National Poetry Month

Winner, 2015 Colorado Book Award Finalist, 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award In the years leading up to his recent passing, Alabama poet Jake Adam York set out on a journey to elegize the 126 martyrs of the civil rights movement, murdered in the years between 1954 and 1968. Abide is the stunning follow-up to York's earlier volumes, a memorial in verse for those fallen. From Birmingham to Okemah, Memphis to Houston, York's poems both mourn and inspire in their quest for justice, ownership, and understanding.

Voted one of the five best poetry collections for 2012 by Publishers Weekly, Animal Eye employs pastoral motifs to engage a discourse on life and love, as Coal Hill Review states "It is as if a scientist is at work in the basement of the museum of natural history, building a diorama of an entire ecosystem via words. She seem snot only interested in using the natural world as a metaphoric lens in her poems but is set on building them item by item into natural worlds themselves."

With scathing humour, brutal honesty, and unflinching detail, award winning spoken word/performance artist Just Chin chews through society's limitations and sterotypes of race, desire, and loss through his own life experiences. In Bite Hard, Chin explores his identity as an Asian, a gay man, an artist, and a lover. He rails against both his own life experiences and society's limitations and stereotypes with scathing humor, bare-bones honesty, and unblinking detail. Whether addressing what really goes on in the kitchen of Chinese restaurants or a series of ex-boyfriends, all named Michael, Chin displays his remarkable emotional range and voice as a poet. His raw, incantatory, stream-of-consciousness poems confront issues of race, desire, and loss with a compelling urgency that reflects his work as in performance, speaking directly to an audience. Throughout this collection, Chin demonstrates his uncanny ability to convey thought-provoking viewpoints on a variety of controversial subjects.

Hip-Hop is the largest youth culture in the history of the planet rock. This is the first poetry anthology by and for the Hip-Hop generation. It has produced generations of artists who have revolutionized their genre(s) by applying the aesthetic innovations of the culture. The BreakBeat Poets features 78 poets, born somewhere between 1961-1999, All-City and Coast-to-Coast, who are creating the next and now movement(s) in American letters. The BreakBeat Poets is for people who love Hip-Hop, for fans of the culture, for people who've never read a poem, for people who thought poems were only something done by dead white dudes who got lost in a forest, and for poetry heads. This anthology is meant to expand the idea of who a poet is and what a poem is for.

Two poets, one white and one black, explore race and childhood in this must-have collection tailored to provoke thought and conversation. How can Irene and Charles work together on their fifth grade poetry project? They don't know each other . . . and they're not sure they want to. Irene Latham, who is white, and Charles Waters, who is black, use this fictional setup to delve into different experiences of race in a relatable way, exploring such topics as hair, hobbies, and family dinners. Accompanied by artwork from acclaimed illustrators Sean Qualls and Selina Alko (of The Case for Loving: The Fight for Interracial Marriage), this remarkable collaboration invites readers of all ages to join the dialogue by putting their own words to their experiences.

Winner of the 2018 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry "A girl has two choices: / to be a tree or / to be the forest." Catechesis combines Grimm fairy tales with horror movies and the Book of Revelation to construct a vision of the dangers and apocalyptic transformations inherent in girlhood. This lyric lore, which includes curious diagrams and collages of the botanical and the anatomical, contains hidden instructions to prepare girls for the hazards ahead.

This first translation of the complete poetry of Peruvian César Vallejo (1892-1938) makes available to English speakers one of the greatest achievements of twentieth-century world poetry. Handsomely presented in facing-page Spanish and English, this volume, translated by National Book Award winner Clayton Eshleman, includes the groundbreaking collections The Black Heralds (1918), Trilce (1922), Human Poems (1939), and Spain, Take This Cup from Me (1939). Vallejo's poetry takes the Spanish language to an unprecedented level of emotional rawness and stretches its grammatical possibilities.

An NPR Favorite Book of 2019 In her third collection of poems, Jillian Weise delivers a reckoning to the ableism of the Western Canon. These poems investigate and challenge the ways that nondisabled writers have appropriated disabled bodies, from calling out William Carlos Williams to biohacking Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" to chronicling the ongoing headlines of violence against disabled women. Part invective, part love poem, Cyborg Detective holds a magnifying glass to the marginalization and fetishization of disabled people while claiming space and pride for the people who already use technology and cybernetic implants every day.

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 inDated Emcees as she examines her love life through the lens of hip-hop's best known orators, characters, archetypes and songs, creating 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.

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.

