferocious invention the extinguishment of a generation and the brutalization of a nation. Of the role of poetry and of his own treatment by the military under this regime, Zurita has said, "You see, the only thing that told me that I wasn't crazy, that I wasn't living in a nightmare, was this file of poems, and then when they threw them into the sea, then I understood exactly what was happening." This elegy refuses to be an elegy, refuses to let the Disappeared disappear.

Things I Meant To Say To You When We Were Old


Merrit Malloy - 1977
    Things I Meant to Say to You When We Were Old [Paperback]

Stars of the Night Commute


Ana Bozicevic - 2009
    "STARS OF THE NIGHT COMMUTE haunts in three dimensions, knit by a below-words rumble in the sure rhythm of dreams"—Annie Finch. "Bozicevic's poetry has everything—a mastery of language, a distinct and singular voice and a worldview so visionary and all-encompassing, so as to both terrify and astound"—Noelle Kocot. "How does she do it?"—Eileen Myles. "Absolutely anything can happen next but whatever it is, it will be perfect.... She is able to stretch language to its most ineffable and musical limits while maintaining a masterful grasp of the colloquial.... She is able to perceive with the eyes of language—then render with lyrical immediacy—the experience of our collective sleepwalking soul, who may well soon awaken to discover that its terror was not a dream"—Franz Wright.

Incubation: A Space for Monsters


Bhanu Kapil - 2006
    Cross-Genre. Asian American Studies. In INCUBATION: A SPACE FOR MONSTERS, Bhanu Kapil "explores/creates a shiftful place for she who is neither one thing nor another. Girl as hybrid of light and dark, of human and machine, of baby and mother, of all motherless, body-bound things. Laloo is a traveler, hitchhiking through landscapes American and otherwise. A frightening, transforming, longing book." Rebecca BrownThis work "celebrates the cobbling together of lives-tracing the simplest desires to connect bodies, words, cultures, just as they threaten to become prosthetic, amputations. With a global body and sharp mind, Bhanu Kapil maps the poetic, exhilarating journey between pain and insight. A true landmark." Thalia Field"

Dread


Ai - 2003
    A collection examining America's loss of innocence, the poems in this title range from the horrific flight of a World War II pilot to the World Trade Center attack, from the death of JFK Jr to the poet's own bastard birth.

New Poets of Native Nations


Heid E. ErdrichNatalie Díaz - 2018
    Heid E. Erdrich has selected twenty-one poets whose first books were published after the year 2000 to highlight the exciting works coming up after Joy Harjo and Sherman Alexie. Collected here are poems of great breadth―long narratives, political outcries, experimental works, and traditional lyrics―and the result is an essential anthology of some of the best poets writing now.Poets included are Tacey M. Atsitty, Trevino L. Brings Plenty, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Laura Da’, Natalie Diaz, Jennifer Elise Foerster, Eric Gansworth, Gordon Henry, Jr., Sy Hoahwah, LeAnne Howe, Layli Long Soldier, Janet McAdams, Brandy Nalani McDougall, Margaret Noodin, dg okpik, Craig Santos Perez, Tommy Pico, Cedar Sigo, M. L. Smoker, Gwen Westerman, and Karenne Wood.

Ayiti


Roxane Gay - 2011
    The debut collection from the vibrant voice of Roxane Gay is a unique blend of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, all interwoven to represent the Haitian diaspora experience.

The Best Cigarette


Billy Collins - 1997
    33 poems, over 70 minutes, very high quality recording on cassette or CD.

A Good Cry: What We Learn From Tears and Laughter


Nikki Giovanni - 2017
    She’s been hailed as a firebrand, a radical, a healer, and a sage; a wise and courageous voice who has spoken out on the sensitive issues, including race and gender, that touch our national consciousness.As energetic and relevant as ever, Nikki now offers us an intimate, affecting, and illuminating look at her personal history and the mysteries of her own heart. In A Good Cry, she takes us into her confidence, describing the joy and peril of aging and recalling the violence that permeated her parents’ marriage and her early life. She pays homage to the people who have given her life meaning and joy: her grandparents, who took her in and saved her life; the poets and thinkers who have influenced her; and the students who have surrounded her. Nikki also celebrates her good friend, Maya Angelou, and the many years of friendship, poetry, and kitchen-table laughter they shared before Angelou’s death in 2014.

