Bone


Yrsa Daley-Ward - 2014
     Bone. Visceral. Close to. Stark. The poems in Yrsa Daley-Ward's collection bone are exactly that: reflections on a particular life honed to their essence--so clear and pared-down, they become universal. From navigating the oft competing worlds of religion and desire, to balancing society's expectations with the raw experience of being a woman in the world; from detailing the experiences of growing up as a first generation black British woman, to working through situations of dependence and abuse; from finding solace in the echoing caverns of depression and loss, to exploring the vulnerability and redemption in falling in love, each of the raw and immediate poems in Daley-Ward's bone resonate to the core of what it means to be human. "You will come away bruised. You will come away bruisedbut this will give you poetry."

What Kind of Woman


Kate Baer - 2020
    In her poem “Deliverance” about her daughter’s birth she writes “What is the word for when the light leaves the body?/What is the word for when it/at last, returns?”Through poems that are as unforgettably beautiful as they are accessible, Kate proves herself to truly be an exemplary voice in modern poetry. As easy to post on Instagram as they are to print out and frame, Kate’s words make women feel seen in their own bodies, in their own marriages, and in their own lives. Her poems are those you share with your mother, your daughter, your sister, and your friends.

Night Sky with Exit Wounds


Ocean Vuong - 2016
    None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence and unrepentant enthrallment, that a gentle palm on a chest can calm the fiercest hungers.

Take Me with You


Andrea Gibson - 2018
    Take Me With You, illustrated throughout with evocative line drawings by Sarah J. Coleman, is small enough to fit in your bag, with messages that are big enough to wake even the sleepiest heart. Divided into three sections (love, the world, and becoming) of one liners, couplets, greatest hits phrases, and longer form poems, it has something for everyone, and will be placed in stockings, lockers, and the hands of anyone who could use its wisdom.

Racing Hummingbirds


Jeanann Verlee - 2010
    Jeanann Verlee's award-winning debut collection is a series of narratives, prayers, and conjurings which address gender, sex, race, poverty, heartbreak, and survival with such stark intimacy, you will find yourself living inside. These poems cannot possibly be about you, yet they are. They cross boundaries and reclaim hope. They are as the opening poem suggests, nothing short of communion.

Oceanic


Aimee Nezhukumatathil - 2018
    Oceanic is both a title and an ethos of radical inclusion, inviting in the grief of an elephant, the icy eyes of a scallop, “the ribs / of a silver silo,” and the bright flash of painted fingernails. With unmatched sincerity, Oceanic speaks to each reader as a cooperative part of the natural world—the extraordinary neighborhood to which we all belong. This is a poet ecstatically, emphatically, naming what it means to love a world in peril.

Sour Honey & Soul Food


Billy Chapata - 2017
    Sometimes life is spiced up through natural events, sometimes life feels bland and tasteless. Sour Honey and Soul Food, is a book which explores the beauty and intricacies of love, life and connections, through poetry. Billy Chapata's third book looks to touch on the variety of flavors we taste, on this beautiful journey we call life.

Love Poems


Pablo Neruda - 1952
    Mostly written on the island paradise of Capri (the idyllic setting of the Oscar-winning movie Il Postino), Love Poems embraces the seascapes surrounding the poet, and his love Matilde Urrutia, their waves and shores saturated with a new, yearning eroticism.And when you appearall the rivers soundin my body, bellsshake the sky,and a hymn fills the world.        © 1973 by Neruda & Walsh

Every Word You Cannot Say


Iain S. Thomas - 2019
    May they find every word they were looking for.***I know you don’t want to talk sometimes. Sometimes because it hurts and sometimes because you’re just not supposed to talk about what you want to talk about. Sometimes it can be hard to say, “this is beautiful,” when no one else can see what you see. Or, “Here, this is where the pain is.” But some part of you knows, the truth about the words you cannot say is that they only hurt until you say them. They only hurt until the person who needs to hear them, hears them.  Because we are human, and the closest we’ve ever come to showing each other who we really are, and how we love, is with words.So I’m going to try to say to you here, what I wish you’d say to me too. Please.Listen. We can change things. Here.

Planisphere: New Poems


John Ashbery - 2009
    Planisphere is a new collection by one of America’s most innovative and influential poets—an exceptional artist whose work stands alongside the finest of Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, and Hart Crane. For more than half a century Ashbery has been producing timeless works such as Chinese Whispers, Hotel Lautréamont, A Wave, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and Where Shall I Wander. Planisphere is proof that the master only improves with age.

The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson


Emily Dickinson - 1924
    The longest poem covers less than two pages. Yet in theme and tone her writing reaches for the sublime as it charts the landscape of the human soul. A true innovator, Dickinson experimented freely with conventional rhythm and meter, and often used dashes, off rhymes, and unusual metaphors—techniques that strongly influenced modern poetry. Dickinson’s idiosyncratic style, along with her deep resonance of thought and her observations about life and death, love and nature, and solitude and society, have firmly established her as one of America’s true poetic geniuses.

Why God is a Woman


Nin Andrews - 2015
    It is also the story of a boy who, exiled from the island because he could not abide by its sexist laws, looks back with both nostalgia and bitterness and wonders: Why does God have to be a woman? Celebrated prose poet Nin Andrews creates a world both fantastic and familiar where all the myths, logic, and institutions support the dominance of women.Nin Andrews's books include The Book of Orgasms and Sleeping with Houdini.

excerpts from the book i'll never write


Nadia Nell Starbinski - 2017
    Divided into four sections: love, loss, acceptance, and growth- the content serves the purpose of making you feel and finding the light at the end of the tunnel.

Life on Mars


Tracy K. Smith - 2011
    What Would your life say if it could talk?                                                            —from “No Fly Zone”With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. In these new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like “love” and “illness” now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope.

Useless Magic


Florence Welch - 2018
    Or a prediction comes true and I couldn't do anything to stop it, so it seems like a kind of useless magic."