Staff Picks
#BroaderBookshelf 2023 - Poetry After 2003 - Prosaic & Poetic
- Mahogany S.
- Monday, January 16, 2023
Collection
Check out one of these titles and fulfill the #BroaderBookshelf 2023 Reading Challenge prompt "read a collection of poetry published since 2003". (These titles are by authors who write novels and articles in addition to poetry).
This list is part of the #BroaderBookshelf 2023 Reading Challenge. Find more lists here.
Light for the World to See
Published in 2020
"From NPR correspondent and New York Times bestselling author, Kwame Alexander, comes a powerful and provocative collection of poems that cut to the heart of the entrenched racism and oppression in America and eloquently explores ongoing events. A book in the tradition of James Baldwin's "A Report from Occupied Territory," Light for the World to See is a rap session on race. A lyrical response to the struggles of Black lives in our world . . . to America's crisis of conscience . . . to the centuries of loss, endless resilience, and unstoppable hope. Includes an introduction by the author and a bold, graphically designed interior."--Amazon.
Dearly
New Poems
Published in 2020
The internationally acclaimed author presents her first collection of poetry in over a decade that addresses themes such as love, loss, the passage of time, nature, and zombies.
Dissolve
Published in 2019
Bitsui's poetry returns things to their basic elements and voice in a flowing language rife with illuminating images. A great reading experience for those who like serious and innovative poetry." --Library Journal Drawing upon Navajo history and enduring tradition, Sherwin Bitsui leads us on a treacherous, otherworldly passage through the American Southwest. Fluidly shape-shifting and captured by language that functions like a moving camera, Dissolve is urban and rural, past and present in the haze of the reservation. Bitsui proves himself to be one of this century's most haunting, raw, and uncompromising voices.
Blue Front
Published in 2006
"In Blue Front, her fifth book of poetry, Martha Collins describes the brutal, frenzied lynching of a black man and, as an afterthought, a white man, both of them left to the merciless violence of the participants. The book patches together an arresting and sometimes conflicting array of evidence - newspaper articles, census data, legal history, postcards, photographs, and Collins's speculations about her father's own experience. The resulting work, fragmented and hallucinatory, is an investigation into hate, mob mentality, culpability, and what it means to be white in a country still haunted by its violently racist history."--Jacket.
Death, and the Day's Light
Poems
Published in 2015
Death, and the Day's Light, the volume of poetry James Dickey was working on when he died, offers the writer's final views on love and death, fathers and sons, and war and resurrection.
Content Warning
Everything
Published in 2022
"Collection of poems by Akwaeke Emezi"-- Provided by publisher.
Anthropocene Lullaby
Published in 2022
"The poems of Anthropocene Lullaby move from the micro to the macro, from dragonflies to galaxies, from the intersecting forces of climate change, capitalism, and digital technologies to intersecting anxieties of selfhood and motherhood. These lyric and prose poems track change--underway and inevitable, personal and impersonal, generative and apocalyptic"-- Provided by publisher.
The Beauty
Poems
Published in 2015
"A collection of original poems by Jane Hirshfield exploring the profundities and quirks of existence"-- Provided by publisher.
Tropic of Squalor
Poems
Published in 2018
"Long before she earned accolades for her genre-defining memoirs, Mary Karr was winning poetry prizes. Now the beloved author returns with a collection of bracing poems as visceral, deeply felt, and hilarious as her memoirs. In Tropic of Squalor, Karr dares to address the numinous--that mystery some of us hope toward in secret, or maybe dare to pray to. The "squalor" of meaninglessness that every thoughtful person wrestles with sits at the core of human suffering, and Karr renders it with power--illness, death, love's agonized disappointments. Her brazen verse calls us out of our psychic swamplands and into that hard-won awareness of the divine hiding in the small moments that make us human. In a single poem she can generate tears, horror, empathy, laughter, and peace. She never preaches. But whether you're an adamant atheist, a pilgrim, or skeptically curious, these poems will urge you to find an inner light in the most baffling hours of darkness." --Front flap of dust jacket.
Shaler's Fish
Poems
Published in 2016
Publishers Weekly (01/18/2016): Macdonald, a British historian, naturalist, and illustrator, made waves with her memoir, "H Is for Hawk" but in her debut collection of poetry she goes beyond simply observing the natural world, displaying the indefatigable curiosity that motivated the early naturalists who inspire her. Macdonald employs her knowledge of the natural sciences as she deftly works scientific discoveries into poems on such subjects as love, politics, solitude, death, and more. Her imagery encompasses biology, geology, physics, weather patterns, and astronomy. For example, in Hyperion to a Satellite, she invokes Widmanstatten patterns found in meteorites: Widmanstatten's grating pat, with a formula/ of primitive and suitably drenched olivine. Noble metals// are dropped onto accident blackspots hailing/ from districts of open light, glossing the connectives// with a discriminating solar bombardment. The rich and heady language calls to mind the tradition of the English Romantic poets while offering wholly new and original constructions: the shade of your eyes approximates the blade as blued dorsal edge/ indigent as the model as side or even air, seen from below// every moment describes some other music/ and I cannot remember banality ever existing. Devoted readers of "H Is for Hawk"will find Macdonald's gift for stunning language, patient curiosity, and expansive wisdom on full display in her poems.
Raised by Humans
Poems
Published in 2015
The poems in Raised by Humans are about surviving childhood and colonization. Childhood did not agree with Deborah Miranda, mostly because the adult humans in charge of her life were not prepared to manage their own lives, let alone the life of a human-in-training. Humans raised Deborah, but it wasn't a humane childhood.
