National Poetry Month

The Poetry of Black America edited by Arnold Adoff; introduction by Gwendolyn Brooks

Call Number: PS591.N4 A32

ISBN: 0060200901

Publication Date: 1973-04-01

In 600 poems by 145 authors, this book gives a cross-section of black American poetry writing in the twentieth century.

Collected Black Women's Poetry edited by Joan R. Sherman

Call Number: PS591.N4 C57 1988 v.1-4

ISBN: 0195052536

Publication Date: 1988-04-14

These four volumes collect the poetic works of eleven African-American women writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Volume 1 presents two collections by Mary E. Tucker Lambert--Loew's Bridge, A Broadway Idyl, a poet's-eye view of lower Manhattan just after the Civil War, and Poems--and Infelicia, a dramatic work by the notorious Adah Isaacs Menken. Volumes 2, 3, and 4 contain works by nine other poets, all of which were were published between 1895 and 1910, a particularly brutal era for blacks. But, surprisingly, only one of these women (Lizelia Moorer) protests the treatment of her race during this period of social upheaval and injustice. The remaining poets all conformed to the ethos of most black writers of the time, "whitewashing" their art while educating and uplifting their people. Their themes are traditional--love, nature, death, Christian idealism and morality, and family--and are for the most part couched in conventional forms and language. As interesting for the subjects that they address as for those that they ignore, these selections offer antique sampling of poetic voices that, until now, have gone largely unheard.

Black Unicorn Poems by Audre Lorde

Call Number: PS3562.O75 B55 1978

ISBN: 0393312372

Publication Date: 1995-08-17

Rich continues: "Refusing to be circumscribed by any simple identity, Audre Lorde writes as a Black woman, a mother, a daughter, a Lesbian, a feminist, a visionary; poems of elemental wildness and healing, nightmare and lucidity. Her rhythms and accents have the timelessness of a poetry which extends beyond white Western politics, beyond the anger and wisdom of Black America, beyond the North American earth, to Abomey and the Dahomeyan Amazons. These are poems nourished in an oral tradition, which also blaze and pulse on the page, beneath the reader's eye."

Black Iris by Jean Joubert; Denise Levertov (Translator)

Call Number: PQ2670.O9 A6 1988

ISBN: 1556590156

Publication Date: 1988-11-01

In Levertov's hands, Joubert's poems take on an English language musicality which corresponds to that of the original French. Bilingual edition.

Radical Poetry by Eduardo Ledesma

Call Number: PQ7082.P7 L446 2016

ISBN: 9781438462011

Publication Date: 2016-11-15

Engages in a critical reanalysis of historical Ibero-American experimental poetry in order to demonstrate how the contemporary digital vanguard owes much to this tradition.

Irish Poetry edited by W. J. McCormack

Call Number: PR8851 .F47 2000

ISBN: 081475628X

Publication Date: 2000-03-01

Debates about Irish culture have long been plagued by neat oppositions between conquering England and colonized Erin, Protestant and Catholic, stolid Saxon and dreamy Celt. Yet the greatest Irish poets have scorned such simplicities. In this avowedly interpretative anthology of Irish verse, W.J. McCormack traces creativity of contradiction through several centuries, finding poets productively at odds with their forebears, their contemporaries--even with themselves. From Yeats's tragic laughter to the quieter ironies of Seamus Heaney, from the rambunctious narratives of Merriman and Joyce to the pathos of Wilde's Reading Gaol, the same sparring spirit is found. This exciting anthology brings together the very best in Irish poetry to reveal a broad yet sharply-focused tradition of diversity and dissidence. W.J. McCormack's compelling collection provokes a wide-ranging reconsideration of one of the world's richest literatures.

Coleridge's Poetry and Prose by Samuel Coleridge; Nicholas Halmi; Paul Magnuson; Raimonda Modiano

Call Number: PR4472 .H35 2002

ISBN: 0393979040

Publication Date: 2003-07-18

His writings are wide-ranging in form and content, and vast in number. Norton's long-awaited edition is the most comprehensive and user-friendly student edition available. Supporting apparatus includes detailed headnotes, footnotes (both Coleridge's and the editors'), biographical register, glossary, and an index of poems and first lines. "Criticism" includes twenty assessments of Coleridge's poetry and prose by British and American authors. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

Reading Biblical Poetry by J. P. Fokkelman

Call Number: BS1405.2 .F655 2001

ISBN: 0664224393

Publication Date: 2001-10-01

A companion to Reading Biblical Narrative, this volume provides an authoritative introduction and overview to biblical poetry. Fokkelman describes in step-by-step fashion how the poets produced their poetry. Full of examples, Reading Biblical Poetry makes available a holistic and integrative approach to understanding poetry found nowhere else.

