Staff Picks
#BroaderBookshelf 2023 - Poetry After 2003 - Award Winning Authors
- Mahogany S.
- Friday, January 20, 2023
Collection
Check out one of these titles and fulfill the #BroaderBookshelf 2023 Reading Challenge prompt "read a collection of poetry published since 2003".
This list is part of the #BroaderBookshelf 2023 Reading Challenge. Find more lists here.
All the Names Given
Published in 2021
"On the heels of his much-lauded debut collection, Raymond Antrobus continues his essential investigation into language, miscommunication, place, and memory in All The Names Given, while simultaneously breaking new ground in both form and content. The collection opens with poems about the author's surname-one that shouldn't have survived into modernity-and examines the rich and fraught history carried within it. The book is punctuated with [Caption Poems] partially inspired by Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim, which speak to the spaces between the poems as well as the moments inside them. As Antrobus outlines a childhood caught between intimacy and brutality, sound and silence, and conflicting racial and cultural identities, the poem becomes a space in which the poet reckons with his own ancestry, and bears witness to the indelible violence of the legacy wrought by colonialism. The poems travel through space-shifting fluidly between England, South Africa, Jamaica, and the American South-and brilliantly move from an examination of family history into the wandering lust of adolescence and finally, vividly, into a complex array of marriage poems-matured, wiser, and more accepting of love's fragility. Formally sophisticated, with a weighty perception and startling directness, All The Names Given is a timely, tender book full of humanity and remembrance from one of the most important young poets of our generation"-- Provided by publisher.
The Galleons
Poems
Published in 2020
"For almost twenty years, Rick Barot has been writing some of the most stunningly crafted lyric poems in America, paying careful, Rilkean attention to the layered world that surrounds us. In The Galleons, he widens his scope, contextualizing the immigrant journey of his Filipino-American parents in the larger history and aftermath of colonialism. Here, Barot's poems are engaged in the work of recovery, making visible what is often intentionally erased: the movement of Brooklyn domestic workers on a weekday morning; a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, fondly sharing photos of his dog; the departure and destination points of dozens of galleons between 1564 and 1815. And so these ships come to represent both the vast movements of history and the individual journeys of those borne along by their tides, explicitly connecting the public and the personal, the epic and the mundane. "Her story is a part of something larger, it is a part / of history," Barot writes of his mother. "No, her story is an illumination // of history, a matchstick lit in the black seam of time." With nods toward Barot's poetic predecessors-including Frank O'Hara and John Donne-The Galleons represents an exciting extension and expansion of this virtuosic poet's work, marrying "reckless" ambition and crafted "composure," in which we repeatedly find the speaker standing and breathing before the world, "incredible and true.""-- Provided by publisher.
Indigo
Published in 2020
"Indigo, the newest collection by Ellen Bass, merges elegy and praise poem in an exploration of life's complex grey areas. Whether her subject is oysters, high heels, a pork chop, a beloved dog, or a wife's return to health, Bass pulls us in with exquisite immediacy. Her lush and precisely observed descriptions allow us to feel the sheer primal pleasure of being alive in our own "succulent skin," the pleasure of the gifts of hunger, desire, touch. In this book, joy meets regret, devotion meets dependence, and most importantly, the poet so in love with life and living begins to look for the point where the price of aging overwhelms the rewards of staying alive. Bass is relentless in her advocacy for the little pleasures all around her. Her gaze is both expansive and hyperfocused, celebrating (and eulogizing) each gift as it is given and taken, while also taking stock of the larger arc. She draws the lines between generations, both remembering her parents' lives and deaths and watching her own children grow into the space that she will leave behind. Indigo shows us the beauty of this cycle, while also documenting the deeply human urge to resist change and hang on to the life we have, even as it attempts to slip away"-- Provided by publisher.
The Sobbing School
Published in 2016
"Selected by Eugene Gloria as a winner of the National Poetry Series The Sobbing School, Joshua Bennett's mesmerizing debut collection of poetry, presents songs for the living and the dead that destabilize and de-familiarize representations of black history and contemporary black experience. What animates these poems is a desire to assert life, and interiority, where there is said to be none. Figures as widely divergent as Bobby Brown, Martin Heidegger, and the 19th-century performance artist Henry Box Brown, as well as Bennett's own family and childhood best friends, appear and are placed in conversation in order to show that there is always a world beyond what we are socialized to see value in, always alternative ways of thinking about relation that explode easy binaries"-- Provided by publisher.
How to Love a Country
Poems
Published in 2019
"The diverse poems in this collection form a mosaic of seemingly varied topics: the Pulse Nightclub massacre; an unexpected encounter on a visit to Cuba; the forced exile of 8,500 Navajos in 1868; the arrival of a young Chinese woman at Angel Island in 1938; the incarceration of a gifted writer; and the poet's abiding love for his partner, who he is finally allowed to wed. But despite each poem's unique subject matter or occasion, all are fundamentally asking one overwhelming question: how to love this country? Seeking answers, Blanco digs deep into the very marrow of our nation--our cities and towns--with poems that interrogate our past and present, grieve our injustices and note our flaws, yet remember to celebrate our ideals and cling to our hopes. Blanco unravels the very fabric of the American narrative, pursuing a resolution to the inherent contradiction of our nation's psyche and mandate: e pluribus unum (out of many, one), charged with the utopian idea that no single narrative is more important than another, and that America could and ought someday to be a county where all narratives converge into one. A country in which we can all truly thrive and truly love"-- Provided by publisher.