The Voice of the Poet: Robert Frost


Robert Frost - 1956
    A first in audiobook publishing--a series that uses the written word to enhance the listening experience--poetry to be read as well as heard. Each audiobook includes rare archival recordings and a book with the text of the poetry, a bibliograohy, and commentary by J. D. McClatchy, the poet and critic, who is the editor of The Yale Review. "To hear a poem spoken in the voice of the person who wrote it is not only to witness the rising of words off the page and into the air, but to experience an aural reenactment of exactly what the poet must have heard, if only internally, during the act of composition. THE VOICE OF THE POET recordings deliver these pleasures as they broadcast the pitch and timbre of many of the major voices in twentieth-century poetry."--Billy Collins, U.S,. Poet Lauerate.

Emergency Brake


Ruth Madievsky - 2016
    This is a new voice made of sunlight, knives, emergencies, heat, honesty, bottles of vodka, and a tanker full of talent. Madievsky has created something we should not go without."- Matthew Dickman"Go ahead, try all you want pulling on Ruth Madievsky’s Emergency Brake—but just remember it won’t do you any good. This will be the most exciting and inventive first book you have read in years, and this poet’s take-no-prisoners attitude makes for an ecstatic joyride. These deeply moving poems reflect the raw darkness paring at the edges of our lives, and they reveal how that dark can sometimes move to the very centers of our being. Sexy, irreverent, sorrowful, thrilling—the poems of Emergency Brake become a young woman’s survival manual for the Twenty-First Century: ignore it at your own peril."- David St. John"...a metaphor-maker par excellence"- ZYZZYVA"The social importance of Emergency Brake doesn’t come at the cost of artful finesse; a cleverly engineered speaker who invites distrust through sly direction guides us through the collection’s gallery of sex and Los Angeles sprawl..."- Columbia Journal"Emergency Brake is filled with boxcar after boxcar of metaphors you’ll wish you wrote, but Madievsky got to them first. You’ll want to hate her if it wasn’t for that sugary child jumping up and down behind your ribs, yelling, 'Do it again! Do it again!'”- Harpur Palate

The Gilded Auction Block: Poems


Shane McCrae - 2019
    In the book’s four sections, McCrae alternately responds directly to Donald Trump and contextualizes him historically and personally, exploding the illusions of freedom of both black and white Americans. A moving, incisive, and frightening exploration of both the legacy and the current state of white supremacy in this country, The Gilded Auction Block is a book about the present that reaches into the past and stretches toward the future.

Equilibrium


Tiana Clark - 2016
    The poems negotiate the colossal movement of hearts figuring and being figured by history. This is a voice that knows the intelligence of passion, that moves through and inside the questioning of who we are in the structures of things we give the power to name us until a song sends us out to question the territory. The poet moves with the exactness of math or physics, with the fearful knowledge of careful imbalances that would have us believe in equilibrium, and with the assuredness of art that knows all is change, that the semblance of order is creation, something we are given the gift of imitating in some small way. The poems in this collection summon the largeness, the volume of a voice that disembodies itself in order to search for the love that made it whole.

Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart


Alice Walker - 2018
    From poems of painful self-inquiry, to celebrating the simple beauty of baking frittatas, Walker offers us a window into her magical, at times difficult, and liberating world of activism, love, hope and, above all, gratitude. Whether she’s urging us to preserve an urban paradise or behold the delicate necessity of beauty to the spirit, Walker encourages us to honor the divine that lives inside all of us and brings her legendary free verse to the page once again, demonstrating that she remains a revolutionary poet and an inspiration to generations of fans.

The Book of What Remains


Benjamin Alire Sáenz - 2010
    On that score, Sáenz hits pay dirt.” —Booklist “A former Catholic priest, this poet creates prayerful verse that is at once mystical and utterly human.” —The Washington Post Poet, novelist, and popular YA writer Benjamin Alire Sáenz writes to the core truth of life’s ever-shifting memories. Set along the Mexican border, the contrast between the desert’s austere beauty and the brutality of border politics mirrors humanity’s capacity for both generosity and cruelty. In his numbered series “Meditation on Living in the Desert,” Sáenz turns to memory, heritage, and a host of literary progenitors as he directly confronts matters of faith, civil rights, and contemporary politics—always with the unrelenting moral urge to speak truth and do something. I am looking at a book of photographs.The photographs document the exodus of Mexicans crossing the desert.I am staring at the face of a woman who is more a girl than a woman.She is handing her documents to a government official. I know and you know and we all know that the documents are forged.The official is not in the photograph. Only the frightened eyes of a girl. A former Catholic priest who worked with Mother Teresa, Benjamin Alire Sáenz has published five books of poetry, four novels, a collection of short stories, and two bilingual children’s books. He received the American Book Award and teaches in the bilingual MFA program at University of Texas, El Paso.