Staff Picks
#BroaderBookshelf 2021 - One Word Titles (Poetry)
- Mahogany S.
- Tuesday, October 12, 2021
Collection
Books with One Word Titles span genres. Here are some Poetry titles that are only one word.
Learn more about the Broader Bookshelf challenge and see more lists here.
Conjure
Published in 2020
"A new book of poems by the National Book Critics Circle Award and Pulitzer Prize-winner, exploring thought, dialogue, and everyday interactions"-- Provided by publisher
Dispatch
Poems
Published in 2019
"Set against a media environment that saturates even our most intimate spaces, these poems grapple with news of violence in the United States today and in the past-in particular, violence inflicted on people of color and on transgendered people. Winner of the 2018 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award, Dispatch is poignant example of poetry's possibilities for transformation, solidarity, and renewal"-- 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.
Obit
Poems
Published in 2020
"After her mother died, poet Victoria Chang refused to write elegies. Rather, she distilled her grief during a feverish two weeks by writing scores of poetic obituaries for all she lost in the world. In Obit, Chang writes of "the way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking." These poems reinvent the form of newspaper obituary to both name what has died ("civility," "language," "the future," "Mother's blue dress") and the cultural impact of death on the living. Whereas elegy attempts to immortalize the dead, an obituary expresses loss, and the love for the dead becomes a conduit for self-expression. In this unflinching and lyrical book, Chang meets her grief and creates a powerful testament for the living"-- Provided by publisher.
Semiotics
Published in 2020
"The poems in the collection are interested in the unnamed spaces of agency that exist beyond the limits imposed on black femme bodies. As a whole its preoccupied with utilizing the lessons of lived experience to comment on and engage with larger movements toward expression and liberation for black people across temporal and physic spaces. So the collection moves in and out of the material and the spiritual world, in and out of nations and borders. The collection riffs off and borrows from varied intellectual and quotidian discourses regarding queerness, Afro-diasporic studies, refugee studies, gender and sexuality, and Global South subjectivity"-- Provided by publisher.
Floaters
Poems
Published in 2021
"From the winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize come masterfully crafted narratives of protest, grief, and love. In this collection, Martín Espada bears witness to confrontation with anti-immigrant bigotry as a tenant lawyer years ago, and now sings the praises of Central American adolescents playing soccer in an internment camp founded on that same bigotry. He knows that times of hate also call for poems of love-even in the voice of a Galápagos tortoise. Whether celebrating the visions of fallen dreamers and poets or condemning the devastation of Hurricane Maria and official negligence in his father's Puerto Rico, Espada invokes ferocious, incandescent spirits"-- Provided by publisher.
Renditions
Published in 2021
"An energetic exploration of the expanse of language translated and otherwise transformed In Renditions Reginald Gibbons conducts an ensemble of poetic voices, using the works of a varied, international selection of writers as departure points for his translations and transformations. The collection poses the idea that all writing is, at least abstractly, an act of translation, whether said act "translates" observation into word or moves ideas from one language to another. Through these acts of transformation, Gibbons infuses the English language with stylistic aspects of other languages and poetic traditions. The resulting poems are imbued with a sense of homage that allows us to respectfully reimagine the borders of language and revel in the fellowship of idea sharing. In this tragicomedy of the human experience and investigation of humanity's effects, Gibbons identifies the "shared underthoughts that we can (all) sense:" desire, love, pain, and fervor"-- Provided by publisher.
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.
Bodega
Poems
Published in 2019
Against the backdrop of the war on drugs and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, a Korean girl comes of age in her parents' bodega in the Queensbridge projects, offering a singular perspective on our nation of immigrants and the tensions pulsing in the margins where they live and work.
Ringer
Published in 2019
Ringer approaches womanhood from two directions: an examination of ways that womens identities are tied to domestic spaces, like homes, cars, grocery stores, and daycare centers; and a consideration of physical, sexual, and political violence against women, both historically and in the present day. Lehmanns poems look outward, and go beyond cataloguing trespasses against women by biting back against patriarchal systems of oppression, and against perpetrators of violence against women. Many poems in Ringer are ecopoetical, functioning in a “junk” or “sad” pastoral mode, inhabiting abandoned, forgotten, and sometimes impoverished landscapes of rural America. -- Publisher website.
DayliGht
Published in 2020
"A necessary new voice explores sexuality, grief, and the resilience of the Black woman in an unconventional yet highly accessible debut poetry collection"-- Provided by publisher.