Jazz Day by Roxane Orgill; Francis Vallejo (Illustrator)

Call Number: Juv 781.65 .O689 2016

ISBN: 9780763669546

Publication Date: 2016-03-08

What happens when you invite as many jazz musicians as you can to pose for a photo in 1950s Harlem? Playful verse and glorious artwork capture an iconic moment for American jazz. When Esquire magazine planned an issue to salute the American jazz scene in 1958, graphic designer Art Kane pitched a crazy idea: how about gathering a group of beloved jazz musicians and photographing them? He didn't own a good camera, didn't know if any musicians would show up, and insisted on setting up the shoot in front of a Harlem brownstone. Could he pull it off? In a captivating collection of poems, Roxane Orgill steps into the frame of Harlem 1958, bringing to life the musicians' mischief and quirks, their memorable style, and the vivacious atmosphere of a Harlem block full of kids on a hot summer's day. Francis Vallejo's vibrant, detailed, and wonderfully expressive paintings do loving justice to the larger-than-life quality of jazz musicians of the era. Includes bios of several of the fifty-seven musicians, an author's note, sources, a bibliography, and a foldout of Art Kane's famous photograph.

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes

Call Number: PS3558.A873 A44 2018

ISBN: 9780143133186

Publication Date: 2018-06-19

In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country's past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered - the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning.

Unaccompanied by Javier Zamora

Call Number: PS3626.A62786 A6 2017

ISBN: 9781556595110

Publication Date: 2017-09-05

Javier Zamora was nine years old when he traveled unaccompanied 4,000 miles, across multiple borders, from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents. This dramatic and hope-filled poetry debut humanizes the highly charged and polarizing rhetoric of border-crossing; assesses borderland politics, race, and immigration on a profoundly personal level; and simultaneously remembers and imagines a birth country that's been left behind. Through an unflinching gaze, plainspoken diction, and a combination of Spanish and English, Unaccompanied crosses rugged terrain where families are lost and reunited, coyotes lead migrants astray, and "the thin white man let us drink from a hose / while pointing his shotgun." 

Not Here by Hieu Minh Nguyen

Call Number: PS3614.G87 A6 2018

ISBN: 9781566895095

Publication Date: 2018-04-10

Not Here is a flight plan for escape and a map for navigating home; a queer Vietnamese American body in confrontation with whiteness, trauma, family, and nostalgia; and a big beating heart of a book. Nguyen's poems ache with loneliness and desire and the giddy terrors of allowing yourself to hope for love, and revel in moments of connection achieved.

The Undefeated by Kwame Alexander; Kadir Nelson (Illustrator)

Call Number: Juv 811.6 .A374u 2019

ISBN: 9781328780966

Publication Date: 2019-04-02

The Newbery Award-winning author of THE CROSSOVER pens an ode to black American triumph and tribulation, with art from a two-time Caldecott Honoree. Originally performed for ESPN's The Undefeated, this poem is a love letter to black life in the United States. It highlights the unspeakable trauma of slavery, the faith and fire of the civil rights movement, and the grit, passion, and perseverance of some of the world's greatest heroes. The text is also peppered with references to the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others, offering deeper insights into the accomplishments of the past, while bringing stark attention to the endurance and spirit of those surviving and thriving in the present. Robust back matter at the end provides valuable historical context and additional detail for those wishing to learn more.  

When I Grow up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities by Chen Chen; Jericho Brown (Foreword)

Call Number: PS3603.H4471 A6 2017

ISBN: 9781942683339

Publication Date: 2017-04-11

In this ferocious and tender debut, Chen Chen investigates inherited forms of love and family--the strained relationship between a mother and son, the cost of necessary goodbyes--all from Asian American, immigrant, and queer perspectives. Holding all accountable, this collection fully embraces the loss, grief, and abundant joy that come with charting one's own path in identity, life, and love. In the Hospital My mother was in the hospital & everyone wanted to be my friend. But I was busy making a list: good dog, bad citizen, short skeleton, tall mocha. Typical Tuesday. My mother was in the hospital & no one wanted to be her friend. Everyone wanted to be soft cooing sympathies. Very reasonable pigeons. No one had the time & our solution to it was to buy shinier watches. We were enamored with what our wrists could declare. My mother was in the hospital & I didn't want to be her friend. Typical son. Tall latte, short tale, bad plot, great wifi in the atypical café. My mother was in the hospital & she didn't want to be her friend. She wanted to be the family grocery list. Low-fat yogurt, firm tofu. She didn't trust my father to be it. You always forget something, she said, even when I do the list for you. Even then. 

Whereas

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. "I am," she writes, "a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation--and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live." This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.

Good Bones

Good Bones, which has made a difference to so many people around the globe--called "Official Poem of 2016" by Public Radio International. Maggie Smith writes out of the experience of motherhood, inspired by watching her own children read the world like a book they've just opened, knowing nothing of the characters or plot. These poems stare down darkness while cultivating and sustaining possibility and addressing a larger world.