The New Testament
Published in 2014
""Erotic and grief-stricken, ministerial and playful, Brown offers his reader a journey unlike any other in contemporary poetry."-Rain Taxi "To read Jericho Brown's poems is to encounter devastating genius."-Claudia Rankine In the world of Jericho Brown's second book, disease runs through the body, violence runs through the neighborhood, memories run through the mind, trauma runs through generations. Almost eerily quiet in even the bluntest of poems, Brown gives us the ache of a throat that has yet to say the hardest thing-and the truth is coming on fast.Fairy TaleSay the shame I see inching like steam Along the streets will never seep Beneath the doors of this bedroom, And if it does, if we dare to breathe, Tell me that though the world ends us, Lover, it cannot end our love Of narrative. Don't you have a story For me?-like the one you tell With fingers over my lips to keep me From sighing when-before the queen Is kidnapped-the prince bows To the enemy, handing over the horn Of his favorite unicorn like those men Brought, bought, and whipped until They accepted their masters' names. Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans before earning his PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston. His first book, PLEASE (New Issues), won the American Book Award. He currently teaches at Emory University and lives in Atlanta, Georgia. "-- Provided by publisher.
All the Gay Saints
Published in 2020
Whiting Award winner Kayleb Rae Candrilli's second full-length book, ALL THE GAY SAINTS, is a collection of trans joy and resilience. Focused on love, partnership, and cultivating the landscape of one's own body, ALL THE GAY SAINTS seeks happiness in a world saturated with transphobia and marred by climate change. And though this world is finite, these poems want you to live forever. They will unbarb your body if you let them.
Nothing to Declare
Published in 2015
"A bold new collection of poems of feral beauty and intense vulnerability The poems in Henri Cole's ninth book, Nothing to Declare, explore life and need and delight. Each poem starts up from its own unique occasion and is then conducted through surprising (sometimes unnerving) and self-steadying domains. The result is a daring, delicate, unguarded, and tender collection. After his last three books--Touch, Blackbird and Wolf, and Middle Earth--in which the sonnet was a thrown shape and not merely a template, Cole's buoyant new poems seem trim and terse, with a first-place, last-ditch resonance. In their sorrowful richness, they combine a susceptibility to sensuousness and an awareness of desolation. With precise reliability of detail, a supple wealth of sound, and a speculative truthfulness, Cole transforms the pain of experience into the keen pleasure of expressive language. Nothing to Declare is a rare work, necessary and durable, light in touch but with just enough weight to mark the soul"-- Provided by publisher.
DiVida
Published in 2018
Published posthumously, this powerful second collection is a raw dialogue about being black in today's society, exploring injustices survived by using a dream-like consciousness to take on multiple personas: DiVida, who wants to assimilate into the larger culture, and Sapphire, who refuses to follow at the expense of her self-actualization. --amazon.com.
Lighthead
Published in 2010
The fourth collection by the author portrays the light-headedness of a mind trying to pull against gravity and time. It sets what it means to be "light longing for lightness" against what it means to "burn with all the humanity fire strips away." Hayes navigates melancholy, irreverence, and the sublime.--Publisher information.
House of Lords and Commons
Published in 2016
"A stunning collection that traverses the borders of culture and time from the 2011 winner of the PEN / Joyce Osterweil Award"-- Provided by publisher.
Black Crow Dress
Published in 2013
""These poems move forward like a novel in verse with a real understanding of the differences between the past and history. Or, as Johnson herself says in the opening poem, 'Each one is hungry for a voice & music to re-bloom.' This is a poet the best readers will be reading for the rest of their lives."-Jericho BrownA haunting collection of lyrically intense persona poems, Black Crow Dress is at once about the emancipation of slaves in their myriad voices as well as a meditation on the self. The collection's lush imagery takes us from churchyard to church, chanting the old spirituals, as Roxane Beth Johnson seeks to embody the spirits of the dead: Clea, Caroline, and Zebedee. From "Slave Ancestors Found Unburied in a Dream":Each one is hungry for a voice& music to re-bloom them alive in this room like water softens beans. Leaning near, close to me they see my tooth & tongue that test doneness, licks stamps & hums. Their ear listens to what a hand might fiddle if it had fingers. Stare this way witheyes like smudges.Roxane Beth Johnson's first book of poetry, Jublilee (Anhinga Press, 2006), won the 2005 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. She won an AWP Donald Hill Prize in Poetry and a Pushcart Prize in 2007 and has received scholarships and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Cave Canem, The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, San Francisco Arts Commission, and Vermont Studio Center. She lives in San Francisco, California. "-- Provided by publisher.
Cain Named the Animal
Published in 2022
"A new poetry collection by Shane McCrae"-- Provided by publisher.