Cutlish
Published in 2021
"Rajiv Mohabir's Cutlish uses history to interrogate the word "home" and all that it might mean to those who thrive in spite of homophobia, stereotype, and xenophobia. These poems are grounded in definite time and space in a voice that refuses to be silenced, "They are vexed you survive; that you/rise up from the pavement..." But what I love most is read a poet as disciplined and committed as Mohabir as he transforms and reinvents himself in tone, in subject, and in line: "Let's get one thing queer-I'm no Sabu-like sidekick,/I'm the main drag. Ram Ram in a sari; salaam//on the street. I don't speak Hindu, Paki, or Indian,/can't control minds, have no psychic powers." Jericho Brown Cutlish, Rajiv Mohabir's stunning new collection, asks urgent questions about queer identities, diaspora and silence. Deeply grounded in 1838, the year the first ships brought indentured servants from India to Guyana, Cutlish reckons with the relationship between language and violence. These poems challenge the colonizer's English through Creole, Sanskrit, Hindi, Hindustani and Chutney songs, dazzling us at every turn: "May each face who ever said, Speak English / find their own tongue fettered and split, / my mixed blood blackening their faces." The book's title evokes the violence of a cutlass, and everywhere here we see language as knife and blade but also as solace. Cutlish is a luminous, beautiful book. Rajiv Mohabir is one of the most important poets writing today. --Nicole Cooley"-- Provided by publisher.
Dark Energy
Published in 2015
"A new collection from the awardwinning poet and author of the bestselling novel Gap Creek. In the words of Poetry magazine, Robert Morgan's poems "shine with beauty that transcends locale." The work in his newest collection, rooted in his native Blue Ridge Mountains, explores the mysteries and tensions of family and childhood, the splendors and hidden dramas of the natural world, and the agriculture that supports all culture. Morgan's voice is vigorous and exact, opening doors for the reader, finding unexpected images and connections. The poems reach beyond surfaces, to the strange forces inside atoms, our genes, our heritage, and outward to the farthest movements of galaxies, the dark energy we cannot explain but recognize in our bones and blood, in our deepest memories and imagination"-- Provided by publisher.
All Along You Were Blooming
Thoughts for Boundless Living
Published in 2020
A collection of illustrated inspirational poetry and prose thoughts from the Instagram poet Morgan Harper Nichols.
At the Foundling Hospital
Published in 2016
""Since the death of Robert Lowell in 1977, no single figure has dominated American poetry the way that Lowell, or before him Eliot, once did. But among the many writers who have come of age in our fin de siècle, none have succeeded more completely as poet, critic, and translator than Robert Pinsky."--James Longenbach, The Nation The poems in Robert Pinsky's At the Foundling Hospital consider personality and culture as improvised from loss: a creative effort so pervasive it is invisible. An extreme example is the abandoned newborn. At the Foundling Hospital of eighteenth-century London, in a benign and oddly bureaucratic process, each new infant was identified by a duly recorded token. A minimal, charged particle of meaning, the token might be a coin or brooch or thimble--or sometimes a poem, such as the one quoted in full in Pinsky's poem "The Foundling Tokens." A foundling may inherit less of a past than an orphan, but with a wider set of meanings. The foundling soul needs to be adopted, and it needs to be adaptive. In one poem, French and German appear as originally Creole tongues, invented by the rough needs of conquered peoples and their Roman masters. In another, creators from scorned or excluded groups--among them Irving Berlin, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, and W.E.B. Du Bois--speak, as does the Greek tragic chorus, in the first-person singular. In these poems, a sometimes desperate, perpetual reimagining of identity, on the scale of one life or of human history, is deeply related to music: The quest is lyrical, whether the subject is as specific as "the emanation of a dead star still alive" or as personal as the "pinhole iris of your mortal eye." "-- Provided by publisher.
Drought-Adapted Vine
Poems
Published in 2015
"Revell pushes boundaries between words and music, transcending our current notion of beauty and innocence. Personal memory, the visionary, the eccentric, and the divine intertwine between networks of stories that connect past and present through paint strokes, composition and pastoral lyric. Pure of heart poems lie down in a vibrant field of paradox, basking gratefully in the sun of unknowing"-- Provided by publisher.
Lessons on Expulsion
Poems
Published in 2017
"What is life but a cross / over rotten water?" Poet, novelist, and essayist Erika L. Sánchez powerful debut poetry collection explores what it means to live on both sides of the border -- the border between countries, languages, despair and possibility, and the living and the dead. Sánchez tells her own story as the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants and as part of a family steeped in faith, work, grief, and expectations. The poems confront sex, shame, race, and an America roiling with xenophobia, violence, and laws of suspicion and suppression. With candor and urgency, and with the unblinking eyes of a journalist, Sánchez roves from the individual life into the lives of sex workers, narco-traffickers, factory laborers, artists, and lovers. What emerges is a powerful, multifaceted portrait of survival. Lessons on Expulsion is the first book by a vibrant, essential new writer now breaking into the national literary landscape.
Vinegar Hill
Published in 2022
"A wide variety of poems, ranging in setting and topic, Vinegar Hill deals with gay experience and with the experience of loss, with memory and a fading past as well as the present moment"-- Provided by publisher.
Night Sky with Exit Wounds
Published in 2016
A haunting debut that is simultaneously dreamlike and visceral, vulnerable and redemptive, and risks the painful rewards of emotional honesty.
Taking the Arrow out of the Heart
Poems
Published in 2018
"Alice Walker, author of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning The Color Purple--"an American novel of permanent importance" (San Francisco Chronicle)--crafts a bilingual collection that is both playfully imaginative and intensely moving. Presented in both English and Spanish, Alice Walker shares a timely collection of nearly seventy works of passionate and powerful poetry that bears witness to our troubled times, while also chronicling a life well-lived. 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"-- Provided by publisher.