A Little Book on Form

From the former U.S. Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winner, an illuminating dissection of poetic form, traditional and modern, for students, enthusiasts, and newcomers alike In addition to his magisterial poetry, Robert Hass is beloved for his incisive, meditative criticism. A Little Book on Form takes up the central contradiction between poetry as genre and the poetics of the imagination. A wealth of vocabulary exists with which to talk about, map, and explain poetry in rigorous formal terms. But the more intuitive, creative aspects of a poet's work and processes are more elusive: if the most interesting parts of form are those expressive, essential gestures inside it, how can we come to a better understanding of form as passion, as art? A Little Book on Form brilliantly synthesizes Hass's formidable gifts as both a poet and a critic. In suggestive, informal "notes," Hass breaks the idea of a poem down to its barest building blocks, from the one line haiku to the villanelle and sonnet. His approach singularly employs postmodern perspectives on shape, thought, feeling, content, and movement, calling on Catullus and Allen Ginsberg, Issa and Czeslaw Milosz. Begun as a project for students of poetry, A Little Book is anything but--Hass investigates the ancient roots of the poetic impulse, taking a wide-ranging look at the most intense experience of human thought and feeling in language. 

Poems by Emily Dickinson; edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson

ISBN: 9781775415909

Publication Date: 2009-06-01

Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886) was an eccentric, reclusive poet, though born to a family of good standing within their Massachusetts community. She had fewer than a dozen poems published in her lifetime, though posthumously her sister found a cache of nearly eighteen hundred, all of which have now been published. Emily's style was broke with the common forms of poetry at the time, and foreshadowed what was to come. Her work was harshly criticized when first published, but she is now considered one of the American greats.

Poetry and Geography edited by Neal Alexander and David Cooper

ISBN: 9781846318641

Publication Date: 2013-05-22

Poetry & Geography examines the rich diversity of geographical imaginations informing post-war and contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland. Drawing impetus from the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences, the fourteen essays collected here appraise the significance of ideas of space, place, and landscape for 'mainstream' and 'experimental' poets, post-romantics and neo-modernists alike. Cumulatively, the book's varied articulations of poetry and geography sketch out a series of intersections between language and location, form and environment, sound and space. Poetry's unique capacity to invigorate and expand our vocabularies of site and situation, of our manifold relations with the world outside us, is described and explored. Bringing together fresh, interdisciplinary readings of poets as diverse as Roy Fisher and R.S. Thomas, John Burnside and Thomas Kinsella, Jo Shapcott and Peter Riley, Alice Oswald and Ciaran Carson, Poetry & Geography sketches a topographical map of shared poetic terrains.

Poetry for Beginners by Gabeba Baderoon

ISBN: 9789882370241

Publication Date: 2018-03-13

This pocket-sized paperback is one of the twenty-four titles published for 2017 Hong Kong International Poetry Nights. The theme of IPHHK2017 is "Ancient Enmity". IPNHK is one of the most influential international poetry events in Asia. From 22-26 November 2017, over 20 invited poets from various countries will be in Hong Kong to read their works based on the theme "Ancient Enmity." Included in the anthology and box set, these unique works are presented with Chinese and English translations in bilingual or trilingual formats.

Tamil Love Poetry edited by Martha Selby

ISBN: 0231521588

Publication Date: 2011-06-07

Dating from the early decades of the third century C.E., the Ainkurunuru is believed to be the world's earliest anthology of classical Tamil love poetry. Commissioned by a Cera-dynasty king and composed by five masterful poets, the anthology illustrates the five landscapes of reciprocal love: jealous quarreling, anxious waiting and lamentation, clandestine love before marriage, elopement and love in separation, and patient waiting after marriage. Despite its centrality to literary and intellectual traditions, the Ainkurunuru remains relatively unknown beyond specialists. Martha Ann Selby, well-known translator of classical Indian poetry and literature, takes the bold step of opening this anthology to all readers, presenting crystalline translations of 500 poems dense with natural imagery and early examples of South Indian culture. Because of their form's short length, the anthology's five authors rely on double entendre and sophisticated techniques of suggestion, giving their poems an almost haikulike feel. Groups of verse center on one unique figure, in some cases an object or an animal, in others a line of direct address or a specific conversation or situation. Selby introduces each section with a biographical sketch of the poet and the conventions at work within the landscape. She then incorporates notes explaining shifting contexts.