In this moving, bilingual collection, renowned poet Jorge Argueta reminisces about growing up in El Salvador, the impact of war on his family and neighbors, life as an exile in the United States and ultimately his rebirth as a poet. He became involved in the revolution as a teen, not realizing what was to come. The 48 poems in this collection--in Spanish and English--smolder with loss and longing. Argueta's indigenous roots ultimately contribute to his salvation after he flees his homeland. Eventually, he returns to writing and becomes a successful children's book author. In spite of the pain and sorrow expressed in many of these poems, Argueta's work is a powerful testament to love, hope and the strength of the human spirit.

In this blistering collection of lyric poems, Cynthia Huntington gives an intimate view of the sexual revolution and rebellion in a time before the rise of feminism. Heavenly Bodies is a testament to the duality of sex, the twin seductiveness and horror of drug addiction, and the social, political, and personal dramas of America in the 1960s.

The first anthology of its kind, Indivisible brings together forty-nine American poets who trace their roots to Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Featuring award-winning poets including Meena Alexander, Agha Shahid Ali, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Vijay Seshadri, here are poets who share a long history of grappling with a multiplicity of languages, cultures, and faiths. The poems gathered here take us from basketball courts to Bollywood, from the Grand Canyon to sugar plantations, and from Hindu-Muslim riots in India to anti-immigrant attacks on the streets of post–9/11 America. Showcasing a diversity of forms, from traditional ghazals and sestinas to free verse, experimental writing, and slam poetry, Indivisible presents 141 poems by authors who are rewriting the cultural and literary landscape of their time and their place. Includes biographies of each poet.

A themed poetry collection--a kind of "sance"--an evening to get in touch with other souls, and the world they once lived in. Yet, as a linked collection, the poems trace the arc of a life from birth to death, from childhood to old age, and move towards a spiritual journey in art. Our lives seem to be vanishing acts, perfected from birth to death. The trip also takes us within. There are joys and sorrows, a sense of delight, and also grief. The collection suggests that the "real horror" is losing a loved one. But, while the poems keep an eye on death, the point is life, even the contemplation of a life beyond death.

you gasp as I roar, my mane exploding, sizzling-- lion of the sky! Haiku meet riddles in this wonderful collection from Laura Purdie Salas. The poems celebrate the seasons and describe everything from an earthworm to a baseball to an apple to snow angels, alongside full-color illustrations.

Milk Black Carbon works against the narratives of dispossession and survival that mark the contemporary experience of many indigenous people, and Inuit in particular. In this collection, autobiographical details - motherhood, marriage, extended family and its geographical context in the rapidly changing arctic - negotiate arbitrary landscapes of our perplexing frontiers through fragmentation and interpretation of conventional lyric expectations.

The concentration camp at Dachau was the first established by the Nazis, opened shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933. It first held political prisoners, but later also forced laborers, Soviet POWs, Jews, and other "undesirables." More than 30,000 deaths were documented there, with many more unrecorded. In the midst of the horror, some inmates turned to poetry to provide comfort, to preserve their sense of humanity, or to document their experiences. Some were or would later become established poets; others were prominent politicians or theologians; still others were ordinary men and women. This anthology contains 68 poems by 32 inmates of Dachau, in 10 different original languages and facing-page English translation, along with short biographies.

In Names above Houses, Oliver de la Paz uses both prose and verse poems to create the magical realm of Fidelito Recto--a boy who wants to fly--and his family of Filipino immigrants. Fidelito's mother, Maria Elena, tries to keep her son grounded while struggling with her own moorings. Meanwhile, Domingo, Fidelito's fisherman father, is always at sea, even when among them. From the archipelago of the Philippines to San Francisco, horizontal and vertical movements shape moments of displacement and belonging for this marginalized family. Fidelito approaches life with a sense of wonder, finding magic in the mundane and becoming increasingly uncertain whether he is in the sky or whether his feet are planted firmly on the ground.

With inquisitive flair, Aimee Nezhukumatathil creates a thorough registry of the earth's wonderful and terrible magic. In her fourth collection of poetry, she studies forms of love as diverse and abundant as the ocean itself. She brings to life a father penguin, a C-section scar, and the Niagara Falls with a powerful force of reverence for life and living things. With an encyclopedic range of subjects and unmatched sincerity, Oceanic speaks to each reader as a cooperative part of the earth, an extraordinary neighborhood to which we all belong.From “Starfish and Coffee”:And that's how you feel after tumblinglike sea stars on the ocean floor over each other.A night where it doesn't matterwhich are arms or which are legsor what radiates and how—only your centers stuck together.

