Staff Picks
#BroaderBookshelf 2017 - Read a Book of Poetry
- Chantal W.
- Friday, April 14, 2017
Collection
Check off an item on your #BroaderBookshelf list by reading a book of poetry. Whether you're in the mood for European or American poets; classic or modern themes; funny, epic, romantic, or dramatic writing styles, Richland Library has got you covered with a wonderful collection of poetry!
The Breakbeat Poets
New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-hop
Published in 2015
"This is the first anthology of poems by and for the hip-hop generation . . . It includes more than four decades of poets and covers the birth to the now of hip-hop culture and music and style"--page xv.
Haiku
Published in 2003
Jazz Poems
Published in 2006
Poems of the American South
Published in 2014
"An anthology of poems about the American South from the past four centuries"-- Provided by publisher.
Poetry Speaks Who I Am
Published in 2010
Collects more than one hundred poems for young readers, with selections by Maya Angelou, Arthur Sze, Langston Hughes, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, and others; and includes an audio CD with some of the poets reading their works.
The Spoken Word Revolution Redux
Published in 2007
Collects over one hundred poems, forty of which can be heard on the accompanying CD, which are presented along with essays describing the importance of poetry being heard aloud and the changes the form has undergone in recent years.
Love That Dog
Published in 2001
A young student, who comes to love poetry through a personal understanding of what different famous poems mean to him, surprises himself by writing his own inspired poem.
Wait Till I'm Dead
Uncollected Poems
Published in 2016
A posthumous collection of more than 100 Ginsberg poems is largely comprised of spontaneously penned or forgotten works included in letters or sent to obscure publications and is arranged in chronological order and complemented by extensive author notes. --Publisher's description.
Blue Lipstick
Concrete Poems
Published in 2007
A 15-year-old girl named Jessie voices typical--and not so typical--teenage concerns in this unique, hilarious collection of poems. Her musings about trying out new makeup and hairstyles, playing volleyball and cello, and dealing with her annoying younger brother are never boring or predictable. Who else do you know who designs her own clothes and writes poetry to her cat? Jessie's a girl with strong opinions, and she isn't shy about sharing them. Her funny, sarcastic take on high school life is revealed through concrete poetry: words, ideas, type, and design that combine to make pictures and patterns. The poems are inventive, irreverent, irresistible, and full of surprises--just like Jessie--and the playful layout and ingenious graphics extend the wry humor.
The Opposite of Light
Poems
Published in 2016
Can the notion of Romantic love withstand our endless postmodern moment? In these extraordinary poems, Kimberly Grey explores our abiding need for neatness, order, and symmetry in matrimony, considering our ideals for love and language in this digital age--its weightless, distracting, and inescapable pressures. She portrays the ways in which love reflects us back to ourselves: familiar but strange, predetermined but new. There is "a drop of blue light," she writes. "But no high-tech way / to say you’re mine. No way to love / each other but with these ancient bodies."
Dated Emcees
Published in 2016
"Chinaka Hodge came of age along with hip-hop-and its influence on her suitors became inextricable from their personal interactions. Form blends with content as she examines her love life through the lens of hip-hop's best known orators, characters, archetypes and songs in a finely crafted collection of 25 poems, its length meant to mirror that of a classic double album. Dated Emcees blurs the line between lived and imagined experience, and creates a new and inventive narrative about the music that shaped the craggy heart of a young woman poet, just as it also changed the global landscape of pop"-- Provided by publisher.
Driving Without a License
Published in 2016
The best way to hide is in plain sight. In this politically-charged and candid debut, we follow the chronicles of an undocumented immigrant speaker from the Philippines over a twenty-year span as she grows up in the foreign and forbidding landscape of America.
O What a Luxury
Verses Lyrical, Vulgar, Pathetic & Profound.
Published in 2013
The celebrated radio host presents his first collection of poetry, featuring his reflections on daily life, love, politics, and religion in verse that reflects his characteristic humor and insight.
Newspaper Blackout
Published in 2010
Presents a collection of poetry constructed using a newspaper and permanent marker, including sections on how the author got started, how to make a newspaper blackout poem, and contest winners.
Rapture
Poems
Published in 2016
In this award-winning debut, Sjohnna McCray movingly recounts a life born out of wartime to a Korean mother and an American father serving during the Vietnam War. Their troubled histories, and McCray's own, are told with lyric passion and the mythic undercurrents of discovering one's own identity, one's own desires. What emerges is a self- and family portrait of grief and celebration, one that insists on our lives as anything, please, but singular. Rapture is an extraordinary first collection, with poems of rare grace and feeling.
XX
Poems for the Twentieth Century
Published in 2016
"XX is award-winning poet Campbell McGrath's astonishing sequence of one hundred poems--one per year--written in a vast range of forms, and in the voices of figures as varied as Picasso and Mao, Frida Kahlo and Elvis Presley. Based on years of historical research and cultural investigation, XX turns poetry into an archival inquiry and a choral documentary." -- From dust jacket.
The After Party
Poems
Published in 2016
"A debut collection from a major new voice in contemporary poetry"-- Provided by publisher.
Poems
New and Selected
Published in 2016
"A collection of haunting lyricism that evokes the beauty and hardship of the rural South, by a revered American master of letters the award-winning, bestselling author of the novels Serena, Something Rich and Strange, and Above the Waterfall. In this incandescent, profound, and accessible collection, beloved and award-winning poet, novelist, and short-story writer Ron Rash vividly channels the rhythms of life in Appalachia, deftly capturing the panoply of individuals who are its heart and soul men and women inured to misfortune and hard times yet defined by tremendous fortitude, resilience, and a fierce sense of community. In precise, supple language that swerves from the stark to the luminous, Rash richly describes the splendor of the natural landscape and poignantly renders the lives of those dependent on its bounty in cotton mills and tobacco fields, farmlands and forests. The haunting memories and shared histories of these people their rituals and traditions animate this land, and are celebrated in Rash s crystalline, intensely imagined verse. With an eye for the surprising and vivid detail, Ron Rash powerfully captures the sorrows and exaltations of this wondrous world he knows intimately. Illuminating and indelible, Poems demonstrates his rich talents and confirms his legacy as a standard-bearer for the literature of the American South." --Book jacket.
A Woman of Property
Published in 2016
"A new book from a poet whose work is "wild with imagination, unafraid, ambitious, inventive" (Jorie Graham) Located in a menacing, gothic landscape, the poems that comprise A Woman of Property draw formal and imaginative boundaries against boundless mortal threat, but as all borders are vulnerable, this ominous collection ultimately stages an urgent and deeply imperiled boundary dispute where haunting, illusion, the presence of the past, and disembodied voices only further unsettle questions of material and spiritual possession. This is a theatrical book of dilapidated houses and overgrown gardens, of passageways and thresholds, edges, prosceniums, unearthings, and root systems. The unstable property lines here rove from heaven to hell, troubling proportion and upsetting propriety in the name of unfathomable propagation. Are all the gates in this book folly? Are the walls too easily scaled to hold anything back or impose self-confinement? What won't a poem do to get to the other side?"-- Provided by publisher.
Where the Sidewalk Ends
The Poems & Drawings of Shel Silverstein.
Published in 2002
A boy who turns into a TV set and a girl who eats a whale are only two of the characters in a collection of humorous poetry illustrated with the author's own drawings.