Women's Poetry by Daisy Fried

ISBN: 9780822962380

Publication Date: 2013-03-10

Daisy Fried's third book of poetry is a book of unsettling, unsettled Americans. Fried finds her Americans everywhere, watching Henry Kissinger leave the Louvre, trapped on a Tiber bridge by a crowd of neo-fascist thugs, yearning outside a car detailing garage for a car lit underneath by neon lavender, riding the train with Princeton seniors who have been rejected by recession-bound Wall Street, feeding stray cats drunk at midnight, bitching at her mother in the labor room, shopping with wide-bodied hunters for deer-dismembering band saws in the world's largest supplier of seasonal camouflage, cursing her cell phone and husband at eighty-five miles an hour, hiding behind the mask of an advice column to proclaim Charles Bukowski "America's greatest poetess." There is nothing like this book, because there is nothing in it but America. No comfort, no consolation, no life-affirming pats on the back, no despair about God, no fear or acceptance of death, no irrational exuberance, no guilt or weariness, no misery even in the middle of personal and political crisis. Plenty of humor and plenty of seriousness. Joy. And a new kind of poetry: not nice, but rich and real.

The Black Maria by Aracelis Girmay

Taking its name from the moon's dark plains, misidentified as seas by early astronomers, the black maria investigates African diasporic histories, the consequences of racism within American culture, and the question of human identity. Central to this project is a desire to recognize the lives of Eritrean refugees who have been made invisible by years of immigration crisis, refugee status, exile, and resulting statelessness. The recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry, Girmay's newest collection elegizes and celebrates life, while wrestling with the humanistic notion of seeing beyond: seeing violence, seeing grace, and seeing each other better. "to the sea" great storage house, history on which we rode, we touched the brief pulse of your fluttering pages, spelled with salt & life, your rage, your indifference your gentleness washing our feet, all of you going on whether or not we live, to you we bring our carnations yellow & pink, how they float like bright sentences atop your memory's dark hair.

Modern Sudanese Poetry by Adil Babikir (Editor, Translator); Matthew Shenoda (Foreword by)

ISBN: 9781496215635

Publication Date: 2019-09-01

Spanning more than six decades of Sudan's post-independence history, this collection features work by some of Sudan's most renowned modern poets, largely unknown in the United States. Adil Babikir's extensive introduction provides a conceptual framework to help the English reader understand the cultural context. Translated from Arabic, the collection addresses a wide range of themes--identity, love, politics, Sufism, patriotism, war, and philosophy--capturing the evolution of Sudan's modern history and cultural intersections. Modern Sudanese Poetry features voices as diverse as the country's ethnic, cultural, and natural composition. By bringing these voices together, Babikir provides a glimpse of Sudan's poetry scene as well as the country's modern history and post-independence trajectory.   

Poetry by Vivian Norton (Editor)

ISBN: 9781536154337

Publication Date: 2019-06-25

The opening chapter of Poetry: Interpretations and Influence on the World tries to explain the correlation between history and poetry, as well as and the elements that currently aid in the recognizance of the presence of the poetic in the work of historians. Following this, the authors discuss six poems from the poetry collection Charred Tree (1945) and three poems from the collection Shadowland (1966), both published by Estonian writer Bernard Kangro (1910-1994) while in exile. 

Killing Poetry

Winner of the 2019 Lilla A. Heston Award Co-winner of the 2018 Ethnography Division's Best Book from the NCA In recent decades, poetry slams and the spoken word artists who compete in them have sparked a resurgent fascination with the world of poetry. However, there is little critical dialogue that fully engages with the cultural complexities present in slam and spoken word poetry communities, as well as their ramifications.   In Killing Poetry, renowned slam poet, Javon Johnson unpacks some of the complicated issues that comprise performance poetry spaces. He argues that the truly radical potential in slam and spoken word communities lies not just in proving literary worth, speaking back to power, or even in altering power structures, but instead in imagining and working towards altogether different social relationships. His illuminating ethnography provides a critical history of the slam, contextualizes contemporary black poets in larger black literary traditions, and does away with the notion that poetry slams are inherently radically democratic and utopic.   

I Am Still Your Negro

Social Justice Poetry Spoken-word poet Valerie Mason-John unsettles readers with potent images of ongoing trauma from slavery and colonization. Her narratives range from the beginnings of the African Diaspora to the story of a stowaway on the Windrush, from racism and sexism in Trump's America to the wide impact of the Me Too movement. Stories of entrapment, sexual assault, addictive behaviours, and rave culture are told and contrasted to the strengthening and forthright voice of Yaata, Supreme Being. I Am Still Your Negro is truth that needs to be told, re-told, and remembered. I was your Negro Captured and sold I am still your negro Arrested and killed --from "I Am Still Your Negro"

Dear Azula, I Have a Crush on Danny Phantom

Dear Azula, I Have a Crush on Danny Phantom is a crossover of our coming of age universes. Exploring the interplay of adolescence and media, Dear Azula is a masterclass on how Generation Z see themselves reflected on screen, how they find themselves in characters when the world does not grant them the possibility. These poems pay homage to the cartoon characters who made us the wicked lovestruck people that we are.