30+ Poetry Books for Poetry Month
April 2, 2020
It's Poetry month! Here are 30+ poetry books that we adore and recommend! Check out our online store for more. Remember, we can ship to you!
"... poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action." ― Audre Lorde
“Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.”
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Fashions are not fashions at all but refashioning; language is not communication but reinvention. They are never in place but on display. - Dionne Brand
"I am in the middle of it: chaos and poetry; poetry and love and again, complete chaos. Pain, disorder, occasional clarity; and at the bottom of it all: only love; poetry. Sheer enchantment, fear, humiliation. It all comes with love”
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"In poetry, I didn't have to provide resolution. I could ask hard questions without feeling responsible for the answers." - Vivek Shraya
"The poet knows it sooner than the people do." -James Baldwin
"...only poetry can be [our] resurrection.” - Langston Hughes
"We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer." -Tracy K. Smith
Postcolonial Love Poem
Natalie Diaz
Natalie Diaz’s highly anticipated follow-up toWhen My Brother Was an Aztec, winner of an American Book AwardPostcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire...
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Not One of These Poems Is About You
Teva Harrison
In this remarkable, frank, and gut-wrenching mix of words and images, Teva continues on her journey, grappling with what it means to live with...
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Homie
Danez Smith
Danez Smith is our presidentHomie is Danez Smith’s magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s...
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Soft Science
Franny Choi
Soft Science explores queer, Asian American femininity. A series of Turing Test-inspired poems grounds its exploration of questions not just of identity, but of...
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This Wound is a World
Billy-Ray Belcourt
This Wound is a World slip-slides between poetry and essay to get at the shaky tempos of Indigenous life in a world bent on...
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All Day I Dream About Sirens
Domenica Martinello
From Homer to Starbucks, a look at sirens and mermaids and feminism and consumerism. What started as a small sequence of poems about the...
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Obits.
Tess Liem
Can poems mourn the unmourned? In Obits. a speaker tries and fails to write obituaries for those whose memorials are missing, those who are...
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A Fortune for Your Disaster
Hanif Abdurraqib
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist. and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His first poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was named a...
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A Sand Book
Ariana Reines
Winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize and longlisted for the National Book AwardLonglisted for the National Book Award DEADPAN, EPIC, AND SEARINGLY CHARISMATIC,...
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Disintegrate/Dissociate
Arielle Twist
In her powerful debut collection of poetry, Arielle Twist unravels the complexities of human relationships after death and metamorphosis. In these spare yet powerful...
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day/break
Gwen Benaway
day/break, Governor General's Literary Award Winner Gwen Benaway's fourth collection of work, explores the everyday poetics of the trans feminine body. Through intimate experiences...
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Citizen
Claudia Rankine
* Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry ** Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry * Finalist for the...
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A Handbook of Dissapointed Fate
Anne Boyer
A Handbook of Disappointed Fate highlights a decade of Anne Boyer's interrogative writing on love, art, time, mortality, Kansas City, and other impossible questions....
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How to Cure a Ghost
Fariha Róisín
A poetry compilation recounting a woman’s journey from self-loathing to self-acceptance, confusion to clarity, and bitterness to forgiveness Following in the footsteps of...
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Resisting Canada
Resisting Canada gathers together poets for a conversation bigger than poetic trends. The book's organizing principle is Canada--the Canada that established residential schools; the...
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Live from the Afrikan Resistance!
El Jones
Live from the Afrikan Resistance! is the first collection of spoken word poetry by Halifax’s fifth Poet Laureate, El Jones. These poems speak...
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The Blue Clerk
Dionne Brand
Griffin Poetry Prize winner Dionne Brand's startlingly original work about the act of writing itself.On a lonely wharf a clerk in an ink blue...
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Calamities
Renee Gladman
"Renee Gladman has always struck me as being a dreamer?she writes that way and the dreaming seems to construct the architecture of the world...
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Hustling Verse
In this trailblazing anthology, more than fifty self-identified sex workers from all walks of the industry (survival and trade, past and present) explore their...
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There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce
Morgan Parker
The only thing more beautiful than Beyoncé is God,and God is a black woman sipping rosé and drawing alavender bath, texting her mom, belly-laughing...
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Zong!
M. NourbeSe Philip
In November, 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship’s owners...
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Vulgar Mechanics
K.B. Thors
Grappling with queerness and trauma from Alberta to Brooklyn, powering through body, sex, and gender to hit free open roads In Vulgar Mechanics, K....
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Shiner
Maggie Nelson
In this electrifying and raw debut anthology, Maggie Nelson unpicks the everyday with the quick alchemy and precision of her later modern classics The Argonauts and Bluets....
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New and Selected Poems, Volume One
Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver was awarded the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems, Volume One. Since its initial appearance it has become one of the...
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