Forage
Published in 2019
"In this, her third collection of poems, Rose McLarney considers themes including animals' symbolic roles in art and as indicators of ecological change, and how water can represent a large, troubled system or the exceptions of smaller, purer tributaries. These poems go beyond lamenting environmental degradation and disaster to record the beauty of the world in which we live"-- Provided by publisher.
Stereo(TYPE)
Published in 2021
"At the intersections of space and the body, race and region, sexuality and class, comes the poetry of Jonah Mixon-Webster. Stereo(TYPE) is a reckoning and a force, a revision of our most sacred mythologies, and a work of documentary poetry reporting from Mixon-Webster's hometown of Flint, Michigan, where clean tap water remains an uncertainty and the aftermath of racist policies persist. Challenging stereotypes through scenes that scatter with satire, violence, and the extreme vagaries of everyday life, Mixon-Webster invents visual/sonic forms, conceptualizes poems as FAQs and transcripts, dives into dreamscapes and modern tragedies, deconstructing the very foundations America is built on. Interrogating language and the ways we wield it as both sword and shield, Stereo(TYPE) is a one-of-a-kind, rapturous collection of vital and beautiful poems"-- 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.
Indecency
Published in 2018
"Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful--the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us."--Amazon.com.
Dunce
Published in 2019
"A new collection of poems by Mary Ruefle, the author of My Private Property, Trances of the Blast, Madness, Rack, and Honey, Selected Poems, The Most of It, and A Little White Shadow"-- Provided by publisher.
Hermosa
Published in 2019
Hermosa is the path to becoming one's own home. A thread pulled when Salgado thinks about who she is and who she has been. Beyond the survival, grief, and fight, Hermosa lives in the small moments hidden beneath it all. A journey of firsts, of mistakes, of celebrations, of the love, the crush, the disaster, the rebuilding, and the never-ending cycle of growth.
Tesoro
Published in 2018
"Tesoro is a story of family, survival, and the formative power of the women in Salgado's life. It is a telling of the balance between love and perseverance. Tesoro is an unearthing of the sacred connections that make a person whole; the treasure we forever keep with us when we learn from those we love, when we mourn those we've lost, and what grows in between."-- Provided by publisher.
Frank
Sonnets
Published in 2021
""The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without," Diane Seuss writes in this brilliant, candid work, her most personal collection to date. These poems tell the story of a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, from Seuss's working-class childhood in rural Michigan to the dangerous allures of New York City and back again. With sheer virtuosity, Seuss moves nimbly across thought and time, poetry and punk, AIDS and addiction, Christ and motherhood, showing us what we can do, what we can do without, and what we offer to one another when we have nothing left to spare. Like a series of cels on a filmstrip, frank: sonnets captures the magnitude of a life lived honestly, a restless search for some kind of "beauty or relief." Seuss is at the height of her powers, devastatingly astute, austere, and--in a word--frank."--Publisher's website.
Goldenrod
Poems
Published in 2021
"With her breakout bestseller Keep Moving, Maggie Smith captured the nation with her "meditations on kindness and hope" (NPR). Now, with Goldenrod, the award-winning poet returns with a powerful collection of poems that look at parenthood, solitude, love, and memory. Pulling objects from everyday life--a hallway mirror, a rock found in her son's pocket, a field of goldenrods at the side of the road--she reveals the magic of the present moment. Only Maggie Smith could turn an autocorrect mistake into a line of poetry, musing that her phone "doesn't observe / the high holidays, autocorrecting / shana tova to shaman tobacco, / Rosh Hashanah to rose has hands."​--Amazon.
Monument
Poems
Published in 2018
"Layering joy and urgent defiance -- against physical and cultural erasure, against white supremacy whether intangible or graven in stone -- Natasha Trethewey's work gives pedestal and witness to unsung icons. Monument, her first retrospective volume, draws together verses that delineate the stories of working-class African American women, a mixed-race prostitute, one of the first black Civil War regiments, mestizo and mulatto figures in casta paintings, Gulf Coast victims of Hurricane Katrina. Through the collection, inlaid and inextricable, winds the poet's own family history of upheaval and loss, resilience and love... As a whole, Monument casts new light on the trauma of our national wounds, our shared history. This is a poet's remarkable labor to source evidence, persistence, and strength from the past in order to change the very vocabulary we use to speak about race, gender, and our collective future"-- Provided by publisher.