Collected works of Emily Dickinson. Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in 1830 in Amherst Massachusetts. Rightly regarded as a major American poet, her life was sheltered, introverted, and reclusive. Despite writing over 1800 poems, only a dozen or so were published during her lifetime. Her structures and wordings are at times difficult to get to grips with, though recurring themes of religion and death certainly shadow many of her works. At her death is 1886, it is likely her work might have been lost had it not been for a publication by her sister. Indeed it was only in the 1950s that a complete and unedited collection of her works was published.

The poems of The Primitive Observatory, set roughly in the Gilded Age, take readers into a dreamy, alluring world where hapless travelers, doomed heirs, and other colorful types grapple with horrors. Within the pages of this book, we find a group of cousins who wager their pets in endless games of mahjong, a village whose inhabitants all dream the same dreams, and Maurice, who watches Greta Garbo movies while waiting for death in the macabre home of his grandfather, a man suspected of sinister hypnosis and unspeakable crimes.   Kimbrell explores such themes as memory, class prejudice, family violence, and greed in a flamboyant, yet matter-of-fact style to create verse that is both amusing and unsettling. Combining prose that evokes H. P. Lovecraft, classical mythology, and Marcel Proust with the look and taut line of traditional formalist verse, the poems appear on the page as perfect rectangles, yet revel in narrative and linguistic absurdities. The Primitive Observatory offers a dark and evocative experience through the tangible grotesque. Fans of David Lynch, Franz Kafka, Edward Gorey and the like will be startled, excited, and pleased by this entertaining and disturbing book of poetry.

The poems in this captivating collection weave beauty with violence, the personal with the historic as they recount the harrowing experiences of the two hundred thousand female victims of rape and torture at the hands of the Pakistani army during the 1971 Liberation War. As the child of Bangladeshi immigrants, the poet in turn explores her own losses, as well as the complexities of bearing witness to the atrocities these war heroines endured. Throughout the volume, the narrator endeavors to bridge generational and cultural gaps even as the victims recount the horror of grief and personal loss. As we read, we discover the profound yet fragile seam that unites the fields, rivers, and prisons of the 1971 war with the poet's modern-day hotel, or the tragic death of a loved one with the holocaust of a nation. Moving from West Texas to Dubai, from Virginia to remote villages in Bangladesh and back again, the narrator calls on the legacies of Willa Cather, César Vallejo, Tomas Tranströmer, and Paul Celan to give voice to the voiceless. Fierce yet loving, devastating and magical at once, Seam is a testament to the lingering potency of memory and the bravery of a nation's victims.

Along with writing comedic and dramatic plays, William Shakespeare was also a master poet. Using the sonnet structure (three quatrains and a final couplet composed in iambic pentameter), he composed 154 poems covering timeless themes of love, beauty, and mortality. The poems' subjects--the Fair Youth, the Dark Lady, and the Rival Poet--have become nearly as famous as the sonnets themselves. While not the first to write poems in sonnet form, Shakespeare's sonnets are considered the most influential examples of this style. The sonnets were first published in a 1609 quarto; this is an unabridged collection of all of Shakespeare's iconic sonnets, including Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"), Sonnet 116 ("Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ Admit impediments"), and Sonnet 130 ("My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun").

Muscogee (Creek) writer and humorist Alexander Posey (1873-1908) lived most of his short but productive life in the Muscogee Nation, in what is now Oklahoma. He was an influential political spokesperson, an advocate for improving conditions in Indian Territory, and one of the most prominent American Indian literary figures of his era. One of Posey's dearest subjects was the Oktahutche River, which he so loved that he gave it voice in his poem, 'Song of the Oktahutche'. His poetry, drawing from Romantic European and Euro-American influences such as Robert Burns and John Greenleaf Whittier, became a sort of Indian Territory pastoral in which the Greek nymph Echo shares a river with Stechupco, the Tall Man spirit of the Muscogees. Song of the Oktahutche collects for the first time all of Posey's poetry, which has until now been scattered in various rare volumes, either unpublished or replete with textual errors. His highly regarded poems constitute the largest body of Native poetry from the turn of the twentieth century.

Since 1990, Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe's work has stood out as essential testimony to Indigenous experiences within the ongoing history of colonialism and the resilience of Indigenous storytellers. Sôhkêyihta includes searing poems, written across the expanse of Halfe's career, aimed at helping readers move forward from the darkness into a place of healing. Halfe's own afterword is an evocative meditation on the Cree word sôhkêyihta: Have courage. Be brave. Be strong.

