Hundreds of books are added to the Library's collection each month. Here are the most recent Poetry books for adults.
Numinous Stones
"From Elgin Award winning author Holly Lyn Walrath, a haunting collection of poetry about grief and the sacred that digs deep beyond a fairytale world into the grave. Told in the circular pantoum form, Numinous Stones is a poetic graveyard littered with horror--from sentient scarecrows to silent skeletons to scorched sacred spaces. As each line repeats, new meaning gleams like bones unearthed in a shattered realm of monsters, dark forests, and dusty ghosts.""--Page 4 of cover.
Format: Book
View Numinous StonesWard Toward
"There are places," Cindy Juyoung Ok writes, "where shaking is expected, loss is / assumed." In the 118th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Ok moves assuredly between spaces--from the psych ward to a prison cell, from divided countries to hospice wards. She plumbs these institutions of constraint, ward to ward, and the role of each reality's language, word to word, as she uncovers fractured private codes and shares them in argument, song, and prayer. Using visual play in invented forms, Ok counters familiar narratives about mental illness, abuse, and death, positing that it is not a person's...
Format: Book
View Ward TowardA Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye
"Written over a decade while the author lived on four continents, A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye maps the cultural legacies we cherish against those we reject. Playful and wrenching by turns, with lines inflected by the spoken music of their Arabic, Oshiwambo, Xhosa, and Italian contexts, these profound poems explore a life where displacement is the norm. From choosing not to have children to wrestling with a left-hand stick shift in Johannesburg traffic to braising a camel loin for friends in Damascus, V. Penelope Pelizzon's poems transport us into unexpected depths of feeling with language that is...
Format: Book
View A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the EyeSilver
"Rowan Ricardo Phillips's fourth collection is a book as lustrous as the metal of its title"-- Provided by publisher.
Format: Book
View SilverBainbridge Island Notebook
"Sheltering with his wife and child on Washington State's Bainbridge Island during a global pandemic, the poet as political surrealist considers themes of isolation and connection in the most personal terms using his unique brand of explosive abstraction to carve out a space to explore the meaning of home, family, and diaspora"-- Provided by publisher.
Format: Book
View Bainbridge Island NotebookRifqa
Each day after school, Mohammed El-Kurd's grandmother welcomed him at the door of his home with a bouquet of jasmine. Her name was Rifqa -- she was older than Israel itself and an icon of Palestinian resilience. With razor-sharp wit and glistening moral clarity, El-Kurd lays bare the brutality of Israeli settler colonialism. His poems trace Rifqa's exile from Haifa to his family's current dispossession in Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem, exposing the cyclical and relentless horror of the Nakba. El-Kurd's debut collection definitively shows that the Palestinian struggle is a revolution, until victory.
Format: Book
View RifqaArchitect
"'When he died, my brother became the architect of the rest of my life,' writes Alison Thumel in Architect, which interweaves poems, lyric essays, and visual art to great emotional effect. In this debut collection, the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright become a blueprint for elegy, as Thumel overlays the language of architecture with the language of grief to raze and reconstruct memories, metaphors, and myths. With obsessive and exacting focus, the poet leads us through room after room in a search to answer whether it is possible to rebuild in the wake of loss"--Provided by publisher.
Format: Book
View ArchitectTender Machines
"Set against the backdrop of a changing urban landscape, the poems in Tender Machines swing between the domestic and the surreal, charting motherhood, sexual desire and an immigrant family's haunted inheritance. Mapping the lives of women and the lives they inhabit, poems such as "Small Essays on Disappearance,"-which channel the aftermath of motherhood and 9-11-collide with aubades describing mornings in a ruined city: "buying food at the bodegas...nectarines and skin-tight plums." The poems in Tender Machines live in the space between the public and the private, braiding an intimate narrative. This is an intersectional portrait of womanhood with all its...
Format: Book
View Tender MachinesPortrait of the Alcoholic
"In Islam prayer is not transactional, poetry is not divorced from the quotidian and portraiture is embraced only in the abstract. And yet here in Kaveh Akbar's book, entreaty is earnest, aimed at the human and particular more often than the divine but at the same time the language and form elevate themselves to the fevered register of desperation. Yes, sure, fine, you would think that a Muslim writing about being a drunk would have to adopt unconventional approaches, but drunkenness in the Islamic literary tradition is a long and time-honored metaphor. For what? Abandonment to God, a cessation of...
Format: Book
View Portrait of the Alcoholic