Early Hour
Published in 2017
""It's [McGriff's] language that keeps you reading along, transfixed."--New York Times Book Review "A lyricist at heart, McGriff is a masterful maker of metaphor." --Third Coast "McGriff's vivid grit remains hard to gainsay."--Publishers Weekly A book-length sequence inspired by the Nazi-persecuted German Expressionist painter Karl Hofer's work, McGriff's third collection meditates on eros, cosmology, independence, provenance, "occupied territories," and deviance. Detailed yet indeterminately American landscapes flood with surrealist dream imagery and subtle violence, while the voice of these poems intertwines between the intimately personal and the honestly imagined--all while remaining plainspoken, angular, direct. From Cosmology The river moves beneath the sheet ice. The wind is a grand hall of records. In the recipe box above the refrigerator, the deathbed photos of four generations-- somewhere, their hands have turned to prime numbers
Post-
Poems
Published in 2016
The poems of this fourth collection from Wayne Miller exist in the wake of catastrophe. It is a world populated by rogue gunmen on shooting sprees, a world where the only inheritance a father has to pass on is his debt. In this world, every box could be a bomb and what comes after is what is lived. And yet, this painful past is not set in stone. The past becomes the present, yielding toward an immediate future.
Felicity
Published in 2016
"Mary Oliver, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, celebrates love in her new collection of poems,"--Amazon.com.
Reconnaissance
Published in 2015
"A powerful, inventive collection from one of America's most respected poets -- There's a trembling inside the both of us, there's a trembling, inside us both. The territory of Reconnaissance is one where morals threaten to become merely "what the light falls through," "suffering [seems] in fact for nothing," and "all we do is maybe all we can do." In the face of this, Carl Phillips, reconsidering and unraveling what we think we know, maps out the contours of a world in revision, where truth lies captured at one moment and at the next goes free, transformed. These are poems of searing beauty, lit by hope and shadowed by it, from a poet whose work "reinstates the possibility of finding meaning in a world that is forever ready to revoke the sources of meaning in our lives" (Jonathan Farmer, Slate)"-- Provided by publisher.
Feed
Published in 2019
"Feed is the fourth book in the Teebs tetralogy. It's an epistolary recipe for the main character, a poem of nourishment, and a jaunty walk through New York's High Line park, with the lines, stanzas, paragraphs, dialogue, and registers approximating the park's cultivated gardens of wildness. Among its questions, Feed asks what's the difference between being alone and being lonely? Can you ever really be friends with an ex? How do you make perfect mac & cheese? Feed is an ode of reconciliation to the wild inconsistencies of a northeast spring, a frustrating season of back-and-forth, of thaw and blizzard, but with a faith that even amidst the mess, it knows where it's going."-- Provided by publisher.
The Malevolent Volume
Published in 2020
"Subverting celebrated classics of poetry and mythology and examining horrors from contemporary film and cultural fact, National Book Award winner Justin Phillip Reed engages darkness as an aesthetic to conjure the revenant animus that lurks beneath the exploited civilities of marginalized people. In these poems, Reed finds agency in the other-than-human identities assigned to those assaulted by savageries of the state. In doing so, he summons a retaliatory, counterviolent Black spirit to revolt and to inhabit the revolting"-- Provided by publisher.
The Lunatic
Poems
Published in 2015
This volume of poetry from Charles Simic, one of America's most celebrated poets, demonstrates his signature style--a mix of understated brilliance, wry melancholy, and sardonic wit. These seventy poems range in subject from mortality to personal ads, from the simple wonders of nature to his childhood in war-torn Yugoslavia.
Life on Mars
Poems
Published in 2011
A collection of poems in which Tracy K. Smith examines the discoveries, failures, and oddities of humans.
Three Poems
Published in 2020
"A British poet's debut collection, winner of the 2018 T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry"-- Provided by publisher.
Music's Mask and Measure
Published in 2007
"Music's Mask and Measure presents a series of five "equations" in a cosmic algebra. Drawing from such disparate sources as medieval theology, modern physics, and a Pythagorean sense of harmony, these poems offer glimpses of a dance in which only one partner can be seen. Reading them, we move in "the firm embrace / of the unsolved.""--Jacket.
Stones
Poems
Published in 2021
"A book of elegy, loss, and what binds us to life, by a towering poetic talent. "We sleep long, / if not sound," Young writes early on in this exquisite gathering of poems, "Till the end/ we sing / into the wind." In scenes and settings that circle family and the generations in the American South--one poem, "Kith," exploring that strange bedfellow of "kin"--the speaker and his young son wander among the stones of their ancestors. "Like heat he seeks them, / my son, thirsting / to learn those / he don't know / are his dead." Whether it's the Louisiana summer's fireflies in a mason jar (doomed by their collection), or his grandmother, Mama Annie, who latches the screen door when someone steps out for just a moment, all that comprises our flickering precarious joy, all that we want to protect, is lifted into the light in this moving book. Stones becomes an ode to Young's home places and his dear departed, and to what of them--of us--poetry can save"-- Provided by publisher.