Looking at a wide swath of Chinese history and literature, this collection examines various issues stemming from immigration to America. Wang Ping conveys the voices of centuries of farmers and factory laborers, revolutionaries, writers, artists, and craftsmen. She has a unique gift for telling small stories with powerful emotional effects. The titular poem, "Ten Thousand Waves," was inspired by a tragedy that occurred on February 5, 2004. More than 20 Chinese laborers drowned in Morecambe Bay, England, when they were caught by an incoming tide. They were collecting cockles late in the evening, having been misinformed about the tidal times. The victims were undocumented immigrants, mainly from Fujian Province, China. In 2006, English filmmaker Nick Broomfield directed and produced Ghosts, a dramatic film based on the tragedy at Morecambe Bay. Not long after that, another filmmaker, Isaac Julien, commissioned Ping to write a narrative script for his film on global immigration, Small Boats. When he saw the finished poem, Julien decided to make a film installation specifically on Chinese immigration, which he entitled Ten Thousand Waves, after Ping's poem. Ten Thousand Waves has been featured at the Pace Foundation galleries in San Antonio, Texas, and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

"Dear fear, dear darkness, dear misunderstandings, dear life, dear lost-in-myself, I am no longer afraid of you. Now I have this book. I have Lightsey Darst's amazing and ecstatic meditation on being a person in the world, I have these poems to guide me, I have her bravery and wild mind, I have her spells and wisdom, I have these incredible poems to carry with me wherever I go." --Matthew Dickman
"Lightsey Darst's ability to find astonishment within and without--to lift the story of many varied days inside a set of years inside and outside of a marriage, a love affair, and a pregnancy--until it sings with revelation, drew me intoThousands immediately and never let go. Thrillingly unafraid to state what women are often dismissed for stating, Darst elevates language into something so wholly artful that neither the poems nor the grit can be denied. In Thousands, Darst takes longing and ecstasy and melancholy and doubt back from the patriarchy to write toward the canon of the future." --Lynn Melnick

Concerned with physical experience, pain, and disability, Veil and Burn illuminates an intense desire to feel through the Other, embrace it, become it, and in the transformation, to understand the suffering body. In poems about animals, artifacts, and monsters, Lambeth displays a fascination for all bodies while exploring their pain, common fate, alienation, and abilities. Hovering between poem and prose fragment, between the self and fellow creatures, Laurie Clements Lambeth celebrates physical sensation, imbuing it with lyric shape, however broken, however imprisoned the shape may be.

The Willow's Whisper brings the voices of 35 poets from the Irish and Native American communities together in one compilation. This collection of poems provides an aesthetic commentary on the potential which is beyond and within the everyday. From Gabriel Rosenstock and Biddy Jenkinson to N. Scott Momaday and Karenne Wood, mother-earth comes to life through each sound and syllable, and reawakens our senses to the world at its most beautiful and evocative. This volume will aid us to reconnect with that part of our being which we may have lost touch with; that part of us intimately linked to nature. It will help us see life in every meandering stream as it surges and animates, and in the breeze moving through the branches of a willow-a whisper of hope.

"We defy translation," Sandra María Esteves writes. "Nameless/we are a whole culture/once removed." She is half Dominican, half Puerto Rican, with indigenous and African blood, born in the Bronx. Like so many of the contributors, she is a blend of cultures, histories and languages. Containing the work of more than 40 poets--equally divided between men and women--who self-identify as Afro-Latino, ¡Manteca! is the first poetry anthology to highlight writings by Latinos of African descent. The themes covered are as diverse as the authors themselves. Many pieces rail against a system that institutionalizes poverty and racism. Others remember parents and grandparents who immigrated to the United States in search of a better life, only to learn that the American Dream is a nightmare for someone with dark skin and nappy hair. But in spite of the darkness, faith remains. Anthony Morales' grandmother, like so many others, was "hardwired to hold on to hope." There are love poems to family and lovers. And music--salsa, merengue, jazz--permeates this collection.Editor and scholar Melissa Castillo-Garsow writes in her introduction that "the experiences and poetic expression of Afro-Latinidad were so diverse" that she could not begin to categorize it. Some write in English, others in Spanish. They are Puerto Rican, Dominican and almost every combination conceivable, including Afro-Mexican. Containing the work of well-known writers such as Pedro Pietri, Miguel Piñero and E. Ethelbert Miller, less well-known ones are ready to be discovered in these pages.